Date of Award

Spring 6-10-2026

Document Type

Thesis (Undergraduate)

Department

Sociology

First Advisor

Kathryn J. Lively

Abstract

This thesis examines how three prominent charismatic figures, Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Jordan Peterson, convert experiences of epistemic dislocation into ideological belonging among a specific subset of men experiencing status anxiety, social isolation, and institutional distrust. Drawing on social identity theory, epistemic injustice theory, affect control theory, and Weberian charismatic authority, the study develops a theoretical model called the Epistemic Pathway to Digital Belonging, which describes radicalization-adjacent persuasion as a sequential process of epistemic and emotional repair. Through this framework, perceived identity threat produces interpretive instability and negative self-sentiments, instability produces recoil from mainstream discursive spaces, recoil produces an epistemic vacuum, and charismatic rhetoric enters that vacuum by validating the audience's experience and supplying new interpretive frameworks through which private suffering becomes collectively intelligible.

Using a qualitative comparative case study design, the thesis analyzes nine publicly available speeches, interviews, and media appearances across the three leaders, applying parallel codebooks organized around three analytic dimensions: crisis diagnosis, testimonial validation, and masculine performance and authority style. The analysis identifies a consistent underlying repair mechanism operating across all three cases while documenting systematic divergence in the registers through which it is performed. Trump's populist register locates crisis in named external betrayers and routes the resulting energy toward collective political restoration. Tate's entrepreneurial register locates crisis in a totalizing system of institutional captivity and offers individual escape through discipline and material sovereignty. Peterson's existential-paternal register locates crisis in the collapse of shared meaning structures and offers philosophical and archetypal frameworks for reconstructing purpose through voluntary burden.

The findings suggest that charismatic epistemic repair is a rhetorical function rather than a property of any particular political content, operating through radically different means while producing the same structural outcome: the conversion of shame, confusion, and loneliness into anger, conviction, and belonging. The thesis extends Fricker's epistemic injustice framework to dominant-group dynamics, showing how anticipated rather than actual dismissal produces the same functional consequences as structural epistemic harm. It contributes to the sociology of masculinity and digital culture by treating the manosphere not as an ideological aberration but as a legible social response to real conditions of dislocation, and it argues that understanding the rhetorical mechanism through which these leaders work is a necessary condition for developing alternatives capable of meeting the same needs differently.

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