By the time you hold this magazine in your hands, President Donald Trump will have been inaugurated for the second time. Barely a month into the new year, and TikTok may have evaporated from our lives via an unconstitutional ban, the city of Los Angeles has been forever changed by mutant wildfire, and Israel and Hamas have reached a shaky ceasefire deal after fifteen months of the world’s first livestreamed genocide. It is ever clearer as we wade deeper into 2025: We are walking on tenuous ground.
As this issue goes to press, the concept of “hypernormalization” has taken wing on the soon-to-be-censored algorithms that link us. “What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working, that structures are crumbling, that society is going through these massive shifts—and yet the institutions and the people that are in power just are like ignoring it, and are pretending like everything is going to go on the way that it has, and we all know that that’s not true,” said Rahaf Harfoush, author and digital anthropologist, in a video that went viral online. “There’s a term for it, it’s called hypernormalization.” Harfoush credited the concept’s progenitor, University of California, Berkeley, anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, and mentioned a 2016 BBC documentary on the topic by British filmmaker Adam Curtis.
The documentary, according to its website, delves into how “all of us in the West—not just the politicians and the journalists and the experts, but we ourselves—have retreated into a simplified, and often completely fake version of the world.” This has left “those who are supposed to be in power,” the film asserts, “paralyzed—they have no idea what to do.”
Of course, the powerful are intentional in their continual hoarding of wealth and power. But we might, in our disillusionment, also recognize another truth: The elite have so distorted societal priorities that even imminent problems are met with responses completely out of step with reality. This much can be seen in the United States sending more weapons to Israel following the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide was at “risk of irreparable harm.” It can also be seen in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s bowing down to Trump by removing the fact-checking function from Facebook—claiming political bias despite evidence that most flagged items were nonpolitical or clear spam. And it can be seen in Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass’s move to “clear the way to rebuild homes as they were” amid the city’s charred and increasingly fire-prone landscape.
In these pages, readers will confront what happens when our systems come apart at the seams, overinflated to the point of explosion. Anna Lekas Miller reports on how mass deportation of the kind threatened by Trump can only be achieved through administratively redefining who is “illegal.” Finbarr Toesland investigates how conversion therapy, widely discredited in the West, is now being exported to African nations by U.S. organizations under the guise of religious freedom and autonomy. Robert Davis takes a look at how guaranteed income programs have become political targets even as they are transforming the lives of their participants for the better. Hallie Lieberman reports on how the performers at the legendary Las Vegas male strip show Chippendales unionized, only to see retaliation. Silja J.A. Talvi writes about the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples throughout the United States, a crisis largely hidden behind bars.
In his second term as President, Trump will target the same people he always has: immigrants and Black people, the disabled and the unhoused—generally the most marginalized among us. But as hypernormalization dawns on more of us, another fact is just as clear: The people are ready to respond. “I expect, unfortunately, that Donald Trump will be so cruel and so horrific on immigration issues that there will be backlash to his cruelty,” the new chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, U.S. Representative Greg Casar, tells The Progressive in this issue.
Writing on the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Sarah Jaffe puts it this way: “There is a deep well of anger and pain in the United States, and across the world, and a good number of those angry and hurting people know quite well who is causing their pain.”
Taking consistent, organized action on this knowledge in the coming years might help us break the hypernormal hypnosis, so we might see ourselves as we are, and as we can be.
In solidarity,
Alexandra Tempus