For a second time, someone tried to assassinate Donald Trump. And for a second time, the media tried to convince us it never happened.

This is life in what I call our Cluster B society. And it’s getting worse every day.

Why did it seem like our politicians and cultural institutions had the same mental derangement that animates private domestic abuse?

But it’s nothing compared to what awaits us if we elect Kamala Harris president.

Coffee talk

What we know as “domestic abuse” has gone public and feral. More specifically, Cluster B personality disorder dynamics (extreme narcissism, manipulation, sociopathy, emotional instability) have taken over public discourse.

For the last couple of years, I've been discussing this on a weekly show I do with my friend Kevin Hurley, "Disaffected."

My mother first helped me understand our national dysfunction.

It was 2016. I was holding a spoon over my coffee at 8 p.m. in her kitchen. The spoon was a survivor from childhood, one of the original set we had with a trailing vine motif.

It had to be lowered to the counter very carefully. Lower it too fast, and it would make an audible "click" when it hit the counter. Lower it too clumsily, and it might fall and clatter as each end bounced up over the other.

It had to make no sound. Or my mother would scream.

I was 41 years old, terrified to let a spoon make an audible noise lest my mother turn her profane tirade on me. At the moment, it was aimed at her husband: the “retard,” the “brain-damaged a**hole” who “couldn’t do a godda**ed thing right.”

That moment turned my life. It was a cusp. I was 41, but I was also 7 years old, holding my breath and hunching my shoulders, hoping I’d be too small and quiet to notice.

Ka-chunk!

It wasn't exactly her kitchen. She lived there, but I owned the house. I bought it to rent to her so she could have a place to retire in impoverished old age. In just two years, my mother’s derangement had turned my days into a choice between becoming a Valium addict or washing enough of it down with my nightly vodka to make sure I didn’t wake up.

”This has to end. This has to end right now, or I’m going to die.”

I called my sister. What’s wrong with mother? What is happening to her? Why is she making up stories about things that never happened? Why is she lying to my face and accusing me of things I never did? Is it Alzheimer’s?

“Josh, she’s not going into dementia. I think our mother is a narcissist. I think she has a personality disorder,” my sister said.

I spent the next three days reading everything I could find on Cluster B personality disorders.

A remarkable thing happened. I was watching as a lifetime of “crazy” and “disconnected” maniacal behaviors slotted themselves neatly into categories. Like an industrial packaging machine, my memories were self-organizing into slots, into a taxonomy. Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk.

I found the key to understanding the kind of childhood that most people think only happens in low-budget, made-for-TV movies. My mother’s swings from elation to despair to rage. The lying. The claims that everyone from her brother-in-law to the grocery store manager had it in for her. The screaming in her children’s faces as she shook our shoulders and bellowed, “Why are you doing this to me?!”

Fast-forward to a time closer to today. When I discovered the source of my family’s derangement, I also discovered one of the sources of our current cultural crisis.

Cluster B nation

Cluster B. The emotional instability and self-victimization natural to borderline personality disorder, the grandiosity and insatiable vanity of narcissistic personality disorder — why did it seem like our politicians and cultural institutions have the same mental derangement that animates private domestic abuse?

Because they do. It started on the extreme left, the woke left, my former political and cultural home. But it has metastasized. It’s not just the “extreme left” that acts like an emotionally dysregulated autocrat any more. It’s the mainstream left.

It’s mainstream American culture. The White House. MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the New York Times (supply your own infinite series). It’s our teachers, our cultural leaders, our doctors, our universities.

We are living in a Cluster B world, and if we don’t wake up to that fact, it will be our undoing.

Gaslight this!

The mainstream media did its best in the hours right after the attempt on Trump’s life to make it "not real." It did it with plausible deniability. Headlines said things like, “Incident at golf course near Trump,” or similar constructions.

The media will allege and assert that it was merely being cautious and careful in the immediate aftermath because fog of war, etc.

This is not true. The media is deliberately working to disappear the fact that someone was trying to kill Trump again. The media wanted to make sure Americans did not have the normal emotional reaction to and investment in a presidential candidate being targeted for murder.

This is gaslighting, and it’s something I’m finding very difficult personally. You might even say it’s triggered me.

Like you, I find words like “gaslighting” and “triggered” tiresome. But I am using these terms in their true, real, and original sense. These phenomena exist; they are still real phenomena even though the words have been co-opted and abused by the left.

Look what you made me do

Only after the government and the FBI had to admit it was a second assassination attempt (oh, the irony) did the media come clean. But then it shifted tack and started blaming Trump himself for his own targeting.

This is evil. It’s what the word “evil” means. It’s pure Cluster B abuse. It is exactly parallel to the way abused children are blamed by their parents for causing their own abuse.

This was a constant feature of my childhood. My mother would blame me for “making” her lose her temper with me. I would not only be punished for my original infraction, but I would then be punished for “making her” get violent or abusive with me.

Yes, even as a child of less than 10 years old, I knew this was morally insane. I never did not know it. It infuriated me and made me despair. I prayed to God to make her stop and to give me justice.

Justice did not come. As happens to every child with abusive parents, when the home life became too dangerous to ignore, I was placed in kid jail. Children are institutionalized, put in juvenile hall, or put in corrective homes for wayward kids for the actions of their parents. Children are punished for the literal statutory crimes their parents commit against them.

Kamala dearest

Donald Trump is being so punished today.

And Kamala Harris, as we saw at the debate, is the current instrument of that punishment: a brazen, shameless liar who deliberately provoked him with the specific purpose of putting him on defense while he knew no one would check her.

That histrionic smirking, the hand poses with her chin on her fingers, the Hillary Clinton-esque derisive smiling headshake. It's disgusting.

If this country elects Kamala Harris, it will be electing a facsimile of my mother.

Man up?

Some men will accuse me of whining. They’ll interpret this as me saying that the only problem with the debate was that Kamala Harris was being mean to Donald Trump and that the purpose of my essay is to generate personal, little-boy sympathy for him.

I understand. These men are tired of the feminization of society, just as I am. They are tired of men being subordinate wimps to manipulative women. They are tired of seeing men pushed to “show their feelings” as if men have the same emotions as women. They are rightly tired of grown adults — but mainly other men — acting like little boys and failing to carry themselves as adult men.

I’m with them. We agree, though some of them incorrectly think that I disagree with them.

Because such men are so reactive against feminization, they go too far, and they start excusing actual substantive mistreatment by women of men. They focus only on the man’s reaction. Their only criticism is for a man being insufficiently stoic. All the time. In every situation. No matter how outnumbered he is. No matter how demonstrably rigged the legal system is.

This is going way too far. It’s going so far that such men are not actually acting like brothers in arms to men targeted this way; they are replicating the very same abuse dished out to these men.

The injustice of all of this is intolerable. No man today, no matter how ripped, how based, how stoic, how masculine, has the power to exist outside a feminized system that has made male-specific abuse and disempowerment legally and culturally enforceable.

If you’re one of those men I’m talking about, you’re not man enough either, no matter how highly you think of your abilities. You, too, are constrained to some degree within this system.

Unburdened by restraint

The point is that Kamala Harris is a dangerous psychopath. She gets away with it in large part because she is a woman. She benefits from the false perception that women cannot be as dangerous as men.

If she is elected, Harris is going to practice psychopathy on all of us. Not just Donald Trump.

I point out the narcissistic abuse so that you can see it and understand how it works and how dangerous its effects are.

I do not do it so that you’ll feel personal sympathy for Donald Trump. I do it so that you’ll understand what Kamala Harris is going to do to you, your family, your children, your legal system, the tax structure, and everything else she will be able to destroy if she is given more power.