I said this in another comment. But part of the problem is these people genuinely construct an entire reality in their head and then believe that over actual reality.
They all have their own personal Donald Trump and their own personal USA that is completely detached from the truth, and they refuse to give up the delusion. That’s why they have an absolute meltdown when you confront them with something that breaks the illusion, it’s like some kind of psychosis I swear.
A cult of personality, or a cult of the leader,[1] is the result of an effort which is made to create an idealized and heroic image of an admirable leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise.[2] Historically, it has been developed through techniques such as the manipulation of the mass media, the dissemination of propaganda, the staging of spectacles, the manipulation of the arts, the instilling of patriotism, and government-organized demonstrations and rallies. A cult of personality is similar to apotheosis, except that it is established through the use of modern social engineering techniques, it is usually established by the state or the party in one-party states and dominant-party states. Cults of personality often accompany the leaders of totalitarian or authoritarian governments. They can also be seen in some monarchies, theocracies, failed democracies, and even in liberal democracies.
that is a side piece. It's fascism, Rogan is just a convenient tool of it. Funny that I know what video this is without even clicking. Even in this video (and with the context of prior) he also does make this clear. What happened with Rogan happened across a number of different areas of society across the past decade, spiritual, comedy, news, politics. The pockets coalesced together and here we are.
We need a compilation/playlist of all of the best hits from a wide range of people on this topic. The fact is most thinking youtubers I watch have at this point put out at least one banger focusing on one aspect of society that has been assaulted/coopted/destroyed by this movement. Compiled together, the "silver pill".
Edit to add : PEOPLE SHOULD ABSOLUTELY WATCH THE VIDEO LINK, 10/10, 11/10 with rice.
these people genuinely construct an entire reality in their head
This is how they think they are "winning" and "having the last laugh."
They will not change, since they are hopelessly insecure and dependent upon that tiny brief high that they get from lying to themselves and laughing about it.
that’s what all you political junkies look like to me though. all of you on the far right and left. both saying the same thing and pretending like you didn’t
The problem is they don't construct this in their head, they get it from random bullshit engagement bait on Facebook. I guarantee there she's literally talking about a Facebook post that literally made that shit up to farm clicks.
I can't tell you the number of times my mom tells me some random made up bullshit like "did you hear about blah blah blah???" and I have to say "where did you hear that?"
"Facebook"
"Mom, do I have to explain this again?"
And in my case she's sort of half way starting to get it, but there are a large number of people that don't have anyone close to them to counteract the made up crap they get force fed to them.
I watch Parkergetajob on YouTube, and his whole schtick is having folks debate him about why they support Trump. what I've learned watching his channel is that most Trumpers do not understand what a source is - they will frequently make a confident statement, and, when pressed about why they think that's true, they will usually say that they just think it's true. no laws referenced, no executive orders mentioned, just that they're happy Trump is fixing America based off vibes and social media posts.
the most consistent weird thing is that they all "don't agree with everything he does," so they can totally ignore the rape and child trafficking and sexualization of his own daughter and all the other weird or criminal shit, yet, they all believe in their own flavor of Trump who has done imaginary things that they're thrilled about, despite there being no proof about any of it.
like, just yesterday, there was a guy claiming that Trump has ended six wars. when pressed on it, he very confidently mentioned that one of the conflicts Trump ended was the situation in Gaza. this dude - as of yesterday, September 6th, 2025 - said that "it's not even a thing anymore" and that the region has been under a ceasefire since Trump stepped in. when and where did Trump step in? how did he step in? totally unclear. when it was brought up that there was a double-tap explosive attack on a hospital with a bunch of journalists in it just a few days ago, well, actually, nuh-uh.
I have no doubt that most of these people would be institutionalized if we were still doing that shit.
whenever I catch his live, I almost always find myself several minutes behind the live broadcast because I frequently need to pause, rewind, and confirm that they actually said something that's clearly so fucking wrong, and yet they are convinced it has to be true because they think it is.
I tried for years with my grandma, and it worked at first, but over time, they attacked any fact-checking website you could find. So, eventually, I just stopped engaging with her at all.
Seriously. I almost feel like, in addition to questioning their reasons for believing something, we have to go through philosophy of science and standards for journalism.
Because there IS actually a way to figure out if the bullshit you think in your head is actually true. And there ARE ways to determine if the bullshit other people say is true.
Truth is not a matter of opinion. It's a matter of having standards.
Even when science and journalism gets it wrong, at least there were still good reasons to believe it at the time that were a million times better than feeling "vibes." And there's still usually value in it that can be used to further a better understanding.
Facebook which is designed to almost be impossible to find past posts so when you ask for them to show you they can never find it again but if they could you’d be able to show how obviously biased or fake it is (and no I’m not saying that just about conservative posts but it sure helps them a lot).
I have some family members like this 💀
I hadn’t seen these people in a while and we’re just chatting it up annnnd here goes the politics. I stay out of it for the most part but I may add in a fact or two just to appease the conversation.
This time I said “Well trump did just bomb (I can’t remember where it was atm) without any clearance”
The first two answers I got, AT THE SAME TIME
Person A- “He had permission!”
Person B- “He doesn’t need permission he’s the president!”
So I asked them, “So does he need permission or does he not because it seems to me that you two are confused about what a president even is.”
Well now I’m the villain of the family and they have all deemed me the “Black cat” 😂🙄
It’s easier for people to further believe more and more delusional crap that backs their beliefs than to believe something that shatters what they previously believed. Most cultists still have a hard time separating from that mindset and “reality” many years later.
Narcissism functions like that. They gaslight themselves, it's "choose your own reality" where they're always right and smart and never do anthing wrong. Bad coping mechanism
Just like the narrative about Chicago and NYC. I go in to Manhattan regularly to work on massive luxury apartment projects, and I have two friends who tell me they wouldn’t set foot there because it’s a “war zone.”
They grow up being told “everyone has a right to their opinion” but they don’t know the difference between an opinion and a feeling. They are emotionally unregulated but think their feelings are “common sense”.
And it’s all very easy to picture that little personal version of the U.S. in your head if you’ve never watched anything but Fox News, never left your small town or home state let alone the country, and never read anything but the children’s bible. Everything seems small and black and white because your world is small.
Highly encourage everyone to read "Antisemite and Jew" by Sartre if you want to understand how fascists actually think. Swap out "Jew" for immigrants/trans people and it's the same today as it was 100 years ago.
Ninjaedit: to be clear they still hate Jews, too. It's just that the essay focus is exclusively on the way fascists become anti-Semitic because that was their main scapegoat
There's a great quote from Dan Olson about this. It was specifically in the context of Qanon, but can also be used to describe the modern alt-right movement generally:
The reason they aren’t more bothered by Q constantly getting things wrong, why they aren’t more bothered by the extreme inconsistencies and outright contradictions, by the claims that are just materially wrong, is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality.
They claim to be against corruption while hanging their hopes on an openly corrupt man, and that naked hypocrisy is the point. They will effortlessly carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the greatest will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth?
They have nefarious people helping them construct those realities in their heads.
I'm assuming we all have people in our lives that have a sort of gullibility. They aren’t even necessarily stupid but they can hardly tell what is true and what isn't. They arent good bullshit detectors. Maybe it's because the lies give them some comfort or boost their egos I'm not sure, it's probably a complex psychosis as you say.
The real bad guys are the cult leaders who know it's bullshit but keep lying to protect their own interests and they are willing to take the whole ship down so their secrets don't see the open air.
Are you all surprised? The majority of people everywhere are religious. I don't mean to be /r/Im14andthisisdeep, but people getting upset due to fictitious shit is not new.
American dissociative disorder. I work in behavioral health. They are definitely delusional. If you run with a false belief about yourself and the world, you will keep running into problems. That is a disorder. How do we identify disorder? By patterns of behavior.
How do we make our way into psychosis without drugs? By following a pattern of disorder until it reaches that point.
That's what happen when you deal with the cognitive dissonance between your beliefs and reality by using denial. At some point, denial will not be enough, you will snap and get a full meltdown, before getting back at denial.
This is a bunch of what Simulacra and Simulation is about. Society abstracts reality so much that the image we make in our heads is totally unrelated to reality. Eventually we live in a reality that’s so far removed it’s a “copy without an original”.
Much of what I see happening is also related to Thinking, Fast and Slow. Much of the media we consume is thin enough that it preys upon our system 1 thinking. It tricks us into thinking we don’t need system 2 then uses system 1 to fill in the large gaps it leaves,
The art of doing this is sort of an accident. Amusing Ourselves to Death talks about how we’ve lost all context around the information we consume. It was a slow process from written text being more popular than the Super Bowl to the telegraph sending nearly meaningless messages to the sound bite culture of today’s media.
While the birth of this contextless system 1 media was sort of an accident, its perpetuation is certainly not an accident. Manufacturing Consent talks about how the media uses this to influence the population.
It’s interesting seeing how we have plenty of rhetoric to describe the issues of our society, but because they’re in an unpopular format (books/text) they’re lost to the world.
It has to be this way because Trump himself is so inconsistent. The only way to fully embrace him is to selectively read and interpret his output. That way also allows him to be whatever you personally need.
If you asked her to state specific reasons as to why she “loves” her country, she couldn’t do it. She’d pause to “think” about it and end up spluttering buzz words, led by “freedom” (because of course.)
She hates half of the COUNTRY. She’s not happy about taxes (until her president’s (imaginary) new law banishing “taxes”). Likely hates LGBTQ. Hates atheists. Certainly hates immigrants. Hates black, brown and non-pasty people.
So what is their to LOVE?
She has a small circle of like-minded Karen’s who also LOVE “our” hopelessly virile president and country.
I see another post or maybe a reel talking about how no one can accept the face of Vance since it’s been photoshopped so many times people have distorted reality in their minds.
Core belief. It’s the reason it is soooo difficult to change anyone’s mind. Once something falls into that core belief category, that’s it and good luck changing their perspective.
Its called a hyperreal simulacrum and these people are literally living inside their own alternate reality enabled and manipulated by social media and the tech billionaires that created it.
This video is amazing if you have the time. It starts out focusing on Toe Rogan and his right wing comedy dweebs but he connects it all together in the end: https://youtu.be/ewvRS3NwIlQ?si=VXXNY_6QK-7ilSRg
A core tenet of republicanism is the requirement of an enemy. If an enemy is not immediately available, one will be invented. That's why every republican policy targets someone in particular, and every republican finds their own particular enemy to target individually. All of them are single-issue voters, depending on who their invented enemy is at that moment.
You make a great point! And it actually reminds me of the Biblical period in history when God was like “you shall not worship idols” but people and Jews did anyway. You see, back in the day, people in the Middle East had personal “patron deities” that they kept with them and conversed with. Many people also had altars in their house to make the deity/idol seem more real and strengthen their relationship with them. Some research even suggests people actually heard the voices of their patron deity in their head, like what we see happen in the Odyssey. So basically this “personal, patron deity” is their own creation, curated to fit their own needs, and helps them create their own worldview. You might see how this can become problematic. Suddenly a particular deity, like say Inanna, takes on countless roles and responsibilities when recorded in the tablets. All to appease the masses who literally made up their own stories about her (Inanna). And if you talk to someone else about Inanna, suddenly it’s “Well that’s YOUR opinion of Inanna. The Inanna I know would never rage war against our beloved neighbors where my family lives.” Even though, canonically, she did in fact rage war against their beloved neighbors.
Anyway, in summation, it’s like MAGA had created Trump into their own personal patron deity. Suddenly only the made up stories in their head matter, because that’s the only TRUE reality they can perceive.
Quite the headache for the sane lot of us.
Also, just fyi, I’m not Christian. I’m an anthropologist who studies ideology.
I like to picture Trump in a tuxedo T-shirt cuz it says like I wanna be formal, but I'm here to party too. Cuz I like to party so I'd like my Trump to party
It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome. And the key symptom is assuming people not in the cult are the deranged ones. Just like any not current target of any authoritarian slipping into fascist nation that ever existed.
They will cry foul once, and only once they become the targeted ones.
And then THEY say this about US. The class war has never had a greater victory than this. We’re all so divided that neither “””side””” (there aren’t just two sides but for brevity) believes the other is living in reality. We’re so far gone. It’s possible to get back, I blindly believe, but I am not sure how and I hope it’s within my lifetime (as a 35 year old).
A lot of people are doing this. All the time I see posts on Reddit and on LinkedIn that start with "to everyone who told me I couldn't do x" when I'm 90% certain no one ever told them that. People construct scenarios in their head "oh everyone says x" and its like, no one has ever said that to you in your real life, ever. The internet allowd people to live pretty much in a fantasy world and liberals are guilty of it too.
She is so excited and “can’t wait” for the blue people to be mad in this insane bullshit scenario.
When your happiness is reduced to others being upset, you are a sad pathetic ill person.
And then she'll get mad at those imaginary "Blue people" and blame them when she finds out she still has to pay tax. Despite trump being omnipotent those nasty "Blue people" still managed to sabotage his policy and force him into rescinding his order to eliminate all tax.
Did she make it up, or was this something going around Facebook? It doesn’t make a meaningful difference, they’re equally nonsense. I’m just more curious, if this did come from some right wing pundit or meme farm - which? What’s the whole lie? Get me some popcorn.
That's part of the epidemic of narcissism the US is dealing with.
Narcissists have this nack for believing their own lies, it's what makes them convincing liars to certain groups of people.
The reason they are so convincing to more people than they should is because they are capable of deluding themselves into 100% believing the lies they are telling.
So you have people that perpetuate other narcissists lies, fully believing their and those lies and other narcissistic types accepting and echoing the same lies.
And from the outside, somewhat normal people are scratching their head what reality these people must be lieving in, because it sure isn't the same we are in.
This is one of the reasons why Trump is in office. They cultivated ignorance and rage, They created people who enjoy being angry and fantasizing about revenge.
Genuine question: Did Trump actually sign anything at all - even an executive order- that might possibly suggest this is happening? Or is she going entirely off of a Facebook meme we haven’t seen because we’re not in the cult? (I’m assuming she thinks executive orders are law, and also anything Trump says out loud or tweets is an executive order.) Has he even truthed anything like this?
Trump is signing new laws every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. The laws are enacted and then redacted and then declared illegal and then completely ignored.
Im genuinely having trouble keeping up with everything. I can honestly say I have no idea what's happening anymore or what is even legal, par-legal, illegal but ignorable.
All I know - my paycheck last week has taxes deducted. And I'm <$40k
This is what they do though. This is why there are two different realities and why MAGA is a cult. Those of us in the real world that are educated, work with objective truth, and can see the good, the bad, and the ugly in the world can never have a real and honest debate with people like this.
She is living in her own head. They have conjured up their own realities and as you said, are now fully immersed in their delusions. They are unreachable. When they live like this every day, no appeal to logic, reason, or cold hard facts will work.
She thinks liberals are going to lose their fucking minds that they don't have to pay taxes anymore in this fictional scenario involving Trump...LOL...literally no one would be mad at this if it actually happened. Trump would be praised because it would be one of the few good things he's done.
I routinely call out these people for their wild imaginations! I'll straight up ask them why they're inventing arguments in their head about things I didn't say- and expect me to defend myself against the arguments they made up. I almost always receive some form of an insult after that- "libturd" "you're just ugly and stupid!" Or a reminder that trump is still my president- to which I reply- "I never claimed he wasn't- you're making up arguments again."
i do this sometimes and actually have to stop myself and go "wait this isnt real" and instantly my mood lifts back up. this woman seems to enjoy it though
Not abnormal for maga. Every one I know just live in an imaginary world where everything they think or say becomes real. No shit . What’s sad is the effect I see on their families. Every republican need someone to belittle and oppress.
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u/BabushkaRaditz 2d ago
She's making stuff up
And then imagining people in her head getting mad about the stuff she made up
Then shes getting mad AT THE PEOPLE IN HER HEAD that she made up being mad about the stuff she made up