> I don't equate this speech with violence.

Oh I don't say you do. I am saying the need of so many people to do it suggests there's a distinct lack of violence to point at, otherwise they'd be pointing at it, instead of pointing at words. And since these people are highly motivated to find anything to point at, their failure to find it suggests maybe there's indeed not much political mob violence to find.

> The level of fervor I see on some of these subreddits tells me that someone is programming these people.

For some definition of "programming", maybe. But for that definition, everybody who debates on the internet "programs" everybody else participating in the debate. It's just a nefariously sounding way of describing mundane things, just like writing "contains chemical compounds!" on food packaging.

> People are using the tools of psychology to achieve goals that would not be achievable otherwise

Not sure what you mean by "otherwise". People communicate. Some of them use knowledge of human psychology to make their message more persuasive. It's not something that appeared today or yesterday or this century or this millenium. Is it harder to convince somebody in something if you ignore human psychology? Of course. But there's nothing nefarious about it - it's like saying "people are using tools of physics and chemistry to achieve goals that would not be achievable otherwise". Sure they do, all power to them! That's why we spend all the big bucks financing the science!

> My point is that there is a singular event, Trump leaving office prematurely, that large groups of the right will inevitably interpret as a coup.

That would largely depend on the manner of said leaving, I'd assume. For example, if he becomes gravely ill or suddenly dies, that sounds unlikely. If Democrats win majority in Senate and House in the next election and decide immediately to impeach Trump "because he's bad", without a proof of any real crime committed - that sounds much more likely. But that would be a consequence of highly inappropriate behavior resulting in loss of trust in the democratic system by citizens. The cure for it is not to behave like that. If there's no such behavior then the history shows there would be no significant violence. I've heard rumors that Bush would cancel elections and institute martial law, then Obama would cancel elections, and no doubt I'll hear about Trump cancelling elections, and then whoever will be elected after Trump would cancel elections too. There's always talk about this, because it's easy.

> I realize that there is a spectrum of using psychology to influence people, and I can't tell you where the line is of too far, but can we agree that the line exists?

Not really. There's no "using psychology" but plain old persuasion, and no persuasion is "too far".

Well, of course, if you use violent methods like torture, you can also achieve psychological effects, but if we're talking about persuasive speech alone, then there's nothing "too far" in that. There's no words that can make robots out of people, and in fact convincing somebody to change one's mind on a political question by just throwing words at them is really hard. Possible, but hard. People may be "programmable", but not very easily. Usually if they become convinced in something, there are a lot of reasons for it and a lot of background for it, not just some nefarious article on some forum.