When They Come For You: The Psychology of Expanding Violence
Welcome to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. In light of recent events in Minneapolis and other US cities, I thought I would do a short three episode series. Today, we're talking about one of the most well documented patterns in the psychology of authoritarianism, the expansion of state violence. This is part one of a three part special series this week on American authoritarianism.
Leslie Poston:Over these three episodes, we're going to examine what's happening to the people in The United States through the lens of research, not to make it more palatable, but to understand how this was predictable. Because psychology tells us exactly how this works and what comes next. Also, we'll be highlighting many Black scholars in this episode because Black people in America have been telling us that this was coming for quite some time. Here's what we know: Since January 2025, federal immigration agents have shot at least 30 people. Eight are dead from that gunfire.
Leslie Poston:Thirty two people died in ICE detention in 2025, an all time high with December being the deadliest month on record. Six more have died in detention since January 2026 alone. Another 17 deaths in border patrol custody were reported to Congress. I want to honor these victims' memories by naming some of them: Keith Porter Jr. Renee Nicole Goode.
Leslie Poston:Alex Preti. Geraldo Lunas Campos, whose autopsy found he was choked to death by guards at a detention facility. The names on this incomplete list are not statistics. These are human beings who were alive and who are now dead because of an enforcement apparatus that is expanding, accelerating, and consuming more categories of human beings every week. Most of the people who have been harmed were pursuing legal immigration proceedings.
Leslie Poston:Some were even green card holders. At least three of those names Porter, Goode, and Pretty were American citizens. They were not undocumented, not committing immigration violations. They were just in the way. And this is not a malfunction.
Leslie Poston:This is the authoritarian pattern, and research tells us exactly why it happens. Moral exclusion is what happens when certain people are perceived as outside the boundary where moral rules apply. Susan Apatow's research defines it this way. Those who are morally excluded are seen as expendable, undeserving, and harming them is something authoritarian propagandists can attempt to make appear acceptable to a heavily propagandized public. The key insight from Apotow's work is that moral exclusion isn't binary.
Leslie Poston:It's a continuum, from mild discrimination all the way out to genocide. And the boundary of who counts as deserving protection is not fixed. It shifts and can expand, or it can contract. We're watching the contraction in real time. Jennifer Eberhardt's research shows how this exclusion operates in the brain.
Leslie Poston:People who consciously reject racism can still unconsciously associate black faces with criminality and threat. Brain imaging studies by Eberhardt and Lisanna Harris found that when people view images of highly stigmatized groups, the medial prefrontal cortex, or region involved in empathy, goes quiet. The brain processes them not as people, but as objects. This isn't some character flaw it's a trainable response. And it's being trained on US citizens deliberately.
Leslie Poston:Research on policing shows that officers exposed to words associated with crime are faster to detect black faces. As many of you are aware, news coverage of black defendants uses more dehumanizing language and photo. Defendants with more stereotypically black features are more likely to be sentenced to death. Goff's work on policing found that implicit dehumanization predicts endorsement of police violence. The more someone is dehumanized in the public imagination, the more violence against them seems acceptable.
Leslie Poston:This is why you hear comparisons of black, brown, indigenous, and disabled people, as well as women ramping up in the last decade plus, to shift the Overton window towards violence and genocide. This is also why Keith Porter's death on New Year's Eve barely registered, while Renee Goode's death sparked immediate outrage and protests. That's not random it's the predictable outcome of whose humanity has been systematically denied, and whose has been systematically protected. Intersectionality, the framework developed by Kimberle Crenshaw, helps explain why violence against some people registers, while violence against others stays invisible. People who exist at multiple intersections of marginalization are harmed by systems that others don't even perceive as harmful.
Leslie Poston:The violence isn't hidden, it's just not seen by those whose position allows them to look away. A psychological blind spot of bias that causes immense harm to flourish unchecked. Mass incarceration and criminalization function as systems of racial control. Michelle Alexander's work documented how millions of people, disproportionately black and brown, are subject to a legal regime that strips them of rights, dignity, and freedom. What's happening with ICE is an extension of that system.
Leslie Poston:The carceral state expanding its reach, its targets, and its willingness to kill. Alexander also makes the point that this system's racial control is as much about keeping white people in line as it is controlling black and brown bodies and lives. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death. That definition matters here. What ICE is doing isn't random violence it's the systematic production of vulnerability to death for specific groups, and the continual expansion of which groups are included.
Leslie Poston:Terror management theory can be used to explain part of why people resist seeing this. When confronted with reminders of death, people can cling harder to their worldview, become more hostile to outsiders, and distance themselves from victims. If you can convince yourself the victim deserved it, you can convince yourself you're safe. This is the driver behind much of the victim blaming that occurs in the media and in society, and one reason why harmful behavior from the perpetrators of the violence is punished less harshly and less often. But this just world belief or conviction that people get what they deserve is empirically false.
Leslie Poston:Clinging to that doesn't protect you, it just delays your recognition of danger, putting you in harm's way. Look at the pattern of attention here. Keith Porter was black. He was killed on New Year's Eve, and the story barely registered nationally. Renee Goode was White.
Leslie Poston:She was killed on January 7, and protests erupted. Alex Preti was White and male. He was killed January 24, and now there are general strikes and expanded protests around the country. The violence didn't start when white people died. The attention did.
Leslie Poston:That pattern, whose deaths break through for which audiences, is itself evidence of the moral exclusion that makes the violence itself possible. The boundary of who deserves protection, who counts as fully human, isn't natural it's constructed. And because of that, it can and will be deliberately narrowed. Research on perpetrators of genocide shows us that ordinary people don't commit atrocities because they're monsters. They do it because the category of who counts as human has been systematically contracted through language, imagery, and repetition.
Leslie Poston:Language like illegals, aliens, invaders, or vermin. Every repetition is training your brain to exclude certain people from moral consideration. Authoritarian aggression isn't principled it's opportunistic. Altmeyer's research on authoritarian followers found that they'll target whoever authority designates, And those designations always expand the target shifts, but the psychology doesn't. Constitutional protections that theoretically apply to everyone function differently depending on race.
Leslie Poston:Devin Carbado's work shows that the Fourth Amendment protects some Americans from police intrusion, while offering almost no protection to black and brown Americans who are subject to stops, searches, and violence that would be unthinkable if it was applied at that level to white citizens. The law on the books appears universal, but the application, again, is not. This is the mechanism, Violence that would be intolerable if applied to an Us becomes invisible or acceptable when applied to a them, and the boundary of them keeps moving. First, it was undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and then undocumented immigrants, and then legal immigrants, and then citizens who look like they might be immigrants, and then citizens who help immigrants. Now it's expanded to citizens who document what's happening.
Leslie Poston:Alex Preti was an ICU nurse, a citizen. He was filming agents with his phone and helping a woman who'd been pushed to the ground. None of that protected him, because by then the category of them had expanded to include anyone who interfered with authoritarian enforcement. No amount of citizenship or whiteness or professional respectability protects you once the circle contracts far enough. The only protection is stopping the contraction.
Leslie Poston:I want to be clear. I'm not presenting this research to paralyze you. I'm presenting it because understanding the pattern is protective. The people who survived authoritarian regimes, the ones who got out, who resisted, and who protected others, were the ones who believed the evidence of their eyes early enough to act. The research on survivor psychology shows us this consistently.
Leslie Poston:Denial is not protection. Clarity is. Helping you find clarity is the main reason I started this podcast in the first place. So what does clarity look like? First, stop believing in your own exemption.
Leslie Poston:Remember that the just world belief is comforting and false. No demographic category, no professional credential, no track record of compliance guarantees safety once state violence begins expanding. The research on authoritarian aggression shows repeatedly that it targets whoever authority designates, and that those designations always change and expand. Second, pay close attention to who's being targeted right now, especially if it's not you. Your moral circle is a choice.
Leslie Poston:The deaths in detention centers, the killing of Keith Porter on New Year's Eve, these mattered before the names that made national news. The violence didn't become real when white citizens were killed, your awareness of it did. Keep that front of mind. Third, recognize that the lies are part of the system. When the administration tells you Renee Goode was a terrorist or Alex Preti intended to massacre law enforcement, they're not trying to use their lies to convince you.
Leslie Poston:They're testing you. They're finding out whether you'll accept their unreality as the price of your comfort, whether you'll choose their lie over the truth you can see with your own eyes. This has been part one of our short series American Authoritarianism. In episode two, we'll examine the lie on the video, how regimes wage war on reality itself, and what decades of research tell us about the psychology of manufactured unreality. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace.
Leslie Poston:I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. As always, until next time, stay curious and stay clear about what's happening. And don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode, and send it to a friend if you think this might be helpful.
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