For as long as I can remember, I have picked up on the subtle differences between people, sometimes in ways they do not even see. I do not go looking for it. It is just something my idle brain started doing on its own. When you notice these little patterns long enough, you start to realize that most of them do not matter at all. But there is one divide that I think is the most telling.

There are the humans who move through the day trying not to get in anyone’s way. They just want to do what they need to do, get home, and stay out of trouble. They are not looking to stir anything up. They are not looking to make life harder for anyone. They just want to get through the day with as little friction as possible.

And then there are the other humans. The ones who seem to move through the world looking for friction. The ones who get in the way on purpose. The ones who provoke. The ones who poke and prod and push. The ones who seem to take a certain pleasure in making things more difficult than they need to be. These are the trolls.

Once you start noticing that difference, you begin to see it everywhere. You see it in families. You see it in churches. You see it in workplaces and in public life. And you start to realize that what we call trolling online is really just a louder version of something that has been happening around us for a very long time.

People rarely call this behavior trolling. They rename it. Being a sore loser. Picking. Teasing. Toughening someone up. Telling it like it is. Just joking. Boys being boys. Tradition. Anything to avoid the truth of what’s happening.

And the pattern shows up in all aspects of life. Families confuse bluntness with honesty. Churches confuse volume with conviction. Communities confuse dominance with leadership. Elders speak harm without challenge. Misogyny passes as masculinity. Cruelty passes as strength.

These are all forms of trolling. We simply do not call them that. After that, the rest of the story makes sense.

We have all been in a room where this happens. Someone gets pushed too far, they finally say so, and instantly they are the problem. The person who did the pushing insists their words were “just joking,” no matter how sharp they were. The person who speaks up becomes “too sensitive” simply for revealing their discomfort. And the group quietly decides that protecting the vibe matters more than the person who spoke up.

Because this did not happen in a vacuum. It happened inside a cultural operating system shaped by American exceptionalism and by the quiet assumption that one kind of person represents the national default. The straight white Christian male has been treated as the emotional center of the country for generations. Most people do not think about this consciously. It is so normalized that it feels invisible.

When a society treats one identity as the baseline, people inside that identity encounter fewer emotional checkpoints. They learn, without ever being told, that their reactions define the room. Their experience is the standard. Everyone else’s is the variation. This is why so many Americans believe that everyone else in the world secretly wants to be them. That belief is not arrogance in the cartoon sense. It is the emotional byproduct of a culture that has spent generations teaching people that their identity is the center of gravity.

When the boundary between church and state blurs, the emotional logic of faith enters politics. Certainty becomes virtue. Disagreement becomes threat. Compromise becomes betrayal. Conflict becomes moral theater. Antagonism becomes proof of conviction.

Religion played a central role in this drift. The old televangelists may have pioneered the style, but megachurches perfected it. They turned worship into a production, pastors into brands, and conviction into a performance. They taught people that the louder you are, the more right you must be. That certainty is a virtue. That emotional manipulation is spiritual leadership. It is trolling with a choir behind it.

None of these shifts happened loudly. They were not announced. They accumulated. A small exception here. A cultural assumption there. A moment where church and state blurred just enough to feel convenient. A leader who refused accountability and paid no price. Each shift was tiny and almost invisible. Over decades, these micro moves stacked on top of each other until the emotional logic of the country changed without anyone noticing.

So when commentators describe certain political communication styles as trolling, they are not talking about a single person. They are talking about a culture that has been training itself for this moment for a very long time. A culture that has learned to mistake antagonism for authenticity. A culture that has learned to mistake spectacle for leadership. A culture that has learned to mistake certainty for competence.

This is how people troll their way into positions of authority. Not because the culture is broken. Because the culture has been rehearsing this emotional script for decades.

And that is why the United States now feels like a place where trolling is not a fringe behavior. It is a national posture. It is a cultural reflex. It is a political identity.

Understanding this is not cynicism. It is clarity. And clarity is the beginning of accountability. A culture built on antagonism can only survive if people keep accepting the terms. We do not have to. The moment we stop treating trolling as strength, it stops being strength.  

The moment we stop protecting the vibe, the truth finally has room to speak.