April 14, 2026

COPING:

Cognitive dissonance helps explain why Trump supporters remain loyal, new research suggests (Eric W. Dolan, April 11, 2026, PsyPost)

A third study took place in October 2022, just after Trump was arraigned for his involvement in the January 6 Capitol attack. The scientists recruited 187 participants who had voted for Trump in the 2020 election. These individuals read an article summarizing the public hearings regarding the events of January 6.

After reading the summary, participants answered questions about how accurate they felt the information was and whether it made them feel bothered or uncomfortable. This step allowed the researchers to measure the actual emotional discomfort associated with cognitive dissonance. Participants then wrote open-ended responses explaining how they reconciled their support with reports of illegal election interference.

The results from the third study echoed the earlier findings, though participants relied even more heavily on disbelief. Over 60 percent of the respondents claimed the accusations regarding election interference and the Capitol attack were false. A small minority of participants, about 13 percent, noted that they had supported Trump in the past but no longer did so after learning about his actions.

The researchers found a positive association between feeling bothered by the news article and expressing disbelief in the allegations. Participants who experienced higher levels of mental discomfort were more likely to claim the accusations were fabricated. This suggests that the denial is not just a calm rejection of information, but rather a direct response to the psychological distress of cognitive dissonance.

From a psychological perspective, these responses represent novel ways to reduce mental friction. For instance, arguing that a politician’s personal life does not matter is a way of conceptually separating, or compartmentalizing, conflicting pieces of information. By making the personal misconduct seem completely irrelevant to political leadership, individuals can successfully eliminate their mental tension.

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER?:

The Multipolarity Trap: How a KGB talking point became a staple of American right-wing discourse (Park MacDougald, April 07, 2026, Tablet)

At the time, this struck us as a strange argument to make at a nominally “America First” conference. Multipolarity, after all, was originally conceived by the Russian intelligence services as a tool to weaken the West. It was first formulated by Yevgeny Primakov, a KGB Arabist who served as foreign minister under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and has since been popularized internationally by the state-backed Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. In essence, multipolarity opposes “unipolar” U.S. dominance in favor of an arrangement in which Russia and its allies, China and Iran, are granted freedom of action in their respective “spheres of influence.” Over time, the idea has worked its way into the propaganda of China and Iran and the arguments of their Western sympathizers.

While phrased as an essentially defensive arrangement against American “globalism,” multipolarity is, in practice, a strategy for Communist-Islamist world domination. U.S. grand strategy since World War II is premised on the idea of “forward defense” in the Eurasian rimland, which runs from continental Europe to the Middle East and on to coastal Asia, and which is home to most of the world’s people and economic activity. Without control of the rimland, presently secured by the combination of U.S. naval power and Washington’s system of alliances, the United States would become a second-tier “hemispheric” power. For elements of the isolationist right, the appeal of being a “hemispheric” power in a “multipolar” world is no doubt that it would rule out further U.S. military entanglements in far-flung locations while allowing us to shed the costs of maintaining our “empire.” But exchanging lucrative economic and defense partnerships with Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for stronger relations with El Salvador and Peru is hardly a recipe for increasing American military power or national wealth. Instead, it would be the greatest self-own in the history of geopolitics—a recipe for making America radically poorer and less secure, and therefore subject to the dictates of more powerful countries like China. Which one suspects is the point.

In reality, it’s an ever more unipolar world.

THE RIGHT’S “METOO!”:

Identity Politics Is a Problem for Conservative Christians Too (George Yancey, 4/12/26, The Dispatch)_

Progressive identity politics led to the rise of movements such as MeToo and Black Lives Matter, which were more successful political endeavors than outright Marxism. Conservative political activists became aware of this relative success; consequently, it was unsurprising that Republicans such as Donald Trump tapped into some dynamics of progressive political identity to create their own form of identity politics. Whereas the left had defined racial minorities, sexual minorities, and women as oppressed groups for those promoting progressive identity politics, the right defined whites, men, and Christians as oppressed groups for those promoting conservative identity politics.

Now we have the rise of Christian identity politics. While conservative Christian activism erupted in the 1970s and has remained active, the early version of Christian identity politics did not focus on the notion of Christians as victims. Instead, it focused on implementing Christian values in the issues of abortion and sexuality. But more recently, some conservative Christians have focused on the idea of Christians as an oppressed group. Though it may seem counterintuitive, conservative Christians are not especially likely to be politically active. Indeed, they tend to lag behind the nonreligious and progressive Christians in the degree to which they participate in political activity. But some of those who have become very politically active have tapped into their own version of identity politics to motivate their political activism.