The Lucas Bean Show

Every authoritarian regime in modern history has faced the same problem. The leader needs subordinates to govern. But competent subordinates are dangerous. A competent deputy has options. A competent deputy has leverage. A competent deputy can build their own power base and, if the moment comes, replace the leader entirely.

So the leader does something that looks irrational from the outside but is perfectly logical from the inside. He stops hiring for competence. He hires for desperation.

Political scientists call this negative selection. The term dates back to observations of Hitler’s inner circle, where Albert Speer noted that the most powerful positions were deliberately filled with the most incompetent men available. Not because Hitler lacked access to talent. Because talent was a threat. Incompetence was safety.

The concept was formalized by economists Georgy Egorov at Northwestern University and Konstantin Sonin at the University of Chicago in a paper called “Dictators and Their Viziers.” Their model demonstrated what historians had observed for centuries. Authoritarian leaders face a loyalty-competence tradeoff. The more competent a subordinate is, the more capable they are of betrayal. The more incompetent they are, the more dependent they remain on the leader. Weak leaders, especially those who feel their grip on power slipping, will always sacrifice competence for loyalty because loyalty is the only thing keeping them alive.

Egorov and Sonin found something else. The tradeoff gets worse over time. A leader who comes to power surrounded by capable people will, as he becomes more insecure, systematically replace them with weaker ones. The regime becomes less effective with every replacement. But the leader does not care about effectiveness. He cares about survival. And a mediocre loyalist who owes everything to the leader is safer than a brilliant operator who could function without him.

How Negative Selection Works in Practice

The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. The leader identifies people who are compromised, disgraced, indebted, or otherwise unable to function outside his protection. He elevates them. He gives them titles, power, and authority they could never have earned on merit. And in doing so, he manufactures a dependency so complete that betrayal becomes structurally impossible.

A person who earned their position through competence can walk away. They have a reputation. They have credentials. They have options. A person who was given their position as a lifeline has none of that. If the leader falls, they fall. Their survival is fused to his survival. That fusion is the point.

This is not a side effect of poor hiring. It is the strategy. The leader does not want people who can leave. He wants people who cannot.

Consider the composition of Trump’s cabinet and inner circle. A disgraced television host overseeing the military. A man implicated in an FBI sting running border enforcement. A nominee who admitted in court that a parasitic worm consumed part of his brain, placed in charge of public health. These are not appointments that make sense if the goal is effective governance. They make perfect sense if the goal is total loyalty manufactured through total dependency.

Each of these people arrived compromised. Each of them was given authority they could never have obtained through normal channels. And each of them now exists in a position where the only thing standing between them and complete professional annihilation is the continued power of the man who elevated them.

The Ratchet

Negative selection does not stop at hiring. It deepens over time through a mechanism that functions like a ratchet. Every line a subordinate crosses on behalf of the leader pushes them further from any possible exit.

Illegal deportations. Defiance of federal court orders. Participation in coverups. Each act adds another layer of complicity. Each layer makes the subordinate more dependent on the leader’s continued power because the leader’s continued power is the only thing preventing accountability.

This is the difference between loyalty earned and loyalty manufactured. Earned loyalty comes from shared values and mutual respect. It can survive disagreement. Manufactured loyalty comes from shared exposure. It cannot survive the leader’s fall because the leader’s fall triggers the subordinate’s prosecution.

Egorov and Sonin’s model predicts exactly this dynamic. As the leader becomes more insecure, he demands greater demonstrations of loyalty. Those demonstrations take the form of increasingly compromising acts. Each act binds the subordinate more tightly to the regime. And the subordinate, now unable to leave without facing consequences, becomes more extreme in their public defense of the leader. Not because they believe in him. Because they have no other option.

This is why the defenses get more absurd over time. This is why cabinet members say things on camera that contradict what they said six months earlier. This is why people who once had independent reputations now sound like hostages reading prepared statements. They are not defending a policy. They are defending themselves. Because if this administration ends, the investigations begin. And every one of them knows it.

Why It Looks Like Incompetence

From the outside, negative selection looks like stupidity. Why would anyone put unqualified people in charge of the most powerful institutions in the world? The question assumes the goal is governance. It is not. The goal is control.

A qualified person running the Department of Defense might make independent decisions based on their expertise. An unqualified person running the Department of Defense will call the White House before making any decision at all. The incompetence is not a bug. It is the mechanism of control. Every decision that has to go through the leader is another decision the leader controls. And every decision the subordinate makes that later proves disastrous is another piece of leverage the leader holds.

This is what Egorov and Sonin’s research describes as the terminal phase of the loyalty-competence tradeoff. The regime becomes less and less capable of governing effectively. Decisions get worse. Outcomes deteriorate. Public trust erodes. But the leader’s personal grip on power remains intact because every person in the hierarchy owes their position to him and cannot survive without him.

The regime is not failing because the leader made bad hiring decisions. The regime is failing because it was designed to serve the leader, not the country. And a system designed to serve one person at the expense of institutional competence will always produce exactly the outcomes we are watching right now.

The Endgame

Every regime built on negative selection faces the same terminal problem. The leader cannot be replaced from within because everyone around him was selected specifically for their inability to replace him. And the regime cannot adapt to changing circumstances because adaptation requires competence that was deliberately excluded from the system.

The hierarchy holds as long as the leader holds. The moment the leader weakens, there is no institutional capacity underneath to sustain anything. No bench. No succession plan. No competent deputy waiting in the wings. Just a collection of compromised people whose only skill was loyalty to a single person.

When that person is gone, they scatter. Not because they were never loyal. But because the loyalty was never about belief. It was about survival. And survival, once the umbrella collapses, means getting as far from the wreckage as possible.

That is negative selection carried to its logical conclusion. A system that prioritizes one man’s power over everything else will, eventually, have nothing else left.

Sources

Egorov, G. & Sonin, K. (2011). Dictators and Their Viziers: Endogenizing the Loyalty-Competence Trade-Off. Journal of the European Economic Association, 9(5), 903-930.

Speer, A. (1970). Inside the Third Reich. Macmillan.

Haber, S. (2006). Authoritarian Government. In B. Weingast & D. Wittman (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. Oxford University Press.

There is a question that sits underneath every argument you will ever have with a conservative, and it is not the one you think. It is not why they believe false things. It is why the true thing, once you show it to them, so often makes them trust you less.

You produce the document, the footage, the record, and it slides off them as if it were the lie. That reaction looks insane from the outside. It is not insane.

It is the predictable end state of a life spent inside copies, and a French thinker described the whole machine more than forty years before it finished assembling itself in America.

The Map Becomes the Territory

In 1981, the philosopher Jean Baudrillard published a book called Simulacra and Simulation, one of the most influential accounts ever written of what happens to a mind soaked in manufactured images.

His argument was that modern culture had begun producing copies of things that no longer had an original. A copy of a copy of a copy, each one referring only to the last, until the real thing it once pointed at was gone and no one noticed the absence. He called the result hyperreality. A condition in which the simulation feels more real, more vivid, more trustworthy than the reality it replaced.

The mechanism is simpler than the vocabulary. When the fake version of a thing becomes more familiar to you than the real version, the fake version quietly becomes your standard for what is real. Not through a decision. Through repetition.

You do not choose the counterfeit over the genuine article. You simply never meet the genuine article, so the counterfeit is all you have to measure by. Show such a person the real thing later and it will feel wrong to them, off, suspicious, because it fails to match the only reference they own.

That is the trap.

Once the copy sets the standard, reality itself starts to look like the fraud.

A Lifetime of Rehearsals

Now hold that lens up to what the American right consumes, and the picture arranges itself with uncomfortable neatness.

Consider the entertainment. Professional wrestling is combat with the consequences surgically removed. The blows land without landing, the blood is real but the fight is not, and no one is ever truly accountable for anything because nothing that happens was ever permitted to matter. It is conflict rehearsed as spectacle, and it trains the viewer to enjoy the shape of a struggle while feeling none of its weight.

Consider the news. Fox, Newsmax, and the outlets orbiting them do not deliver the events of the world through a conservative lens. They deliver a product engineered to confirm, to soothe, to tell the audience that its existing feelings were correct all along. Actual journalism reports what occurred whether or not it flatters you. This is the opposite service. It reports how you already wished to feel and dresses it as the day’s events.

Consider the faith, and here it must be said plainly rather than politely. The version of religion at work is one that supplies the costume of morality while excusing its owner from the hard part. The pews get filled on Sunday, and the actual labor of examining and changing one’s conduct gets skipped.

Because the performance of virtue has been substituted for the practice of it. It is another rehearsal standing in for the real thing.

Consider the idols. They worship Donald Trump, not the man who lost fortunes and bankrupted casinos, but the character an editing bay assembled for a reality program, the decisive tycoon who never existed off the soundstage. They worship Andrew Tate, whose own attorneys, defending him in the Romanian proceedings, argued that the fleet of supercars was rented and the empire was a marketing act, a performance staged for the camera. In both cases the devotion attaches not to a real accomplishment but to a character, because the character is frictionless and the truth is not.

Why Evidence Turns to Ash

String those together and the reason facts fail comes into focus. Fake combat, fake reporting, fake devotion, fake tycoons, fake hard men. A person raised on that full diet does not merely develop a taste for the counterfeit.

The counterfeit becomes the ruler against which everything else is measured, and reality, arriving late and unfamiliar, cannot pass the test. Your evidence fails not because it is weak but because it issues from the very realm these consumers were trained to distrust.

The simulation feels authentic because it is familiar. Reality feels like the deception, precisely because it contradicts the only world they know by heart.

That is hyperreality doing exactly what Baudrillard said it would. The copy does not sit beside the original arguing for attention.

It devours the original and takes its place, and the person living inside the copy loses the equipment needed to tell that anything was ever swapped.

The Replacement

This is the part worth carrying out of the essay, because it corrects a strategic error the opposition makes constantly. The movement did not persuade millions of people to abandon reality through some feat of argument. Argument was never involved. It handed them a replacement for reality, built over decades, delivered through everything they watched and cheered and prayed to, and a replacement does not have to defeat the original in a debate. It only has to arrive first and stay longer. By the time the truth shows up to make its case, the seat is already taken.

Which points to the only response with any hope of working, and it is not the one most of Trump’s critics reach for. You will not dislodge a simulation by pelting it with facts, because the facts are read as the intrusion and the simulation as the home. What erodes a counterfeit is contact with the real thing often enough that it stops feeling foreign. That is slow, unglamorous, person-by-person work. It is also the only force that has ever pulled anyone back out.

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Sources:

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Éditions Galilée, 1981. English translation, University of Michigan Press, 1994.“Andrew Tate’s lawyers argued his lavious lifestyle was partly performance.” Reporting on the Romanian trafficking proceedings, 2024.

There is a comforting story the left tells itself about the people who vote for Donald Trump. In this story, they are dupes. They were lied to, they believed the lies, and the remedy is therefore simple. Supply the missing facts, expose the falsehoods, and the spell will break. It is a reassuring theory because it puts the problem somewhere it can be repaired. Bad information in, bad politics out, and the fix is better information. Every fact-check and every patient thread laying out what the man said against what the man did rests on that one assumption. That the voter was fooled.

The assumption is wrong. And the proof comes from a field nobody thought to consult. The study of professional wrestling.

The Word That Explains Everything

In 2022, political scientist David Moon at the University of Bath published a peer-reviewed paper in Political Studies Review with a title that sounds like a joke and functions as a thesis. Can pro wrestling help us understand Donald Trump. Moon’s answer is yes, and it lands harder than the dupe theory because it does the reverse of what the dupe theory does. It grants the voter total knowledge, and then explains why that makes the situation worse rather than better.

The key is a word wrestling has used for a century. Kayfabe. It is the industry’s term for the shared agreement to treat a staged show as real while it is happening. The feud is scripted. The blows are pulled. The winner was settled in a production meeting before either man walked to the ring. Every person in the building knows this. They roar anyway. And that roar is not the sound of people being deceived. It is the sound of people who know exactly what they are watching and have decided the knowledge does not matter.

The Smart Fan

The instinct is to assume the crowd simply is not clever enough to see the strings. Moon dismantles that. Modern fans are what the business calls smart. They follow the backstage contract disputes, the booking decisions, the politics of who gets pushed and who gets buried. They know the machinery better than the casual viewer ever will. And they still mark out, which is the fan’s own phrase for surrendering to a moment as if it were real while knowing full well that it is not.

This is the piece outsiders miss. Knowing the show is fake and cheering anyway is not the fan failing at skepticism. It is the fan succeeding at fandom. The pleasure was never located in believing the thing was real. The pleasure was located in the performance, and the performance is enjoyed most fully by the person who understands precisely how it is made. That, Moon argues, is how a cynical electorate engages with Trump. Not as marks who swallowed a con, but as a knowing audience that bought a ticket to a show it understands completely.

The Heel

Wrestling runs on a villain, and the villain has a name. The heel. The strongest heels in the history of the business share one strange shape. They are dominant and aggrieved at the same time. They brag without limit, then complain without shame. They cheat to win, then insist the only reason they had to cheat is that the whole system was rigged against them. They humiliate everyone in reach, then weep victim the instant anyone hits back.

The audience holds both halves of that contradiction at once and feels no strain, because the form spent decades teaching them how. Trump stepped into the role without a seam. The most powerful man on earth who is also, to hear him tell it, the most persecuted man in American history. The billionaire who is somehow the ultimate outsider. His crowd carries both pictures with no friction because the psychological wiring was already installed, laid down by years in front of the screen. It would be a mistake to hand him credit as some master builder for this. He did not invent kayfabe and he did not construct the audience. The form was a century in the making and a slice of the public arrived already fluent, already aching for a heel to cheer. His one move was to stand in the ring and be the villain they came to see.

Why Facts Bounce Off

This is why the fact-check fails, and it fails for a reason more fundamental than stubbornness. When you correct a broken promise, you believe you are ending the match by exposing that the punches were staged. But the crowd knew the punches were staged before you arrived. You are explaining the trick to people who paid to watch the trick performed. The lie was never a defect they overlooked. It was the product on the marquee. You are attempting a policy debate with someone who is watching a wrestling show, and the scoreboard you keep pointing at is the one thing in the building nobody in the seats came to see.

The House They Burned Down

Here is where the framework stops being clever and starts being grim. A wrestling fan swept up in the performance goes home when the lights come up. The arena is not their house. The storyline does not reach their kid’s classroom or their father’s pension or the price of eggs on the way home.

Trump’s audience does not get that separation, and this is the difference that should haunt anyone who reaches for the wrestling comparison and then stops at the fun part. Their jobs are real. Their children’s schools are real. Their parents’ Social Security is real. Their premiums, their mortgage rates, their grocery bills are all real, and all of it sits inside the very story they are cheering. The same crowd that knows the feud is staged treats the wreckage as if it were staged too, applauding a plot twist that is in fact the roof coming down on their own heads. They set fire to the house, then pulled a chair into the rubble to watch it burn on television, and called it a good show.

That is not stupidity. It is something more specific and more troubling. It is the wholesale swap of emotional entertainment for rational self-interest, run so deep that the person doing it can no longer feel the difference between a story and their own life.

What It Means for the Rest of Us

The lesson is not that these voters are stupid or lost, and the fatalistic reading is both cruel and useless. The lesson is that you cannot fact your way out of a performance. As long as politics is consumed as a show, the result does not register and only the spectacle does, and every corrected figure you offer sails straight past the part of them that is watching.

The work, then, is not to win the argument inside the ring. The ring is rigged, and everyone in the stands already knows it, and pointing at the rigging only confirms what they came to enjoy. The work is to get people out of their seats altogether. To make them stop watching politics as wrestling and start seeing it as the machinery that decides whether their own lives get better or worse. That is a far harder task than any debunk. It is also the only one that has ever moved anybody.

Sources:

Moon, D. S. “Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can Pro-Wrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump?” Political Studies Review, vol. 20, no. 1, 2022, pp. 47-61.Moon, D. S. “Sad but true: Donald Trump really did wrestle his way into the White House.” The Guardian, 2024.

Every cult in history has ended.

The Peoples Temple. Heaven’s Gate. The Branch Davidians. Aum Shinrikyo. The Rajneeshees. NXIVM. Every single one. The leaders told their followers this movement was different. That this time it was real.

That this community would last forever. It never does.

The psychological research on why cults collapse is remarkably consistent. Five mechanisms appear across decades of scholarship from entirely different fields. Communications theory, psychiatry, social psychology, cognitive science, and sociology. None of these researchers were studying the same thing. But they all found the same pattern. Cults do not die because the members get smarter. Cults die because the structure holding them together stops working.

The World Inside the Screen

George Gerbner spent decades running the Cultural Indicators Project at the University of Pennsylvania, tracking how violence was portrayed across thousands of television programs and measuring what happened to the people who consumed large quantities of it. His finding was that heavy viewers did not just absorb content. They absorbed a worldview. People watching more than three hours of television per day significantly overestimated their chances of being victimized by crime, significantly overestimated the amount of violence in their communities, and were significantly less likely to trust other people. Gerbner called it Mean World Syndrome. The screen was not reflecting reality. It was replacing it.

Gerbner was studying network television in the 1970s and 1980s. He could not have predicted that an entire political movement would one day be built on the same mechanism, running at ten times the dosage. Fox News viewers are not consuming three hours a day. Many are consuming eight. The world being constructed inside their heads is not just slightly more dangerous than reality. It is unrecognizable from reality. Caravans. Invasions. Cities on fire. Crime spiraling out of control. None of it matches the data. Violent crime has been declining for decades. But the data does not matter when the feeling has been installed at the neurological level through years of repetition. You cannot fact-check a feeling. And that is what makes Mean World Syndrome so effective as a political tool. It does not persuade. It conditions.

The Wall Nobody Sees

Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism in 1961 after spending years interviewing American prisoners of war and Chinese citizens who had been through state-run reeducation programs. He identified eight criteria of thought reform, and the first was the one that made everything else possible. He called it milieu control.

Milieu control is not about telling someone what to think. It is about controlling what information they have access to. You build an information environment so complete and so sealed that the person inside it has no contact with any contradicting reality. You do not need to win an argument if the other side of the argument never reaches the listener. The wall does the work for you.

Lifton found that milieu control does not feel like control to the person experiencing it. It feels like clarity. The world outside the wall sounds confusing and contradictory. The world inside the wall is simple. There are good people and bad people. There is one source of truth and everything else is lying to you. The simplicity is the trap. Once the wall is up, the person inside it does not experience themselves as cut off from reality. They experience everyone else as cut off from reality.

Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, and Truth Social function as a milieu control system at industrial scale. Millions of Americans consume their information from a single ideological ecosystem that does not share facts, sources, or even basic narratives with any other news environment. The wall was built so slowly over so many years that the people inside it never noticed it going up. They think they are informed. They think everyone else is brainwashed. That inversion is exactly what Lifton described sixty years ago.

The Prophecy Problem

Leon Festinger infiltrated a doomsday cult in 1954 to study what would happen when the group’s prophecy failed. The leader, Dorothy Martin, had told her followers that a flood would destroy the world on December 21st and that a UFO would arrive to rescue the faithful. Some members sold their homes. Others quit their jobs. They gave up everything to be ready.

December 21st came and went. No flood. No UFO. Festinger expected the group to dissolve. Instead, the most committed members became more devoted. They called newspapers. They recruited strangers. They preached harder than ever.

Festinger called the mechanism cognitive dissonance. The human brain cannot hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. “I gave up everything for this” and “this was a lie” cannot coexist. One has to go. For the members who had sacrificed the least, the lie was easy to release. They walked away. For the members who had sacrificed everything, admitting the lie meant admitting they had destroyed their own lives for nothing. That admission is psychologically unsurvivable for most people. So instead of releasing the belief, they grip it harder. The investment becomes the proof. I gave up everything, therefore it must be real. Because the alternative is unbearable.

This is the engine that keeps political cults alive long past the point where the evidence should have killed them. Every broken promise that should weaken loyalty actually strengthens it among the most committed, because those are the people who have sacrificed the most. They have lost relationships. They have alienated family members. They have staked their identity on this being real. Admitting it was a lie does not just cost them a political opinion. It costs them their entire sense of self.

The Identity Trap

Henri Tajfel’s minimal group experiments in the 1970s demonstrated something unsettling about how human beings relate to groups. He took complete strangers, assigned them to arbitrary categories with no shared history or common interest, and watched what happened. Within minutes, participants were favoring their own group members and discriminating against the other group. No conflict was necessary. No real difference existed. The mere act of categorization was enough to trigger loyalty and hostility.

Tajfel called it social identity theory. People do not just join groups. They become the group. The group answers the question “who am I?” which means leaving the group is not a change of opinion. It is a loss of identity.

This is why cult members stay long after the evidence turns against them. The cost of leaving is not intellectual. It is existential. Who am I if I am not part of this? Who are my friends? Who do I talk to? What do I believe? For many people inside a political cult, the movement is the only community they have. The rallies, the group chats, the shared language, the shared enemies. That social infrastructure is real even when the ideology underneath it is fraudulent. And walking away from it means walking into a void with no identity waiting on the other side.

Tajfel also found that groups fracture when the loyalty tests become impossible to pass. When the leader starts attacking members of the inner circle. When the people who built the movement get called traitors for asking a question. When belonging requires you to defend things that violate your own sense of reality. The fracture does not happen all at once. People do not make announcements. They just quietly disappear. They stop posting. They stop showing up. They let the hat collect dust in a closet. The exit is silent because the cost of a public exit is social annihilation.

The Show That Cannot Last

Max Weber identified three forms of authority: traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic. The first two are stable. They are built into institutions and survive the individuals who occupy them. Charismatic authority is different. It depends entirely on one person’s ability to perform as extraordinary. The moment the leader weakens, ages, stumbles, or fails publicly, the authority evaporates.

Weber called the inevitable transformation the routinization of charisma. Every movement built on a single personality faces the same crisis. The leader cannot perform forever. And when the performance degrades, there is no institutional structure underneath to hold the movement together. It collapses under its own weight. Charisma cannot be transferred. It cannot be inherited. It cannot be taught. There is no successor because the entire architecture was built on one person’s ability to command a room.

This is the structural vulnerability that no amount of loyalty can fix. The movement has no second act. No bench. No institutional DNA that survives the founder. When the show ends, there is nothing behind the curtain.

The Pattern

Five researchers. Five different fields. Five different decades. One pattern.

A media ecosystem builds a false reality inside the viewer’s mind. An information wall seals them inside it. Broken promises strengthen commitment among the most invested because the cost of admitting failure is too high. Group identity traps members in a community they cannot leave without losing themselves. And the entire structure depends on one person’s charisma, which is the most unstable form of authority that exists.

Every cult in history has followed this arc. The structure holds until it does not. The leader performs until he cannot. The promises fail until the cost of denial exceeds the cost of admission. And then it ends. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once. But always.

The only variable is damage. How much gets destroyed before the structure collapses is the only question that remains unanswered. And that question is not academic. It is being answered right now, in real time, at the scale of an entire country.

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Sources

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1986). Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Perspectives on Media Effects (pp. 17-40). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. W. W. Norton & Company.

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.

Tajfel, H. (1979). Individuals and Groups in Social Psychology. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 18(2), 183-190.

Weber, M. (1947). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Trans. A. M. Henderson & Talcott Parsons. The Free Press.

If you watched the video, you already know what locus of control is and why it explains how Trump built his entire political movement around people who refuse to take responsibility for their own lives. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the real-world mechanics, and why millions of Americans would rather blame immigrants than look in the mirror.

What Is Locus of Control?

Julian B. Rotter was a clinical psychologist at Ohio State University. In 1954, he published “Social Learning and Clinical Psychology,” in which he introduced a concept that would fundamentally change how psychologists understand motivation, depression, and political behavior.

Rotter proposed that every person develops a generalized expectancy about whether the outcomes in their life are controlled by their own actions or by external forces. He called this locus of control. Locus is Latin for place. The question is: where do you believe the control over your life is located?

People with an internal locus of control believe they are the primary architects of their outcomes. When they succeed they attribute it to their effort, preparation, or ability. When they fail they look inward for explanations and for solutions. They believe their choices matter. They believe their effort produces results. They take ownership of their lives because they believe ownership is possible.

People with an external locus of control believe the opposite. They believe outcomes are determined by forces beyond their influence: luck, fate, powerful institutions, other people, the system, the economy, the government. When they succeed it was lucky. When they fail it was unfair. They do not look inward because they do not believe the answer is in there.

In 1966, Rotter published a landmark article in Psychological Monographs summarizing over a decade of research. He found that external locus of control was consistently associated with higher anxiety, greater depression, lower academic achievement, poorer health outcomes, and greater susceptibility to authoritarian influence.

The finding is intuitive once you see it. If you believe you have no control over your own life, you need someone else to control it for you. And the person who promises to take control becomes the most important person in your world.

The MAGA Application

Trump’s political message has never been about policy. It has always been about blame.

Your life is bad. It is not your fault. It is the immigrants taking your jobs. It is the deep state rigging the system. It is the radical left destroying your values. It is China stealing your future. It is the media lying to you. It is the elites looking down on you.

Every single message externalizes the problem. The source of your suffering is always outside of you. It is never your decisions. It is never your lack of education. It is never your refusal to adapt. It is never anything you could change about yourself. It is always someone else.

For a person with an internal locus of control, this message is transparently manipulative. They hear it and think: that is not how the world works. My choices matter. My effort matters. I am responsible for my outcomes.

For a person with an external locus of control, this message is the most validating thing they have ever heard. Someone is finally saying what they have always believed. It is not their fault. It was never their fault. Someone else did this to them. And now someone is going to fix it.

“I alone can fix it” is not a campaign slogan. It is a promise specifically designed for people who have already decided they cannot fix it themselves.

Where External Locus of Control Comes From

Rotter’s research found that locus of control develops in childhood based on the relationship between a child’s actions and the outcomes they experience.

Children who grow up in environments where their effort produces consistent, predictable results develop an internal locus of control. They study and they get better grades. They practice and they improve. They make choices and they see consequences. The connection between action and outcome is clear and reliable.

Children who grow up in environments where outcomes are chaotic, unpredictable, or disconnected from effort develop an external locus of control. They study and their grades do not improve because the school is underfunded. They work hard and their family’s economic situation does not change. They make choices and the consequences are random. The connection between action and outcome is broken.

This is where the MAGA demographic becomes relevant. The communities that produce the strongest Trump support are communities where the connection between effort and outcome has been severed for decades. Factory towns where hard work used to guarantee a middle-class life until the factory closed. Agricultural communities where farming used to sustain families until corporate agriculture made them obsolete. Working-class neighborhoods where a high school diploma used to mean something until the economy changed and nobody told them.

These people did not choose to have an external locus of control. Their environment taught them that their effort does not matter. And once that lesson is internalized it becomes a worldview that shapes everything: their politics, their relationships, their health decisions, and their willingness to follow a leader who promises to do the work for them.

The Accountability Gap

The deepest difference between internal and external locus of control is not optimism versus pessimism. It is accountability.

A person with an internal locus of control who loses a job asks: what could I have done differently? What skills do I need? What can I change? They may be devastated. They may be angry. But the direction of inquiry is inward.

A person with an external locus of control who loses a job asks: who did this to me? Who is to blame? Who is responsible? The direction of inquiry is outward. Always outward.

This is why MAGA supporters can watch Trump fail at everything and never hold him accountable. Accountability requires an internal locus. It requires the belief that people are responsible for their outcomes. But they do not believe that about themselves, so they cannot apply it to him either.

If you have spent your entire life believing that external forces control everything, then Trump’s failures are also caused by external forces. He did not fail. The deep state sabotaged him. He did not lose. The election was stolen. He did not make a bad decision. The media twisted it.

The external locus of control is a closed system. Nothing is ever anyone’s fault. Nothing can ever be fixed by the person experiencing the problem. And the leader who validates that worldview can never be held responsible because responsibility itself has been removed from the equation.

Why Facts Do Not Work

Rotter’s framework explains one of the most frustrating experiences in modern American life: the impossibility of changing a MAGA supporter’s mind with evidence.

Evidence-based persuasion assumes that the person you are talking to has an internal locus of control. It assumes they believe that their beliefs are things they chose based on evidence and that presenting better evidence will produce a better choice. That is how an internal locus mind works.

An external locus mind does not work that way. Beliefs are not choices they made. Beliefs are things that were given to them by their authorities: Trump, Fox News, their Facebook group, their pastor. Presenting contradicting evidence is not presenting better information. It is attacking the authority they depend on. And attacking their authority feels the same as attacking them.

This is why the conversation always ends the same way. Not with reflection. With anger. Not with curiosity. With hostility. You are not challenging an idea. You are threatening the only structure they have for making sense of their lives.

And they will follow anyone who promises to blame someone else so they never have to blame themselves.

Sources

Rotter, J. B. (1954). “Social Learning and Clinical Psychology.” Prentice-Hall.

Rotter, J. B. (1966). “Generalized Expectancies for Internal Versus External Control of Reinforcement.” Psychological Monographs, 80(1), Whole No. 609.

Lefcourt, H. M. (1976). “Locus of Control: Current Trends in Theory and Research.” Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Phares, E. J. (1976). “Locus of Control in Personality.” General Learning Press.

Strickland, B. R. (1989). “Internal-External Control Expectancies: From Contingency to Creativity.” American Psychologist, 44(1), 1-12.

Twenge, J. M., Zhang, L., and Im, C. (2004). “It’s Beyond My Control: A Cross-Temporal Meta-Analysis of Increasing Externality in Locus of Control, 1960-2002.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(3), 308-319.

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., and Sanford, R. N. (1950). “The Authoritarian Personality.” Harper and Brothers.

Before the internet, every town in America had them.

The guy at the end of the bar who thought the moon landing was faked. The woman in the break room who swore the government was hiding aliens. The neighbor who bought every tabloid at the grocery store checkout and believed every word.

Before the internet, grocery stores used to sell these trashy magazines at the checkout counter filled with fake headlines designed to trick stupid people into buying them. Headlines like “Woman Gives Birth to Alien Baby.” And people bought them. Eagerly. Repeatedly. Without a shred of skepticism.

Everyone knew who these people were. They were the gullible ones. Not very bright. Not all there mentally. And most people just laughed it off because it didn’t matter. These people were harmless. They were scattered across the country in random towns with no way of connecting to each other. There was no infrastructure for stupidity. No network. No platform. No way for the guy in Ohio who believed in alien babies to find the woman in Texas who believed the same thing. They were isolated. And isolated gullible people are just local entertainment. Sad, a little funny, and ultimately irrelevant.

Then the internet happened.

In 2001, legal scholar Cass Sunstein at Harvard University published a book called Republic.com that predicted almost exactly what was about to happen to American democracy. Sunstein had spent years studying how people consume information and how groups form opinions. What he found was unsettling. When people have the ability to choose their own information sources, they don’t seek out the most accurate ones. They seek out the ones that already agree with them. And when they find other people who share their beliefs, something dangerous happens.

They don’t moderate each other. They radicalize each other.

Sunstein called it group polarization. The principle is simple and devastating. When like-minded people talk only to other like-minded people, their views don’t stay the same. They get more extreme. The group doesn’t pull people toward the middle. It pushes them toward the edges. The most extreme voice in the room gains the most social currency. And everyone else moves in that direction to keep up. Not because they’re thinking harder. Because they’re thinking less. The group is doing the thinking for them.

Before the internet, this process was limited by geography. You could only talk to the people around you. And the people around you were diverse enough, by accident of proximity, that you were constantly encountering people who disagreed with you. You had to deal with the neighbor who thought your alien baby theory was idiotic. You had to sit next to someone at work who rolled their eyes when you brought up your conspiracy. That friction kept people tethered to reality. Not because they wanted to be tethered. Because they had no choice.

The internet removed that friction entirely.

For the first time in human history, gullible people could find other gullible people instantly, across state lines, across time zones, by the millions. They could form groups. They could create communities. They could talk to each other all day, every day, in spaces where nobody ever disagreed with them and nobody ever challenged them.

And exactly what Sunstein predicted would happen, happened.

They got more extreme. They got more confident. They got louder. The tabloid readers who used to believe in alien babies started believing the election was stolen. The people who used to think the government was hiding UFOs started thinking the government was trafficking children. The scale of the delusion grew because the network that supported it grew. And the network grew because the technology made it effortless.

Sunstein updated his warnings in 2009 with Going to Extremes and again in 2017 with #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Each edition more urgent than the last. By 2017 he was describing what he called “information cocoons” and “echo chambers” where citizens receive only information that confirms what they already believe, never encountering anything that might challenge or correct them. He warned that this fragmentation wasn’t just bad for individuals. It was destroying the shared reality that democracy requires to function.

But it wasn’t just the people finding each other. The platforms were actively pushing them together.

In 2019, Facebook’s own researchers created a fake user account to study how the platform’s recommendation algorithm treated a new conservative user. The experiment was called “Carol’s Journey to QAnon.” Carol Smith wasn’t a real person. She was a test account. The researchers gave her some basic conservative interests and then watched what happened.

Within two days, Facebook’s algorithm began recommending QAnon groups. Within five days, the account’s feed was flooded with what the researcher described as extreme, conspiratorial, and graphic content. Nobody asked for it. Nobody searched for it. The platform’s own recommendation system, the same system designed to keep users engaged and scrolling, took a brand new account and steered it directly into a rabbit hole of violent conspiracy theories.

Carol Smith didn’t go looking for extremism. The algorithm delivered it.

These findings were among thousands of pages of internal documents later disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. The documents revealed that Facebook had known for years that its recommendation tools were pushing users into extremist groups. They studied it. They documented it. They understood exactly how it worked. And they did almost nothing to stop it because the engagement metrics were too good.

Renee DiResta, then the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, put it plainly when she reviewed the internal documents. Facebook didn’t just allow a cult to form on its platform. Facebook helped facilitate a cult.

And this wasn’t a one-time glitch. The body of Facebook’s internal research consistently found that recommendation tools pushed users into rabbit holes, increasingly narrow echo chambers where violent conspiracy theories thrived. At Facebook’s scale, even a small percentage of radicalized users translated to millions of real people being funneled toward extremist content by a machine that was optimized for engagement, not truth.

This is what Sunstein warned about twenty years earlier. Not just that people would choose to surround themselves with agreeable information. But that the technology itself would do the sorting for them. That the architecture of the internet would make it easier to be radicalized than to remain informed. That the path of least resistance would lead directly to extremism.

And that’s exactly what happened. The tabloid readers found each other. Social media and the internet didn’t just feed them and amplify their nonsense. It gave them platforms to connect with one another. It gave them communities. It gave them leaders. It gave them an identity. The same people who would have believed in an alien baby in 1995 now believe the election was stolen, vaccines have microchips, and a billionaire con man is fighting for them.

The people didn’t change. The technology did. The grocery store tabloid just became a Facebook feed. And the algorithms didn’t just show them the content. The algorithms found them more people who believed the same things, then pushed all of them further toward the edges, just as Sunstein said they would.

A group of gullible people who only talk to other gullible people doesn’t get less gullible. It gets more confident. More extreme. More organized. And eventually, more dangerous.

The idiots who used to be harmless now vote. They run for office. They storm the Capitol. And every single day, the same platforms that connected them keep pushing them further from reality and closer to each other.

That’s not a political movement. That’s a tabloid magazine with a voting booth.

Sources

Sunstein, C. R. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton University Press.

Sunstein, C. R. (2002). The law of group polarization. Journal of Political Philosophy, 10(2), 175-195.

Sunstein, C. R. (2009). Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide. Oxford University Press.

Sunstein, C. R. (2017). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press.

Facebook Internal Research. (2019). Carol’s Journey to QAnon. Disclosed via SEC filings by Frances Haugen, 2021.

DiResta, R. Quoted in NBC News, October 22, 2021. “Carol’s Journey: What Facebook Knew About How It Radicalized Users.”

Gas prices went up. They blamed Biden. Tariffs are killing small businesses. They blame the media. Their retirement accounts are collapsing. They blame the deep state. Grocery prices are through the roof. They blame immigrants. The economy is contracting. They blame Democrats.

Never Trump. Never once Trump.

Not when he was in charge. Not when he signed the orders. Not when the consequences landed directly on their doorstep. Not when every piece of evidence pointed in one direction and one direction only.

Never Trump.

I call this dissonance-induced blame shifting. It’s what happens when someone makes a decision so tied to their identity that their brain physically cannot admit it was wrong. The mistake doesn’t get processed. It gets redirected. The blame goes outward, toward anyone and everyone except the person responsible. And the target of that blame is you.

The psychology behind this pattern has been documented for nearly seventy years.

The Brain That Cannot Admit a Mistake

In 1957, psychologist Leon Festinger at Stanford University published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, one of the most influential works in the history of psychology. Festinger’s theory was built on a deceptively simple observation: when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time, or when their actions contradict their beliefs, the brain experiences a state of psychological discomfort so intense that it will do almost anything to make it stop.

Festinger called this state cognitive dissonance.

The brain doesn’t resolve dissonance by calmly evaluating the evidence and adjusting its position. That would require admitting a mistake. Instead, it reduces the discomfort by changing the belief, discrediting the evidence, rationalizing the behavior, or finding someone else to blame. Whatever it takes to make the contradiction disappear without having to confront the possibility that you were wrong.

Festinger demonstrated this most dramatically before he even published his theory. In 1954, he and his colleagues infiltrated a small doomsday cult led by a woman who claimed to have received messages from extraterrestrials warning that the world would be destroyed by a great flood on December 21st. The cult members had quit their jobs, sold their possessions, and organized their entire lives around this prophecy. Festinger wanted to observe what would happen when the prophecy inevitably failed.

December 21st came. There was no flood. The world didn’t end. The evidence was absolute and undeniable.

And the cult members didn’t leave. They doubled down. They concluded that their faith had been so strong that God had spared the Earth because of them. The failure of the prophecy didn’t weaken their belief. It strengthened it. Because admitting the prophecy was wrong would have meant admitting that they had destroyed their lives for nothing. And the brain could not allow that.

Festinger published these findings in 1956 in a book called When Prophecy Fails. It remains one of the most chilling studies in the history of psychology.

When the Mistake Becomes the Identity

Most people can admit when they were wrong about a politician. Because the politician was just a choice they made. You voted for someone. They turned out to be a disappointment. You adjust. You move on.

For Trump supporters, it went further than that.

Voting for Trump wasn’t just a decision. It became who they are. Their identity. Inside. Everything they told their family and friends they stood for. They wore the hat. They put the flag on their truck. They posted the memes. They got in fights at Thanksgiving. They cut off family members. They made Trump the centerpiece of their personality, their social life, and their understanding of the world.

Admitting Trump was a catastrophic mistake doesn’t just mean they were wrong about one man. It means they were wrong about themselves. It means every argument they had was wrong. Every relationship they damaged was damaged for nothing. Every position they defended was indefensible.

The brain will never allow that. Because they are weak people. So instead of looking inward, it looks outward. For a target. And that target is you.

Dan Kahan, a researcher at Yale Law School, has spent years studying exactly this phenomenon. He calls it identity-protective cognition. Kahan’s research has shown that people don’t process evidence as neutral observers. They process it through the lens of their group identity. When a piece of evidence is identity-affirming, they accept it readily. When it’s identity-threatening, they dismiss it, discredit it, or attack the person presenting it.

And here is the finding that should terrify you: the smarter someone is, the better they are at doing this. Intelligence doesn’t protect against identity-protective cognition. Intelligence makes it worse, because smarter people are better at constructing sophisticated rationalizations for why they’re not wrong.

MAGA supporters aren’t rejecting evidence because they can’t understand it. They’re rejecting it because understanding it would destroy the identity they’ve built around Trump.

Dissonance-Induced Blame Shifting

This is where cognitive dissonance becomes something more dangerous than a personal coping mechanism. This is where it becomes a political weapon.

When the brain cannot admit a mistake, it doesn’t just go quiet. It gets aggressive. The dissonance doesn’t disappear. It has to go somewhere. And if it can’t go inward, if the brain refuses to direct it at the self, it goes outward. It finds a target.

That’s what I mean by dissonance-induced blame shifting. It’s the predictable pattern where the consequences of one group’s decision get systematically blamed on everyone except the people who made the decision. The worse the consequences get, the louder the blame gets, because the cost of admitting the mistake grows with every new piece of damage.

Gas prices went up under policies Trump supported. The brain can’t blame Trump. So it blames Biden. Tariffs are destroying small businesses. The brain can’t blame the man who imposed the tariffs. So it blames the media for reporting on it. Their retirement accounts are shrinking. The brain can’t connect that to the economic policies they voted for. So it blames the deep state, the Democrats, the immigrants, the woke, the elites, anyone and everyone except the one person responsible.

This is not a conscious strategy. This is the brain protecting itself from a truth it cannot survive. And the more damage Trump does, the harder the brain works to redirect the blame, because the cost of admitting the mistake grows with every consequence.

The worse things get, the more aggressively they blame you. Not despite the damage. Because of it. Every piece of evidence that Trump is failing is another piece of evidence that they were wrong. And every time they were wrong, the dissonance increases. And every time the dissonance increases, the blame has to go somewhere louder, somewhere angrier, somewhere further from the truth.

They’re Not Angry Because You’re Wrong

This is the part most people get backwards.

When a Trump supporter attacks you for pointing out that the economy is struggling, or that the tariffs aren’t working, or that the investigations uncovered real crimes, you assume they’re angry because they disagree with you.

They’re not.

They’re angry at you because you keep pointing at the damage. And the damage proves they did this.

Every fact you present is a mirror. And they cannot look in it.

You are not the source of their pain. You are the reminder of it. Every time you say “this is happening because of Trump,” their brain hears “this is happening because of you.” Because they voted for him. They defended him. They staked their identity on him. And now the consequences are landing on everyone, including them, and you won’t stop pointing at it.

Their anger at you is not about politics. It is the sound of cognitive dissonance hitting a wall. It’s the brain thrashing against a truth it cannot metabolize.

Accountability Is Coming

And right now, everyone else is paying for their decision. The people who warned them. The people who voted against Trump. The people who saw this coming from the beginning. All of us are living inside the consequences of a choice that millions of people made and refuse to own.

They know this. Somewhere underneath the rage and the blame and the conspiracy theories and the flags and the rallies, they know. They know the damage is real. They know who caused it. They know they were part of it.

And they know accountability is right around the corner.

Not political accountability. Personal accountability. The kind that comes when the last excuse runs out. When the last scapegoat stops working. When the last conspiracy theory collapses under its own weight. When the people around them, the family members they alienated, the friends they lost, the coworkers who stopped engaging, finally say what everyone has been thinking.

You did this. And you knew.

Cognitive dissonance can delay that moment. It can redirect it. It can bury it under layers of blame and denial and rage. But it cannot prevent it forever. Because the evidence doesn’t stop accumulating just because you refuse to look at it.

MAGA doesn’t blame Trump. They blame you. And they will keep blaming you until the weight of what they’ve done becomes impossible to put on anyone else’s shoulders.

And that day is closer than they think.

Sources

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

Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., and 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.

Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition. Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper Series No. 164, Yale Law School.

Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 407-424.

A Republican senator says something mildly critical of Donald Trump. Within hours, MAGA is flooding their social media with death threats. A journalist reports a fact that contradicts the official narrative. They’re called an enemy of the people. A former ally, a former attorney, a former cabinet member says publicly that Trump is lying. They become a traitor overnight. Their family gets harassed. Their career gets targeted. Their safety gets threatened.

This is not how normal political supporters behave. Normal political supporters disagree with criticism. They push back. They argue. They vote for someone else next time.

MAGA doesn’t do any of that. MAGA punishes. MAGA retaliates. MAGA makes an example out of anyone who breaks rank. And they don’t just do it reluctantly, as some grim political necessity. They enjoy it. They celebrate it. They compete with each other to see who can be the most vicious toward whoever Trump has designated as today’s enemy.

That behavior has a name. And it was identified nearly fifty years ago by a psychologist who spent her career studying what happens inside families organized around one abusive, narcissistic parent.

The Narcissistic Family System

In 1979, psychologist Alice Miller in Zurich, Switzerland published a book called The Drama of the Gifted Child that would go on to become one of the most important works of psychology in the twentieth century. Miller, a Polish-born Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust by concealing her identity, spent her career studying what happens to children raised in families organized around protecting one toxic narcissistic parent’s ego.

What she found was that these families don’t function like normal families. They function like systems. And the system has one purpose: to protect the dominant parent’s ego and their version of reality at all costs.

A narcissistic family system is a family organized around protecting one super toxic dominant person’s ego and their version of reality. The narcissistic parent can lie, abuse someone, humiliate someone, or do something obviously wrong, and then shortly after doing that awful thing, deny it ever happened. They rewrite what happened. They blame somebody else. They gaslight the family. And eventually everyone learns that keeping the peace means accepting the narcissistic parent’s version of reality. Not because it’s true. But because the consequences of disagreeing are unbearable.

The Roles

So the family develops roles.

The obedient children protect the parent. They repeat the new family narrative. They enforce the family’s version of events. They attack anyone who threatens the story. And their reward for doing so is acceptance by the family. Approval. Belonging. The feeling that they are on the right side, that they are safe, that the parent’s love, however conditional and distorted, is directed at them and not against them.

But there is always one child who can’t do it. One child who sees what is actually happening and says so. One child who says, “No. That didn’t happen that way. You’re lying.”

That child becomes the scapegoat.

The Scapegoat

And it’s not just the narcissistic parent who attacks the scapegoat. The obedient family members attack them too. They shame them, blame them, gaslight them, and ostracize them for refusing to go along with the family’s version of reality that’s not true.

The scapegoat becomes an outsider in their own home. Living with their family, but also completely alone. It’s an incredibly lonely place to be.

And here’s the part that matters most for understanding what’s happening in this country right now. The scapegoat isn’t punished because they’re a liar. They’re punished because they’re telling the truth about something the family has agreed not to acknowledge. Their honesty threatens the system. And the system cannot tolerate honesty, because honesty would require every obedient member of the family to confront something they have invested their entire identity in avoiding.

Miller didn’t stop with the family. In 1983, she published For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, where she traced a direct line from the narcissistic family to political authoritarianism. She examined nineteenth century German parenting manuals that instructed parents to break the child’s will in the first year of life, to enforce blind obedience, to withhold affection, and to punish any sign of independent thinking. She called these practices poisonous pedagogy.

Miller wrote that the teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown. She argued that the child trained to suppress their own perception of reality, to obey without questioning, becomes the adult who follows without questioning. Not because they’re stupid. Because the obedience was installed before they were old enough to resist it.

Now Look at MAGA

Donald Trump has recreated the exact architecture of a narcissistic family system on a massive scale. And he didn’t have to build it from scratch. He just had to step into the role that millions of Americans were already primed to fill a vacancy for.

Trump is the narcissistic parent. He establishes the family narrative. The election was stolen. The investigations are witch hunts. The media is lying. Everyone is against us. And his followers protect that narrative regardless of how many times it falls apart. Regardless of how much evidence contradicts it. Regardless of how many former allies, former attorneys, former cabinet members, and former advisors say publicly that it isn’t true.

Republicans who challenge Trump become RINOs. Former allies become traitors. Journalists become the enemies. Judges, prosecutors, investigators, scientists, educators, anyone who contradicts the family story becomes the problem. Not because they’re wrong. Because they’re threatening the narrative. And in a narcissistic family system, threatening the narrative is the only unforgivable act.

Because this isn’t about whether Trump is telling the truth. It’s about loyalty. For people who learned in childhood that belonging means submitting to authority, and protecting the family narrative is the only way to survive, or else that parent hurts you, this system doesn’t feel foreign. It feels like home.

This Is How They Grew Up

This system feels incredibly familiar and comforting to many Trump supporters. Because this is how they grew up.

They know how to be the obedient child. They know how to take the side of the authoritarian abusive parent. They know the consequences of not playing along. They learned the rules before they could read.

And most importantly, they can’t wait to help punish the scapegoat. Because it makes them feel good to hurt someone else. For the focus to be on someone else. For the parent’s rage to land on someone else’s back instead of theirs.

Ganging up on the scapegoat was rewarded as kids and gets rewarded today.

The obedient children in a narcissistic family don’t just attack the scapegoat because they’re told to. They attack the scapegoat because that’s how they bond with the parent. The shared cruelty is the connection. It’s how they earn acceptance, approval, and belonging. Hurting someone together is the closest thing to love that family has ever known.

That’s the MAGA rally. That’s the comment section. That’s the pile-on. They’re not just attacking a target. They’re bonding with each other through the attack. The cruelty is the connection.

Every time Trump points at a target and his supporters pile on, they are doing the exact same thing they did in their childhood home. Protecting the parent. Attacking the truth teller. Earning their place in the family by proving they can be trusted to enforce the lie.

Clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula at California State University, Los Angeles, has spent years studying how narcissistic family patterns scale into broader societal structures. Durvasula’s work describes how narcissistic behavioral patterns thrive in societies characterized by authoritarianism, rigid power hierarchies, and cultures that reward loyalty over truth. She has written that these dynamics do not support the development of empathy or emotional depth in relationships, and that they dehumanize others and treat them as dispensable. The narcissistic system, whether it operates in a kitchen or a country, runs on the same fuel: unquestioning obedience from the family and merciless punishment of anyone who breaks rank.

Trump recreated the old familiar narcissistic family system MAGA grew up in. He didn’t invent a new form of politics. He resurrected a form of family that millions of Americans already knew how to survive inside. And for people who spent their childhood navigating that system, the rules of MAGA aren’t confusing. They’re automatic.

We Are the Scapegoats

No matter how insane the story is that Trump makes up, his obedient children will defend it. Trump doesn’t even need to convince his supporters he’s telling the truth about anything. He only needs to tell them what the family is supposed to believe. That new story becomes their reality, a reality they will defend like it’s the truth. They will rewrite reality when Trump tells them to. Because that’s what the obedient child does. That’s what the obedient child has always done.

To Trump and MAGA, the 70 percent of Americans who reject Trump are the scapegoats. Liberals, immigrants, historians, intellectuals, educated women. We’re all now the targets of this toxic family system.

We’re the outsiders who refuse to accept the family narrative. We keep saying, “No. That didn’t happen that way. And you’re lying.”

And every time we say it, we trigger the same response that the scapegoat child triggered in the narcissistic home. Rage. Blame. Harassment. Threats. The full weight of the family’s dysfunction directed at the one person who refused to go along.

That’s why facts don’t work. That’s why evidence doesn’t work. That’s why logic doesn’t work. You are not arguing with a political position. You are arguing with a family system that was built to destroy anyone who tells the truth. And the people inside it were trained from childhood to do exactly what they’re doing right now.

But This Time Is Different

If you grew up as the scapegoat in a narcissistic family, watching MAGA can feel like watching your childhood play out on a national stage. The same gaslighting. The same rewriting of history. The same punishment for honesty. The same loneliness of being surrounded by people who have chosen the comfortable lie over the painful truth.

But here’s the difference. In the family, you were a child. You had no power. You couldn’t leave. You couldn’t vote. You couldn’t organize. You were trapped in a system that punished you for seeing clearly.

You’re not a child anymore.

And this time, the scapegoats outnumber the family.

They don’t punish the liars in a narcissistic family system. They punish the people who tell the truth.

But when the truth tellers are 70 percent of the country, the toxic family system doesn’t get to write the story anymore.

Sources

Miller, A. (1979). The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Suhrkamp Verlag (German); Basic Books (English, 1981).

Miller, A. (1983). For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Durvasula, R. (2019). Don’t You Know Who I Am? How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility. Post Hill Press.

Durvasula, R. (2024). It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. Penguin Random House.

James Gilligan spent 25 years running psychiatric care inside the Massachusetts prison system. He directed mental health services at Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane. He sat across from men who had committed acts so violent most clinicians refused to treat them. Men who killed over a wrong look. Men who blinded cellmates over a slight at dinner. Men who would rather die than feel small.

Gilligan was not building criminal profiles. He was asking a question nobody else in his field was asking. Not what these men did. What they were feeling in the seconds before they did it.

The one answer, across every population he studied, across decades of clinical work?

shame.

Not anger. Anger was the output. Shame was the fuel. Gilligan found that men who lacked the emotional tools to process shame converted it into destruction. The direction did not matter. Outward toward another person. Inward toward themselves. The mechanism was identical. A man who could not tolerate the feeling of being inadequate would destroy something rather than sit with it.

Gilligan published his findings in 1996 in Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. The book was not about politics. It was about clinical psychiatry inside maximum security facilities. But the pattern he identified does not stay behind prison walls.

The Distance Between the Man and the Mirror

Gilligan’s central insight was not just that shame causes violence. It was the specific type of shame that matters. The men he studied were not ashamed of a single act. They were ashamed of who they were. They carried a gap between the person they believed they were supposed to become and the person they actually became. When that gap gets wide enough, and a man has no vocabulary for what he is feeling, the shame becomes intolerable. And intolerable shame demands a target.

This is the part that maps onto politics with uncomfortable precision.

Consider the demographic profile of the average Trump rally. These are not men at the peak of their lives. They are men who expected more from their lives and did not get it. Men who thought respect was something the world owed them and then discovered it was not. Men who told themselves ambition was for suckers and education was for elites and hard work was beneath them, and then spent two decades watching the people who did those things build lives that left them behind.

That produces exactly the type of shame Gilligan spent his career studying. Not guilt over a specific failure. A pervasive sense that they are less than what they were supposed to be. And no tools to deal with it.

Why the Targets Keep Changing

If the rage were actually about immigration, it would have started when immigration became a policy issue and ended when policy changed. If it were about the economy, it would track economic data. It does neither. The targets rotate. Immigrants. College graduates. Trans people. Drag queens. Teachers. Scientists. Journalists. The specific enemy changes every few months but the emotional intensity never drops.

Gilligan’s research explains why. The target is not the point. The externalization is the point. A man carrying shame he cannot process needs someone to be less than him. Anyone. The target is interchangeable because the target is not what is driving the behavior. The shame is driving the behavior. And shame is permanent until you develop the capacity to face it.

These men did not develop that capacity. Nobody taught them how. The culture they grew up in told them that real men do not feel things. That vulnerability is weakness. That sitting with difficult emotions is something women do. And so they carry a weight they were never given permission to name, and they aim it at whoever Fox News or Truth Social puts in front of them that week.

The Rally as Anesthetic

Gilligan found that the men he treated experienced violence as relief. Not pleasure. Relief. For a brief window, the act of destroying something external replaced the unbearable internal pressure of being disappointed in themselves. Then it was over. And the shame came back. And they needed to do it again.

The political rally operates on the same cycle. A room full of men who feel small, being told for two hours that they are actually big. Being told their failures belong to someone else. Being given permission to scream. For those two hours the shame is gone. They feel powerful. They feel like they matter. Then they drive home. Nothing in their life has changed. The gap between who they are and who they thought they would be is exactly the same width it was before they arrived. And they need another rally. Another enemy. Another hit.

That is not political engagement. That is the behavioral pattern of someone managing an emotional wound they refuse to look at.

What Gilligan Actually Proved

Gilligan never studied Trump voters. He studied men in maximum security prisons who committed acts of extreme violence.

The application to politics is an extension, not a clinical finding.

What does not require any extension at all is the mechanism.

Shame that cannot be processed becomes destruction.

Men who cannot face their own inadequacy will find someone to blame for it.

And any leader willing to hand them a target will own their loyalty for as long as the shame persists.

The shame will persist because nothing about a red hat or a rally or a bumper sticker, closes the gap between who these men are and who they thought they would be.

The gap is still there every morning.

The rage is just how they get through the day without looking at it.

This was never about politics. It was always about a man who never became what he expected. And instead of reckoning with that, he needs someone else to pay for it.

Sources

Gilligan, J. (1996). Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic. Vintage Books.

Gilligan, J. (2001). Preventing Violence. Thames and Hudson.

Gilligan, J. (2022). Holding a Mirror Up to Nature: Shame, Guilt, and Violence in Shakespeare. Routledge.

Conservatives are afraid of everything. They think crime is surging. They think immigrants are invading. They think cities are burning and civilization is collapsing. The data says the opposite. Violent crime has been declining for decades. The economy recovered after 2008 and again after the 2020 pandemic. The world is not ending.

But if you watch Fox News eight hours a day, you would think it is.

There is a psychological reason for that.

Three different researchers across three different decades studied what happens when people consume large amounts of partisan media. Their findings, taken together, describe a machine. Not a news network. A machine designed to build fear, seal people inside a false reality, and keep them there.

The Fear Factory

In 1968, communications professor George Gerbner at the University of Pennsylvania launched the Cultural Indicators Project. It would run for decades. He tracked more than 3,000 television programs and studied how violence was portrayed across American media. Then he tracked what happened to the people who watched it.

What he found changed everything we know about media and perception.

Heavy television viewers, people watching more than three hours a day, were significantly more likely to believe the world was dangerous. They overestimated the amount of violence in their neighborhoods. They overestimated their chances of being a victim of a crime. They believed most people could not be trusted.

Gerbner called it Mean World Syndrome.

The television was not showing them a more dangerous world. It was building one inside their heads. The more they watched, the more afraid they became. Not because reality had changed. Because their perception of reality had changed.

Gerbner warned us. He said that whoever tells the stories of a culture governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it is a handful of corporations with nothing to tell people but a lot of things to sell them.

Fox News did not invent Mean World Syndrome. But it weaponized it. People are watching Fox eight hours a day and getting fear delivered to them in a continuous stream. Caravans. Crime waves. Chaos. Eight hours a day of a world that is falling apart. After years of that, the viewer does not just believe the world is dangerous. They feel it in their bones. And you cannot argue someone out of something they feel in their bones.

The Information Wall

Mean World Syndrome explains why Fox viewers are afraid. But it does not explain why they cannot hear anything else.

In 1961, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton published Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. He had spent years interviewing American prisoners of war and Chinese citizens who had been subjected to what the press called brainwashing. What he found was not a single technique. It was a system. A set of specific steps designed to reshape what a person believes.

Lifton identified eight criteria of thought reform. The first was milieu control: the control of information and communication within a person’s environment. You do not just tell someone what to think. You control what information they have access to. You build a wall between them and anything that contradicts the narrative. You isolate them from outside sources until the only reality they know is the one you have constructed for them.

That is what Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, and Truth Social do at scale.

Fox does not give its viewers a conservative perspective on the news. It gives them different news entirely. Different facts. Different stories. Different threats. It builds an information environment so sealed off from reality that anything from the outside sounds foreign. Not just wrong. Unrecognizable.

Lifton found that once milieu control is in place, the person stops questioning. Not because they have been convinced by a better argument. Because they have been cut off from anything that would make them question in the first place. The wall was built so slowly they never saw it go up.

This is not media bias. This is the first step of thought reform, the same technique used in Chinese communist reeducation programs, operating at a scale of millions of people. Most of them have no idea it is happening.

What Happens When the Wall Comes Down

Mean World Syndrome builds the fear. Milieu control seals people inside it. But the question nobody had answered until recently was whether any of it could be reversed.

In 2020, political scientists David Broockman at UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla at Yale decided to find out. They recruited 763 regular Fox News viewers. The participants were overwhelmingly white, 92% Republican, with an average age of 54. They were watching Fox News an average of 14 hours every week.

The researchers randomized 304 of those participants into a treatment group and paid them $15 an hour to watch CNN instead of Fox during primetime for an entire month. They gave them weekly quizzes to make sure they were actually paying attention.

The results were striking. The participants did not become liberals. But after one month of watching a different news source, their views started to shift. 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 became more critical of Donald Trump. They stopped believing the world was as dangerous as Fox had told them it was.

One month. That is all it took to start breaking through years of constructed reality.

And then the study ended.

Two months later, the researchers followed up. Most participants had gone back to Fox News. Every single change they had experienced reversed. The fear came back. The misinformation came back. The loyalty came back as though the month of real news had never happened.

What the Machine Looks Like

Three researchers. Three decades of work. One consistent finding.

Heavy media consumption builds a false reality inside the viewer’s mind, a world that feels more dangerous than it actually is. Controlling information is the first step in controlling what a person believes. Cut people off from outside sources and they will accept whatever reality you construct for them. And even when the wall comes down briefly, even when reality gets through, the machine pulls them back.

This is not a news network with a conservative lean. This is a propaganda machine that builds fear, seals its viewers into an information environment with no exits, and feeds them a version of reality designed to keep them afraid, angry, and loyal.

Right now, millions of Americans are sitting inside that machine. They are consuming 40 hours a week of manufactured rage and engineered fear. They are wondering why the world feels so dangerous. And they have no idea that the danger they feel was built for them, on purpose, by people who profit from their fear.

The machine does not inform them. It owns them. And the data says they will not leave on their own.

Sources

Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1986). Living with Television: The Dynamics of the Cultivation Process. In J. Bryant & D. Zillmann (Eds.), Perspectives on Media Effects (pp. 17-40). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lifton, R. J. (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. W. W. Norton & Company.

Broockman, D. E., & Kalla, J. L. (2022). The Manifold Effects of Partisan Media on Viewers’ Beliefs and Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers. Working Paper, UC Berkeley and Yale University.