Show Notes
There is a direct relationship between how well a person understands a system and how susceptible they are to conspiracy theories about that system. The relationship is not a subtle one. It is nearly mechanical. The less someone understands about how something works, the more likely they are to believe that something sinister is happening inside it. The more blackbox the system is, the larger the conspiracy it can support. This pattern holds across every major conspiracy theory in American political life. It explains, with uncomfortable precision, why the MAGA movement has become the most prolific generator of conspiratorial thinking in modern American history.
The Blackbox Problem (opacity) Consider the difference between an abacus and a smartphone. An abacus is transparent. You can see every bead. You can watch the math happen. You can verify the output with your own eyes. There is no room for a conspiracy theory about an abacus because there is nowhere for a conspiracy to hide. The mechanism is fully visible. A smartphone is the opposite. It is a sealed box running processes that the vast majority of its users cannot see, cannot audit, and cannot understand. The average person knows their phone does things they did not ask it to do. It serves ads that seem to respond to conversations. It tracks location. It collects data in ways that are documented but not intuitive. All of this is real and verifiable. But the leap from “my phone collects data for advertising purposes” to “the government is monitoring my every thought through my phone” is not a leap supported by evidence. It is a leap enabled by opacity. The person making that leap cannot distinguish between what their phone actually does and what it theoretically could do because they cannot see inside the box. So they fill the gap with the worst possibility their imagination can produce. Not because they are paranoid by nature, but because the human brain is architecturally incapable of tolerating unexplained complexity without generating an explanation. This is the dynamic at the center of every MAGA conspiracy theory. The system is too complicated for the person to understand. The opacity creates a void. And the void gets filled with a villain.
The Believing Brain In 2011, researcher Michael Shermer at Chapman University published “The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies.” Shermer had spent decades studying why people believe things that are not true, first as the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, then as a researcher and author examining the cognitive machinery behind belief formation. “The Believing Brain” represents his most comprehensive analysis of why the human mind generates beliefs first and seeks evidence for them second, rather than the other way around. Shermer identified two cognitive processes that operate in tandem to produce conspiratorial thinking. The first he called patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. Humans evolved to detect patterns because pattern detection is a survival advantage. The ancestor who heard rustling in the grass and assumed a predator was more likely to survive than the ancestor who assumed it was the wind. The cost of a false positive (running from nothing) was low. The cost of a false negative (ignoring a real threat) was death. The result is a brain that is biased toward seeing patterns even when none exist. We see faces in clouds. We find meaning in coincidences. We connect events that have no causal relationship and construct narratives to explain the connection. This is not a defect. It is an evolutionary feature that produces a significant number of errors precisely because producing errors is less costly than missing real patterns. The second process Shermer identified is the one that turns false patterns into conspiracy theories. He called it agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. Onc
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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.