Belief Managers, or Why So Many Intelligent People Fall for Political Propaganda

by Kendra Mallock (February 2026)

A while back, my son was riding in a car with a group of people he knew. All of them were far-left, reflexively anti-Trump; my son was the odd one out. NPR was on and, unusually, it aired a segment that was straightforwardly positive about Trump and the economy. No spin, no sarcasm. Just a fact, stated plainly.

There was a brief silence. Then the man sitting next to my son asked, genuinely confused,

“Well … that sounds positive about Trump. What are we supposed to think about that?”

Not is it true.

Not is the data sound.

But what are we supposed to think.

That question lingered with me, because it shows how propaganda actually works—and why so many intelligent, educated people are unable to resist it.[1]

One mistake conservatives often make is assuming people fall for propaganda because they’re ignorant or uninformed. That’s not it. Some of the most credentialed and well-educated people I know are also the most ideologically trapped.[2]

The difference isn’t intelligence. It’s how beliefs are held.

Some people treat beliefs as provisional—things you test, adjust, sometimes abandon. Others find that intolerable. For them, beliefs aren’t judgments. They’re structures: something that must stay coherent, defended, and publicly aligned.

For these people, beliefs are not evaluated. They’re managed.[3]

What’s going on here isn’t a failure of reasoning. It’s a shift in purpose. For belief managers, beliefs aren’t primarily about truth; they’re about belonging. The real question isn’t, “Is this true?” but “What does believing this say about me?” Once beliefs start functioning that way, evidence stops being corrective and starts being dangerous. Facts that reinforce identity are welcomed. Facts that threaten it have to be neutralized, explained away, or ignored.

Belief managers don’t ask whether a claim is true. They ask whether it fits the story their social world requires them to live inside—and whether it’s safe to say out loud. The man in the car wasn’t confused about the economy. He was confused about how to process unsanctioned information without rattling his identity.

On the modern left, politics isn’t just political anymore. It’s moral—almost religious. Certain positions aren’t merely wrong—they’re sinful. These people see disagreement as a character flaw.[4]

Once politics turns into a morality test, propaganda no longer needs to persuade, it just needs to signal righteousness.

This is how otherwise thoughtful people end up excusing authoritarian regimes as long as they posture “against the West,” praising Islamist movements while dismissing their treatment of women, gays, and religious minorities, rationalizing antisemitism as long as it’s called “anti-Zionism,” flattening Israel into a cartoon villain, and filtering every fact through a permanent Trump hatred—even when that means denying reality itself.[5] The conclusion is fixed. The evidence is rearranged to fit it, and everyone moves on.

***

For belief managers, cognitive dissonance isn’t interesting; it’s threatening.

Research shows that when beliefs get tied up with identity, people deal with discomfort not by changing their minds, but by reworking the evidence.[6] This is especially true of highly educated people who tend to be very good at talking themselves into whatever they already believe.[7]

This is where propaganda works best. It supplies ready-made explanations that preserve identity while eliminating doubt.

But persuasion still isn’t the main mechanism.

People gravitate toward others who speak the same language. They repeat the same phrases. They hear themselves echoed back. Each repetition reinforces the belief—not because it’s true, but because it’s familiar, affirmed, and socially rewarded. Over time, that belief turns into reflex. Facts don’t fail here; they just interrupt a loop. This pattern isn’t new.

During the Cold War, large segments of the Western intellectual class acted as belief managers for Soviet communism. Stalin’s crimes were minimized or denied. Famines were reframed as unfortunate side effects of progress. Mao’s China received similar treatment. Reports that contradicted the moral narrative were dismissed as capitalist propaganda.[8]

A clear example is Jean-Paul Sartre[9], who openly acknowledged the atrocities of the Soviet system while insisting they should not be discussed, lest criticism weaken the revolutionary cause. Truth was secondary to alignment, so they chose silence.

In every case, these were smart people. Moral certainty was absolute. Reality, somehow, was still negotiable.[10]

The slogans change. The psychology doesn’t.

Nothing exposes belief management like Israel. It blows up the simplistic oppressor-oppressed story because it can’t be understood without history. Israel forces you to hold two things at once: a people who were hunted for centuries, and a people who are now capable of defending themselves.[11]

This combination breaks the moral machinery. For belief managers, this complexity is intolerable.

Israel must be flattened into a symbol of evil. Jews stop being people and become symbols. Hamas gets endlessly “contextualized.” Hezbollah is suddenly “complicated.” Violence against Israelis gets explained away, while their right to defend themselves is treated as a moral failing.

Propaganda steps in to restore the simple moral story complexity ruins.

***

The danger here isn’t just partisan. It’s cultural.

When educated people hand their thinking over to ideological authorities, societies lose their capacity for self-correction. Preference falsification becomes normal and dissent is a risk.[12]

Belief managers don’t lack information. They just aren’t allowed to act on it.

That moment in the car stuck with me because it was quietly tragic: a grown man, educated and articulate, momentarily paralyzed by a fact that didn’t fit the script—not because it was false, but because it was unsanctioned.

Propaganda doesn’t succeed because people are stupid.

It succeeds because many people would rather belong than think.

_______________________
[1] Dan Kahan, “Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth,” Scientific American (Nov. 16, 2017). Kahan’s work explains why reasoning skills get used to defend tribal belonging rather than to pursue truth. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/why-smart-people-are-vulnerable-to-putting-tribe-before-truth/
[2] Tom Nichols, “How America Lost Its Mind,” The Atlantic (Sept. 2017) documents how education and expertise no longer function as safeguards against ideological thinking, and in some cases intensify it. This supports the argument that propaganda vulnerability is not about ignorance but about how beliefs are socially held. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
[3] Timur Kuran coined the term “preference falsification” in the late 1980s (developed fully in Private Truths, Public Lies, 1995) to describe situations in which individuals publicly misrepresent their private beliefs because of social pressures that reward conformity and punish deviation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification
[4] Jonathan Haidt, “How Science Explains America’s Great Moral Divide,” Scientific American (Oct. 2, 2012) explains how political beliefs become moralized, so disagreement feels less like error and more like character defect, supporting the claim that ideological disputes on the modern left are treated as moral tests rather than factual disagreements. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-science-explains-americas-great-moral-divide/
[5] Nick Cohen, “Our Absurd Obsession with Israel Is Laid Bare,” The Guardian (Feb. 27, 2011) is cited as an example of how Israel receives disproportionate moral scrutiny compared to far worse actors. It illustrates how moral frameworks, once fixed, direct outrage selectively rather than proportionally. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/27/nick-cohen-arab-middle-east-conflict
[6] Eddie Harmon-Jones & Judson Mills, “An Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance Theory and an Overview of Current Perspectives on the Theory,” in Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology (American Psychological Association, 2019) explains how people reduce psychological discomfort not by changing beliefs, but by reinterpreting evidence. It grounds the claim that cognitive dissonance feels threatening rather than clarifying when identity is at stake. https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/Cognitive-Dissonance-Intro-Sample.pdf
[7] Keith E. Stanovich, “The Bias That Divides Us,” Quillette (Mar. 17, 2019) shows that intelligence does not protect against bias and often enables more sophisticated rationalization, supporting the position that education can make belief managers better at defending false beliefs. https://quillette.com/2019/03/17/the-bias-that-divides-us/
[8] Paul Hollander, “The Politics of Envy,” The New Criterion (Nov. 2002) documents how Western intellectuals repeatedly excused or minimized atrocities committed by regimes aligned with their ideological commitments, providing historical grounding for the claim that belief management is not new. https://newcriterion.com/article/the-politics-of-envy/
[9] Jean-Paul Sartre, biographical discussion of Sartre’s political commitments, including his relationship to Marxism and Soviet communism and his tendency during the early Cold War to downplay or bracket Soviet abuses in favor of revolutionary alignment. Sartre serves as a concrete example of belief management overriding truth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre
[10] Tony Judt, “The Problem of Evil in Postwar Europe,” The New York Review of Books (Feb. 14, 2008) analyzes how postwar European intellectuals constructed moral systems that allowed them to evade responsibility for confronting evil, supporting the claim that moral certainty can coexist with moral blindness. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/02/14/the-problem-of-evil-in-postwar-europe/
[11] Robert S. Wistrich, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century” (2004) demonstrates how anti-Zionist rhetoric often reproduces classic antisemitic themes under a different name, supporting the the argument that Israel uniquely exposes ideological distortions on the left. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/isdf/text/Wistrich_antisemitism.pdf
[12] Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, “The Spiral of Silence: A Theory of Public Opinion,” Journal of Communication 24, no. 2 (1974) explains how fear of social isolation suppresses dissent and amplifies perceived consensus, supporting the claim that belief management is reinforced by social risk, not just persuasion. https://vnecas.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/spiral_of_silence.pdf

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