Before you roll your eyes and scroll past, hear me out. I know what you are thinking. You have seen this kind of post before — some conservative calling liberals crazy and patting himself on the back for it. This is not that.
This is something I genuinely have been wrestling with for years, and I think the MAGA crowd needs to hear it just as much as the left does. Because if all you are doing is laughing at these people, you are missing something important. And if we are being honest — which is the only mode I operate in — mocking someone who is genuinely suffering is not a conservative value. It is not any decent human being’s value.
So let me say what I actually think is going on. Not as a political attack. As a science teacher. As a 23-year Army combat medic. As a paramedic who spent 20 years running calls — including in Cleveland, where I would finish a 12-hour shift dropping patients off at the hospital and walk straight into college classes to earn my teaching degree, just to turn around and do it all again the next day. As someone who literally published a textbook on human anatomy and how the brain works.
I think a lot of people on the left are suffering. Genuinely. And I am not entirely sure it is their fault.
What I AM sure of is that the Democrat Party knows it. And they are using it.
Let me explain.
THE DIAGNOSIS IS NOT TDS — TDS IS JUST A SYMPTOM
“Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a punchline. I know that. I have used it. It is funny, and it is also the kind of shorthand that makes people stop thinking. Because if we are being intellectually honest — and as a science teacher, that is literally what I am paid to do — TDS is a symptom, not a diagnosis.
The actual condition is something bigger. Something documented. Something that has been sitting in peer-reviewed journals and neuroimaging studies for years, and nobody in mainstream media wants to talk about it because it is deeply, profoundly inconvenient for the people who write the checks.
Because if the Democrat Party’s voters ever figured out that they are being DELIBERATELY KEPT IN A STATE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL CRISIS to ensure their loyalty at the ballot box — if they ever genuinely understood that — the whole machine collapses overnight.
So nobody talks about it.
I am going to talk about it.
PART ONE: YOUR BRAIN IS BUILT DIFFERENTLY — AND THAT IS NOT AN INSULT, IT IS AN EXPLANATION
Here is the science, and I want you to pay attention, because this is what I actually teach. Not what I read in a partisan blog. Not what someone told me at a dinner party. What I have studied, what I have taught to students, and what I put in print in a published anatomy and physiology textbook.
Multiple neuroimaging studies, including research published in legitimate academic journals, have shown STRUCTURAL DIFFERENCES in the brains of self-identified liberals versus conservatives. Not opinions. Not political attacks. MRI data.
THE AMYGDALA: This is the threat-processing center of your brain. The part that fires when you sense danger. Conservative-leaning brains, on average, show larger amygdala volume. Liberals, on average, have a smaller amygdala. Researchers linked this to greater tolerance for ambiguity and novelty.
In plain English: when conservatives see a potential threat, their brain screams “danger, assess this carefully.” When liberals see that same threat, their brain processes it more slowly and with more openness.
Neither is universally superior. They both have trade-offs.
But here is where it gets sinister — and yes, I am going to use that word deliberately. Having a smaller amygdala does not mean you are immune to fear. It means your THREAT CALIBRATION is different. It means you require a BIGGER perceived threat before your alarm goes off. And the Democrat Party and its media apparatus have figured this out.
So they do not give you small threats. They give you ENORMOUS ones. They tell you democracy is dying TODAY. That fascism arrived LAST TUESDAY. That every Republican is literally Hitler and the apocalypse is one election away. They have to crank the volume up to eleven just to get the alarm bells ringing in a brain that was built to tolerate ambiguity.
And then they cannot turn it off.
You panic. At scale. On schedule. Right before every election.
And the fundraising emails go out. And the donations pour in. And the Democrat Party cashes the check written in your psychological suffering.
THE ANTERIOR CINGULATE CORTEX (ACC): Liberals, on average, show LARGER gray matter volume here. This region handles conflict resolution, error detection, and cognitive flexibility. In theory, this means liberals are faster at detecting inconsistencies and updating their beliefs.
Sounds like a superpower, right?
The problem is that this same region, when it is overactivated — when it is firing constantly because you are submerged in a media environment specifically engineered to produce outrage — contributes to chronic anxiety, rumination, and an inability to let things go. The brain that is supposed to help you update beliefs instead gets stuck in an endless loop of “something is wrong, something is wrong, something is WRONG.”
And here is what makes me genuinely angry: the Democrat Party needs that loop running. They need you anxious. They need you activated. They need you convinced that taking a single day off from the outrage machine might cost you everything. Because the moment you calm down — the moment you actually look at what their policies have produced in the cities they have run for fifty years — the sales pitch falls apart completely.
Quinn’s Law #5: “When liberalism conflicts with reality, reality must give way.” The overactivated ACC makes that law run on autopilot. Your brain is literally working to protect the belief system rather than question it. And the people running the Democrat messaging machine understand this, even if they have never read a neuroscience paper in their lives.
THE INSULA: Liberal-leaning brains show greater left-insula activity, which is linked to empathy toward outgroups — people outside your immediate community. This is a genuinely beautiful trait when it is functioning correctly. It is what makes someone care about strangers they will never meet.
But when insula-driven empathy is overloaded — when you are being fed a CONSTANT, UNRELENTING stream of suffering, outrage, and victimhood specifically curated to keep you emotionally destabilized — it does not just make you caring. It makes you DYSREGULATED. It makes you unable to distinguish between a genuine emergency and a manufactured one.
And a political party that needs an emotionally destabilized voting base has a very strong incentive to make sure you cannot tell the difference.
In practice, dysregulation looks like a woman screaming on a train platform because she saw a Trump flag miles ago. It looks like a woman quitting her job and living in her car because her boss voted Republican. It looks like grown adults booking “rage therapy” sessions to smash pinatas shaped like political opponents.
These are documented, reported incidents. And in every single one of them, there are Democrat politicians and media figures who look at that behavior and see not a person in crisis who needs help, but a RELIABLE VOTER who needs to be kept exactly where they are.
That is not politics. That is predatory.
PART TWO: THE NUMBERS ARE NOT AMBIGUOUS — AND NEITHER IS THE MOTIVE
Large-scale surveys — the General Social Survey, the Cooperative Election Study — have found consistent and deeply troubling patterns.
Among self-identified VERY LIBERAL individuals, particularly young women between 18 and 29, rates of reporting poor mental health more than 50% of the time DOUBLED compared to moderate or conservative counterparts. One data set found 56% of white liberal women in that age bracket reported poor mental health. The number for very conservative women in the same demographic was 27%.
That is not a rounding error. That is a gap wide enough to drive a truck through. And it has been getting WORSE, not better, in direct proportion to the increasing intensity of progressive media coverage and Democrat campaign messaging.
Overall, liberals are approximately TWICE as likely to report ever receiving a mental health diagnosis compared to conservatives. Extreme liberals showed a 150% HIGHER rate compared to political moderates.
Now stop and think about that for a second.
The party that claims to be the compassionate one — that wraps itself in the language of mental health awareness, of “you are not alone,” of “we see you” — that party’s core voting bloc is in measurably worse psychological shape than the people they have spent forty years calling heartless.
I want to say clearly: there is no shame in having a mental health diagnosis. None. I have run enough calls to know that.
The issue is not that people are suffering. The issue is that an entire political party has looked at that suffering and decided the most useful thing they can do with it is KEEP IT GOING.
Quinn’s Law #4: “Liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it will not survive without it.”
When your party’s power depends on 56% of your young female voters staying in a state of chronic psychological distress, you do not invest in fixing the distress. You invest in maintaining it. You give them more things to fear. More enemies to hate. More crises to survive. You tell them conservatives want them dead, that their rights are being stripped away, that the world is ending — and you do it every single day right up until November, and then you cash the check.
That is not governance. That is a protection racket. And the people being “protected” are the ones paying the highest price.
PART THREE: WHAT “CRAZY” ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE NOW — AND WHAT IT WOULD HAVE LOOKED LIKE 30 YEARS AGO
I am old enough to remember when the following behaviors would have landed someone in a serious mental health evaluation, not a sympathetic CNN segment.
In 2016, videos flooded social media of adults — grown people with jobs and mortgages — literally screaming at the sky on election night. Not metaphorically. Actually standing outside, faces pointed upward, wailing. The mainstream media covered this sympathetically. Democrat politicians signal-boosted it. Nobody said “maybe these people need some help.”
Thirty years ago, if your neighbor stood outside and screamed at the sky because of an election result, you would have asked if they were doing okay. You might have gently suggested they call someone. You would not have put it on national television as a sign of healthy civic engagement.
A woman in April 2025 quit her actual job and moved into her car because she discovered her employer had voted for Trump. She presented this as a principled stand. She had thousands of supporters cheering her on. Not one of those supporters, and not one Democrat politician who saw that clip, said “wait — this person needs actual help.” Because a woman living in her car over a political disagreement is not useful to the Democrat Party. A woman living in her car who blames Republicans for it, though? That is a campaign ad.
College campuses in 2016 offered “cry-ins” with coloring books, Play-Doh, and therapy dogs — not for students who had experienced loss or trauma, but for students who had experienced a democratic election outcome they did not prefer. Universities — institutions supposedly preparing young adults for the world — validated and SPONSORED the idea that an election result requires the same emotional infrastructure as a bereavement.
And not one Democrat said “this is not healthy.” They said “this is beautiful.”
A person who needs coloring books and Play-Doh to recover from an election is not politically activated. They are in distress. Real distress. And they deserve actual help, not institutional validation designed to keep them emotionally dependent and politically compliant.
This is not mockery. This is the observation of someone who has spent decades around people in genuine crisis and knows the difference between pain that is being treated and pain that is being managed just enough to keep the patient functional and controllable.
The Democrat Party has chosen the second option. Every time. For decades.
PART FOUR: THE MEDIA IS THE DRUG — AND THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IS THE DEALER
Here is what my science background will not let me ignore, and what makes me angrier than almost anything else I am going to say in this article.
The brain structures we have been discussing — the hyperactive ACC, the overloaded insula, the miscalibrated threat response — are all significantly worsened by one thing above all others: CHRONIC STRESS EXPOSURE. Specifically, environments engineered to produce continuous low-grade alarm.
The modern progressive media ecosystem is, without exaggerating, one of the most sophisticated chronic stress delivery systems ever constructed by human beings. Every headline is an emergency. Every policy disagreement is an existential threat. Every Republican is not just wrong — they are EVIL, they are DANGEROUS, they are the living embodiment of everything history has taught us to fear.
And then they sell advertising against it.
Here is the vicious cycle: the already-elevated anxiety of the audience makes them more receptive to threat-based framing. The threat-based framing elevates the anxiety further. The audience seeks more content because chronically anxious people seek information that explains their anxiety — even when that information is the very thing CAUSING it. Ratings go up. Ad revenue goes up. Democrat fundraising emails go out with subject lines like “THIS IS AN EMERGENCY” and “WE ARE LOSING EVERYTHING.”
Meanwhile, the person on the other end of that email is lying awake at 2 in the morning, cortisol elevated, convinced the country is ending, genuinely unable to experience a single news cycle without feeling like they are in physical danger.
Not one person profiting from that anxiety has any incentive to make it better.
Quinn’s Law #16: “Liberals view the world the way they think it should be, not the way it is.” The chronically distressed brain doubles down on the framework that is causing the distress rather than updating it, because updating it would require admitting that the people you trusted to tell you the truth have been lying to you for years. And the people who built that framework — the strategists, the media executives, the party officials — they know this. They count on it.
I have watched this exact dynamic in classrooms. A student who has been told, repeatedly and convincingly, that they are going to fail will see a 75 on a test and experience it as confirmation of failure. Their brain is not broken. It is running the program it was given. The problem is the program. And the people who wrote the Democrat program knew exactly what they were doing.
They handed an entire generation of psychologically vulnerable, well-meaning, genuinely caring people one instruction: EVERYTHING IS A CATASTROPHE AND YOU ARE A VICTIM AND ONLY WE CAN PROTECT YOU.
And those people’s brains are running it at full throttle, right up until they pull the lever for the people who wrote the program in the first place.
That is not an accident. That is a business model.
PART FIVE: WHAT I WANT — AND WHAT THE DEMOCRAT PARTY DESPERATELY DOES NOT WANT YOU TO HAVE
I know this is going to get screenshotted and dunked on. Someone will clip one paragraph out of context and call me a monster. That is fine. I have been called worse things in languages I did not speak while people were actively shooting at me, so the bar for what I find intimidating is fairly high.
What I actually want — as a science teacher, as a combat medic, as a father of four feeding his family on a single teacher’s salary, as someone who has seen people at their absolute worst and still believes in their fundamental dignity — is for people on the left to GET BETTER.
Not to agree with me. Not to vote differently. To actually be okay.
Because right now, a substantial portion of one of this country’s two major political coalitions is being psychologically ground down, deliberately and systematically, by a media machine that profits from their suffering and by politicians who need them afraid to stay in power.
I have run mental health calls in Cleveland. I know what genuine psychiatric crisis looks like. I know what it sounds like when someone has lost the thread entirely. I know the difference between someone who is hurting and someone who is being KEPT hurting because their pain is useful to someone else.
What the Democrat Party has built is the second thing. A system that takes people who are already neurologically predisposed to anxiety and empathy fatigue, floods them with manufactured crisis around the clock, validates the resulting psychological breakdown as political courage, and then harvests the votes of people too dysregulated to look up and notice what is being done to them.
They do not want these people to get better. A mentally healthy person who is not in a constant state of fear might start asking inconvenient questions. Like: what have Democrats actually accomplished in the cities they have run for fifty years? Like: why does every policy designed to help the poor seem to produce more poor people? Like: if you are so powerful and virtuous, why is everything still getting worse?
Those are not questions a panicking person asks. And that is exactly the point.
Quinn’s Law #9: “To liberals, intentions are more significant than the outcomes they achieve.” The left genuinely believes it cares about the suffering of the vulnerable. Many individuals within it genuinely do.
But caring about something and systematically exploiting it for political gain are not mutually exclusive. And the outcomes — the measurable, documented, peer-reviewed outcomes — of decades of Democrat messaging on the psychological health of their own voters are nothing short of catastrophic.
If intentions were sufficient, that would matter.
They are not.
Do you disagree? Tell me where I am wrong — in the replies, with data, with science. I genuinely want to hear it. And please share this, not to score points, but because someone you know has been exhausted, angry, and terrified for years and cannot remember what it felt like to just be okay.
They deserve better than what they are being given. Every single one of them.
But what do I know — I am only a science teacher, a 23-year Army combat medic, a paramedic who spent 20 years running calls including in Cleveland where mental health crises are not political talking points but real human beings on sidewalks, and someone who literally wrote the textbook on how the human brain works. What could I possibly know about any of this.
Mike Borowski is a medically retired Army combat medic with 23 years of service, including a combat deployment to Iraq, and a high school Anatomy and Physics teacher at a high-need Career Technical district in Northeast Ohio — where he also wrote and published the textbooks for both courses. He runs “Bski’s Classroom,” a platform dedicated to cutting through political noise with data, history, and the kind of blunt honesty that comes from someone who has seen both war and the American classroom up close.
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