The Lucas Bean Show

There is a pattern that shows up across decades of political psychology research that nobody in mainstream media wants to talk about directly.

The smarter a man is, the less likely he is to embrace conservative politics.

Not slightly less likely. Significantly less likely. And the data goes back further than most people realize.

THE STUDY NOBODY TALKS ABOUT

In 1987, researchers at Saarland University and Philipps University in Germany launched one of the most ambitious longitudinal studies in political psychology. They identified over 7,000 third grade students, isolated the gifted ones, and then followed them into adulthood for 35 years. They measured intelligence. They tracked political views. They watched what happened over time.

The results were consistent and striking.

Men with high IQ scores consistently moved away from conservative politics as they aged. Men with average to below average IQ scores moved toward conservative values and embraced conservative politics at significantly higher rates.

This was not a one-time finding buried in an obscure journal. It was a pattern that held across decades and got replicated across cultures.

Psychologists who study this call it the Cognitive Complexity Openness Hypothesis. The basic argument is straightforward. Higher intelligence correlates with greater openness to new experiences, greater tolerance for ambiguity, and a stronger ability to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and evaluate them independently. Conservative ideology, by its nature, demands the opposite. It requires certainty. It rewards deference to authority. It treats complexity as a threat rather than an invitation.

For men with high cognitive capacity, that kind of rigid thinking feels intellectually suffocating. So they reject it.

IT GETS WORSE

In 2019, Alain Van Hiel at the University of Ghent published research that added another dimension to this pattern. His work found that men with low emotional intelligence are significantly more likely to hold authoritarian political views.

This matters because it separates two different kinds of intelligence and finds the same result in both. Raw cognitive ability. Emotional processing capacity. Two different measurements. Same direction. Men who score lower are drawn toward authoritarian conservative politics at measurably higher rates.

The Ghent research built on a substantial body of earlier work including studies from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom that found consistent negative correlations between measured intelligence and right-wing authoritarianism scores.

The pattern is not a fluke. It is a finding that has survived replication across cultures and decades.

WHAT HIGH IQ MEN ACTUALLY DO DIFFERENTLY

It is not enough to say that smart men reject conservatism. The more interesting question is what they move toward and why.

High cognitive complexity does not automatically produce a political identity. What it produces is a tolerance for ambiguity that makes rigid ideological frameworks feel inadequate. Smart men are more likely to hold positions that cross traditional party lines. They are more likely to change their views when presented with new evidence. They are more likely to distrust anyone who claims to have simple answers to complicated problems.

This is why high IQ men cluster toward policy positions that require systems thinking. Climate science. Economic complexity. Public health infrastructure. Immigration as a demographic and economic phenomenon rather than a cultural threat. These are not liberal positions by nature. They are positions that require holding multiple variables in mind simultaneously. Which is exactly what high cognitive complexity enables.

The Republican party has spent decades making that kind of thinking unwelcome. It has replaced policy with identity. Replaced expertise with loyalty. Replaced complexity with enemies.

Smart men did not leave the Republican party. The Republican party made itself uninhabitable for them.

WHY THE FRAMING IS SPECIFICALLY MEN

This needs to be addressed directly because the question will come up.

The research on intelligence and political orientation shows different patterns by gender. Women with high intelligence move left for overlapping but distinct reasons. The research on women and political identity is significantly shaped by factors including reproductive rights, wage inequality, and social safety net policy in ways that create different psychological pathways to the same destination.

The specific dynamic the Cognitive Complexity Openness Hypothesis captures most cleanly is the male pattern. Because conservative identity for men carries a specific set of psychological rewards that it does not carry for women in the same way. Dominance. Hierarchy. In-group status. Authority structure. These are male-coded rewards that conservative politics delivers with particular intensity.

For high IQ men those rewards are not enough to override the cognitive discomfort of being required to think simplistically. For lower IQ men the rewards are substantial and the cognitive cost is low.

That is why the pattern is most pronounced and most consistently documented in men specifically. It is not that women are exempt from this dynamic. It is that the psychology operates through different mechanisms.

THE ECONOMIC ANXIETY OBJECTION

This is where conservatives always push back. They say working class men vote Republican because of economic anxiety. Lost jobs. Dying towns. Being left behind by globalization. Not because of low intelligence.

The research addresses this directly.

Economic anxiety is real. The devastation of deindustrialization in working class communities is real. The feeling of being ignored by coastal elites is real.

But here is what the data also shows. High IQ working class men do not follow the same pattern as low IQ working class men even when their economic circumstances are identical. Two men in the same dying town with the same lost factory job and the same financial stress do not make the same political choices at the same rate when their cognitive complexity differs.

Economic anxiety explains the anger. It does not explain the direction the anger takes. That is where cognitive complexity comes in.

Low cognitive complexity makes authoritarian scapegoating feel like a satisfying explanation. Immigrants took your job. Elites looked down on you. The deep state is conspiring against you. These are simple narratives with clear villains. They require no systems thinking. They demand no tolerance for ambiguity.

High cognitive complexity makes those explanations feel insufficient. Because they are insufficient. And smarter men know it even when they are just as angry.

Economic anxiety loads the gun. Cognitive complexity determines where it gets pointed.

THE CEILING PROBLEM

What makes this particularly important right now is what it means for the future of the Republican party.

The party has made a strategic decision over several decades to build its coalition around low-information, low-complexity voters. It has rewarded anti-intellectualism. It has attacked universities, scientists, journalists, and experts as enemies. It has told its base that thinking too hard is a sign of weakness or corruption.

That strategy works in the short term. It produces intense loyalty from people who have been told their instincts are more reliable than expertise.

But it creates a ceiling.

You cannot build a durable governing coalition out of people who reject complexity. Because governing is complex. Policy is complex. The world is complex. And a party that has spent decades telling its voters that complexity is the enemy eventually loses the ability to govern at all.

What you are left with is performance. Spectacle. Outrage as a substitute for results.

Which is exactly what we have.

And here is what that ceiling means in practice. The Republican party is now entirely dependent on suppressing participation, manipulating information, and holding power through structural advantages rather than persuasion. Because persuasion requires making an argument that can survive scrutiny. And they have spent forty years building a base that neither produces nor tolerates scrutiny.

That is not a sustainable governing position. It is a position that requires increasingly extreme measures to maintain.

WHAT TO DO WITH THIS

If you are a high IQ man who left the Republican party years ago, this research explains something you probably already felt but could not articulate. The discomfort was real. The intellectual suffocation was real. You were not abandoning your values. You were outgrowing a framework that stopped being able to hold them.

If you are still trying to have fact-based conversations with MAGA supporters in your life, this research should change your strategy. You are not going to think them out of a position they did not think themselves into. The entry point is not facts. It is the emotional architecture underneath the politics. The fear. The status anxiety. The need for simple answers in a complicated world.

And if you are watching the Republican party dismantle expertise, attack universities, and reward ignorance as a political strategy, understand what you are actually watching.

They are not doing it because they are stupid.

They are doing it because their coalition depends on it.

The data is not ambiguous. Smarter men reject rigid authoritarian thinking. They always have. The research has been showing this for nearly forty years.

The right loves the poorly educated because the poorly educated are the only ones left who will follow without questioning.

That is not an insult. It is a conclusion.

Take it up with the data.

SOURCES

Longitudinal study on intelligence and political orientation, Saarland University and Philipps University, Germany, 1987, tracking gifted students over 35 years

Alain Van Hiel, University of Ghent, research on emotional intelligence and authoritarian political views, 2019

Cognitive Complexity Openness Hypothesis, political psychology literature

Gordon Hodson and Michael Busseri, Brock University, research on cognitive ability and right-wing ideology, published in Psychological Science, 2012

Van Hiel, Onraet, and De Pauw, University of Ghent, research on need for cognitive closure and political conservatism

They will tell you the Republicans freed the slaves. They will tell you the Democrats founded the hood and burning cross crowd. They will tell you the parties never switched.

There is a psychological reason for that.

Ziva Kunda, psychologist at the University of Waterloo, spent her career studying how people process information that threatens what they want to believe. In 1990 she published one of the most cited papers in social psychology. She called the phenomenon motivated reasoning. The brain does not evaluate evidence objectively. It starts with the conclusion it needs to be true and works backwards. It recruits facts that support the conclusion and discards everything else.

Conservatives need the party switch to be a myth. Because if it is real, their party is the political heir to the Confederacy. So the brain goes to work. It finds the two facts that feel safe and stops there. Republicans freed the slaves. True. Democrats founded the hood and burning cross crowd. True. And it goes no further. Because going further is too dangerous.

So here is what actually happened.

For nearly a century after the Civil War, the South was a Democratic stronghold. Not because Southern Democrats were liberals. Because they were segregationists and the Republican Party was the party that had defeated them in the Civil War and freed their slaves. Southern Democrats didn’t share values with Northern Democrats. They shared an enemy. The Republican Party.

That changed in 1948 when Harry Truman desegregated the military. A faction of Southern Democrats walked out of the Democratic National Convention in protest and formed the States Rights Democratic Party, better known as the Dixiecrats. Their platform was explicit. Racial segregation. Opposition to federal civil rights legislation. Preservation of white supremacy as a legal and social structure. Their presidential candidate Strom Thurmond won four Southern states.

The Dixiecrats lost that election. But they had drawn a map.

In 1964 Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law. That night he told his aide Bill Moyers that he thought they had just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come. Johnson understood that signing that bill was an act of political self-destruction for the Democratic Party in the South. He signed it anyway.

Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate that same year, voted against it. He didn’t use racial language. He called it an unconstitutional overreach by the federal government. But the effect was identical. Black voters who had been slowly migrating to the Democratic Party since the New Deal left the Republican Party entirely. And white Southern voters who were furious about civil rights saw a new home forming.

Richard Nixon’s team formalized what was already happening.

They called it the Southern Strategy.

Political strategist Kevin Phillips laid out the blueprint in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority. The argument was clinical. Republicans were not going to win Black voters. So they should stop trying and go hunting where the ducks were. The ducks were white Southern voters radiating with rage over federal civil rights enforcement. Law and order. States rights. The silent majority. Every phrase was a signal. Every signal was received.

It worked beyond anything Nixon’s team had projected.

By the late 1970s the entire political leadership of the South had flipped from Democrat to Republican. By the 1990s the transformation was complete. The same states that had voted Democratic for a hundred years were now reliably Republican. The same states that flew Confederate flags as Democrats flew them as Republicans. The same politicians who had built careers on segregation either switched parties or were replaced by Republicans who adopted identical positions with slightly cleaner language.

The platform didn’t follow the voters by accident. The Republican Party made a deliberate choice to absorb the ideological content of Southern Democrats. Small government. Opposition to federal authority over states. Hostility to social welfare programs that redistributed wealth across racial lines. These were not coincidentally similar to Dixiecrat positions. They were Dixiecrat positions repackaged for a national audience.

Ronald Reagan launched his 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Not Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town of seven thousand people with no strategic electoral significance whatsoever, except for one thing. It was where three civil rights workers had been murdered by the Klan in 1964. Reagan stood in that town and gave a speech about states rights. Nobody in his campaign accidentally chose that location.

And yet conservatives will tell you the parties never switched.

This is motivated reasoning operating at its most sophisticated. The argument is not that the history is false. The argument is that it doesn’t mean what it clearly means. They will tell you only one Dixiecrat senator switched parties. True, and irrelevant. The voters didn’t need to formally switch. They just needed to vote differently. They will tell you Nixon never made explicitly racist appeals. True, and irrelevant. Dog whistles work precisely because they don’t require explicit language. They will tell you the South took decades to fully flip. True, and irrelevant. Realignments of that magnitude always take decades.

Every objection is technically accurate. Every objection avoids the conclusion the evidence demands.

That is motivated reasoning. That is the brain starting with what it needs to be true and working backwards to construct a defense that feels intellectually honest.

The facts are not hidden. They are not seriously disputed by historians. The Southern Strategy is documented in the words of the people who designed it. The platform shift is documented in fifty years of Republican policy positions. The electoral realignment is documented in voting records going back to 1948.

But accepting what the evidence shows would require conservatives to confront something unbearable. That the party they love, the party they have organized their identity around, the party they believe represents freedom and strength and American values, deliberately recruited the political descendants of the Confederacy and built its modern majority on their votes.

That is not a comfortable thing to know about yourself.

So the brain does what Kunda said it does. It finds the two facts that feel safe. And it stops.

Republicans freed the slaves.

Democrats founded the hood and burning cross crowd.

And a hundred years of history simply ceases to exist.

So when someone tells you the parties never switched, ask them one question.

Why does the party of Lincoln now fly the Confederate flag?

Sources

Kunda, Z. (1990). The Case for Motivated Reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498. University of Waterloo.

Phillips, K. (1969). The Emerging Republican Majority. Arlington House.

Britannica. (2026). Southern Strategy. Retrieved from britannica.com.

History.com. (2025). How the Party of Lincoln Won Over the Once Democratic South.

LegalClarity. (2026). The Party Switch of the 1960s: What Really Happened.

Atlanta Magazine. (2024). The Great American Political Party Switcheroo.

Carter, D. (1995). The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics. Simon and Schuster.

Philip Tetlock, psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studied what happens when people feel their God, their country, and their leader are under attack. He calls it the intuitive prosecutor mindset. When that switch flips, the brain stops functioning like a judge and starts functioning like a prosecutor. The verdict comes first. The evidence comes second. Information that proves guilt gets amplified. Information that contradicts it gets ignored.

Trump has convinced his followers that their God, their country, and their leader are under attack. All the time. By the same people.

The results are not hard to find.

Hillary Clinton was guilty before a single charge was filed. The FBI investigated for two years. They found nothing. It didn’t matter. Sixty million people chanted lock her up at arenas across America while the investigation was still open. The verdict had already been delivered.

Immigrants are criminals. This is one of the most repeated claims in American politics. It is also one of the most thoroughly debunked. A 2024 Northwestern University study tracked incarceration data across 150 years and found that immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the United States. In 2023, a record number of migrants arrived at the southern border. That same year Texas saw a 15% drop in violent crime and Arizona saw an 8.8% drop. The data could not be clearer. It doesn’t matter. Build the wall.

This is the intuitive prosecutor mindset in action. The anger comes first. The evidence gets recruited to support the anger. Anything that contradicts the verdict gets dismissed as fake news, deep state, or liberal propaganda.

Tetlock found that the angrier people are, the more punitive they become. Not more careful. Not more discerning. More punitive. The intensity of the anger determines the severity of the punishment demanded. Trump has understood this from the beginning. He does not need to prove his opponents did anything wrong. He needs to keep his followers angry enough that they never stop prosecuting.

This is why the targets keep changing but the verdict never does. Clinton. Immigrants. Soros. The media. The deep state. The identity of the enemy is interchangeable. The guilt is always predetermined.

When the verdict is always guilty, justice was never the point.

Sources

Tetlock, P.E. (2002). Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors. Psychological Review, 109(3), 451-471. University of Pennsylvania.

Goldberg, J.H., Lerner, J.S., and Tetlock, P.E. (1999). Rage and Reason: The Psychology of the Intuitive Prosecutor. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29, 781-795.

Jacome, E. et al. (2024). Immigrants and Incarceration: A 150-Year History. Northwestern University.

American Immigration Council. (2024). Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime.

Third Way. (2024). The Myth of the Migrant Crime Wave.

WHY YOU AND YOUR SIBLING SEE THE WORLD COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY

You and your sibling grew up in the same house. Same parents. Same dinner table. Same rules.

So why do you see the world completely differently? Why does one of you support Trump and the other is horrified by him? Why does one of you need a strong authority figure to feel safe while the other can spot a con artist from across a room?

The answer starts before any of you were old enough to understand what was happening. And it has been documented by psychologists, family systems researchers, and trauma specialists for decades.

NO CHILD EVER GROWS UP IN THE SAME HOUSE

Psychologist Judith Rich Harris at Rutgers University spent decades challenging the assumption that children in the same family share the same environment. Her research, published in her 1998 book The Nurture Assumption, demonstrated that no two children in the same family actually grow up in the same environment.

Birth order changes everything. The firstborn gets young, anxious, inexperienced parents who treat every milestone as a major event. The middle child gets distracted parents who are managing multiple competing needs. The youngest gets parents who have either relaxed entirely or given up. Add in economic changes, family stress, illness, job loss, and the emotional state of the parents at different points in their lives and you have four completely different childhoods happening under one roof simultaneously.

But in a narcissistic authoritarian household something else happens on top of all of that. Something more deliberate. More damaging. And more consequential for the adults those children become.

WHAT A NARCISSISTIC AUTHORITARIAN FAMILY ACTUALLY IS

A narcissistic authoritarian parent is not just difficult or selfish. They are someone who rules the family through fear, control, and punishment. Their word is law. Questioning them is not allowed. Disagreeing with them is dangerous. The family learns one rule above all others. Go along to get along or face the consequences.

Love in this house is not unconditional. It is a reward for compliance. Obedience gets you safety. Disobedience gets you punished. And the punishment is not just from the parent. The whole family learns to enforce it because if they don’t they become the next target.

The parent does not raise children. They manage them. Each child gets assigned a role based on one thing. How useful they are to the parent’s ego and control. And once that role is assigned the entire family system works to enforce it. Not for a year. Not for a childhood. Forever.

Psychologist Alice Miller at the University of Basel documented this dynamic in her landmark 1979 book The Drama of the Gifted Child. She found that narcissistic parents do not allow their children to develop authentic identities. Instead they shape each child into a role that serves the parent’s psychological needs. The child who reflects the parent’s grandiosity becomes the golden child. The child who threatens the parent’s control becomes the scapegoat. And the child who is simply not useful enough to bother with fades into invisibility.

These roles are not chosen randomly. They are assigned based on the child’s temperament, birth order, and most importantly their willingness to comply with the family’s unspoken rules.

THE GOLDEN CHILD

The golden child is the one who always seemed to have it easier.

More praise. More protection. More forgiveness when things went wrong. Every achievement celebrated. Every failure explained away. From the outside it looked like love. From the inside it was a transaction.

Psychologist Karyl McBride, author of Will I Ever Be Good Enough, spent decades studying narcissistic family systems. She called this the golden child dynamic. The child is not loved for who they are. They are loved for what they perform. For how well they make the parent look good.

The golden child learns the game early. Stay close to power. Follow the rules. Report back to the parent. And when someone steps out of line make sure the parent knows about it. They are the hallway monitors. The ones who tell the teacher when someone is running. And then smile when that kid gets in trouble.

At first they do it to survive. Siding with the authority figure means safety. Enforcing the rules means approval. Watching someone else get punished means they are not the one being punished. What starts as survival becomes identity. They stop enforcing the rules to stay safe. They start enjoying it.

Dr. Ramani Durvasula, clinical psychologist and professor at California State University Los Angeles, documented what the golden child becomes as an adult. Her research found that golden children frequently develop narcissistic traits. They grow up entitled. Unable to empathize. Convinced the rules exist for everyone but them. They become the controlling partner. The abusive boss. The parent who starts the whole cycle over again with their own children.

And because cruelty felt like safety in that house cruelty feels like safety everywhere they go. When a powerful person mocks someone, humiliates someone, punishes someone who stepped out of line their brain does not feel disgust. It feels comfort. It feels familiar. It feels like home.

That is why golden children are drawn to authoritarian leaders. That is why when Trump mocks a disabled reporter or humiliates a political enemy they do not look away. They cheer. Because their childhood taught them that this is what power looks like. And power is the only thing that ever kept them safe.

They are the most susceptible people on earth to authoritarian movements. And the cycle continues through them into the next generation.

THE FORGOTTEN CHILD

The forgotten child never got targeted. They got something worse. They got ignored.

No praise. No punishment. No attention of any kind. They were simply not useful enough to bother with. The parent was too busy performing for the golden child and punishing the black sheep to notice them at all.

Not consciously. But systematically they made themselves invisible. They stopped asking for things. Stopped making noise. Stopped having needs that might draw attention. They faded into the walls of the house and learned to survive on nothing.

Psychologist Karyl McBride identified the lost child as the most neglected and overlooked role in the narcissistic family system. She found that by the time these children are adults they often cannot tell you what they want, what they feel, or what they need. Because nobody ever asked. The absence of attention is not neutral. It is its own form of damage. It hollows a person out.

They grow up believing they do not matter. That their needs are an inconvenience. That wanting things is selfish. That the safest version of themselves is the smallest one.

As adults the forgotten child gravitates toward partners who ignore them. Bosses who overlook them. Friendships where they give everything and receive nothing. Not because they enjoy it. Because it feels like the only kind of relationship they know how to be in.

They are the ones who checked out of politics entirely. Not because they do not care. Because they learned that engaging with anything powerful gets you noticed. And getting noticed was always dangerous.

They are still disappearing. Still waiting for someone to finally see them. Still waiting.

THE BLACK SHEEP

The black sheep did not become the target because they were bad. They became the target because they were real.

In a narcissistic authoritarian household the parent needs everyone to perform a lie. The lie that the parent is good. That the family is healthy. That everything is fine. Most children out of survival go along with the lie. The black sheep does not. Not because they are trying to cause trouble. But because their brain will not let them perform something they know is false. They ask questions. They point out contradictions. They refuse to pretend that what is happening is normal.

And that refusal is a threat to the entire system.

Psychiatrist Murray Bowen at Georgetown University spent decades studying how families assign roles to maintain their dysfunction. He found that authoritarian households need a scapegoat to function. They need someone to carry all the blame so everyone else can pretend they are fine. The black sheep becomes that person. Not because they did anything wrong. Because they were the most honest person in the house.

The parent responds by making the black sheep the cause of every problem. The golden children learn to pile on. The forgotten child learns to look away. And the black sheep spends their childhood as a prisoner in their own home bearing the weight of a family’s dysfunction that was never theirs to carry.

When the black sheep points at the truth the parent flips it. Suddenly the parent is the victim. The child who spoke up is the abuser. The family rallies around the parent. And the black sheep is left wondering if they imagined the whole thing. Psychologists call this gaslighting. Robin Stern at Yale University documented it as the systematic undermining of a person’s perception of reality. The black sheep experiences this not occasionally but as a daily feature of their childhood.

Some black sheep do not make it out. The weight of being hated by the people who were supposed to love you is not a small thing. It breaks people. Freddy Trump was the black sheep of his family. His father called him weak every day. His brother joined in. He drank himself to death at 42. That is what happens when a black sheep never escapes the family system. When the abuse follows them everywhere they go and they never find their way out.

Psychologist Bessel van der Kolk at Boston University spent decades studying what happens to children who grow up in threatening environments. He found that these children develop what he called hyper-vigilance. A trauma response where the brain never stops scanning for threats, lies, and manipulation. The brain learns to look for the gap between what someone says and what they actually mean. Because in that house missing that gap got you hurt.

For the black sheep hyper-vigilance is a blessing and a curse. Exhausting to live with. Impossible to manipulate.

When an authoritarian leader shows up and tells them that immigrants are the problem, that only he can fix it, that anyone who questions him is the enemy, the black sheep brain does not feel the pull. It recognizes the pattern. It has felt this exact dynamic before. In their own kitchen. At their own dinner table.

They are not immune because they are smarter. They are immune because they already survived this.

And they are not going back.

WHAT THIS MEANS

Same house. Same parents. Same dinner table. Three completely different childhoods. Three completely different adults.

The golden child is still performing. Still looking for the next authority figure to tell them who to target. Still cheering for whoever promises to protect them from the people they were taught to fear.

The forgotten child is still disappearing. Still avoiding conflict. Still waiting for someone to finally notice them.

And the black sheep is still being told they are the problem. By politicians. By employers. By partners who learned the same playbook in their own homes.

But here is what the narcissistic parent never understood.

The child they targeted the hardest became the one person in that family impossible to manipulate.

The black sheep was not the problem in that house. They were the only one telling the truth. And the ones who make it through carry that truth with them everywhere they go.

The parent tried to break them.

Instead they built the one thing an authoritarian system can never survive.

Someone who refuses to be controlled.

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I would greatly appreciate it.

SOURCES

Harris, J.R. (1998). The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Free Press.

Miller, A. (1979). The Drama of the Gifted Child. Suhrkamp Verlag.

McBride, K. (2008). Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers. Free Press.

Durvasula, R. (2015). Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship with a Narcissist. Post Hill Press.

Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.

Stern, R. (2007). The Gaslight Effect. Morgan Road Books.

Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

Most people have never heard of Roy Cohn. That is by design.

Roy Cohn spent his entire career making sure that the most important things about him never made it into the public record. He was Donald Trump’s mentor, his lawyer, his role model, and the architect of the political style that now runs the United States government.

He was also gay.

Deeply, desperately, dangerously closeted gay.

And the distance between those two facts is where American history gets very dark very fast.

WHO ROY COHN WAS

Roy Cohn was born in the Bronx in 1927. He graduated from Columbia Law School at 20, so young he could not yet take the bar exam. By 23 he was prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage. They were executed in 1953. Many legal scholars have since questioned the fairness of that prosecution. Cohn never expressed doubt about it.

He became chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings. He was McCarthy’s attack dog. His job was to destroy people. He was extraordinarily good at it.

During this same period Cohn and McCarthy orchestrated what historians call the Lavender Scare. The systematic purge of gay and lesbian employees from the federal government. They argued that gay people were security risks because their sexuality made them vulnerable to blackmail. They ruined careers. They destroyed lives. Multiple people who were exposed committed suicide.

Roy Cohn was closeted and gay the entire time he was doing this.

His cousin David Marcus confirmed it. His coauthor Sidney Zion confirmed it posthumously. Multiple people in his social circle confirmed it. He had long term male partners. He lived an openly gay private life while maintaining a furiously anti-gay public one.

Politico described him as a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe. That is not an editorial opinion. That is a documented description of a documented pattern.

THE PSYCHOLOGY

In 1936 psychoanalyst Anna Freud identified the mechanism that explains Roy Cohn completely.

She called it reaction formation.

When the brain encounters an impulse it finds shameful or threatening it does not suppress it. It converts it into the exact opposite behavior. And then performs that opposite behavior loudly, publicly, and aggressively. The more unbearable the internal conflict the more extreme the outward performance.

Roy Cohn did not crusade against gay people because he believed homosexuality was wrong. He crusaded against gay people because his brain needed the performance to survive. Every prosecution was a wall he was building between himself and what he could not face.

Reaction formation does not make the impulse disappear. It makes it louder. It just points it outward instead of inward.

The research confirms what the pattern suggests. In 1996 Henry Adams and his colleagues at the University of Georgia measured the physical arousal of self-identified heterosexual men while exposing them to gay male content. Men who scored highest on homophobia showed measurably higher physical arousal than non-homophobic men. And they significantly underestimated their own arousal when asked to report it afterward.

They were not lying to the researchers. They were lying to themselves.

Roy Cohn was lying to himself for 59 years.

HOW HE DIED

Roy Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984. He told everyone it was liver cancer.

He bullied Ronald and Nancy Reagan into getting him access to experimental AIDS treatment that was not available to the general public. The Reagans helped him. They denied the same favor to their friend Rock Hudson.

He continued to publicly deny being gay while dying of a disease that at the time was devastating the gay community he had spent his career persecuting.

He was disbarred three weeks before he died for dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.

He died on August 2 1986. Alone. Broke. Disgraced.

Trump did not visit him.

Trump later said in the White House that he wished he still had a Roy Cohn. Someone willing to do anything. Someone with no limits. Someone who attacked without mercy and never admitted defeat.

He did not say he missed his friend. He said he missed the weapon.

WHAT COHN TAUGHT TRUMP

Roy Cohn gave Donald Trump three rules that have defined his entire public life.

Never admit you are wrong. If they attack you counterattack harder. And never stop lying no matter what.

Trump has followed those rules without exception for fifty years.

Every time Trump denies something obvious. Every time Trump attacks the people investigating him. Every time Trump lies about something with documented proof. That is Roy Cohn.

Cohn described himself and Trump as exactly alike. Two men who would do absolutely anything to win. Two men for whom the truth was a tool to be used or discarded depending on what the moment required.

Cohn once said what you say can have nothing to do with what you believe. Trump has lived by that rule every single day of his public life.

THE PATTERN

Roy Cohn is not the only one. He is just the most famous example.

Every generation produces men like Roy Cohn. Men so terrified of what they are that they spend their lives destroying everyone who reminds them of themselves. Ted Haggard. George Rekers. Larry Craig. The list is long and it keeps growing.

The loudest voices against gay rights are almost always the ones with the most to hide. The research supports this. The history supports this. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence.

Trump’s mentor was gay. His lawyer was gay. His role model was gay.

The man who taught Trump how to be Trump spent his entire life destroying gay people.

He was one of them.

And he died the way they all eventually die. Exposed. Alone. Having spent everything he had performing a person he was not.

The performance always ends. The truth always comes out.

Roy Cohn just made sure his came out after he was dead.

SOURCES

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Hogarth Press.

Adams, H.E., Wright, L.W., & Lohr, B.A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440-445.

Von Hoffman, N. (1988). Citizen Cohn. Doubleday.

Zion, S. (1988). The Autobiography of Roy Cohn. Lyle Stuart.

Brenner, M. (1997). How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America. Vanity Fair.

History.com. Roy Cohn: From Red Scare Prosecutor to Donald Trump’s Mentor.

Jones Town vs. MAGA Cult: The Similarities are Undeniable

Most people think Jonestown was a one time event. A singular madman. A tragedy that could never happen again.

They are wrong.

What happened in Jonestown on November 18 1978 was not random. It was the end result of a precise, documented, repeatable process that psychologists have studied, named, and published in peer reviewed journals. A process that has been used by authoritarian leaders throughout history. A process that is being used right now.

In 1961 psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton at Harvard Medical School published his landmark study on thought reform. He mapped the exact psychological mechanisms used to replace a person’s independent reality with a leader’s reality. He identified eight criteria. He called the process thought reform.

Jim Jones used every single one of Lifton’s mechanisms. So does Donald Trump.

This is not a metaphor. This is not a political opinion. This is a clinical analysis of two movements using the same documented playbook.

Here are the six mechanisms that explain how one man convinces thousands of people that dying for him makes sense.

1. THE CREATION OF A SAVIOR

Jim Jones did not arrive as a monster. He arrived as a saint.

He built one of the first racially integrated congregations in Indiana at a time when that was genuinely radical. He fed the poor. He marched for civil rights. He provided community, purpose, and belonging to people who had been told their entire lives that they did not matter.

And then he performed miracles.

He pulled tumors out of people on stage. Cancerous masses removed by the laying of hands. The crowds gasped and wept. The tumors were chicken parts wrapped in tissue. The people on stage were planted. The miracles were theater. And the audiences believed every single one.

Psychologist William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin spent decades studying what happens when a person’s identity merges completely with a leader. He called it identity fusion. The psychological state in which the boundary between self and leader disappears entirely.

When identity fusion occurs the leader’s enemies become the follower’s enemies. The leader’s survival becomes the follower’s survival. An attack on the leader registers in the brain as a physical attack on the self.

This is why facts stop mattering once a person reaches this state. You are not having a political disagreement with them. You are threatening the person they have become.

Jones did not build followers. He built extensions of himself. People whose sense of self was so thoroughly merged with his that they could not imagine existing without him.

Trump did the same thing. He told forgotten Americans the system had failed them and only he could fix it. MAGA was not a political platform. It was a personality transplant. When you criticize Trump you are telling his followers their own judgment was wrong. Their own instincts were broken. Their own identity was a mistake.

Jones did not build followers. He built extensions of himself. And extensions do not leave. They do not question. They do not doubt.

They just follow. All the way to the end. So does Trump.

2. THE INVENTED ENEMIES

Once Jones had followers he needed to keep them. And the most powerful way to keep people is not love. It is fear.

Every authoritarian movement in history has understood this. Love is fragile. Love requires reciprocity. Love can be withdrawn. Fear is self-sustaining. Fear needs only one thing to survive. An enemy.

Jones invented enemies everywhere. The government was watching. The CIA was plotting. Reporters were agents of a conspiracy. Defectors were traitors who would bring destruction down on everyone if they were not stopped.

Psychologist Jeff Greenberg at the University of Arizona spent decades studying what happens to people when they believe their survival is under threat. His landmark 1986 research identified what he called Terror Management Theory. When people believe they are in danger their brain stops evaluating information and starts looking for protection. They cluster around their leader. They reject outsiders. They become more extreme. The more scared they are the more loyal they become.

This is the mechanism that turns ordinary people into true believers. Not ideology. Not persuasion. Fear. Existential, unrelenting, manufactured fear.

Jones fed his followers that fear every single day. The outside world was corrupt and dangerous. The government was coming. The media was lying. The only safe place was inside the movement, behind Jones, following his instructions exactly.

Trump runs the same machine. Immigrants are invading. Democrats are grooming children. The deep state is plotting. The media is lying. Every institution that produces evidence against him is part of the conspiracy.

A leader who makes followers feel their survival is under constant threat does not need to earn loyalty every day. Fear does that for him.

3. THE STAGED PERSECUTION

Jones did not just tell followers they were under attack. He showed them.

He staged fake assassination attempts with blood-stained shirts and miraculous survivals. He ran what he called White Night drills in which followers were handed cups and told the liquid was poison. When they did not die he told them it was a loyalty test. He did this multiple times before the actual event. He was training them.

The more dramatic the persecution the more devoted the followers became. If this many powerful people want him dead he must matter. And surviving together bonded his followers in a way nothing else could.

Robert Jay Lifton identified the mechanism that makes this work. He called it milieu control. The deliberate manipulation of the environment so the leader becomes the only stable point in a world of manufactured chaos. When everything outside feels dangerous and unpredictable the leader becomes the only thing that makes sense.

Trump ran the same play. In 2011 Barack Obama mocked him at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Trump has said himself that night motivated him to run for president. Then came 91 felony counts. A bullet in Butler Pennsylvania. A second attempt on a golf course. Every single time his poll numbers went up. Every single time his followers said this proves they are terrified of him.

Jones staged his persecution. Some of Trump’s were real (were they?).

The psychological result was identical.

The more powerful the enemy the more important the leader must be.

4. THE COLLAPSE OF REALITY

Once Jones had followers isolated and afraid he made himself the only source of truth.

Followers in Jonestown had no access to outside news. Letters were monitored. Visitors were controlled. Defectors were called traitors. When followers heard something that contradicted Jones they were taught one response. That is what the enemy wants you to think.

Contradictions were not problems. They were proof the conspiracy was bigger than anyone knew. The more evidence that mounted against Jones the more convinced his followers became that powerful forces were trying to destroy the only man telling them the truth.

Psychologist Arie Kruglanski at the University of Maryland spent decades studying what happens to people when they stop tolerating uncertainty. He called it need for cognitive closure. When people feel threatened their brain locks onto one clear answer and builds walls around it. New information does not update the belief. It gets rejected as a threat.

Once a person reaches this state reality itself becomes the enemy. Any fact that contradicts the leader is proof of the conspiracy against the leader. Any person who presents that fact is an agent of that conspiracy.

Trump built the same fortress. Fake news. Enemy of the people. Every judge who rules against him is corrupt. Every witness is a plant. Every Republican who turns on him is a traitor. His followers do not evaluate the evidence. They reject it before it lands.

Jones needed a jungle to build that fortress. Trump built it inside people’s phones.

5. WHY PEOPLE STAY

By the time followers realized something was wrong in Jonestown it was too late to admit it.

Jones’s followers had signed over their bank accounts. Signed false confessions. Cut off their families. Moved to a jungle on another continent. To admit Jones was wrong meant admitting they had destroyed their own lives for a lie. The brain will do almost anything to avoid that conclusion.

Psychologist Barry Staw at the University of California Berkeley identified this mechanism in his research on organizational behavior. He called it escalation of commitment. The more a person invests in a decision the harder it becomes to walk away regardless of the evidence. Because walking away means admitting everything was wasted.

In a cult this becomes something darker. It becomes what I call sunk cost shame. The weight of everything you have invested in a leader combined with the public humiliation of admitting you were wrong. Jones’s followers had not just invested money and time. They had invested their identity. Their community. Their entire understanding of who they were and what the world meant.

Trump’s followers are in the same trap. They defended him at Thanksgiving. Cut off friends. Put the flag on the truck. Wore the hat. A decade of loyalty publicly performed in front of everyone they know. To admit Trump is a fraud means admitting they were the person pushing the con at every family dinner for ten years.

Jones did not need guards to keep people in Jonestown. The shame kept them there. Trump does not need to threaten his followers. The shame keeps them there too.

6. THE JUNGLE

When outside pressure became too great Jones made one final move. He took his followers somewhere no outside correction could reach them.

Jonestown was not a commune. It was a controlled environment where Jones’s psychology became the movement’s psychology. Sleep deprivation. Forced labor. Public humiliation of anyone who questioned leadership. Armed guards at the perimeter. Jones became increasingly paranoid and unstable. And his paranoia became their paranoia.

Psychologist Albert Bandura at Stanford University spent decades studying how ordinary people come to commit extraordinary harm without experiencing themselves as monsters. He called it moral disengagement. The process by which a person’s conscience is gradually bypassed through a series of small steps each of which feels justified in the moment.

Jones’s followers did not wake up one day and decide to poison their children. They arrived at that moment through a thousand small surrenders. Each one feeling more normal than the last. Each line crossed making the next one easier.

When Congressman Leo Ryan flew to Jonestown to investigate, Jones ordered his assassination at the airstrip. Then he ordered everyone to drink the Flavor Aid his followers had prepared in large vats.

Over 900 people died. 304 of them were children.

Trump has not taken his followers to a jungle. But January 6th did not happen in a day. It happened through years of moral disengagement. People who had never imagined storming the United States Capitol found themselves inside it. By that point they had crossed so many lines that one more felt like nothing.

A paranoid leader with no external correction is the most dangerous thing in the world.

WHAT THIS MEANS

This is how cult leaders work. A savior appears. Enemies are invented. Persecution is staged. Reality collapses. The exits close. And by the time people realize what they are inside they have given too much to walk away.

Jones did it in a jungle with armed guards. Trump is doing it on a phone with a WiFi connection.

Both of them built cults.

Every manipulation Jones used to trap his followers has been studied, named, and documented by psychologists.

And Trump is using every single one of them.

One of these cults ended in a jungle in Guyana with 918 bodies.

The other one is collapsing in front of us.

SOURCES

Lifton, R.J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. W.W. Norton.

Swann, W.B., Gomez, A., Seyle, D.C., Morales, J.F., & Huici, C. (2009). Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 995-1011.

Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. (1986). The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R.F. Baumeister (Ed.), Public Self and Private Self. Springer-Verlag.

Kruglanski, A.W. (1989). Lay Epistemics and Human Knowledge. Plenum Press.

Staw, B.M. (1976). Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A study of escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27-44.

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetuation of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.

Reiterman, T., & Jacobs, J. (1982). Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People. Dutton.

Moore, R. (2009). Understanding Jonestown and Peoples Temple. Praeger.

There is a psychological reason why grown adults call Donald Trump “daddy.”

It is not a joke. It is not irony. It is not a meme.

It is a clinical diagnosis that Bob Altemeyer spent 40 years documenting.

And once you understand what he found you will never look at a Trump rally the same way again.

THE RESEARCH

In 1981 psychologist Bob Altemeyer at the University of Manitoba began what would become one of the most comprehensive studies of political psychology ever conducted. He put thousands of people through a standardized psychological assessment and measured one specific thing.

How easily they hand their brain to someone else.

He tested how readily people adopted the beliefs of authority figures without questioning them. How aggressively they attacked whoever that authority figure pointed at. And how rigidly they conformed to whatever that authority figure defined as normal.

The results were disturbing.

A significant portion of the population did not think for themselves at all. They did not evaluate information. They did not weigh evidence. They simply waited for the authority figure to tell them what to believe and then believed it completely.

Altemeyer called this authoritarian submission. The psychological tendency to defer completely to whoever is perceived as a legitimate and powerful authority figure.

This was not a fringe phenomenon. Altemeyer found it across cultures, across countries, and across decades of research. And he found something specific about where it comes from that explains everything about the MAGA movement.

WHERE IT COMES FROM

Authoritarian submission does not develop randomly. Altemeyer traced it back to a specific kind of childhood.

Children raised in households where the world was presented as dangerous and threatening. Where obedience was demanded and questioning authority was punished harshly and arbitrarily. Where the father figure was the source of both fear and safety. Where love was conditional on compliance.

These children did not learn to think for themselves. They learned to find the strongest authority in the room and submit to it completely. Because submission meant safety. Because questioning meant punishment. Because the father who scared them was also the father who protected them.

That psychological wiring does not turn off when they grow up. It just goes looking for a new father figure to submit to.

A separate longitudinal study published in 2020 tracked children from birth to age 26 and found that young children with fearful temperaments raised by authoritarian parents were significantly more likely to hold conservative political orientations as adults. The fear response and the submission response were installed in childhood and stayed installed for life.

WHAT TRUMP UNDERSTOOD

Trump did not stumble into this. He understood it intuitively from the beginning.

He positioned himself not as a politician but as a patriarch. Strong. Decisive. Angry on their behalf. Willing to punish their enemies. Unafraid of consequences. The father who finally sees what they see and is willing to do something about it.

To someone wired for authoritarian submission that is not a political platform. That is a psychological homecoming.

This is why they say “daddy’s home” when Trump appears. This is why they say “wait till Trump gets back, he’s gonna make them pay.” This is why they talk about him the way children talk about a powerful and frightening father they are desperate to please.

They are not choosing a leader. They are choosing a father figure. And their brain is doing exactly what it was trained to do in childhood.

Submit. Comply. Believe whatever he says. Attack whoever he points at.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FATHER FIGURE TAKES OVER

Altemeyer spent the final years of his life studying what happens when a population with high authoritarian submission finds a leader willing to exploit it.

He co-wrote a book specifically about Trump called Authoritarian Nightmare. He was not being dramatic. He was describing the most dangerous possible combination in a democracy. A population psychologically primed to submit to authority and a leader willing to weaponize that submission without limit.

Authoritarian followers do not evaluate their leader’s actions. They rationalize them. Every lie becomes strategy. Every crime becomes persecution. Every failure becomes proof of the conspiracy against him.

They cannot criticize him because criticizing him means criticizing the father figure their psychology has been built around. And criticizing the father figure means losing the one thing that makes the fear manageable.

The structure. The certainty. The sense that someone powerful is in charge and on their side.

Take Trump away and the fear has no answer. The world goes back to being dangerous and chaotic and out of control with no father to make it stop.

That is why they hold on no matter what he does. That is why every conviction makes them more loyal. That is why every scandal makes them send more money.

They are not defending a politician. They are protecting the psychological structure their brain depends on to function.

THE PART THAT SHOULD CONCERN ALL OF US

Altemeyer found that populations with high authoritarian submission are the single most dangerous constituency in a democracy.

Not because they are evil. Not because they are stupid.

Because they are psychologically designed to follow whoever feels like the strongest authority in the room. And that design has no built-in limit. No internal check. No moment where their own conscience overrides the authority figure’s instruction.

Jones’s followers did not think they were poisoning their children. They thought they were following their father’s instructions at the moment the world finally came for him.

Trump’s followers do not think they are destroying democracy. They think they are following their father’s instructions at the moment the deep state finally came for him.

The psychology is identical. The scale is just larger.

Altemeyer warned us. He spent 40 years warning us. He called it an authoritarian nightmare not because of Trump specifically but because of what happens when a democracy fills up with people who have outsourced their conscience to a father figure.

They do not need to be ordered to cross lines. They need to be pointed at them.

And Trump has been pointing for ten years.

SOURCES

Altemeyer, B. (1981). Right-Wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press.

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.

Altemeyer, B. & Dean, J.W. (2020). Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers. Melville House.

Legate, N., et al. (2020). Parenting, temperament, and attachment security as antecedents of political orientation: Longitudinal evidence from early childhood to age 26. Developmental Psychology.

There is a psychological reason why the men who scream loudest about homosexuality keep getting caught in airport bathrooms.

It is not hypocrisy. It is not weakness. It is not irony.

It is a documented psychological phenomenon that has been studied, named, and published in peer reviewed journals. And once you understand it you will never watch a homophobic politician give a speech the same way again.

THE PATTERN IS IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE

Ted Haggard. Evangelical pastor. Preached homosexuality was a sin for years. Was paying a male escort for sex the entire time.

George Rekers. Co-founder of the Family Research Council. One of the most prominent anti-gay activists in American history. Was caught returning from a European vacation with a male escort he hired from a website called Rentboy.com.

Larry Craig. United States Senator. Voted against every piece of gay rights legislation he ever encountered. Was arrested in an airport bathroom in Minneapolis for soliciting sex from an undercover male police officer.

Josh Duggar. Anti-gay activist. Family values defender. Was caught accessing Ashley Madison, a website designed for extramarital affairs, and was later convicted of downloading child sexual abuse material.

The list goes on. And on. And on.

This is not a coincidence. This is a pattern. And psychology has had an explanation for it for nearly a century.

THE BRAIN BURIES WHAT IT CANNOT FACE

In 1936 psychoanalyst Anna Freud identified a defense mechanism that explains everything about these men.

She called it reaction formation.

When the brain encounters an impulse it finds threatening or shameful it does not suppress it. It converts it into the exact opposite behavior. And then performs that opposite behavior loudly, publicly, and aggressively.

The more unbearable the internal conflict the more extreme the outward performance.

Ted Haggard did not preach against homosexuality because he believed it was wrong. He preached against it because his brain needed the performance to survive. Every sermon was a wall he was building between himself and what he could not face.

Reaction formation does not make the impulse disappear. It makes it louder. It just points it outward instead of inward.

The crusade is not about you. It has never been about you. It is about them.

THE SCIENCE IS NOT SUBTLE

In 1996 researchers Henry Adams, Lester Wright, and Bethany Lohr at the University of Georgia conducted a peer reviewed study that should have ended this conversation permanently.

They measured the physical arousal of self-identified heterosexual men while exposing them to gay male content.

The results were extraordinary.

54 percent of men who scored highest on the homophobia scale showed definite physical arousal. Only 24 percent of non-homophobic men did the same.

And when asked afterward to report their own arousal the homophobic men significantly underestimated what their own bodies had just recorded.

They were not lying to the researchers. They were lying to themselves.

The most homophobic men in the room are the most aroused by gay men in the room. That is not a political talking point. That is a published peer reviewed finding from a university laboratory conducted under controlled conditions.

The louder the objection the closer the mirror.

THE PUBLIC PERFORMANCE GIVES THEM PERMISSION

Watch how these men build their public identities.

Church leader. Family values defender. Anti-gay activist. Author of books about the sanctity of marriage.

That is not their biography. That is a cover story.

In 2001 psychologists Benoit Monin and Dale Miller at Stanford University identified a mechanism they called moral credentialing. When people build a public record of moral behavior it licenses them to privately do the opposite. The public performance of virtue accumulates like currency that gets spent in private.

Every anti-gay sermon. Every vote against gay rights legislation. Every book written about protecting traditional marriage. It is not conviction. It is currency. They are buying themselves permission to do exactly what they are preaching against.

George Rekers did not co-found the Family Research Council despite hiring male escorts. He co-founded it because of it. The organization was not his life’s work. It was his alibi.

The more aggressively they perform the virtue in public the more permission they accumulate to violate it in private. And the cycle feeds itself until it collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

GAY PEOPLE EXISTING IS A MIRROR THEY CANNOT ESCAPE

Non-homophobic men are not disturbed by gay people existing in public. They are not agitated by two men holding hands. They are not panicked by a pride flag. They do not feel personally threatened by someone else’s relationship.

But watch a deeply homophobic conservative man encounter any of those things and something completely different happens.

The agitation is immediate. It is visceral. It is wildly out of proportion to anything actually happening.

That is not politics. That is not religion. That is a man reacting to his own reflection.

The Adams study confirmed this. The men who showed the strongest physical arousal to gay content were the same men who reported the most hostility toward gay people in their daily lives. The hostility and the attraction were not opposites. They were the same psychological response pointed in two different directions.

You cannot be that angry about something that has nothing to do with you. The anger always has a source. And in these men the source is a mirror they have been running from their entire lives.

WHEN THE CONFLICT GETS UNBEARABLE IT BECOMES VIOLENCE

These men are not angry at gay people.

They are angry at themselves. And that anger has to go somewhere.

In 1939 psychologist John Dollard and his colleagues at Yale University identified what they called the frustration aggression hypothesis. When a person is repeatedly blocked from reaching a goal the frustration builds until it explodes outward as aggression. The target is never the real source of the frustration. It gets displaced onto whoever is safest to attack.

For these men the goal they can never reach is self-acceptance. That frustration builds for years. Decades. An entire lifetime of performing a person they are not.

And then it comes out as legislation. As activism. As violence.

They are not protecting children. If protecting children was the goal they would be focused on the documented epidemic of child sexual abuse inside the very institutions they defend. They are not protecting marriage. They are not protecting values.

They are protecting the lie they built their entire life around. And when that lie gets threatened they do not get sad. They get dangerous.

The rage was never about you. It was always about what they see when they close their eyes at night.

They always get caught. Because you cannot perform your way out of who you are.

They are not protecting their values. They are scared you will see their search history.

SOURCES

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Hogarth Press.

Adams, H.E., Wright, L.W., & Lohr, B.A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440-445.

Monin, B., & Miller, D.T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33-43.

Dollard, J., Miller, N.E., Doob, L.W., Mowrer, O.H., & Sears, R.R. (1939). Frustration and Aggression. Yale University Press.

Most people assume that if you are loyal enough to Trump you are safe.

They are wrong.

Tucker Carlson assumed that. He campaigned for Trump. He wrote speeches for him. He called him the most important political figure of his lifetime. He was one of the most powerful media voices in the country and he used every bit of that power to put Trump back in the White House.

Then Tucker Carlson said the Iran war was a mistake.

This week the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official implied he was no longer a conservative. Under Trump’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy that is not a minor designation. That is the difference between being a protected American citizen and being a target of the federal government’s domestic security apparatus.

Tucker Carlson did not commit a crime. He did not threaten anyone. He did not break any law.

Tucker Carlson disagreed with President Trump.

And that was enough to be labeled a Domestic Terrorist.

THIS IS NOT UNPRECEDENTED. THIS IS THE PLAYBOOK.

Before we get to the psychology it is worth documenting exactly what has happened in the past few weeks because the media has largely missed it.

Trump’s administration released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy. It identifies three primary terror threats. Narcoterrorists. Legacy Islamist terrorists. And violent left-wing extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists.

Nowhere in the document does it mention right-wing extremism. When Breitbart editor Alex Marlow asked Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s top counterterrorism official, whether right-wing extremism was a threat at all, Gorka’s answer was revealing.

He said he was not sure Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes were conservatives. If they are not conservatives then under this strategy they fall into the category of people the administration is targeting. He accused Carlson of lauding Sharia law based on a comment Carlson made about being warmly received as a Christian while visiting Saudi Arabia. Journalist Ken Klippenstein reviewed the original interview and called Gorka’s characterization ridiculous.

None of this is actually about extremism. Carlson’s real offense was calling Trump’s Iran war the single biggest mistake any American president had ever made. Fuentes said no war with Iran. Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned and criticized the Iran war and is now under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information.

The pattern is not subtle. Criticize the Iran war and become a target of the national security state.

Trump’s own national security directive states that its counterterrorism powers will not be used to target Americans who simply disagree with the administration. The document then proceeds to build exactly the architecture needed to do that.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WHY THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS

This is not unique to Trump. This is what every authoritarian movement does when it reaches a certain stage of consolidation. And psychology has had a name for it for over fifty years.

In 1971 psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol published his landmark research on how people form and maintain group identities. He called it social identity theory.

Tajfel found that when people build their sense of self around membership in a group the boundaries of that group become psychologically critical. The in-group is not just a preference. It is an identity. And anything that threatens the coherence of that identity is processed as an existential threat.

This explains something that confuses most outside observers about authoritarian movements. Why does the leader treat defectors more harshly than he treats actual enemies? Why is Tucker Carlson more dangerous to Trump than a Democrat?

Because Carlson’s defection does something no Democrat can do. It legitimizes doubt from the inside. It says to every Trump supporter who has privately questioned the Iran war that a loyal, credentialed, deeply committed member of the movement looked at the same facts and came to a different conclusion.

That doubt cannot be allowed to spread. So it has to be contained. And the way you contain it is by stripping the defector of their identity first. Carlson is not a conservative anymore. He is a Sharia sympathizer. He is effectively a left-wing extremist. He is not one of us.

And once he is not one of us he can be treated like all the others.

Tajfel called this out-group derogation. The tendency to demonize former in-group members more aggressively than established outsiders because their existence poses a unique psychological threat to group cohesion.

THE LOYALTY TEST THAT NEVER ENDS

Here is what Trump’s remaining supporters do not understand about how this works.

The loyalty test never ends. The definition of a true believer keeps getting narrower. The in-group keeps getting smaller. And everyone who has ever publicly supported Trump has already given him ammunition to use against them if they ever step out of line.

Tucker Carlson spent years defending Trump on national television. Those clips exist. The moment Carlson broke with Trump those clips became evidence of complicity that Carlson himself acknowledged. He said on the record that he was implicated in Trump’s rise. That admission did not protect him. It gave the administration a weapon.

This is how authoritarian movements consolidate power over their own base. Not through overt coercion but through the accumulation of compromising material that makes leaving more dangerous than staying.

Tucker Carlson thought his loyalty record protected him. It did not.

Candace Owens was one of the most prominent Black conservative voices in the country. She built her entire brand around Trump. She broke with him and was immediately dismissed and marginalized.

Megyn Kelly was attacked by Trump repeatedly after she asked him a question he did not like at a debate. She was never the same.

Nick Fuentes spent years as one of the most extreme voices in the MAGA ecosystem. He said no to the Iran war and is now being categorized alongside left-wing extremists by the administration’s counterterrorism apparatus.

The list goes on. And it will keep growing. Because loyalty to an authoritarian is not a shield. It is a down payment on future compliance.

WHAT THE NO TRUE SCOTSMAN FALLACY TELLS US

There is a logical fallacy that philosophers call the No True Scotsman argument. It works like this.

No true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge. Ian from Glasgow puts sugar in his porridge. Well no true Scotsman does that.

The fallacy allows you to define any inconvenient member out of the group by simply declaring they were never really a member to begin with.

Trump uses this constantly. Tucker Carlson is not really a conservative. Liz Cheney was never really a Republican. Anyone who breaks with Trump was never really a true believer.

The power of this move is that it allows Trump to claim perfect loyalty from his base while eliminating anyone who dissents. The in-group is always defined as exactly the people who agree with him right now. Anyone who stops agreeing immediately ceases to be a member.

This is not just a rhetorical trick. It is the mechanism by which authoritarian movements purge themselves of internal critics without appearing to do so. They do not punish dissent. They simply declare that the dissenter was never really one of them and therefore the punishment is not really punishment.

Gorka did this explicitly. Carlson is not a conservative. Therefore targeting Carlson is not targeting conservatives. Therefore the counterterrorism strategy does not target the right even as it places one of the most prominent right-wing voices in the country in its crosshairs.

WHAT JONES KNEW AND WHAT TRUMP KNOWS

Jim Jones did this too.

Anyone who raised questions in Jonestown was not a true believer. They were an enemy agent. A CIA plant. A traitor. The more loyal their history the more dangerous their defection and the more aggressively they needed to be neutralized.

Defectors from Jonestown were surveilled. Threatened. In some cases physically restrained from leaving. The community’s resources were mobilized against anyone who tried to create distance between themselves and Jones.

Trump does not have armed guards. He has the FBI. He has national security directives. He has a counterterrorism apparatus that can be pointed at anyone who steps out of line and then redefined as a left-wing extremist so that the targeting does not register as what it actually is.

The mechanism is identical. The scale is just larger.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Authoritarian movements do not stabilize at a comfortable level of internal purging. They escalate. Each purge requires a new purge to demonstrate continued purity. The circle of true believers keeps contracting until it is just the leader and whoever has the most to lose from admitting they were wrong.

Tucker Carlson thought he was safe because of everything he had done for Trump.

He was not safe.

You are not safe.

The only people who are safe in this system are the people who have not yet said anything inconvenient. And that window closes every day.

Tajfel’s research showed that once a group enters a defensive consolidation phase the out-group threat response becomes self-perpetuating. Every purge creates more potential defectors. Every defector requires a more aggressive response. The movement feeds on its own paranoia until there is nothing left to feed on.

Jones ended up in a jungle in Guyana with 918 dead.

Trump is doing this in the most powerful country on earth.

With a counterterrorism apparatus.

And a Truth Social account.

The cult is eating its own. And it will not stop until there is nothing left to eat.

SOURCES

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J.C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W.G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Brooks/Cole.

Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge University Press.

Klippenstein, K. (2026, May 13). New Counterterror Strategy Eyes Tucker Carlson. kenklippenstein.com.

The New Republic. (2026, May 13). Trump Counterterrorism Adviser Brands Tucker Carlson an Enemy.

Newsweek. (2026, May 13). Fact Check: Did Trump Aide Name Tucker Carlson Possible Domestic Terrorist?

This only happened because of you.

You watching my videos and reading my substack made this interview happen so thank you. I very much appreciate you.

I Was on I’ve Had It. Here’s Everything We Talked About.

I sat down with Jennifer Welch on I’ve Had It Podcast & IHIP News and we went deep.

Trump’s Obama obsession. Latent homophobia in the MAGA movement. Authoritarian religion as a pipeline to cult followership. The psychological wage of whiteness. The Dark Tetrad. All of it.

If you missed it, here is the full breakdown.

Why Trump Cannot Stop Saying Barack Hussein Obama’s Name

We opened with a clip of Trump using Obama’s full name in front of a group of children. Emphasizing it. Savoring it.

This is not random. This is not dementia. This is scapegoating operating exactly as designed.

Trump uses Obama as a proxy. When he attacks Obama, he is signaling to his base who the enemy is. And that enemy is not just one man. It is everything Obama represents. Black excellence. Intellectual credibility. Dignity in the highest office in the land.

But there is a deeper psychological layer underneath it.

W.E.B. Du Bois identified what he called the psychological wage of whiteness. For generations, poor white Americans were given a psychological consolation prize. You may be broke. You may have nothing. But you are white. And that means you are better than your black neighbor who is just as broke as you are.

That wage kept poor white people from organizing with poor black people around shared economic interests. It was a tool of division that served the wealthy class perfectly.

When Barack Obama became president, that wage collapsed.

You could no longer tell a poor white conservative that they were superior to Black Americans when a Black man held the highest office in the land. The whole permission structure broke.

That is why they go crazy for Obama. That is why Trump goes crazy for Obama. And that is why Megyn Kelly said out loud on her podcast that they have not felt the same since Obama was president. She said the quiet part loud.

Trump knows he can never be Obama. Obama was a statesman. He was measured, brilliant, and composed. Trump walks around carrying a bucket of shame and humiliation every single day because he knows it too. So he attacks. Over and over. Because that is what his father Fred Trump installed in him. You are a winner. Winners attack. Winners never admit they are wrong.

It broke him. And now he points that broken psychology at the one man he knows he could never be.

The Dark Tetrad and the Fanatics Who Will Never Leave

Jennifer asked about the hardcore MAGA base. The ones who will not leave no matter what. The ones who would watch him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and cheer.

From my research, the fanatical core of Trump’s base scores extremely high across four dark psychological traits. Psychologists call this the Dark Tetrad.

Narcissism. Machiavellianism. Psychopathy. Everyday sadism.

These are not people with clinical diagnoses. They are people with extremely high trait levels across all four dimensions. And the one thing that unites them is that they cannot be wrong. They were like this before Trump. They found a home in Trump.

People with these trait combinations will burn their own lives down before they admit they made a mistake. That is not a metaphor. That is what the research shows. They will destroy relationships, finances, and futures rather than concede they were conned.

My estimate is that 20 to 25 million of Trump’s followers fall into this category. They are not persuadable. They will only shift when the cult starts hurting them personally. Gas prices. Grocery bills. Tariffs. That is the only language that reaches them.

Authoritarian Religion Is the Pipeline

Jennifer brought up evangelical Christianity and she was right to.

The research backs this up completely. People raised in authoritarian households with black and white thinking and no tolerance for questioning are psychologically primed for a figure like Trump.

These are people who were taught as children that questioning the Bible is blasphemy. That complexity is sin. That the answer is always simple, always certain, and always handed down from above.

And then Trump walks in.

The same hair. The same suit. The rambling certainty. I alone can fix this.

For people raised to submit to that kind of authority, it is not a leap. It is a homecoming.

The data on evangelical support for Trump reflects this. It is not a contradiction that deeply religious people support a man who is the opposite of every Christian value they claim to hold. It makes perfect sense once you understand that for authoritarian followers, the structure of the authority matters more than its content. They are not looking for a moral leader. They are looking for a strong one.

And Trump gave them something the church always provided. Simple answers to complex problems. A clear enemy. A promise of restoration. That is the entire formula.

The Homophobia Research

This is the one that gets people.

In 1996, Henry Adams and colleagues at the University of Georgia ran a study on homophobia and sexual arousal. They recruited men who scored high on homophobia measures and men who did not. They showed both groups gay pornography while measuring physiological arousal.

Approximately 54 percent of the men who scored highest on homophobia showed significant arousal responses to the gay pornography. Among the non-homophobic men, that number was significantly lower.

The men most enraged by homosexuality were the most aroused by it.

This is reaction formation. A psychological defense mechanism first described by Sigmund Freud and later formalized by Anna Freud. When an internal impulse is too threatening to acknowledge, the mind converts it into its opposite. The feeling does not disappear. It gets weaponized outward as aggression toward the very thing it desires.

We see this everywhere in the MAGA movement. The obsession with trans people. The fixation on drag shows. The constant policing of other men’s masculinity. Straight men who are secure in their identity do not spend this much energy on the topic. They do not need to.

Trump himself is a case study. The unsolicited commentary on men’s physical appearances. The Arnold Palmer remarks. The UFC fighter. The microphone pantomime on the campaign trail.

His filter is gone. His narcissistic collapse is accelerating. And what is leaking out is exactly what the research would predict.

Jennifer told me that Grindr reportedly sees enormous spikes in activity at events like the Republican National Convention and Turning Point Charlie Kirk gatherings. Married MAGA men. Deep red zip codes. The data does not lie.

The loudest voices against gay rights are statistically the most likely to be suppressing exactly what they are legislating against.

The Permission Structure

We ended on something I think about a lot.

Trump did not just give permission to his low income base to be openly racist. He gave permission to the billionaire class to drop the social politeness they had been performing for decades.

Look at what these men say now. Look at how they behave publicly. The grievances. The performative victimhood from men worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is asymmetric norm enforcement. A pattern that appears in every authoritarian system throughout history. The rules apply to everyone except the people in power. You follow the law. They do not. You show deference. They demand worship.

And because people in this culture already treated billionaires like geniuses before Trump, the infrastructure for this was already in place. Trump just gave it permission to go public.

The French Revolution came for Marie Antoinette after “let them eat cake.”

The mob always comes eventually.

Thank you to Jennifer Welch and the entire I’ve Had It team for having me. It was one of the most fun and honest conversations I have had in a long time.

Once again thanks to my readers and watchers. I appreciate you.

Watch the episode on YouTube here:

Sources

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935). Black Reconstruction in America. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Adams, H.E., Wright, L.W., and Lohr, B.A. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440-445.

Paulhus, D.L. and Williams, K.M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556-563.

Buckels, E.E., Jones, D.N., and Paulhus, D.L. (2013). Behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2201-2209.

Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.

Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. International Universities Press.