The Enemy You’ve Never Met
- Gary Toyn
- Mar 3
- 12 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
How preconceived notions are destroying our ability to think, talk, and solve problems together
At a Glance
● Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently admitted on the Joe Rogan podcast that his lifelong mental image of Republicans turned out to be a fiction, not because he lacked intelligence, but because the machinery that manufactures enemy images is that powerful. If it worked on a Kennedy, it is working on all of us.
● Controlling how people imagine the enemy is the oldest political technology in the world, deployed from ancient Rome through Nazi Germany to modern American religious and political life. The targets change across history; the mechanism stays the same.
● Our brains are hard wired for tribal thinking, and that circuitry can be easily exploited. Research shows that contrary facts often harden preconceptions rather than correcting them. Simply repeating a false claim, without any argument, makes it feel more true over time
Before you read another word, notice something. You have already seen the image above on this page. A man speaking at a political rally, with a headline calling him a shameless sycophant. Plus two names: RFK Jr. and Joe Rogan.
You had a reaction to all of it. The image, the headline, the names. Maybe it was a flicker of contempt, maybe validation, maybe curiosity. You did not choose the reaction. It arrived before you could choose your reaction.
That involuntary moment is exactly what this article is about. So, before we go any further, ask yourself this question: who programmed that response in you?
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sitting across from Joe Rogan on February 27, 2026. Rogan asked RFK a simple question: What surprised you most about working in the Trump White House?
Kennedy paused. Then he said something thought provoking:
“I had not spent a lot of my life hanging out with Republicans, and what I imagined they were talking about is exactly the opposite of what I found. I always imagined the Republicans would get together and they’d be thinking about how do we screw the poor, and how do we reduce taxes on the rich? But they’re just narrowly focused on how do we solve these big problems and how do we make our country work.”
Let that sink in. This is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Son of RFK. Nephew of JFK. A man who grew up breathing Democratic Party politics the way the rest of us breathe air. Sixty years inside one of the most powerful political tribes in American history. And the entire time, he was carrying around a mental image of the other side that turned out to be a fiction.
He wasn’t lying or exaggerating for effect.
He was genuinely surprised. And that’s the part that should unsettle all of us, because if it happened to him, with all his experience and intelligence and access, it is happening to the rest of us too.
So ask the real question: Where did that image come from? Who built it? And why did they need him — and you — to have it?
The Oldest Con in the World
Controlling how people imagine the enemy has always been more powerful than controlling the enemy itself. The Romans figured this out first and built an empire on it.
When Rome defeated Carthage, Roman historians didn’t just record a military victory. They manufactured a narrative of Carthage that was worthy of hate. According to their accounts, the Carthaginians sacrificed their children, broke every treaty, and wallowed in depravity. Archaeologists have since found little evidence supporting these claims. Carthage appears to have been a civilization governed by codes as structured as Rome’s own. But the smear worked. It unified a fractious republic. It turned conquest into righteousness and made the victims of Roman aggression into the villains who deserved it.
Two thousand years later, Joseph Goebbels studied that playbook and put it to scale. His genius (if you can call it that) was recognizing that he didn’t need to invent hatred of Jewish people. He just needed to industrialize the antisemitism that already existed. He used film. Radio. Schoolbooks. Posters. All of it coordinated, all of it repeating the same images and the same words, over and over, until ordinary German families felt the threat in their bones, and long before they ever stopped to ask if it was real or not. By the time the facts arrived, the negative preconception had already sealed the fate of six million Jews.
Anti-Catholic rhetoric flourished in Protestant America, promoted by groups like The American Protective Association who concocted false narratives about “escaped nuns” testifying of their Catholic “horror stories.” Crowds paid to attend, already primed to believe every word, because they had long been told the Pope was the “Antichrist.”
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, his Catholic faith was treated as a disqualifying liability. Critics argued openly that a Catholic president would take his orders from the Pope rather than the Constitution, that his loyalty to Rome made him fundamentally untrustworthy as an American. The concern was so serious that Kennedy felt compelled to address it directly in a nationally broadcast speech to a group of Protestant ministers in Houston, essentially asking to be judged as a man rather than as a member of his church. He won. But the fact that the most powerful democracy in the world nearly disqualified a candidate over his religion, based on an image manufactured over centuries, tells you everything about how durable these preconceptions become.
Roughly a half century after Kennedy's speech to defend his faith before a room of Protestant ministers, Mitt Romney faced a nearly identical gauntlet. During the 2011 presidential primary, a prominent Southern Baptist pastor publicly called Romney a member of a "cult" at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, triggering a national news cycle that had nothing to do with Romney's policies or qualifications. The story was covered critically even by Fox News, a network not known for sympathy toward Romney's opponents. The label did its work regardless. It activated decades of carefully maintained preconception about Latter-day Saints, reframed a mainstream American politician as a religious outsider, and forced Romney's campaign onto defense about theology rather than governance.
Two presidential campaigns.
Two different faiths.
The same machinery, running fifty years apart.
I know this particular machine well. As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have watched it operate up close for most of my life. A case in point, a 2023 Pew Research survey found that Latter-day Saints have the lowest net favorability rating of any major American religion, lower than Muslims, lower than atheists. Most people who hold that opinion have never spent much time at all talking with an actual Latter-day Saint. That is not a coincidence. That is the machinery working exactly as designed.
And today that machinery has a power source its inventors never dreamed of.
Your Brain Is Not Your Friend Here
Before you get too comfortable blaming the propagandists, there’s something you need to know about yourself.
Your brain is not a neutral recording device. It is a survival machine, and it was built for a world that no longer exists. Since men first gathered around fires, the most important thing a human being could do was figure out who was in the tribe and who wasn’t, because the answer determined whether you lived or died. The groups that developed the strongest in-group loyalty, and the most powerful instinct to distrust outsiders, were the ones that survived long enough to have children. You are descended from those people. Their instincts live in your nervous system right now.
MRI brain imaging studies confirm what you can probably feel if you’re honest with yourself. We process out-group faces with measurably more suspicion. We feel other people’s suffering more acutely when those people are “one of us.” We instinctively see our own group as a collection of individuals with all their nuance and variation. But on the other hand, our brains instinctively see the out-group as a monolith. Every Mormon is the same Mormon. Every Republican wants the same thing. Every Muslim believes the same things. We know this is not true. But our brains simply don’t care.
And here is where it gets genuinely frightening: when anyone presents facts to someone whose identity is bound up in a preconception, the brain will fight against those logical arguments and treat them as a threat rather than information.
Neuroscience has a name for it. The backfire effect. When the brain encounters hard evidence that a deeply held belief is wrong, it registers that evidence as a threat. The same way it would register a physical danger. Adrenaline. Defensiveness. The analytical part of the brain steps aside, and the alarm system takes over. The result is that the preconception hardens. The person who was already certain becomes even more certain. You handed them proof, and they walked away more convinced they were right.
This is why presenting evidence to a convinced Islamophobe tends to entrench them further. This is why two centuries of arguing with anti-Mormon critics has not ended anti-Mormon bigotry. This is why RFK Jr. spent sixty years swimming in accurate information about the world and still arrived in the White House carrying a cartoon. The preconception was not a reasoning error. It was the brain’s tribal hardware doing what comes naturally.
Say It Enough Times and It Becomes True
Now add the most insidious piece.
Researchers call it the illusory truth effect. The more times you hear something, the more true it feels, not because you’ve evaluated the evidence and found it persuasive, but simply because it’s familiar.
Your brain mistakes repetition for reliability. It registers familiarity as a signal of truth. And the effect is so powerful that it works even on people who already know the claim is false.
People in controlled studies who were told a statement was wrong still rated it as more credible after hearing it multiple times. Knowing something is false does not protect you from feeling that it is true.
Goebbels grasped this before the scientists named it. So did every other demagogue who ever lived. You do not need to convince people. You simply need to repeat yourself. The brain does the rest.
Every time the word “cult” gets applied to Latter-day Saints on a podcast, in a Broadway play or a television series, in a conversation between strangers, it doesn’t need to be argued. It just needs to be heard. Every time someone describes Islam as “demonic,” it doesn’t need to be proven. Repetition is the proof, as far as the brain is concerned.
And the research goes one step further: repeated exposure to dehumanizing language doesn’t just make you believe the label. It makes violence against the labeled group feel less wrong.
The contemptuous words comes first. The violent acts follow. Every time, if these poisonous and contemptuous words are not confronted.
The Machine That Never Sleeps
Social media did not invent tribal preconception. It just runs it twenty-four hours a day with algorithmic precision and no conscience.
The algorithm’s only loyalty is to engagement, and nothing drives engagement like outrage. It does not show you the most accurate version of the people you distrust. It shows you the version most likely to make your blood pressure spike, because that version gets the clicks, and keeps you on the platform.
You get fed the worst examples of the out-group, over and over, each one confirming the preconception, each one making the next confirmation feel more inevitable. It is the illusory truth effect running on a server farm.
RFK put it plainly on the Rogan show:
"These connectors in our brain evolved over millions of years of living in these little tribal communities. And now you’ve got machines that can activate those parts of the brain, and they’re being manipulated all the time.”
Here is how bad it has gotten. Kennedy issued a medical advisory about Tylenol use during pregnancy, based on a review of 76 peer-reviewed studies showing a strong association with neurodevelopmental problems in children. A reasonable person could disagree about the interpretation of the data. That is what fair scientific conversation is all about.
Instead, within hours, TikTok was flooded with videos of pregnant women eating Tylenol. Not to protect their babies. To mock a political enemy.
The preconception had become so powerful that it overrode the most fundamental human instinct there is: protecting your own child.
Rogan, whose views on many topics are his own, put this particular instinct plainly:
“Imagine the aliens watching us and going, 'They're not ready. They're not ready for sophisticated time traveling technology. These (expletive deleted) dopes. What are they doing? They're fighting over nonsense.”
He’s right. And the aliens would simply shake their heads in wonder.
What We’re Throwing Away
When preconception governs our behavior, problems don't get solved. They get assigned to tribes.
In the same interview, Kennedy described billions of dollars in fraudulent Medicaid and Medicare billing, foreign criminal enterprises systematically looting American taxpayers.
Rogan's response was the kind of common sense that should cross every political line: "This is stealing from your tax money. All of our tax money. We should all be united on stopping any kind of fraud. Forget about who's going to get responsibility for it. Like, who cares? Stop fraud."
Whether every number cited was precisely accurate is almost beside the point. The reaction was instant and tribal. A significant portion of the country dismissed the issue not because they evaluated the evidence and found it wanting, but because the source of the fraud claims had already been disqualified. The facts never got a fair hearing. The preconception arrived first and decided what was allowable.
That is not a left-wing failure or a right-wing failure. Both sides of the American political divide do this with equal facility, on different issues, about different enemies. The tragedy is not that one tribe abandoned critical thinking. It is that we have built an entire information ecosystem that rewards the abandonment of critical thinking and punishes the kind of honest engagement that might actually move things forward.
The Only Thing That Actually Works
So if facts don’t work, and repetition makes things worse, and the algorithm is designed against us, is there any hope for overcoming this critical issue?
The answer is almost insultingly simple: get in the same room with them.
Seventy years of research on what psychologists call intergroup contact, beginning with Gordon Allport’s foundational work in the 1950s, points to the same conclusion: nothing reduces prejudice as reliably as genuine personal contact with actual members of the group you’ve been taught to fear. Not pamphlets. Not documentaries. Not corrective articles. The person. In the room. Working on the same problem.
Researchers at Stanford found something remarkable. In three separate experiments, they told partisans a simple fact: the other side dehumanizes you significantly less than you think they do.
That was the entire intervention.
No video.
No emotional appeal.
No lengthy argument.
Just a corrective piece of information delivered in roughly forty-five seconds of reading. The result was measurable and consistent: partisans who received that correction significantly reduced their own dehumanization of the other side. The effect held up a week later in follow-up testing, suggesting it wasn't a momentary blip. It stuck.
Think about what that means. Decades of propaganda, algorithmic reinforcement, and social sorting — and a forty-five second correction moved the needle. The researcher behind the study, Alex Landry, put it plainly: "Social platforms could scale this up at almost no cost."
The brain can update. It is not permanently captured by the preconception. What it needs is accurate information about actual people, not the algorithmically perfected caricature it has been fed. The problem is not that human beings are incapable of seeing each other clearly. The problem is that the machinery surrounding us has a powerful financial interest in making sure we don't.
Kennedy’s experience is not a political story. It is a human story, and it is older than the republic. We have always been capable of seeing each other clearly. What we lack is not the capacity. It is the contact.
We have sorted ourselves so completely into separate information ecosystems, separate neighborhoods, separate social circles, that many Americans can go years without a genuine conversation with someone from the political or religious out-group. We are not fighting the enemy. We are fighting the image of the enemy. And the image was built by people with a purposeful agenda that’s likely not our own.
One Last Question
Kennedy was genuinely surprised to find that the people he had spent a lifetime imagining as cartoon villains were, in fact, likeable, talented, idealistic. They were working on the same problems he cared about. It would be easy to say he shouldn't have been surprised. But like all of us, he was a product of the machinery, and it got to him first.
But it’s also instructive to notice what happened next.
The Daily Beast initially ran a headline describing the interview this way: “RFK Jr. Shamelessly Sucks Up to Republicans on Rogan’s Show.” It was later revised, but the tribal message was clearly delivered. Kennedy was, despite his pedigree, a dupe and a traitor. He deserves to be called a “suck up” because he’s on the wrong team.
That is how closed the loop has become.
The next time you hear a loaded word like cult, demonic, fascist, socialist, or any of the hundreds of other epithets in circulation, pause long enough to ask: who’s handing me this image? What do they need me to believe it? And have I ever met and conversed with a person they’re teaching me to fear or loathe?
Because until you have, you don’t know them. You know the manufactured image. And someone built that image for a reason.
The preconception is not the truth. It is a tool.
Once you see it as a tool, you can decide whether or not you want to be used by it.
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