I Saw A Cop Looking At My ‘Veterans Against Trump’ T-Shirt. Then He Started Walking My Way.

The human brain is a classification machine (it has to be to survive), but it can also be incredibly lazy. Psychologists call it heuristics: those quick, energy-saving shortcuts that let you spot patterns and threats without thinking too hard about them. They’re efficient in the wild, when a rustle in the grass might mean danger, but in a coffee shop, they mostly just expose how fast we build bullshit stories about people we’ve never met.

Of course, I mostly fit the same description as that officer: I’m middle-aged, white, veteran, bearded, tattooed. I could’ve been the guy someone else quietly assumed was itching for a fight about the flag. In fact, I know I have been. Stereotypes don’t disappear just because you happen to fit the category they’ve placed you in. They keep multiplying until everyone’s sorted, and no one’s understood.

I don’t hold a Ph.D. in psychology (or anything else), but from the books and essays I’ve read on human behavior, it seems clear that our brains are built more for pattern recognition than precision. There’s a term for one of the ways that shows up: the out-group homogeneity effect. It’s the tendency to think “they” are all the same while “we” are individuals. Social psychologists have been watching it unfold in labs for decades through what’s known as the minimal group paradigm — experiments showing that people will favor their own group almost immediately, even when the division between groups is arbitrary. Give those groups visible markers, like different-colored jerseys, and within minutes they’ll start reading motives, intelligence and morality into the teams. It’s ancient tribal wiring dressed up in modern clothes, and it governs more of our public life than most of us want to admit.

Would-be autocrats and strongmen like Trump know this. They depend on it. Authoritarian politics thrives on division because clarity — even false clarity — feels safer than complexity. “Us and them.” “Patriots and traitors.” “Law and chaos.” It doesn’t even matter which words they choose, only that the line stays bright and absolute. Once we accept the framing, we stop seeing individuals and start seeing teams. From there, almost anything becomes possible.

Donald Trump’s entire political career has been built on that simplicity. One of his earliest campaign speeches set the tone: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” He sprinkled in a few “good people” for plausible deniability, but the damage was done. Every category since has followed the same pattern: journalists are “the enemy of the people,” judges who rule against him are “corrupt,” generals who disagree are “traitors,” and immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase so steeped in fascist history it barely needs translation. It’s a worldview allergic to nuance, because nuance complicates control.

This type of rhetoric doesn’t stay confined to rallies or cable news hits. It filters quietly into the national psyche. The more we absorb it, the more we start doing the demagogue’s work for him. Our brains begin scanning for the categories before we even realize it: who’s safe, who’s suspect, who’s “one of us.” Once that happens, truth becomes secondary to pattern recognition. And patterns, as every good propagandist knows, can be manufactured.

The science behind this is uncomfortably literal. The amygdala — the brain’s threat detector — fires almost instantly. The prefrontal cortex, which is the part responsible for reason and restraint, lags behind by a fraction of a second. That tiny gap is where fear and politics meet. If you can keep people stuck in that first, reactive moment, you can get them to believe almost anything. Tell them the same story often enough, and they’ll stop checking whether it’s true.