It’s a Feature of Power
How strong leaders rewrite reality—and our memories go along for the ride
There’s a theory circulating in the deeper corners of the internet: maybe the Mandela Effect isn’t about parallel universes or simulation glitches at all. Perhaps it’s just what happens when power, propaganda, and psychology get tangled up in the quantum universe.
And—brace yourself—we have Donald Trump to thank for helping expose it. Let’s break it down.
What Is the Mandela Effect?
You've heard the examples: some people swear they remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Or that the Monopoly man wears a monocle (he doesn't). Or that it's spelled "Berenstein Bears" rather than "Berenstain Bears." These shared false memories are vivid and widespread—yet completely wrong.
Psychologists refer to these as false memories, particularly when they occur across multiple groups. There's nothing supernatural about it. Our brains piece together memories from fragments of information, and when those fragments get mixed with social conversations, media, or assumptions, mistakes happen. When enough people take the same mental shortcuts? Bazinga—the Mandela Effect.
But What If It’s More Than Memory?
What if the Mandela Effect doesn’t just happen accidentally? Can it be engineered? The profit George Orwell thought so.
Remember when Trump saw thousands of Muslims celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey? It never happened. But once he said it—and repeated it—people believed it. Some even remembered seeing it, too. No footage exists. But vivid lies become a mental image. Later? A memory.
Now zoom out.
In Nazi Germany, the public came to believe the army hadn’t lost World War I—Jews and communists betrayed it. That lie, repeated by Hitler, became a foundational memory for an entire generation.
In Stalin’s USSR, people were erased from photographs. They rewrote the history. Memory became a weapon of the state.
In post-9/11 America, people remembered Saddam Hussein being linked to the attacks. Not because it was ever true, but because leaders continued to imply it was.
These are not flukes. They are mandated memory glitches—false realities reinforced by repetition, fear, and identity.
The Quantum Nature of Facts
Here’s where it gets weird. Maybe information is quantum. Maybe facts don’t become real until they’re observed—and if no one was there, anything could have happened.
If no one saw whether the cats in Springfield disappeared because of coyotes or cannibal neighbors (yes I am being absurd, but what the fuck, we cannot get much more ridiculous than this, until we do, FUCK), then the most entertaining story wins. The one that gets repeated. The one that fits your political tribe.
And if your leader says it loudly enough? It becomes memory. I hope the aliens think twice about asking us to take them to Trump.
The Science of Misinformation
Psychology backs this up. There’s the misinformation effect—we take in new false info after the fact and overwrite our original memory. There’s memory conformity—when one confident person’s false story infects others. There’s motivated reasoning—we remember the facts that make our team look good.
We don’t believe lies—we remember them. Think about that for a minute. People pass along lies to their friends and family because they believe them.
So What Now?
This isn’t just about trivia. The Mandela Effect is a mirror that shows how easily reality can be rewritten and not just with lies, but with shared stories, repeated claims, and tribal identity.
If we don’t defend the integrity of our shared memory—through education, critical thinking, and a healthy distrust of charismatic bullshit—then our collective history becomes a fog of illusion.
Not because the universe glitched. But because we let someone else tell us what happened.
📎 Full research and citations compiled by ChatGPT, 2025: Read the detailed report