How political hatred works
Commenter “phsicsguy” has a request:
,,, [I]n every other aspect of [the lives of the Democrats I know who want Trump dead], they act within the general morality of our culture. They don’t beat puppies and babies, they don’t steal, they’ll lend a helping hand to their neighbors, etc. My BiL is extremely active in the Catholic Church. Yet…..when it comes to Trump, and now through the relentless propaganda, conservatives and republicans in general, the “violent minds” turn on. I keep wishing that someone well-versed in psychology could explain this phenomenon to me, and also provide a solution. I haven’t seen such. If it exists it might even save the country from some terrible consequences.
It does certainly seem like a contagion, but there seems to be no antibiotic to employ.
I have no solution. But I’ll have a go at an explanation. The analogy to contagion is a good one, although obviously there are no microbes involved. People come to believe Trump is a Hitler equivalent, tremendously evil and otherwise unstoppable politically, so it follows that he must be killed. The analogy to Hitler is not an idle one because there were indeed many failed attempts on Hitler’s life and most people consider those who tried to do so to be heroes. The fact that Trump bears no resemblance to Hitler is irrelevant, because most people don’t evaluate things for themselves and their sources – their trusted sources – say Trump is tremendously evil, Hitlerian, and out to destroy our country and must be stopped.
Why those sources are trusted is another story. It’s different for different populations. For older people, it’s the news media amplified by social media. For younger people, the source is other online platforms such as TikTok and Twitch (Hasam Piker is a huge Twitch personality, for example). For many of all ages, they live in communities where pretty much everyone thinks this way, whether it be a blue city or just their own family or their own ethnic group. Often a clergyman or church or synagogue group is part of the echo chamber (in which case Trump-hate is not a religious substitute but is considered consistent with their religion as a sort of “just war”), and of course many Democrat politicians and spokespeople, as well as celebrities, artists, authors, and public intellectuals.
In my case I am often the only Trump supporter friends and family members know. Some have cooled, but some have “grandfathered” me in, as it were, because they’ve known me so long and know I’m not evil.
In addition, some of my Democrat friends simply don’t care. It’s not that they don’t care about politics, but they don’t care in the same very personal way. They never talk politics to me and never mention my curious support of Trump; it simply is not an issue they take into the personal realm. They are my friends (at least so far), they’ve been my friends for years, and that’s that. Nor do they ever mention wanting to kill Trump or wanting him dead, although they’ve made a few remarks indicating they detest him.
What distinguishes these two groups from each other? I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute, plus the intensity with which they view it. But why do people belong to one group rather than another? I don’t know. I have found no specific characteristics that I can see that differentiate between the two groups: neither is predominantly male or female, neither is religious, nor do they differ in education or the way they habitually vote. They also do not differ in the intensity of their personalities in other areas of their lives.
Trusted sources. Oh my!
If I ever ran a school for young kids, instilling a healthy skepticism of ALL sources would be job #1.
TommyJay:
Ah, but once people don’t trust official sources in general, they tend to go the wacky conspiracy theory route and are open to all manner of beliefs, including anti Semitism of the Carlson et al variety. I plan to write a post on the “doubt everything” phenomenon.
Propaganda is effective, as Joseph Goebbels appreciated and employed on the Nazis’ behalf. It crescendo’d into Jew hatred, and the German majority did not resist or object.
We have the same thing here today. The anti-Trump media are almost all Democratic, and in their constant and increasingly vicious clamor have persuaded and led many of our fellow Americans into idiot land. I expect this to lead to violence, and possibly separation into two ununited countries. We see this today on the East Coast: New England and south to the Carolinas’ border North/South is Democrat-land, further south is GOP country.
Who came up with “red” and “blue” states? Red is the classic color of violence in the political arena, communists are red, and our Southland is tagged as red by the Democrat MSM.
> Who came up with “red” and “blue” states?
Back in the day, the news media used to swap colors every election: red and blue vs. blue and red. I distinctly remember the Republicans being blue in 1980.
Eventually, they figured out that since red is associated with communism, making the Democrat party red was a little too on the nose, so the Republican party became always red after that. I don’t know when that happened, but it was a news media thing.
Not sure. This stuff crosses their radar screen, so to speak, along with tons of other stuff. And THIS is the which they grab with both hands. THIS they WANT to believe. Why this? Why do they feel so good believing in contrast to facts. Why do they want to hate,,?
Richard Aubrey:
Not sure I get what you’re saying. Of course there are “tons of other stuff ” that people see. But this is a relentless and pervasive message, coming from many trusted sources for a decade. Plus, they see Trump dismantling things they hold dear, and sometimes speaking nastily, and they wouldn’t be inclined to give him the benefit of any doubt.
That’s for your attempt, Neo.
I think we have a “cause- effect” ordering problem. Does the incessant propaganda that Trump is Hitler ramp up the hatred, or does the hatred cause creduality with the propaganda?
Based on my observations, I tend to go with the latter. The people I know hate him with the reptilian part of their brain. It’s so visceral which then seems to make them believe anything about him. I remember back in 2016 my friend said he hated Trump on sight. This just after his candidate announcement. Why?? He had no explanation. I see these people in the last few days saying they dont want political assassination, but they hope he wakes up with the most painful and incurable cancer.
I detest Obama, but I never harbored such thoughts about him. And I don’t think many on the right did/do. Is there something in the liberal brain that brings out such base emotions?
neo has taken a good swing at the topic.
I would add “When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World” (1956).
____________________________
…a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, published in 1956, detailing a study of a small UFO religion in Chicago called the Seekers that believed in an imminent apocalypse. The authors took a particular interest in the members’ coping mechanisms after the event did not occur, focusing on the cognitive dissonance between the members’ beliefs and actual events, and the psychological consequences of these disconfirmed expectations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
____________________________
According to the book after a specific end of the world prophecy failed to occur, the members didn’t walk away, but doubled-down in their beliefs.
Similarly, I would argue that some of the vehemence and violence of the Democrat/Left is a doubling-down since Obama’s “prophecy” of transformation failed after Trump won in 2016.
Instead of rethinking, the Obama left doubled-down on unremitting fury towards Trump and all Trump supporters.
(However, according to wiki, a 2025 article “argued that the main theses of the book are false and were known to be false by the authors.” The problem seems to be that the researchers were not neutral observers, but actively interacting with the believer community and contaminating the data.)
neo on April 28, 2026 at 3:17 pm said:
TommyJay:
Ah, but once people don’t trust official sources in general, they tend to go the wacky conspiracy theory route and are open to all manner of beliefs, including anti Semitism of the Carlson et al variety. I plan to write a post on the “doubt everything” phenomenon.
________
I don’t know about that. I’ve never been tempted by that sort of thinking (unless you’re one who think Thomism is “wacky”.) I started doubting at least by 4th grade; that’s when I realized my teachers didn’t always know what they were talking about. But even before that, I was puzzled by the fact that the books they had in class were so much worse than the ones my grandmother had me reading.
Note: this was the 50s and 60s on Long Island.
Eeyore:
I don’t just mean questioning what you’re told. I always did that. I mean thinking virtually everything you’re told is a lie, and then glomming onto some “truth teller” like Tucker Carlson and believing what HE ways. I see this constantly. Conspiracy theories run amuk, because human nature abhors a vacuum.
physicsguy:
Susceptibility is the key, and although (as I wrote in the post) I’m not sure exactly what makes some Democrats susceptible to this extreme hatred and wishing death to Trump, it obviously only strikes people who already dislike him and/or what he’s doing. Disliking him and his policies is not the mystery. The mystery is who is susceptible to its turning into wishing for his death.
As many people here have said, many on the right disliked Obama and his policies, but it was rare for people to wish him death. It’s not rare among Democrats regarding Trump. I think the difference is the constant drumbeat of trusted people saying it, which you didn’t hear about Obama.
I suppose the tentative contagion model places the “works for what?” question [end state —telos] outside the “victims'” intention.
In politics (and particularly within the realm of “faction” as expressed in Federalist 9 & 10, where we might look to gain our bearings), however, intentions, ends, are kind of a big deal. I can see the peculiar question we have concerning the generation, genesis, or “coming-to-be” of this thing, this hatred of Trump and all things nearly associated to him. I mean, it’s definitely wierd to those who aren’t “afflicted”. But to return to the “interests” questions the framers would raise . . . it’s damned hard to see the effective goods, the “gains” to be had, and then where those gains are spelled out, why, suddenly the “contagion” model goes *poof*.
Our excellent host wrote: “People come to believe Trump is a Hitler equivalent, tremendously evil and otherwise unstoppable politically, so it follows that he must be killed.”
Several years ago I figured out why some people (especially on the Left) say or do things that to normies seem extreme or ridiculous.
They begin with a crucial claim, premise, or assumption. That they do not question, and usually that they never prove or justify. And everything that follows is based on this.
In this case, and we see this with so many Americans, the crucial claim is “Trump is Hitler”.
sdferr:
Plenty of gains. The Democrat politicians and pundits and “influencers” demonize Trump and try to put him out of commission, either by inspiring someone to kill him or by lawfare, and justify their heightening grip on power and prestige and money. For the regular folk who end up hating Trump with the heat of a thousand suns, it’s a great bonding experience and and outlet for rage and frustration, and they get to feel virtuous into the bargain.
By “healthy skepticism” I primarily mean that one should always consider the possibility that a supposed fact being conveyed is false, regardless of the source.
It also depends on what you mean by “official” sources. Government official sources can be some of the worst. Official scientific sources are generally pretty good in my experience, but some of the best science history stories are about the errors and falsehoods. (I should say, scientific sources delivered outside of a governmental or political system or context. Think CDC or the UN’s IPCC.) And that’s ignoring the paradigm shifts like Newtonian physics giving way to relativistic physics.
I’ll never forget some of the very first research I did as a grad student. We were doing a particular lab experiment, so I read a couple articles by others who had done it, published in one of the Phys. Rev. journals. (Peer reviewed, doncha know!) I spent a couple hours puzzling over one of the articles, before it dawned on me. A key point was utterly wrong. Had the authors never taken a comprehensive E&M course?? Unbelievable.
TommyJay:
By “official” I mean not just government, but anyone with a rank or position or education or reputation, as opposed to some random podcaster on YouTube.
There are many people who are not just skeptical, but dismiss it all as a matter of course, throwing out the baby with the bathwater and yet following and believing obvious scams from random people online.
All of the above are certainly factors, but at base neo nailed it when she opined; “I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute plus the intensity with which they view it.”
Secular substitution of religion has nothing to offer in the face of the largest, deepest and most personal fact of life… namely that death awaits all of us. Given that bleakest of realities for the fervent secularist, leaving the world a ‘better place’, as they wish it to be is… everything.
And Trump and his supporters threatens it all.
Whereas, secularists that are not susceptible to TDS fall in the camp that comedian Steven Wright personifies; “Don’t take life too seriously… you’re never going to get out of it alive.”
My friends are preparing for one thing. They are stocking up on ammunition and getting ready. They all know where this will end. They also are not shy to let people know where they stand on issues. They do not see how this can be avoided.
Richard Cook wrote: “They all know where this will end.”
Just this week I am seeing a lot of posts on social media along these lines. Am seeing comparisons to the Spanish Civil War. Had to look that up. We can debate how valid those comparisons are. Basically that is what happens when one lets the Left keep advancing without taking a hard stand and pushing back. As Picard famously said,
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further!
I wish this (that this will end in armed conflict) were not the case. Increasingly it appears that it is. I have never owned a firearm. Do not want to own one. They terrify me. For the first time in my life am seriously considering it.
neo,
Yes, skepticism is easy, but a discerning healthy skepticism is very, very hard. Where does the “healthy” line begin and end?
I’m recalling an investment pundit who used to use the catch phrase “official Wall Street gibberish.” Regarding the pundit: He used to take his errors very seriously and discuss them. Then he didn’t, and I quit watching his presentations.
The point of his catch phrase, which I suspect is true, not being very experienced in the ways of upper income Wall Street advisors, is that these people have an axe to grind. If they use obfuscating language, your confusion is their gain. Just turn your money over to us and you don’t have to worry your head about these complexities.
Most sources will have an axe to grind and it behooves you understand which things serve their interests.
Some of it is ignorance of basic facts. I really do think that a lot of older people on the left do not understand how radical in general and specifically deeply involved the left wing political / cultural / education class has been in the promotion of transgenderism among children. The mainstream media ignores the indoctrination aspect and generally acts as if it is just happening among kids. An older Democrat lady I was talking to a few years ago asked if ” conservatives” were promoting transgenderism. I really , really think there are a lot of low info people out there.
“I detest Obama, but I never harbored such thoughts about him. And I don’t think many on the right did/do. Is there something in the liberal brain that brings out such base emotions?”
Trump haters are bombarded with permission and encouragement.
Defeating Hillary was the beginning. Turned all those Apprentice fans into haters.
@TommyJay: Yes, skepticism is easy, but a discerning healthy skepticism is very, very hard. Where does the “healthy” line begin and end?
Agreed. Not easy.
I never say “blue state” or “red state” because I don’t want to affirm the propaganda which labels them as such. “Democrat states” and “Republican states” works fine.
And I don’t say “leftists,” just “Democrats.” They’ve earned their anti-American reputation; make them wear it!
= = = = = = = =
I would hypothesize that most of these violent thinkers are non-religious, and they trumpet their hatred to gain affirmation from other haters, whose religion is also hate.
Personally I hate Obama, Comey, George Soros, etc. for what they have done to our country, but I hope that they will be punished in this life by our justice system. If not, I believe they will be punished in the afterlife. I wouldn’t consider participating in illegal violence against them and I don’t marinate in hate and broadcast it gratuitously to the world. God is in control, and He works all things together for good, for those who love him.
I think that people who are overcome by hate, based on false premises, have a sort of neurosis or mental illness. They are lacking in discernment, and in their civic duty. And they are manipulated by the “princes and powers of the air,” i.e. media and the Devil.
Christian belief holds that before the coming of Jesus, people were spiritually saved by their innate sense of right and wrong, and their devotion to the Law of God the Father. “Live not by lies.” Those TDS sufferers who base their hatred on the lies which Democrats spread about Trump, are leading themselves and the country into evil.
= = = = = = = =
I agree with TommyJay about skepticism. And what kind of a “skeptic” is not skeptical of dodgy online sources? A fool.
I think it’s pretty simple and I maybe repeating . It’s a belief in a law higher than all others that which can only be discerned by the (woke elite) death in defense of this law means a spiritual promotion.
Whenever I chat with a left-wing person, I am always surprised that he/she expects me to agree with him/her politically. Even if they’ve never discussed any politics with me. Even if they have often discussed politics with me and I have ALWAYS disagreed!
David Foster linked his newest Substack post on the Open Thread, and it is certainly relevant to this discussion.
https://davidfoster273133.substack.com/p/life-in-the-fully-politicized-society
Or at Chicago Boyz, with comments.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/76630.html
It’s actually rather frightening to see how early the Left started burrowing into America, and how far they have gotten.
Of course, their playbook is a very ancient one, and its adherents are never absent from any society, but the cancer seems to have metathesized since Obama’s regime opened the floodgates to normalizing the goals totalitarians used to keep hidden.
The red state/blue state thing happened after the 2000 election. Before that they swapped back and forth each election year. They dragged 2000 out so long that the color selection for that year stuck. That it let them swap out the communist color to the Republicans was just a bonus.
This Substack post by Glenn Reynolds makes a provocative connection to David Foster’s.
Bottom line is that Trump said in 2016 that he would dump over all the rice bowls, and the Entrenched State believed him.
And then he did.
No wonder he is “literally Hitler” in their world!
https://instapundit.substack.com/p/our-self-colonized-nation
Pride.
‘and they get to feel virtuous into the bargain.’
When I was younger I wondered why pride was the first of the deadly sins
Not any more.
The cure is Christian ‘humility’.
I believe in ‘The Day of Judgement’ when ‘the secrets of all hearts will be revealed’.
Damn, not looking forward to that!
‘I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute…’
Gotta be that. Other wise, how can they look ahead to the day of judgement – will they ask God to affirm their hatred – they were such a GOOD haters – rather than forgive it?
” I have never owned a firearm. Do not want to own one. They terrify me.”
Why are you terrified of an inanimate object? Are you also terrified of knives and baseball bats? I always enjoy the democrat response to a murder. They denounce gun violence or knife violence or blunt object violence and then they want to ban or confiscate guns, knives or blunt objects. They really believe that banning an inanimate object will prevent crime.
> ‘I think it’s the personalization of politics and the transformation of it into a religious substitute…’
This is the core of it. People who reject religion are doomed to recreate it… poorly. And leftism in general is very much like a religion, but it’s missing several key elements. It has sin, but no forgiveness. Punishment, but no mercy. It teaches a false virtue that is nothing more than a way to pound unbelievers into submission. It has saints, but who they are can and will change at a moment’s notice. It has a moral framework (of sorts) but it constantly changes, so that what was good and virtuous a decade ago is now thoughtcrime and worthy of excommunication. It’s almost like everything is design to keep you off balance. It doesn’t matter what is right, it only matters that _you_ are wrong.
Among the many things that are prophetic about the book “1984” was the idea of “Two Minutes Hate”, except now it’s become 24/7 hate, and the fictional (within the book’s world) Emmanuel Goldstein is now the real Donald Trump. And when Trump is gone, the next candidate will be immediately promoted into that role. They’ve done that every Republican candidate since Goldwater. They even did it to Romney, who is almost one of them.
I am also amused by their obsession with Hitler. Sure, he stands among the greatest villains in all of history for good reason, but I think people in the Left generally fall into two categories with respect to Hitler.
First, are the people who only know of Hitler as an example of a murderous, totalitarian tyrant. If you go to places like Reddit (which granted is a leftist echo chamber) you will find the folks there skew young, leftie and ignorant. I even saw someone accuse Stalin of being right-wing. And they all think to a man that Bernie Sanders is a libertarian. But Reddit is only a distilled version of what young people think in general.
The second group are people who know about the other murderous, totalitarian tyrants, but do not find them very objectionable (e.g., Mao, Stalin, etc.).
And the irony does not escape any of us here that politically, the Left has way more in common with the Nazis than the Right ever had, up to and including the foaming-at-the-mouth antisemitism.
Well, they’re assholes.
Much speculation above and elsewhere that we are headed for some sort of showdown- some sort of Spanish Civil War-ish resolution of an irreconcilable divide. Yes, I have read the Schlichter books.
I definitely hope not. I have a bunch of grandkids who I hope will be able to live the type of blessed American life that I have enjoyed.
Maybe it stays like this. An undercurrent of seething hatred within maybe 30% of the populace, occasional skirmishes (Charlie Kirk, the 2 dead jackwagons in MN [I don’t put them in the same moral universe but they do]), minor advances across legislative and judicial no-mans-land, but no macro changes. Financial constraints will keep things from getting worse, reds will keep reproducing, blues will keep replacing their population declines with legal and illegal immigration.
We will continue to have a rifle behind every blade of grass and that may be what keeps things from spreading from the blue city cores to the ‘burbs and further.
Things that can not go on will not go on, but are we sure that this is one of those things?
Cappy:
But not the funny kind.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sen8Tn8CBA4
(Spaceballs)
Power
20 years ago those folks would have been watching 60 Minutes and yelling at their televisions. Pretty harmless stuff. But with Internet and social media they can connect with a million other like minded souls and egg each other on.
And the 1 in 10,000 who are willing to die for a cause know they will be seen as a hero to that million of others.
T. Hobbes, Leviathan chpt. XI, “Of the Difference of Manners”:
I think it necessary to distinguish how people act as individuals, and how they act as group members. The psychology is different, and not by accident. We are social animals, and traditionally lived in small groups, with larger tribal affiliations which had less hold. I think what we are seeing is an extension of small group psychology to larger groups due to technology. Goebbels was certainly aware of that, and exploited it. He was quite intelligent.
Fashion would be another example. Fashion spreads instantly these days, and we have whole industries dedicated to exploiting fashion. There are smart people who make a living out of manipulating fashion, David Axelrod for instance. For that matter, Trump is also establishing a sort of fashion, he has a foot in that world. Perhaps that accounts for the instant hostility of the opposing camp.
There is no perhaps about it!
— Jon Baker
I used to get into debates with an older relative of mine, herself quite conservative on most issues. The thing is she would rebuke me for saying that the Democratic politicians hated America, or that they wanted gay marriage, or so on. When I pointed out after 911 that the PTB would use any surveillance powers against us, she thought I was being obtuse, of course they would never do that.
She didn’t like the Democratic leadership, she thought they were wrong about most things, but the idea that they actually hate their own country, or their fellow Americans, was just alien to her. They couldn’t possibly be that bad.
Later she apologized to me, watching Obama convinced her that I had been right, and she admitted she just couldn’t imagine them being that bad before.
One of the big strengths of the post 1968 Left is that so many people just couldn’t believe that they were serious, until it was almost too late.
It exists on both sides. I’ve heard liberals complain about Muslim-controlled city councils shutting down Pride month and being hostile to LGBT issues. They literally had no idea what Islam actually teaches.
If the Muslim vote keeps becoming more important to the Dems, I look for us to start seeing some Dem politicians telling gays and lesbians to ‘get back in the closet’ .
Consider yourself lucky to have maintained friendships. I’ve lost a number who used to be moderate Democrats and we got along fine, even able to argue finer points of disagreement. But then Trump came along and it’s like I turned into some hideous example of humanity. Just one example: I had one friend of well over 20 years – an active H activist – that called me one night to rage against me for not supporting H and worse, supporting Trump. That was followed by the most foul Christmas card I thought anyone would write. Several other long, long time friends have disappeared from my life because I don’t support Ds. It was never an issue before …
There must be something like a dog whistle that only certain people can hear – only Ds – and it drives them mad.
DT:
So sorry you’ve been through that – it’s very painful.
Just to clarify: I have indeed lost some friends, but fortunately not too many. And some relatives have cooled (one very much), which is hard. Other friends seem to have cooled but they haven’t told me why – I just don’t hear from them, so it’s hard to say what’s what. One relative stopped talking to me for a year after the 2024 election but then started again. So it’s a mixed bag. But most of my closest friends don’t seem to personalize politics in the way a lot of other people do, which is good.
@ Neo > “most of my closest friends don’t seem to personalize politics in the way a lot of other people do”
Like attracts like, perhaps.
@ Neo > “most of my closest friends don’t seem to personalize politics in the way a lot of other people do”
@AesopFan > Like attracts like, perhaps.
That’s been true with me as well, but not with my wife. A number of her friends, both online and real life, have succumbed to TDS in a bad way. Some of them are reasonable enough to not bring it up, others can’t help themselves.
I’ve always thought a sign of a reasonable and intelligent person is not that they avoid politics, or even avoid discussing it, but that they don’t bring it up when it’s not relevant to the conversation. And yet, some of my wife’s friends are quite intelligent, or at least she says she always thought so, but can’t shut up about ORANGE MAN BAD.
On the other hand, I’ve never had people do that kind of thing at work, which has been a blessing, and a testament to professionalism.