Brilliant piece from Hannah Spier, MD

I heartily recommend subscribing to her blog called 'Psychobabble'

I am travelling insanely at present - just arrived in Budapest from Aspen, CO - and so not writing myself at present; but want very much to give you this piece by the profoundly insightful Norwegian psychiatrist whose work I follow. It helps make sense of the insanity that surrounds us. She is a brave writer who is far from fanatical, an important difference from the people she here analyses so well.

The Psychological Mechanisms behind the Cult of Progressivism

No parent can look at the story of Tyler Robinson, the suspect charged with the murder of Charlie Kirk and safely say, “My child would never do this.”Because Tyler wasn’t an outlier. In 2025, 34% of college students said they condoned using violence to silence campus speech. Tyler was simply willing and capable of carrying out the violence his group called for — and for that, he is celebrated.

Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old charged with the murder of Charlie Kirk, was not destined for violence. He grew up in a wholesome Republican family, the son of a sheriff’s deputy, disciplined and loved. Yet within a single year of college, he was unrecognizable, “a Reddit kid,” who lived with a transgenderpartner, wore communist shirts, posted in an Antifa Discord server where he would later confess his crime, and turned family dinners into battlegrounds. He called Charlie Kirk a fascist, an existential threat, and engraved antifascistslogans on the bullet casings he would one day use.

The answer to how this transformation came about lies in the cultish mechanisms hiding in plain sight. And like all cults, it radicalizes its youth. We have been trained to spot cults only when they look alien; a doomsday sect in the woods or jihadists waving black flags. But the same psychological patterns unfold in real time, from our houses of prayer to mothers in gym locker rooms, echoing the logic of extremism without even realizing it.

The Cult Narrative: How Progressivism Radicalizes Its Youth

The cult of progressivism offers a narrative that satisfies every universal human need: belonging, purpose, significance, and transcendence. Psychologists like Arie Kruglanski and Clark McCauley have shown how radical movements follow a predictable arc: the world is corrupt, there is a clear enemy, you are part of a righteous in-group, redemption comes through struggle against the out-group and leaving carries a cost. Tyler, his friends, and countless teens are being drawn into a story of injustice and moral redemption that is far more emotionally compelling than anything the secular, liberal society now offers. It’s the same structure that has always fueled radical ideologies.

The World is Corrupt. Young people are pessimistic about the future, feeling they are powerless in the face of an unprecedented economic situation and poor job market doomed to pay off debts and never own their own home. (more than 50% of youth in the U.S are extremely worried about climate change).

Villain. In the progressive storyline, the world is broken because of oppressors who rig society in their favour. The villain are entire systems and those supporting them: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, heteronormativity, colonialism. All said to be endangering lives because they don’t care about your “human rights.” This was often said about Charlie Kirk who even after being murdered was reduced to a “symbol of a toxic culture” and “evil.” This furthers the “us versus them” mentality already well established by Hillary Clinton a decade ago, when she dismissed conservatives as a “basket of deplorables.” Progressivism provides a clear target for anger and a justification for dehumanization.

Chosen Group. The defenders of the hierarchy of victims. The protectors of the ever- expanding category of “human rights.” They are so moral, they worship the highest good: compassion. But compassion directed not toward humanity itself, which is no longer sacred, the value of humanity is awarded according to the individual’s position on the oppression hierarchy, where skin colour, race, gender or even physical location (inside the womb vs. outside) place value in relation to victimhood.

Path to Redemption. In the progressive story, redemption comes not from personal growth or moral effort, but from submission to a collective struggle against hate. It means joining the “compassionate” side against those who, by their mere disagreement, are said to deny others basic human rights. In this framework, compassion is not just a virtue—it is the sole moral currency. Hate is its opposite, and anything associated with hate is automatically evil. Words of hate are treated as violence; silence is complicity.

To be redeemed, you must confess your privilege, renounce your past ignorance, adopt the movement's language, and make your allegiance visible. It often starts small: dyeing your hair, a mental health struggle publicly disclosed as a badge of belonging, identifying as “queer,” cross-dressing and cutting off contact with disapproving parents. Increasingly, parents report the devastating loss of contact with their children due to ideology. Each act signifies the “authentic self” finally freed from the constraints of the haters.

Rituals of Belonging: The Everyday Performance of the Cult

This means speaking the approved slogans: “Trans rights are human rights,” “women’s rights are reproductive rights” and performing them in conversation, and even in therapy. It means aligning with the aesthetic: the non-gendered fashion, the recycled tote bags, the ethical consumption rituals, the performative veganism, the defiant weight gain, or still wearing a mask outside. It means the current flag representing the cause, be it the rainbow, Ukraine or Palestine, edited into the social media profile picture. And it means knowing the facial choreography: the concerned squint, intake of breath with the slight head tilt, and the strained, pinched mouth that appears the moment someone says something “problematic.” It’s the look people make when someone spills red wine on a white carpet at a dinner party—a mix of discomfort, and thinly veiled blame. The expression communicates disapproval, and moral superiority as they distance themselves from the discretion. Everyone in the room now knows you're on notice.

Progressives often pride themselves on being non-conformists because of their highlighting acceptance and tolerance, but ironically, no ideology today produces such striking uniformity. To outsiders, they’re easy to spot: never more than one “shaggy bob” haircut away from predicting a person’s entire opinion catalogue. This kind of homogeneity points towards psychological forces driving cult dynamics: thought reform.

Psychiatrist Robert Lifton studied how Maoist China used “thought reform,” and formed eight criteria to show how they systematically reshaped people’s minds. Taken together with Erving Goffman concept of how the “total institution” — based on prisons, asylums, or monasteries — organize life under one authority and make dissent impossible, their frameworks map perfectly onto how progressivism now functions.

Mystical Manipulation. The moral elevation of empathy and the words “tolerance,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “diversity is our strength” serve as transcendent values. Where compassion is the highest good, then to grieve the “hater” Charlie Kird is to betray compassion itself. To mourn him would mark one as an outsider. Predictably, we hear from every pundit: “Political violence is never okay, but…” — always followed by a justification rooted in Kirk’s views. To the progressively trained ear, this may sound like objective, intelligent reflection. In reality, it is a ritual of belonging.

Similarly, when comparisons are raised to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, JFK, or even the killing of George Floyd, the response is a knee-jerk insistence that it is not the same, laced with shock that one would even dare to compare. That reflex itself reveals the closed loop: some deaths are sacred, others profane, and the boundary is drawn not by the fact of murder or any universal human value, but by alignment to the progressive transcendent value.

Demand for Purity. The endless policing of language and behavior enforces a constant hunt for contamination. The infamous “Okay, Boomer” dismissal, which polices age-related speech as inherently oppressive. Professors and employees face discipline for using terms like “colored people” instead of “people of color.” Those applying for work know they are required to declare pronouns on LinkedIn, comedians lose gigs for jokes that once passed unnoticed. Veganism becomes the morally pure diet, with meat-eaters shamed as complicit in oppression. Environmental purity tests appear in the admonishment of mother who host birthdays with plastic straws or show up with gas-powered cars. Each ritual makes clear that the smallest deviation marks you as tainted.

Confession. Visible in public self-abasement rituals: stating “I am privileged so I don’t have the right to speak to this,” white women deferring to black women, men yielding the floor to women, and mandatory diversity statements in corporations and universities.

Sacred Science. Systemic oppression itself functions as unquestionable doctrine. As researcher James Nuzzo has shown, progressive terminology has permeated academic papers to the point that without it, they will often fail peer review.

Loading the Language. Jargon such as “microaggressions,” “holding space,” “heteronormative,” “neurotypical,” and “lived experience” sanctifies personal claims as beyond scrutiny, while euphemisms like “undocumented” instead of illegal, or “gender-affirming care” instead of sterilization, reshape reality.

Doctrine Over Person. This is why the side effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex surgeries remained hidden for so long — and are still not widely acknowledged. As the WPATH files revealed, many doctors suppressed their own observations in order to protect the doctrine. Doctrine is placed over the person, demanding that individuals deny or reinterpret their own experiences to fit ideology.

Dispensing of Existence. Dissenters are cast as “bigots” or “Nazis.” When Charlie Kirk was killed, the group not only permitted but demanded celebration. One young man was even caught stomping on Kirk’s memorial while dressed in the suspected assassin’s clothing. This is adaptive psychopathy in action. Ordinary young people, raised with normal consciences, learn to toggle empathy on for their in-group and off for the out-group. It is not mental illness but an ancient evolutionary capacity: tribes survived by protecting their own and dehumanizing enemies. In the cult of progressivism, that mechanism has been reactivated.

This reactivation in the young happens through the “total institution” Goffman described.

Thought Reform at Cultural Scale

Enclosure. People now swim in a single moral narrative without realizing that alternatives are systematically filtered out. As Herman’s propaganda model observed, the media rarely censor outright; instead, they highlight some realities and obscure others in ways that consistently reinforce the dominant ideology. The daily saturation of the same ideological vocabulary across education, news, and entertainment creates precisely the environment Goffman meant by enclosure.

When Wikipedia, one of the most influential distributors of common knowledge, titles articles differently, such as: “The Killing of Charlie Kirk,” “The Killing of Iryna Zarutska,” but “The Murder of George Floyd.” And when the New York Times reduces Kirk to nothing more than a “symbol of a toxic culture,” it shapes thought.

The average news consumer, who never heard of the murdered Democratic representative Melissa Hortman, has now been taught to invoke her name as a baiting response: “Well, were you equally sad after Melissa Hortman was killed?” — as though failing to recall every Democrat ever murdered justifies celebrating the death of a conservative. The overlooked difference — the one that matters — is that no conservative outlet reported on Hortman’s shooting by highlighting her political views.

We are immersed in a system that sacralizes some lives and empties others of value. That is the mark of a cultish attitude toward a defined out-group. To ask, “What did he believe?” in the context of a murder is no different from asking a rape victim, “Well, what were you wearing?” The instinctive recoil from this analogy only proves the point: the hierarchy of victims determines the emotional reaction. Not every rape victim receives the same outrage either; the gangrape victims in England were forgotten after receiving only the bare minimum of coverage.

The brutal subway stabbing of Iryna Zarutska was similarly reframed by the NYT and AP News to focus not on the crime but on the right-wing response to it. Had the roles been reversed, the racial aspect would have been foregrounded with language designed to spark another wave of riots.

Surveillance. Public shaming on social media enforces compliance. Peer pressure plays out in micro-gestures and loyalty rituals, from the facial expressions at a “problematic” remark to students turning in classmates for wrongthink.

Regimentation. National rituals of allyship now structure the civic calendar: Pride Month, Black History Month, Women’s Day, land acknowledgments, DEI pledges.

Identity Stripping. The total institution has the ability to strip away prior identities to create new, institutionally defined ones. This means that no matter how well parents raise a child, the system they enter will re-engineer their identity around its own values. That is why, when Peter Boghossian, PragerU, or Turning Point interview ordinary people on the street, you see shock cross their faces when confronted with basic counterarguments. Not because they are stupid, but because they have literally never heard the information before. In their eyes, it’s as if you can see an error message. They will either refuse to engage further due to the discomfort of cognitive dissonance or give the admission “I’ve never heard that.” Both reveal the existence of a closed system.

Those few outside of the closed system often respond with disbelief, frustration, and the urge to shake people awake. Others will join other communities in anger, even if the only common denominator is opposition to the cult. The closed loop leaves both sides trapped: insiders unable to question, outsiders unable to penetrate.

Cultural Capture. What began in colleges has expanded into the wider culture. After George Floyd’s death, churches and synagogues flooded members’ inboxes with carefully worded statements of solidarity. Across Christian and Jewish institutions, debates about female and LGBTQ clergy rage, and from the various pulpits current topics like immigration are covered in Lifton’s loaded language, preaching compassion above all, as if scripture never mentioned any other virtue. The result is a society-wide total institution.

The High Cost of Dissent: Why Leaving the Cult Feels Impossible

Exit Cost. The chilling levels of self-censorship across campuses tell us how steep the cost of leaving the cult is. According to FIRE’s 2026 survey, more than 80% of college students admit to self-censoring at least some of the time, and nearly one-third do so often — the highest rate ever recorded. Faculty face the same pressure: one-third report toning down their writing to avoid controversy (nearly four times as many as during McCarthyism), while nearly a quarter worry that expressing their views could cost them their jobs. Once a student has declared themselves an “anti-racist activist” or “trans ally” on social media, retreat would mean humiliation. Leave the ideology and become a “bigot” yourself, with no identity, no friends or moral worth.

Another sign that progressivism has taken on cultic characteristics is the profile of its most forceful critics. Those who resist the progressive narrative most fiercely are often self-described ex-liberals. People who once identified as classic liberals but now find themselves suddenly branded as conservatives. They report being confused, since those positions were mainstream a decade ago, and like of ex-cult members, feel a duty to expose the inner workings of the closed system they escaped and warn others of its dangers. Just as former cultists describe the difficulty of breaking through to family and friends still inside, these ex-liberals struggle to raise awareness in a culture that denies the cult even exists.

This is not a right versus left issue. This is about progressives versus everybody else. This is about parents doing their utmost and still failing in the end because of the cult progressivism that has infiltrated every institution surrounding us.

Psychobabble.

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