Episode Details

Most people assume that if you are loyal enough to Trump you are safe.

They are wrong.

Tucker Carlson assumed that. He campaigned for Trump. He wrote speeches for him. He called him the most important political figure of his lifetime. He was one of the most powerful media voices in the country and he used every bit of that power to put Trump back in the White House.

Then Tucker Carlson said the Iran war was a mistake.

This week the Trump administration’s top counterterrorism official implied he was no longer a conservative. Under Trump’s new National Counterterrorism Strategy that is not a minor designation. That is the difference between being a protected American citizen and being a target of the federal government’s domestic security apparatus.

Tucker Carlson did not commit a crime. He did not threaten anyone. He did not break any law.

Tucker Carlson disagreed with President Trump.

And that was enough to be labeled a Domestic Terrorist.

THIS IS NOT UNPRECEDENTED. THIS IS THE PLAYBOOK.

Before we get to the psychology it is worth documenting exactly what has happened in the past few weeks because the media has largely missed it.

Trump’s administration released a new National Counterterrorism Strategy. It identifies three primary terror threats. Narcoterrorists. Legacy Islamist terrorists. And violent left-wing extremists including anarchists and anti-fascists.

Nowhere in the document does it mention right-wing extremism. When Breitbart editor Alex Marlow asked Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s top counterterrorism official, whether right-wing extremism was a threat at all, Gorka’s answer was revealing.

He said he was not sure Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes were conservatives. If they are not conservatives then under this strategy they fall into the category of people the administration is targeting. He accused Carlson of lauding Sharia law based on a comment Carlson made about being warmly received as a Christian while visiting Saudi Arabia. Journalist Ken Klippenstein reviewed the original interview and called Gorka’s characterization ridiculous.

None of this is actually about extremism. Carlson’s real offense was calling Trump’s Iran war the single biggest mistake any American president had ever made. Fuentes said no war with Iran. Joe Kent, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned and criticized the Iran war and is now under FBI investigation for allegedly leaking classified information.

The pattern is not subtle. Criticize the Iran war and become a target of the national security state.

Trump’s own national security directive states that its counterterrorism powers will not be used to target Americans who simply disagree with the administration. The document then proceeds to build exactly the architecture needed to do that.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF WHY THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS

This is not unique to Trump. This is what every authoritarian movement does when it reaches a certain stage of consolidation. And psychology has had a name for it for over fifty years.

In 1971 psychologist Henri Tajfel at the University of Bristol published his landmark research on how people form and maintain group identities. He called it social identity theory.

Tajfel found that when people build their sense of self around membership in a group the boundaries of that group become psychologically critical. The in-group is not just a preference. It is an identity. And anything that threatens the coherence of that identity is processed as an existential threat.

This explains something that confuses most outside observers about authoritarian movements. Why does the leader treat defectors more harshly than he treats actual enemies? Why is Tucker Carlson more dangerous to Trump than a Democrat?

Because Carlson’s defection does som