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You Can’t Shame People Back Into Reality

You Can’t Shame People Back Into Reality

Last updated on: August 20, 2026 at 1:43 pm by Stuart Delony

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You Can’t Shame People Back Into Reality 2026-08-20T13:43:56-04:00 Stuart Delony

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A man angrily points and shouts at his own reflection in a mirror, the two identical figures facing each other in a dimly lit room, symbolizing a self-reinforcing conflict.

Image created by DALL-E

I’ve called MAGA a cult. Not as a metaphor. I meant it.

I’ve watched people I once knew — normal, decent humans — turn into walking comment sections. Same talking points. Same rotating villains. Same low-grade paranoia dressed up as patriotism.

I’ve removed people from my life because every conversation became either smug cruelty toward some imagined enemy or an unspoken test of whether I was still one of the good ones.

And I’m not going to pretend I handled that with saintly calm. I’ve felt anger, contempt, even a flicker of satisfaction when things went badly for figures inside that world. There is a part of me that wants them embarrassed. Publicly. Decisively. I want the spell broken and I want them to have to admit it.

Honestly, I want them to feel what they helped put into the world.

Which is exactly why this bothers me.

Because none of that is happening.

Lies don’t break the loyalty.
Scandals don’t end the devotion.
Corruption doesn’t matter.
Even reality doesn’t register.

And the support continues.

When Criticism Feels Like an Attack on Identity

At some point you have to stop saying, “they just don’t see it,” and start asking a harder question:

What if they can’t see it — not intellectually, but psychologically?

We keep reaching for the easiest explanation: they’re stupid, brainwashed, or evil. Maybe some are. But that still doesn’t explain persistence. Bad ideas usually collapse when they meet reality. This one adapted.

This isn’t primarily politics anymore. It’s identity.

For a lot of supporters, Trump isn’t functioning as a candidate. He’s functioning as a mirror. People don’t just support him — they recognize themselves in him. Which means criticism doesn’t land as disagreement. It lands as disrespect.

When someone says, “he lied,” they hear, “you fell for it.”
When someone says, “he’s corrupt,” they hear, “you’re gullible.”
When someone mocks him, they feel mocked.

Now facts are irrelevant because the brain is protecting self-worth.

That’s why “fake news” works. It isn’t a media critique. It’s psychological armor.

You Already Understand This (Just Not Here)

And here’s the part we don’t want to admit:

We understand this dynamic perfectly well — just not when it’s political. Because here, understanding feels too much like letting them off the hook.

We understand it when people leave church.

We understand why someone doesn’t wake up one morning and say, “I built my life around something that wasn’t true.” We understand the embarrassment, the relationships at risk, the years invested. We understand why people double down long after doubt appears.

But when it comes to politics, we forget all of that and go straight to contempt. Because admitting the psychology would require something harder than being right.

It would require patience.

You can think a movement is dangerous and still want to understand why people stay inside it.

Why People Don’t Leave (And What Actually Makes It Possible)

Leaving a movement like this isn’t just changing a vote. It’s rewriting your own past. It’s admitting you defended things you now can’t defend — sometimes loudly, sometimes cruelly. It’s remembering the posts, the arguments, the relationships damaged along the way. It’s facing the possibility that you were confidently wrong in public.

That isn’t a minor adjustment. That’s identity collapse.

And here’s the thought I keep coming back to:

Many supporters aren’t staying because they love the leader. They’re staying because they don’t yet have a psychological place to go — a way out that doesn’t require them to burn down their own self-respect on the way out.

Which leads to the part I don’t like.

Humiliation makes leaving harder, not easier.

If walking away requires joining the people who mocked them, most won’t walk away. Because the alternative feels like becoming the thing they’ve been told to hate. The mind protects dignity before it accepts truth.

I wish outrage worked. It would feel fair. Harm was done. They helped enable it. That matters, and it should not be erased.

Humiliation rarely pulls people out of identity systems. More often it seals them inside — because the only way out now runs through the people who were laughing. Think about the last time someone mocked you into changing your mind. You can’t.

People don’t change when cornered. They change when doubt becomes survivable — when they can admit, “I trusted the wrong person,” instead of, “I am irredeemable.”

An actual exit won’t look dramatic. No viral apology tour. It will look boring: less posting, less defending, quiet distance, slow disengagement. And almost always it requires somewhere to land — relationships that don’t interrogate and space to change without instant condemnation.

The Offramp Problem

Here’s the uncomfortable conclusion:

If our goal is punishment, we’re doing great.
If our goal is a shared reality again, we are not.

A society can survive anger. It cannot survive permanent humiliation cycles.

We want them to feel what they made others feel. I understand that impulse because I feel it too. But follow it to the end: if the only acceptable outcome is their disgrace, many will choose loyalty over reality forever. Not out of devotion — out of self-preservation.

There has to be an offramp.

We’ve seen this before. Not in politics — in families, in churches, in cults with less reach. The people who came back almost never came back to confrontation. They came back to someone who left a door open and didn’t mention the cost of walking through it.

The answer we want is accountability through humiliation.
The answer we need is accountability with a path back to belonging.

It tastes worse. But it’s the only thing that has ever worked.

I don’t like that answer. I just think it’s the only one that leads back to a country we can live in together.

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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