Why It All Makes Sense: The Psychology and Sociology Behind What We’re Watching

A deeper companion to “They’re Not Crazy.” .

A Note Before You Read This

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #955: Thursday, July 2nd, 2026.

I wrote this one for paid subscribers on June 27th, 2026…less than a week ago. I’m taking the paywall off it today, for everyone, and I want to tell you why…because the reason matters more than the gesture.

This isn’t the article that tells you something is wrong. You already know that. This is the one that tells you why it isn’t crazy…why the leader’s behavior…the follower’s certainty…the lie that won’t die…no matter how many times you correct it, all of it is documented…studied…and predictable. Not a glitch. A pattern.

And patterns…can be recognized before they finish playing out. That’s not a small thing to gatekeep behind a subscription.

I built this piece to be checked, not believed. Every claim has a name…a study…and a link attached to it…including the studies that failed to replicate…and the critics who pushed back hard. I did that on purpose. Trust the sources, not me.

If you’ve been telling people “read Jack’s stuff,” this is the one to send them.

It’s built to travel. Share it…restack it…put it in a group chat…hand it to the relative who still thinks this is all just chaos. Orientation isn’t useful if it stays behind a wall.

If it’s useful to you, paid subscriptions are what let me keep doing the version of this work that takes days…instead of hours…but that’s a separate conversation from whether this particular piece should be free. It should be. So it is.

#HoldFast

-Jack

P.S. If you are a paid subscriber, seeing this again…and didn’t get it shared the first time, I’d be grateful if you did so this time.

Why It All Makes Sense: The Psychology and Sociology Behind What We’re Watching

A deeper companion to “They’re Not Crazy.” For paid subscribers.

The Jack Hopkins Now Newsletter #949: Saturday, June 27th, 2026.

In the shorter piece, I made a claim and asked you to take a lot of it on faith:

That almost nothing we’ve watched is insane, and that “bat-shit crazy” is a comforting story we tell ourselves to avoid the harder one.

This is where I pay that off.

What follows is not opinion…dressed up as analysis.

It’s a tour through what researchers in psychology…social psychology…political science…and history have actually documented…much of it decades before the current moment, some of it using data gathered on the very people we’re trying to understand.

I’ll give you the names…the mechanisms…and the links…so you can check every load-bearing claim yourself. I’d rather you trust the sources than trust me.

I’ll also do something most persuasion pieces won’t:

I’ll show you where these theories are contested. Several have faced serious challenges, failed replications…or sharp methodological critiques.

That’s not a weakness in the argument. It’s the argument. People who are confident in the truth…can afford to show you the disputes. People selling you something…can’t.

Here’s the through-line before we start:

The behavior isn’t a glitch in human nature. It’s a feature of it…a set of predictable responses to fear…status…identity…and information…that have been studied for generations. That’s the bad news…and the only good news, both at once.

Let’s go.

Part I: The Leader’s Logic: Dominance, Not Derangement

Start at the top, because this is where “crazy” fails fastest.

The single most useful body of work here belongs to the late Bob Altemeyer, a psychologist who spent four decades measuring authoritarianism with actual instruments…rather than vibes. His free book, The Authoritarians, is the best entry point anyone has written.

Altemeyer drew a distinction that dissolves a lot of confusion.

There are authoritarian followers and authoritarian leaders…and…they are not the same animal. Leaders tend to score high on what’s called social dominance orientation…a worldview that sees the human world as divided into the strong and the weak…with the strong entitled to rule.

To a high social dominator…deception…broken promises…and cruelty aren’t lapses. They’re tools. “Might makes right” isn’t an accusation you’d level at such a person; it’s closer to their operating premise.

Now hold that next to the behavior. Constant dominance displays. Loyalty prized over competence. Promises made and discarded without apparent friction. Cruelty deployed as a signal rather than concealed as a shame.

Through the lens of “crazy,” that’s chaos. Through the lens of social dominance…it’s coherent. It’s a person doing exactly what the framework predicts a person like that will do…because it has worked for them their entire life.

Altemeyer also identified a rare and dangerous type he called the “Double High”… someone who scores high on both social dominance AND authoritarian submission.

And…he warned about what happens when a social-dominator leader…links up with a mass of authoritarian followers: a volatile condition he flagged as the historical precursor to the worst outcomes a society can produce.

Read that again.

He wasn’t theorizing in the abstract. His final book, co-written with Watergate’s John Dean…applied the lifetime of data directly to the present.

The point of Part I…is narrow but essential:

At the leadership level…what looks like impulsive madness…is better explained as a stable personality structure…pursuing power by the means it has always trusted. That’s not a diagnosis of illness. It’s a description of a strategy.

Part II: The Follower’s Mind: Why Devotion Survives Disproof

This is the part people find genuinely baffling. How do they still believe it? How does the evidence just bounce off?

Because…and I cannot stress this enough…the evidence is not the point. Once you understand that…the fog lifts.

Identity, not information.

The legal scholar and psychologist Dan Kahan…spent years documenting what he calls identity-protective cognition.

The finding is unsettling:

When a factual question gets fused to a group identity…people don’t process evidence to find the truth.

They process it to protect their standing in the group.

And…here’s the gut-punch; Kahan’s data show that the most numerate, most cognitively sophisticated people are often better at this…not worse.

They use their intelligence to build stronger defenses for the conclusion their tribe requires. You cannot fact your way past this with a smarter argument. A smarter argument…is just more raw material for the defense.

Moral disengagement.

But how do otherwise decent people…endorse indecent things?

Albert Bandura, one of the most cited psychologists who ever lived…mapped the exact machinery. He called it moral disengagement…and he identified the specific levers by which ordinary, kind people…switch off their own conscience:

• Euphemistic labeling: sanitizing an ugly act with a clean word…so it never has to be felt as ugly.

• Displacement of responsibility: “I’m just following the leader / the law / orders.”

• Diffusion of responsibility: when everyone’s a little complicit…no one feels responsible.

• Advantageous comparison: “Whatever our side did, the other side is worse.”

• Dehumanization: once a group is recast as vermin…criminals…or an infestation… the normal rules of decency are quietly suspended.

Bandura’s chilling observation…was that large-scale cruelty is usually carried out by people who are compassionate in the rest of their lives.

They don’t stop being good neighbors. They just exclude certain people from the category of those who deserve good treatment.

I know I’ve already said it once in this article, but read THAT…again.

That’s not insanity. That’s a documented..repeatable cognitive maneuver…and notice that every item on Bandura’s list maps onto rhetoric you have heard this year.

Fear of death, defense of worldview.

Then there’s terror management theory, developed from the work of Ernest Becker by Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski.

The core finding…supported across hundreds of studies:

When people are reminded of their own mortality…when death is made salient… they cling harder to their cultural worldview…defend their in-group more fiercely…and turn more hostile toward out-groups. (Yes, Democrats are considered an out-group to MAGA.)

Now ask yourself what a steady diet of “they’re invading,” “they’re coming for you,” “it’s an existential threat” actually does to an audience, day after day.

It keeps the fear of annihilation switched on.

And frightened people…don’t reason. They circle the wagons. (In fairness: a large multi-lab replication, Many Labs 4, failed to reproduce the classic mortality-salience effect, and the theory’s founders disputed the methods. The mechanism is real and influential but genuinely contested; I’m telling you that on purpose.)

Status, not the wallet.

Finally…the engine under the grievance.

The political scientist Diana Mutz, using a panel that tracked the same Americans from 2012 to 2016…found that the shift toward Trump was better explained by perceived status threat…the felt loss of dominant-group standing among traditionally high-status Americans…than by personal economic hardship.

The “left behind, pocketbook” story was the comfortable one; the data pointed at something more primal:

The fear of losing your group’s place at the top. (This finding, too, has been challenged… sociologist Stephen Morgan re-analyzed Mutz’s data and argued economic interests matter at least as much. Worth knowing.)

Stack these four and the follower stops being a mystery.

Their beliefs are protecting their identity…their conscience has been professionally disengaged…their fear of death is being held open like a wound…and their sense of status feels under siege.

A person in that state isn’t crazy. They are behaving exactly as the research says a human being in that state behaves.

Part III: The Machinery of Belief: How a Lie Becomes “Just True”

Here’s the one I’d tattoo on the wall if I could.

The illusory truth effect, first documented by Lynn Hasher and colleagues in 1977 and replicated relentlessly since:

Simply repeating a claim makes it feel truer…even when it’s false, even when it’s implausible…and (this is the devastating part) even when the listener already knows better.

Lisa Fazio’s work carries a title that says it all:

Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth. Your prior knowledge that something is false…does not reliably stop repetition from eroding it.

The mechanism is processing fluency:

The more easily your brain processes something…the more “true” it feels…and repetition is the cheapest way to make something feel easy.

Simpler, more familiar messages beat complex…nuanced ones…not because they’re more accurate…but because they’re more fluent.

This is the entire engine of the “Big Lie” as a technique rather than a personality flaw.

You don’t repeat the same falsehood because you’re delusional. You repeat it…because repetition works on the human brain…mechanically…regardless of truth value.

And…newer research…found something worse still:

Repetition doesn’t just raise belief, it blunts moral judgment; repeated exposure to an unethical act makes it feel less wrong. The flood isn’t noise. The flood is the method.

And this is exactly where the AI dimension that’s been worrying so many of you comes in.

Nothing about the logic is new…propagandists have always tried to colonize perception before the ballot box. What’s new is the economics.

Repetition used to cost money and labor. Now…persuasion is cheap…and confusion is scalable.

The oldest cognitive exploit in the book…just got an industrial engine bolted to it…at the exact moment independent accountability journalism is weakening. That combination is the thing to watch.

Part IV: The Slow Part: Why It Doesn’t Look Like a Coup

People keep waiting for the dramatic moment…the tanks…the announcement. They’re waiting for the wrong thing…and the research on how this actually unfolds tells us why.

It’s freely given.

The historian Timothy Snyder, in On Tyranny…opens with the most important sentence for this moment:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. He calls it anticipatory obedience…people adapting in advance…offering compliance before it’s even demanded…teaching power what it’s allowed to do.

His example is Austria in 1938:

It was the population’s anticipatory obedience…the looking-on with “interest and amusement,” that showed the regime what was possible. Nobody had to be forced first. Enough people volunteered.

It’s legal-looking and gradual.

The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die… document the modern pattern with comparative data:

Democracies today rarely die by tanks. They die at the hands of elected leaders…who dismantle the system using the system…gradually…legally…almost boringly.

The protections that actually hold a democracy together…aren’t only the written laws; they’re two unwritten norms…the authors name mutual toleration (accepting your opponents’ legitimate right to exist and govern) and institutional forbearance (not using every legal power to its maximum just because you can).

When those norms erode…when politicians switch to constitutional hardball, doing whatever isn’t explicitly forbidden…the guardrails are gone long before any law is broken.

Their four warning signs are worth committing to memory:

• Rejecting democratic rules

• Denying opponents’ legitimacy

• Tolerating or encouraging violence

• Showing willingness to curtail civil liberties and the press.

It feels like Thursday.

And here’s why none of it registers as an emergency: acclimation.

Citizens don’t experience erosion as a sequence; they experience it…as a series of individual controversies…each of which fades.

The departure becomes the new baseline…and the next exception…gets measured against the already-compromised one instead of the original.

Weimar Germany lived under emergency executive decrees…so many times in the early 1930s…that by the time full powers were handed over…most Germans had spent years watching their government operate outside normal process.

The final threshold didn’t feel like a threshold. It felt ordinary. That is the most dangerous sentence in this whole essay: the point of no return rarely announces itself as one.

This is why a “postal rule” matters more than a tank. The tank would wake people up. The postal rule…puts them to sleep.

Part V: Why “Crazy” Is the Most Dangerous Word You Can Use

So why, given all of this, do so many people still reach for “they’re insane”?

Because it’s cognitively cheap… and your brain loves cheap. “Crazy” is a closed door:

No homework…no further thought. It makes you the normal one by contrast…so the world still works the way you were raised to expect.

And…most seductive of all…it implies the problem is temporary…because crazy supposedly burns itself out and trips over its own feet.

Every one of those comforts is false, and each one is a gift to the people running the play.

“Crazy” tells you to wait. The research tells you that waiting…is precisely the strategy …your opponents are counting on.

There’s a deeper reason, too, and it’s the most honest thing I can say to you. “It makes sense” is far more frightening than “it’s crazy” …and that fear is exactly why people refuse it.

If it’s madness…it’s rare and self-limiting. If it makes sense…it’s common…repeatable… and teachable; it has worked across centuries and continents…and it can work here.

The reluctance to name the pattern isn’t a sign the pattern isn’t there. The reluctance is itself a data point…the instrument reading true.

I want to be scrupulously fair…because this matters. Not one of these frameworks is the final word. Terror management theory has a serious failed replication on its books.

Mutz’s status-threat finding has been credibly contested. The symmetry of motivated reasoning across left and right is still debated. Authoritarianism research carries its own methodological arguments.

Real science is supposed to look like this…contested…revised…argued over. But notice what survives the disputes: a deep, cross-disciplinary convergence on a simple idea.

Frightened people defending their identity and status…fed repeated claims in a degraded information environment…will gradually accept what they would once have rejected…and will experience the whole descent as a series of ordinary days.

You don’t need every theory to be airtight for that convergence to be the most important thing in the room.

What To Do With This

Orientation precedes remedy. That’s been the spine of everything I write here. But I’ll sharpen it now: orientation today requires sourcing.

The defense isn’t to be smarter in an argument…Kahan showed that smarter often just means better-defended. The defense isn’t to spot every fake; in the AI era, no one can.

The defense is structural and humble:

Know the playbook well enough to recognize a move before it lands.

Build a small web of sources and people you trust enough to check against…and build it now…while it’s calm…because in a degraded environment independent reporting will not find you…you have to go find it.

Refuse anticipatory obedience:

Don’t pre-comply…don’t grant in advance what hasn’t even been demanded. And measure every new “exception” against the original standard…not the already-eroded one…because the acclimation machine only works on people who’ve forgotten where the line used to be.

None of that requires you to be a hero. It requires you to stay oriented when everything around you is engineered to make you flinch…shrug…or sleep.

It makes sense. That’s the hard truth. And…it’s the only reason we have a fighting chance…because a thing that makes sense can be understood…and a thing you understand, you can beat.

#HoldFast

Back soon.

-Jack

Jack Hopkins

P.S. Here's a test you can run this next week. The next time a story breaks and your first reaction is "that's insane," stop and ask the second question: insane... or strategic?

Who benefits if I look away? What does this train me to accept as normal? You'll be right that it's outrageous. You'll just stop being surprised…and surprise is the tax the unprepared pay. Drop your answers in the comments. I read every one.

Sources

Every major claim above is anchored here. These are starting points; most contain full bibliographies if you want to go deeper.

Authoritarian leaders and followers

• Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarians (free full book): theauthoritarians.org — full PDF here

• Overview of Altemeyer’s right-wing authoritarianism research: Wikipedia: Bob Altemeyer

Why evidence bounces off — motivated reasoning

• Dan Kahan explains motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition (plain-language): Discover Magazine Q&A

• Kahan et al., “Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection” (the study finding more sophisticated reasoners polarize more): SSRN

How decent people endorse cruelty — moral disengagement

• Albert Bandura’s overview of moral disengagement: albertbandura.com

• Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities” (1999, full PDF): link

• Summary of the eight mechanisms: Wikipedia: Moral disengagement

Fear, mortality, and worldview defense — terror management theory

• Review and application of TMT: Pyszczynski et al., Journal of Humanistic Psychology

• Overview including the failed Many Labs 4 replication and the founders’ response: Wikipedia: Terror management theory

The engine of grievance — status threat

• Diana Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” PNAS (full PDF): link

• The principal critique (read the other side): Stephen Morgan, “Status Threat, Material Interests, and the 2016 Presidential Vote”: link

Why repetition makes lies feel true — the illusory truth effect

• Fazio et al., “Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth” (APA, full PDF): link

• A review of how repetition increases belief in misinformation: ScienceDirect

• Plain-language summary, including the moral-repetition effect: Vanderbilt University

Anticipatory obedience and the slow death of norms

• Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (overview and excerpts): timothysnyder.org — the twenty lessons summarized: Scholars Strategy Network

• Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (mutual toleration, institutional forbearance, the four warning signs): Wikipedia overview — reading/teacher’s guide: Penguin Random House

A note on method: I’ve linked freely available and authoritative sources wherever possible, and I’ve deliberately included the strongest published critiques of the contested findings. If a framework only survives when you hide its disputes, it isn’t worth building on. These survive the disputes.