#contradictions

by Micha Danzig

It’s remarkable. The same activists who shout themselves hoarse at Western protests, who flood social media with memes and reels, somehow manage to hold two (or three, or ten) contradictory claims in their heads at once without blinking.

Like Soviet propagandists or Goebbels’ Ministry of Public Enlightenment, they rely on volume, not consistency. Because in propaganda, coherence is optional — but outrage is mandatory.

As Joseph Goebbels infamously put it: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” That is the strategy: not persuasion through reasoning, but relentless repetition.

Here’s a sampling from the Hamas-friendly, Israel-hating narrative machine:

Contradiction #1: Gaza — Prison or Paradise?

Before October 2023, Gaza was an “open-air prison” or even a “concentration camp.” But also, before October 7, it had many wonderful features — including being a “beautiful Mediterranean beachside paradise” — that Israel supposedly destroyed. Which is it? Concentration camp or paradise? Apparently both, depending on which slur works best.

Contradiction #2: Statehood or Extermination?

“Israel is a racist ethno-state.” But the same activists chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — and in Arabic, “Palestine will be Arab.” Destroying Israel and denying Jews the right to live on the land, in order to establish a 23rd Arab ethno-state is fine; but Jewish sovereignty in any form is racism.

Contradiction #3: Hostages? What Hostages?

“There were no hostages taken on Oct. 7.” Yet also: “Look how well Hamas treats the hostages!” So which is it — none taken, or proof of Hamas’ supposed hospitality?

Contradiction #4: Peace or Perpetual War?

“Ceasefire now!” they scream. But even in the same demonstrations: “Long live the Intifada!” and “Israel will soon be destroyed.” So, do they want peace — or endless war until Israel no longer exists?

Contradiction #5: Starvation Theater

Way back in 1989 Robert knew what Trump was.

* * * *

The Method in the Madness

Why Trump’s chaos isn’t accidental—and how it corrodes democracy’s foundations

James B. Greenberg

Sep 21, 2025

Like many others, I once dismissed Trump as a clown—perhaps even a puppet of others’ designs. But that view underestimates his own tactical instincts. His chaos has method, his performance has purpose, and the damage lies not in accident but in intent.

Trump’s Art of the Deal is often shelved as business lore, but its real function is strategic. It outlines a worldview where power is extracted through leverage, not built through institutional trust. The tactics—think big, retaliate, control the narrative—aren’t just tools for negotiation. They form a template for dominance, one that translates easily into political life. When applied to governance, they don’t strengthen institutions. They bend them.

Strongmen have long relied on spectacle, loyalty tests, and enemy creation to consolidate control. What makes Trump distinctive is the setting: a system with formal constraints but exhausted citizens. He doesn’t dismantle institutions outright; he forces them to absorb disruption until their function is distorted. The result is a hazy authoritarianism—pervasive yet hard to pin down.

Governance turns episodic. Each act is calibrated for emotional impact rather than policy coherence. Firings, executive orders, and legal provocations are timed for maximum media saturation. Where institutions are slow and procedural, Trump’s moves are fast and theatrical. The mismatch is deliberate: it keeps courts, agencies, and journalists reactive, leaving oversight in a constant chase. Spectacle substitutes for substance until performance itself becomes policy.

By overwhelming the system, Trump reframes resistance as sabotage. Judges who block his orders or journalists who investigate his claims are cast as enemies of the people. This inversion lets him operate in legal ambiguity, test boundaries, and dare institutions to respond. The law, instead of constraining him, becomes bargaining space, and the tactic recodes legitimacy itself.

Some maneuvers are obvious; others operate beneath the surface. Symbols are turned into weapons that shift attention from structural problems to cultural fights: racial justice protests become threats to order, immigration becomes a proxy for national identity. The point is not to solve problems but to redirect blame. Narrative saturation intensifies the effect. Rather than impose a single version of events, Trump floods the arena with contradictions—COVID guidance, election claims, legal threats—each undermining the last. This confusion is deliberate, a strategy that erodes shared reality and turns institutional authority into partisan theater.

The pace produces exhaustion. Executive actions and rhetorical escalations force oversight bodies into constant response. The system hasn’t collapsed, but it is drowning in shocks: watchdogs scramble, norms fray, the public tunes out, and fatigue sets in. Chaos becomes a loyalty test. Adapt and you remain; resist and you’re cut out. In such an environment, competence matters less than obedience, while unpredictability functions as a diagnostic tool, revealing who recalibrates and who resists.

Drift also redistributes wealth and advantage. Chaos funnels power upward. Deregulation by disruption clears the field for corporations, financiers, and insiders who can act quickly while oversight bodies drown in procedure, allowing those closest to power to scoop up contracts, licenses, and exemptions. This short-term spectacle clashes with democracy’s slower rhythms of deliberation, hearings, and accountability. Trump governs on the tempo of the news cycle, while democracy depends on patience, and the mismatch corrodes civic time itself, leaving citizens disoriented and public life ruled by immediacy rather than continuity.

Legal ambiguity reinforces the pattern. Trump rarely violates laws directly but thrives in the spaces between them—pressuring officials, exploiting vagueness, delaying consequences. Institutions are forced to interpret rather than enforce. Accountability becomes a matter of timing: announcements dropped late, investigations slow-walked, momentum carefully managed.

Even the madman bluff—the threat to Zelenskyy, the erratic diplomacy, the rhetorical escalations—follows this logic. The threat is extreme, the delivery unpredictable, the consequence real. It forces reactive compliance and destabilizes negotiation, turning unpredictability into coercion through disorientation.

Some tools remain underused. Constitutional overhaul is untouched, though norms are tested. Surveillance is present but not expanded as a signature device. Militarized repression appears selectively rather than systemically. Judicial purges are avoided in form but achieved through appointments. These absences preserve the appearance of continuity while masking the drift, which spreads not from a single center but across networks of loyalists, media allies, and local officials who replicate tactics in their own domains.

This drift carries anthropological weight. It reshapes how people perceive authority, truth, and civic possibility. The danger lies in gradual warping: institutions lose symbolic weight, discourse turns into a contest of emotion, and trust erodes under the tempo until the shared architecture of civic life begins to fray.

Political ecology offers a parallel. Ecosystems don’t always collapse through sudden shocks; they degrade through imbalance, erosion, and stress. Civic systems follow the same pattern. The symptoms are familiar: confusion, fatigue, displacement. The response can’t be procedural alone. It must also be cultural, strategic, and narrative.

Countering this requires more than rebuttal. It demands frameworks that decode symbolic inversion, track motif drift, and restore institutional rhythm. The typology of tactics—displacement, saturation, exhaustion, ambiguity—offers a diagnostic lens for civic literacy and editorial resistance. And it calls for public life that refuses spectacle and insists on substance.

Suggested Readings

Applebaum, Anne. Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. New York: Doubleday, 2020.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1951.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W.W. Norton, 2020.

Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.

❤ | Your options shall be: Sunday, Aventurine, Dan Heng, Veritas Ratio, Boothill, Jing Yuan, Blade, Phainon, Mydei, or Moze. Whoever you think suits this prompt.

❤ | Flower & it's definition: Cherry Blossom | symbolize contradiction. It symbolizes both life and death, beauty and violence. As the coming of spring promises new life, so the blooming of cherry blossoms brings a sense of vitality and vibrancy. At the same time, their short lifespan is a reminder that life is fleeting.

The Language of Flowers

Tags: Jing Yuan x Reader, Blade x Reader, Mydei x Reader, Fluff, Angst, Emotional Introspection, Character Development, Romantic Undertones, Metaphor, Contradictions (symbolism of life, death, beauty, violence), Inner Struggles, Brief Moments of Peace, Healing/Comfort, Reflection.

Warnings: Minor Dark Themes, Mild Violence, Mentions of Death (due to the symbolism of the cherry blossoms and each character’s life experiences), Heavy Emotional Themes, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst.

You stood beneath the cherry blossoms, the soft pink petals drifting around you as the warm breeze of spring swept through the air. The petals were fragile, their beauty fleeting, yet their presence gave a sense of peace and calm that only nature could provide. It was a reminder that even in the briefest moments of life, there was beauty to be found.

Yes, the Wizard has some sympathetic qualities, Elphaba has some flaws and briefly turns to villainy toward the end, and Glinda is a mass of moral grayness under her perky pink facade. But for the most part it's clear who the villains are (the Wizard and Madame Morrible), Elphaba's stance against them is clearly heroic, and Glinda's choice to work for them is clearly a moral sell-out, with which she struggles and from which she eventually redeems herself. When the Animals' treatment parallels the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, you can't take a "both sides" view of the situation. But every now and then, the show seems to do just that – whether in the song "Wonderful" with the Wizard's talk of "moral ambiguities" (though of course in that song, he's trying to justify his actions and manipulate Elphaba into joining him), or Elphaba and Glinda's reconciliation in "For Good," where they paint themselves as having been equally at fault. And again, and again, I've heard people say "There are no real villains in Wicked: the whole point is that there are two sides to every story and neither side is all good or all bad." But if that's the intended message, does it honestly fit with a plot that involves fascism and racial persecution?

Another work of fiction that I think has some uneasiness between its themes is Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Namely between "the Beast as a suffering, misunderstood outcast" and "the Beast as a powerful bully who needs to be humbled and change." I think a lot of the controversy about that movie stems from the uneasiness between those two themes.

On the one hand, the Beast is a spoiled, selfish prince, who was cursed as punishment for shutting out a poor beggar woman, who has a terrifying temper, and who orders others around and throws tantrums when he doesn't get his own way. His beastly appearance and mannerisms can be seen as outward symbols of his bad behavior, which is based in toxic class privilege and masculinity. From this perspective, Gaston is his kindred spirit, which is emphasized by visual cues: e.g. their similar striking blue eyes, or Gaston's pelt-covered, horned chair in the tavern that looks like the Beast's silhouette. The difference between them is that the Beast finally realizes he was wrong and changes his ways, while Gaston only becomes more beastly. But on the other hand, the Beast is also an "other", who hides from the world, who struggles with basic social skills, who is full of insecurity and self-loathing, whom Belle bonds with because they're both misfits, whose bestial mannerisms and overpowering rages are at least partly because the spell is warping his mind (in other words, a magical mental illness), and whom a mob tries to murder just because he looks scary. Analogies have rightly been drawn between the Beast and victims of racism, homophobia, or other prejudice. From this viewpoint, Gaston is his opposite: the type of privileged boor who receives undeserved hero-worship just because he's handsome and charismatic, and who persecutes "others" like the Beast.

When people view it chiefly as a story about the taming of a powerful bully, you hear accusations of "Stockholm Syndrome" and of the dangerous fantasies of changing an abuser. Viewing the Beast as a misunderstood outcast, who finds acceptance in a fellow outcast and who overcomes his mental health struggles and bad coping mechanisms as a result, reduces those accusations. But if you view the Beast chiefly as a misunderstood outcast, then his character arc can feel disempowering: so much of it consists of learning to be more people-pleasing and self-effacing, not to mention re-learning "normal" human manners and behavior (as an autistic person, I know I've sometimes felt "He needs to mask to be loved"), and he becomes fully "normal" by becoming human again in the end.

Maybe there is no uneasiness between these different themes: maybe it's just complexity. Maybe my feelings on the subject shows that I'm autistic and struggle with things that aren't black-and-white. But in both of these works of fiction, I do sometimes feel as if the writers were trying to tell two different stories at once, which sometimes fit together, sometimes not.