My eternal question, is Nick consciously lying, or does he believe his own lies? Was he getting choked up last night out of frustration, because people are seeing through his lies, or because the court's pushback is shaking his own faith in the bullshit delusions that reign in his head?
My experience with NPD people says that it's a mixture of both. Often there's an underlying belief in a delusion that gets paired with awareness that others won't necessarily agree and need to be
convinced shown the errors of their ways because only you know the Truth
, leading to conscious lying with the aim of making the internal and external worlds agree.
This can be seen in his daughter testing positive for coke. If for arguments sake we say it was caused by accidental exposure, Nick's rotted brain would immediately jump to the conclusion that it didn't happen, or if it did it wasn't his fault. How could it be? He's a model father and dindu nuffin. He then realises, or is forced to realise by interacting with others, that they don't share his view and so he needs to pull out his bag of gaslighting tricks and cast enough doubt over the situation and results of the test so that the most reasonable conclusion is the one he feels to be true. He benefits from the court's secrecy in this respect because it gives him a void to fill with half truths and outright fabrications. This is why I'm particularly thankful for
@MNPublicRecords as he can never be entirely certain what we will know in time, and for all that people distrust the government, no one believes that everything it says is entirely untrue (especially when we have independent evidence to corroborate it's findings thus far).
If all else fails, and we're seeing this more and more lately, he'll make a claim to special knowledge that he unfortunately can't reveal at this time. This is where allusions to him being a cult leader are most pertinent because it's classic cultist behaviour; we are simply not worthy of the facts that would set the situation right, but believe him, the Balldo is just dying to reveal them. Even if you accept this premise as plausible you cede power to him because he then gets to set the stage for when and how the reveal happens. Except it never will. Or he'll wait until it's no longer legally problematic for him to lie, and he'll tell you the most unbelievable bullshit imaginable. And if you don't believe it, well, you weren't there so what do you know about the facts?
With all this said, it's the NPD that makes Nick the special type of lolcow he is, in my opinion. Any sane person in his shoes wouldn't have embarked on his streaming career because they would've known that they were a shit lawyer with next to no experience, with 5 fucking kids to raise rather than streaming in the dead of night because muh narcolepsy. It's all just barrelled downhill from there, and the deeper the hole, the more absurd he's needed to become to hold the lie together.
