Show Notes
You’ve seen it happen in real time. A Trump supporter walks into a debate, a comment section, a family conversation, or a live stream with total confidence. They say something that sounds like a position. It has the shape of an argument. It has the rhythm of someone who knows what they’re talking about. For about ten seconds, it could pass. Then someone pushes back. Not even aggressively. Just a follow up question. Just a “can you explain what you mean by that.” And it falls apart. But here’s the part that makes your head spin. They don’t care. They don’t care that it fell apart. They don’t care that they were wrong. They don’t care that millions of people just watched them get humiliated on camera. They move on to the next talking point with the exact same confidence. They say “I don’t care” and mean it. Or they say “do your own research” as if that’s a rebuttal. Or they just get louder. And you’re standing there thinking: how is this person not embarrassed? How do they just keep going? Because being proven wrong only hurts if you were trying to be right. And they were never trying to be right. In 1986, philosopher Harry Frankfurt at Princeton University published an essay that would eventually become one of the most important pieces of philosophical writing of the last fifty years. Originally published in the Raritan Quarterly Review, then expanded into a book by Princeton University Press in 2005, the essay introduced a formal distinction that most people have never heard but that explains nearly everything about how MAGA supporters communicate. Frankfurt identified a category of dishonesty that is worse than lying.
A liar knows the truth and deliberately hides it. A liar cares about the truth, even if only as something to be avoided. A liar respects truth enough to work around it. A liar and a truth teller are playing the same game, just on opposite sides. Both of them acknowledge that truth matters. What Frankfurt identified is a completely different category. A person who is indifferent to truth. A person for whom truth never enters the equation at all. Not because they’re hiding it. Not because they’re afraid of it. But because it was never part of their process to begin with. Frankfurt called this indifference to truth, and he argued it is a greater enemy of truth than lies are. Because at least a lie can be caught. At least a lie operates within a framework where truth exists and matters. Indifference to truth operates outside that framework entirely. Truth is irrelevant. The question was never “is this true.” The question was always “does this sound good.” Now apply that to every political conversation you’ve ever had with a Trump supporter. They hear a talking point. They like how it sounds. They repeat it. If it turns out to be true, fine. If it turns out to be false, fine. It doesn’t matter. It was never about being right. It was about saying something with enough confidence that nobody pushes back. The performance of saying something smart is all they are looking for. This is not speculation. In 2015, researcher Gordon Pennycook at the University of Waterloo published a landmark study in the journal Judgment and Decision Making that put Frankfurt’s philosophical concept to an empirical test. Pennycook and his colleagues created a series of randomly generated sentences filled with abstract buzzwords. Sentences that had the syntactic structure of something profound but were literally constructed without any concern for truth or meaning. Sentences like “wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” and “hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.”
They showed these sentences to people and asked them to rate how profound they were. And people did. They rated literal nonsense as genuinely profound. But the study went further. Pennycook found that the people who were most receptive to these meaningless statements shared a consistent psychological profile. They scored lower on cognitive ability tests. They were les
More from The Lucas Bean Show
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.