Compact⁠77%

How Liberals Misread MAGA ⁠71%

By Gregory Conti⁠0%

6/22/2026, 11:00:09 AM

BS Summary: This article contains 23 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Confirmation Bias, and Ad Hominem, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 82.7% saturation with 441 hits. Analysis detected 1,639 faulty-reasoning hits from 533 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 63.8% and a BS Rank of ⁠71% (6,369 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 70.90% of the article peer group.

<em>Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right</em>&nbsp;<br>By Laura K. 
Field<br>Princeton, 432 pages, $35<br><br><em>Where Harvard Went Wrong</em> <br>By Harvey Mansfield<br>Encounter, 152 pages, $24.99</i><p>Laura Field’s <em>Furious Minds</em> was published last November, one day shy of the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris. 
The book, a study of the “MAGA new right,” has received a great deal of attention, an impressive feat for our author to have pulled off in our increasingly illiterate culture. 
The reception has predictably broken down along partisan lines, with left-of-center commentators hailing it as a mordant dissection of their enemies and right-wing critics complaining that it is a misleading polemic.&nbsp;</p><p><em>Furious Minds</em> is an intellectual history of the present, and the thing about the present is that it keeps happening even after the last page has been proofread. 
Unless the tea leaves are read exactly right, contemporary history risks becoming dated more quickly than do books about ostensibly warmed-over classic subjects. 
Eighteen months into Trump’s second administration, how much does this celebrated portrait of the MAGA mind tell us about what has actually transpired? 
Not much, I’m afraid.</p><p>To be sure, <em>Furious Minds</em> is a book from which many readers can profit. 
Even those who follow developments on the right closely are likely to have missed some of the strands which Field has woven together here. 
For instance, her documentation of the different responses of figures on the new right to the embarrassment that was the January 6 riot is valuable. 
The place of the personalistic nondenominational Protestant churches known as the Independent Charismatics in the Trump coalition will be new to many readers. 
Field is correct as well to observe that many new right thinkers anchor their views in a sloppy and reductive conception of the history of liberalism.</p><p>Field is also right that the “realignment” that many of her characters sought has not come to pass. 
Despite the efforts of some on the new right, we haven’t seen a reorientation of the GOP toward soft-left economics. 
The sought-after transcendence of “market-absolutism” (to use a term of which new right thinkers are fond) has not occurred, Liberation Day notwithstanding. 
Instead, Trump has enacted a vision of neoliberalism in one country, with business and capital unshackled from tax and regulatory burdens wherever possible but the flow of goods and people into the country from abroad regarded with skepticism. 
“Privatize and deport,” rather than a novel post-neoliberal but culturally conservative economic dispensation, has been the story of Trump II.</p><p>However, the shortcomings of <em>Furious Minds</em> make it an inadequate guide to the Trump era. 
For one thing, the book is written in such a fit of pique that its analytical force often founders. <em>Furious Minds </em>opens with an epigraph intended to liken her subjects to Nazis, and the tone hardly lightens thereafter. 
As a result, for close exegesis the book often substitutes an overreliance on what Bentham called “passion-kindling appellatives”; insults abound. 
For example, Field mocks the clothes worn by attendees at the conferences she drops in on and laments what she considers the subpar demeanor of various speakers, while invariably remarking that there are too many white men in the crowd (how many is few enough?).</p> 
Article reasoning-pattern comparisonThis article: 18.9%Gregory Conti: 7.5%Compact: 8.0%Confirmation Bias18.9%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.5%Anchoring Bias0.0%This article: 4.3%Gregory Conti: 1.1%Compact: 3.1%Availability Heuristic4.3%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 1.5%Representativeness Heuristic0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 1.3%Hindsight Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.8%Compact: 3.0%Overconfidence Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 4.5%Compact: 5.2%Framing Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.3%Loss Aversion0.0%This article: 3.8%Gregory Conti: 0.9%Compact: 0.5%Status Quo Bias3.8%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.1%Sunk Cost Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 2.7%Optimism Bias0.0%This article: 11.6%Gregory Conti: 4.4%Compact: 1.7%Pessimism Bias11.6%This article: 61.5%Gregory Conti: 16.8%Compact: 7.2%Negativity Bias61.5%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.6%Self-Serving Bias0.0%This article: 7.1%Gregory Conti: 1.8%Compact: 1.5%Fundamental Attribution Error7.1%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.1%Actor-Observer Bias0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 2.6%In-Group Bias0.0%This article: 8.4%Gregory Conti: 7.3%Compact: 2.0%Out-Group Homogeneity Bias8.4%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 1.9%Halo Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 3.9%Compact: 0.3%Horn Effect0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.1%Dunning-Kruger Effect0.0%This article: 4.3%Gregory Conti: 1.1%Compact: 1.3%Recency Bias4.3%This article: 4.5%Gregory Conti: 1.1%Compact: 0.8%Primacy Effect4.5%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.1%Blind-Spot Bias0.0%This article: 15.6%Gregory Conti: 14.9%Compact: 1.6%Ad Hominem15.6%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 2.1%Compact: 2.1%Straw Man0.0%This article: 3.8%Gregory Conti: 1.9%Compact: 3.6%Appeal to Authority3.8%This article: 10.5%Gregory Conti: 2.6%Compact: 2.8%False Dilemma10.5%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 1.7%Slippery Slope0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.5%Circular Reasoning0.0%This article: 3.8%Gregory Conti: 2.6%Compact: 13.1%Hasty Generalization3.8%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.2%Red Herring0.0%This article: 10.9%Gregory Conti: 2.7%Compact: 0.8%Bandwagon10.9%This article: 7.1%Gregory Conti: 2.7%Compact: 4.8%Appeal to Emotion7.1%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 2.1%Begging the Question0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 4.6%Post Hoc (False Cause)0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.3%Tu Quoque0.0%This article: 4.3%Gregory Conti: 1.1%Compact: 0.6%Burden of Proof4.3%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.9%Appeal to Nature0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 1.0%Composition/Division0.0%This article: 8.1%Gregory Conti: 2.0%Compact: 2.1%Anecdotal8.1%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.2%No True Scotsman0.0%This article: 8.4%Gregory Conti: 2.1%Compact: 1.8%Ambiguity (Equivocation)8.4%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.0%Gambler’s Fallacy0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.2%Middle Ground0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.1%Personal Incredulity0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.1%Special Pleading0.0%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 0.5%Genetic Fallacy0.0%This article: 3.8%Gregory Conti: 0.9%Compact: 1.9%Unattributed Quote3.8%This article: 7.1%Gregory Conti: 1.8%Compact: 1.5%Quote-first Misdirection7.1%This article: 82.7%Gregory Conti: 46.3%Compact: 13.0%Biased Writer Voice82.7%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.0%Compact: 2.5%Indoctrination0.0%This article: 8.4%Gregory Conti: 2.1%Compact: 1.3%Politically Left Leaning Bias8.4%This article: 0.0%Gregory Conti: 0.4%Compact: 5.2%Politically Right Leaning Bias0.0%This article: 8.4%Gregory Conti: 2.1%Compact: 0.5%Attempt to Sell a Product or S…8.4%

533 words analyzed.

Speakers

No attributed speakers were identified in this analysis.

Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…

Analysis

Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.