How MAGA's Educated Elite Helped Build the Cult
Kristoffer Ealy
I have written before that MAGA is not simply a political movement but a cultish one, complete with loyalty tests, identity fusion, and the systematic punishment of independent thought. I have written about the moments when members begin waking up from the spell. I have written about Harvard lawyers and Yale graduates standing at podiums to defend a man who has never demonstrated the intellectual curiosity of a curious ninth-grader.
And whenever I make that argument, the responses from the right come with a particular brand of indignation that I have come to recognize immediately. How dare you. These people are educated. They have degrees. They went to good schools. Some of them graduated at the top of their class. Who are you to question their judgment? They are entitled to change their minds, and frankly, your arrogance in suggesting otherwise says more about you than it does about them. And honestly, I understand the instinct. Most of us like to believe that education provides at least some protection against manipulation, that a diploma functions as a kind of psychological vaccine against blind devotion. It is a comforting theory. The problem is that history keeps ruining it.
So today, I am going to be very fair. I am going to take the ‘but they’re educated’ defense and treat it with the full seriousness it deserves. And by the time we’re done, the people making that argument are going to wish I had just kept being unfair.
Because before we ever get to Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio or Mike Johnson or Megyn Kelly, we need to talk about what history has already told us—loudly, repeatedly, and with devastating specificity—about the relationship between advanced degrees and cult membership. Spoiler: the diploma doesn’t make you immune. If it did, the world’s cult leaders would have spent the last century recruiting exclusively from community theater groups and Facebook comment sections. Instead, they have spent an awful lot of time collecting doctors, lawyers, scientists, professors, and engineers. In some cases, the credential doesn’t protect you from the cult. It makes you more useful to it.
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