Loyalty and the Line: When Standing By Someone Becomes Collusion
Psychopaths don’t just show up. They recruit defenders.
The tension was high. I was sitting on a couch in a very rural location, trying to explain to a small core of people in a resistance group that their leader was compromised. I systematically walked through the signs—the refusal to hear feedback, the groupthink, using the group to chase personal validation instead of group goals, the use of ‘action currency’ as a lever to force compliance, the sudden presence of cash that seemed to appear out of nowhere, all of it. Their leader was following the exact playbook that I’ve written about here many times.
It took me over two hours to lay it out, including the present and future effects on the individuals in the group if he was allowed to continue. They agreed with everything I said; I was filling in gaps for them and giving context to things that had bothered them too.
Then came the response that stuck with me: "He’s gotten the group a lot of good attention though. We’re gonna stick it out with him."
That was it. No defense of facts. No denial of the behavior. Just a declaration of personal loyalty, used as a shield against unimpeachable truth. Why? Because their leader had previously gone to jail for the cause. That made his ‘action currency’ nearly celebrity-level status. I’ve written about that too:
It was the moment I realized that in activist circles, the most dangerous person isn’t always the obvious saboteur. It’s the one we don’t question or challenge. The conversation ended, and the group—a state-level group with a national reputation—went on to implode in fantastic fashion less than six months later. The group still technically exists, and that leader is still running it, but quite frankly, they’ve been reduced to a sycophant club, loyal to a guy who’s a narcissist at best and a controlled asset at worst.
I came across a Substack article by Harrison Koehli that unpacks a classic psychological profile: the enabling friend. (I highly recommend all of his stuff, well worth the read.)
But he doesn’t stop there. He takes it further, exploring why people remain loyal to dangerous individuals even after the mask slips. His piece bridges family loyalty, cultivated facades, and the darker currents of group psychology. It’s a must-read for anyone who’s ever seen a group defend the indefensible.
But this isn’t just about family. For those of us working in counterintelligence within activist networks, movements, and parallel structures, the core of his argument reveals something critical: unquestioned loyalty is a vector — and one of the most reliable tools of infiltration, manipulation, and operational decay.
The Para-Appropriate Response: Loyalty as a Weapon
Koehli cites Polish psychiatrist Andrzej Łobaczewski’s concept of the “para-appropriate,” when normal emotional responses are elicited for abnormal ends. Loyalty. Sympathy. Forgiveness. Trust. These are powerful when earned, but when deployed by a psychopath or manipulator, they become tactical weapons.
That “ride or die” instinct, the one that says family sticks together no matter what — can be exploited just like a misplaced password—especially in groups that are marketed as a brotherhood. Worse: the person being manipulated often believes they're demonstrating moral strength by extending loyalty.
This is why, in activist and underground circles, we hammer the concept of routine vetting. Make it robust. Normalize it. Do it so often that it’s second nature, and do it until it doesn’t make you feel guilty whatsoever to say no to someone trying to get into your group. Because loyalty, when given too early or too broadly, is exposure, not virtue.
The Red Flag Framework Meets Ponerology
In my Vetting Red Flag List (coming out tomorrow!), we talk about pattern observation, persona-mirroring, and strategic over-helping. But underlying all those red flags are two brutal truths:
People don’t want to believe their friends or leaders are dangerous, because it means that they ‘failed’ at spotting a threat.
People often aren’t emotionally healthy enough to give up what they see as the biggest source of their own validation.
This resistance creates fertile ground for the “salami-slice theory” Koehli names: each breach of ethics, each breach of trust, is just small enough to excuse. Until suddenly, you’re rationalizing behavior that is dangerous to your group’s mission and even you personally.
What Koehli names as group-scale ponerogenesis — the normalization and sanctification of pathology — is something every movement builder and group leader needs to recognize. While you might be organizing logistics, teaching skills, or building comms, someone else might be building a mythology around themselves — one that silences dissent, absorbs critique, and demands loyalty—and this can happen right under your nose as a leader if you’re not looking for the signs.
Where to Draw the Line
When does loyalty stop being honorable — and start being complicity?
Here’s the operational answer: when you choose emotional balance over truth.
This goes back to the validation vs. shame model, and strikes at the heart of your motivation to be in the group in the first place. This is why it’s so critical to handle your trauma and heal what’s broken before getting involved with a group. If you don’t, then when you find yourself in a position like the guys at the beginning of this article, you’re not going to choose truth. You won’t even choose the most ethical or efficient course for the group goals that you say you believe in.
You will choose the path that you think keeps fulfilling your need to matter.
And if you feel like asking hard questions would “divide the group,” or threaten that need, you’re already in danger because you’ve trained your brain to rationalize what you already know is a problem.
The money quote from Koehli’s article is this:
Having standards requires a certain amount of disagreeableness—a willingness to look around at the insanity of the crowd and say, “Yes, you are all wrong, and no, it does not bother me to say so.”
Guess what that amount of disagreeableness requires first?
Emotional health and maturity. Disconnecting your identity from your group and cause. And figuring out where you think your value comes from. Because people who are afraid they won’t matter as people if they lose the group are not capable of the above statement.
Standards Aren’t Cruel — They’re Defensive
Koehli’s article poses a hard question: How far can loyalty go before it becomes delusion? For those of us navigating decentralized movements or tight-knit operational groups, we have to answer it tactically, without emotion, and we need to have our own emotional cracks fixed, so that they aren’t sitting at the decision-making table trying to weigh in.
That’s why we build checklists. That’s why we train pattern recognition. That’s why we write things like this.
Calling out a problem early is hard. But rebuilding after a collapse is near impossible.
🧠 Want the checklist? Subscribe and download the Vetting Red Flag List tomorrow! Paid subscribers also get a MASSIVE breakdown with case studies, as well as a downloadable template for documenting those things that stick out to you during vetting. Don’t miss it!