The Mega-Lie

I posit that an ad hoc psychological operation has emerged over several decades to ensnare America, manipulating self-described Christians to maintain and consolidate authoritarian power for fossil fuel elites, Big Religion, the Republican party, and the billionaire class in general. Rooted in religious fervor and technological hubris, this decades-long scheme exploits apocalyptic visions to hasten a neo-Dark Age, threatening democracy and planetary survival.

The End Times Psyop began in 1980 with an alliance of social conservatives—a group that included fossil fuel tycoons, Goldwater Republicans and the Southern Baptist Convention, the latter of which mobilized 50 million evangelical Christians to vote—for the first time—for Republican candidate Reagan for president. This coalition, blending neoconservative “noble lies” inspired by Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman’s neoliberal deregulation, aimed to reshape America into an anti-rational, pliable society. Fossil fuel elites and fundamentalist leaders like Jerry Falwell sought to gut public education, offshore jobs, and erode the Church-State divide, fostering a Christian nationalist culture.

In 1971, Reagan, then California governor, told State Senator James Mills that Ezekiel’s prophecy identified Russia as “Magog,” a godless power doomed to attack Israel, signaling Christ’s imminent return. His biographer, Edmund Morris, noted Reagan’s fixation on Ezekiel as his “favorite book of prophecy,” recounting a 1988 Oval Office discussion where he linked Gog to Moscow, unsettling aides. Michael Reagan confirmed his father’s belief that he lived in the “last days” and hoped to witness the Second Coming. This apocalyptic zeal made Reagan an ideal vessel for political manipulation.

In 1980, Republican strategists, allied with fossil fuel tycoons and the Southern Baptist Convention, saw Reagan’s End Times obsession as a tool to mobilize 50 million evangelicals. By anointing him as a divinely inspired leader, they harnessed his charisma to hoodwink Christians into supporting policies that enriched elites while ignoring climate destruction. Reagan’s coalition promoted neoliberal deregulation and anti-intellectualism, gutting environmental protections and prioritizing oil profits. His administration’s denial of early climate warnings, like those from the 1970s Limits to Growth study, reflected a thanatos-driven embrace of collapse, masked as divine will, in service of greed. The irony is stark: Christians, believing they serve God, became the tools of those who would sacrifice humanity’s future for profit—in biblical terms, Mammonites.

Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy deepened inequality, creating economic despair among the working-class, who were lured into churches preaching biblical literalism and cultural warfare. This alliance, exploiting decisions like Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Roe v. Wade (1973), framed secularism as an existential threat, priming believers for anti-intellectualism. Reagan’s era also saw the rise of cable news and talk radio which, alongside evangelical media, amplified Christian nationalist narratives, setting the stage for the internet’s algorithmic disinformation that would later fuel Trump’s kayfabe politics.

The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 supercharged neoconservative hubris, with figures like Francis Fukuyama proclaiming the “end of history” and envisioning global dominance through military might and media control. Fossil fuel interests backed US support for Israel, catering to the GOP's Christian base, while moving to secure Middle Eastern oil with military dominance, while ignoring climate science warnings. Under George W. Bush, a self-described born-again Christian, the 2003 Iraq invasion embodied this delusion, aiming to remake the Middle East while enriching oil barons. The PATRIOT Act expanded surveillance, normalizing state overreach and chilling dissent, laying the groundwork for authoritarianism. Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy (2006) critiqued this reliance on oil, radical religion, and debt, warning of ideological extremism.

The Psychological Flaw: Narcissism and Denial

Humanity’s crisis is rooted in psychological traits—narcissism, greed, tribalism—traceable to Homo erectus’s territoriality and amplified by technology. The Great Filter, a theoretical barrier that prevents intelligent species from making the jump to interstellar civilization, is psychological: our inability to balance ambition with empathy. Past civilizations like Easter Island and the Maya, blinded by cultural obsessions, collapsed by overexploiting resources, a pattern echoed in today’s fossil fuel addiction and AI hype. Trump’s narcissistic persona, diagnosed by psychologists like Mary Trump as grandiose and empathy-deficient, mirrors that of the slave-holding elites in the antebellum South, with the added advantage of having social media to assist in spreading propaganda.

Decades of wage stagnation and job offshoring, begun by Reagan’s policies, fueled resentment and desperation among the white working class. Progressive acquiescence to neoliberal policies, like Clinton’s trade deals and welfare cuts, deepened working-class despair, inadvertently bolstering the evangelical base’s susceptibility to Republican manipulation.

A generation later, the time was ripe for Trump to play political messiah. The New Apostolic Reformation’s Lance Wallnau cast Trump as a Cyrus-like savior in 2015, promising to restore a mythical Christian America. Rooted in Cold War-era Pentecostal revivals, this Christian nationalism rejects not only evolution but also climate science, thriving on poor education and media manipulation. Trump’s rallies, pulsing with apocalyptic fervor, promise a sadistic utopia of domination, fueled by AI-generated propaganda. His 2024 claim that Christians “won’t have to vote anymore” signals an authoritarian endgame, resonating with a base awaiting rapture. Psychologically, Trump’s control mirrors a fundamentalist pastor’s, demanding “unquestioned dominion” while followers offer “total subordinance,” downplaying whatever portrays him in a bad light, or dismissing it as “fake news.”

Trump takes lying to another level, though his shtick is an old one. “The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour…He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it…[you] will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not…Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.” (-Jonathan Swift, “The Art of Political Lying”)

Add to that Trump's effect on media profitability. As CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said in February, 2016, “[Trump] may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” As Matt Taibbi said in 2017, “On the one hand, ratings for cable news programs are higher than ever. And on the other hand, every poll shows that both Democrats and Republicans have less confidence in the news media than ever. They believe us less and they watch us more…That means we are beginning to occupy the entertainment space more than we ever were before. People like watching reality shows because they like to see what fucked-up thing will happen next…We’ve gradually turned the electoral process into a reality show over the last two decades or so. The only thing different about Trump is that he was better at it than everyone else. Trump understood that politics has been reduced to a TV show, and so he made it a kick-ass show that gets awesome ratings.

“On the one hand, you have to blame the two parties, because part of what they’ve been doing is putting forward candidates whose job is to basically say nothing. They can’t be real about their politics. They can’t say, “I took $30 million from the financial services industry, so I’m going to repeal this or pass that.” They can’t be honest about their motivations, about what politics actually is in this country, so they’re obliged to be full of shit all the time. So their phoniness has made the process less authentic and more vapid. They’ve made politics a contest of performers, not ideas. They want people who look the part, not people who actually have an agenda or a backbone. So voters got used to the idea of voting for someone they wanted to have a beer with as opposed to someone who is going to provide jobs or health care.”

Cognitive dissonance locks evangelicals into loyalty, as they reconcile Trump’s lies and harmful policies with their belief in his divine anointment, suppressing doubts to maintain their apocalyptic worldview. Add to this Taibbi's idea that today's voters are more like sports fans—they rarely switch their allegiance to a different team.

Tech Broligarchs: Secular Escape Plans

Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, aware of a looming polycrisis—resource depletion, food production decline, and population collapse by 2030—prepare bunkers and space stations as an “exit strategy." Musk’s X platform amplifies MAGA disinformation, while his Department of Government Efficiency accesses sensitive data, enabling coercion. Thiel’s Palantir profiles migrants, and his neocameralist vision, inspired by Curtis Yarvin, seeks corporate governance over democracy. Their AI optimism, claiming solutions to climate and health crises, masks a speculative bubble. Supporting far-right causes, like Musk’s endorsement of Germany’s AfD and Thiel’s claim that “freedom and democracy are incompatible,” they align with autocrats like Vladimir Putin, who benefits from Trump’s weakening of NATO.

Mass surveillance via Section 702 of FISA and Big Tech’s data collection creates a panopticon stifling dissent, with DOGE’s access to biometric and financial data enabling blackmail akin to China’s Xinjiang model. Social media, particularly X, drowns out truth with bots and algorithms, amplifying disinformation. America’s mental health crisis—rising suicides, anxiety, and isolation—reflects a society failing Maslow’s basic needs, with empty homes—owned by banks and hedge funds—outnumbering the homeless, and an increasing number of people relying on GoFundMe campaigns to secure healthcare. This atomization, worsened by eroded trust, makes the public vulnerable to manipulation.

Climate tipping points are already being crossed, and cascade effects are imminent. Trump’s fossil fuel push, gutting EPA protections and dismissing climate scientists, will accelerate this crisis. Tariffs and deregulation, sold as populist, will spike inflation and tank GDP, hurting the MAGA base most. Fossil fuel depletion threatens industrial and agricultural collapse, while elites exploit shocks to consolidate wealth, as seen during the Covid pandemic. Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation blueprint, advocates a unitary executive in charge of an increasingly theocratic government.

Meanwhile, as most recently reported in The Guardian, “a national network of American neofascist fight clubs is endorsing youth-oriented offshoots aimed at grooming the next generation of racist activists. So-called ‘active clubs’ have proliferated across the US and are a combination of fitness and mixed martial arts groups that often espouse neo-Nazi and fascist ideologies, openly taking their historical cues from the Third Reich’s obsession with machismo and European soccer hooliganism. [They are] perhaps the most dangerous form of far-right political organizing today, with links to other militant organizations, including Patriot Front, layered with ideologies promoting a US race war and using the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) as a gateway to recruiting.”

The Path Forward

Breaking this mass-psyop demands psychological maturity, reason, and empathy. Media literacy, algorithm regulation, and wealth taxes could rebuild trust. A working-class revolt, uniting progressives and disillusioned evangelicals around jobs and healthcare, would offer hope. Reviving Enlightenment values like science and Church-State separation, and global cooperation on climate and resources, could mitigate accelerated climate change, though they will not prevent it, barring revolutionary technological breakthroughs and Manhattan-Project-level efforts. Meanwhile, Trump’s surveillance and MAGA militias risk an oligarchic lockdown, enforcing a neo-Dark Age. The CIVICUS Monitor’s 2025 watchlist inclusion of the US signals global alarm at this democratic erosion.

The End Times Psyop, the first phase of which began in 1980, exploits MAGA’s religious zeal and tech elites’ hubris amid climate and social collapse. From Reagan’s coalition to Trump’s authoritarianism, hubris, narcissism and denial—amplified by technology and propaganda—drive this crisis. Only by confronting these roots, rebuilding trust, and prioritizing collective survival can America and the world have any chance of escaping the Great Filter—extinction.

Meanwhile, the tech broligarchs continue to advance their project whereby they will survive—off-world—as Earth becomes increasingly uninhabitable. Apart from their concubines and progeny, I suspect that their space stations will have room for only about 800 other people (if that many), or 0.0001% of Earth's population. The last time there was such a dramatic population reduction was during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. The genetic data suggest that 813,000-930,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans experienced a severe "bottleneck," losing about 98.7% of their breeding population, and numbered about 1,280 for about 117,000 years. Homo sapiens emerged roughly 200,000-300,000 years ago. It makes a hominin think.