The Parasocial Style in American Politics, Part 2: Witch Hunts and Comfort Blankets

Earlier this year, I argued that American politics as mediated by our smart phones was bested by increasingly dysfunctional forms of parasocial relationships. In particular, I said that febrile kinds of fandoms and anti-fandoms now define not only people’s relationships to major politicians but also their attitudes toward far less prominent and even relatively powerless individuals. Here, I want to push deeper into this fandom and anti-fandom dynamic by looking at how these dynamics undermine healthy political socialization. 

People have turned idol worship of political figures and online personalities into something like a comfort blanket—clinging to them in reverential, memeified, and childlike ways that more resemble how someone might talk about the characters on their favorite TV show. The result looks significantly like a witch hunt. I mean this not simply in the sense that it is farcical. People are imputed with darkly villainous intent and an outsized ability to effect outcomes that no one really possesses. 

Let's walk through these dynamics and some recent manifestations. 

I saw Sarah Good with the Devil

In his study of witches and witch trials in seventeen charity New England, historian William Gaskill notes that the practice of witchcraft was viewed as “not some wild superstition but a serious expression of disorder embedded in politics, religion and law.”

What’s important in how I think of witch hunts as a function of the parasocial style is that they are fundamentally about community maintenance and interpersonal grievances. What Gaskill describes are dynamics that emerged from the highly proximate religious, economic, and social relationships of colonial New England. As Gaskill puts it, 

Opponents charged each other with diabolic allegiance, and freethinkers were denounced as heretics, which in Massachusetts was a crime akin to idolatry and witchcraft.

I don’t mean here to engage in what would be a ridiculous attempt to overlay the seventeenth-century mind and the historically specific dynamics of witchcraft onto our present moment. But bearing in mind the universal aspects of the human condition, I do mean to apply some wrinkles to the metaphor of the witch hunt. The people of colonial New England understood themselves to be in a world of conflict, ordered by an all-powerful and all-knowing God but subject to the constant and ever-present assaults of the adversary. 

So when we think about how this becomes parasocial, it’s not only about the projection of fantastical nefariousness onto someone a person or community has identified as an adversary. It’s about how this is entirely constructed and maintained through mediated platforms like social media. There isn’t the in-person, neighborly component. This makes the caricature all the more absurd and all the more dangerous. 

There are obvious echoes here in how the religious right has talked about issues like homosexuality, pornography, and Islam in recent decades. And in the last ten years, MAGA-infused Christian conservatism has become even more obsessed with the idea that socialists and LGBTQ+ people are somehow sabotaging America—or, for that matter, antifa. But these are paranoias about groups and ideologies. The parasocial style requires a fixation on individuals. 

But specific persons do offer us an inroad. Take Elliot Page, whose supporting role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has been a particular source of ire on the right. Actors and musicians are already the archetypal targets of parasociality, so the right-wing preoccupation with Page is filtered through both this and their hatred for trans people. Bigots and hard right zealots on X have analyzed Page’s gait, obsessively made demeaning AI slop of him, misgendered him almost constantly, and insisted his casting is itself a Trojan Horse plot to spread wokeness. Elsewhere, MMA fighter Sean Strickland suggested Page’s transition is a tragedy. 

This is hysteria. And it is toxically parasocial, scrutinizing Page in many of the same inappropriately intimate ways we have long observed celebrities but with added elements of hateful cruelty. Page is taken to be something other, something possessed and disfigured. Page must be watched, must be disciplined, and must be cast out. This all presumes a knowledge of Elliot Page that is transgressively personal, fueled by a parasocial anti-fandom, and justified by the ideas that he is in the service of dark forces threatening the order of our society.  

Yet Page is a successful Hollywood actor. As I argued previously, the more insidious turn in the parasocial style in American politics is the application of these dynamics to much less powerful, less famous people. This aspect is largely a product of social media. Here, I’ll again offer the example of Will Stancil. This is because the online socialization around Stancil has become one of the key examples of the parasocial style. He is almost totemic of it.  People simply cannot seem to stop being “weird about Will Stancil,” as more than one observer has put it. 

The hatred for Stancil only seemed to increase during the DHS action in Minneapolis, during which Stancil participated in ICE rapid response and posted frequently about DHS activities on his social media. By the end of the occupation of Minneapolis, a narrative had emerged on the left that Stancil was a saboteur, snitching on other protesters, and even endangering female activists in his area. The Verge even dispatched a reporter who did a ride-along with Stancil that culminated in a hit piece masquerading as a profile. There is something genuinely bizarre about the progressive press taking time out of their coverage of an authoritarian immigration regime to individually harangue a fellow anti-fascist who happens to be the target of a parasocial enmity on Bluesky. 

A new fit of rage was unleashed on Stancil after he posed a policy question about New York Mayor Mamdani’s city-owned grocery store project. Stancil was assailed as someone who hates the poor and is actively working to undermine anything that would help the working class and people of color. The hate piled on and when, days later, Stancil posted that his tires had been slashed, it intensified. One account went so far as to say that the tire slasher should have “skipped the middle man and just cut his worthless throat.”

It’s worth noting that Stancil did not allege his tires were slashed by an angry Bluesky poster. But social media users have stalked and threatened him in the past, with one of those going on to murder two staffers in a shooting at the Israeli Embassy. So it isn’t absurd to think this incident could have stemmed from a fit of parasocial rage, though Stancil acknowledged myriad possible explanations. The point here is partly that Will Stancil is not particularly powerful, but it is also that he’s quite clearly not malevolent. When he posts, there are no sinister machinations at work. When he protests, he is not a covert agent for the powers that be. He’s a normal progressive liberal, even as many who disagree with him are normal democratic socialists or perhaps more moderate centrists. It is a kind of parasocial witch hunt to see in Stancil these shadowy evils, and it is a kind of parasocial witch hunt to attempt to prosecute his malfeasance with pile ons, death threats, and intimidation. 

This dynamic approaches the paranoid style that is evident in things like George Soros conspiracism and antifa fearmongering, but these lack the hypermediated and uncomfortably personal ways parasocial witch hunts operate. 

It’s also true that there are individuals out there leveraging their influence to nefarious ends. For example, the outrage directed at author JK Rowling is not a witch hunt, despite The Free Press’s podcast series entitled “The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.” She is, in fact, a remarkably wealthy and powerful person who is explicitly using that power to harass and limit the rights of trans people. 

The core dynamic at play in the parasocial witch hunts I’m describing is an obsession with the subject that pushes the relationship into a place of one-sided enmity. This is reinforced by the monomaniacal inspection of their words, actions, habits, relationships—their lives. With every step, the fixated becomes more sure of their suspicions but moves farther away from reality. 

Emotional support dictators  

I do not know who coined the term “emotional support dictator,” but I am grateful for it. It captures the way that many online, highly politically engaged people on the far right and far left have turned a whole set of strongmen, terrorists, and other thugs and murderers into their comfort blanket. The attachments come off more like the way a person might cling to the characters in their favorite binge watch.  

Donald Trump is the most prominent American example of this. As I noted previously, his political rise was shaped by a star turn on network reality TV and a successful social media presence. The production of fawning, hagiographic, and frankly deranged imagery of Trump by his adoring base has been one of the defining cultural markers of this age. It’s a trend that’s only accelerated as AI image generation has made it even easier for MAGA zealots to reproduce their most excessive and lurid fantasies, which the president often reposts via his own social media. 

Trump himself carries quite the torch for dictatorial leaders dead and alive. He talks constantly about his affection for Andrew Jackson, often veering into delusion. He once said that “had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart.” It would be shocking if it wasn’t said by a man who also thinks Adolf Hitler did some good. To say that he has a thing for men who oppress their people and kill their enemies would be an understatement. 

Yet plenty on the left will condemn Trump’s authoritarianism while retaining a morally ludicrous infatuation with figures like Lenin and Mao. Indeed, the commitment with which many on the far left will defend their own more ideologically-aligned dictators while correctly condemning Trump as a fascist is a degree of cognitive dissonance sustained by a kind of parasocial idol worship. 

This is not to say that fan-like attachments to political and historical figures didn’t exist before the social media era. The iconic image of Che Guevara that adorned the bedroom posters and t-shirts of teens and twenty-somethings since the 1960s speaks to this. Rugged good looks aside, Che was a complicated and ultimately savagely brutal revolutionary. It was his violence—especially his violence—that enamored a generation of terrorists like the Weather Underground. 

But the way in which online socialization operates has helped to make these sorts of fandoms weirder and more self-reinforcing. Figures of deserved historical ignominy are rehabilitated into noble, likable, and even precious role models for alienated young radicals—people they can turn to like a favorite song or tv show. 

Earlier this year, Jacobin published a youth-focused issue entitled Teen Jacobin, with a cover that aped magazines like CosmoGirl. One of the coverlines bubbled, “LENIN OR LUXEMBURG, WHO'S YOUR SOCIALIST SWEETHEART?” It was a cutesy way of reducing the murderous, autocratic founder of the Soviet Union to a boy band member. 

This July, a video resurfaced of leftist streamer Hasan Piker declaring, 

I never would and never will [make fun of Mao Zedong]. Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, a man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet…There was a lot of excesses…but the People’s Republic of China would not exist without Mao Zedong.

It is fairly easy to find twee apologia for communist dictators across places like Bluesky that do not strike me as all that different from the obsessive slop produced by right-wing diehards about Trump and his fellow fascists. On TikTok, too, you can find videos offering Stalin revisionism in the same upbeat style that someone might talk about the new Billie Eilish album. 

But these are not frivolous figures. And they would not, if you met them, be your friends—no matter how much theory you’ve read. They were genuinely abusive and even homicidal autocrats. Whatever reforms they achieved came at the cost of countless dead. Most of these victims were themselves the poor and dispossessed. Some merely dared to hold dissenting political views. All were grist for the mill of dictatorial ego and ambition. Harboring adolescent crushes on Lenin and Mao should be no less embarrassing than Trump’s praise for Andrew Jackson and Vladimir Putin. And yet in many parts of the left it’s a sign that you belong to right fandoms, that you are a community member who loves the same characters. As with witch hunts, this is a process of rendering people as totemic figures in a war between good and evil. 

A good guy with a gun

My colleague Samantha Hancox-Li wrote an essay last week about the Prairieland protest, an attempt to dispassionately assess the efficacy of such actions. Some of the more negative responses to it raised another aspect of parasocial idolization that I think follows from the previous discussion. 

Samantha argued that the shooting of a cop was, setting everything else aside, a strategically bad decision. Here’s how she summarized her argument:

The Prairieland activists decided to meet the administration on the field the administration picked and deliver them the fight the administration wanted. By contrast the ordinary citizens of Minneapolis, and their resolute nonviolence, even in the face of brutal murders committed by agents of the state, have done far more to change national opinion on the mass deportation machine. They chose not to give the administration the fight it wanted. They met physical force with soul force, as Dr. King put it. Forget about the morality. The tactic was effective.

A lot of left-wing readers hated Samantha’s argument, and many insisted that violent protest has a history of success. John Brown was held up as a key example of this. His Harper’s Ferry raid, they said, helped to begin the end of slavery. John Brown was a martyr. So perhaps if you genuflect at his altar vigorously enough, that righteousness will inevitably rub off on you.

One group that prominently cited Brown as a North Star was the Weather Underground. The WUO militant revolution group that engaged in bombing campaigns and other acts of violence during the 1970s in an attempt to bring about the overthrow of the United States government. They did not succeed. Neither did the other contemporary militant groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army or FALN, all seeking revolutionary aims. But they did hurt people, even kill them. What concerns me here is the way the idolizing of an individual radical like John Brown can enable stupid, arrogant, and ultimately ineffective violence. Brown was complicated, even troubled. The final years of antebellum America are sui generis in their conditions. But turning Brown into a Christlike figure with whom one can be in communion if you pick up your gun and fight erases all of that. This is not treating Brown like a real figure to be learned from. This is treating Brown like a sticker to slap on your phone case to prove you're One Of The Good Ones.

All of this entails a kind of magical thinking. It’s easier to turn people into storybook characters, even super-powered ones, who make the world a better or worse place. It’s an oversimplification and an exercise in fantasy. But it’s  also a disservice to ourselves. It’s a way of thinking that strips us of agency and the capacity for nuanced moral reasoning. 

There’s been a similar energy to the continued glorification of Luigi Mangione, the man who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York City sidewalk. Some of the interest in him has been purely superficial, with many online drooling unashamedly over his good looks. Some on the political left have celebrated his actions. In many cases, these dynamics converge, turning Mangione into a kind of Ryan Gosling meme for edgy, romantically maladjusted socialists. Aside from sexualizing him, one popular image depicts Mangione as a saint, complete with a golden halo. Other supportive memes play off existing pop culture templates. It all feels pathetically adolescent, a sign of a culture retreating into hypermediated spaces and soothing themselves with daydreams about their favorite “good” vigilante. 

Perhaps it’s the next best thing to imagining themselves with their finger on the trigger. But that’s a false promise, too, because action heroes don’t exist. The same goes for benevolent dictators who do things our way. 

Featured image is "The Witches' Flight," Francisco Goya 1798.