The Lucas Bean Show

There is a quote from one of the most successful con men in American history that explains everything about MAGA.

His name was Joseph Weil. He operated in Chicago in the early 1900s. He conned thousands of people out of millions of dollars over a career that lasted decades. When someone finally asked him why his victims were so eager to hand over their money, his answer was simple.

They wanted something for nothing.

That is the secret. That is the entire game. A con doesn’t work on someone who doesn’t want anything. A con works on someone who wants something they shouldn’t want, knows they shouldn’t want it, and jumps at the chance to get it anyway.

This is why con artists are almost never prosecuted. Not because they are hard to catch. Because their victims will not report the crime. Reporting the crime means standing in front of a room full of people and admitting what you were trying to buy.

And what you were trying to buy is the one thing you will never say out loud.

The Confidence Game

In 2016, psychologist Maria Konnikova at Columbia University published a book-length investigation into how con artists manipulate their victims. Konnikova holds a PhD in psychology from Columbia, studied under Walter Mischel, and spent years interviewing both con artists and the people they destroyed.

What she found overturned the basic assumption most people have about fraud. Most people believe the con artist tricks an innocent person into doing something they wouldn’t normally do. Konnikova showed the opposite is true. The con artist doesn’t force anyone to do anything. The con artist makes you complicit in your own undoing.

The con artist doesn’t steal from you. You give it to them willingly.

Konnikova called it the confidence game. The word confidence is not about the con artist’s bravado. It is about your confidence. The con works because the con artist earns your trust and then weaponizes it. But trust alone isn’t enough. The victim has to want something. And the thing they want has to be something that makes them willing to suspend their own judgment.

According to an AARP study Konnikova cited, only 37 percent of fraud victims over the age of 55 will admit to having been conned. Just over half of victims under 55 will admit it. Most con artists never see a courtroom. Not because they disappeared. Because nobody filed a report.

The shame of being conned is bad enough. But what keeps people silent isn’t just the shame of being fooled. It is the shame of what they were reaching for when they got fooled.

The Anatomy of a Con

Konnikova broke the confidence game into stages. Each stage maps perfectly onto what Trump did to the Republican base.

The first stage is the put-up. This is where the con artist identifies the victim. Not just anyone. The right person. Someone with a specific vulnerability. Someone who wants something badly enough to overlook the red flags.

Trump didn’t target everyone. He targeted people who already felt invisible, resentful, and left behind. People who already believed the system was rigged against them. People who already wanted someone to tell them that their anger was justified and their failures were someone else’s fault.

The second stage is the play. This is where the con artist builds trust. Not through credentials or evidence. Through emotional connection. The con artist mirrors the victim’s feelings. He validates their frustrations. He makes them feel seen.

Trump didn’t campaign on policy. He campaigned on rage. He said the things his audience was already thinking but couldn’t say out loud. He validated every grievance. He mirrored every resentment. He made millions of people feel like someone finally understood them.

The third stage is the rope. This is where the con artist introduces the scheme. Not all at once. Gradually. Each step feels reasonable. Each step feels like the victim’s own idea.

First you just support the candidate. Then you defend him online. Then you cut off the family member who disagrees. Then you donate money. Then you share the conspiracy theory. Then you show up at the rally. Then you buy the merchandise. Then you storm the Capitol. Each step felt small at the time. But each step pulled you deeper into complicity.

The fourth stage is the convincer. This is where the victim sees what appears to be real profit. Evidence that the scheme is working. The con artist gives back a small return to build confidence for the bigger ask.

Trump gave his supporters emotional returns. He punished the people they hated. He said the racist thing on television. He humiliated the journalist. He attacked the immigrant. Every cruelty was a dividend. Every outrage was proof that the investment was paying off.

The final stage is the blow-off. This is where the con is complete and the con artist disappears. But the blow-off only works if the victim stays silent. And the victim stays silent because talking means admitting what they were doing. Konnikova showed that the con artist relies entirely on the victim’s shame to ensure silence. The victim’s reputation, their self-image, their relationships all depend on never admitting what happened.

Why They Will Never Admit It

In 1957, psychologist Leon Festinger published the theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger showed that when a person holds two contradictory beliefs at the same time, the psychological discomfort is so intense that the brain will do almost anything to resolve it. And the brain almost never resolves it by admitting the uncomfortable truth. It resolves it by building a story that makes the contradiction disappear.

Festinger studied this by infiltrating a doomsday cult. The cult’s leader had predicted the world would end on a specific date. When the date passed and the world did not end, Festinger expected the members to leave. They didn’t. They doubled down. They became more committed. They started recruiting new members more aggressively than before.

The reason is elegant and terrifying. The cult members had sacrificed too much. They had quit jobs. They had sold homes. They had cut off families. Admitting the prophecy was false didn’t just mean being wrong about a date. It meant every sacrifice they made was for nothing. Every relationship they destroyed was destroyed for a lie.

So the brain did what brains do. It rewrote the story. The prophecy wasn’t wrong. Their faith had saved the world. The sacrifice wasn’t pointless. It was heroic.

This is exactly what is happening with Trump supporters. They didn’t just vote for him. They defended him at Thanksgiving dinner. They cut off siblings. They screamed at their children. They posted things online that are permanently attached to their names. They donated money. They wore the hat. Some of them committed federal crimes on camera.

Admitting Trump is a con artist doesn’t just mean changing a vote. It means every argument they started was wrong. Every relationship they destroyed was destroyed for a fraud. Every dollar they donated went to a man who wouldn’t let them into his living room.

The psychological cost of that admission is so catastrophic that the brain simply refuses to make it. It is cheaper, psychologically, to keep believing the lie than to face what the truth would mean about who you are and what you did.

What They Were Really Buying

This is where Konnikova’s research cuts the deepest.

A con only works when the victim wants something they shouldn’t want. The con artist doesn’t create the desire. The con artist finds the desire that is already there and builds a story around it.

Trump didn’t trick innocent people. He found people who already wanted permission to be racist and called it patriotism. People who already wanted permission to be cruel and called it strength. People who already wanted someone to blame for their failures and called it politics.

He didn’t sell them a lie they didn’t want. He sold them the lie they were already telling themselves. He just said it out loud.

That is the confidence game. The victim can’t expose the con artist without exposing themselves. A Trump supporter can’t say “he conned me” without someone asking the obvious follow-up question: what were you buying?

They were buying permission to be the worst version of themselves. And they got it.

They got to be openly racist and feel patriotic about it. They got to be cruel and call it toughness. They got to be selfish and call it freedom. They got to hate and call it love of country.

That is the product Trump sold. Not economic policy. Not national security. Permission.

And you can’t return permission. You can’t ask for a refund on something you already used. You can’t report the crime when the crime is that someone sold you exactly what you wanted.

The Blow-Off

When MAGA eventually collapses, and it will, the blow-off will be the most predictable stage of the entire con.

They will not admit they were conned. They will not apologize. They will not take responsibility for the damage they caused. They will do what every con victim does when the shame is too big to carry.

They will go quiet. They will take the hat off. They will delete the posts. They will stop bringing up politics at dinner. They will act like none of it ever happened. And they will expect the rest of us to play along.

That is the blow-off. The con artist disappears. The victim pretends the con never happened. And nobody is held accountable.

The difference this time is that the rest of us watched the whole thing happen in real time. We saw what they were buying. We know what they wanted. We have the receipts.

They weren’t shopping for a president. They were shopping for permission.

And they will never confess that. Because confessing means admitting what they wanted in the first place.

And what they wanted is the one thing they can never say out loud.

Sources

Konnikova, M. (2016). The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It... Every Time. Viking Press.

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

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.

AARP. (2015). Caught in the Scammer’s Net: Risk Factors That May Lead to Becoming an Internet Fraud Victim. AARP Research.

Konnikova, M. (2020). The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. Penguin Press.

You Did Your Own Research? Cool Story Bro.

Imagine you take a test. Twenty questions on logical reasoning. You finish, put your pencil down, and the researcher asks you one more question.

How well do you think you did compared to everyone else in the room?

You think about it. You feel pretty good. You say you’re probably around the 62nd percentile. Better than most people here.

Your actual score? 12th percentile. You got almost everything wrong.

That’s not a hypothetical. That is exactly what happened in a psychology lab at Cornell University in 1999.

Psychologist David Dunning and his graduate student Justin Kruger ran four experiments. They tested Cornell undergraduates on three things: logical reasoning, English grammar, and humor. After each test, they asked every participant to estimate how well they had performed compared to their peers.

The results were devastating. Participants who scored in the bottom quartile, the lowest performers in the room, estimated that they had outperformed roughly two thirds of their classmates. They scored in the 12th percentile and believed they were in the 62nd. They weren’t slightly off. They were off by 50 points.

The top performers showed the opposite pattern. They scored above the 86th percentile but estimated themselves around the 70th to 75th. They slightly underestimated themselves. Not because they lacked confidence, but because they assumed that what was easy for them was easy for everyone.

Dunning and Kruger called this a dual burden. The skills you need to get the right answer are the same skills you need to recognize when you’ve gotten the wrong one. If you don’t understand grammar, you also can’t tell when your grammar is bad. If you can’t reason logically, you also can’t tell when your reasoning has fallen apart. You are blind to your own blindness.

That paper was titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It.” It was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. And it named something that most of us already knew but had never had the language for. The Dunning-Kruger Effect. The less you know about something, the more confident you are that you know it. The more you actually know, the more you recognize how much you don’t.

This is the engine behind every Facebook expert, every YouTube epidemiologist, every uncle at Thanksgiving who read one article and now thinks he knows more than the entire medical establishment.

“I did my own research.” No you didn’t. You watched a ten minute video made by someone with no credentials and an algorithm that rewards outrage. You scrolled through a thread posted by someone equally as uninformed as you. You found a meme that confirmed what you already believed and called it evidence. That is not research. Research is peer-reviewed studies. Controlled experiments. Years of education. Specific expertise built over decades. Not twenty minutes on the toilet watching conspiracy content.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect explains why this gap is so hard to close. It is not just that these people are wrong. It is that they lack the cognitive tools to recognize they are wrong. You cannot correct an error you cannot see. You cannot question a conclusion when you don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it.

This is why real experts sound uncertain. Doctors say “the data suggests.” Climate scientists say “based on current evidence.” Virologists say “our best models indicate.” They speak carefully because they understand complexity. They have studied the nuance. They know what they don’t know. Conservatives hear that careful language and interpret it as weakness. If the expert isn’t 100 percent certain, then it must not be true. If there is any doubt, then my gut feeling is just as valid as your thirty years of research. That is not critical thinking. That is the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action. It is incompetence so deep it disguises itself as confidence.

Dunning and Kruger ran a fourth study that makes this even clearer. They took the bottom-quartile performers from their grammar test and split them into two groups. One group received a short training session on the grammatical concepts they had been tested on. The other group did a filler task. After the training, the group that had been taught the material did something the untrained group did not. They revised their self-assessment downward. Their confidence dropped. Not because they got worse. Because they finally had enough knowledge to recognize how little they had known before. The untrained group? Their confidence stayed exactly where it was. High and wrong.

That is the trap. Learning makes you less confident, not more, because learning shows you the size of what you don’t know. The people who never learn never face that reckoning. They stay on top of the mountain of their own ignorance, looking down at everyone else, fully convinced they have the best view in the room.

This is the MAGA base in one finding. Millions of people who have never studied medicine telling doctors they are wrong. Who have never read a climate study telling scientists they are lying. Who have never taken a single course in epidemiology telling virologists it was all a hoax. And when the facts prove them wrong, they don’t update. They don’t reconsider. They double down. They shout “Fake news!” or “You have TDS!” and storm away from the conversation the way a child storms out of a room when they have lost an argument they were never equipped to have.

Because admitting you are wrong requires the same skill that the Dunning-Kruger Effect says you are missing. It requires the metacognitive ability to evaluate your own thinking. And if you don’t have that, you will never see the gap. You will spend the rest of your life confusing volume for intelligence, certainty for knowledge, and outrage for being right. The confident idiots now have bigger platforms than qualified experts. Right-wing media hands them a microphone every single day. The algorithm rewards their certainty. And everyone else suffers for it, because the loudest voices in the room have always been the ones with the least to say.

Sources

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134.

Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning-Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one’s own ignorance. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 247-296.

Schlösser, T., Dunning, D., Johnson, K. L., & Kruger, J. (2013). How unaware are the unskilled? Empirical tests of the “signal extraction” counterexplanation for the Dunning-Kruger effect in self-evaluation of performance. Journal of Economic Psychology, 39, 85-100.

Try this experiment.

Ask a liberal to describe who they are. Not what they believe. Who they are.

You’ll hear things like: I’m a dad. I coach my daughter’s soccer team. I like to cook. I’m learning guitar. I run a small business. I’m a husband. I’m a nerd about old movies.

Now ask a MAGA supporter the same question. Same words. “Tell me about yourself.”

And listen to what comes out.

I’m Pro-Life. I’m Second Amendment. I’m a Trump-supporting Christian. I’m a patriot. I’m anti-woke.

Every single word is a group. Not one word is about them as a person. Not a hobby. Not a skill. Not a passion. Not a relationship. Just a list of memberships.

The liberal gave you a person. The MAGA supporter gave you a uniform.

That difference is not an accident. It’s not a coincidence. It’s a documented pattern in human psychology that was first identified in the late 1970s by one of the most influential social psychologists of the twentieth century.

The Psychology

In 1979, psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol, along with his colleague John Turner, published a theory that changed how researchers understand the relationship between the individual and the group. Tajfel, a Polish-born Jewish man who survived World War II by concealing his identity from German captors, had spent his career studying how group membership shapes human behavior. What he and Turner proposed was that every person’s sense of who they are, their self-concept, operates on two distinct layers.

The first layer is personal identity. That means you know who you are because of the things you’ve done, the things you care about, and the life you built on your own. Your interests, your skills, your relationships, the experiences that made you who you are independent of any group.

The second layer is social identity. That means you define yourself through the groups you belong to. Your political party. Your religion. Your nation. Your team.

Tajfel and Turner called it social identity theory.

Both layers exist in everyone. That’s normal. But the balance between them matters enormously. When someone has a strong personal identity, the group is something they participate in. It’s a part of their life, not the entirety of it. They can lose the group and still know who they are.

When someone has a weak personal identity, the group becomes the only thing holding them together. It becomes the self. Without it, there’s nothing there.

Before Tajfel published social identity theory, he had already demonstrated something unsettling about how easily group identity takes hold. In his earlier experiments at Bristol, known as the minimal group paradigm studies, Tajfel assigned schoolboys to completely arbitrary groups based on nothing more than which abstract painter they preferred, Klee or Kandinsky. The groups were meaningless. The boys didn’t know who else was in their group. There was no competition, no history, no reason to care. But when given the opportunity to distribute rewards, the boys consistently favored their own group over the other. Not because they had anything real in common. Simply because they had been told they were in a group.

That finding has been replicated hundreds of times. The human brain doesn’t need a real reason to attach to a group. It just needs to be told it belongs to one. And once that attachment forms, the group becomes worth defending, even at the expense of others.

Now apply that to people who had nothing to begin with.

MAGA supporters didn’t join a movement because they believed in a set of policies. Most of them can’t name a single policy with any depth or detail. They joined because the movement gave them something they never had on their own. An identity.

They had nothing going on in their lives. No accomplishments. No ambition. Nothing about themselves worth talking about. So they borrowed an identity. From MAGA. From the Bible. From Fox News. They put on the red hat and for the first time in their mediocre lives they finally felt like they mattered.

This isn’t speculation. In 2021, researcher Michael Hogg published a comprehensive review of what he calls uncertainty-identity theory, which builds directly on Tajfel’s framework. Hogg, working out of Claremont Graduate University, found that when people experience self-uncertainty, when they don’t have a clear sense of who they are or what their life means, they are drawn to groups that offer rigid, clearly defined identities. The more uncertain someone is about themselves, the more extreme the group they seek out. Hogg specifically found that self-uncertainty can motivate a strong preference for zealous identification with extremist groups, groups that offer populist ideology, conspiracy theories, and narratives of victimhood.

That is MAGA described in a single research finding.

The movement doesn’t attract people who know who they are. It attracts people who don’t. People who need the group to fill a hole that their own personality never could. People who need to be told what to think, who to hate, and what to call themselves, because they never figured any of that out on their own.

That’s why they fight so hard. They’re not defending ideas. They’re not defending policies. They’re defending the only identity they’ve ever had. Every argument about politics is actually an argument about their existence. Because without MAGA, without the group, without the red hat and the bumper stickers and the rallies, there’s no person left. Just an empty, angry nobody with nothing to show for their life.

That’s what the bumper stickers are. Twenty on one side of the truck telling you what groups they belong to. Twenty on the other side telling you what groups to hate. That’s not a personality. That’s a costume on a mannequin. It’s a person screaming “look at me” because they’ve never once had anyone’s attention based on who they actually are.

Researcher William Swann at the University of Texas at Austin has studied what happens when this process goes even further. In 2009, Swann and his colleagues published research on what they call identity fusion, a state where the boundary between the personal self and the group identity dissolves completely. When people become fused with a group, they don’t just identify with it. They become it. Their personal identity and their social identity become functionally the same thing. And fused individuals are willing to fight, sacrifice, and even die for the group, because an attack on the group is experienced as an attack on the self.

That’s the MAGA rally. That’s the January 6th defendant who threw away their career and their freedom for a man who doesn’t know their name. That’s the person who cuts off family members over a political argument. They’re not being dramatic. They’re experiencing an identity threat. Because the group is all they have.

Liberals don’t have this problem. Because someone in their life taught them who they were before a group had to tell them. Someone encouraged them to develop interests, build skills, form their own opinions, and figure out what they care about independent of any movement. That’s personal identity. That’s the thing MAGA supporters never built.

And that’s the part nobody talks about. This isn’t really about politics. It’s about people who never developed a self and found a group that gave them one for free. The politics are just the wrapping paper. Underneath it is a person who peaked in high school and never moved on, who never built anything they were proud of, and who discovered that putting on a red hat was easier than doing the work of becoming someone worth knowing.

MAGA supporters didn’t join a movement because they believed in something. They joined because they had nothing else. Because these are people who peaked in high school and never moved on.

Sources

Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223, 96-102.

Tajfel, H. and Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin and S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33-47). Brooks/Cole.

Hogg, M. A. (2021). Self-uncertainty and group identification: Consequences for social identity, group behavior, intergroup relations, and society. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 64, 263-316.

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

Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavallee, L. F., and Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 141-156.

You already know what it looks like.

Someone at Thanksgiving starts talking about the border. Or the economy. Or whatever Fox News ran that morning. They say something short. Something confident. Something that sounds like it was pulled directly off a Facebook meme because it was.

And for about ten seconds, they feel like the smartest person in the room.

Then someone asks a follow up question. Not even a hard one. Just something like, “What do you mean by that?” or “Can you explain how that works?”

And it’s over.

The confidence disappears. The eye contact breaks. They either change the subject, start yelling, call you a name, or hit you with the classic MAGA escape hatch: fake news, TDS, do your own research.

Every single time.

You’re not imagining it. This is not just stubbornness. This is a documented failure in human cognition, and it was identified over twenty years ago at Yale University.

In 2002, researchers Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil published a study in the journal Cognitive Science that examined something most people never think about: the gap between how well you think you understand something and how well you actually understand it. They asked people to rate their understanding of common things. People rated themselves high. Then they asked those same people to actually explain how those things worked. Step by step. Mechanically.

And people fell apart.

They couldn’t do it. The understanding they were so sure they had simply wasn’t there. It was a feeling of knowledge, not actual knowledge. A sense that they understood, without the ability to demonstrate that understanding in any meaningful way.

Rozenblit and Keil called it the illusion of explanatory depth.

The illusion works like this. You hear something explained in a short, confident way. A cable news host says it. A podcast repeats it. A meme frames it. And your brain registers that as comprehension. You feel like you get it. You feel like you could explain it yourself. But you never actually try. You never sit down and walk through the logic. You never test the idea against a counter argument. You just carry the feeling around and mistake it for knowledge.

That is the MAGA base in one paragraph.

The entire right wing media ecosystem is built to exploit this exact cognitive failure. The talking points are engineered to be short enough to memorize, confident enough to repeat, and emotional enough to feel like they mean something. They are designed to give stupid people enough confidence to say them out loud.

And that’s as far as it goes.

These people have been taking shortcuts their entire lives. In school. At work. In every conversation they’ve ever had about anything that required depth. So of course they take shortcuts with their politics too. Of course they won’t do any actual research. Of course they won’t have any original thoughts. Lazy thinkers never do.

Their knowledge starts and ends with that one line they learned to memorize. If they are asked to explain what they mean on that topic, they can’t. They have no thinking past that initial comment. Nothing.

In 2013, researcher Philip Fernbach and his colleagues published a study in the journal Psychological Science that proved exactly this. They took Rozenblit and Keil’s concept and applied it directly to political beliefs. They asked people to explain how specific policies actually work. Not give their opinion. Not list their reasons. Explain the mechanics. Step by step. What happens first. What happens next. How does this policy produce the outcome you claim it produces.

Two things happened. Peoples’ confidence in their own understanding collapsed. And their positions became significantly less extreme.

They didn’t learn anything new. They just finally realized they never understood it in the first place.

But here’s the part that should terrify you. When a different group was asked to simply list reasons for their position instead of explain the mechanics, nothing changed. Confidence stayed high. Positions stayed extreme. Because listing reasons lets you lean on feelings, slogans, and borrowed language. Explaining the mechanics forces you to confront whether you actually know what you’re talking about.

Nobody in MAGA world is ever asked to explain the mechanics of anything. They are handed the talking point and told to repeat it.

Fernbach kept pulling on this thread. In 2019, he and his team published a study in Nature Human Behaviour that looked at people who held extreme positions on genetically modified foods. They surveyed over 2,000 adults across the United States and Europe. What they found was that as the extremity of opposition increased, actual scientific knowledge decreased, but self-assessed knowledge increased. The people who knew the least were the most confident that they knew the most.

The pattern is always the same. The less you know, the more sure you are that you know everything. And that certainty makes you impossible to teach, because you’ve already decided you don’t need the lesson.

That’s why facts don’t work on MAGA.

You are not arguing with someone who came to their position through reason. You are arguing with someone who memorized a line, mistook the feeling of understanding for actual understanding, and now has their entire identity invested in never finding out they were wrong.

So when they get exposed, when someone pushes past the surface and asks them to explain what they actually mean, they do what every weak person does when caught in an embarrassing moment.

They lash out.

They rage quit the conversation. They change the subject. They call you names. They scream fake news. They claim you have TDS. They do exactly what narcissistic toxic people have always done. Every time they don’t have a canned response, they lose their s**t. And every time they do this, the shame builds. They know they’re not being honest. Their ego just can’t handle it.

The talking points were never built to make people smart. They were built to make stupid people feel smart enough to say them.

Feeling smart is a shortcut. Being smart takes decades of work. And MAGA doesn’t want to do the work. They never wanted to do the work to be smart. They just want to sound smart and then hope you don’t ask any follow up questions.

Poor little MAGA. They really want those participation trophies.

They feel empowered to debate experts and they think they look smart doing it, when really they just look like the clowns they are. The knowledge they pretend to have is borrowed, and borrowed knowledge without any real learning shows your weakness pretty fast.

You don’t sound smart to us, MAGA.

You sounded like someone who memorized the answer but never learned the subject.

Sources

Rozenblit, L. and Keil, F. (2002). The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth. Cognitive Science, 26(5), 521-562.

Fernbach, P. M., Rogers, T., Fox, C. R., and Sloman, S. A. (2013). Political extremism is supported by an illusion of understanding. Psychological Science, 24(6), 939-946.

Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y., and Rozin, P. (2019). Extreme opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 251-256.

If you watched the video, you already know what identity fusion is and why it explains the difference between how liberals and MAGA supporters relate to politicians. This Substack goes deeper into the research, the childhood origins, and why millions of people handed their entire sense of self to a man who does not know their name.

What Is Identity Fusion?

William B. Swann Jr. is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2009, Swann and his colleagues Ángel Gómez, D. Conor Seyle, J. Francisco Morales, and Carmen Huici published a foundational paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology titled “Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behavior.”

Swann defined identity fusion as a visceral sense of oneness with a group or leader in which the borders between the personal self and the group become porous and highly permeable. In plain language: fused people stop knowing where they end and the group begins.

Normal group identification is cognitive. You support a team. You vote for a party. You attend a church. But you know you are separate from these things. If the team loses you are disappointed but you are still you. If the party nominates someone you dislike you can criticize them. Your identity remains intact because it was never dependent on the group.

Identity fusion is different. When fusion happens the group or leader becomes an extension of the self. An attack on the leader is not a political disagreement. It is an attack on you personally. The leader’s wins feel like your wins. The leader’s losses feel like your losses. The leader’s humiliation feels like your humiliation. The boundary between self and other has dissolved.

Swann’s experiments demonstrated this in dramatic fashion. In several variations of the classic trolley dilemma, highly fused participants endorsed saving fellow group members by throwing themselves in front of a speeding locomotive. They were willing to die for the group. Not because they were ordered to. Because the group had become so deeply fused with their identity that saving the group felt the same as saving themselves.

Trump Fusion vs Clinton Fusion

A 2019 study by Jonas Kunst, John Dovidio, and Lotte Thomsen produced a finding that captures the entire difference between MAGA and liberals in a single data point.

They found that most Trump supporters were more loyal to Trump than to the Republican Party. They were fused with the leader, not the institution. Trump was the identity. The party was just the vehicle.

A separate study by Misch, Fergusson, and Dunham (2018) found the opposite pattern among Democrats. Clinton supporters reported higher fusion to the Democratic Party than to Clinton herself. They were fused with the institution and its values, as they reflect their values, not any individual leader.

If the leader does something wrong against their values, Democratic people instantly reject those people.

This is the structural difference the script describes. Liberals attach to values and institutions. Progressive people can criticize a leader because the leader is not the identity. The values are.

MAGA attaches to the man. The man is the identity. Criticize the man and you are attacking them personally. That is why every conversation with a MAGA supporter about Trump feels personal. Because it is to them.

Why Fusion Happens

Swann’s research found that identity fusion does not happen at random. It happens under specific psychological conditions.

The most important predictor of identity fusion is the strength of a person’s personal identity. People with a strong, stable, well-developed personal identity can belong to groups without losing themselves in them. They have a clear sense of who they are independent of any group membership. They can join, participate, contribute, and still walk away with their self intact.

People with a weak, unstable, or underdeveloped personal identity cannot. They do not have a clear sense of who they are on their own. The group fills that void. The leader fills that void. And once the void is filled the person cannot separate from the source without experiencing something that feels like psychological death.

This is why identity fusion is most common among people whose individual lives are not giving them what they need. When your career is not fulfilling. When your relationships are struggling. When you feel invisible, unimportant, and irrelevant. You have a void where a personal identity should be. And a leader who tells you that you are special, that you are a patriot, that you are part of something historic fills that void instantly.

Trump did not create the void. The void was already there. He just offered to fill it.

Where the Void Comes From

The void does not appear out of nowhere. It is built in childhood.

The majority of people who are susceptible to identity fusion grew up in environments that actively prevented the development of a strong personal identity.

Authoritarian households where questioning was punished. Children in these homes learn that the only safe move is to obey. They do not learn to question, explore, or develop their own beliefs. They learn that the person in charge is always right and that disagreeing is dangerous. That pattern does not disappear in adulthood. It just transfers to a new authority figure.

Churches where doubt was treated as sin. Children raised in fundamentalist religious environments learn that certainty is virtue and questioning is betrayal. They do not develop the ability to sit with ambiguity, evaluate evidence, or hold two competing ideas simultaneously. They learn that someone else has all the answers and their job is to believe.

Communities where emotional awareness was never modeled. In many conservative communities, therapy is seen as weakness. Vulnerability is shameful. Self-reflection is soft. Asking for help means you failed. Children raised in these environments never develop the internal tools needed to process their own emotions, evaluate their own behavior, or ask what they could do differently.

The result is a person who reaches adulthood without a stable internal sense of self. They do not know who they are independent of a group, a leader, or a belief system. They were never given the tools to build that. Looking inward is not an option because there is nothing there. Nobody ever helped them build it.

The only direction they know how to look is outward. And outward means finding someone else to tell them who they are and who to blame.

Why Blame Feels Like Strength

Conservative culture did something specific that makes this pattern self-reinforcing. It rebranded blame as strength and self-awareness as weakness.

Therapy is weakness because you are admitting something is wrong with you. But blaming immigrants is not weakness because you are fighting for your country.

Self-reflection is soft because you are questioning yourself. But blaming the deep state is not soft because you are seeing what others cannot.

Vulnerability is shameful because you are exposing yourself. But blaming liberals is not shameful because you are standing your ground.

The culture flipped the entire framework. Looking inward became cowardice. Pointing fingers became courage. Admitting you are the problem became weakness. Saying someone else is the problem became patriotism.

This is why MAGA supporters externalize everything. Not because they are incapable of self-awareness in some biological sense. Because every system they grew up in, the home, the church, the community, the culture, taught them that self-awareness is the enemy and blame is the virtue.

And then a politician arrived who validated that worldview completely. Trump never asks his supporters to reflect. He never asks them to grow. He never asks them to consider whether they might be wrong. He gives them someone to blame. Every single day. Immigrants. Liberals. The media. The deep state. The enemy is always external. The problem is always someone else. And for people who were raised to believe that looking inward is weakness, that message is not just appealing. It is the only message they know how to hear.

Why Liberals Do Not Fuse

The Misch, Fergusson, and Dunham (2018) finding is not an accident. Liberals fuse with institutions and values rather than leaders for a structural reason, not a moral one.

Liberal culture, encourages the tools that prevent identity fusion. Therapy is normalized. Emotional awareness is valued. Questioning authority is not just permitted but expected.

Education emphasizes critical thinking.

Self-reflection is treated as a sign of maturity, not weakness.

The result is that most liberals develop a personal identity that is strong enough to exist independently of any political figure. They can vote for a candidate and disagree with that candidate the next day because their sense of self does not depend on the candidate being right.

The candidate is a tool for their values, not the source of their identity.

This is not because liberals are inherently smarter or better. It is because the environments they grew up in were more likely to provide the psychological tools needed to build an independent self.

Education.

Emotional literacy.

Permission to question.

Permission to doubt.

Permission to change your mind without losing who you are.

MAGA supporters, did not grow up in those environments. They grew up in environments that punished every one of those behaviors.

And the result is a population of adults who never built a personal identity strong enough to stand on its own.

When a liberal loses an election they are disappointed and they move on with their lives.

When a MAGA supporter loses an election they storm the Capitol.

Because the liberal lost a politician.

The MAGA supporter lost themselves.

The Accountability Gap

The difference between a liberal and a MAGA supporter is not intelligence. It is not education. It is not income. It is accountability.

When a liberal’s life is not working they look inward. They go to therapy. They change careers. They read a book. They ask what can I do differently. They take ownership of their problems and they work on them.

When a MAGA supporter’s life is not working they look outward. They blame immigrants. They blame the deep state. They blame elites. They blame liberals. They never once ask what they could do differently. And then they find a leader who tells them it is not their fault. And they fuse with him because he is the first person who ever told them someone else is to blame for their life.

The person who takes ownership of their problems does not need a savior. The person who blames everyone else does.

That is why liberals do not worship politicians. They do not need to. They have themselves.

That is why MAGA worships Trump. Conservative culture never gave them the tools to build their own identity. It told them therapy is weakness. Self-reflection is soft. Vulnerability is shameful. Blaming others is strength. So they never built a self. And a man on television offered to be one for them.

Without Trump, MAGA supporters are just lonely, uneducated, angry people sitting in a room with nothing to talk about and no one to blame.

Sources

Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, A., Seyle, D. C., Morales, J. F., and Huici, C. (2009). “Identity Fusion: The Interplay of Personal and Social Identities in Extreme Group Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 995-1011.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Jetten, J., Gómez, A., Whitehouse, H., and Bastian, B. (2012). “When Group Membership Gets Personal: A Theory of Identity Fusion.” Psychological Review, 119(3), 441-456.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Klein, J. W., and Gómez, A. (2024). “Comprehensive Identity Fusion Theory (CIFT): New Insights and a Revised Theory.” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 70, 275-332.

Kunst, J. R., Dovidio, J. F., and Thomsen, L. (2019). “Fusion with Political Leaders Predicts Willingness to Persecute Immigrants and Political Opponents.” Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 1180-1189.

Misch, A., Fergusson, G., and Dunham, Y. (2018). “Group Identification and Political Engagement Among Clinton and Trump Supporters.” Unpublished research cited in Swann et al. (2024).

Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, A., Dovidio, J. F., Hart, S., and Jetten, J. (2010). “Dying and Killing for One’s Group: Identity Fusion Moderates Responses to Intergroup Versions of the Trolley Problem.” Psychological Science, 21(8), 1176-1183.

Gómez, A., Brooks, M. L., Buhrmester, M. D., Vázquez, A., Jetten, J., and Swann, W. B., Jr. (2011). “On the Nature of Identity Fusion: Insights into the Construct and a New Measure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(5), 918-933.

Buhrmester, M. D., and Swann, W. B., Jr. (2015). “Identity Fusion.” In Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.

Baumeister, R. F. (1991). “Escaping the Self: Alcoholism, Spirituality, Masochism, and Other Flights from the Burden of Selfhood.” Basic Books.

Baumrind, D. (1966). “Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior.” Child Development, 37(4), 887-907.

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

There is a question that never gets asked in the Christian nationalism debate.

If this movement is really about faith, why do the people who push it the hardest show the least evidence of actually practicing it?

They are not the people who pray the most. They are not the people who read the Bible the most. They are not the people who attend church the most. In many cases they have not read the Bible at all.

But they will tell you with absolute certainty what God wants for America. And what God wants always seems to line up perfectly with what they want.

Control over women. Hostility toward immigrants. Contempt for gay people. Domination over anyone who does not look, think, or worship the way they do.

That is not a coincidence. Researchers have now proven it.

What the Research Actually Found

In 2020, sociologists Andrew Whitehead at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and Samuel Perry at the University of Oklahoma published the first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in America. Their book, Taking America Back for God, drew on multiple sources of national survey data spanning decades and included in-depth interviews with Americans across the political spectrum.

They defined Christian nationalism as a cultural framework. A collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life. The key word is fusion. Christian nationalists do not simply believe that faith should play a role in public life. They believe the American government should unapologetically privilege Christianity above all other belief systems. And they believe that being a true American requires being a certain kind of Christian.

But here is what the data actually showed.

Christian nationalism does not predict devotion. It does not predict prayer. It does not predict Bible reading. It does not predict the behaviors that define a person who genuinely practices their faith.

What it predicts is something else entirely. Authoritarianism. Racism. Xenophobia. Opposition to immigration. Opposition to interracial marriage. Support for police violence against Black Americans. Anti-Muslim sentiment. Rigid enforcement of traditional gender roles. Hostility toward anyone who does not fit the template.

The people who scored highest on Christian nationalism were not the most devout. They were the most authoritarian. The most prejudiced. The most hostile toward people who were different from them.

They used the language of faith to make all of it sound holy.

The Most Devastating Finding

The most important result in the entire body of Christian nationalism research is one that most people have never heard.

When Perry and Whitehead controlled for Christian nationalism in their statistical models, something remarkable happened. The relationship between religion and prejudice reversed.

Once Christian nationalism was removed from the equation, actual religiosity, measured by how often a person attends church, how often they pray, and how often they read scripture, was negatively associated with racism and opposition to interracial families. That means the more genuinely religious a person is, the less prejudiced they are.

Read that again. Genuine faith makes people less racist. Christian nationalism makes people more racist. The two are not the same thing. They are opposites wearing the same costume.

This finding has been replicated across multiple studies. Perry and Whitehead showed it with anti-Black racism. They showed it with xenophobia. They showed it with hostility toward immigrants. The same pattern appeared every time. Strip out the nationalism and the faith itself is protective. It is the nationalism, not the Christianity, that predicts every form of bigotry the research measures.

This is what makes the movement so dangerous. It uses the credibility of genuine faith as camouflage for something that has nothing to do with faith.

The Jesus Problem

The script makes a point that the research confirms in detail. The stated values of Christianity and the measured values of Christian nationalism are in direct opposition.

Jesus said feed the poor. Christian nationalists support cutting food assistance programs.

Jesus said love your enemy. Christian nationalists want to deport their neighbors.

Jesus said turn the other cheek. Christian nationalists elected a man who mocked a disabled reporter on national television and cheered when he did it.

Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers. Christian nationalists support authoritarian violence against people they consider outsiders.

Jesus said the last shall be first. Christian nationalists believe they should be first in everything, permanently, by law.

This is not a case of imperfect people struggling to live up to high ideals. The research shows that the ideology itself is structured around dominance, not devotion. Christian nationalism does not fail to meet the standards of Christianity. It replaces those standards with something else entirely and keeps the label.

The Persecution Performance

One of the most consistent patterns in Christian nationalism research is the weaponization of victimhood.

Christian nationalists routinely claim they are being persecuted. They claim that their religious freedom is under attack. They claim that secular America is trying to silence them.

But the research tells a different story. What they describe as persecution is almost always a loss of privilege. When a school stops leading students in Christian prayer, that is not persecution. That is equality. When a business is told it cannot refuse service to gay customers, that is not an attack on religious freedom. That is the law applying equally to everyone.

The research consistently shows that Christian nationalists define religious freedom not as the right to practice their own faith, but as the right to impose their faith on others. When that imposition is challenged, they experience the challenge as persecution.

This is the same mechanism that shows up in every authoritarian movement. The dominant group frames any reduction in its dominance as an attack. They are not losing power. They are losing the ability to use power unchecked. And they describe that loss as oppression.

They start trouble. They force their beliefs on people who did not ask for them. When someone pushes back, they cry religious persecution. They are the bully who punches you in the face and runs to the teacher crying when you push back.

The Costume

Christian nationalism is not a faith. It is a costume.

It gives authoritarian people a moral vocabulary they did not earn. It gives racist people a divine justification they do not deserve. It gives abusive people a shield that nobody in America feels comfortable challenging.

Because the costume is a cross. And in American culture, questioning someone’s relationship with God makes you the bad guy. That is the entire strategy. That is why it works.

They use God as a shield. They use the Bible as a bat. And they use the word Christian to make you feel guilty for fighting back.

The researchers proved it. This has nothing to do with Jesus. These are authoritarian, prejudiced people wearing a cross because it is the one costume nobody in America is allowed to question.

But questioning it is exactly what needs to happen. Because the research is unambiguous. The more someone pushes Christian nationalism, the less their behavior has to do with Christianity. And the more it has to do with power, control, and dominance dressed up in the language of God.

They do not love God. They love what God lets them get away with.

Sources

Whitehead, A. L., & Perry, S. L. (2020). Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press.

Perry, S. L., & Whitehead, A. L. (2015). Christian Nationalism and White Racial Boundaries: Examining Whites’ Opposition to Interracial Marriage. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(10), 1671-1689.

Perry, S. L., Whitehead, A. L., & Davis, J. T. (2019). God’s Country in Black and Blue: How Christian Nationalism Shapes Americans’ Views About Police (Mis)Treatment of Blacks. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(1), 130-146.

Perry, S. L., Whitehead, A. L., & Grubbs, J. B. (2021). Prejudice and Pandemic in the Promised Land: How White Christian Nationalism Shapes Americans’ Racist and Xenophobic Views of COVID-19. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 44(5), 759-772.

Perry, S. L., & Whitehead, A. L. (2022). The Role of Christian Nationalism on January 6 and After: What National Survey Data Tell Us. Expert Testimony Submitted to the United States House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Whitehead, A. L., & Perry, S. L. (2020). How Culture Wars Delay Herd Immunity: Christian Nationalism and Anti-Vaccine Attitudes. Socius, 6, 1-12.

Perry, S. L., Cobb, R. J., Whitehead, A. L., & Grubbs, J. B. (2022). Divided by Faith (in Christian America): Christian Nationalism, Race, and Divergent Perceptions of Racial Injustice. Social Forces, 101(2), 913-942.

Try something the next time you’re talking to a Trump supporter.

Don’t argue with them. Don’t fact check them. Don’t try to change their mind. Just ask them one question.

“Where did you hear that?”

Watch what happens. They won’t be able to answer. Not because they’re hiding the source. Because they genuinely don’t know. The information is in their head but they have no idea how it got there. It just showed up one day like a bumper sticker they didn’t remember putting on their car.

Now ask a follow up. “What do you think about it?” Not what Fox News thinks. Not what Trump thinks. What do they think.

And you will watch a person buffer in real time.

This is not an insult. It’s not an exaggeration. It’s a documented pattern in human cognition that was identified over sixty years ago, and it explains why millions of American adults cannot process information without an authority figure handing it to them first.

In 1962, psychologist Herman Witkin published a book called Psychological Differentiation that changed how researchers understood the way people think. Witkin had spent years running experiments where he placed people in tilted rooms and asked them to determine whether a rod was straight. Some people could ignore the tilted room and judge the rod on its own. Others couldn’t. They needed the room, the surrounding environment, the external frame, to tell them what was straight and what wasn’t.

This wasn’t about intelligence. It was about cognitive style. Witkin called the two ends of the spectrum field independence and field dependence.

A field-independent person can take in a piece of information, separate it from the noise around it, and evaluate it on its own terms. They don’t need the group to agree with them first. They don’t need an authority to validate what they’re seeing. Their brain works on its own.

A field-dependent person cannot do this. They rely on the surrounding environment, the field, to tell them what’s true. They process information through the people around them, the social cues, the authority figures, the dominant frame. Without that external structure, they struggle to determine what’s real and what isn’t. The information doesn’t compute unless someone else processes it for them first.

Witkin found that this cognitive style is remarkably stable across a person’s life. And his research, along with his colleague Ruth Dyk, traced its roots directly to childhood. In a 1965 study published in Child Development, Dyk and Witkin examined family environments and found a clear pattern. Parents who encouraged their children to explore, question, and act independently produced children who grew up to be field-independent thinkers. Parents who demanded obedience, discouraged questioning, and enforced conformity to authority produced children who grew up to be field-dependent.

The authoritarian home doesn’t just raise an obedient child. It raises a mentally dependent adult who will spend the rest of their life looking for someone to obey.

Witkin revisited his own theory in 1977 at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey, and refined his framework further. He and his colleague Donald Goodenough described field dependence and field independence as tendencies to function with greater or less autonomy from external referents. Field-independent people rely on internal referents when processing information. They use their own judgment. Field-dependent people rely on external referents. They look outward for answers. And this tendency shows up not just in perception, but in social behavior. Field-dependent individuals are more attentive to social cues, more sensitive to social criticism, and more influenced by the people around them.

Now apply this to the MAGA information ecosystem.

Right wing media has built an entire infrastructure designed to serve one function: provide external referents to people who cannot generate internal ones. Fox News doesn’t inform its audience. It instructs them. It gives them the line, the frame, the emotional charge, and the target, all in one package. Facebook memes don’t encourage analysis. They provide conclusions. The entire content pipeline is engineered to do the thinking so the audience doesn’t have to.

And for a field-dependent person, this feels right. It feels natural. Because they have always needed someone else to tell them what’s straight and what’s crooked.

This is why MAGA supporters can say a talking point with total confidence but collapse the moment you ask them to explain it. They didn’t arrive at the position through their own reasoning. They received it. The way a student memorizes a formula without understanding the math behind it. They can repeat the line, but they can’t show their work, because there is no work. There was never any work.

Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer spent decades studying this exact phenomenon from a different angle. His research on what he called right-wing authoritarianism, published across multiple books beginning in 1981, identified a personality pattern built on three interlocking traits: submission to authority figures perceived as legitimate, aggression toward whoever those authorities target, and rigid adherence to social conventions. Altemeyer called these people “authoritarian followers” to emphasize the point. They are not leaders. They are followers. Their entire psychological architecture is built around receiving instructions from above and executing them without reflection.

Altemeyer found that authoritarian followers are more likely to submit to established authorities whether they agree or disagree with those authorities’ political orientation. The obedience runs deeper than ideology. It’s structural. These are people whose brains are wired to comply first and rationalize later.

And what did Altemeyer find about where this comes from? The same thing Witkin found. Upbringing. Parents, religion, and early education play a direct role in determining whether someone develops this pattern of reflexive submission. The research points in one direction every time. Homes that reward curiosity produce adults who can think. Homes that reward compliance produce adults who need to be told what to think.

That’s the MAGA base. Millions of adults who were never taught to think and now can’t function without someone telling them what is real.

They’re being fed every day. The way livestock are fed. On a schedule. From a trough. And they line up for it every single day.

That’s why facts don’t work with Trump supporters. You are showing evidence to a person whose brain doesn’t process evidence independently. It only processes instructions from authority. You are trying to reason with a person who was never given the tools to reason.

Liberals don’t have this problem. Because someone in their life taught them to think. And people who were taught to think don’t need a televangelist or a con man or an algorithm to do the thinking for them.

MAGA supporters aren’t free thinkers. Every opinion they have came from someone else’s mouth. The dumbest people in America somehow now think they’re the smartest people in the room. They think sounding smart is the same as being smart. They’ve been the joke for a decade and they still think people are laughing at someone else.

Sources

Witkin, H. A., Dyk, R. B., Faterson, H. F., Goodenough, D. R., and Karp, S. A. (1962). Psychological Differentiation: Studies of Development. Wiley.

Dyk, R. B. and Witkin, H. A. (1965). Family experiences related to the development of differentiation in children. Child Development, 30, 21-55.

Witkin, H. A. and Goodenough, D. R. (1977). Field dependence revisited. ETS Research Bulletin Series, 1977(1), i-53.

Witkin, H. A. and Goodenough, D. R. (1976). Field dependence and interpersonal behavior. ETS Research Bulletin Series, 1976(1), i-78.

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

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

There is a type of person who will walk into a room full of strangers, start a fight, and then tell everyone they were attacked.

They will say something offensive on purpose. They will wait for the reaction. And then they will point to that reaction as proof that they are being persecuted.

This is not random behavior. This is a strategy. And researchers have now measured it.

The Study That Changed Everything

In 2021, researcher Ekin Ok at the University of British Columbia ran six studies on people who publicly display two things at the same time: their virtue and their victimhood.

She wanted to know what kind of person does this the most.

The answer was clear across all six studies.

The people who combined virtue signaling with victim signaling scored highest on three personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. These three traits together are known as the Dark Triad. They represent the most manipulative, self-serving, and emotionally cold personality profile psychologists have ever measured.

But the most important finding was not who these people were. It was what they were doing.

Ok and her team found that this combination of signals was not about expressing real pain or real goodness. It was a resource extraction strategy. The research showed that people who signal virtue and victimhood at the same time are more successful at getting other people to give them things. Attention. Sympathy. Money. Status. Followers.

Psychologists call this nonreciprocal resource transfer. That means the signaler takes, but never gives back.

And the people who do it the most are not the ones who have actually been hurt. They are the ones who score highest in manipulation.

Why Religion Is the Perfect Weapon

Now here is where it gets worse.

Religion gives narcissistic people something no other institution can offer: a moral framework that comes pre-installed with authority.

If you claim to speak for God, you do not need credentials. You do not need evidence. You do not need anyone’s permission. The authority is built into the claim itself.

Psychologist Gordon Allport spent decades studying why some religious people behave well and others behave terribly. He came up with a framework that splits religious motivation into two types.

The first type is intrinsic. That means a person practices their faith because they actually believe in it. They have internalized the values. Their religion shapes how they treat people, how they make decisions, how they live. Their faith is the point.

The second type is extrinsic. That means a person uses religion as a tool. They go to church for the social network. They quote scripture for the authority it gives them. They perform devotion because it gets them status, comfort, or control. The faith is not the point. The benefits are the point.

Decades of research have confirmed the same pattern. Extrinsic religiosity is linked to prejudice, manipulation, and dysfunction. Intrinsic religiosity is not.

And here is the part that should concern everyone.

A 2026 study published in Personality and Individual Differences found that every single facet of narcissism was linked to extrinsic religious orientation. Agentic narcissism. Antagonistic narcissism. Neurotic narcissism. Communal narcissism. All of them. Every type of narcissist uses religion as a means to an end.

Not one type of narcissism was linked to intrinsic faith.

The Communal Narcissist Problem

There is a specific type of narcissist that thrives in religious settings more than any other. Researchers Jochen Gebauer and Constantine Sedikides identified what they call communal narcissism.

A communal narcissist does not brag about being rich or powerful. They brag about being the most caring person in the room. The most selfless. The most giving. The most spiritually evolved.

But here is the catch. When researchers actually measured their behavior, communal narcissists were no more prosocial than anyone else. They just believed they were. The gap between how good they thought they were and how good they actually were was enormous.

This is the person who stands up in a public space and preaches at people who did not ask to be preached at. This is the person who records the confrontation. This is the person who posts it online with a caption about being persecuted for their faith.

They are not doing this because they care about your soul. They are doing this because the performance of caring is what feeds them.

How the Trap Works

The genius of this strategy is that it is almost impossible to call out.

If you push back against someone who is using religion to provoke you, they have a ready-made defense: you are attacking their faith. You are persecuting a believer. You are proving their point.

This is exactly what Ok’s research predicted. The virtuous victim signal works because it puts the target in a lose-lose position. If you react, you become the villain in their story. If you do not react, they escalate until you do.

The research also showed that people who frequently signal virtuous victimhood are more willing to lie, cheat, and exaggerate claims of being harmed. This was not a side finding. It was a core result across multiple studies.

These are not people who were wronged and are asking for help. These are people who manufacture conflict because conflict is profitable.

The Difference Between Faith and Performance

None of this is an argument against religion. The research actually makes the opposite point.

People with intrinsic faith tend to be more humble, more forgiving, and more empathetic. Genuine belief appears to be protective against exactly the kind of manipulation described here.

The problem is not faith. The problem is people who use the language of faith as a delivery system for narcissistic supply.

When someone preaches at strangers on a train and keeps going after being told to stop, they are not practicing religion. They are farming content.

When someone records the reaction and posts it online, they are not spreading the gospel. They are building a brand.

When someone frames your discomfort as persecution, they are not defending God. They are feeding a personality disorder.

The sermon is not the point. The reaction is the point.

Your discomfort is the product.

Sources

Ok, E., Qian, Y., Strejcek, B., & Aquino, K. (2021). Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1634-1661.

Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal Religious Orientation and Prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5(4), 432-443.

Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., Verplanken, B., & Maio, G. R. (2012). Communal Narcissism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 854-878.

Nehrlich, A. D., Gebauer, J. E., Sedikides, C., & Schoel, C. (2019). Agentic Narcissism, Communal Narcissism, and Prosociality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 117(1), 142-165.

Personality and Individual Differences (2026). Between Ego and Faith: Motivational, Affective, and Cognitive Dimensions of Religious Engagement in Narcissism.

Hermann, A. D., & Fuller, R. C. (2018). Grandiose Narcissism and Religiosity. In A. D. Hermann, A. B. Brunell, & J. D. Foster (Eds.), Handbook of Trait Narcissism. Springer.

Before I explain how propaganda works, I want you to answer a question.

Why are scientists always changing their minds?

If you started thinking about an answer, you just fell for it.

Nobody proved scientists are always changing their minds. That claim was hiding inside the question. And by the time your brain started working on an answer, it had already accepted the claim as true without checking it first.

That is how every piece of propaganda you have ever encountered was designed to work. Not by lying to you directly. By hiding the lie inside a question, a headline, or a statement where your brain would accept it automatically.

There is a name for this mechanism. There is decades of research behind it. And there is a skill that makes you almost immune to it.

What Lakoff Found

In 2004, cognitive linguist George Lakoff at the University of California Berkeley published research on how political language controls the way people think.

Lakoff had spent years studying something most people never notice. The structure underneath the words. Not what a sentence says, but what it assumes to be true before you even begin processing the content.

Lakoff called these structures frames.

A frame is not an argument. A frame is the invisible architecture that tells your brain what is true before you even start thinking about whether it is true. Frames are built into the language itself. They activate automatically. And once a frame is active in your brain, everything you think about the subject happens inside that frame.

Here is Lakoff’s most famous example. If someone says “don’t think of an elephant,” you immediately think of an elephant. The frame has already been activated. You cannot choose not to think about it. The instruction to ignore it actually reinforces it.

Political language works the same way. When a politician says “tax relief,” the word “relief” tells your brain that taxes are a burden, an affliction, something you need to be rescued from. That is not an argument. That is a frame. And once your brain accepts the frame, the only debate left is how much relief you deserve. The question of whether taxes are a burden in the first place never gets asked. It was already answered by the frame before the conversation started.

This is why Lakoff argued that whoever controls the frame controls the debate. Not because they have better evidence. Because they decided what counts as evidence before anyone else showed up.

The Loaded Question

The most effective version of framing in propaganda is the one used in every example in the script. The loaded question.

A loaded question is a question that contains a hidden assumption. The assumption has not been proven. It may not even be true. But it is built into the structure of the question in a way that forces you to accept it the moment you start thinking about an answer.

“If mail-in voting is secure, why do so many countries restrict it?”

The hidden assumption is that many countries restrict mail-in voting. Nobody proved that inside the question. The question just asserts it and moves on. And if you start answering the question, you have already accepted the premise that widespread restriction exists. Now you are debating inside a reality someone else built for you.

“Why are climate scientists exaggerating the data?”

The hidden assumption is that climate scientists are exaggerating. Nobody proved that. Nobody cited a study. Nobody pointed to a specific case. But the question treats it as an established fact. And if you start explaining why they are not exaggerating, you have already accepted the frame. You are now defending against an accusation that was never proven in the first place.

This mechanism is not new. Researchers have studied it for decades under the name presupposition. In linguistics, a presupposition is a proposition that a sentence takes for granted as already being true.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated this in 1975. She showed subjects a film of a car accident and then asked them questions about it. When she asked “Did you see the broken headlight?” subjects were far more likely to say yes, even when no headlight was broken in the film. The word “the” presupposed that a broken headlight existed. The question did not ask whether there was a broken headlight. It assumed one existed and asked whether the subject saw it. The assumption slipped past their critical thinking entirely.

In 2021, psychologist Myrto Pantazi published research in Political Psychology showing that presupposition accommodation is one of the key mechanisms through which political misinformation spreads. When a news headline or a political statement embeds an unproven claim as a presupposition, the brain processes it automatically as background information. It does not flag it for review. It does not treat it as a claim that needs evidence. It just absorbs it and moves on.

This is why propaganda does not need to convince you of anything directly. It just needs to get you to engage with a question that has the conclusion already baked in.

Why MAGA Falls for This Every Time

Every piece of right-wing propaganda is built on this mechanism.

“Why does the mainstream media hate Trump?” The assumption is that the mainstream media hates Trump. Nobody proved that inside the question. The question just treats it as a fact and moves on.

“Why are Democrats trying to destroy America?” The assumption is that Democrats are trying to destroy America. No evidence. No argument. Just a frame disguised as a question.

“Why do liberals want open borders?” The assumption is that liberals want open borders. Nobody proved it. Nobody cited a policy. The question skips the proof and goes straight to the debate.

Every one of those questions is designed to do the same thing. Get you to accept a conclusion before you have seen a single piece of evidence. And if you start answering the question, you have already lost. You are now arguing inside a reality that someone else created.

MAGA supporters are not falling for these frames because they are incapable of thinking. They are falling for them because right-wing media has spent decades perfecting the delivery system. The same frames get repeated across Fox News, Newsmax, Truth Social, talk radio, and podcasts every single day. The repetition is not accidental. Lakoff’s research showed that repeated activation of a frame strengthens it. The more times the brain processes a frame, the more automatic it becomes. Eventually the frame does not feel like a frame anymore. It feels like reality.

This is why a Trump supporter can hear a perfectly sourced argument and dismiss it instantly. The frame is already installed. The argument never reaches the part of the brain that would evaluate it. It gets rejected at the door because it does not fit the frame.

How to Kill Propaganda Before It Starts

In 2017, psychologist Sander van der Linden at the University of Cambridge published research showing that people can be made resistant to propaganda before they ever encounter it.

Van der Linden calls this inoculation. The concept works exactly like a vaccine. You expose a person to a weakened form of a manipulation technique. You show them how it works. You let them see the mechanism. And once they can see it, their brain starts flagging it automatically every time it appears.

Van der Linden tested this with climate change misinformation and found that people who were inoculated against the manipulation technique were significantly less likely to be influenced by it later. The effect worked across political lines. Liberals and conservatives were both more resistant after seeing how the technique worked.

The critical finding was this: inoculation does not work by giving people better facts. It works by teaching people to recognize the structure of the manipulation itself. You do not need to know whether a specific claim is true or false. You just need to see the frame.

That is exactly what the script describes. The people who are hardest to manipulate do not engage with the content of a loaded question. They look at the question itself and ask: what assumption am I being asked to accept?

If nobody has proven that assumption, they reject the frame. They do not argue inside it. They do not debate the content. They reject the entire structure and the propaganda dies before it starts.

I call that skill frame resistance. And it is the single most important thing you can learn in an environment saturated with propaganda.

The difference between someone who falls for propaganda and someone who does not is not intelligence. It is not education. It is not access to better information.

It is the ability to see the frame before you step into it.

MAGA accepts every frame they are given. That is why they are the most propagandized group of people in American history. And they are too deep inside the frame to know it is happening to them.

Sources

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Lakoff, G. (1996). Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. University of Chicago Press.

Loftus, E. F. (1975). Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report. Cognitive Psychology, 7(4), 560-572.

Pantazi, M., Kissine, M., & Klein, O. (2021). Social and Cognitive Aspects of the Vulnerability to Political Misinformation. Political Psychology, 42(S1), 267-304.

Lombardi Vallauri, E. (2019). Manipulative Shallow Processing Induced by Presuppositions and Topics. In Ferretti, F. et al. (Eds.), Pragmatics and Its Interfaces. Frontiers in Communication.

van der Linden, S., Leiserowitz, A., Rosenthal, S., & Maibach, E. (2017). Inoculating the Public Against Misinformation About Climate Change. Global Challenges, 1(2), 1600008.

van der Linden, S., & Roozenbeek, J. (2020). Inoculating Against Fake News About COVID-19. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 566790.

Roozenbeek, J., van der Linden, S., Goldberg, B., Rathje, S., & Lewandowsky, S. (2022). Psychological Inoculation Improves Resilience Against Misinformation on Social Media. Science Advances, 8(34).

You have been in this argument before.

You came prepared. You had the sources. You had the data. You had the court documents, the direct quotes, the video evidence. You laid it all out clearly, calmly, step by step.

And the person you were talking to looked at everything you presented and said fake news.

Not because your evidence was weak. Not because your argument had a flaw. Not because they had better information.

Because their brain physically would not let them hear you.

That is not a metaphor. A neuroscientist put people in a brain scanner and proved it.

The Brain Scanner Study

In 2016, neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan at the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute published a study that fundamentally changed how we understand political disagreement. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports by Nature.

Kaplan and his colleagues put 40 participants inside a functional MRI scanner. Then they challenged those participants’ beliefs with counter-evidence. But they did it in two categories. They challenged political beliefs and they challenged non-political beliefs.

When they challenged non-political beliefs, the brain did what a healthy brain is supposed to do. It processed the new information. It updated. Participants adjusted their positions. The system worked.

When they challenged political beliefs, something completely different happened.

The brain activated the default mode network.

The default mode network is a set of interconnected structures in the brain associated with self-representation. It is the part of the brain that processes who you are. Your identity. Your sense of self. Your ego.

The brain did not process the political challenge as new information. It processed it as an attack on the self.

Kaplan described it this way. Political beliefs are like religious beliefs. Both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong. To consider an alternative view, you would have to consider an alternative version of yourself.

Read that again. The brain does not treat a political challenge as a factual dispute. It treats it as an existential threat. A challenge to a political belief does not activate the reasoning centers of the brain. It activates the identity centers.

The Fear Response

The study did not stop there. Kaplan and his team also measured which specific brain regions showed the most activity in the participants who were most resistant to changing their minds.

Two areas lit up the most. The amygdala and the insular cortex.

The amygdala is the brain’s threat detection center. It processes fear, anxiety, and the fight-or-flight response. It is the part of the brain that tells you a predator is nearby. It is the alarm system that evolved to keep you alive.

The insular cortex processes feelings from the body and is critical for detecting emotional significance. It helps the brain determine whether something matters enough to react to.

Together, these two regions tell the same story. The brain of a person whose political beliefs are being challenged with facts is experiencing the same neurological response as a person who is facing a physical threat. The fear and disgust centers of the brain are firing. The body is responding as if it is in danger.

Their brain literally treated a fact as a threat to their survival.

This is why presenting evidence to a Trump supporter does not lead to a productive conversation. You think you are sharing information. Their brain thinks you are trying to destroy them. The evidence never reaches the part of the brain that evaluates evidence. The threat response intercepts it first.

The Backfire Effect

In 2010, political scientists Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth and Jason Reifler at the University of Exeter published research that identified a pattern consistent with what Kaplan later found in the brain scanner.

They tested what happens when you give people factual corrections to political misinformation they already believe. In several of their experiments, they found something that should have been impossible. The correction did not just fail to change people’s minds. It made the misperception stronger.

Nyhan and Reifler called this the backfire effect. Presenting counter-evidence to a strongly held political belief does not reduce the belief. It reinforces it.

To be clear about the full picture: later replication studies found the backfire effect is not as universal as originally reported. Nyhan himself has acknowledged this. In many cases, factual corrections do improve accuracy. The backfire effect appears to be strongest when the belief being challenged is deeply tied to a person’s identity and group membership.

Which brings us back to Kaplan’s brain scanner. The backfire effect may not happen every time. But the neurological mechanism Kaplan documented always happens. When a political belief is challenged, the default mode network activates. The brain treats the challenge as an identity threat. Whether that threat causes the person to dig in deeper or simply ignore the information, the result is the same. The evidence does not get processed on its merits.

Identity-Protective Cognition

The mechanism Kaplan found in the brain scanner has a name in the psychology literature. Dan Kahan, professor of law and psychology at Yale University, has spent years studying it.

Kahan calls it identity-protective cognition. The tendency of individuals to unconsciously dismiss evidence that does not reflect the beliefs that predominate in their group.

But Kahan’s most important finding is the one that breaks everyone’s assumption about how this works. Most people believe that education and intelligence protect against this effect. That smarter people are more likely to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

The opposite is true.

Kahan’s research shows that the most scientifically literate, most cognitively proficient people are the most polarized. Not the least. Intelligence does not protect against identity-protective cognition. Intelligence makes it worse. Because smarter people are better at finding sophisticated reasons to dismiss evidence that threatens their identity.

This means you cannot fix this problem with education. You cannot fix it with better arguments. You cannot fix it with more data. The problem is not a lack of information. The problem is that the brain has a built-in defense system that prioritizes identity over accuracy. And the smarter the person, the more effective that defense system becomes.

The Echo Chamber Feedback Loop

Now layer Kaplan’s finding on top of the media environment that most conservatives live inside.

Every single day, Fox News, Newsmax, Truth Social, and right-wing podcasts reinforce the same political identities. The same group boundaries. The same us-versus-them framework. Every day, the identity gets stronger. Every day, the default mode network’s association between political belief and personal identity gets reinforced.

Kaplan’s study showed what happens in a single moment when a political belief is challenged. But that single moment is happening inside a brain that has been soaking in identity-reinforcing media for years. The political belief is no longer just an opinion the person holds. It is fused into their sense of self. It is woven into their relationships, their social media feeds, their daily rituals, their vocabulary.

At that point, the brain cannot tell the difference between “you are wrong about immigration” and “you are worthless.” Both register as attacks on the self. Both trigger the amygdala. Both activate the default mode network. Both get shut down before they ever reach the reasoning centers of the brain.

This is what Kaplan meant when he said that to consider an alternative political view, a person would have to consider an alternative version of themselves. For a Trump supporter whose entire social world, entire information diet, and entire sense of purpose is organized around MAGA, considering an alternative view does not mean changing a policy position. It means dismantling who they are.

The brain will not allow that. It will protect the identity at all costs. Even at the cost of reality.

What This Actually Means

This research does not mean that Trump supporters are biologically incapable of changing their minds. It means the conditions required for change are far more extreme than most people realize.

Facts alone will never do it. The brain has already classified facts as threats. Better arguments will never do it. The identity defense system is specifically designed to neutralize arguments. Even firsthand experience may not do it, because identity-protective cognition can override what a person sees with their own eyes.

The only thing that consistently breaks through is the collapse of the social structure that maintains the identity. When the group falls apart. When the media ecosystem loses credibility. When the leader fails so visibly that the identity becomes more painful to maintain than to abandon.

That is not a conversation. That is a rupture.

And until that rupture happens, you are not arguing with a person. You are arguing with a brain that has already decided, before you opened your mouth, that everything you are about to say is a threat to its survival.

That is not a political party. That is a neurological hostage situation.

Sources

Kaplan, J. T., Gimbel, S. I., & Harris, S. (2016). Neural Correlates of Maintaining One’s Political Beliefs in the Face of Counterevidence. Scientific Reports, 6, 39589.

Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303-330.

Nyhan, B. (2020). Why the Backfire Effect Does Not Explain the Durability of Political Misperceptions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(24), 13549-13556.

Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the Logic of Identity-Protective Cognition. Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 605.

Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2017). Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 54-86.

Kahan, D. M., Braman, D., Slovic, P., Gastil, J., & Mertz, C. K. (2007). Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 4(3), 465-505.