Different people were describing different relationships, but the underlying pattern was the same.

“I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“I keep replaying what they said.”

“I’m trying to figure out what they’re going to do next so I can be ready.”

Underneath all of it was a shared belief that if they …

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Last night, the opening topic was admitting powerlessness. One participant, who has dutifully been applying these concepts for her own well-being, and not to try to extricate her loved one from their ideological entrenchment, noticed something surprising. Her loved one began to change in response.

Our participant asked “I know we are supposed to admit we are powerless to change another person. And then from that space, we start to do things differently. But as I see them start to respond in little ways that suggest they are willing to compromise, then I get more excited about doing more of the things mentioned here. So, then, am I not still trying to control?”

The answer is “well, that depends”.

This goes to the old adage that A + B = C. (You) A can’t directly change B (your loved one). But if A changes, then C, the sum of the equation (i.e. your relationship) will change. Just, one never knows how exactly.

Her question reminds me of a powerful part of the book How Al-Anon Works for Families & Friends of Alcoholics (B-32). In the chapter “The Family Disease of Alcoholism” there is a section that describes the entire family holding the alcoholic above water. When one person lets go, the alcoholic falls beneath the surface. At that point, the alcoholic may become so uncomfortable (with drowning!) that he chooses something different.

If you start to accept your powerlessness over another person’s thinking and stop trying to fix, manage or control it, your loved one will likely sense a difference in you. And if they begin to shift in ways you like, you may feel a surge of hope; this is working, I should do more of this.

That is the temptation of the ego. It helps to remember that YOU didn’t change someone. You got out of the way, allowing the conditions for change to happen of their own accord.

So do you do more of that? Will you get more change?

At this point, the question is no longer about behavior. It is about motivation. Are you admitting powerlessness as a strategy to control them, or are you admitting powerlessness because you have honestly looked back at everything you have tried and seen that none of it worked, and some of it made things worse? Those are not the same thing, even if they look similar on the surface.

If you truly admit you are powerless over your loved one’s ideological extremism and let go of trying to change them, then when they begin to shift, the answer is not to double down on subtle forms of control. The answer is to continue letting go.

So what do we do? We keep the focus on ourselves. We keep moving forward, keep letting go. Keep processing the blocks to letting go that arise as we do the work.

And remember, we can’t do it alone.

The Solutions and Serenity group for friends and family of political extremists meets every Tuesday night and is offered free through LeavingMAGA.org. Click here to get the link or get on the list.

And if the question arises: Am I manipulating? No you are letting go. Just keep letting go. We win by surrender. Yes, it is worth pausing on that line. WE WIN BY SURRENDER.

Of course the victory doesn’t always look the way we think it is going to look exactly. There may be no sweeping apology. No big “You were right! “ moment. But there may be something quieter and just as real: a slow softening, less defensiveness, a gradual movement out of polarity and rigidity.

That is not nothing. It is, in many cases, the beginning.

There’s a particular kind of pain moving quietly through a lot of American families right now.

Not the loud kind that shows up on cable news. The quieter kind. The kind where a conversation that used to be easy suddenly requires choreography. Where people plan what topics to avoid on the drive over for dinner. Where holidays that once felt automatic now feel like delicate diplomatic missions.

People are experiencing ideological rupture.

In the groups I’ve been facilitating for family members and friends of MAGA-aligned loved ones, people come in carrying something that looks a lot like grief. Not abstract political frustration. Actual grief.

They talk about spouses who have become strangers. Parents who repeat things that feel cruel or conspiratorial. Adult children who are exhausted by being unheard.

And beneath all of it is the same question, asked in a dozen different ways.

What happened to the person I love?

Lately another question has started showing up in those conversations too. It comes out more slowly, usually after people have been talking for a while.

How many will be too many? How many obvious lies will be overlooked? How many escalations excused? How many moments where loyalty requires ignoring what’s right in front of you?

With global tensions rising again and another widening war in the Middle East hanging in the air, that answer can’t come soon enough.

For families watching from the outside, the pain is obvious.

What’s less visible is what may be happening inside the person who’s still in it.

That’s the part Rich Logis writes about in his new book, One Betrayal Too Many: Why I Left MAGA.

Rich wasn’t someone studying the movement from a distance. For seven years he was deeply inside it. He attended events at Mar-a-Lago. He defended Donald Trump publicly. This wasn’t casual political support, it was identity.

One of the moments that stayed with me from the book happens on election night in 2020. Rich describes the confidence in the room as the returns begin to come in, the assumption that victory is inevitable. Then Fox calls Arizona and the energy changes.

Later that night, watching the results unfold, he realizes something quietly but unmistakably. Trump has lost.

And when Trump declares victory anyway, Rich writes that he knew, internally, the claim wasn’t true.

He describes that realization with a word that matters.

Betrayal.

What struck me, and what families for MAGA- identified individuals will recognize immediately, is that this realization didn’t lead him to leave right away.

In fact, he says at that point, he doubled down.

In the book Rich calls the year that followed his “year of heaven and hell.” Instead of stepping away, he defended the narrative more aggressively. He attacked critics. He leaned harder into the identity.

People in the groups I facilitate know this phase very well. It’s often the moment when their loved one seems more rigid than ever, more certain, more reactive.

Psychologically that makes sense. When an identity begins to wobble, the instinct is often to protect it rather than abandon it.

Anthropologists have a word for the stage that comes next. Liminality. The space between identities, when someone is no longer fully inside something but not yet outside it either.

It’s an incredibly fragile psychological place to stand, and it’s usually invisible to the families watching from the outside.

Rich’s story isn’t just about leaving a political movement. It’s about the long process of reckoning that follows when someone realizes they were wrong about something that once defined them. And then, he doesn’t simply walk away and say, well, that was then.

He says he’s sorry.

And then he does something you almost never see in public life. He devotes himself to making amends. Rich founded Leaving MAGA, an organization dedicated to helping people disengage from political extremism and rebuild their relationships with family and community. The groups I facilitate for families are offered free through that organization, and every week I see people trying to navigate the emotional wreckage that ideological extremism has left in their lives. (Find out more and come join us FREE HERE)

Watching someone attempt to repair harm, not rhetorically, but through sustained action,is rare enough that it’s worth noticing.

Rich could have simply gone on with his life. Instead he chose something harder. He decided to help other people find their way out.

There’s something quietly miraculous about that kind of transformation. Not miraculous in a magical sense. Miraculous in the sense that it reminds us human beings are capable of changing, even after they’ve contributed to harm.

In our conversation on Peace and the Power, Rich and I talk about what that process actually looks like. The first crack in belief. Why people often double down before they leave. The fragile psychological space between loyalty and doubt. And what families can and cannot do if they hope to keep the door open.

If you are someone who loves a person inside the movement, this conversation may help you understand what might be happening beneath the surface.

And if you are someone who has begun to feel that quiet crack in your own certainty, Rich’s story may feel uncomfortably familiar.

Here’s my conversation with Rich Logis, originally aired on Frontline Voices On WBAI 99.5 FM NYC:

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So much of the public conversation about climate change gets flattened into one narrow question:

“Is this going to cost more at the pump?”

As if the destabilization of the Earth’s climate — the oceans, forests, wildlife, agriculture, and the basic systems that sustain life — can somehow be reduced to a few cents on a gallon of gasoline.

That framing has always struck me as deeply inadequate.

So when I invited former Washington Governor Jay Inslee onto my show on WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City to talk about rising fuel prices, I shifted the conversation outside that narrow economic lens. Instead, I asked him to explore the larger moral and human questions behind the climate crisis — what kind of relationship we want to have with the living world, and what kind of future we are capable of building.

Not in a fru-fru, dreamy idealist kind of way. But grounded in the reality of the situation we’re actually facing.

To his credit, he met that invitation and took it even deeper.

Toward the end of the conversation he spoke about something very simple: birds. The loss of them. The strange quiet that follows when species disappear.

And he also described something hopeful — riding on a clean electric bus. Not just the emissions difference, but the quiet of it. The way the driver doesn’t have to shout over a roaring engine all day, the way the whole experience becomes calmer and less exhausting.

It was one of those moments that reminded me that the energy transition isn’t just about policy debates or infrastructure plans.

It’s about the quality of life we create, right now.

What struck me most about this conversation was Governor Inslee’s optimism — not a denial of the seriousness of the moment, but a grounded belief that humanity still has the capacity to make wiser choices.

We also talked about why change has been slow, and he spoke about that with real compassion.

But he also painted a picture of what is still possible.

One of the things I try to explore here in The Peace and The Power is how we face enormous challenges without losing our humanity — how we hold truth, compassion, and imagination at the same time.

This conversation with Governor Inslee felt like a glimpse of that.

You can listen to the full interview below.

Most of the people in that room are not living…

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What we are seeing now is a shift from narcissism to megalomania, and that shift matters because it changes how power behaves — and what responses actually work.

Narcissism seeks admiration. Megalomania demands submission. A narcissist wants attention; a megalomaniac wants control. When that kind of personality encounters resistance, the response is not reflection or adjustment. It is escalation.

This is why appeasement has stopped working.

This pattern has been visible for some time. European leaders have learned to open meetings with exaggerated praise, public flattery, and affirmations of strength — not because they believe them, but because they know access and cooperation depend on it. We saw it even more starkly with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was openly criticized for failing to show sufficient deference, only to adjust his tone — offering overt praise and personal affirmation — after which relations immediately warmed. These were not policy shifts. They were behavioral accommodations, learned through consequence.

Appeasement assumes that the powerful ultimately want stability — that concessions will calm the situation and restraint will be reciprocated. But megalomania feeds on boundary violation. It interprets restraint as weakness and compromise as permission.

That distinction explains much of what is unfolding now.

Domestically, there is no longer serious debate about whether limits are being respected. We are watching them tested and crossed in real time: courts attacked for enforcing the law, civil liberties treated as obstacles, administrative authority expanded without transparency, constitutional constraints handled as inconveniences rather than guardrails. The issue is not ambiguity. It is whether boundaries will be enforced.

Internationally, the response has been unusually direct.

After the president’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, several world leaders openly questioned whether the United States can still be treated as a reliable democratic ally — particularly with respect to NATO, support for Ukraine, and the stability of global trade systems that have anchored economic cooperation for decades.

Alliances do not function on weapons systems alone. They function on credibility. Once credibility erodes, everything else becomes provisional, including security guarantees, trade agreements, and diplomatic assurances.

For years, allied governments tried accommodation: softening language, absorbing instability, treating norm-breaking as personality rather than escalation. In practical terms, they indulged the behavior and hoped it would exhaust itself.

But behavior that has never encountered sustained consequences does not self-correct. It escalates until an external limit is imposed.

That is why the shift we are seeing from Europe matters. It is not emotional backlash. It is a decision to stop confusing accommodation with control.

When real limits finally appear — not from critics or the press, but from systems that cannot be flattered or worn down — courts, markets, allied governments acting together — the reaction follows a familiar pattern. Increased volatility. Anger. Repeated testing of whether those boundaries are real.

History is clear on this.

Trade wars offer a useful example. In the 1930s, the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act triggered retaliatory tariffs that collapsed global trade and accelerated political radicalization. What began as economic leverage spiraled because once escalation starts, backing down is framed as surrender.

That is why recent European threats of coordinated trade measures matter. Restricting market access is not symbolic pressure. It is leverage. And when consequences move from rhetoric to markets, as in when economic pain becomes imminent, power responds. Not out of principle, but because disorder becomes unmanageable. I would not be surprised if pressure from American corporations doing business in Europe was not responsible for President Trump’s extreme course correction regarding his extreme tariff threats toward the EU for not giving him Greenland. Those enterprises certainly did not want to face a trade bazooka.

This brings us to containment.

After World War II, the key insight was not appeasement and not panic. It was discipline: alliances, economic pressure, clear red lines, and patience. Containment did not change psychology. It changed the environment. It constrained options and reduced the payoff of escalation — but only because allies acted together.

That is why what Mark Carney said in Davos is worth paying attention to. He warned that middle powers can no longer rely on compliance or deference for safety, and that collective action is now necessary to avoid being dominated rather than consulted. He described the current moment not as a transition, but as a rupture — with systems built for cooperation now being used as instruments of coercion.

That is not reassurance. It is boundary-setting.

After Vietnam, U.S. credibility collapsed not because the country lost a war, but because allies no longer trusted its judgment or restraint. Rebuilding that trust took decades. Credibility, once lost, is expensive to restore. When it erodes, allies hedge and prepare for unpredictability.

That is what we are seeing now.

Appeasement fails not because people lack civility, but because the problem has changed. When the issue is entitlement to domination, the response has to change as well.

Megalomania does not de-escalate gracefully. When consistent boundaries are imposed — by courts, by markets, by allied governments — the response is often further escalation. Crises are manufactured. Spectacle is sought. Pressure is applied wherever resistance appears weakest.

That does not mean boundaries are a mistake. It means we should expect pushback when they are enforced.

What works is steady, collective restraint, enforced patiently, until domination stops paying off.

That is the moment we are in now.

The question is whether our institutions are prepared to hold the line.

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This morning, I spoke through this argument live on the radio — responding to the moment as it’s unfolding. For those who want to hear how this lands out loud, I’m sharing that audio below