Gonna say again something I posted earlier, and then I'll stop harping because this is evergreen:
One way to approach characters is via four levels of personality: public, private, secret, and hidden (learned this from Robert McKee, who learned it from Mad Men's Matthew Weiner).
Public is what work colleagues know about you. Private is what your family and close friends know. Secret is what even the people in your private life don't know. Hidden is what you can't or won't know even about yourself.
Of all four levels, the hidden is most consequential in determining behavior--and especially counterproductive behavior. People justify their behavior by reference to the public, maybe the private, possibly even the secret. But what's hidden is really what's driving things. The rest is rationalization.
Somewhere along the line, we've become burdened with some of the worst rulers imaginable. Worst in part because what's hidden in their psyches is so broken and pathetic that they rationalize risking the end of humanity in service to it.
Note: Listing all the reasons why the majority of Americans [Magas and far too many blue voters] do not understand that we have already fallen into a fascist abyss: consider the primary building blocks and guardrails for any democracy: 1] the separation of powers doctrine, 2]the
Within minutes after DOGE accessed the NLRB's systems, someone with an IP address in Russia started trying to log in.
The attempts were "near real-time", and made and using one of the newly created DOGE accounts with the correct username and password.