The Anatomy of American Fascism: Loyalty, Scapegoats, and the Loss of Doubt

Christopher Hitchens warned us: 'The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.' MAGA follows no principle, only loyalty. It rewrites the rules not for justice, but for revenge.”

The Authoritarian Blind Spot

If history is the laboratory of tyranny, then MAGA is its latest experiment, proving, in real-time, that with enough repetition, grievance, and moral reversal, you can raise not citizens, but loyalists. The kind once called the Hitler Youth now wear red caps and call themselves patriots.”

This is not to say MAGA is a Nazi movement, but that its psychological infrastructure, its demand for obedience, scapegoating, and moral certainty, follows the same authoritarian blueprint. The comparison isn’t about the swastika. It’s about the system of thought that enables tyranny to grow under the banner of virtue.

Authoritarianism doesn’t always arrive with tanks and censorship. Sometimes it wears a baseball cap and waves a flag. It speaks in the language of grievance and promises a return to something, order, greatness, control. And for those who feel left behind, threatened by change, or haunted by imagined losses, that promise sounds like salvation.

MAGA doesn’t see itself as authoritarian. It sees itself as the last defense against one. Its supporters believe they are preserving America, not reshaping it into something crueler. But this is the central delusion. The authoritarian impulse doesn’t announce itself with tyranny. It cloaks itself in virtue. It says: “We’re not the problem, they are.”

Over and over, MAGA frames its rage as reaction. “We were pushed,” they say. Pushed by the radical left, by corrupt media, by stolen elections, by brown faces crossing borders, by people who use different pronouns. The story MAGA tells is that it was driven to this. But that’s not what the evidence shows.

What the psychology shows, what history shows, is that these beliefs, these instincts, this hunger for control, obedience, and punishment, were already there. Waiting. Waiting for permission. Waiting for a leader who would not ask for their shame but offer them a mirror, one that turned grievance into virtue and cruelty into patriotism.

This isn’t just about Trump. This is about what was unleashed the moment Trump gave people permission to stop pretending. When he told them the press was the enemy. That immigrants were animals. That disobedience should be met with force. That loyalty mattered more than law, more than truth, more than conscience.

And when critics point this out, when they say, “this is what authoritarianism looks like,” MAGA doesn't refute it. They just say it’s fake news. Or they pivot. Or they cheer. Because in the MAGA mind, anything that threatens their identity must be the real enemy. And so, the more truth threatens them, the more they must deny it.

In this piece, we’ll explore the psychology behind this blindness. We’ll show why MAGA doesn’t just tolerate authoritarianism, it needs it. We’ll walk through eight interconnected mechanisms: from obedience psychology and motivated reasoning to dehumanization, identity fusion, and the myth of the outsider threat.

This isn’t about political disagreement. This is about a movement that can no longer separate who it is from what it believes. A movement that has made certainty sacred and doubt treason. A movement that sees authoritarianism not as danger, but as destiny.

And the most dangerous part?
They still think they’re the good guys.

They Didn't Turn Authoritarian, They Always Were

The story MAGA tells itself is that it was “pushed” into extremism, by the radical left, by media lies, by stolen elections. But this is historical and psychological fiction. MAGA didn’t mutate into authoritarianism. It emerged from it.

Studies show that right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) isn’t merely a reaction to political chaos or cultural conflict. It’s a measurable predisposition, a stable psychological profile marked by a desire for uniformity, obedience to authority, and punitive aggression toward outsiders who threaten perceived social norms. As Karen Stenner explains in The Authoritarian Dynamic, authoritarianism is "latent until activated by normative threats" (Stenner, 2005, p. 17). It isn’t diversity itself that triggers authoritarian expressions, but rather the visibility of difference, the sense that one’s worldview is being destabilized in real time.

This helps explain why the rise of MAGA coincided not with any radical shift from the left, but with cultural milestones: a Black president, growing LGBTQ+ visibility, shifting demographics. These didn’t cause authoritarianism, they exposed the deep discomfort already brewing among those predisposed to it. As Stenner puts it, “Authoritarianism is not a pathology. It is a normal and ubiquitous feature of human psychology that lies dormant until normatively activated” (Stenner, 2005, p. 327).

So long before Trump entered politics, the seeds were already sown. What he did wasn’t transformation, it was permission. He validated what many were conditioned to suppress. And once that psychological dam broke, everything else followed.

This shift didn’t just alter what people believed, it changed how they processed reality. As Ziva Kunda’s (1990) work on motivated reasoning showed, individuals often interpret information in biased ways to preserve emotionally important beliefs. When people are “motivated to arrive at a particular conclusion,” they employ biased memory search, interpretation, and belief construction to defend it (Kunda, 1990, p. 483). This isn’t conscious lying, it’s identity-protective distortion.

This is how you get a movement that can:

• Call for “law and order” while cheering the January 6th insurrection.

• Demand “freedom” while supporting the mass deportation of peaceful families.

• Rail against “big government” while worshiping an all-powerful executive.

But perhaps the most authoritarian trait isn’t behavior. It’s the inability to see it.

This blindness is amplified by the backfire effect, where factual corrections strengthen misperceptions rather than weaken them, especially when those misperceptions are linked to group identity. In their widely cited study, Nyhan and Reifler (2010) found that when corrections conflicted with strongly held ideological beliefs, people often “strengthened their initial misperceptions” instead of abandoning them (p. 311).

MAGA doesn’t believe Trump’s lies because they’re convincing. They believe them because disbelieving would fracture the identity Trump helped construct.

And that’s what makes the movement fundamentally authoritarian. Not just in its slogans or its policies, but in its structure of belief, where obedience replaces thought, and loyalty demands the elimination of doubt. It was never about persuasion. It was about finding a story where punishment felt like justice, conformity felt like safety, and submission could finally pass for patriotism.

Trump didn’t radicalize them. He unmasked them. And they’ve been saluting ever since.

Why They Can’t Be Wrong

To the average observer, MAGA’s inability to admit fault seems like stubbornness. But that’s a surface diagnosis. The deeper truth is more troubling: many MAGA supporters are psychologically unable to accept that they’re wrong, because doing so would mean dismantling their very identity.

This phenomenon is well-documented in political psychology. Ziva Kunda’s (1990) foundational work on motivated reasoning demonstrated that people don’t neutrally process information when their beliefs or values are at stake. Instead, we search for reasons to reinforce what we already believe. Kunda emphasized that this effect is strongest when the belief under scrutiny is tied to self-concept, what she called “self-definitional beliefs” (Kunda, 1990, p. 483).

But the issue isn’t just internal bias. According to Nyhan and Reifler (2010), when people are confronted with factual corrections that contradict their core political beliefs, they often double down instead of updating their views, a psychological phenomenon known as the backfire effect. They wrote: “Direct factual contradictions can actually strengthen misperceptions among ideological subgroups” (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010, p. 311).

This happens because for many MAGA supporters, politics is not a matter of opinion, it’s an extension of self. Swann et al. (2009) describe this phenomenon as identity fusion, where the boundaries between personal identity and group identity collapse. In such cases, attacks on the group are processed like personal assaults, triggering emotional rather than rational responses.

This is why MAGA voters can:

• Justify mass deportations as “just enforcing the law,” even when they harm peaceful families.

• Defend the January 6 attack as “fighting for election integrity,” despite overwhelming evidence of sedition.

• Deny Trump’s lies while embracing the idea that “the media lies more.”

It’s not that they haven’t seen the facts. It’s that accepting the truth would cause identity collapse. So instead, they reach for emotionally satisfying explanatory fictions: “Trump was misquoted.” “It was Antifa.” “The media is corrupt.”

Raunak Pillai (2021) found that Trump’s repetition of falsehoods served to reinforce belief, not through truth, but familiarity. “All the President’s Lies Repeated” showed how exposure to lies, especially when uncorrected, created a psychological sense of familiarity that led to increased belief, even in blatant falsehoods (Pillai, 2021, p. 8).

What we’re witnessing isn’t reasoned disagreement. It’s cognitive loyalty, a psychological loyalty that resists correction because the price of being wrong is simply too high.

Authoritarianism Wears Their Flag, So They Can’t See It

Authoritarianism rarely announces itself with a jackboot. It shows up draped in familiar symbols, lags, anthems, slogans about “freedom,” “faith,” and “family.” That’s why MAGA supporters don’t recognize it when they see it in the mirror. It looks like home.

This blindness isn’t accidental. It’s structural. The very psychology that draws people to authoritarian movements also makes them uniquely incapable of identifying those movements as authoritarian. In a 2021 study, Collective Narcissism and the Weakening of American Democracy, Osborne et al. found that Americans high in collective narcissism, the belief that their group is exceptional but underappreciated, were more likely to support undemocratic actions as long as those actions were seen as protecting the ingroup (Osborne et al., 2021, p. 12). If democracy feels like it’s “failing them,” they no longer defend it.

This is MAGA’s core delusion: they mistake dominance for justice. They believe protecting “real America” means punishing dissenters, immigrants, and critics. That’s not a betrayal of democracy in their eyes, it’s a restoration of it.

And when you try to point out the authoritarian traits, like loyalty pledges, violence against political opponents, or rule-by-decree, they don’t just reject the label. They turn it around.

This is textbook projection, a form of motivated reasoning where individuals attribute to others the very traits they deny in themselves. Altemeyer and Dean (2020) note that authoritarian followers often accuse their opponents of the very things they’re doing, calling others “fascist,” “tyrannical,” or “brainwashed” while demanding total loyalty to their own leader (Altemeyer & Dean, 2020, p. 170).

They say the left is silencing dissent, while banning books and censoring school curriculums.

They say Biden is a dictator, while cheering Trump’s calls to imprison political enemies.

They say they’re patriots, while flying Trump flags above the American one.

This isn’t just rhetorical hypocrisy. It’s psychological protection. As Stenner (2005) argues, authoritarian predispositions produce cognitive simplicity, a craving for clear categories of “us” and “them,” good and evil, friend and traitor (p. 218). That binary thinking makes it emotionally impossible for MAGA supporters to admit wrongdoing. Admitting it would rupture the clean lines their identities depend on.

So they live in a world where:

• “Freedom” means obedience to their version of truth.

• “Justice” means vengeance against perceived enemies.

• “Democracy” means winning at any cost, or burning the system down.

The more their beliefs are challenged, the more they project. The more they lose elections, the more they claim fraud. The more evidence piles up against their hero, the more they believe he’s being persecuted.

In this sense, Trumpism is not just a political movement. It’s an epistemic shield, a way of knowing that filters reality through grievance, identity, and myth. And that makes it authoritarian without ever needing to say the word.

Dehumanization and Scapegoating

Every authoritarian movement needs two things to thrive: an internal enemy to blame, and a population willing to believe that enemy is less than human. MAGA provides both.

Trump’s rhetoric has never been subtle. He has referred to immigrants as “animals,” accused them of “infesting” the country, and repeatedly decried refugees and asylum seekers as invaders. This isn’t accidental, it’s a textbook example of dehumanization. Research shows that when groups are described using animalistic or disease-based metaphors, people are more willing to support harsh policies against them, including violence, exclusion, and mass detention¹.

Psychological studies confirm that dehumanization isn’t just inflammatory, it’s effective. In one study, Bruneau, Kteily, and Falk (2018) found that dehumanizing language significantly increased support for aggressive actions toward outgroups, even among people who would otherwise consider themselves moderate². This is why the rhetoric matters. When Trump called certain people “vermin” and “thugs,” he wasn’t just venting, he was giving moral license to his base³.

It’s not a coincidence that hate crimes surged during Trump’s campaign and presidency. According to the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics report, the number of reported hate crimes rose sharply from 2016 onward⁴. Peer-reviewed research has linked this uptick not only to broader cultural polarization but directly to Trump’s campaign events. A Stanford study by Bursztyn et al. (2019) found that counties which hosted Trump rallies experienced a 226% increase in reported hate incidents compared to matched counties that did not⁵.

The MAGA worldview thrives on scapegoating. Rather than address structural inequality or economic insecurity, the movement blames immigrants, Black Americans, LGBTQ people, Muslims, or “elites” for every perceived failure. This is a psychological maneuver to preserve group superiority. As social dominance orientation (SDO) research shows, people high in SDO are more likely to embrace hierarchical structures and demonize those they perceive as threatening that order⁶.

And it’s not just immigrants. Trump’s 2025 executive orders, including bans on trans rights, “ending radical indoctrination,” and “restoring sanity to American history,” function as ideological purges, targeting difference itself⁷. This echoes the authoritarian strategy of erasing dissent by dehumanizing it, turning social pluralism into moral contamination.

But the most telling evidence isn’t what MAGA opposes, it’s how they justify it. “They broke the law.” “They’re destroying our values.” “They’re not like us.” These aren’t policy arguments. They’re identity boundaries. Once a group is declared outside the moral circle, any abuse becomes defensible. Deportation is rebranded as protection. Discrimination becomes tradition. Hatred becomes virtue.

And so, dehumanization isn’t the side effect of MAGA ideology. It’s the point. Because if your goal is to preserve a narrow, mythologized version of America, you have to erase everyone who doesn’t fit in it.

The Role of Identity Fusion and Violence Justification

To understand why MAGA supporters defend the indefensible, from mass deportations to January 6th, you have to look beyond ideology and into identity. This isn’t just political loyalty. It’s identity fusion, a psychological state in which personal identity merges with group identity, making criticism of the group feel like an attack on the self.

Identity fusion creates a powerful emotional bond between the individual and the cause, a bond strong enough to override moral norms. Individuals high in identity fusion exhibit a heightened willingness to fight, die, or endorse violence for the group, particularly when the group is perceived as under threat (Swann et al., 2009). This helps explain why MAGA adherents not only tolerate Trump’s rhetoric but often rationalize, justify, or even celebrate acts of political violence committed in his name.

This psychological fusion doesn’t require mass hypnosis or a cult leader’s charisma. It thrives in environments of real or perceived humiliation. As Richard Hofstadter observed in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, movements that see themselves as “dispossessed” are more vulnerable to extreme ideologies (Hofstadter, 1964). Trump didn’t invent the grievance; he organized it into a usable weapon of identity.

Once fused, supporters begin to interpret every event through a lens of loyalty. Violence ceases to be “violence,” it becomes self-defense. Every deportation is justice. Every protester hit with a baton is a threat neutralized. This process is visible in the aftermath of January 6th, where Trump loyalists downplayed the attack or reframed it as patriotic action. One study found that individuals who viewed Trump as morally “good” were more likely to believe violence on January 6th was justified, or even necessary (Paredes et al., 2022).

This is how collective morality is corrupted: not through abstract belief in violence, but through the belief that violence is only bad when the other side does it. Once violence begins to serve a group’s identity and cohesion, it becomes self-justifying (Staub, 1990). MAGA doesn’t think it’s violent because it doesn’t see its targets as worthy of equal moral concern. That’s the logic of fused identity. The ingroup is sacred. The outgroup is expendable.

This also explains why MAGA supporters, despite claiming to abhor “cancel culture,” routinely support state violence and authoritarian policies. It’s not a contradiction, it’s coherence within a fused moral system. If someone is deemed “anti-American,” no punishment is too harsh. Denying bail, deporting without appeal, banning books, restricting protests, these are not seen as excesses, but necessary rituals of group purification.

And because the fused identity absorbs all doubt, the movement becomes incapable of reflection. Accountability feels like betrayal. Empathy becomes weakness. And politics becomes war.

Why MAGA Can't Admit They’re Wrong

Ask a MAGA supporter to consider Trump’s lies, his failures, or the harm caused by his policies, and you’ll rarely get reflection. More often, you’ll get deflection, whataboutism, or outright denial. This isn’t just stubbornness. It’s a deeply rooted psychological defense mechanism; one that protects not just Trump, but the believer’s very sense of self.

At the core is motivated reasoning: the process by which people selectively interpret information in ways that reinforce their prior beliefs and identities. Ziva Kunda’s seminal 1990 study on the topic found that when our motivations are identity-based, as they often are in politics, we don’t seek the truth. We seek confirmation (Kunda, 1990). In the MAGA worldview, Trump cannot be wrong without the entire movement being wrong. And since that would mean admitting personal error, the truth becomes a threat, not a tool.

This is reinforced by the backfire effect. When MAGA supporters are confronted with corrective information, especially about election fraud or Trump’s rhetoric, they often double down instead of reconsidering. Research shows that when facts contradict deeply held beliefs, people may become more entrenched in their views (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010). It’s not ignorance. It’s identity preservation.

But the denial doesn’t stop at information. It extends to morality. When confronted with harm, children in cages, attacks on journalists, encouragement of political violence, the reaction isn’t horror. It’s rationalization. “They broke the law.” “The media had it coming.” “It wasn’t that bad.” This moral disengagement is classic authoritarian psychology. As Altemeyer noted, right-wing authoritarians tend to downplay harm done by their leaders while exaggerating threats from the outgroup (Altemeyer, 1996).

This leads to asymmetrical empathy. MAGA can weep for January 6th rioters facing charges, but not for Black Americans choked by police. They will mourn the job loss of a conservative professor, but not the loss of reproductive rights. The inconsistency isn’t a bug, it’s a feature of system justification, a theory which explains how people rationalize injustice when it benefits their in-group or dominant identity (Jost & Hunyady, 2003).

And at the foundation is fear, not just fear of others, but fear of shame. To admit Trump lied is to admit you were fooled. To admit he incited violence is to admit complicity. And shame, as research shows, is far more corrosive to identity than guilt, it threatens the whole self, not just an action (Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Better to deny everything than face the possibility that you were wrong.

So MAGA doesn’t just argue facts. They defend a worldview. One that says: “If I’m wrong about Trump, then what else might I be wrong about?” That question is too terrifying to answer. So instead, they cling harder. Louder. Meaner.

Because to them, being wrong isn’t just uncomfortable, it’s existential.

The Authoritarian Rebranding of “Freedom”

In MAGA circles, the word “freedom” is sacred, plastered on flags, shouted at rallies, tattooed across social media bios. But the freedom they’re defending isn’t freedom in any universal sense. It’s conditional, exclusionary, and increasingly authoritarian. MAGA didn’t abandon the value of liberty. They rebranded it, into something that only applies to them.

True freedom means the ability to live without undue interference from others, especially the state. But MAGA’s version often demands the opposite: an empowered state that can deport millions without due process, ban books, arrest protesters, and force ideological conformity in schools. These aren’t lapses in principle, they’re expressions of a deeper belief: that freedom only belongs to the “right” kind of American.

This isn’t new. Authoritarian movements have long hijacked the language of liberty while eroding its practice. As Jost et al. (2003) argue, this distortion emerges from system justification, where individuals endorse hierarchies not in spite of their inequality, but because inequality protects their group’s dominance (Jost et al., 2003). In this view, “freedom” becomes a license to dominate, not to coexist.

You can see this in the way MAGA defends policies that restrict other people’s rights while insisting their own are under attack. Trans people using bathrooms? That’s “radical.” Police being investigated for brutality? That’s “war on cops.” Women demanding bodily autonomy? That’s “killing babies.” But banning trans healthcare, shielding police from oversight, and forcing pregnancies? That’s just “freedom.”

Psychologists call this asymmetric moral concern,th e tendency to show compassion and fairness only when one’s ingroup is affected (Waytz, Dungan & Young, 2013). And MAGA’s moral compass is deeply skewed. They scream about “free speech” when a conservative speaker is protested, but cheer when a teacher is fired for supporting Black Lives Matter. They rage over government overreach when asked to wear a mask, but applaud when protestors are tear-gassed in the street.

It’s a loyalty test disguised as a liberty movement. The same people who cry “tyranny” over public health mandates had no problem with Trump suggesting we delay the election, send the military into cities, or strip citizenship from dissenters. The contradiction only makes sense through the lens of authoritarian submission, a trait well-documented in right-wing authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1996). These voters don’t oppose tyranny in principle. They just want their side in charge of it.

Even “parental rights,” a key MAGA slogan, isn’t about universal freedom. It’s about enforcing a cultural and moral worldview. Parental rights to opt out of sex ed? Absolutely. But not the right to affirm a transgender child. The “freedom” to ban books? Yes. The freedom to read them? Not if they offend white, Christian sensibilities.

And because MAGA frames all this as moral defense, not political repression, it’s nearly impossible to challenge. As Stanley (2018) notes, authoritarian propaganda redefines freedom as the ability to preserve tradition, even if that tradition requires silencing others (Stanley, 2018). In MAGA’s America, freedom means freedom from others, not with them.

It’s why they can defend mass deportation as “sovereignty,” but call diversity “invasion.”

It’s why they’ll call a police officer kneeling on a neck “law and order,” and an unarmed protestor blocking traffic “terrorism.”

They don’t want freedom. They want control, dressed in the flag of liberty.

They Think They’re the Heroes

The most chilling aspect of MAGA authoritarianism isn’t its brutality. It’s that its followers believe they’re saving the country.

This isn’t a movement that sees itself as extremist. It sees itself as righteous. Every deportation, protest crackdown, or civil liberty eroded is recast as necessary to protect the nation. This is not a rational calculation, it’s the result of deep psychological mechanisms like collective narcissism, where group identity becomes so inflated that even criticism is treated as betrayal (Golec de Zavala et al., 2009).

MAGA supporters aren’t simply loyal to Trump. They believe they are America. As Trump once said to his base, “You’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.” That isn’t just flattery. It’s identity fusion in action, a belief that to criticize MAGA is to attack the country itself (Swann et al., 2012).

This is why arguments fail. This is why facts bounce off. Because you’re not challenging a policy. You’re challenging a sacred self-image.

And that image is always under siege. From immigrants. From liberals. From universities, media, scientists, drag queens, anyone who complicates the simple story of American greatness. As Karen Stenner observed, the authoritarian mind is not primarily interested in laws or ideology, it craves oneness and sameness, and sees pluralism as a direct threat (Stenner, 2005).

To maintain the illusion of moral purity, MAGA reinterprets every act of repression as moral defense. They don’t see January 6th as an insurrection. They see it as a revolution that was supposed to happen. They don’t see deportations as cruelty. They see them as cleansing. The question isn’t “How can you support this?” It’s “How could you not?”

This is the psychology that enables ordinary people to defend extraordinary abuses. As Staub (1990) noted in his work on group violence, once a group defines itself as good and righteous, violence against “outsiders” becomes not only justified but necessary to maintain moral order (Staub, 1990). They become what they claim to fight. And they believe it’s heroic.

This is also why MAGA can’t admit error. If they’re wrong, the world becomes chaotic and shameful. But if they’re right, about Trump, about “rigged” elections, about “radical leftists,” then every act of repression becomes redemption.

This is not the mindset of democratic citizens. It’s the mindset of zealots.

The true danger of MAGA isn’t just what it believes. It’s that it sees itself as the last hope of a dying republic, when in reality, it is one of the forces killing it. And it will keep marching, waving flags and quoting the Constitution, blind to the authoritarian nightmare it has already become.

Because when you think you’re the hero, you will justify anything to win the story.

Conclusion: The Authoritarian Blind Spot

MAGA isn’t drifting toward authoritarianism. It’s already there. And the terrifying part is not just that it denies it, that it genuinely can’t see it.

Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with marching boots and manifestos. It arrives draped in flags, quoting scripture, and swearing it’s defending freedom. That’s the sleight of hand. The same hands that raise the Constitution high will tear out its due process clause with the other. The same voices that scream about tyranny will cheer as families are deported, protesters are brutalized, and history itself is rewritten by executive order.

And they’ll say it’s patriotic.

But as this series has shown, this isn’t a mystery of political opinion. It’s a psychological pattern, mapped and measurable. Traits like Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) predict intolerance, obedience to strongmen, and hostility toward outgroups. Identity fusion explains why MAGA defends violence while claiming victimhood. Motivated reasoning reveals why facts don’t matter. And collective narcissism explains how a movement can both claim moral superiority and demand cruelty.

None of this is accidental. None of it is just disagreement. It’s what happens when identity replaces reality, when grievance becomes gospel, and when a nation’s democratic soul is bartered away for the illusion of control.

MAGA is not a political party with bad policies. It is an authoritarian project wrapped in the language of liberty.

And like every movement of its kind throughout history, it doesn’t recognize its own reflection. Because it thinks it’s the hero.

That’s the danger. And that’s why it must be exposed, not just with facts, but with moral clarity, psychological truth, and the courage to say what others won’t:

This is not normal.

This is not patriotic.

This is authoritarianism.

And the first step to stopping it, is refusing to pretend it’s anything else.

References

• Bruneau, E., Kteily, N., & Falk, E. (2018). Interventions highlighting hypocrisy reduce collective blame of Muslims for individual acts of violence and assuage anti-Muslim hostility. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(6), 423–429. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0335-3

• Bursztyn, L., Egorov, G., & Fiorin, S. (2020). From extreme to mainstream: How social norms unravel. NBER Working Paper No. 24715. https://doi.org/10.3386/w24715
  (Note: This is the study that found counties that hosted Trump rallies had significant increases in hate incidents.)

• Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2016–2020). Hate Crime Statistics Annual Reports. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/ucr/hate-crime

• Hofstadter, R. (1964). The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Harper’s Magazine, November 1964.

• Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480

• Paredes, M. L., Rosenfeld, D. L., & Kraus, M. W. (2022). Support for political violence and the morality of Trump. PLOS ONE, 17(10), e0274914. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0274914

• Staub, E. (1990). Moral exclusion, personal goal theory, and extreme destructiveness. Journal of Social Issues, 46(1), 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1990.tb00272.x

• Stenner, K. (2005). The Authoritarian Dynamic. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511614712

• Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, Á., Seyle, D. C., Morales, J. F., & Huici, C. (2009). Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 995–1011. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013668

• Sidanius, J., & Pratto, F. (1999). Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139175043

• Nyhan, B., & Reifler, J. (2010). When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions. Political Behavior, 32(2), 303–330. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-010-9112-2