The right promised freedom. What it delivered was permission to hate

When Donald Trump emerged as the voice of the American right, many were stunned — not just by the lies, but by how freely he told them. Not just by the hate he spread, but by how proudly he wore it. He didn’t just ignore the rules, he erased them. And in doing so, he revealed something deeper: for a growing number of people, this wasn’t horrifying. It was liberating.

The political right, especially under Trump, didn’t just normalize lying, hating, and rejecting facts — it glorified it. It gave people something they didn’t know they were hungry for: permission to stop pretending. To stop holding back. To behave, quite frankly, like toddlers who no longer had to follow the rules of the grown-up world.

For millions, this wasn’t repulsive — it was intoxicating. Finally, they were free. Not free in the democratic sense — freedom of thought, of speech, of opportunity — but a more primal kind of freedom: freedom from shame, from responsibility, from norms they felt had only ever judged them.

And it’s no wonder. When you’ve spent your whole life barely scraping by, constantly told you’re not good enough, not successful enough, because you didn’t “work hard enough” — this kind of freedom feels like justice. Capitalism has preached the same lie for generations: if you just work hard, you’ll get what you deserve. But when that promise breaks; when you’re still drowning no matter how hard you try, the shame turns inward.

So when someone comes along and says, “It’s not your fault. You’re not the problem. They are” — that feels like relief. They, meaning migrants. Black and brown people. Trans people. Queer people. Anyone who doesn’t fit the mold. Anyone capitalism has painted as a threat to what little you have left.

The right knew exactly what it was doing. It gave people an outlet. A target. It allowed them to let go of the burden of self-blame and replace it with rage. And not at the billionaires or corporations who’ve actually rigged the system — but at their neighbors. It was never about truth. It was about emotional release. Venting.

This is what the right sold: not policy, not solutions — but the freedom to hate out loud. The freedom to believe lies if they made you feel better. The freedom to stop caring whether anything made sense.

But that’s not real freedom. That’s just what it looks like when you’re trapped inside a system that humiliates you — and someone finally tells you it’s okay to punch down.

If we want to break this cycle, we have to confront the root cause: capitalism. Not the buzzword version; the real, grinding machinery that tells people every day that they’re not worth much unless they produce, consume, and win. The system that sells dreams, then blames you when you wake up with nothing. The system that needs people to hate one another so they don’t start asking who’s actually hoarding all the wealth, all the safety, all the futures.

Capitalism trained us to believe that truth doesn’t matter, that whoever owns the story, owns the power. And so, people stopped caring what’s real. They just wanted the same privileges the elites had: to lie, to ignore facts, to shape the world with words, no matter how disconnected from reality.

The result? A culture where space rockets shaped like phallic monuments to ego are celebrated more than ending hunger or building trust.

If we want to stop the right-wing grift, this snake oil version of “freedom” that’s really just cruelty in disguise; we need to offer people the kind of freedom they’ve actually been craving all along: stability. Dignity. Jobs that pay enough to live. Communities built on care. Systems that don’t humiliate, but support. Institutions that tell the truth , and earn our trust.

That’s not possible under capitalism as it stands. No matter how many reforms, how many promises, the core logic remains: divide, exploit, distract.

There is no shortcut. If we want to end the politics of hate and disinformation, we have to dismantle the system that made them necessary.

Because only when people feel seen, safe, and secure will they stop needing the freedom to hate.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.