The Record
A Crisis Dispatch
I want to document something, because I think it matters — not as personal vindication, but as a case study in the psychology of this moment. I am the primary source. The record is mine to give.
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On April 9, 2025, I published a piece called The Time of Monsters. I argued that the warning signs of catastrophic conflict were flashing red for anyone willing to see them. I named the conditions: an insurgent elite backing itself into a corner where the calculation becomes power or jail; a feedback loop in which economic pain would reinforce the victimhood narrative rather than produce policy reconsideration; institutional erosion accelerating past the point where normal corrective mechanisms could function; the framing of disagreement as existential threat, which makes compromise impossible because it is experienced as surrender.
I was not predicting war. I was mapping a mechanism. Two plus two equals four. The mechanism was running. I described where it ran.
The response from people close to me was instructive. Friends suggested I had lost my mind. Family members expressed concern. I was told I was drinking “the Resistance Kool-Aid” — that I had been captured by a political panic, that I was seeing monsters because I had decided to see monsters, that my alarm was a symptom of something personal rather than an analysis of something real.
Andy Mills — a journalist I respect, whose work I had followed — spent several hours recording audio with me about The Plot Against America, the piece that preceded The Time of Monsters. He was producing a podcast series called The Last Invention. After those hours of conversation, he filed my analysis under conspiracy theory.
I am not telling this story to settle scores. I am telling it because it is data.
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What my friends, my family, and Andy Mills were exhibiting has a name. I named it in the piece they were responding to: normalcy bias. The mind reflexively rejects scenarios that threaten its fundamental assumptions about stability and continuity. It is not stupidity. It is not bad faith. It is a deeply human response to intolerable uncertainty — the psychological mechanism that makes it easier to pathologize the messenger than reckon with the message.
What makes the pattern diagnostic rather than merely ironic is this: the dismissal of the alarm takes the same form regardless of the alarm’s accuracy. The person sounding it is characterized as unhinged, as having been captured by a narrative, as drinking someone’s Kool-Aid. The content of the alarm is not engaged. The standing of the person making it is attacked. This is not argument. It is the social immune system doing what it does — rejecting the foreign body before it can be evaluated.
I watched this happen to me in real time. I had written a careful piece, grounded in historical precedent, naming specific mechanisms, making no predictions I could not support. The response was not “your analysis of the Smoot-Hawley parallel is wrong” or “the feedback loop you describe has a corrective mechanism you’ve missed.” The response was: you have lost your mind. You are one of those people now.
This is the psychological landscape I want to document. Not because I was right and they were wrong — that accounting is not the point. But because the mechanism of dismissal is itself the story. It is how civilizational risks accumulate past the point of correction. The alarm is not answered. It is pathologized. And while the pathologizing is occurring, the mechanism runs.
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One year later, I will simply offer the record.
The Iran war. The IRGC running a crypto toll booth in what used to be international waters. Inflation at a two-year high, American households paying $8.4 billion more for gas in a single month. A former Attorney General fired days before she was scheduled to testify under oath about the Epstein files, the firing used as the legal mechanism to block the subpoena. A Vice President conducting shadow diplomacy through Pakistan while bolstering an authoritarian in Budapest. A ceasefire that four parties describe in mutually exclusive terms. A constitutional order under sustained assault from the executive branch it is supposed to constrain.
These are not the ravings of someone who lost their mind. These are the things I said were coming, described with the precision available to me at the time, in a piece that people who care about me characterized as evidence of paranoia.
I am not satisfied by this. I want to be clear about that. Vindication of this kind — where what you feared would happen has happened, where the people you were trying to warn are now living inside the thing you warned them about — is not satisfying. It does not feel like winning. It feels like what it is: a loss, distributed across everyone who had to live through it, shared by the people who saw it coming and the people who couldn’t.
Orwell came back from Catalonia with dispatches that the New Statesman wouldn’t publish because they contradicted the comfortable narrative. He was not vindicated by being right. He was vindicated by what happened. The vindication did not restore the people who died while the comfortable narrative held.
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I want to say something about Andy Mills specifically, because the pattern is diagnostic.
Mills spent hours recording audio with me for what would become The Last Invention — a podcast series in which I am credited as a featured contributor in the opening episode, framed as the tip that led to a “much bigger story.” He then filed my analysis under conspiracy theory. This is the same journalist whose flagship podcast returned its Peabody Award after its central source was exposed as a fabricator. He has since defended Bari Weiss’s good intentions to my face.
The pattern is diagnostic: the people most invested in the performance of journalistic sobriety — and most embedded in the networks that benefit from the gates staying closed — are often the ones who reach most readily for “conspiracy theory” as a sorting mechanism.
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The people who called me unhinged were not my enemies. They were my friends and family, doing what people do when someone they love tells them something they cannot bear to hear. The normalcy bias is not a character flaw. It is a feature of human psychology — documented, predictable, and, in the current moment, carrying a cost that will be distributed across everyone.
What I am asking, now, is not for acknowledgment that I was right. I am asking for something harder: the willingness to update. To look at the record — not my record, the record — and ask what the analysis that produced it might have to say about what comes next. Because the mechanism has not stopped running. The window of action has not permanently closed. And the people who spent last year pathologizing the alarm are going to be needed in the next phase, if they can bring themselves to look at what the past year actually produced.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. This is still the time of monsters.
The question is what we do while we are living in it.
Thanks for such an insightful post.
Normalcy bias reduces feelings of anxiety, but does not manage the actual triggers that evoke anxiety. Being accurate enough makes normalcy bias persuasive. The inaccuracies make it dangerous.
It takes intention, effort, and open-mindedness to set normalcy bias aside and evaluate anxiety triggers as objectively and thoughtfully as possible. Diversity of thought provides both distracting static and "canaries in the coal mine" that are signaling danger.
Mike, normality is a dream we aspire to without realizing it’s usually a dream, and our bias towards normality keeps us sane in hard times but unprepared in a genuine crisis.
Prophets are vilified throughout history, perhaps because their truths are uncomfortable, and perhaps because they use the same language as the crazies who are wrong.
It’s easy to dismiss what is almost impossible to accept — a world view fundamentally at odds with our hopes.
People see a train coming at them with no way to get out of its path. They desperately want to change where they are or the direction of the train, but no one is helping them do either, with a captive Congress and no citizen recall mechanism for elected officials. There’s an unprecedented situation with no clear mechanism to stop it; those who could constrain the administration simply decline to do so and even go home just to avoid a vote.
You’re not crazy. Some conspiracies are real. Some horrible truths are hard to face. And yes, it’s normalcy bias — but we need leaders who lay out the evidence for and the consequences of what’s actually happening as well as the specifics of what we can do to change the trajectory.