The Lucas Bean Show

In April 2026, Hungary voted out Viktor Orbán after 16 years. On October 25, students in Serbia toppled Aleksandar Vučić. On the same day, Lula beat Bolsonaro in Brazil. Within a single month, three far-right leaders on three continents were finished. This feels like a wave. But it is not a wave. It is a pattern. And the pattern has been studied for decades. The far right has a structural problem....

A skateboarder went to France during the riots. Not to document the uprising, not to support the protesters and definitely not to understand why people were in the streets fighting for their rights. He went to make a skate video. He skated through burning streets and clashing crowds, filmed himself doing tricks against a backdrop of civil unrest, and posted it for likes. He laughs as he runs from...

In this week’s video, I talked about Bob Altemeyer’s research on right-wing authoritarianism and how people who score high on his scale grew up in households that trained them to see the world as dangerous. The video covers the basics. This piece goes deeper into the research, because the science behind the authoritarian brain is one of the most well-documented findings in all of political psychol...

This week, Donald Trump stood on stage at a rally in North Carolina and told the crowd he’d been studying Jon Husted’s body. He described the senator’s backside as “like a pile of muscle.” He went through his shoulders, his jawline, his legs, his hands. He said tapping Husted’s shoulder actually hurt his hand. A few days before that, at a rally in Kentucky, he told the audience he’d “examined his...

I needed a short break from politics, so I researched and made this video instead. I hope you like it. Almost everyone has some degree of morbid curiosity, and most people don’t want to admit it. We slow down at car accidents. We binge true crime podcasts. We watch horror movies that we know will keep us up at night. And every October, we turn an entire holiday into a celebration of death, fear, a...

There is a pattern that shows up in the research on authoritarianism that almost nobody talks about publicly. Not because it is hidden. Because it is uncomfortable. The people who fill megachurches on Sundays and the people who fill MAGA rallies on weeknights are, in disproportionate numbers, the same people. Not metaphorically. Psychometrically. They score the same on the same instruments, hold t...

There is a specific type of person who will tell you with complete confidence that socialism is destroying America but cannot tell you what socialism is. Not in a vague, hand-wavy way. In a literal, recorded-on-camera, asked-four-times-and-still-couldn’t-answer way. This is not a failure of education. It is not a failure of access to information. It is a measurable psychological phenomenon with de...

Political movements do not collapse all at once. They collapse in layers, from the outside in, with the least committed leaving first and the most committed holding on until long after everyone else has moved on. This pattern is not unique to MAGA. It is one of the most consistent findings in the psychology of group identity, cult behavior, and political disillusionment. And the research that expl...

MAGA Isn’t a Political Movement. It’s a Personality Disorder Called Ressentiment. In 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche published On the Genealogy of Morals. It is one of the most disturbing books in the history of philosophy, and not because of its arguments about religion or power. It is disturbing because Nietzsche identified a psychological state that, once you see it, you cannot stop seeing it everywh...

There is a particular kind of man who shows up to political rallies in body armor he bought online, drives a truck that has never hauled anything, and screams about strength while falling apart the moment someone disagrees with him. He is not hard to spot. He is the loudest person in any room he enters. He is also, according to decades of research, the most frightened. The video that accompanies t...

There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore....

Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attac...

In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually...

A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a...

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian de...

Every parent who has ever caught a child doing something wrong has heard the same defense. “But I didn’t get in trouble for it.” The child does not argue that the action was right or that the action was justified. The child’s entire moral framework rests on a single variable: did punishment follow? If the answer is no, the child concludes the action was acceptable. This reasoning is normal in a se...

In the summer of 2025, psychologist Craig Neumann did something no researcher had done at this scale before. He measured the empathy profiles of over 9,000 American adults, mapped those profiles against their political affiliations and views of Donald Trump, and published what he found in the Journal of Research in Personality. The results did not reveal what most people expected. The common assum...

In 2012, a research team at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind poll set out to answer a straightforward question: how well do Americans who consume different news sources understand basic current events? The study was not designed to embarrass any particular network. It was designed to measure knowledge, the kind of factual awareness a functioning democracy requires of its citizens in ord...

Charlie Kirk never graduated from college. He applied to West Point, was rejected, and instead of trying again somewhere else, he built a career telling other people that college was the problem. That decision, and the audience it attracted, is one of the cleanest real-world examples of a psychological phenomenon that researchers have been studying for years. In 2020, psychologist Hallgeir Sjåstad...

In 1975, psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg published Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism , a book that would reshape how the field understood the most dangerous personality structure in clinical psychology. Kernberg, working at Cornell University’s Institute for Personality Disorders, spent decades studying patients whose entire sense of self was built on a fabrication. Not a white lie or...

Something doesn’t add up about American politics. Millions of people vote against their own healthcare. They vote against their own wages. They vote against clean air and clean water in their own neighborhoods. And when you show them the data, when you lay out the numbers, when you present the evidence that the policies they support will hurt them personally, they don’t change their minds. They ge...

Most people who recognize what is happening in their country right now share one thing in common. They don’t know what to do about it. They vote. They post. They argue at Thanksgiving. And then they go back to their lives and hope someone else figures it out. This is not cowardice. It is the absence of a plan. And the absence of a plan is one of the most studied problems in the history of politica...

There is a particular kind of anger that has nothing to do with what is happening in front of you. It is not a reaction to a policy, a headline, or a specific event. It is older than that. It sits underneath everything else, coloring every interaction, turning every perceived slight into proof of a story the person has been telling themselves for decades. It is the anger of someone who did not bec...

In 2012, researcher Brené Brown at the University of Houston published Daring Greatly , the result of over a decade spent studying shame across thousands of interviews. What she found about men was not what she expected. Brown went into her research focused on women. Shame in women, she found, orbits around appearance and motherhood. The pressure to be perfect while making it look effortless. That...

In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter sat in his office at Columbia University and wrote a sentence that described MAGA sixty years before MAGA existed. He defined anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.” Not ignorance. Resentment. That distinction is the key to under...