The Lucas Bean Show

Most Christians in America are good people.

They go to church. They help their neighbors. They try to live by what Jesus actually taught.

This article is not about them.

This is about a completely different group, one that has hijacked the word “Christian” to mean something Jesus never intended.

What Christian Nationalism Actually Is

Christian nationalists believe America was built for white Christians and should stay that way.

That means everyone else doesn’t fully belong here.

Black Christians. Brown Christians. Immigrants. Gay people. Jewish people. Muslims. In their vision of America, all second class.

And if democracy gets in the way of that goal? Democracy has to go.

That is not Christianity. That is something much darker. And the research and the historical record, prove it.

What the Research Shows

Researchers at PRRI surveyed over 6,000 Americans to find out what Christian nationalism actually predicts.

What they found: Christian nationalism does not predict church attendance. It does not predict prayer. It does not predict any actual Christian behavior.

What it does predict is a love of authoritarian leaders, resentment toward people who look different, and support for political violence.

People who believe in Christian nationalism are nearly seven times more likely to support political violence than people who believe in regular Christianity.

Seven times.

This is not a faith movement. This is a power movement wearing a cross.

We Have Seen This Before

Jim Jones called himself a Christian preacher. He used the Bible to demand total obedience. He killed over 900 of his own followers.

David Koresh called himself a Christian prophet. He used scripture to justify abuse and control. He armed his followers and prepared them for war.

Neither of these men represented Christianity. They used Christianity as a weapon to gain power over people.

Christian nationalism works the same way. It takes the cross and puts it in front of a political agenda. It uses the language of faith to demand loyalty to a leader. It punishes anyone who questions the movement.

Real Christianity calls for humility, mercy, and love of your neighbor.

Christian nationalism calls for dominance, fear, and the destruction of anyone who gets in the way.

These are not the same thing. They have never been the same thing.

What the Founders Actually Said

Here is where Christian nationalists have a serious problem. They claim America was founded as a Christian nation. But the people who actually founded it said the opposite in writing, officially, as law.

The Constitution itself never mentions God. Not once.

It does say this, in Article VI:

“No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”

No religious test. Ever. For any office.

That is the opposite of a Christian nation.

And the First Amendment written by the same founders begins:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

No established religion. That’s not an accident. That was the entire point.

Then There’s the Treaty of Tripoli

In 1796, the United States negotiated a peace treaty with Tripoli a Muslim nation to protect American ships from pirates in the Mediterranean.

The Senate read it aloud on the floor. Every senator got a copy. Then they voted unanimously to ratify it. No debate. No objection.

John Adams signed it into law on June 10, 1797.

Here is what Article 11 of that treaty says, word for word, as ratified by the United States government:

“As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Mussulmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

“Not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Those are not the words of a secular blogger trying to score a debate point. Those are the words of the United States government in 1797. Signed by John Adams. Ratified unanimously by the Senate. Printed in the Philadelphia Gazette for the American public to read.

If the founders believed they were building a Christian nation, why did they write that into an official treaty and ratify it without a single dissenting vote?

What the Research Says Christian Nationalism Is Really About

Researchers Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead spent years studying Christian nationalism. Their finding was the same every time.

The strongest predictor of Christian nationalism is not how religious someone is.

It is how much they want power over other people. How afraid they are of losing that power. How much they resent people who don’t look like them. How willing they are to use violence to stay on top.

Jesus said blessed are the meek.

Christian nationalists want a leader who will never turn the other cheek.

That is not Christianity. That is authoritarianism with a Bible in its hand.

Real Christians Should Be the Most Offended People in the Room

This is not an attack on Christians. It is the opposite.

Real Christians should be furious that a movement built on racial resentment, authoritarian obedience, and political violence has claimed their faith as its banner.

The founders were clear. The Constitution is clear. The Treaty of Tripoli is clear.

America was not founded as a Christian nation.

And the people trying to turn it into one are not following Christ.

They are following something else entirely.

And the research proves it.

Sources

Research

* PRRI (Public Religion Research Institute) — Christian Nationalism and the January 6, 2021 Insurrection — prri.org

* Samuel Perry & Andrew Whitehead — Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States (2020), Oxford University Press

Primary Sources

* Treaty of Peace and Friendship (Treaty of Tripoli), Article 11 — ratified by the U.S. Senate June 7, 1797, signed by President John Adams June 10, 1797 — Full text: avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/bar1796t.asp

* U.S. Constitution, Article VI, Clause 3 (No Religious Test Clause)

* U.S. Constitution, First Amendment (Establishment Clause)

Historical Record

* Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the United States Senate — documents the treaty being read aloud and copies distributed to every senator prior to unanimous ratification

* Philadelphia Gazette, 1797 — original publication of the treaty text for public record

Additional Reading

* Americans United for Separation of Church and State — A Word From John Adams: A 224-Year-Old Treaty Says The U.S. Was Not Founded As A Christian Nation — au.org

* First Amendment Encyclopedia (Middle Tennessee State University) — 1797 Treaty of Tripoli — firstamendment.mtsu.edu

We have never been a Christian Nation. 

People keep asking the wrong question. They want to know why Trump supporters believe the lies. Why they ignore the evidence. Why facts bounce off them like nothing.

That is not the right question.

The right question is what wound Trump is filling. Because there are two distinct psychological profiles inside his movement, and both of them arrived with something missing. Something he figured out how to give them.

One profile was shaped by brain structure they were born with. The other was carved into them by childhood. Together they account for the bulk of what we call the Trump cult.

Profile One: Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Researchers at Charite University in Berlin scanned the brains of people diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and found something that cannot be argued away.

Their brains are physically different.

Measurably less gray matter in the anterior insula, the region of the brain responsible for empathy. And a prefrontal cortex roughly nine percent smaller than average.

That second finding matters enormously. When something threatens a person, the amygdala fires instantly. It wants to react. Attack. Rage. The prefrontal cortex is the brake. It steps in and asks whether the response is proportionate to the actual threat.

In people with NPD that brake is nine percent smaller. So the amygdala fires and almost nothing stops it.

That is why the rage inside MAGA is so fast and so disproportionate. It is not a political stance. It is a neurological one.

This is not about intelligence. Not about education. Not about income. A smaller prefrontal cortex does not care how much money you have or what college you attended.

A narcissist carries an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for external admiration, and a near-total absence of empathy for anyone outside their circle. They only submit to two kinds of people: someone who makes them feel powerful by association, and someone who reminds them of themselves.

Trump is both.

They need constant validation. They need an enemy to blame. They need to feel chosen above everyone else. Trump gives them all three on a daily basis.

This group will not leave voluntarily. The only thing that moves them is if Trump turns on them directly and publicly humiliates them by name. That is the only pain their ego cannot absorb and redirect.

Profile Two: Authoritarian Personality

In the years following World War Two, psychologist Theodor Adorno set out to answer one of the most disturbing questions in modern history: how did ordinary people follow Hitler?

What he found was a distinct psychological profile he called the Authoritarian Personality, shaped not by brain structure but by upbringing.

Children raised in strict, punitive households where love was conditional and punishment was constant grow up with a specific wound. They learned that submission to power is how you stay safe. They learned that being hurt by authority is normal. Even comforting in its familiarity.

So as adults they are not merely tolerating the cruelty and humiliation that comes from a strongman. They are seeking it. Because it feels like home.

Psychologist Bob Altemeyer spent decades confirming Adorno’s findings and identified three consistent traits in authoritarian followers: submission to authority, aggression toward outsiders, and a desperate need to belong to the in-group.

This is where the bulk of Trump’s support originates.

What Connects Them

Here is what most analysis misses. Authoritarian followers share many traits with narcissists. The grandiosity. The in-group loyalty. The hostility toward anyone who challenges the leader.

But the motivation is completely different.

Narcissists follow from ego. They need to feel superior. This explains why wealthy, educated, high-status people end up in the cult. It is not economic anxiety. It is the need to feel chosen.

Authoritarian followers follow from fear. They need to feel safe. They need a strong figure telling them who the enemy is and that the in-group will be protected.

Trump gives the narcissist power and recognition. He gives the authoritarian follower protection and belonging. Two completely different psychological needs. One movement feeding both.

That is why facts do not move them. That is why scandal makes some of them more loyal. You are not reaching voters who need better information. You are reaching people whose wounds Trump is actively filling.

When the information threatens the source of their validation or their sense of safety, the brain does not evaluate it. It rejects it as an attack.

Understanding this does not make it acceptable. It makes it predictable. And predictable is the first step toward not being surprised by it anymore.

This is not a political movement that went too far.

This is a cult built out of broken people. And it was designed that way.

Sources

Schulze, L., Dziobek, I., Vater, A., Heekeren, H. R., Bajbouj, M., Renneberg, B., Heuser, I., and Roepke, S. (2013). Gray matter abnormalities in patients with narcissistic personality disorder. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 47(10), 1363-1369. Charite University Berlin.Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., and Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper and Row.Altemeyer, B. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Harvard University Press.Altemeyer, B. (2006). The Authoritarians. Self-published. Available at theauthoritarians.org.American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition. DSM-5. Narcissistic Personality Disorder criteria, 669-672.

You’ve been in this argument. Maybe at Thanksgiving. Maybe in a comment thread. Maybe with someone you used to respect.

You bring the facts.

They scream fake news.

You bring the logic. They say you have Trump Derangement Syndrome. You bring the receipts, the video, the court ruling, the sworn testimony and somehow, inexplicably, you end up on the defensive.

You walk away feeling crazy. Like you lost an argument you should have won by a mile.

You didn’t lose because you were wrong. You lost because you didn’t understand the game being played.

The Law Nobody Taught You

In 2013, Italian software engineer Alberto Brandolini was watching a political debate on television when he noticed something that stopped him cold.

No matter how many facts the journalist presented, the politician just kept producing new claims. Faster than anyone could address them. The journalist was visibly exhausted. The politician looked completely comfortable.

Brandolini wrote a single observation on Twitter that would eventually be cited in academic literature on misinformation:

The amount of energy needed to refute b******t is an order of magnitude larger than what it takes to produce it.

We now call this Brandolini’s Law. And it is not an opinion. It is a structural feature of how information works.

Producing a lie takes zero effort. No sources. No research. No evidence. You just say it. Disproving that same lie requires sources, context, historical background, peer-reviewed studies, and a patient audience willing to follow every step, none of which you have in a thirty-second exchange.

Four Lies in Ten Seconds

Trump uses the same lies on repeat. Consider what he deploys in a single rally appearance:

He said no new wars on his watch. We are currently involved in active conflict abroad. He said he built the greatest economy in American history. Economists rank it behind several previous administrations. He said the 2020 election was stolen. Sixty-one courts, his own Attorney General, and his own Department of Homeland Security found no evidence of widespread fraud. He said violent crime is at an all-time high. The FBI’s own data shows crime rates well below their historic peaks.

Four lies. Ten seconds. To fully address each one would take hours of documented research that nobody is going to read anyway.

And by the time you finish, he has said thirty more.

You are not having a debate. You are playing a game designed to exhaust you into giving up.

Why His Supporters Keep Falling For It

This is where most people get the analysis wrong. They assume Trump supporters are simply uninformed. That if you showed them the right information, something would click.

The research tells a different story.

In 1977, psychologists Lynn Hasher, David Goldstein, and Thomas Toppino published a landmark study on what they called the Illusory Truth Effect. They found that people rate statements as more likely to be true simply because they have heard them before, regardless of whether the statements are actually accurate. Repetition alone creates the feeling of truth.

Subsequent research has confirmed this effect across hundreds of studies. A 2019 meta-analysis in the journal Psychological Bulletin found the illusory truth effect is robust even when people are explicitly warned about it, even when the false statements contradict things they already know to be true, and even when the source is identified as unreliable.

Trump does not need to convince anyone. He just needs to repeat things until they feel true. The lying is not a bug. It is the mechanism.

This Was Built This Way

None of this is accidental. The firehose of falsehood, flooding the information environment with so many claims that no one can keep up, is a documented propaganda technique studied extensively by the RAND Corporation in research on Russian information warfare.5

The goal is never to persuade. The goal is to exhaust. To make the truth feel too complicated to chase down. To make both sides seem equally uncertain. To make the person trying to hold reality together feel like the unreasonable one.

When you understand that, the argument stops being confusing. It becomes predictable.

Trump doesn’t need to win arguments. He just needs to lie faster than you can keep up. And he has spent a decade proving that works.

What You Actually Do With This

Stop playing defense. You cannot out-fact a firehose and you cannot out-argue someone whose brain has been rewired by repetition to treat lies as truth.

What you can do is name the game. Point to the exhaustion tactic directly. Make the mechanism visible. Because the one thing Brandolini’s Law cannot survive is an audience that understands it is being used on them.

That is the only argument worth having.

Sources

1. Brandolini, A. (2013, November 11). [Original tweet]. Twitter/X. Cited in Williamson, E. (2019). Fantasy Island. Crown.2. FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (2023). Crime in the United States. U.S. Department of Justice.3. Hasher, L., Goldstein, D., & Toppino, T. (1977). Frequency and the conference of referential validity. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 16(1), 107–112.4. Dechêne, A., Stahl, C., Hansen, J., & Wänke, M. (2010). The truth about the truth: A meta-analytic review of the illusory truth effect. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(2), 238–257.5. Paul, C., & Matthews, M. (2016). The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model. RAND Corporation.

There is a pattern so consistent with Donald Trump that you can almost set a clock to it.

A lawsuit goes against him. A court rules against him. A poll drops. An ally flips. Within hours, sometimes minutes, someone gets attacked. A judge. A prosecutor. A former friend. A reporter. It does not matter who. What matters is that someone gets targeted, and Trump gets to be the one doing the targeting.

Most people assume this is political calculation. Distract the media. Fire up the base. Change the subject. Those things may be true. But they are downstream of something much more fundamental. Something that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with psychology.

Where the research starts

James Gilligan spent decades as a psychiatrist working inside the American prison system, studying men who had committed serious acts of violence. He interviewed hundreds of them. He looked for patterns across cases, across backgrounds, across crimes. What he found was not what most people expected.

The root cause was not poverty, though poverty was often present. It was not mental illness, though that appeared too. The single most consistent factor across every case Gilligan studied was shame. Specifically, the experience of humiliation triggering a shame response so unbearable that violence became the only available exit.[1]

Gilligan documented this so consistently that he came to describe shame as the primary driver of violence in human behavior. Not anger. Anger is the surface. Shame is the engine underneath it.

“Shame is not just an emotion. In Gilligan’s framework it is a threat to the self so severe that the psyche treats it as a survival crisis.”

How shame becomes aggression

Here is the mechanism. When a person experiences deep shame about their adequacy, their status, or their failures, that feeling does not simply sit still. It looks for somewhere to go. For many people, it goes inward, into depression, withdrawal, self-destruction. But for another type of person, it goes outward.

Into hostility. Into aggression. Into the compulsive need to dominate other people.

The reason is simple and brutal. Attacking someone else, shaming them publicly, making them feel small in front of an audience, produces an immediate neurological hit of power. For someone who carries chronic feelings of inadequacy or worthlessness, that hit is genuinely addictive. It does not solve anything. But it feels, in the moment, like proof that you exist and that you matter.

Gilligan found repeatedly that the men most prone to explosive aggression had grown up in environments where they received no consistent affirmation of their worth. No reliable message that they were enough, that they were loved, that they had inherent value. The shame took root early. And it never left.

The political application

Trump has constructed an entire political identity on top of this dynamic. Every loss triggers an attack. Every threat to his status triggers a counterattack. This is not spin management. It is compulsion. The pattern is too consistent, too automatic, and too disproportionate to be purely strategic.

What makes it politically potent is that a significant portion of his base operates from the same wound. Their towns were gutted by automation and outsourcing. Their identities were built around work that no longer exists. The economy restructured around them and left them behind, and the people in power showed little visible concern about any of it.

Trump did not offer those voters solutions. He offered them targets. And attacking a target, whether it is immigrants, academics, the media, or political opponents, produces the same neurochemical relief for the audience that it produces for him. A momentary sense of power in lives that have felt powerless.

“He did not give them a plan. He gave them an enemy. And in the psychology of shame, an enemy is often enough.”

Why confrontation alone fails

Understanding this pattern carries a practical implication that most people get backwards.

Confronting a shame-driven person with evidence of their failure usually makes things worse. Telling them they are wrong, embarrassing them publicly, cataloguing their losses, piles more shame on top of the shame that was already driving the behavior. The result is typically escalation, not reflection.

This does not mean confrontation is wrong. It means confrontation without consequence is nearly useless. What actually moves the needle, both in clinical settings and in political ones, is accountability with a cost attached. Behavior changes when the behavior stops working. Not when someone has a breakthrough. Not when they are shamed into self-awareness. When the calculus shifts and the attack no longer produces the reward it used to.

Empathy without accountability, in this framework, is not compassion. It is permission.

The person you probably know

This dynamic is not limited to one man or one political movement. You almost certainly know someone who fits the pattern. A family member who used to be easy to be around and now looks for fights. A friend who became cruel somewhere along the way. Someone who seems to need conflict the way other people need food.

They did not decide to become that person. Something made them feel small, and they found a way to feel large again. That explanation does not excuse the behavior. Most people who feel shame do not hurt anyone. The shame is not the problem. The response to it is.

But the explanation does clarify what you are actually dealing with. And it clarifies what actually works.

You stop laughing it off. You stop treating cruelty as personality. You name it every time it happens and you make clear there is a cost. Not because shame-driven people respond to reason, but because they respond to consequences.

That is not a political strategy. That is psychology. And it is the only thing the research consistently shows works.

References

* Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. G.P. Putnam. Gilligan served as Director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Harvard Medical School and drew on decades of clinical work inside the Massachusetts prison system. His central argument is that shame, particularly shame triggered by humiliation, is the primary proximate cause of violent behavior in human beings.

I did not choose the experiment. It chose me.

I was housesitting for a friend. Their living room television ran Fox News for roughly eight hours a day, every single day. Within 48 hours I was a different person. Short-fused, restless, sleeping in fragments. I wrote it off as work stress and moved on.

Then one day I spent the whole afternoon with headphones on, just music, no news cycle bleeding through the walls. By evening I felt genuinely lighter. Not a little better. Dramatically better. I did not know why and I was not going to interrogate it.

The following morning I walked into the living room and the familiar voice hit me before I could think. My stomach dropped. The anxiety came back immediately, like flipping a switch. That is the moment I understood something was actually happening. Not just mood variance, not just stress. Something physiological.

“The anxiety came back immediately, like flipping a switch. My stomach dropped before I had consciously registered what I was hearing.”

What the research actually says

Neuroscientists at University College London conducted large-scale brain imaging studies across thousands of subjects, published across multiple peer-reviewed journals. The findings were consistent: people who self-identify as politically conservative show measurably greater volume and reactivity in the amygdala, the brain region responsible for detecting threats, processing fear, and triggering the stress response.[1]

This is not a character indictment. The amygdala does not care about your values. It is a smoke detector and it exists to protect you. But a smoke detector with an oversized sensor goes off more often, and a media ecosystem built to trigger it will find its audience with surgical precision.

Fox News is not accidentally doing this. The format, rotating manufactured threats, named enemies, escalating outrage, is a direct hit on the overactive threat-processing system. Eight hours of that flooding your body with cortisol is not news consumption. It is physiologically indistinguishable from being followed home every day for a year.

The reality gap

Political scientists David Broockman at UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla at Yale ran a controlled study that paid regular Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month, then measured what changed. What they documented was not a shift in tone. It was a shift in what viewers believed to be factually true. Fox viewers were not just getting a different interpretation of events. They were getting different events entirely.[2]

The researchers called this partisan coverage filtering, the deliberate selection and omission of information to construct a coherent but alternate picture of reality. Viewers do not feel deceived because they have no access to the omissions. From inside the bubble, everything is consistent. That is precisely how it is designed.

The reward mechanism

The cycle has a structure. Every broadcast day follows the same emotional arc: the identification of a target, the collective denunciation, the resolution. Psychologists describe this dynamic through the lens of social dominance orientation, the tendency to organize communities around shared in-group elevation and out-group degradation. It feels like belonging. It feels like winning. And in the short term, those feelings are neurologically real.

Conspiracy theories serve a specific function inside this system. They are not offered because the producers believe them. They are offered because a viewer who possesses secret knowledge feels elevated above the ordinary audience. They see what others refuse to see. That is an identity, not just a belief, and identities are significantly harder to abandon than opinions.

“They do not feel manipulated. They feel chosen. The architecture of the addiction is that it rewards the very cognitive state it creates.”

What I actually observed

When I finally persuaded my friend to change the channel, my baseline returned within a single day. The irritability dissolved. Sleep improved. The low-grade sense of threat, the ambient feeling that something was wrong somewhere, lifted.

That is a measurable stress response. Cortisol has a half-life of roughly 60 to 90 minutes in the bloodstream, which is why removal from the stimulus produces relatively fast recovery. My body was not reacting to ideas. It was reacting to a sustained acoustic and visual threat signal, the same as it would to anything genuinely dangerous in the environment.

The people who consume this for years, who wake up and immediately reach for the first outrage of the day, are not stupid. They are caught in a feedback loop that activates, satisfies, and rebuilds the exact psychological condition it exploits. The addiction is elegant in the most troubling sense of that word.

The sad part is not that they are being manipulated. It is that from inside the loop, the manipulation feels like clarity.

Reality has a way of interrupting that feeling eventually. The question is whether the interruption comes gently or all at once.

References

* Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C. and Rees, G. (2011). Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults. Current Biology, 21(8), pp. 677-680. University College London. The study found larger amygdala volume in self-reported conservatives across a sample of 90 young adults.

* Broockman, D. and Kalla, J. (2023). Consuming Cross-Cutting Media Causes Learning and Moderates Attitudes. American Political Science Review. UC Berkeley and Yale University. The study documented significant factual divergence between Fox News viewers and CNN viewers on the same set of real-world events.

You ever notice how the smartest men you know are rarely conservatives?

There’s a scientific reason for that.

In 1987, researchers at Saarland University and Philipps University in Germany launched one of the most ambitious political psychology studies ever conducted.

They identified over 7,000 gifted third grade students. Then followed them into adulthood for 35 years. Measuring their intelligence and tracking their political views across their entire lives.

What they found was consistent and damning.

Men with high IQs consistently rejected conservative politics. Men with average to low IQs embraced conservative values.

Researchers call it the Cognitive Complexity Openness Hypothesis.

Here is how it works. Smarter people are more open to new experiences. They are better equipped to handle complex ideas. They can hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time and evaluate them both separately without their brain short circuiting.

Conservative ideology demands the opposite.

It requires certainty. Simple answers. Clear enemies. Rigid rules. Someone to tell you what to think so you never have to figure it out yourself.

For high IQ men that kind of rigid thinking feels intellectually suffocating. So they reject it.

This is not one study making a controversial claim.

In 2019, professor Alain Van Hiel at the University of Ghent in Belgium studied 983 participants and found that men with low emotional intelligence were significantly more likely to hold authoritarian political views. Specifically, those who scored lower on emotional understanding and management were more likely to submit to authority figures and prefer inequality between social groups.

His conclusion was direct. People who endorse authority and strong leaders and who do not mind inequality show lower levels of emotional abilities.

And a third study published in 2024 examined over 300 biological and adoptive families using full IQ tests and genetic data. It found that higher intelligence directly predicted social liberalism and lower authoritarianism even after controlling for income, education, and family environment.

Three studies. Three countries. Three different methodologies. All pointing the same direction.

The pattern is consistent across decades of research. The smarter a man is the less likely he is to need rigid rules to make sense of the world.

This is why Trump’s base is overwhelmingly men without college degrees. This is why MAGA rejects science, experts, and complexity. This is why facts do not work on them.

When you argue with a Trump supporter you are not debating someone who sees the world differently.

You are debating someone whose brain cannot process the complexity required to see the world clearly.

Conservative political ideology for these men is not about values.

It is about comfort. It is about finding a home in a system that never asks them to think beyond what they already believe.

It is the ceiling of their cognitive ability dressed up as a political identity.

The data is clear. Smarter men reject everything the Republican party stands for.

That is why Trump famously said he loves the poorly educated.

If it were not for them the Republican party would not exist.

Sources

Krolo, Maximilian, Jörn R. Sparfeldt, and Detlef H. Rost. “Exploring Exceptional Minds: Political Orientations of Gifted Adults.” Marburg Giftedness Project. Saarland University and Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. 2026.

Van Hiel, Alain, et al. “The Relationship Between Emotional Abilities and Right-Wing and Prejudiced Attitudes.” Journal of Emotion. University of Ghent, Belgium. 2019.

Carl, Noah, et al. “Predicting Political Beliefs with Polygenic Scores for Cognitive Performance and Educational Attainment.” PMC. 2024.

You ever notice how conservative women vote against the very rights that protect them?

There’s a scientific reason for that.

And you’re not going to like the answer.

In 2018, political scientists Mark Setzler and Alixandra Yanus at High Point University analyzed data from the 2016 American National Election Study to answer one specific question: why do women vote for Trump?

The conventional story was that Trump’s base was angry white men, working class, non-college educated, evangelical. That story was only half right.

Over 40 percent of American women voted for Trump on Election Day 2016, despite his well-documented history of sexual misconduct and demeaning comments about women. LSE And in 2024, more than 6 in 10 white women without a college degree voted for Trump again. EMILY’s List

The researchers wanted to know why.

Was it party loyalty? Religion? Region? Class? Education?

None of those explained it.

Despite the prevailing narrative about Trump’s electoral base being dominated by older, working-class, non-college-educated men, none of these demographic indicators explained much about the motivations behind vote choice after accounting for voters’ underlying attitudes. LSE

What actually explained it was two things.

Reason One: Racial Resentment

The researchers measured racial resentment using standard survey questions, statements like “if Black people would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.” Agreement with those statements was used to score respondents on a racial resentment scale.

The results were stark.

Women with the highest levels of racial resentment were more than four times as likely, 68 percent versus 16 percent, to support Trump than women with the lowest levels of racial resentment. LSE

That’s not a small effect. That’s a massive one. Being a Republican woman increased the probability of voting for Trump by 29 points. Racial resentment blew that out of the water.

These women didn’t vote for Trump because of the economy. They voted because of who they believed didn’t deserve what they had.

Reason Two: Hostile Sexism

This is the part nobody wants to talk about.

The researchers also measured something called hostile sexism, a specific set of beliefs about women. Not generic sexism. Hostile sexism. Beliefs like: women seek to gain power by controlling men. Women exaggerate problems they face. Women are too easily offended.

And here’s what they found.

Among women, those with the highest levels of sexism were 54 percentage points more likely, 76 percent versus 22 percent, to support Trump than women who expressed no sexist attitudes. LSE

Read that again. Women who believed other women were manipulative, exaggerating, and seeking power they didn’t deserve, those women voted for Trump at a rate of 76 percent. Women who held no such beliefs voted for Trump at 22 percent.

That’s a 54 point gap. Driven entirely by how much one woman resented other women.

Controlling for all other factors, possessing the levels of sexism and racism typical of a female Trump voter increased the probability of voting for him by 37 percentage points, compared to being a female Republican, which only increased the probability by 29 points. Pacific Standard

Prejudice was a stronger predictor than party. Let that sink in.

The Bigger Picture

Without a college degree, options narrow. Status becomes tied to your husband, your community, the social order staying exactly as it is.

When other women start earning more, getting promoted, gaining power, it doesn’t feel inspiring. It feels threatening.

The researchers confirmed it. These women weren’t voting for better healthcare. They weren’t voting for lower prices. There is no evidence to suggest Trump’s female supporters voted for him primarily because of partisanship rather than prejudice. LSE

They voted to keep the hierarchy in place. Even if that hierarchy was the thing holding them down.

And in 2024, Trump’s margin of victory among non-college-educated white women was between 25 and 28 points, nearly identical to his support among these voters in 2020. EMILY’s List

Nothing changed. Nothing is going to change on its own.

Sources:

Setzler, M. & Yanus, A.B. (2018). “Why Did Women Vote for Donald Trump?” PS: Political Science & Politics, Vol. 51, Issue 3, pp. 523–527. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096518000355

Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University. “Gender Differences in 2024 Vote Choice Are Similar to Most Recent Presidential Elections.” https://cawp.rutgers.edu/blog/gender-differences-2024-presidential-vote

Edison Research / National Election Pool, 2024 Presidential Exit Polls.

The pattern is undeniable. Every debunked conspiracy. Every obvious lie. Every absurd claim. Trump supporters believe it all without question.

It’s not stupidity. It’s psychology.

Research into authoritarian movements reveals a disturbing truth: cult members don’t fall for propaganda by accident. Their brains are wired to accept it. Understanding why requires examining how authoritarian groups systematically dismantle critical thinking and replace it with unquestioning belief.

The Closed Information Ecosystem

Cults don’t just control what members believe. They control what members see.

In 2020, researchers David Broockman and Joshua Kalla conducted a groundbreaking study published in the American Political Science Review. They paid heavy Fox News viewers to watch CNN instead for one month. The results were remarkable.

Fox viewers held beliefs that were demonstrably false. They believed COVID-19 was less deadly than it actually was. They believed protests were more violent than they actually were. They believed mail-in voting fraud was widespread despite zero evidence.

After watching CNN for just 30 days, these beliefs shifted toward reality.

The study revealed something critical: people don’t believe propaganda because they’re gullible. They believe it because it’s the only information they receive. When the information diet changes, beliefs change.

Trump’s movement operates the same way. Followers are told mainstream media lies. They’re directed to “alternative” sources that confirm every conspiracy. They’re warned that fact-checkers are liberal operatives. The ecosystem is sealed. No contradictory information gets through.

Sacred Values Trump Reality

Psychologist Philip Tetlock identified a phenomenon called “sacred values.” These are beliefs so central to identity that questioning them feels like a moral violation.

For Trump supporters, loyalty to Trump has become a sacred value.

When researchers present Trump followers with evidence of his lies, something fascinating happens in brain scans. The areas associated with reasoning don’t activate. Instead, the areas associated with identity protection light up.

They’re not evaluating truth. They’re defending who they are.

This is why fact-checking fails. You can’t fact-check identity. When Trump’s dishonesty is exposed, his followers don’t reconsider their support. They reconsider the source of the information. The messenger becomes the enemy. The message gets dismissed.

Sacred values create cognitive closure. Once Trump loyalty becomes sacred, contradictory evidence doesn’t register as information worth considering. It registers as an attack.

The Epistemic Bubble

Philosophers C. Thi Nguyen and Regina Rini describe “epistemic bubbles” as information environments where alternative viewpoints simply don’t exist.

Trump’s information ecosystem is a textbook example.

His followers consume content exclusively from right-wing sources. They watch Newsmax, OAN, and Fox. They scroll Truth Social and X accounts that amplify Trump messaging. They listen to podcasts hosted by conspiracy theorists. They attend rallies where the only voice is Trump’s.

It’s not that they reject outside perspectives. They never encounter them.

Studies on media consumption show that heavy Fox News viewers genuinely don’t know what mainstream outlets are reporting. They’re not choosing to ignore it. They’re not exposed to it. The information never reaches them.

This creates a reality distortion field. Inside the bubble, everyone agrees. Everyone shares the same “facts.” Everyone reinforces the same beliefs. Dissent doesn’t just feel wrong—it feels impossible.

When your entire information world confirms a narrative, that narrative feels like truth.

Authority Dependency

Authoritarian movements cultivate dependence on a single source of truth: the leader.

Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism found that authoritarian followers have high trust in authority figures and low trust in independent verification. They don’t want to evaluate evidence themselves. They want trusted leaders to tell them what’s true.

Trump exploits this perfectly.

He positions himself as the sole arbiter of reality. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” he told supporters in 2018. His message is clear: trust me, not your own eyes.

And his followers comply.

Studies show Trump supporters are significantly more likely to believe claims simply because Trump said them. Even when presented with contradictory evidence, the fact that Trump endorsed a claim makes it credible in their eyes.

This isn’t critical thinking. It’s outsourced thinking.

The authoritarian mindset doesn’t want the burden of evaluating complex information. It wants certainty. It wants a leader who provides answers. Trump gives them that. He tells them what to think, and they’re relieved.

Moral Disengagement

Psychologist Albert Bandura identified “moral disengagement” as a process where people justify immoral actions by reframing them.

Trump has mastered every technique.

Euphemistic labeling: “Alternative facts” instead of lies. Advantageous comparison: “Biden is worse.” Displacement of responsibility: “I’m just fighting back.” Dehumanization: Immigrants are “animals.” Distortion of consequences: January 6th was “a day of love.”

Each technique allows followers to accept what they’d normally reject.

When Trump lies, it’s “strategy.” When he breaks norms, it’s “draining the swamp.” When he incites violence, he’s “standing up for America.” The immoral becomes moral through reframing.

Bandura’s research shows that once moral disengagement takes hold, people can justify almost anything. The psychological guardrails disappear. Behavior that would normally trigger guilt or shame gets rationalized.

Trump supporters aren’t ignoring his misconduct. They’ve convinced themselves it isn’t misconduct.

The Propaganda Trap

Combine these elements and you get a propaganda machine that’s nearly impossible to escape.

Followers live in a closed information ecosystem where only pro-Trump narratives exist. They’ve made Trump loyalty a sacred value that can’t be questioned. They depend on him as their sole source of truth. They’ve morally disengaged from his worst behavior.

At that point, propaganda doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It just needs to be consistent.

Trump can claim the 2020 election was stolen despite 60 failed lawsuits. He can call January 6th peaceful despite video evidence. He can deny saying things he said on camera. None of it matters.

His followers believe him because their entire psychological architecture is built to believe him.

Breaking Free Requires Deprogramming

Understanding why Trump supporters fall for propaganda is the first step.

The second step is recognizing that arguing facts won’t work. You can’t fact-check someone out of a cult. You can’t debate someone out of an identity.

What works is exposure to alternative information over time, reconnection to non-political identity, and rebuilding trust in independent verification.

The Broockman and Kalla study proved that changing information diets changes beliefs. But it takes sustained exposure. One conversation won’t do it. One article won’t do it.

Deprogramming from authoritarian movements is a process, not an event.

It requires patience. It requires empathy. And it requires understanding that the people trapped in Trump’s cult aren’t stupid.

They’re psychologically captured. And escaping takes more than facts. It takes rewiring an entire way of seeing the world.

Research cited:

* Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2020). “The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections: Evidence from 49 field experiments.” American Political Science Review.

* Tetlock, P. E. (2003). “Thinking the unthinkable: Sacred values and taboo cognitions.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

* Nguyen, C. T. (2020). “Echo chambers and epistemic bubbles.” Episteme.

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

* Bandura, A. (1999). “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities.” Personality and Social Psychology Review.

What Happens When You Force Fox News Viewers to Watch Real News

Researchers at UC Berkeley and Yale decided to find out.

Political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla recruited 763 hardcore Fox News viewers for a peer-reviewed study published in the American Political Science Review in 2023. Overwhelmingly white men, average age 54, watching 14 hours of Fox News every single week. The researchers paid them $15 an hour to watch CNN instead during prime time. One hour a day. For an entire month. They even gave them weekly quizzes to make sure they were actually paying attention.

Here’s what happened.

They didn’t become liberals. But after one month of real news, they started to change. They became more likely to believe voting by mail was secure. Less likely to believe Democrats were stealing the election. Less likely to believe Biden wanted to defund the police. They stopped thinking the world was such a dangerous place. And they became more critical of Donald Trump overall.

One month. That’s all it took to start breaking through decades of propaganda.

This tells you something important about what Fox News actually does to the brain. It doesn’t inform you. It isolates you. It builds a wall between you and reality so thick that facts can’t get through. You’re not watching news. You’re watching a machine designed to keep you afraid, angry, and loyal.

This finding connects directly to what researchers call epistemic closure, a concept documented extensively by political psychologist John Jost at NYU, published in Political Psychology in 2017. When a media ecosystem tells you every outside source is lying, your brain stops processing contradictory information entirely. It’s not stubbornness. It’s a trained neurological response.

And here’s the part that should break your heart.

Two months after the study ended, most participants went back to Fox. And every single change they had experienced reversed. The fear came back. The lies came back. The loyalty came back. Like it never happened. Broockman and Kalla documented this reversal in the same study, noting that the effects were significant but not durable without sustained exposure to outside information.

This isn’t media bias. This isn’t slant or spin or corporate interest. This is a propaganda machine so powerful that one month of reality wasn’t enough to break it.

The neuroscience supports this. Research published in Nature Neuroscience found that conservatives show higher reactivity in the amygdala, the brain’s fear and threat detection center. Fox News is not accidentally triggering that response. Its entire programming architecture is built around it. Fear. Threat. Enemy. Repeat.

And right now, millions of Americans are living inside that machine. Watching it every night. Wondering why the world feels so dangerous. Wondering why they’re so angry all the time.

They don’t know the machine is doing that to them.

That’s the whole point.

Sources

Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2023). “The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes.” American Political Science Review, 117(2), 636–652.

Jost, J.T. (2017). “Ideological asymmetries and the essence of political psychology.” Political Psychology, 38(2), 167–208.

Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). “Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults.” Current Biology, 21(8), 677–680.