In defeating a demagogue, bully, or any manipulator, the power is all your own.

Take responsibility

Whether on a personal, nationwide, or global level, the remedy is the same: take responsibility for the world you want to live in. If you don’t consciously define your own world, you have to assume that someone else is doing it for you.

 Assume power

If you do not define clearly for yourself that above all you want peace and safety, you will always face threats and challenges to your peace and safety.

If it is uncomfortable for you to endure these threats and challenges, this is only telling you to pay more attention to your peace and safety.

Pivot

Instead of enduring or engaging with threats, go back to the idea of peace and safety. What would it mean for you on a personal level? What would it look like? How would peace and safety present, if your present circumstances have you thirsting after them?

Affirm in a quiet, serious way within yourself, that it is your goal above all to have peace and safety.  Perhaps you’d shorten that to simply peace, since the presence of peace cannot exclude the presence of safety.

They are branches of the same tree.

Perhaps you don’t realize that you have been consistently choosing the opposite of peace. But this always happens when you fail to make any choice at all. This is abdicating power.

If you are not consciously choosing peace, then you are choosing its opposite by default.

This works of course on a personal level. Are you going from one relationship to another, receiving one flavor of misuse after another? Do you doubt your ability to do things? Is there anyone you blame for your failures? Are you angry?

If any of these are true of you, you have not made the decision for peace. Or, which is the same thing, you have not made the decision often enough. You might have mouthed an allegiance to peace, you might have assumed it was too obvious to mention, or you might have had the mistaken notion that you didn’t deserve it.

To choose peace, constantly affirm it to yourself

You may well give it other names. You may see peace in security, joy, calm, love, service, continuity, flow, or balance. Then, of course, it is these that you affirm you want, as often as you wish. as often as it occurs to you. Constantly.

That way, there can be no doubt in your own mind that you deserve peace, you’re asking for peace, and you expect peace.

Then there is no doubt at all in the minds of others, who must bow to give you what you have solemnly decided upon.