Hooked on Hatred

The Grievance-Industrial-Complex and the Neuropolitics of Right-Wing Revenge Addiction

“I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those who have been wronged or betrayed, I am your retribution.” So proclaimed Donald Trump at the 2023 Maryland Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), when he launched his third and ultimately successful campaign for the presidency. Of course, as in all things, he was speaking of and for himself. Payback has been his lifelong, unrelenting crusade into which he invites others to enlist.

Trump has built a career on seeking revenge against anyone who obstructed his pursuit of wealth, power, praise, and legal impunity. As a narcissist of the thin-skinned kind, every joke at his expense, mockery, criticism, and failure to praise him not only sting initially but become suppurating psychic wounds that never heal. They are also registered as endlessly accumulating debts in his ever-expanding ledger of resentments, which must be paid back with interest.

Only revenge, even many years after the initial injury, promises relief from his humiliation. Barack Obama faced an unremitting, decades-long campaign of demonization for joking about Trump’s birther slander in his 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech. That vendetta targeted not just Obama personally but also his political and legislative legacy, such as the Affordable Care Act. At Trump’s urging, Republican members of Congress have ceaselessly tried to overturn and erase it from history.

Revenge is so central to the MAGA vision of governing that early in the 2024 presidential campaign, one avid Trump ally, Ivan Raiklin, a former U.S. Department of Intelligence employee, anointed himself the future president’s “secretary of retribution.” Raiklin had already compiled a target list of “deep state” enemies of Dear Leader, many of whom are now in the regime’s crosshairs, such as James Comey, Leticia James, and John Bolton. He reached out to right-wing sheriffs nationwide, hoping to organize future “live-streamed swatting raids” against those who had tried to hold Trump accountable for his many crimes. Raiklin’s enemies list, circulating since January 2024, included law enforcement officials, elected officials, journalists, and TV reporters. While not holding any elected or appointed position, GOP House members allowed him to attend committee meetings.

While Trump may be a befuddled and incurious ignoramus, he and those packaging him correctly intuit the malignant psychological synergy his base has with him. His followers mirror Trump’s sense of victimization, though from a very different class position. They are mostly white middle- and lower-income men who harbor toxic bitterness over what they perceive as forces that undermine their status and dominance.

Unlike Trump, they may suffer from the very real injuries and humiliations of class. Importantly, their rage is directed away from those who truly dominate them – the petty tyrants they must obey at work and the corporate oligarchs who rig the economic and political systems to their advantage – and instead toward non-white citizens, immigrants, women demanding equal treatment, and sexual and gender minorities. Forbidden from punching upward, they have to settle for the consolation of punching downward.

Those lacking the economic resources or political power to exact vengeance directly can fork out $18.94 to Liberty Tees and have this bit of MAGA revenge swag embossed on their own camo hoodies.

Upstream from this misdirected fury and resentment is the grievance-industrial-complex, comprised of Fox News, Sinclair, fascist bro podcasts, and other MAGA propaganda outlets. Like voracious ticks, they adhere to the minds of their viewers, extract profit from the attention they command, all the while injecting their hosts with toxic political memes. Inoculated with grievance narratives about the alleged actions of countless enemies, consumers of these media become addicted to fantasies of vengeance. As you will see, their addiction is literal, not metaphorical.

The Neurochemistry of Revenge and Its Role in Politics

James Kimmel Jr., the foremost researcher on the science of revenge, cites brain activation studies showing that when people see images of others taking revenge against an alleged bad guy, it activates the nucleus accumbens, part of the brain’s reward system, which receives a pleasurable surge of dopamine. These vicarious revenge studies mirror research with cocaine addicts who watch videos of others preparing to smoke crack. They experience a significant dopamine rush in their midbrain areas, as if they were the ones inhaling the drug. Even more remarkably, this vicarious reward activation only needs about 30 milliseconds of subliminal (non-conscious) exposure to trigger the effect.

You don’t need to be suffering a direct grievance or be the one seeking revenge to feel it. Merely fantasizing about revenge is enough to activate your dopamine system. This is something every action movie marketer understands instinctively. It is also an insight instinctively grasped by those who script the right-wing fairy tales for Rupert Murdoch, which have made his TV network such a profitable hedonic commodity. According to one study, the most common villains depicted in Fox News’ grievance narratives are women and people of color. It is no mystery that the MAGA base so ardently supports policies targeting women’s rights and aims to keep non-white citizens as a perpetual underclass.

For those who want to geek out on the neurological details of revenge circuitry, here is a simplified overview: grievance activates the anterior insula, part of the pain network. This then triggers the activation of the reward network in the dorsal striatum and nucleus accumbens. This induces a craving for reward, leading to reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex and dampening inhibition.

Ideally, a homeostasis is in effect when pursuing rewards. The inhibitory functions of the prefrontal cortex (what Kimmel calls the “stop circuitry”) should balance the gratification-seeking of the midbrain (the locus of the “go circuitry”). Like any addiction or compulsion, the unmodulated craving for revenge can have profoundly destructive effects.

Kimmel argues for a category of psychopathology he calls “revenge use disorder,” which is his term for the obsession with real or perceived grievances and a compulsive drive for revenge. His research indicates that it shares a biochemical signature very similar to substance use disorder, an established and well-understood diagnosis. Subjects with genetic variations that cause increased activity in their reward circuits also displayed heightened responses to revenge. These two addictive disorders also share the potential for high lethality. Revenge can manifest as mass killings or take milder forms, like trolling or compulsive Fox News watching. Naturally, the latter two can serve as initial steps toward the former.

It is crucial to recognize that in all these cases, the rush of dopamine happens in anticipation of a reward. The actual moment of getting a drug hit, winning big at a Vegas poker table, the sound of a protester’s skull hitting the end of an ICE baton, or a Trump opponent being lynched isn’t necessary. For the couch-bound MAGA TV viewer, just the promise of revenge against the enemy du jour is enough. So far in Trump’s second term, the sadistic punishment of immigrants is one promise he is actually fulfilling.

Grievance Porn, The Fox News Business Model

The process of revenge starts with a grievance over a real or imagined injury. This creates the motivation to seek revenge against the perceived culprit. That retaliation feels incredibly satisfying. It is so neurochemically rewarding that, over time, people can become addicted to the cycle of harboring grievances and seeking retribution. Research on revenge shows that it’s not just the grievance that fuels the desire for vengeance, but the vengeful acts or even fantasies of revenge are so enjoyable that some people seek out opportunities to stoke their grievances.

That easily stirred lust has made Rupert Murdoch and the lesser merchants of political grievance who followed in his wake very wealthy. Their unwritten business model became legible during Fox News’ promotion of the 2020 stolen election lie. When a Fox reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, fact-checked Trump’s voter-fraud fable and tweeted about the lack of evidence, then Fox star Tucker Carlson went into a rage. Even though he had expressed his own disbelief in the Big Lie, Carlson ranted in a group email (which later became evidence in the Dominion voting machine libel suit), “Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”

Of course, right-wing media moguls did not create the grievance-revenge circuitry; they merely profit from it. By cultivating a tribal identity, they promoted the informational self-segregation necessary to maximize and target grievance motivation. This helps explain why right-wingers often stick to media outlets like Fox, which reliably deliver a steady stream of grievance narratives and vicarious tales of revenge against those perceived as responsible – liberals, fact-based media, scientists, assorted experts, and the usual suspects listed above.

Their efforts to restrict free speech, to the contrary, Republicans and the Trump regime—unlike most other authoritarian movements and governments of the past—do not need censorship or total control of all media to manage the flow of information to the public. They can count on the inherently gratifying nature of the grievance-industrial-complex to keep tribal eyes from wandering.

As I’ve noted, to achieve the physiological reward of revenge, merely the fantasy of exacting it is pleasurable. However, that pleasure is short-lived, producing a craving for more. This might explain why spouses and other family members I’ve worked with in therapy often say they can’t get their loved ones to turn off the TV when Fox is on.

The Grievance-Revenge Algorithm on Social Media

It’s not just right-wing media that have profited from revenge addiction. Kimmel writes about a Facebook whistleblower’s congressional testimony, claiming that the platform’s algorithm favors posts that evoke grievances. This, in turn, encourages revenge-driven responses. Regardless of users’ partisan identities, engagement rises, benefiting both Facebook and its eyeball-hungry advertisers. Additionally, a post’s circulation and prominence grow as it receives more angry emojis than likes from users. This algorithm reversed a decline in user engagement.

The rise in hate rhetoric, conspiracy mongering, and disinformation proved to be too profitable for Mark Zuckerberg to want to moderate or stop it. Just before the January 6^th MAGA insurrection, the algorithm caused a surge of posts calling for violence and executions in response to the “stolen election.” That was not the first time Facebook’s grievance-revenge algorithm contributed to political violence. Amnesty International published a report revealing Facebook’s role in fueling ethnic hatred against the Rohingya starting in 2012, which led to a genocidal campaign by Myanmar security forces in 2017. Kimmel cites a study showing that X (formerly Twitter) is the main recruitment platform for right-wing and Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups, from Neo-Nazis to Al Shabab.

The Trumpian metanarrative of revenge is also strikingly similar to Hitler’s. Hitler was driven by intense and obsessive grievance, which, like Trump’s, took an explicitly ethnic form. Essentially, the message is: We, good white Christian patriots, have been hard done by those tribal outsiders and our own nation’s liberal enablers and race traitors. For both Trump and Hitler, the ethnic other is seen as a contamination that ‘pollutes the blood.” And for both, cleansing revenge means abduction to concentration camps, torture, or ultimately eradication.

Perpetrators and Victims, Real and Imagined

The drive to seek revenge for perceived wrongs is both an evolved instinct and a neuroplastic development. In other words, it exists as a potential in all humans, but its expression depends on specific environmental conditions. For those capable of enough self-reflection, it can be consciously modulated. To do so, we must distinguish revenge from self-defense and delusional injury from real harm.

Solitary spree killers and school shooters often cite an actual, but usually imagined, injury they suffered at the hands of others, and then seek revenge. For right-wing incels, it’s women they can’t possess. For racists, it’s non-white people. For homophobes, it’s gay individuals. For the MAGA lynch mob member, it might be Democrats or liberals. For the confused misanthrope, it could be fellow humans in general. The revenge carried out by these “lone-wolf” mass murderers is a form of collective punishment, not unlike that inflicted at a group level by Hamas, the Israeli Defense Forces, and Putin’s soldiers in Ukraine. The individual identities of the targeted outsider group members fade, merging into a generalized “them.” One is designated an enemy simply by belonging to the targeted group.

Many perpetrators were once actual victims. In cases of collective punishment, those former victims might not have been harmed by the specific people they seek revenge against. Especially in feuds between clans or ethnic groups, such distinctions rarely matter. Whether or not revenge is precisely targeted, a history of victimization—real or perceived—is often used to justify violent actions. This dual identity, being both a perpetrator and a victim, appears in nearly every act of ethnic cleansing and genocide, and it can also fuel larger conflicts like nation-state wars. Usually, the label of perpetrator is disavowed by the in-group and attributed to the outsider group. Religious terrorists—whether Islamic, Hindu, Jewish, or Christian—often leverage their victim identity to claim a moral exemption for mass murder.

Part of what makes torture or murder rewarding is the belief that one is exacting righteous retribution for a crime against one’s own group. Slaughter that fits into a story of grievance and revenge is something to boast about, not deny.

Revenge and Political Masochism

Revenge drives some citizens to vote against their own material self-interest. As I detailed in my book on the psychology of political tribalism, Hatreds We Love, Republican voters are the most harmed by Republican policies. Many social psychology studies indicate that people who feel wronged by others are often willing to accept significant financial losses to punish those they see as wrongdoers. Evolutionary psychologists call this altruistic punishment. In the context of cutting the social safety net, the logic is: if “undeserving” and “lazy” poor people, mainly non-White populations in urban areas, are denied food stamps and healthcare, we should be willing to suffer the pain of losing those benefits.

This has been the lose-lose strategy of working-class and underclass GOP voters for generations. As long as Republican politicians and Fox News can promote grievance narratives about immigrants benefiting from healthcare subsidies (the current fiction they have crafted to undo Obamacare) and welfare cheats stealing tax dollars that fund entitlements, some of their voters will happily trade their own benefits for the addictive pleasure of depriving unworthy others of those benefits and feel virtuous in the process.

My bad-news-battered readers might wonder where hope lies. Is it even possible to break the hold that political revenge addiction has over so many citizens? Remember that, like other addictions, the reward of revenge is fleeting. When it has been inflicted, whether in reality or fantasy, nothing really changes afterward. Our psychic or material suffering persists unabated. This presents an opportunity for those in the prosocial/prodemocracy/pro-planet resistance movement to highlight the connection between genuine grievances and their root causes, use that shared understanding to build alliances across tribal lines, and hold actual perpetrators accountable.

The psychological and messaging approach to creating that trans-tribal coalition is discussed in the last chapter of my book. I hope some of you will be inspired to explore it. Of course, not everyone can be reached. Many in MAGA will fiercely resist any effort to break the umbilical link to their favorite right-wing propaganda outlets. But if fair elections continue in the US, all we’ll need is a majority.

If an anti-fascist coalition can win elections again, it would also revivify another crucial institution that could serve as a bulwark against the perils of individual and group vengeance: a functional, independent, and fair justice system. In the most recent Democratic Justice Department, led by Merrick Garland, timidity, delay, and political caution share responsibility with Republican sycophancy for Trump’s currently lawless and corrupt regime. And now, under his autocratic control, the Justice Department has become the vehicle for personal vendettas rather than providing an alternative to them.