I was driving in the East San Francisco Bay today and couldn't help but notice a crowd of seriously deluded people waving Israeli flags, pride flags, American flags and pro-Israel banners on the pedestrian bridge over the I80 in Berkeley. They were trying to get honks of support from the cars in the heavy traffic below but as I passed, I didn't hear anyone honking or giving a thumbs up (when anti-genocide people wave Palestinian flags from the very same bridge, they gets lots of positive honks from the cars below).

I'm not the sort of person to be crude or uncouth but I simply had to give them the finger as I passed by.

My thought at the time was: how can these people be so delusional that they think they are on the right side of history and that their cause is just?

Fortuitously, Caitlin Johnstone has published this article today where she writes about this exact same mental phenomenon: what some say is a form of 'paranoid delusional psychosis'.