How MAGA's Educated Elite Helped Build the Cult

History is full of brilliant people who traded their credentials for devotion. MAGA didn’t invent this. It just put it on cable news.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor 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.

Let’s start with something everybody understands, because this piece is built on a foundation that lives outside of politics entirely. We have all known someone brilliant — genuinely, certifiably smart — who stayed in a relationship that was destroying them. Someone with a graduate degree, a sharp mind, a successful career, who kept going back to a partner who lied to them, manipulated them, humiliated them, and isolated them from the people who loved them. And when we tried to intervene, they had an explanation for everything. They had rationalized every red flag into something manageable. Because that is what intelligent people do — they are exceptionally good at constructing arguments for the conclusions they have already reached emotionally.

The abusive relationship and the cult operate on identical infrastructure. Manufactured dependency. Isolation from outside voices. The gradual erosion of independent judgment until the relationship becomes the primary source of identity and validation. And the thing that pulls a smart person into both is not stupidity. It is need. An abusive partner, like a cult leader, is almost always fulfilling something — relevance, belonging, protection, status, purpose — that is not being fulfilled anywhere else. The intelligence of the person being drawn in does not protect them from that need. It just means they can build a more elaborate internal architecture to justify staying.

Keep that in your pocket. We’re going to need it.