Show Notes
Charlie Kirk never graduated from college. He applied to West Point, was rejected, and instead of trying again somewhere else, he built a career telling other people that college was the problem. That decision, and the audience it attracted, is one of the cleanest real-world examples of a psychological phenomenon that researchers have been studying for years. In 2020, psychologist Hallgeir Sjåstad at the Norwegian School of Economics published a study with co-authors Roy Baumeister at the University of Queensland and Michael Ent at Towson University that investigated what happens inside a person’s psychology after they fail to reach a goal they genuinely wanted. The finding was not that people feel bad and move on. The finding was that people rewrite the goal itself. After failure, the thing they wanted becomes the thing they never really wanted in the first place. Sjåstad and his co-authors called this the sour-grape effect, after Aesop’s fable of the fox who, unable to reach the grapes hanging above him, walked away declaring they were probably sour anyway. The most striking part of the research was that this revision is not a conscious lie. Participants in Sjåstad’s experiments genuinely believed their diminished assessment of the goal was what they had always felt. The original desire had been overwritten. The failure was not denied. It was erased and replaced with a new narrative that never included wanting the thing in the first place. This is the psychological engine that powered Charlie Kirk’s entire career.
The Audience Kirk Built Kirk’s audience was not random. It was psychologically specific. His core following was built from young men in their twenties and thirties who did not go to college and needed a story for why that was the right outcome. Some of them could not afford it. Some were not academically prepared. Some were afraid to leave their small towns. The reasons varied but the emotional need was the same. They needed college to be a scam so that not going to college was not a failure. Kirk provided that story on camera, over and over, hundreds of times. He would walk onto college campuses with a microphone and a film crew and engage college students in exchanges designed to produce a very specific visual: a confident adult making a teenager look foolish. The format was rigged from the start. Kirk was thirty years old, had spent years practicing rapid-fire talking points, and controlled the microphone. The students were eighteen or nineteen, standing in public, often encountering these arguments for the first time. The outcome was never in question. But the content of those exchanges was almost irrelevant. What mattered was the image. A man who did not go to college standing on a college campus and appearing to dominate the people who did. For Kirk’s audience, every one of those clips was a piece of evidence in the story the sour-grape effect had already written for them. College is worthless. The people who go there are not that smart. Not going was the right call. The fact that Kirk’s method relied on talking over people, cutting off responses, and rattling through false claims faster than anyone could fact-check them in real time did not matter to his audience. They were not watching for intellectual rigor. They were watching for confirmation. And Kirk delivered it by the hour.
What the Research Tells Us About Why This Worked Sjåstad’s study revealed something important about who is most susceptible to the sour-grape effect. Not everyone in his experiments responded to failure by devaluing the goal. People with high achievement motivation, those who were internally driven and comfortable with setbacks, were less likely to revise their assessment. They could fail and still acknowledge the goal was worth pursuing. The people most prone to the sour-grape effect were those whose self-worth was tied to external validation and who lacked the psychological resources to sit with failure. For these individuals,
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There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies this piece covers sociologist Robb Willer’s research on masculine overcompensation: the finding that men whose masculinity is threatened respond with exaggerated displays of dominance, aggression, and toughness. The effect is consistent and measurable. It shows up in attitudes toward war, attitudes toward gay people, and even in what kind of car a man wants to buy. But the research goes much deeper than one study, and the implications stretch far beyond a rally.
There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.