Hypervigilance: How MAGA Short Circuits Rational Thought

You know that feeling of being jumpy after a horror movie?

Imagine you’ve just come out of a movie theater having watched a violent horror film and a friend grabs your arm from behind to say something. What happens? Well, you might yank it away, scream involuntarily, or run—before your brain even has a chance to ask, “Who is that?”

That feeling of being jumpy after a car accident, or after watching a horror movie is hypervigilance—a natural, biological response to trauma.

Your brain, sensing a threat, has switched into survival mode—which is a sensible evolutionary adaptation, right? If something bad just happened, something worse might be coming next.

What’s happening neurologically is that your prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thinking—gets bypassed. Instead, your older, faster threat systems take over, specifically the amygdala, which is responsible for choosing: fight or flight?

Behaviorist B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning theory showed that intermittent reinforcement of rewards vs. punishments was a powerful mode of creating addictions from gambling to social media.

“A variable ratio schedule yields the highest rate of response and greatest resistance to extinction.”

—B.F. Skinner, The Behavior of Organisms (1938)

Through hypervigilance, the brain becomes addicted, not to the reward, but to the system itself.

Authoritarian cults create hypervigilance in their members for exactly this reason. They don’t want you thinking. And, especially starting with the birth of media, they have always used traumatic content as part of the process of ensuring it.

Triggered

All major authoritarian movements have used graphic, emotionally overwhelming, and traumatic messaging to induce hypervigilance and psychological dependence. These methods are clinically associated with PTSD-style threat conditioning and emotional rupture.

Nazi Germany

• Propaganda films like The Eternal Jew (1940), Triumph of the Will (1936) and state-controlled newsreels were designed to dehumanize Jews, foment rage, and reinforce perceived threats to German identity.

• This cinematic trauma was part of a recurring cycle of fear and scapegoating which created a nationalized hypervigilant society willing to die for Hitler.

Jim Jones / Jonestown

• Jonestown residents were subjected to relentless auditory control through loudspeakers:
  “All you ever heard 24/7 was his voice… It was a way for him to consistently control our minds, our thoughts, our energy, our being.”
  — Yulanda Williams, former Peoples Temple member

• The compound had a closed-circuit TV system; all outside media was filtered and interpreted by staff, ensuring controlled messaging at all times—including vilification of the U.S. and exaltation of socialist regimes.

ISIS

• ISIS set up “media points” in occupied towns where citizens, including children, were shown graphic execution videos, stoning scenes, and traumatic content designed to desensitize and indoctrinate.

  

  Icsr Report Cubs In The Lions’ Den Indoctrination And Recruitment Of Children Within Islamic State Territory

  900KB ∙ PDF file

  Download

  Download

• UN-verified reports state that children as young as 8 were kidnapped and forced to watch daily videos of guerrilla attacks and executions during their indoctrination camps in school settings.

QAnon / MAGA

• The base of QAnon messaging relies heavily on graphic narratives and videos of child abuse, satanic rituals, and elite depravity (e.g., Epstein, Pizzagate).

• MAGA forums are replete with violent, excessive brutality—videos of beatings and murders blamed on Democrats, BLM or Antifa are endlessly circulated. It is all a violent, constant threat that has been permanently affixed to their reality, creating a beaten-down, hypervigilant cult largely incapable of rational thought.

America, Exhausted and Jumpy

As I wrote, here are the five steps as I see them for how America has been brainwashed in the age of social media, and how hypervigilance plays a key role:

Step 1: Redpilling & Trauma

Emotionally overwhelming, violent, or disturbing messages and content create the trauma that leads to hypervigilance. This is what hijacks rational thought.

Constant messages of betrayal, collapse, and danger:

• “The deep state is coming for your children.”

• “The election was stolen.”

• “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you. And I’m just in the way.”

Step 2: Dissociation

Dissociation is, in many ways, an attempt to rewire the brain so that it can still use the pre-frontal cortex, still think, despite overwhelming incoming stimuli. This dual personality that’s created under threat—a barely functional, depersonalized executive trying to make sense of a crisis, and the “original” personality which is experiencing extreme trauma and unable to think right—is effectively how cult members act.

Step 3: Salvation

Only the group/leader offers emotional regulation or clarity from endless threat and trauma that’s been inflicted. The cult thus becomes an intermittent reinforcement system or an operant conditional loop, with constant punishment of traumatic content and the variable reward schedule of a “Q drop” or a “Truth.”

Step 4: Refreezing

That “jumpy” feeling of hypervigilance is how people who have been exposed to traumatic content that breaks their existing model of the world are left, full of anxiety and fear. The behavior of fellow cult members in these moments, to “love bomb” and bring them close to the “community,” is designed to increase the rate of cognitive rewards and reinforce the trauma bond to the leader or the group.

• “Boom.”

• “The Storm is coming.”

Step 5: Mimetic Synchrony

The phenomenon of what I call mimetic synchrony, or the tendency of an online cult to act more like a school of fish than a political movement, is controlled and regulated through the hypervigilance of trauma-bonded people who have had their higher brain functions hijacked. Trauma-induced hypervigilance combined with a psychologically compulsive desire to mimic the leader or the prophets—is how the average MAGA lives their life.

Don’t Fall for It, It’s Not Just MAGA

All of us are in an artificially-enhanced reality which gets more artificial every day. Gradually, over the last half-century we have added a massive technological burden to our brains through devices. None of it is “natural.” We were not designed for this constant drama. And it is exactly the gap between how we were designed and this new psychological demand on the system that is being weaponized.

The upside is that we have added an entire layer of cognition to the world, which is all connected at light speed now, but what have we given up in return? The answer is our own sense of safety, of reality, and of self.

As someone who lives the majority of my life online, none of this is normal, none of it is healthy. Our system has been hijacked by people who want to make humans as irrelevant as possible. Their strategy is to make everyone hypervigilant, to exhaust us all looking for danger, and hoping for hopium, while they steal the clothes off our backs.

Don’t fall for it. Don’t let them destroy your ability to think by flooding the zone. Take a walk; call a friend; watch some Netflix. You are not a cog in a machine or a Facebook account. Make sure you remember that, always.

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