The Lucas Bean Show

The Dark Psychology of Unearned Power

Church is the easiest place on earth to get power you did not earn.

A lawyer has to pass the bar. A doctor has to be licensed. A teacher has to be certified. A therapist has to complete thousands of supervised hours before they are allowed to sit alone in a room with a vulnerable person.

A pastor in most independent churches has to do nothing except say God called me.

No degree required. No background check. No licensing board. No oversight committee. No credential of any kind. Just declare your faith, walk through the door, and you are handed a title, a stage, and a room full of people who have been taught that questioning your authority is the same as questioning God.

That is not a flaw in the system. For the wrong kind of person, that is the system working exactly as designed.

The Dark Tetrad

In 2013, psychologist Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia published research identifying a cluster of four personality traits that travel together in the most dangerous people most of us will ever encounter.

He called it the Dark Tetrad.

The four traits are narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism. Each one is distinct. But they share a common core: the willingness to use other people without remorse. And while anyone with these traits can cause damage in any environment, church gives them something no other institution provides. A room full of people who are trained to trust without verification, forgive without accountability, and submit to authority without question.

In 2017, psychologists Pawe Lowicki and Marcin Zajenkowski published a study titled “No Empathy for People nor for God,” examining the relationship between the Dark Triad and religiosity. Their findings added a critical layer to the picture. Dark personality types are not necessarily less religious than anyone else. But they are differently religious. Their relationship to faith is instrumental, not devotional. They use the language and the rituals for what those things provide: access, trust, authority, and cover.

The study found that narcissism specifically predicts higher extrinsic religious orientation. That means narcissists are drawn to religion not because they believe in it, but because they can use it. The faith is not the destination. The faith is the vehicle.

This is the difference that determines everything. There are two types of religious people. There are people who go to church because they believe, and their belief is real, personal, and costs them something. And then there are people who go to church for what it gives them.

The Dark Tetrad is not interested in what faith costs. It is interested in what faith pays.

1. The Narcissist

The narcissist does not go to church to worship God. The narcissist goes to church to be worshipped.

Psychologist Otto Kernberg at Cornell University spent decades studying a specific type of person: the one who poisons every relationship they enter and never once considers the possibility that they are the problem. His work on pathological narcissism became foundational to how we understand the disorder.

Narcissism is the belief that you are better than everyone else, built on a foundation of the deepest insecurity a person can carry. A narcissist survives on what psychologists call narcissistic supply: the praise, attention, and admiration they extract from other people. Without that supply, they do not just feel sad. They feel like they are disappearing. Their entire identity depends on other people constantly telling them they are special. When the supply stops, the narcissist does not reflect. The narcissist panics. And they will do anything to get that supply flowing again.

The majority of narcissists were shaped by authoritarian parenting. A home where being wrong was punished. Where showing vulnerability was dangerous. Where the only way to survive was to perform and never question the person in charge. That defense system does not shut off when they grow up. It just finds a new stage.

Church is the perfect stage.

Church gives a narcissist a title. Elder. Deacon. Youth pastor. Ministry leader. Instant respect, instant authority, zero qualifications. They do not have to build anything. They do not have to earn anything. They just have to perform belief convincingly enough.

And when someone starts to see through the performance, the narcissist does what narcissists always do. They attack. They label the person who saw through them as divisive, as prideful, as being used by the enemy. They turn the congregation against the person who asked the hard question. The person who saw what was behind the mask ends up leaving the church wondering what they did wrong.

Marriages end. Friendships break. Families split apart. The narcissist eventually destroys everyone close enough to see the real person underneath. Everyone else only sees the performance and thinks the narcissist is wonderful.

So the victim can never get anyone to believe them. And the victim walks away thinking it was their fault.

That is not a side effect of narcissism. That is how narcissism works.

2. The Machiavellian

The Machiavellian does not go to church because they believe. They go because a church is full of people who have been trained to trust without asking questions.

In 1970, psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis at Columbia University published a landmark study identifying a personality type built entirely around manipulation and strategic control. They called it Machiavellianism. The belief that the world is a game of power and the only real morality is winning.

Christie and Geis developed the MACH-IV scale, a personality inventory that measured how closely a person’s thinking aligned with the political philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli: use people when it serves you, discard them when it does not, and never let guilt slow you down. Their research showed that high scorers were not angrier or more hostile than anyone else. They were simply better at reading people and more willing to exploit what they found.

A Machiavellian does not want money or fame for its own sake. They want to know they outsmarted you. The win is the drug. The manipulation is the high. And church gives them a room full of people who will never even know they lost.

A congregation is taught that questioning leadership is a sign of weak faith. That forgiveness is mandatory. That doubt is dangerous. A Machiavellian hears all of that and sees a room full of people who will believe anything they are told, forgive anything they do, and never ask a hard question.

They know the language. They quote the verses. They cry during prayer. They volunteer for every mission trip. And while they are doing all of it, they are calculating who trusts them enough to be used.

And then they use them. They borrow money they never intend to pay back from a family that cannot afford it. They seduce a vulnerable person and quote scripture to keep them silent. They steal from the offering plate and blame it on poor bookkeeping. They build alliances within the leadership and eliminate anyone who threatens their position.

The Machiavellian does not exploit strangers. They exploit the people who trust them the most. And no institution on earth manufactures trust faster than a church.

3. The Psychopath

The psychopath does not go to church because they care about other people. They go because church gives them moral cover for the fact that they never have.

Psychologist Robert Hare at the University of British Columbia spent decades studying people who feel nothing for others. His Psychopathy Checklist became the standard clinical tool for identifying the trait. Hare’s research showed that psychopathy is not rage. It is not chaos. It is the complete absence of empathy, operating behind a mask of normalcy that most people never see through.

In a typical brain, when you see someone suffering, a signal fires. It is automatic. It is involuntary. That signal is what makes cruelty feel wrong. In a psychopathic brain, that signal is absent. Other people’s pain produces no internal response. There is nothing to overcome. Nothing to rationalize. The suffering of others is simply neutral information, no different from the weather report.

Church is the ideal hiding place for a psychopath because church measures character by what people say, not by what they do. If you say you love God, then you love God. If you say you have been saved, then you have been saved. Nobody checks. There is no verification system. There is no audit.

Psychopaths are very good at pretending. They learn what face to make when someone is crying. They learn what words to say when someone is grieving. They perform caring perfectly. Not because they feel it. Because the performance gets them access.

They counsel struggling marriages and use what they learn to manipulate both sides. They lead youth groups and identify the most vulnerable kids for exploitation. They gain the trust of families and use that trust as a weapon.

None of it is real. Families are destroyed. Children are damaged for life. And the psychopath moves on to the next church and does it all over again.

Nobody suspects because church taught them that a person who speaks the language of faith must have the heart to match.

4. The Sadist

The sadist does not go to church to help people. They go because church gives them authority to hurt people and call it God’s will.

In 2013, psychologists Erin Buckels and Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia published research identifying a fourth dark personality trait that had been overlooked for decades. They called it everyday sadism. The enjoyment of causing pain or humiliation to other people.

Their study used a bug-killing paradigm in the laboratory. Subjects were given the option to kill insects using a modified coffee grinder. The sadists volunteered at higher rates. But the critical finding came in the second study. When aggression required effort, only sadists were willing to work for the opportunity to hurt an innocent person. Psychopaths will cause harm when it is easy and convenient. Sadists will go out of their way to cause harm because the act itself is the reward.

Unlike psychopaths, who feel nothing, sadists feel everything. That is what makes them worse. They feel the pleasure. They seek it out. They need it.

In the real world, a sadist has to hide what they enjoy. Church gives them somewhere to put it.

A pastor who publicly shames a member for sin is exercising authority. A church leader who interrogates a young woman about her sexual history is doing accountability. An elder who disciplines a family for questioning leadership is protecting the flock. A youth pastor who uses fear of eternal damnation to control teenagers is saving souls.

Every one of those acts involves power over a vulnerable person. Every one of them is protected by the authority of the institution.

A study examining clergy who perpetrated abuse found that the Aggressive/Sadistic scale was the only personality measure that consistently distinguished clergy who sexually abused children from all other clergy groups. Not narcissism. Not psychopathy. Sadism. The one trait defined by taking pleasure in someone else’s pain.

The sadist who publicly humiliates a congregation member is not rebuking sin. They are enjoying it. People leave traumatized. Teenagers develop anxiety disorders. Women carry shame for decades. And the sadist sleeps soundly because the congregation thanked them for it.

The sadist does not have to hide what they enjoy. They just have to call it ministry.

The System That Protects All Four

These four predators are not an unfortunate accident. They are a predictable consequence of a system that was built without safeguards.

Church has one feature that no other institution in America has: mandatory forgiveness.

A Machiavellian gets caught stealing. They cry at the altar. The congregation forgives. They start again on Monday.

A psychopath gets caught manipulating a family. They quote scripture about grace. The congregation forgives. They start again on Monday.

A narcissist gets confronted about their behavior. They reframe the confrontation as an attack on their faith. The person who confronted them gets labeled as the problem.

A sadist gets called out for cruelty. They call it accountability and discipline. The congregation thanks them for their courage.

Forgiveness in these hands is not a path to redemption. It is a get-out-of-jail-free card. And they will use it every single time.

Church is the only institution in America where the barriers to power are low, the access to vulnerable people is high, and the accountability is functionally nonexistent.

These people did not find God. They found a room full of people who are religiously obligated to trust them.

They are praying with you while they plan on preying on you.

Sources

Paulhus, D. L. (2014). Toward a Taxonomy of Dark Personalities. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23(6), 421-426.

Buckels, E. E., Jones, D. N., & Paulhus, D. L. (2013). Behavioral Confirmation of Everyday Sadism. Psychological Science, 24(11), 2201-2209.

Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism. Jason Aronson.

Christie, R., & Geis, F. L. (1970). Studies in Machiavellianism. Academic Press.

Hare, R. D. (1993). Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Guilford Press.

Lowicki, P., & Zajenkowski, M. (2017). No Empathy for People nor for God: The Relationship Between the Dark Triad, Religiosity and Empathy. Personality and Individual Differences, 115, 169-173.

Plante, T. G., & McChesney, K. L. (2011). Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church: A Decade of Crisis, 2002-2012. Praeger.

Langlois, N. E. I., & Bhate, S. R. (2017). Between the Pew and the Pulpit: Can Personality Measures Help Identify Sexually Abusive Clergy? Sexual Abuse, 31(2), 187-207.

In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University published a book that would win him his second Pulitzer Prize. It was called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And it answered a question that most people were afraid to ask out loud.

Why do so many Americans hate educated people?

It had nothing to do with intelligence.

It was about resentment.

Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it.” He found that Americans did not distrust experts because experts were wrong. They distrusted experts because expertise felt like a social slight. The diploma on your wall is a mirror. It reminds people of a path they did not take. And instead of sitting with that feeling, they attack the path itself.

This is not new. Hofstadter traced this pattern all the way back to the earliest days of American evangelical Christianity, which valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.

He argued that America’s Protestant traditions would always be fertile ground for anti-intellectualism to take root. And he was right.

The Data Backs It Up

In 2020, researcher Eric Merkley published a study in Public Opinion Quarterly using the General Social Survey and a survey of 3,600 Americans. He wanted to test what happens when you show anti-intellectual people expert consensus on issues like climate change, nuclear power, and public health.

The results were stunning.

People who scored highest in anti-intellectualism did not just reject the expert consensus. They actually increased their opposition. The more evidence you showed them, the harder they pushed back. Showing them facts made them worse, not better.

Merkley also found a direct connection between anti-intellectualism and populism, the worldview that sees political conflict as a war between ordinary citizens and a privileged elite. When he exposed people to populist rhetoric, even rhetoric that had nothing to do with experts, it activated anti-intellectual attitudes in how they processed expert information.

In other words, every time a politician calls a scientist an elitist or a professor a brainwasher, it primes the audience to reject whatever that expert says next. The content does not matter. The distrust has already been triggered.

The Education Gap in American Politics

The 2024 election confirmed what researchers have been tracking for years. According to Pew Research Center, voters with a four-year college degree favored Kamala Harris by 16 percentage points. Voters without a college degree favored Donald Trump by 14 points.

That 16-point gap among college graduates was not a fluke. It was part of a trend that has been widening since 2016. Pew found that the gap in partisanship between college graduates and those without a degree has been wider since 2017 than at any previous point in their surveys dating back to the 1990s.

Voters with postgraduate degrees favored Harris by roughly two to one. The more education someone had, the less likely they were to support the Republican candidate.

This is not an accident. This is the result of decades of anti-intellectual messaging that has turned education itself into a partisan issue.

The Hypocrisy

Republican-controlled states have been aggressively gutting public education through voucher programs, book bans, and funding cuts. House Republicans proposed slashing education funding by 11 percent in their 2025 budget. Multiple Republican senators have called public schools “cesspools of Marxist indoctrination.”

And yet many of the same politicians who attack higher education attended Ivy League schools themselves. They send their children to elite private institutions while telling their voters that college is worthless.

They send their kids to Ivy League schools and tell you college is a scam.

This is not a contradiction. It is a strategy. An educated population asks harder questions, demands accountability, and is less susceptible to manipulation. Anti-intellectualism does not exist because leaders believe education is bad. It exists because leaders know education is powerful and they would prefer you not have access to it.

Why This Matters

Hofstadter saw all of this coming over sixty years ago. He watched demagogues use anti-intellectualism as a weapon during the McCarthy era. He saw how resentment of “the experts” could be channeled into political power. And he warned that it would happen again.

It is happening right now.

They told you being stupid was patriotic. And while you were burning books, their kids were reading them at Harvard.

Sources

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Alfred A. Knopf.

Merkley, E. (2020). Anti-Intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(1), 24-48.

Pew Research Center. (2025). How Voting Patterns Changed in the 2024 Election.

Pew Research Center. (2024). Partisanship by Race, Ethnicity, and Education.

You have tried everything.

You showed them evidence. They dismissed it. You showed them video. They said it was fake. You showed them court documents. They said the courts were corrupt. You showed them the conspiracy theory falling apart and they found another one to replace it.

Nothing works.

And it is not because you are doing it wrong. It is because what you are up against is not a difference of opinion. It is a psychological architecture that was built, layer by layer, to make sure the truth never gets in.

Here are the seven psychological reasons it does not work, and the research behind each one.

1. The Word Block

You have seen this happen in real time. You make a point. A good one. Sourced. Specific. Undeniable. And the person you are talking to just stops listening. Their eyes glaze. A phrase comes out of their mouth before your sentence even finishes landing.

Fake news. Witch hunt. Deep state. TDS.

This is not a rebuttal. This is a reflex.

In 1961, psychiatrist Robert Lifton published one of the most important studies ever conducted on psychological control. He had spent years interviewing survivors of Chinese Communist thought reform programs. What he documented was not just political indoctrination. It was a systematic method for shutting down the human capacity to think.

Lifton identified eight criteria of thought reform. One of them was what he called thought-terminating cliches. These are short, emotionally loaded phrases that a person learns to deploy the instant an uncomfortable thought begins to form. The phrase fires before the thought can complete itself. The brain shuts down the process and the person moves on, never having engaged with the idea at all.

The mechanism works through repetition. A leader says the phrase over and over. He attaches it to fear and anger. He ties it to the group’s identity. Eventually the phrase becomes automatic. The follower does not choose to say it. The follower’s brain produces it the way your hand pulls back from a hot stove. It is a trained response, not a decision.

Trump said “fake news” over 2,000 times in his first term alone. That was not because he believed it every time. It was because repetition is how you install a thought-terminating cliche. Say it enough times, in enough emotional contexts, and the phrase becomes a wall that activates the moment threatening information appears.

This is why a Trump supporter can kill hours of careful argument with two words. The argument never reaches the part of the brain that evaluates it. The wall goes up first.

Lifton documented this same technique in every cult he studied. It works because the person using it has no idea it is happening. A Trump supporter who says “fake news” genuinely believes they are thinking. They are not. They are running a program someone else installed.

Thought-terminating cliches did not create hateful people. They turned off the part of the brain that used to feel guilty about being hateful.

2. The Significance Quest

Before Trump, a large number of these people were invisible.

Their towns were losing population. Their industries were gone. Their communities were hollowing out. Nobody in media talked to them. Nobody in politics visited them. They did not matter to anyone and they knew it.

Then a man showed up on a golden escalator and said: I see you. You matter. You are the real Americans.

He was lying, of course. But the lie filled a void that nothing else was filling.

In 2014, psychologist Arie Kruglanski at the University of Maryland published a study on why ordinary people join extremist movements. His research spanned multiple countries and included interviews with former terrorists, political radicals, and members of violent groups. What he found surprised nearly everyone in the field.

The primary driver of radicalization was not ideology. It was not hatred. It was not even politics.

The primary driver was the need to feel like your life matters.

Kruglanski called this significance quest theory. The theory identifies three ingredients that push a person toward extremism: a need for personal significance that is not being met, a narrative that tells the person how to earn that significance, and a network of people who reinforce both the need and the narrative.

When someone feels that their life has no meaning, they become vulnerable to anyone who offers them a mission. The content of the mission is almost secondary. What matters is the feeling of purpose it provides.

Trump gave millions of people that feeling. He told them they were not just voters. They were patriots fighting a secret war against forces trying to destroy the country. Conspiracy thinking amplified the feeling even further. They were not just supporters. They were the ones who could see what everyone else was too blind to see.

A person working a dead-end job with no direction gets handed a red hat and told he is saving America from a global conspiracy. That is not politics. That is the first time that person has ever felt like his life had a purpose.

When you try to get through to a Trump supporter, you are not asking them to change a political opinion. You are asking them to become a nobody again. You are asking them to go back to the emptiness that existed before Trump filled it.

They would rather believe the lie than go back to being invisible.

3. The Need to Belong

As a person goes deeper into MAGA, something else starts to happen. They lose people.

Friends stop calling. Family members pull away. Coworkers avoid them at lunch. Holiday dinners become arguments. Relationships that took decades to build collapse in a single conversation.

And every one of those people gets replaced by another Trump supporter.

In 1995, psychologists Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University and Mark Leary at Wake Forest University published one of the most cited papers in social psychology. They reviewed decades of research on human connection and concluded that the need to belong is one of the most powerful drives in the human brain. It is not a preference. It is a requirement. People will tolerate almost anything, including abuse, deception, and the destruction of their own interests, to maintain the feeling of belonging to a group.

Baumeister and Leary showed that when belonging is threatened, the psychological consequences are severe. Anxiety. Depression. Physical health decline. The brain processes social exclusion using the same neural pathways it uses to process physical pain. Being cut off from a group does not just feel bad. It registers in the body as an injury.

Now think about what this means for someone whose entire social world has been reorganized around MAGA. Their friends are MAGA. Their family members who still talk to them are MAGA. Their social media is MAGA. Their news is MAGA. Their sense of humor, their language, their daily rituals are all organized around the group.

The shared secret is the glue. Conspiracy thinking is not a bug of this community. It is the bonding mechanism. They share the same theories. They repeat the same phrases. They tell each other they are the smart ones, the awake ones, the ones who figured out what everyone else cannot see.

That bond is stronger than friendship. It has to be, because for most of these people it is the only bond they have left.

You are not asking a Trump supporter to reconsider a belief. You are asking that person to lose every friend they have. And the research says the human brain will choose the lie over loneliness almost every time.

4. The Sunk Cost of Shame

A Trump supporter does not just defend Trump. They defend every single thing they have ever said and done in Trump’s name.

Every argument. Every Thanksgiving dinner they ruined. Every friendship they blew up. Every post they made. Every yard sign they planted. Every dollar they donated.

Admitting Trump is wrong does not just mean changing a vote. It means admitting the last ten years of their life were wrong. That they were the problem. That everyone who tried to warn them was right.

And they cannot handle that.

In the 1970s, psychologist Barry Staw at UC Berkeley studied what happens when people invest heavily in a failing course of action. He gave research subjects the choice to either cut their losses or double down after receiving clear evidence that their initial decision was failing. The rational choice was to stop. Almost nobody stopped.

Staw found that when people have invested significant resources, time, emotion, money, or reputation into a decision, they do not pull back when the decision starts to fail. They escalate. They put in more. They commit harder. Because stopping would mean the original investment was wasted. And admitting waste triggers a psychological pain that most people will do almost anything to avoid.

Staw called this escalation of commitment.

Applied to MAGA, the mechanism is devastating. Every act a Trump supporter has committed in service of the movement becomes a weight that holds them in place. The more they have sacrificed, the harder it becomes to leave. Not because the movement is getting better. Because leaving would force them to confront the full cost of what they have already done.

They cut off a sister over a political argument. They screamed at their kids for questioning Trump. They posted things online that are now permanently attached to their name. They donated money they could not afford. They repeated lies that hurt people they claimed to love.

If they stop now, every one of those acts stands alone. Unjustified. Unforgivable.

But if they keep going, the original acts become necessary steps in a larger mission. The mission is not over yet. There is still a chance to be right. As long as they never stop, they never have to look back.

The truth does not set these people free. The truth makes them a fool. And their ego cannot survive that.

5. Mutual Destruction

Cults do not just make you believe. Cults make you participate.

This is a design feature, not an accident. The deeper a person’s participation, the harder it becomes to leave. Because leaving does not just mean walking away from a belief. It means turning on yourself.

In 2009, psychologist William Swann at the University of Texas published a study on what happens when people share extreme experiences with a group. Swann found that once people go through something intense together, their personal identity fuses with the group identity. The boundary between who they are as an individual and who they are as a member of the group disappears.

Swann called this identity fusion. Once fusion happens, an attack on the group feels like an attack on the self. Leaving the group feels like losing yourself.

MAGA engineered this on January 6th. Thousands of people committed federal crimes together in a failed insurrection at the Capitol. Some of them streamed it live while they were doing it. They implicated themselves and each other in crimes that carry years in prison.

That is not an accident. That is how shared complicity works. Once everyone has blood on their hands, nobody can leave without exposing themselves.

But January 6th was just the most visible moment. The fusion started much earlier. First they supported Trump. Then they defended his lies. Then they excused his cruelty. Then they attacked anyone who questioned him. Then they spread conspiracy theories that got people killed. Each step bonded them deeper into the group.

They go down, you go down. That is the arrangement.

And where was the leader on the day of the failed insurrection? Watching it on television.

6. The Propaganda Machine

Every single day, Fox News, Newsmax, Truth Social, and right-wing podcasts tell Trump supporters the same story with the same villains.

The media is corrupt. The courts are rigged. The Democrats are evil. Republicans who turn on Trump are traitors.

The same message. Every day. From every source they trust.

In the 1960s, communications researcher George Gerbner at the University of Pennsylvania began studying what happens when people hear the same message over and over again from every source they consume. Gerbner spent decades on this research. What he found was that repeated exposure to a consistent narrative does not just inform people. It replaces what people believe is real.

Gerbner called this cultivation theory. The theory shows that when every source a person trusts tells the same story, the story stops being a story. It becomes reality. The person’s own experience stops mattering. The message itself becomes their lived truth.

This is why real news reporting something bad about Trump registers as “fake news” to his supporters. Their entire information environment has already told them the media is the enemy. When courts rule against Trump, those are corrupt judges. When Republicans break with Trump, those are traitors. There is no outside source they trust anymore.

Every piece of evidence that proves them wrong just proves the conspiracy is bigger than they thought.

Right-wing media is the machine that keeps the cult alive. It is the delivery system for the thought-terminating phrases. It reinforces the conspiracy theories. It feeds the feeling of significance. It keeps every single psychological lock on this door sealed shut, every single day.

Without right-wing media, the whole thing falls apart.

7. The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The least informed Trump supporters are always the most confident.

They have never read a court filing. They have never read the Constitution. They have never studied history, psychology, or political science. But they will tell you with absolute certainty that they understand what is really going on better than every expert in the country.

In 1999, psychologists David Dunning at Cornell University and Justin Kruger at the University of Illinois ran a series of experiments testing people on logic, grammar, and humor. They found a pattern that has become one of the most referenced findings in modern psychology.

The people who scored the lowest rated their own abilities the highest. The people who scored the highest rated themselves average.

The reason is almost elegant in how simple it is. Recognizing incompetence requires the same skills as competence. If you do not know enough about a subject to evaluate the subject, you also do not know enough to evaluate yourself. You do not know what you do not know. And because you do not know what you do not know, you assume you know everything.

This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect. And it shows up everywhere in conservative politics.

Doctors spend twelve years studying medicine. A Trump supporter spent twenty minutes on Facebook and now they have “done their own research.” Climate scientists have decades of data. A Trump supporter saw snow yesterday and thinks that settles the debate. Virologists devoted their careers to studying pandemics. A Trump supporter watched a YouTube video and decided COVID was a hoax.

Real experts doubt themselves constantly. They know how complex things are. They understand the limits of what they know. When they speak, they use careful language. They say things like “the data suggests” or “based on current evidence.” Trump supporters hear that measured language and interpret it as weakness. If the expert is not 100% certain, then it is not true.

Meanwhile, the person who knows the least speaks with the most confidence. And right-wing media keeps giving them a platform to do it.

Why None of This Has Worked

If you have been trying to get through to someone you love and nothing has worked, it is not because you failed. It is because you are fighting against seven psychological barriers that were designed, whether intentionally or not, to keep that person inside the system.

You are not asking a Trump supporter to change their mind about politics. You are asking them to lose their sense of importance, their purpose, their community, their identity, and their certainty about things they have staked their entire social life on.

None of these people are strong enough to survive that. So they choose to believe the lie. And they will keep choosing the lie until the lie collapses under its own weight and brings them back to reality.

And when it does collapse, they will not admit they were wrong. They will not apologize. They will not take responsibility for the damage they caused. They will do what they have always done. They will quietly take the hat off. Delete the posts. Try to walk back into polite society like none of it ever happened.

They think we will just let them back in with no accountability.

They are wrong.

Sources

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

Kruglanski, A. W., Gelfand, M. J., Belanger, J. J., Sheveland, A., Hetiarachchi, M., & Gunaratna, R. (2014). The Psychology of Radicalization and Deradicalization: How Significance Quest Impacts Violent Extremism. Political Psychology, 35(Suppl. 1), 69-93.

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.

Staw, B. M. (1976). Knee-Deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(1), 27-44.

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

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. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Dunning, D., & Kruger, J. (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.

You’ve met this person. Everyone has.

They are never wrong. Nothing is ever their fault. When something goes bad in their life, there is always someone else to blame. A coworker. An ex. The system. The government. A secret group of powerful people pulling strings behind the scenes.

They do not just believe conspiracy theories. They need them.

What Narcissism Actually Is

Most people think narcissism is about being full of yourself. Loving the mirror. Thinking you are better than everyone.

That is the surface. Underneath it is the opposite.

Narcissism is a personality trait built on a fake image. A narcissist needs to be seen as smarter, more important, and more special than the people around them. Not because they actually are. Because without that image they have nothing. No real self esteem. No real identity. Just a deep constant insecurity they spend every waking moment trying to hide.

They will lie. They will manipulate. They will destroy relationships. All to keep the image intact.

And the single biggest threat to that image is being wrong. Because being wrong means everyone sees what they have been hiding. It cracks the mask. And once the mask cracks, they have no idea who they are underneath it.

That is why a narcissist will fight harder to win an argument than they will to save a marriage. The argument is not about the topic. It is about survival. If they lose, the image dies. And the image is all they have.

What the Research Found

In 2016, a political psychologist named Aleksandra Cichocka at the University of Kent ran three studies on what kind of person is most likely to believe in conspiracy theories.

She did not look at education level. She did not look at intelligence. She looked at personality.

What she found was simple. The higher someone scored in narcissism, the more conspiracy theories they believed. Not slightly more. Significantly more. Across all three studies the pattern held every time.

But here is where it gets interesting. It was not high self esteem driving the belief. It was high narcissism combined with low self esteem. That combination is the key. People who need to project superiority but who deep down do not believe it themselves. People who are constantly performing confidence they do not actually feel.

Those are the people most likely to believe that the election was stolen. That the deep state is real. That the media is lying to them. That secret forces are controlling everything behind the scenes.

She called the mechanism behind it avoidance coping. When a narcissist is faced with something stressful, something that threatens the image, they do not deal with it. They avoid it. And the easiest way to avoid being wrong is to find someone else to blame.

Why Conspiracy Theories Are the Perfect Tool for a Narcissist

Think about what a conspiracy theory actually offers.

It gives you an enemy you can never disprove. You cannot prove the deep state does not exist. You cannot prove that a secret group of elites is not pulling strings. The conspiracy lives in the gaps between what can be proven and what can be imagined. And that is exactly where a narcissist needs it to live.

It removes all accountability. The election was not lost because your candidate was unpopular. It was stolen. The economy is not failing because of bad policy. It was sabotaged. Your life is not hard because of choices you made. Powerful people are keeping you down on purpose.

Every conspiracy theory follows the same structure. It takes the blame off the believer and puts it on an invisible force that can never be caught, never be confronted, and never be disproven.

It makes you the hero. This is the part people miss. A conspiracy theory does not just remove blame. It flips the story. Now you are not the person who got fooled. You are the one who sees what everyone else is too blind to see. You are the brave one. The one who figured it out. The one who is not a sheep.

For a narcissist that is everything. It is victimhood and superiority at the same time. You are being persecuted by powerful forces AND you are smarter than everyone around you for seeing it. That is the narcissist’s dream. A story where you are both the underdog and the genius.

How This Plays Out in MAGA

Watch what happens when you challenge a MAGA supporter with facts.

You show them evidence that the election was not stolen. They do not engage with the evidence. They attack the source. The media is biased. The courts are corrupt. The fact checkers are in on it.

You show them data that contradicts their position. They do not update their position. They dig in. They accuse you of being brainwashed. Of watching the wrong news. Of not doing your own research.

You ask them to consider the possibility that they were wrong about one thing. Just one thing. And they react like you just threatened their life.

Because you did. Not their physical life. Their psychological one. The image. The mask. The version of themselves they built out of borrowed confidence and conspiracy theories. That is what you are threatening. And they will burn every relationship they have before they let it fall.

That is avoidance coping on a national scale. Millions of people using conspiracy theories to protect an image that reality already destroyed.

An entire movement of people who would rather believe the election was stolen, the courts are corrupt, the media is fake, and the entire world is lying to them, than admit they picked the wrong guy.

What Happens Next

Here is the prediction. And it is not hard to make because narcissists are predictable.

When this era is over, when the conspiracies have collapsed under the weight of reality, not a single one of these people will say they were wrong. They will pretend it never happened. They will quietly take the bumper stickers off the truck and act like they were never that deep into it.

And if you bring it up, they will get angry at you for bringing it up. They will say you are living in the past. They will say you are the one who is obsessed. They will make you the problem for remembering what they did.

Because that is what narcissists do. They do not reflect. They do not grow. They do not take accountability. They move on to the next conspiracy that protects them from having to sit with who they actually are.

Narcissists love conspiracy theories because it means it is never their fault.

And that is exactly why it keeps happening.

Sources

Cichocka, A., Marchlewska, M., & Golec de Zavala, A. (2016). Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Predict Conspiracy Beliefs? Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and the Endorsement of Conspiracy Theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(2), 157-166.

Marchlewska, M., Green, R., Cichocka, A., Molenda, Z., & Douglas, K.M. (2022). From bad to worse: Avoidance coping with stress increases conspiracy beliefs. British Journal of Social Psychology.

Podsiadłowski, M. et al. (2025). Avoidance coping explains the link between narcissism and counternormative tendencies. British Journal of Social Psychology.

A woman on TikTok just shared something she overheard. A conservative woman said she would happily give up her own right to vote as long as it meant liberal women could never vote again.

Read that again.

She did not say she wanted better schools. She did not say she wanted lower grocery prices. She did not say she wanted safer neighborhoods. She said she would destroy her own political power to make sure other women lose theirs.

That is not politics. That is psychology.

In 2018, researchers Mark Setzler and Alixandra Yanus at High Point University published a study on why women voted for Trump in 2016. They studied over four thousand Americans and asked a simple question. What actually predicts whether a woman votes for Trump?

Was it her income? No. Her religion? No. Her education level? No. Her region of the country? No.

What predicted a woman’s vote for Trump more than any other factor, more than her political party, more than her economic situation, more than any demographic characteristic, was two things.

Racial resentment. And hostile sexism.

Not sexism toward men. Sexism toward other women.

Racial resentment is a specific psychological scale used by researchers to measure attitudes toward racial equality. It is not the same as open racism. Most people who score high on the racial resentment scale would never say they are racist. They say things like “minorities get too many advantages” or “if they just worked harder they would be fine.” They frame it as fairness. But the research shows it is resentment toward people of color gaining ground.

There are 47 million white women in America without a college degree. Over 60 percent of them voted for Trump.

The first reason these women voted for Trump is they believed people of color do not deserve what they have. That belief alone made them overwhelmingly more likely to vote for him.

The second reason is they resented other women gaining power. Their status comes from their husband, their church, and the social pecking order staying exactly where it is. When another woman succeeds outside that system, when she builds her own career, earns her own money, and does not need a man to define her worth, it proves there was another option the whole time. And they never took it.

That is the woman on that TikTok. She just told the entire internet she would destroy herself to destroy other women. She is not voting for better healthcare. She is not voting for lower prices. She is not voting for her children’s future. She is voting to make sure other women fail.

She would rather lose her own rights than watch a liberal woman keep hers.

That is not strength. That is not conviction. That is a woman so threatened by other women’s freedom that she would burn her own house down to make sure her neighbor’s burns too.

And she is not alone. There are millions of her. Women who see other women succeeding and feel something break inside them. Not inspiration. Not admiration. Rage. Because that success is proof that the life they chose was not the only option. And sitting with that proof is more painful than giving up the right to vote.

Trump did not create these women. He just gave them permission to say out loud what they have always felt. That other women getting ahead is a personal attack on the life they built. And they will sacrifice anything, including their own power, to stop it.

That is who these women are. And they just told us.

Sources

Setzler, M., & Yanus, A.B. (2018). Why did women vote for Donald Trump? PS: Political Science & Politics, 51(3), 523-527.

Kim, C., & Junn, J. (2024). Whitewashing women voters: Intersectionality and partisan vote choice in the 2020 US Presidential Election. Politics & Gender.

Frasure-Yokley, L. (2018). Choosing the velvet glove: Women voters, ambivalent sexism, and vote choice in 2016. Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics, 3(1), 3-25.

Conservative culture rewards mediocre people.

There is a psychological reason for that.

Becoming exceptional takes years. It takes discipline. It takes failure after failure after failure and the willingness to keep going. It takes decades of studying, practicing, earning, and proving yourself before anyone hands you authority over anything.

Becoming mediocre takes no effort at all. You just show up and stay exactly who you already are.

But mediocre people want the rewards exceptional people earn. They want the respect. They want the authority. They want the status. They want people to listen to them and take them seriously. They want all of it. They just do not want to do the work it takes to deserve any of it.

So they look for shortcuts.

In 2004 psychologist W. Keith Campbell at the University of Georgia ran nine studies on people who believe they deserve special treatment without earning it. Campbell found that entitled individuals expect favorable outcomes regardless of actual effort or contribution. They do not believe the rules apply to them. They believe they deserve more than everyone else for doing the same work or less. They expect special treatment not because of anything they have accomplished but because of who they believe they are.

Campbell called this psychological entitlement.

Campbell also found that psychological entitlement is correlated negatively with two of the Big Five personality traits: agreeableness and emotional stability. Entitled people are more disagreeable, more emotionally volatile, and more likely to respond with hostility when they do not get what they believe they deserve. They are not just lazy. They are hostile about being called lazy. They do not just expect rewards they did not earn. They get angry when those rewards do not show up.

That is conservative culture in a single research finding.

Conservative culture has built an entire ecosystem of shortcuts that let mediocre people feel powerful without earning a single thing.

Conspiracy theories are a shortcut to feeling special. A guy who watched three YouTube videos on his lunch break thinks he knows more about medicine than a doctor who spent twelve years in training. A woman who read a Facebook post thinks she understands immunology better than the scientists who spent their careers developing vaccines. They did not study anything. They did not earn any expertise. They found a shortcut that lets them feel smarter than the people who actually did the work, and they grabbed it with both hands.

Law enforcement is a shortcut to power over people. Two months of training and you have physical authority over everyone around you. You carry a weapon. You give orders. People have to comply. In almost every other profession on earth, authority comes from years of demonstrated competence. In law enforcement, authority comes from a badge. That is why it attracts the kind of person who wants power but has no interest in earning it the way a surgeon, a lawyer, or an engineer earns it.

MAGA is a shortcut to being your hateful self in public. Before Trump, these people had to keep their ugliest impulses behind closed doors. They could not say the things they wanted to say at work. They could not behave the way they wanted to behave in public. Trump removed that barrier. He showed them that you can be openly racist, openly cruel, openly hostile, and still hold the highest office in the country. MAGA did not create hateful people. MAGA gave hateful people a permission slip.

Religion is a shortcut to moral authority over people. You do not need to demonstrate moral character. You do not need to prove that you are a good person through your actions. You just need to claim that God is on your side. Disagree with a religious person and you are not disagreeing with a person. You are disagreeing with God. And nobody argues with God. That is the most powerful shortcut of all, because it makes the person holding it immune to criticism. You cannot challenge someone who has placed an invisible deity between you and them.

Every single one of these shortcuts does the same thing. It gives mediocre people a feeling they did not earn. The feeling of being special. The feeling of being powerful. The feeling of being right. The feeling of being morally superior. Without doing a single day of the actual work it takes to deserve any of those feelings.

These people do not want mastery. They want the feeling mastery gives you. They do not want wisdom. They want certainty. They do not want respect. They want obedience. They do not want to become extraordinary. They want the rewards extraordinary people get while remaining exactly who they are. Without doing any of the work it takes to be extraordinary.

Campbell’s research makes it clear why this pattern is so destructive. Entitled people do not just passively expect things they did not earn. They actively punish people who challenge that expectation. They respond to criticism with aggression. They respond to accountability with hostility. They respond to being told they are wrong with rage. Because deep down, they know they did not earn it. And that knowledge is the most threatening thing in the world to them.

And the problem is that confident idiots now have bigger platforms than qualified experts. A podcaster with no credentials reaches more people in a week than a climate scientist reaches in a career. A conspiracy theorist on YouTube has more subscribers than a peer-reviewed journal has readers. The people who did the work are drowned out by the people who found the shortcut.

They did not do the work. They never did the work. They found shortcuts that let them skip the work and still feel like they belong at the table with people who did.

That is conservative culture. Shortcuts for people who never earned a single thing in their life. And they will fight to the death to make sure nobody takes those shortcuts away from them. Because without the shortcuts, they have nothing. No expertise. No authority. No moral standing. No identity.

Just a mediocre person in a mediocre life who never did the work.

And they know it.

Sources

Campbell, W. K., Bonacci, A. M., Shelton, J., Exline, J. J., & Bushman, B. J. (2004). Psychological Entitlement: Interpersonal Consequences and Validation of a Self-Report Measure. Journal of Personality Assessment, 83(1), 29-45.

Twenge, J. M. & Campbell, W. K. (2009). The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement. Free Press.

How Religious Dogma gave Us MAGA.

Are religious people less intelligent?

* Religion: An organized system of beliefs, cultural systems and worldviews that relate humanity to spirituality or moral values.

* Dogma: A specific principle, tenet or authoritative rule laid down by a religious group as immutably true and unquestionable.

In 2013, psychologist Miron Zuckerman at the University of Rochester ran one of the largest studies ever conducted on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. He did not run a single study. He ran a meta-analysis. He took decades of existing research across multiple countries and analyzed all of it together.

Every single study pointed in the same direction.

Religious people scored lower on intelligence tests than non-religious people.

Not sometimes. Not in certain countries.

Across the board.

In 2020, Zuckerman updated the analysis with new data.

Eighty-three studies. Over 90 years of research.

The correlation between intelligence and religious belief ranged from -.20 to -.25. In social science, that is not a small effect.

That is a consistent, measurable, replicated pattern that held up across nearly a century of data.

The evidence is not obtuse. Religious people are less intelligent.

So the question is why?

Zuckerman proposed three explanations.

1. Conformity

Religion requires you to accept a fixed set of beliefs. You do not get to question them. You do not get to update them. You accept the rules or you are punished.

Intelligent people resist that. They push back on authority. They ask why. They do not accept “because I said so” as a valid argument.

Religion is built on “because I said so.” God said it. The book says it. The pastor says it. End of discussion.

People who score higher on intelligence tests are more likely to reject systems that demand unquestioning obedience. They are more likely to challenge dogma. They are more likely to think for themselves.

Religious people are trained from childhood to obey authority without asking questions. That same muscle is the one that makes them follow a politician without asking questions. Same obedience. Different costume.

2. Analytical Thinking

Zuckerman’s second explanation is cognitive style. Religion runs on intuition. Gut feeling. Blind faith. Stories you are told as a child that you are expected to accept as literal truth without a single piece of evidence.

Analytical thinking directly undermines that.

When you are trained to ask for evidence, to demand proof, to test claims before accepting them, religious belief becomes harder to maintain. You cannot run a repeatable experiment on prayer. You cannot measure heaven. You cannot peer-review a miracle.

Zuckerman’s 2020 analysis found direct support for this. Analytic cognitive style partially mediated the relationship between intelligence and lower religiosity. In plain language, one of the reasons smarter people are less religious is because they think more analytically, and analytical thinking erodes belief in things that cannot be tested.

The least educated counties in America are the most religious and the most Republican.

That is not a coincidence. That’s a pattern.

3. Functional Equivalence

This is the one nobody wants to hear.

Everything religion gives you, intelligence also gives you.

Religion helps you cope with the fear of death. Intelligence reduces that fear on its own. Religion gives you a moral framework. Intelligent people develop their own moral compass without needing one handed to them from a 2,000-year-old book. Religion makes you feel worthy and significant. When you are intelligent, your accomplishments do that for you.

For people with lower intelligence, religion fills a hole. It provides meaning, structure, comfort, and a sense of purpose that they cannot generate internally.

For people with higher intelligence, that hole was never there.

Religion is not a belief system. It is a coping mechanism. And people who are smart enough to cope on their own, don’t need it.

What This Means

This is not about attacking faith for the sake of it. This is about understanding what the data actually says.

Eighty-three studies. Ninety years. Multiple countries. Every analysis pointing in the same direction.

The less intelligent you are, the more likely you are to be religious. The more religious you are, the more practiced you are at unquestioning obedience. And the more practiced you are at unquestioning obedience, the easier you are to manipulate.

Religion trains people to follow without thinking. Then a political figure shows up, lies to them every single day, and they call it faith.

It is the same pattern. Same obedience. Same refusal to question authority.

The only difference is the building they do it in.

Just because you are religious doesn’t make you less intelligent.

Dogma does make you less intelligent.

Using religion to copout on critical thinking is the problem.

Sources

Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J. A. (2013). The Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity: A Meta-Analysis and Some Proposed Explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 17(4), 325-354.

Zuckerman, M., Li, C., Lin, S., & Hall, J. A. (2020). The Negative Intelligence-Religiosity Relation: New and Confirming Evidence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(6), 856-868.

The Timeline They Don’t Want You to See

Dr. Fauci pleaded the 5th in front of Congress Wednesday July 29th. Over 100 times. And a certain segment of America is celebrating like they just won something.

They didn’t win anything. They just don’t want to talk about what actually happened.

So let’s talk about it.

Here is the timeline of what the President of the United States did while Americans were dying. Not opinions. Just dates and facts.

Pandemic Response:

December 31, 2019. China alerts the World Health Organization to a new virus.

January 22, 2020. Asked if his administration is worried, Trump says, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”

January 30th. The WHO declares a public health emergency. Trump tells a crowd in Michigan, “We think it’s going to have a very good ending for us.”

February 1st. Trump plays golf.

February 5th. German scientists produce an effective test for the virus. The WHO rolls it out across the world. The Trump administration refuses to use it. It develops its own instead. The test does not work. For weeks, no one can tell how fast the disease is spreading.

February 6th. The first American dies.

February 15th. Trump plays golf.

February 24th. Trump tweets, “The Corona virus is very much under control in the USA. Stock market starting to look very good to me.”

February 28th. At a rally in South Carolina, Trump calls the coronavirus the Democrats’ “new hoax.”

March 6th. Trump tells the nation, “Anybody that needs a test gets a test.” Within hours, emergency rooms are flooded with patients who cannot get tested.

March 7th. Trump plays golf. March 8th. Trump plays golf.

By now, South Korea has tested 189,000 people. The United States has tested 1,700. Both countries confirmed their first case on the same day.

March 13th. Trump is asked if he takes responsibility for the testing failures. “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”

A reporter asks why he abolished the White House pandemic response team in 2018. He says, “I don’t know anything about it.”

March 16th. He admits he did abolish it. Asked to rate his response, he says, “I’d rate it a 10.”

March 19th. In a recorded conversation with Bob Woodward, Trump admits he knew it was serious the whole time. “I wanted to always play it down.”

March 26th. 1,000 dead.

March 28th. 2,000 dead. It doubled in two days. Trump suggests nurses are stealing masks. “Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door?”

March 29th. Trump tweets about the TV ratings his daily briefings are getting.

April 3rd. The CDC recommends all Americans wear face masks. Trump refuses. “I just don’t want to wear one myself.”

April 6th. 10,000 dead. Trump says, “We have to open our country up.”

April 15th. 25,000 dead.

April 23rd. Trump suggests scientists look into injecting disinfectant into patients.

April 24th. 50,000 dead.

April 28th. States are reopening at Trump’s urging. None of them meet the federal criteria for doing so. Trump says, “It’s going to go away.”

April 29th. Dozens of decomposing bodies found in trucks at a Brooklyn funeral home. The director says, “Bodies are coming out of our ears.”

May 23rd. Trump plays golf. May 24th. Trump plays golf.

May 27th. 100,000 dead.

June 21st. Trump plays golf. June 27th. Trump plays golf. June 28th. Trump plays golf.

July 3rd. Trump plays golf. July 5th. Trump plays golf. July 11th. Trump plays golf.

July 12th. Florida registers over 15,000 new infections in a single day.

July 18th. Trump plays golf.

July 19th. Asked about the death toll, Trump tells Fox News, “It is what it is.” He then plays golf.

August 1st. 150,000 dead. Trump plays golf.

August 2nd. Golf. August 7th. Golf. August 15th. Golf. August 22nd. Golf. August 23rd. Golf. August 30th. Golf.

September 21st. Trump tells a rally in Ohio the virus “affects virtually nobody.”

September 22nd. 200,000 Americans are dead. One in every 1,600 people in this country.

America’s death toll was double Canada’s. Five times higher than Germany’s. 18 times higher than Australia’s. 80 times higher than South Korea’s.

The highest in the world.

Then Trump got Covid himself.

1.2 Million

That is the final number. 1.2 million Americans dead.

Trump called COVID a Democratic hoax. He refused the working test. He told you not to wear a mask. He suggested injecting disinfectant. He abolished the pandemic response team and then lied about it. He admitted on tape that he played it down on purpose. And he played golf while the bodies piled up in refrigerator trucks on the streets of New York.

That is the timeline. Those are the facts.

And Wednesday, they dragged the doctor in front of Congress.

Not the man who did all of that. The doctor who told you to wash your hands and cover your face.

They aren’t mad at Fauci because he lied to them. They are mad at Fauci because he told them the truth and they did not listen. And now they need someone to blame who is not the man they voted for.

Share this timeline. Make them read it. Every single date. Every single quote. Every single round of golf.

Because they want you to forget. And you should not let them.

Sources

Lead By Donkeys - Covid is a Hoaxhttps://www.ledbydonkeys.org/

CDC, National Center for Health Statistics, Provisional COVID-19 Mortality Surveillance, total reported deaths: 1,237,889.

NPR, “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment in Rand Paul Senate hearing,” July 29, 2026.

NBC News, “Anthony Fauci invokes Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at GOP-led Covid hearing,” July 29, 2026.

CBS News, “Sen. Paul says there’s a ‘very real chance’ Fauci could be prosecuted,” July 29, 2026.

C-SPAN, “Dr. Anthony Fauci Testifies on the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, July 29, 2026.

If you watched the video, you already know the five psychological reasons millions of people turned a scientist into the most hated man in America for telling the truth. This Substack goes deeper into every one of them and adds a sixth reason that did not fit in the script but might be the most important of all.

They released his diary. Over a thousand pages. It proved nothing. No investigation has produced evidence of wrongdoing. And they are still going after him.

1. The Expert Problem

MAGA did not start hating experts with Fauci. The hatred of expertise is older than the country itself.

Richard Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. In 1963, he published “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” a sweeping study of how educated people, scientists, and experts have been treated throughout American history. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1964 because the pattern it documented was so undeniable.

Hofstadter found that every time America faces a crisis, a specific group of people turns on the experts instead of listening to them. Not because the experts are wrong. Because the experts make them feel stupid. These people have a deep suspicion of educated people, experts, and anyone who speaks in the language of evidence and nuance.

Hofstadter traced the pattern through four domains: evangelical religion, which taught that education corrupts faith; democratic politics, which taught that expertise is elitism; business culture, which taught that practical success matters more than knowledge; and progressive education, which taught that critical thinking is less important than social adjustment.

The cycle repeats every generation. An expert says something the public does not want to hear. The public does not argue with the evidence. The public attacks the expert. McCarthy did it to academics in the 1950s. The tobacco industry did it to cancer researchers in the 1960s. Climate deniers did it to environmental scientists in the 2000s. And MAGA did it to Anthony Fauci in 2020.

Fauci is the most qualified infectious disease expert in American history. He has advised six presidents. He led the national response to HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, and COVID-19. He has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. He has published over 1,400 peer-reviewed scientific papers.

None of that matters to MAGA. In fact all of it makes them hate him more. Because in an anti-intellectual culture the more qualified you are the more threatening you become. Your expertise is not a credential. It is an insult. Every time Fauci opened his mouth he reminded millions of people that they did not understand what was happening. And they will never forgive him for it.

2. The Public Humiliation

Fauci did something that nobody in Trump’s orbit is allowed to do. He disagreed with Trump. In public. On camera. In front of the entire country.

Heinz Kohut was a psychologist at the University of Chicago who spent decades studying the inner lives of narcissists. In 1971, he published “The Analysis of the Self,” in which he introduced the concept of narcissistic injury: the intense emotional reaction a narcissist experiences when their grandiose self-image is challenged, contradicted, or humiliated.

Kohut found that narcissists do not experience disagreement the way other people do. For most people, disagreement is a difference of opinion. For a narcissist, disagreement is an existential threat. It is not about the argument. It is about the self. The narcissist’s identity is built on being right, being admired, and being in control. When someone publicly demonstrates that the narcissist is wrong, the narcissist does not process this as new information. They process it as an attack. And they respond with rage.

The timeline of Trump’s conflict with Fauci follows this pattern precisely.

On March 18, 2020, in a White House discussion about hydroxychloroquine, Fauci pushed back against Trump and his trade adviser Peter Navarro, who were promoting the drug as a treatment for COVID-19. Fauci later wrote in his diary: “I took a deep breath and said that this was wrong and should not be done.”

On March 20, 2020, at a press briefing, a reporter asked Fauci directly about the drug. Fauci said the evidence was “anecdotal.” Trump immediately stepped forward and added, “We’ll see. We’re going to know soon.” The contradiction was visible to everyone watching.

When asked by Science magazine how he handled disagreeing with Trump, Fauci said: “I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down.”

By April 2020, Trump was promoting hydroxychloroquine to his 84 million Twitter followers, calling it “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” Fauci was publicly stating that the data was “at best suggestive” and that clinical trials had shown it was “not effective.”

Trump told the country the virus would disappear by Easter. Fauci said it would not. Trump suggested injecting disinfectant. Fauci later said: “I couldn’t stand there and be complicit in saying hydroxychloroquine works when it doesn’t. Bleach works when it doesn’t. The virus is going to go away like magic when it’s not.”

Fauci acknowledged that his public disagreements created what he called “a growing enmity” from Trump and his allies. But he did not stop. “In order to maintain my own scientific and personal integrity, and most importantly, fulfill my responsibility to the American public, I had to do that.”

For a malignant narcissist, that is unforgivable. Fauci did not just disagree with Trump. He made Trump look incompetent in front of the entire world. And a narcissist will spend the rest of his life trying to destroy the person who did that.

The consequence has been severe. Fauci and his family received constant death threats. His three daughters, living in three separate cities, were harassed at their jobs and at home. Someone sent Fauci a letter filled with an unknown powder. He described the moment: “I just looked at it all over me and said, ‘What do I do?’ The security detail said, ‘Don’t move, stay in the room.’ And they got the hazmat people.” The powder turned out to be harmless. But as Fauci said: “It was frightening.”

In 2022, a West Virginia man was sentenced to three years in federal prison for sending threatening messages to Fauci, including one telling him he would be “hunted, captured, tortured and killed.”

In 2025, Trump pulled Fauci’s government-funded security detail, leaving a man who had received death threats for five years without the protection the federal government had determined he needed.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said on the House floor that Fauci should be “prosecuted for crimes against humanity.” Fauci responded: “When you have performances like that, those are the kinds of things that drive up the death threats, because there are a segment of the population out there that believe that kind of nonsense.”

This is what happens when you embarrass a narcissist in front of the whole world. The narcissist does not forgive. The narcissist does not forget. The narcissist mobilizes every resource available to destroy the person who made him look small.

3. Don’t Tell Me What to Do

Fauci told people what to do. And a very specific type of person cannot handle being told what to do.

Jack Brehm was a psychologist at Duke University. In 1966, he published “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” a foundational work in social psychology that explained why people resist instructions even when those instructions are clearly in their best interest.

Brehm defined psychological reactance as the motivational state that arises when a person perceives their behavioral freedom is being threatened or eliminated. The critical finding is that reactance is not a rational evaluation of the instruction itself. It is an automatic emotional response to the act of being told. The content of the instruction is almost irrelevant. What triggers the resistance is the perception that someone is restricting your freedom to choose.

Brehm found that reactance intensifies under specific conditions. The more important the freedom that is being threatened, the stronger the reactance. The more authority the person issuing the instruction has, the stronger the reactance. And the more the person feels that they should not have to comply, the stronger the reactance.

Fauci triggered all three conditions simultaneously. He was restricting some of the most personally felt freedoms in American life: where you can go, who you can see, what you must wear on your face. He was the highest medical authority in the country, which maximized the authority trigger. And he was telling a population that had been politically primed to distrust government experts that they had to do what he said.

The result was explosive. Fauci said wear a mask. Millions of people refused specifically because he said it. Fauci said get vaccinated. Millions of people refused specifically because he said it. The refusal was not based on an evaluation of the science. The refusal was a reaction to being told.

Brehm’s research predicts this precisely. The people who reacted most intensely to Fauci’s guidance were not the people who carefully evaluated the evidence and reached a different conclusion. They were the people who felt most threatened by the act of being instructed. Being told what to do by someone smarter than you, more qualified than you, with more authority than you, made them feel small. And feeling small made them furious. And that fury needed a target.

4. The Mirror

People who knew nothing about virology, epidemiology, immunology, or infectious disease were absolutely certain they knew more than the most published infectious disease researcher in American history.

In 1999, psychologists David Dunning at Cornell University and Justin Kruger at the University of Illinois published a paper titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” It is one of the most cited papers in the history of social psychology.

Dunning and Kruger found that people who perform in the lowest quartile on tests of logical reasoning, grammar, and humor consistently and dramatically overestimate their own performance. They estimated themselves to be performing in the 62nd percentile when they were actually performing in the 12th. The gap between perceived competence and actual competence was enormous.

The reason is structural, not motivational. The same skills that are needed to produce correct responses are the same skills needed to recognize what a correct response looks like. If you lack the knowledge to answer a question correctly, you also lack the knowledge to recognize that your answer is wrong. Incompetence robs you of the ability to see your own incompetence.

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why millions of Americans with no scientific training felt qualified to overrule a man with 50 years of published research. Every person who said the vaccine had a microchip in it. Every person who said masks do not work because the virus is smaller than the holes in the fabric. Every person who said ivermectin was the real cure. Every person who watched a YouTube video and decided they had cracked a code that the entire global scientific community had missed.

Fauci was not just an expert making recommendations. He was a mirror. Every time he spoke, every time he cited data, every time he used the language of evidence-based medicine, he reminded millions of people how little they actually knew. And people who score high on the Dunning-Kruger effect do not look at that mirror and think they should learn more. They look at it and think: that guy is a fraud.

They do not hate Fauci because he is wrong. They hate him because deep down they know he is right. And they cannot stand what that says about them.

5. The Scapegoat

A million Americans died. Somebody had to pay. And it was never going to be the people who were actually responsible.

René Girard was a French philosopher and social theorist who spent most of his career at Stanford University. In 1972, he published “Violence and the Sacred,” introducing his theory of the scapegoat mechanism. Girard argued that when a community is in crisis and cannot face its own responsibility, the community unconsciously converges on a single individual to blame. All of the group’s anxiety, guilt, shame, and aggression is projected onto this target. The target is then punished, expelled, or destroyed. And the act of collective punishment temporarily restores order and unity to the group.

The critical feature of the scapegoat mechanism is that the target does not need to be guilty. The target is not chosen because of evidence. The target is chosen because the group needs someone to carry what it cannot carry itself.

Dr. Fauci said get vaccinated. Republicans said no. Dr. Fauci said wear masks. Republicans said no. Dr. Fauci said socially distance. Republicans said no. A million Americans died. Republicans said prosecute Fauci.

On July 27, 2026, Senator Rand Paul released over a thousand pages of Fauci’s personal diary. The diary proved nothing. STAT News reported that the documents “offer no proof that the pandemic originated from a lab or that Fauci or any other officials worked to cover it up.” No investigation has produced evidence of wrongdoing. Virologists have confirmed there is no proven link between NIH-funded research and the start of the pandemic.

It does not matter.

Trump disbanded the pandemic response team before the pandemic. Trump called the virus a hoax. Trump said it would disappear by Easter. Trump promoted an unproven drug. Trump suggested injecting disinfectant. Trump turned masks into a political statement. Trump held rallies during a pandemic. Trump presided over a response that left America with four percent of the world’s population and roughly twenty percent of the world’s COVID deaths.

Girard found that the scapegoat is never chosen because of evidence. The scapegoat is chosen because the group needs someone to carry what they cannot carry themselves.

Fauci is not being investigated because he did something wrong. He is being investigated because a million people died and the people responsible cannot look in the mirror.

6. The Concrete Thinkers

This section was not in the script. But it might be the most important reason MAGA hates Fauci, and it has nothing to do with politics.

Science does not speak in certainties. Science speaks in probabilities, confidence intervals, evolving evidence, and revised conclusions. A scientist says: “The data suggests.” “The evidence so far indicates.” “We need more research.” “Based on what we know now.” “Our understanding has changed.”

To a person who thinks in black and white, every one of those phrases sounds like a lie.

Dichotomous thinking, also known as black-and-white thinking or concrete thinking, is a cognitive pattern in which a person processes information in binary categories. Something is true or it is false. Someone is right or they are wrong. A treatment works or it does not. A person is trustworthy or they are a fraud. There is no middle ground. There is no nuance. There is no gray.

Research in cognitive psychology has consistently found that dichotomous thinking intensifies under stress, fear, and uncertainty. When the brain is overwhelmed, it abandons nuanced evaluation and defaults to binary categories because binary categories are faster and require fewer cognitive resources. The amygdala takes over. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for nuanced thinking, goes offline. And the person experiences the resulting simplification not as a loss of accuracy but as a gain in clarity. The binary answer feels more true than the nuanced one.

This is catastrophic for public trust in science, because science is fundamentally incompatible with dichotomous thinking. Science does not deal in proof. Proof exists in mathematics and logic. Science deals in evidence, and evidence accumulates in progressive increments, producing more and more accurate approximations of reality but never a final, complete, unquestionable answer.

When Fauci said the evidence for hydroxychloroquine was “anecdotal,” a concrete thinker heard: he does not know. When Fauci updated mask guidance as new data came in, a concrete thinker heard: he lied the first time. When Fauci said “we don’t know yet” about the origins of the virus, a concrete thinker heard: he is hiding something.

Science says: “We were wrong about this, and here is what we now know based on better evidence.” A concrete thinker hears: “You lied. You changed your story. You cannot be trusted.”

This is the trap. The very thing that makes science reliable, its willingness to update based on new evidence, is the thing that makes concrete thinkers distrust it. In their minds, a person who changes their position is not being honest. They are being deceptive. A person who says “we don’t know yet” is not being careful. They are being evasive. A person who says “the evidence suggests” instead of “this is the truth” is not being scientific. They are being weak.

Fauci spoke the way every good scientist speaks. He qualified his statements. He acknowledged uncertainty. He updated his recommendations when the evidence changed. And every time he did, millions of concrete thinkers concluded that he was lying, hiding something, or incompetent.

They did not need a conspiracy theory to distrust him. They just needed to hear him say “we don’t know yet.” Because in their minds, if you do not know for certain, you do not know at all. And if you do not know at all, you have no right to tell them what to do.

The cruelest irony of the pandemic is that the most honest thing a scientist can say, “we are still learning,” is the one phrase that concrete thinkers will never accept. And the most dangerous thing a politician can say, “I know the answer and it’s simple,” is the one phrase they will always believe.

Why They Will Never Stop

They hate him because he is smarter than them. They hate him because he embarrassed their leader. They hate him because he told them what to do. They hate him because he reminded them how little they know. They hate him because somebody had to pay for a million dead Americans and it was never going to be them. And they hate him because he spoke like a scientist in a country full of people who do not understand what science sounds like.

Anthony Fauci told the truth during a pandemic. And that is the one thing MAGA will never forgive.

Sources

Hofstadter, R. (1963). “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.” Alfred A. Knopf. Winner of the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Kohut, H. (1971). “The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders.” International Universities Press.

Brehm, J. W. (1966). “A Theory of Psychological Reactance.” Academic Press.

Dunning, D., and Kruger, J. (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.

Girard, R. (1972). “Violence and the Sacred.” Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girard, R. (1986). “The Scapegoat.” Johns Hopkins University Press.

STAT News (2026). “Anthony Fauci Senate Testimony: New Peril on Old Covid Questions.” July 28, 2026.

NPR (2026). “Rand Paul Releases Anthony Fauci’s Pandemic-Era Diary Notes. Here’s What They Tell Us.” July 27, 2026.

Newsweek (2026). “Fauci to Testify About COVID Pandemic: What His Diaries Reveal.” July 28, 2026.

Forbes (2021). “’It Wasn’t Just Hydroxychloroquine’: Fauci Says Trump’s Covid Response Was Based on Anecdotal Evidence.” January 26, 2021.

ABC News (2020). “Tracking Trump and Fauci’s Tense Relationship.” July 16, 2020.

NPR (2020). “Fauci Reveals He Has Received Death Threats and His Daughters Have Been Harassed.” August 5, 2020.

NBC News/Today (2021). “Dr. Fauci Describes Death Threats and Opening ‘Disturbing’ Letter Filled with Powder.” January 25, 2021.

Yahoo News (2025). “Trump Pulls Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Security Detail.”

Science-Based Medicine (2019). “Dichotomous Thinking and Uncertainty in Medicine and Science.” November 12, 2019.

Arnsten, A. (2009). “Stress Signalling Pathways That Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 410-422.

Bonfá-Araujo, B., et al. (2022). “Seeing Things in Black-and-White: A Scoping Review on Dichotomous Thinking Style.” Japanese Psychological Research.

The weakest people in America all voted for the same man.

There is a psychological reason for that.

In 1996 psychologist Steven Hayes at the University of Nevada published research on what happens when people build their entire lives around avoiding uncomfortable emotions. He found that a wide range of destructive behavior can be traced back to a single pattern. The refusal to feel what you need to feel. The willingness to do anything, believe anything, destroy anything, as long as you never have to sit with the discomfort of being wrong.

Hayes called this experiential avoidance.

Experiential avoidance is the refusal to remain in contact with painful emotions, thoughts, memories, or experiences. Instead of processing them, people who are experientially avoidant take steps to escape them. They run. They numb. They distract. They attack. They do whatever it takes to avoid feeling what they need to feel.

And that is the entire MAGA movement in one psychological concept.

These people have spent ten years defending Trump. Ten years of arguments with family. Ten years of lost friendships. Ten years of ruined Thanksgivings. Ten years of posting things they cannot take back. Ten years of defending a man who does not know their name and does not care whether they live or die.

Ten years is a massive investment. And they do not want to admit they were wrong about any of it.

So they keep running. They keep escalating the commitment to Trump. Because if they keep running, maybe there is a chance they might be right in the future. That delusional dream is all they have to protect them from the reality that they were wrong the entire time.

So they keep running rather than accept accountability.

Because if they stopped, they would have to face ten years of being wrong. Ten years of hurting people. Ten years of defending a fraud. Ten years of being the exact problem they accused everyone else of being.

These are people who have never once in their lives sat with an uncomfortable emotion. They have never taken accountability. They have never admitted fault. They have always played the victim. It is always someone else’s fault. The Democrats. The media. The deep state. The immigrants. Anyone but themselves.

Hayes found that experiential avoidance makes everything worse. The more you run from the feeling, the bigger it gets. The longer you avoid it, the more terrifying it becomes. The pain does not go away because you refuse to look at it. The pain grows because you refuse to look at it.

These people have been running from accountability their entire lives. And Trump gave them permission to keep running. He told them they were right. He told them everyone else was lying. He told them they never had to feel bad about anything they said or did because the other side was worse.

That is not leadership. That is enabling avoidance on a national scale.

They do not think long term. They do not have a plan for their future. They do not even have a plan for Friday night. They are not moving forward because they believe in something. They are moving forward because if they stop, they have to turn around and look at what they have done.

And they are more afraid of that than anything else in the world.

Hayes found in his research that experientially avoidant people will endure extraordinary suffering to avoid emotional discomfort. They will destroy relationships. They will lose jobs. They will sacrifice their health. They will make choices that objectively make their lives worse in every measurable way, all to avoid sitting with a feeling they do not want to feel.

Avoidant people are more scared of being uncomfortable with their emotions than they are of death.

That is why they will follow Trump off a cliff.

The cliff is less scary than the sunk cost of shame they would have to endure if they stopped and faced reality.

They will always choose the cliff over reality. Every single time. Because reality requires the one thing these people have never been willing to do.

Feel something real. Take accountability. And admit they were wrong.

They would rather die than do that. And the research says that is not an exaggeration. It is a clinical finding.

Sources

Hayes, S. C., Wilson, K. G., Gifford, E. V., Follette, V. M., & Strosahl, K. (1996). Experiential Avoidance and Behavioral Disorders: A Functional Dimensional Approach to Diagnosis and Treatment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. Guilford Press.