Karen Attiah writes on Bluesky that "part of what keeps America so violent is the continued insistence that people demonstrate care, pointless kindness, and absolution toward white men who espouse hate and violence." She is fired from the Washington Post within three hours.
Matthew Dowd explains on MSNBC that "hate words lead to hate actions." Fired that same evening.
A California professor posts on Instagram: "I can't feel much compassion, honestly." Suspended the next day.
A Coast Guard sailor shares a meme. Ends up under military investigation.
The "Expose Charlie's Murderers" database publishes forty-one names the day after the murder, listing those guilty of "disrespecting Kirk." It claims to be working through over twenty thousand reports. The State Department revokes visas. The Attorney General threatens prosecutions for "hate speech"—the same administration that for years denounced Big Tech censorship (which, incidentally, are now all united in service of Emperor Trump). All this happens in the week following Charlie Kirk's assassination.
There has never been less freedom of expression in the United States. And the paradox is that those taking it away are precisely those who for years have waved the banner of free speech. The Republicans who accused universities and Big Tech of censorship now orchestrate the most extensive professional purge campaign in recent American history. Freedom is no longer a principle, but a brand.
When I began speaking about Hypnocracy, some praised me for my ability to observe what was hidden from most people's eyes. But on the contrary, everything is exposed in full light. There's no need to show coherence or hide: arbitrary power can be used without any hypocrisy, without timidity. The message isn't hidden, it's explicit: we can destroy anyone, for any reason, at any time. And you can do nothing to stop us.
The hypnocratic effectiveness of this demonstration lies in the fact that everyone can see the arbitrariness of the punishments, the disproportion of the reactions, the violation of the principles that Republicans themselves claimed to defend. Why be so explicit? Why does everything happen in broad daylight? Because this widespread knowledge of injustice, combined with the impossibility of remedying it, generates a state of conscious paralysis that is the heart of the hypnocratic trance.
The system doesn't try to convince us that the firings are just: it wants us to know they are unjust and that we can do nothing. Think about it: this combination of awareness and powerlessness produces an altered state of consciousness deeper than any manipulation or deception. Knowing and not being able to act shatters the psyche more effectively than any propaganda.
The same dynamic operates on an even more terrible scale in Gaza. The UN Commission formally declares that genocide is occurring. The Lancet documents 93,000 deaths. UNRWA certifies 40,000 forced displacements in the West Bank. Everything is documented, certified, incontrovertible. Smotrich can serenely admit that Gaza is a real estate goldmine, Netanyahu can openly declare that Israel will face years of isolation, and proceed anyway with Operation Gideon's Chariots II with 60,000 reservists. Yet nothing changes.
Contemporary power doesn't fear denunciation; rather, it integrates it: it lets everything be visible, knowing that the very evidence of our powerlessness reinforces its grip. The excess of evidence becomes itself a device of concealment. Because when everything is already visible, documented, certified, no gesture remains to be made. Exhibited truth produces more paralysis than hidden lies.
The power of the Israeli government, backed by the American military apparatus, resides precisely in the capacity to commit genocide while the world watches, knows, documents, and remains paralyzed. They have the weapons, the money, the geopolitical control, and above all the will to use all this without moral limits. Hypnocracy reaches here its purest form: the transformation of manifest powerlessness into an instrument of governance.
The system continually shows that we know everything and can do nothing. This repeated demonstration of powerlessness induces a state of active resignation: we continue to function, work, consume, tweet, but we have internalized the impossibility of effective action.
The Trump administration embracing censorship after years of denouncing "cancel culture" is exercising a demonstration of pure power: we can completely contradict ourselves and answer to no one. This capacity to redefine reality at will, to hold opposing positions without consequences, is itself a hypnocratic technique.
The violence of repression after Kirk's assassination has a precise function in the hypnocratic economy: to periodically remind everyone that behind the façade of liberal democracy, public debate, constitutional rights, there's always the possibility of brute force. This latent but periodically manifest violence keeps everyone in a state of preventive submission. Trauma can circulate—indeed, it MUST circulate, because repeated shock deepens the trance. But critical analysis is eliminated with surgical precision because lucidity interrupts the trance.
Contemporary hypnocracy has surpassed the phase where it had to hide its mechanisms. Now it can show them openly, knowing that the very demonstration of our powerlessness in the face of them is its most effective control technique. No manipulation of thought is needed when a phase of manifest domination is reached that uses its own evidence as an instrument of paralysis.
Hypnocracy doesn't need to hide this truth. Rather, its continuous exposure serves to reinforce the collective trance. Knowing oneself to be powerless while watching power act with impunity generates a state of functional dissociation: we continue living while a part of us knows that all this happens under the sign of a violence that could strike us at any moment. The hypnocratic system reminds us daily: look what we can do to Gaza, to anyone who criticizes Kirk, to anyone who opposes. And you cannot stop us. This knowledge of powerlessness, repeated daily through a thousand large and small examples, maintains the population in that altered state of consciousness that is the very medium of hypnocratic power. The demonstration of force has become a technique of daily governance.
The question that remains suspended is: how does one resist when resistance itself becomes a demonstration of powerlessness? How does one maintain lucidity when lucidity means only seeing more clearly one's own impossibility to act? We must recognize that the powerlessness we feel is not our personal or collective failure, but the deliberate product of a system that has perfected the art of transforming the demonstration of force into a technique of consciousness control.
Resisting hypnocracy means accepting that we have no immediate levers, but refusing to yield to resignation. It's not enough to know: we must preserve the critical gaze even when it seems sterile, cultivate communities that don't normalize the unacceptable, remember that shared lucidity is already a political act.
It is "parrhesia": the courage to speak truth under conditions of danger. In a regime that transforms our powerlessness into collective trance, parrhesia is not the definitive solution, but the first breath outside hypnosis.
Hypnocracy doesn't win only because it shows our powerlessness, but because it convinces us to internalize it as destiny. We cannot personally stop the bombs on Gaza nor the arbitrary firings, nor the cancellation of a television show. But we can refuse normalization. We can continue naming injustice as injustice, even when everything pushes us to be silent.
In the regime of collective hypnosis, the true terrain of struggle is consciousness.
