The Lucas Bean Show

You ever notice how some people turn every single conversation back to themselves?

There is a neuroscience reason for that. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it, especially in politics.

The Harvard Experiment

Researchers Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell at Harvard University put people inside brain scanners and gave them a deceptively simple choice.

Answer questions about other people and earn more money. Or answer questions about yourself and earn less.

What they found was remarkable.

When people talked about themselves, the same reward regions that activate for food, sex, and money lit up in the brain. Talking about yourself hits the brain exactly like a drug does.

Most people chose to talk about themselves and left money on the table to do it. When the payoff was equal, people chose to answer questions about themselves more than two thirds of the time. And when talking about others paid more, they still gave up 17 percent more in earnings just for the chance to talk about themselves.

The researchers called this self-disclosure. And the reward was even stronger when someone was listening. The brain did not just want to think about itself. It wanted an audience.

The 30 to 40 Percent Rule

Here is what makes this finding so striking.

Humans spend 30 to 40 percent of all conversation talking about themselves. Not because they are selfish. Because the brain is rewarding them for it with a hit of dopamine. The behavior is not a personality flaw. It is a biological incentive system running in the background of every conversation you have ever had.

Knowing this changes how you interpret a lot of human behavior. Including political behavior.

What This Has to Do with Trump Rallies

Trump supporters are not posting on social media to convince you. They are not going live on Facebook at 11pm to change your mind. They are not sending paragraph after paragraph because they think you will read it and somehow they will win an argument.

They are chasing a dopamine hit.

Every post is self-disclosure. Every rant is self-disclosure. Every argument they pick online is self-disclosure dressed up as politics. The content barely matters. The act of broadcasting themselves is the point.

This is why facts do not land. You are not competing with bad information. You are competing with a reward loop. And no data point, no matter how airtight, is going to interrupt someone mid-hit.

Trump Figured This Out Before Anyone Else Did

His rallies are not political events. They are dopamine delivery systems.

He gives his followers a stage, a crowd, and an enemy to scream about together. And their brains light up accordingly. The chanting, the booing, the repetitive call-and-response — none of it is designed to inform. It is designed to activate.

That is why the same phrases get repeated rally after rally, year after year. Repetition is not a bug. It is a feature. Familiar triggers produce reliable hits.

What to Do With This Information

If you have ever tried to argue someone out of a political position with logic and evidence, and walked away baffled that it made zero difference, this is why.

You were trying to have a debate. They were looking for their next hit.

They will talk over you. And if they go quiet, they are not listening. They are waiting for their next chance to speak.

This does not mean political persuasion is impossible. It means the lever is not facts. The lever is identity, audience, and belonging — the same things the brain is already rewarding. Understanding that is the first step to actually moving people, instead of just being frustrated that they will not move.

Sources

Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. (2012). Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(21), 8038–8043. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1202129109

Tamir, D. I., & Mitchell, J. P. Research overview — Harvard Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab.

https://www.tamirlaboratory.org

After studying how authoritarian movements and cults collapse throughout history, one pattern keeps appearing. These movements do not fall apart all at once. They fall apart in levels. Each level leaves for a completely different reason. And the order is always the same.

After World War II historians studied exactly how the Nazi movement collapsed. The supporters did not all leave at once. They left in a very specific order. For very specific reasons.

MAGA is following the exact same pattern.

Here are the three levels of MAGA and how each one falls apart.

Level One: Casual MAGA

These are the flag wavers. The hat wearers. The people who shared the memes and went to the rallies.

They were never really fully in. They just liked being on the winning team for once.

Psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol spent decades studying why people join political and social groups and why they leave. He called it Social Identity Theory. Tajfel found that people with low commitment to a group stay only as long as that group makes them feel like a winner. The moment it stops they walk away and find a new group to belong to.

In Germany the casual supporters disappeared the moment the war started going badly. Winning stopped feeling like winning and they were gone overnight.

In MAGA it worked exactly the same way. The rallies stopped feeling exciting. Being MAGA stopped feeling cool. And just like that the flags came down, the red hats disappeared into the back of a closet.

No explanation. No announcement. They just moved on. Quietly. Now they do not want to talk politics. It is a sore subject.

Soon they will never admit they ever supported Trump.

This first level is pretty much already gone.

Level Two: The True Believers

These people are different.

They built their whole identity around the movement. All their friends. All their social media. Their whole sense of who they were was MAGA.

Psychologists call this the Sunk Cost trap. The more you invest in something the harder it is to walk away. But everyone has a breaking point. And that breaking point is always personal.

Their grocery bill went up. Their healthcare got cut. Their job disappeared. And the pain became impossible to blame on someone else.

Andrew Schulz, the comedian who hosted Trump on his podcast Flagrant before the election and voted for him, is now publicly saying Trump did the exact opposite of everything he promised. His exact words: “I voted for none of this.”

Joe Rogan has the biggest podcast in the world with 29 million YouTube subscribers. He endorsed Trump and helped him win young male voters in 2024. This past week Rogan called MAGA a movement of dorks. Weird, uninteresting, unintelligent people. His words.

A group called Leaving MAGA had 1,500 subscribers at the start of 2025. By July they had 35,000.

These are not people who hated Trump. These are people who loved him. And the moment he hurt them personally they started slipping out the back door quietly without ever saying why.

After World War II researchers found that most ordinary Germans still privately believed Nazism was a good idea. Just badly applied. They did not change their minds. They just stopped saying it out loud. They went quiet. Changed the subject at dinner. Moved on without admitting anything.

NBC News polled over 20,000 Americans and found that out of every 100 MAGA Republicans 8 of them stopped strongly supporting Trump in a single year. Not because they woke up. Because it started hurting.

This level is fracturing fast. And with the loss of support here the erosion is going to accelerate quickly.

Level Three: The Fanatics

Christian nationalists. Proud Boys. Militia groups. The people who stormed the Capitol.

These people are not leaving. Ever.

Psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult in Chicago to study what happens to true believers when everything falls apart around them. The cult believed the world would end on a specific date. Members quit their jobs. Gave away everything they owned. Said goodbye to their families.

The date came. Nothing happened.

And the most committed members did not walk away. They got louder. They told everyone their faith had saved the world.

Festinger called this Cognitive Dissonance. The more someone sacrifices for a belief the harder their brain fights to protect it. Because admitting they were wrong means everything they gave up meant nothing. That kind of pain is too much for the brain to handle. So instead of leaving they double down and get more extreme.

Seven years after World War II ended, after the death camps were exposed and the country was completely destroyed, 25 percent of Germans still had a favorable opinion of Hitler. They never admitted they were wrong. History just made them irrelevant.

That is exactly what happens to the MAGA fanatics. They do not get converted. They do not wake up. They just become the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving that nobody argues with anymore. Not because he won. Because nobody has the energy.

They will get louder as they get smaller. And then one day they will just be gone.

The fanatics are always the last ones standing in a burning building. No army behind them. No power. No future. Just a red hat and a grudge.

What Comes Next

The first level of the MAGA movement is already gone. The second level is walking out the back door. What is left are the fanatics.

Fanatics are always the smallest group. And without a movement behind them they have no power.

But they only fade if we never stop pushing. Keep going. Accountability is already on its way.

Sources

Social Identity Theory 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 (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories: Studies in Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press.

Sunk Cost Trap Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124–140.

Cognitive Dissonance Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. University of Minnesota Press.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Post-War German Public Opinion Kershaw, I. (1987). The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich. Oxford University Press.

Denazification polling data via Wikipedia citing Kershaw and Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach surveys (1952).

MAGA Polling Data NBC News poll of over 20,000 Americans tracking MAGA Republican approval shifts (2025).

Leaving MAGA Axios reporting on the Leaving MAGA organization subscriber growth (October 2025).

Andrew Schulz Variety, The Daily Beast (July 2025). “Andrew Schulz Turns on Trump: ‘I Voted For None of This.’”

Joe Rogan Mediaite, Newsweek (March 2026). “Joe Rogan Rips MAGA as ‘Bunch of Dorks.’”

Is the Trump Administration a Fascist Regime?

Let’s go through the four pillars of fascism and decide together.

People keep comparing the Trump administration to early Nazi Germany. Scholars who have spent their careers studying fascism are leaving the United States. And every time someone raises the comparison, they get accused of being hysterical.

So let’s do this properly. Let’s define fascism. Let’s go through the four core pillars that every fascist movement in history has shared. And let’s decide together whether the current administration meets the burden of proof.

This isn’t rhetoric. This is pattern recognition.

What Is Fascism? The Full History.

The word itself comes from the Italian fasces, a bundle of wooden rods bound tightly around an axe. It was a symbol of ancient Rome. One rod alone snaps easily. Bound together, they cannot be broken. The axe at the center represents state power backed by force. Roman magistrates carried the fasces in public processions as a signal of authority. It meant: we are unified, and we will cut down anyone who stands against us.

Benito Mussolini revived the symbol in 1919 when he founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the Italian Combat Leagues, in Milan. Italy at the time was a country in crisis. World War One had ended badly despite being on the winning side. The economy was collapsing. Strikes paralyzed cities. Veterans came home to poverty and chaos. The political establishment seemed helpless. Into that vacuum walked Mussolini, a former socialist newspaper editor who had reinvented himself as a nationalist firebrand. He promised order. He promised strength. He promised national rebirth. And he built a movement around himself rather than around any coherent set of policies.

That is the first thing to understand about fascism. It is not an ideology in the way that liberalism, socialism, or conservatism are ideologies. Those systems have philosophical foundations. They make arguments about how society should be organized, what rights people have, how resources should be distributed. You can agree or disagree with those arguments on their merits. Fascism makes no such argument. Fascism is a method. It is a mechanism for capturing power and holding it, and it will adopt whatever ideology, whatever grievance, whatever enemy is most useful for that purpose at any given moment.

Robert Paxton, the Columbia University historian widely considered the world’s foremost authority on fascism, spent decades studying how these movements actually operated versus how they presented themselves. His conclusion, laid out in his landmark 2004 book The Anatomy of Fascism, was that fascism cannot be understood through its stated beliefs because its stated beliefs are almost entirely performance. What matters is its behavior. And its behavior follows a predictable pattern across every country and every era in which it has appeared.

Fascism emerged in the aftermath of World War One across multiple European countries simultaneously because the conditions were nearly identical. Defeated or humiliated nations. Economic devastation. Weak democratic institutions that were new and untested. Mass unemployment. A political establishment the public had lost faith in. And a large population, particularly of veterans, who felt that the society they had sacrificed for had betrayed them.

Mussolini took power in Italy in 1922 after his Blackshirts marched on Rome and the king handed him the government rather than call the army to stop him. Hitler, who had studied Mussolini closely and openly admired him, built the Nazi movement through the late 1920s and came to power legally in 1933 when he was appointed Chancellor. Francisco Franco seized Spain through a military coup and civil war from 1936 to 1939. Each movement looked different on the surface. Underneath, the structure was identical.

Umberto Eco, the Italian philosopher and novelist who grew up under Mussolini, identified fourteen features that recur across fascist movements regardless of national context: a cult of tradition and national glory, rejection of critical thinking, fear of difference, obsession with enemies plotting against the nation, a sense of permanent siege, disdain for the weak, a cult of heroism, machismo, selective populism, and the deliberate impoverishment of public language and discourse. Eco’s point was that you do not need all fourteen features present simultaneously. The syndrome can be diagnosed from a cluster of them.

The American philosopher Jason Stanley, in his 2018 book How Fascism Works, added another dimension. Fascism always operates through a politics that is anti-intellectual, mythological, hierarchical, and dependent on the creation of a chosen people set against a corrupting other. The chosen people are told they are victims of forces conspiring against them. The leader positions himself as their only defender. And the destruction of democratic norms is presented not as a threat to freedom but as the only way to save it.

This is why so many people fail to recognize fascism when it arrives. It does not announce itself as fascism. It announces itself as a rescue operation. It presents democratic institutions not as things worth protecting but as corrupt obstacles standing between the people and their rightful greatness. The courts are rigged. The press is the enemy. The elections are stolen. The system is broken and only one man can fix it.

By the time the population understands what has actually happened, the mechanisms that would allow them to reverse it have been systematically dismantled.

That is the history. That is the definition. Now let’s apply it.

Pillar One: A Leader Who Is Never Wrong

Every fascist movement in history has been built around a single infallible leader. Not a politician who makes mistakes and owns them. A leader who is constitutionally incapable of being wrong. A leader whose failures are always someone else’s fault.

Mussolini was never wrong. Hitler was never wrong. When the regime failed, it was always the socialists, the Jews, the weak, the traitors.

Trump has made over 30,000 documented false or misleading statements during his time in public life, according to tracking by The Washington Post. He lost the 2020 election. More than 60 courts said so. His own Attorney General said so. His own Director of Cybersecurity said so. He declared them all wrong.

He was convicted on 34 felony counts. He said the jury was corrupt. The judge was corrupt. The entire justice system was corrupt.

He fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he disliked a jobs report, then replaced him with a political loyalist. In a healthy democracy, government data is information. In a fascist system, it is whatever the leader needs it to say.

The pattern is consistent and total. When Trump is wrong, it is never Trump who is wrong. It is always the courts, the media, the scientists, the generals, the institutions.

Has Trump met the burden of proof on this pillar? Yes.

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Pillar Two: An Enemy Responsible for Everything

Fascism requires a designated enemy. Not a political opponent. An existential threat. Someone responsible for every failure, every wound, every national humiliation. The leader identifies this enemy and positions himself as the only one powerful enough to destroy them.

Mussolini blamed socialists and communists for Italy’s economic collapse. Hitler blamed Jewish people for Germany’s military defeat and depression. Both men used the existence of these enemies to justify why they needed absolute power. You cannot save the nation, they argued, without the tools to crush what is destroying it.

Trump blames immigrants for crime, job loss, and economic collapse. He calls them an invasion. He has described them as people who are, in his words, “poisoning the blood” of America. That specific phrase appears in Mein Kampf.

He calls Democrats “the enemy from within.” At the State of the Union, he publicly shamed members of Congress who refused to applaud him. He was not making a political point. He was punishing dissent in front of the entire country.

When school shootings occur, Trump has repeatedly blamed radical left Democrats before any investigation is complete, before police have finished their work, before anyone knows who was responsible. The facts almost never support the accusation. But the enemy has been identified and the narrative has been set before anyone can push back.

Has Trump met the burden of proof on this pillar? Yes.

Pillar Three: Extreme Loyalty Above Anything Else

In a democracy, loyalty is to the Constitution. To the country. To the rule of law. In fascism, loyalty is to the leader. Above the law. Above morality. Above your own principles and your company’s survival.

Mussolini tied private business to the state. Companies that served the regime survived. Companies that refused were destroyed. Hitler demanded absolute loyalty from his military and government. Anyone who questioned him was purged.

Trump has purged the military of generals who questioned him. He fired inspectors general across multiple federal agencies for not demonstrating sufficient loyalty. Career civil servants with decades of experience have been replaced by loyalists whose primary qualification is devotion to his agenda. Job applicants for positions in his administration have been asked not about expertise but about their loyalty to Trump personally.

Universities that did not comply with political demands had their funding frozen. He went after Harvard, Columbia, and law firms that had represented his political opponents. He demanded the right to install political appointees into universities to control curriculum.

When Mike Pence refused to overturn the 2020 election results on January 6th, 2021, Trump’s supporters chanted for his execution. When Republican senators criticized Trump, he moved to purge them from the party.

This is not about policy disagreement. This is about the elimination of any constraint on personal power.

Has Trump met the burden of proof on this pillar? Yes.

Pillar Four: Violence Against Anyone Who Refuses to Comply

Fascism always ends in the same place. Violence. Normalized, celebrated, and excused.

Mussolini used violence against anyone who resisted. Beatings. Murders. Intimidation. Violence was not an unfortunate byproduct of the regime. It was the enforcement mechanism. Hitler used it on a massive scale. The SA. The Gestapo. Concentration camps. Submit or be destroyed.

On January 6th, 2021, Trump’s supporters stormed the United States Capitol in an attempted insurrection. They beat police officers. They smashed windows. They hunted members of Congress through the halls. It was a violent attempt to overturn a democratic election.

Trump pardoned every single participant on his first day back in office. He called them hostages. He called them political prisoners. He referred to them as patriots.

ICE agents have shot and killed people in the streets. Trump defended the agents. No accountability. No consequences.

He deployed military troops to Los Angeles over the objection of state and local authorities. Not in response to a declared national emergency. To enforce his agenda and demonstrate that he has the power to use the military against American cities.

He is using the Justice Department to investigate Democratic donors. He is using the IRS to target political enemies. When the Supreme Court ruled six to three that his tariffs were illegal, he attacked the court.

This is not rhetoric. This is a sitting president using the machinery of government as a weapon against anyone who refuses to fall in line.

Has Trump met the burden of proof on this pillar? Yes.

So What Is the Answer?

Is the Trump administration a fascist regime, or are people being hysterical?

Let’s go through the checklist.

A leader who is never wrong. Yes.

An enemy responsible for everything. Yes.

Extreme loyalty above anything else. Yes.

Violence against anyone who refuses to comply. Yes.

The scholars who have spent their entire careers studying fascism are not leaving the United States because they are being dramatic. They are leaving because they recognize what they are looking at. They have seen this pattern before. And they know how it ends.

The question is not whether this is fascism. The historical record is clear and the pattern is documented.

The question is what do we do about it?

Because the time to act is now.

We need to vote, stay involved and push back against Fascism. Your vote counts more than ever now.

Sources

On Trump’s false statements:

The Washington Post Fact Checker. “Trump’s false or misleading claims: The complete list.” Updated through end of first term. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/

On the 2020 election court rulings:

Rutenberg, J. et al. “The Attack on Election Results: A Complete Guide.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/10/us/trump-election-fraud-false-claims.html

Associated Press. “AP Fact Check: Trump’s many false claims about the 2020 election.” https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-ap-fact-check-joe-biden-donald-trump

On Trump’s 34 felony convictions:

New York v. Trump, Manhattan Supreme Court. Verdict rendered May 30, 2024. Coverage: https://apnews.com/article/trump-trial-verdict-guilty-hush-money-b8bc37b3e4206f810dffce8f9df9ee3c

On fascism definitions and historical parallels:

Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. Knopf, 2004. Widely considered the definitive academic text on fascism’s defining characteristics.

Umberto Eco. “Ur-Fascism.” The New York Review of Books. June 22, 1995. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Random House, 2018.

On “poisoning the blood” and Mein Kampf comparison:

Hananoki, Eric. “Trump’s ‘poisoning the blood’ echoes Nazi rhetoric. Media mostly ignored the connection.” Media Matters for America. https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/trumps-poisoning-blood-echoes-nazi-rhetoric

Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. Vol. 1, Chapter 11. (Historical document. Referenced for textual comparison only.)

On Trump’s dismissal of inspectors general:

Broadwater, Luke. “Trump Fires at Least a Dozen Inspectors General in Late-Night Purge.” The New York Times. January 25, 2025.

On January 6th Capitol attack:

U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Final Report. December 2022. https://january6th.house.gov/sites/democrats.january6th.house.gov/files/22-1091_PTRT1.pdf

On Trump pardons for January 6th participants:

Shear, Michael D. and Haberman, Maggie. “Trump Pardons Jan. 6 Rioters on First Day Back in Office.” The New York Times. January 20, 2025.

On military deployment to Los Angeles:

Cooper, Helene. “Trump Sends Active-Duty Troops to Los Angeles Over State’s Objections.” The New York Times. 2025.

On scholars of fascism leaving the United States:

Applebaum, Anne. “The Autocrats Are Winning.” The Atlantic. 2025.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

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Why Some Trump Fanatics Will Go Down With The Ship

Most people assume that if you show someone enough evidence their leader is corrupt, dangerous, or simply wrong, they will eventually change their mind.

The research says otherwise.

The Psychology Behind Why They Stay

In 1985 behavioral economists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer published research on one of the most powerful forces in human decision making.

They called it the sunk cost fallacy. The tendency to keep investing in something not because it is working but because you have already invested so much that walking away feels like total loss.

They found something disturbing. The more someone had invested the harder it became to stop. Not because the investment was paying off. Because stopping meant admitting it never would.

The original investment could be money. It could be time. It could be effort. But the most powerful sunk cost of all is identity. When you have built who you are around a belief or a person, abandoning that belief does not just change your mind. It destroys the version of yourself that existed before.

What Eight Years of Loyalty Actually Costs

Now apply that to someone who has spent eight years defending Trump.

They defended him through the Access Hollywood tape. Through two impeachments. Through January 6th. Through 34 felony convictions. Through the Epstein files. They told their family he was right. They lost friendships over it. They put the flag on the truck. They wore the hat to Thanksgiving. They argued at work. They posted online. They made Trump the centerpiece of their identity.

Every one of those moments was an investment. And every new investment made the previous ones harder to abandon.

The Role of Shame

Psychologist Veronika Tait at Snow College studied the specific dynamic of what happens when people stay committed to something they know is failing.

She found that people were not just protecting their investment in the abstract. They were protecting their identity from shame. Because the moment you admit the investment was wrong you have to face everything you gave up for it. The relationships you damaged. The things you said. The person you became in the process of defending the indefensible.

That shame is not a minor discomfort. It is annihilating. And the brain will do almost anything to avoid it.

Why the Epstein Files Changed Nothing

This is why the Epstein files did not move them. This is why the convictions did not move them. This is why January 6th did not move them.

It is not that they do not see the evidence. Many of them see it clearly. It is that seeing it and accepting it are two entirely different things. Accepting it means accepting that everything they sacrificed was for a lie. That the friendships they lost were lost for nothing. That the family members they alienated were right all along.

That is not a political update. That is a psychological collapse.

And most people will choose almost any alternative over collapsing.

What Actually Changes Minds

Tait’s research suggests the only thing that reliably breaks the sunk cost trap is when the cost of staying becomes higher than the cost of leaving.

Not facts. Not shame from the outside. Not arguments. The internal math has to shift.

For some Trump supporters that moment is already happening quietly. The tariffs hitting their wallet. The promises that never came. The chaos that never stopped. The winning that never arrived.

They are not announcing it. They are just going silent. Taking down the flags. Removing the bumper stickers. Slipping out the back without saying a word.

Because leaving loudly would require admitting they were wrong.

And the sunk cost of shame is still too high for that.

Sources

* Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer — The Psychology of Sunk Cost — Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (1985)

* Richard Thaler — Sunk cost fallacy, Nobel Prize in Economics (2017)

* Veronika Tait — Snow College, research on sunk cost psychology and identity protection

A reading from a section of Chapter 13 of "They Thought They Were Free" by me. 

Please listen and re-listen to this over and over again until you understand it all. 

This is how Fascism rolls in. 

There is a psychological reason Trump’s movement exists at all. And it has nothing to do with policy, economics, or religion. It has to do with something far more basic and far more painful.

Loneliness.

Not the kind you feel on a Friday night. The deep, structural kind. The kind that builds over decades when a culture systematically teaches people that needing others is shameful, that asking for help is weakness, and that emotions are something to be suppressed rather than understood.

That is the story of conservative culture in America. And it is the story of how Donald Trump found his audience.

The Research Is Clear

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam conducted one of the largest studies ever done on the psychological predictors of far-right radicalization. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries spanning fifteen years. They were looking for the variable that most consistently predicted support for radical right movements.

It was not income. It was not education level. It was not race or religion or geographic location.

It was loneliness.

People who reported feeling isolated, invisible, and disconnected from their communities were dramatically more likely to support populist radical right parties. The effect size was not small. It was comparable in magnitude to the relationship between loneliness and serious health conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, and clinical depression.

This was not a one-time finding. A 2021 study conducted by researchers at the RAND Corporation found that loneliness is one of the predominant reasons people adopt extremist views and join extremist groups. The pattern holds across cultures, across countries, and across decades of data.

The Mechanism Nobody Talks About

The question nobody asks is why. Why are these people so lonely in the first place?

The answer is hiding in plain sight.

Conservative culture has spent generations teaching men — and to a significant degree women — a very specific set of rules about what it means to be strong. Do not talk about your feelings. Do not ask for help. Do not admit you are struggling. Therapy is for weak people. Emotions are something to be controlled, hidden, and ashamed of.

So they follow the rules.

For decades.

And they end up completely alone inside their own heads. No tools to process pain. No language to describe what they feel. No relationships deep enough to hold the weight of what they are actually going through. Just a lifetime of performative strength with weak and broken people underneath.

That is what creates the loneliness. Not just circumstance. Culture. A culture that systematically strips people of every outlet for genuine human connection and then acts confused when they become desperate enough to follow anyone who makes them feel seen.

What a Lonely Brain Does

A lonely brain is not just sad. It is dysregulated. Research shows that chronic loneliness impairs the brain’s ability to accurately assess threat, increases sensitivity to social rejection, and primes people for us-versus-them thinking. A lonely brain is a brain that is constantly scanning for danger and constantly hungry for belonging.

This is the psychological state Trump’s movement found and exploited.

When someone shows up and says — I see you, they are the enemy, we are your people — a lonely person does not process that as a political message. They process it as relief. As recognition. As the first time in a long time that anyone seemed to give a damn about them.

Trump did not create these people. Conservative culture did. He just showed up, gave them a group to belong to, and handed them an enemy to hate.

This Is Not A New Story

Florida State University historian Robert Gellately spent his career studying how ordinary Germans became Nazi true believers. What he found was not that Hitler hypnotized them or tricked them. He found that Hitler succeeded because the vision he offered met a ready reception among millions of Germans who felt humiliated, left behind, and desperate for a community that would finally include them.

They were not looking for a political party. They were looking for belonging. And they found it.

Gellately concluded that millions continued to believe in Hitler and his mission right up until the moment he died by suicide and the military was defeated in the spring of 1945. The regime was never remotely threatened by collapse from within.

They went down with him. Not because they were stupid. Because they had invested everything — their identity, their community, their entire sense of self — into the movement. Leaving meant losing the only place they had ever belonged.

Psychologist Leon Festinger called it cognitive dissonance. The more you invest in a belief, the harder your brain fights to protect that investment. Even when the walls are falling down around you.

The Nazi fanatics did not abandon Hitler when the bombs were falling on Berlin. They doubled down. They made last stands they could not win. They chose the movement over their own survival.

Now ask yourself how many Trump supporters you know who would admit they were wrong even if everything collapsed tomorrow.

The Consequence

This is what happens when you teach an entire generation of people that needing others is weakness. That empathy is weakness. That asking for help is weakness.

You do not create strong people.

You create desperate ones.

And desperate people will follow anyone who makes them feel like they finally belong somewhere. They followed Hitler to the bunker. They are following Trump off the cliff.

The solution is not to mock them. The solution is not to debate them. The solution is to understand that you are not fighting a political movement. You are fighting the psychological wreckage of a culture that abandoned millions of people long before Trump ever came along.

He did not radicalize them. Their loneliness did. He just showed up.

Sources

Peterson, D., Rooduijn, M., Hopp, F.R., Schumacher, G., & Bakker, B.N. (2025). Loneliness is positively associated with populist radical right support. Social Science & Medicine, 366, 117676.

RAND Corporation (2021). Violent Extremism and Terrorism: The Role of Loneliness and Social Isolation. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation.

Tirkkonen, S., & Tietjen, R.R. (2025). Loneliness and Radicalization. Philosophy and Social Criticism.

Gellately, R. (2020). Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis. Oxford University Press.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Sycophancy Bias

Conservatives Have Less Empathy. 

If you Have Empathy It's Normal to Be overwhelmed Right Now. 

you ever notice how some people react to change like it’s a personal attack?

New ideas.

New cultures.

New people.

And instead of debating, they panic, rage and scream about “tradition”?

There’s a biological reason for that.

And it explains everything.

Neuroscientists ran multiple peer reviewed studies and they scanned the brains of thousands of people

to see if there was a correlation between the brain scans and political affiliation:

And what they found was wild.

Conservatives have a larger, more reactive amygdala.

That’s the fear center of your brain.

It processes things like fear, anxiety and rage.

Liberals show more activity in the anterior cingulate cortex

the part of the brain that handles complexity and critical thinking.

Go figure.

This was so accurate…

The scientists were able to guess a person political affiliation 82% of the time

82% OF THE TIME!!!!

Now Before you go screaming ‘fake news,’

this isn’t one study.

It’s multiple independent studies across different countries,

published in journals like Nature, Neuroscience, and Current Biology.

This is empirical scientific evidence. not opinion.

Conservative brains run on fear.

Liberal brains runs on curiosity.

The amygdala’s job is simple:

detect threats and freak the f**k out.

Fight. Flight or Freeze.

When the amygdala is oversensitive, everything new feels dangerous.

Brown people moving into your neighborhood? Threat.

Spanish guy on a Super Bowl stage? Threat.

Being chill and not rage watching newsmax? Threat.

Not because there IS a threat.

But because their amygdala MANUFACTURES a threat.

This is why facts don’t work on conservatives.

You’re not debating ideas.

You’re debating their terrified lizard brains.

You present data. They feel attacked.

You offer logic. Their nervous system screams DANGER.

Every racist policy. Every immigrant based rant. Every culture war panic.

It all traces back to the same thing: a hyperactive fear response.

The border “crisis”? Amygdala.

The trans “agenda”? Amygdala.

The war on Christmas? Amygdala having a meltdown.

And here’s the part they’ll hate:

This means progressives literally have a more evolved brain.

Comfortable with change.

Openness to differences

Ability to update long held beliefs

Meanwhile, conservative brains are stuck in caveman threat-detection mode.

Perfect for 50,000 BC.

Horrible for a modern society.

Does this mean conservatives are stupid?

No.

Does it mean conservatives are evil?

No.

Does it mean that their political beliefs are driven by primitive fear

instead of rational thought?

Yes. Exactly that.

So next time someone screams about immigrants, or DEI, or pronouns

Don’t debate them.

Their amygdala won’t let them hear you anyway.

Just remember:

you’re watching a frightened primitive brain try to make the scary new world go away.

And it isn’t working.

Sources:https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3092984/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3572122/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-72980-x

https://news.osu.edu/brain-scans-remarkably-good-at-predicting-political-ideology/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-liberal-brains-might-have-some-real-differences/

This is what we need to start referring to the MAGAnites.

I feel like it suits them.

Conservatives have