Confession. The post starts out admitting fault, listing why his or her candidate isn’t perfect. The same structure. I’ve seen it posted and reposted. Different days. Different authors. Same message.

It starts out with the criticisms. Then the arrogance. How the candidate holds a grudge. But these things bother the author too. And other supporters who feel the same way. The author knows and understands you. Sees you.

The person who reposts it? Thinks it’s brave. Refreshing. “We need more of this kind of honesty,” she says.

I sat there, phone in hand, stunned.

I’m a storyteller. Word patterns and sentence structure are how I read the world. When something doesn’t look or feel right, I question the motive.

Why write it like this? It had a very precise sequence. The pattern was there. Confess the flaw. Earn the trust of your audience, while disarming the skeptic. Deliver the real argument to your opponent who can no longer push back.

Then pull out the big guns: faith, family, freedom. But by this time the reader who disagrees is the dishonest one. The criticism unlocked the door. The reader who agrees? Steps through.

I don’t know the author so to say he or she is a bad person? That’s unkind and out of character for me. I am saying the post was built, and the scaffolding was intentionally misleading.

Now I’m thinking about templates. About certain rhetorical moves and how they travel through social media. Persecution narratives. The lone truth-teller. Corrupt institutions. Miraculous survival. The hero who continues to fight while everyone tries to stop him.

So I decided to try out my template idea. Write the exact same thing, only replace all of it with Jesus. I used every beat. Short sentences. Stacked grievances. A powerful enemy. A defiant hero. Fire emojis at the end.

I didn’t use the candidate’s name.

I used Jesus.

It fit without a single edit. The elites hated him. The establishment came after him with everything they had. They arrested him on bogus charges. The powers of Jerusalem thought a cross would end it.

I sat with that for a while. It scared me. That was way too easy. Too simple.

I’ve carried faith my whole life. Not perfectly. Not without doubt. But seriously, through loss and church hurt and years of trying to figure out what I actually believe versus what I was handed. Jesus is the center of something I’ve staked my life on.

So when I discovered a template built to generate devotion to a political figure fits the story of Jesus without friction? I didn’t laugh. I felt the thing my friend couldn’t name when she called the post refreshing.

We are being worked.

Here’s how it operates. Confess a flaw before your opponent can name it and you defuse the attack while looking self-aware. Name the accusation before it lands. Some of you think supporters are brainwashed. Suddenly the person who was about to say exactly that looks like the unreasonable one. Pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, force a choice. The target isn’t the candidate’s opponents directly. It’s the assumption that supporters aren’t thinking. Freeze that assumption, make it personal, and the reader has to choose sides. You’re either someone who condescends, or you’re someone honest enough to see clearly.

These tools were built for the powerless. For communities organizing against institutions that ignored them. Someone rewired them to make one of the most powerful figures on earth look like an underdog.

That’s the part that should disturb us most.

Not always by bad people. Sometimes by people who genuinely believe what they’re writing. The manipulation doesn’t require a villain. It just requires a structure that runs on emotion instead of thought. One that rewards sharing over sitting still. One that makes you feel like you’re being let in on something honest right before it asks for your loyalty.

The post ended with a line disguised as a plea for fairness. Stop pretending supporters are brainwashed. Some of us just looked at the outcomes and chose the leader who fights.

That line wasn’t for opponents. It was pastoral care for people who needed permission to feel smart about a choice they’d already made.

I know that move. I’ve heard it from pulpits.

Which is the whole problem.

When the grammar of political devotion and the grammar of religious devotion become the same grammar, something has gone wrong. I don’t know how to fix it. I’m not sure anyone does. But I think the first step is learning to see the scaffolding before you walk through the door.

My friend thought the post was brave.

I think it was effective.

There’s a difference.

And it matters more than we want to admit.