Show Notes
Charlie Kirk applied to West Point. He was rejected. He enrolled at a community college outside Chicago. He dropped out after one semester. Then he spent ten years walking onto real college campuses with a camera crew, screaming at teenagers, and building a media empire by telling millions of other people who also didn’t make it that the whole system was a scam. He was assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. He was 31 years old. Political violence should never be a acceptable. Grown men who had never met him posted videos of themselves crying. Strangers built memorials. People who couldn’t name a single policy he supported said they had lost the most important person in their lives. That reaction was not about Charlie Kirk. It was about what Charlie Kirk replaced in the people who followed him. And the psychology behind it is far more revealing than anything Kirk ever said on camera.
The Sour-Grape Effect The first thing Kirk sold was the most valuable product in the history of conservative media. He sold people a story that turned their failure into a choice. In 2020, psychologist Hallgeir Sjåstad at the Norwegian School of Economics published six experiments studying what happens when people fail to achieve something they wanted. The studies, conducted with Roy Baumeister and Michael Ent, spanned multiple countries and settings. The findings were consistent across all six experiments. People who failed didn’t simply accept the failure and move on. They rewrote the story. They convinced themselves they never wanted the thing in the first place. They downplayed the value of the goal they couldn’t reach. Not because they actually thought less of it, but because thinking less of it was the only way to make the failure stop hurting. The researchers called it the sour-grape effect. The name comes from Aesop’s fable about the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes on a high vine and walked away declaring them sour. The psychological mechanism is the same. When reality is too painful to accept, the brain revises what you wanted rather than accepting what you couldn’t get. Now think about Kirk’s audience. Millions of Americans who either couldn’t get into college, couldn’t afford college, dropped out, or never applied because they didn’t think they were smart enough. That failure sits in a person’s chest for years. It shows up every time someone asks where you went to school. Every time a job posting says “bachelor’s degree required.” Every time you sit across from someone at a dinner party and feel the gap. Kirk didn’t fix any of that. He didn’t help anyone go back to school. He didn’t create job training programs. He didn’t build anything that improved anyone’s material circumstances. He told them college was a scam. He told them professors were idiots. He told them degrees were worthless. And for people who had spent years quietly carrying the weight of not having one, that message was the best thing they had ever heard. But the most important finding in Sjåstad’s research was the exception. People high in achievement motivation did not show the sour-grape effect. When they failed, they didn’t devalue the goal. They predicted, correctly, that achieving it would still feel good. They stayed motivated. They kept trying. Which means the sour-grape effect doesn’t capture everyone who fails. It captures the people who have given up. The people who have stopped trying. The people whose response to failure is not to work harder but to rewrite reality so the failure doesn’t count. That is Kirk’s audience. Not people who chose a different path. People who needed someone to tell them the path they couldn’t walk was a path nobody should want. And Sjåstad’s research revealed something even darker. The sour-grape effect didn’t just make people feel better about past failure. It made them underestimate how good it would feel to succeed in the future. The effect cut off future motivation. It didn’t just protect the ego from ye
More from The Lucas Bean Show
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.
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian democracy, the most advanced political experiment in the ancient world, turn on itself. He watched it execute Socrates, his teacher, arguably the sharpest mind in the city, for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions. And instead of moving on, Plato spent the rest of his life trying to explain how a society capable of producing genius could also be stupid enough to kill it. The result was The Republic. And while most of the book covers justice, education, and the nature of reality, Book Eight is something different entirely. Book Eight is a manual. It is Plato at his most concrete, walking through the specific sequence of events that takes a functioning democracy and turns it into a dictatorship. Not in abstract terms. In stages. With causes, mechanisms, and outcomes laid out in an order that has repeated across civilizations for two millennia.