How MAGA Infected American Democracy

By G.J. Nelson

Contrary to Never Trumper discourse, the MAGA movement did not suddenly appear out of nowhere. Donald Trump didn’t descend on a gold-plated escalator onto the political scene and convert millions of Republicans and independent voters overnight. It’s a nice story because it keeps the public from peeking under the mattress, but it’s wrong.

Trump is indeed a unique figure on the right, with his thin-skinned histrionics, cult leader charisma, brazen self-dealing and pathological drive to upend norms and violate the spirit, it not always the literal word, of the US Constitution. The most honest thing about him is his shameless authoritarianism.

But there is a lot more continuity with the past than Trump’s conservative detractors admit. He inherited their base, weaponized their more virulent ideological strains and supercharged their already pugilistic politics. The difference between MAGA and paleo-conservatism is not one of type but of degree. And, boy, does degree matter.

With MAGA, the American right finally found gangsters famous and unscrupulous enough to roll back over a century of gains made by workers, racial minorities, women, immigrants and LGBTQ people. They’re presently shredding the last checks on the wealth class’s power and killing any program that might actually help someone.

If William F. Buckley, Lee Atwater and Gover Norquist were the prophets of this destruction, MAGA is its messiah, the beneficiary of a decades-long project to dismantle the state and reestablish a clear hierarchy of race and class. Trump simply took his place at the top of a monumental political machine primed for his arrival.

We cannot reverse the authoritarian transformation underway without understanding how we got here.

What follows is a series of scattered notes that tell a partial story of how the republic got ensnared in this dangerous demagogic trap. They are steeped in my own ideological biases and polemical tendencies, but I hope they will help others think about MAGA more critically, historically and, most importantly, constructively.

By necessity, I’ve left out a several threads like state politics and gerrymandering, overreliance on polls, and the ascent of Christian nationalism. Hopefully, I will be able to address these in more detail soon.

Part One: Capital Follies

Nineteenth and early twentieth century America was a nation of booms and busts, bubbles and depressions, a cycle of great wealth accumulation followed by mass immiseration. After the Civil War, an unaccountable ruling class of robber barons came to lord over industrial and agricultural laborers, miners, oil field and railroad workers, and virtually anyone else who worked with their hands for a living.

Average Americans fought back, peacefully and violently, organizing and agitating against this status quo of unscrupulous capitalists and proletarian masses. The political class responded with waves of reform.

The Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the New Deal of the 1930s and 40s and Great Society in the 1960s each saw the expansion of rights, social programs, labor associations, antitrust laws and regulations that helped workers, consumers, minorities, women and poor people while taming some of the more predatory corporate practices.

Eventually the excesses of robber baron capitalism and wage labor repression were contained, a regulatory framework was developed that softened economic downturns, the laws that govern financial markets were tightened and often enforced, and more working-class people were able to socially advance, save and build equity, and prosper.

We became fairer and a little more equal, humbled our corporate chieftains, and presided over a world-historical global economy. Setting aside white male supremacy, oppressive rural poverty and exploitation abroad, it was the Age of American Greatness—not the chintzy MAGA knockoff but something real and tangible.

However, the global slowdown, stagflation and high unemployment of the 1970s placed big burdens on the system, which created an opening for free market ideologues, small government conservatives and economic liberals to reset the entire game. In the neoliberal age of the 1980s and 90s, mainstream parties across the West decided they had enough of big government and “unleashed” the markets.

This meant slashing regulations, privatizing public services and utilities, disempowering unions with “right to work” and other anti-labor regimes, and imposing punitive costs on people receiving social welfare like work requirements.

This had benefits, especially for companies seeking to innovate without limits or investors looking for novel portfolios like pensions and prisons. Consumers also benefited from new products at low, low prices brought about by global free trade—even as US industrial labor took hit after hit.

The liberation of capital meant that the very rich could amass more assets, demand astronomical salaries, export jobs out of the US, acquire and radically restructure companies, and transform labor into a largely expendable pool of unorganized workers—ending the age of lifetime employment and guaranteed pensions.

With heavy industry and manufacturing moving overseas, the US began its rapid transformation into a post-industrial service economy. It wasn’t the worst thing ever as the far right would have you believe, but it came with costs. CEOs and bankers got a lot richer, the cost of living rose, and working wages stagnated.

This transformation didn’t happen in a vacuum. Wealthy people and corporations spent decades chipping away at political support for any policies that cut into their profits. Lobbyists diligently advanced their interests in both D.C. and statehouses. Since Citizens United in 2010, their donations have flooded political bank accounts.

They have perpetuated myths like trickle-down economics, the evils of corporate income taxes and estate taxes, the supposed efficiency of the private sector versus the public sector, and how an overbearing nanny state prevents everyone from achieving untold prosperity. I’ve been hearing this stuff my whole half-century on Earth.

Many average people with no vested interest in corporate profits bought into these myths. Which is why a failed real estate tycoon convinced so many voters that he knew how to run a modern economy (twice!), or how DOGE could dismember federal agencies in broad daylight with near complete impunity. The public’s complacency didn’t come out of nowhere.

But the cost of neoliberal mismanagement of corporate and financial sectors to average Americans was high. It was a wild west of Wall Street investments, abetted by a government eager to get people into homes they couldn’t afford, that brought about the collapse of subprime mortgages and the 2008 financial crisis.

We’ve never quite recovered. Housing is more inaccessible, homelessness has become endemic, private equity companies have bought up much of the housing stock, and both cities and states have been left holding the bag for the resulting external social costs of foreclosures followed by the rapid rise in home values.

For all the talk of efficiency, the private sector often makes things less efficient. The private health insurance industry doesn’t provide affordable health care. Charter schools don’t perform nearly as well as their proponents claim they do. And letting private equity buy up tracts of housing doesn’t help people purchase homes.

Instead of using tax dollars to fund robust housing, education, and health care, the US chooses to undercut them and impose a private middle man, a kind of pimp, to take their cut on the transaction.

One of the results of the economic disparities brought about by unleashed markets (not to mention two unsuccessful wars abroad) was more Americans looking for radical solutions and the rise of “burn it all down” nihilism. Idealistic movements like Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders’ two presidential runs tapped into some of that anger, but it was misdirected cultural rage on the right that won out.

Send In the Clowns

Instead of reform, voters picked a reactionary narcissist smeared in more muck than the swamp he claimed to be draining. Rather than blame actual plutocrats or bought-off elected officials for driving social inequality, Donald Trump effectively aimed the ambient rage at women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, racial minorities and leftists.

MAGA burns discontent like rocket fuel. But for all his populist rhetoric, Trump has hit the gas on rising social inequality, slashing public agencies and services in record time, accelerating our transition into a true kleptocracy where all public benefits are privatized or simply discarded.

Despite his rather old-fashioned fixation on tariffs, domestic manufacturing and skimming corporate profits, Trump’s anti-big-government policies have torn away the last protective layer between the American people and private malfeasance. It is perhaps the best example of “creative destruction” the market has ever seen.

The blueprint of MAGA’s butchery is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the latest chapter in think tanks and corporate media demonizing big government and the public sector to liberate capital from regulations and taxes.

The Heritage Foundation has been cherry picking their way to the same pro-business, “pro-family,” and pro-GOP conclusions for decades. While they always claimed a degree of independence, the rise of MAGA lawlessness was too good of an opportunity to pass up. (At least the Cato Institute still goes their own way.)

Project 2025 is the policy paper to end all policy papers. Its agents are tearing down the already frayed social safety net built by Franklyn Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, reinterpreting civil rights laws to favor white people, and radically shrinking most federal agencies regardless of purpose to sizes that can be safely drowned in a bathtub.

Simultaneously, they’re upgrading executive power to monarchial levels, expanding federal law enforcement into a vast secret police force, militarizing American cities, and weaponizing the DOJ to terrorize immigrants and punish political rivals. All while conservative Supreme Court justices idly nod along from the sidelines.

This is the roadmap for creating a rightwing, capitalist-backed dictatorship. Of course, pleasing Trump means that the pro-market ideologues must abide idiosyncrasies like protectionism, cartel (which is to say not free market) capitalism, and attacks on private actors considered insufficiently loyal.

The wealthy people behind this push and those who are amicable to it are willing to destroy the global economy, sacrifice democratic governance and accountability, and pay off a tyrant to do business, and for what? To make some money.

The private sector has been eager to adopt MAGA’s aggression against any internal HR or hiring practice they decide is helping a nonwhite person or woman—regardless of their qualifications. Major corporations have quickly dropped or heavily modified their supposed “core values” to appease Trump. Media companies and their television networks have gone out of their way to bend the knee.

The irony, of course, is that the kind of society MAGA is building is not the competitive, unrestrained free market libertarians and neoliberal capitalists wanted, but rather an intrusive statist system, dumb, corrupt and sluggish, more like a post-Soviet petrostate than a libertarian paradise. It is the worst of all worlds.

Rabid capitalism has engendered a hyper-materialistic culture built around making money at all costs and being as flashy as possible while doing it. You see it in popular music, fashion, reality shows, social media and anywhere else where you can show off McMansions, swimming pools, cars, and especially in bro culture spaces, arm candy.

There’s nothing new about this kind of conspicuous, shameless, and quite frankly brainless consumption, but it’s now the dominant cultural chord. So much of what individuals care about now is niche, but the signifiers of financial success are still near universal. Even as more and more Americans are permanently shut out of it.

It’s in this culture that people like Donald Trump thrive. If the appearance of wealth is exalted, if profitability is placed on the highest pedestal, it makes perfect sense to be ruled by a person who superficially exemplifies it. Grifters are no longer fringe; they’re legitimate businessmen, and sometimes even presidents and federal judges.

If we treated public service, the sciences and arts, and responsible leadership the way we treat wealth, we’d have a very different kind of national politics than what our president, Congress and the courts now offer. We might still be living in a functional democracy instead of a self-dealing kleptocracy slouching toward fascism.

In this new Gilded Age, you don’t have to travel far to find factory towns, impoverished communities, and landless migrants, indicators of a highly stratified system. But instead of addressing causes, MAGA treats these symptoms with more authoritarianism: displacements, arrests, deportations, and occupations. Cruelty.

Part 2: Imperial Dreams and Power Politics

It’s not an original thesis to argue that since World War II, US presidents have accrued incredible power at Congress’ expense. During the Cold War, the executive assumed a central role in guiding foreign policy, military deployments and national security, often running programs outside public view and generally lying about it.

From the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in Vietnam to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to secret wars in Latin American and Iran-Contra to the War on Terror, US presidents have sidestepped Congress and the courts and mostly gotten away with it.

Not long after the September 11 attacks, we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and created the Department of Homeland Security alongside a beefed up national security state under the purview of the executive, one of near unapologetic mass surveillance, secret courts, extraordinary rendition and torture, complete with a legal framework.

When you’re lawless abroad, when you flout international laws (even laws the US itself supported), when you dehumanize non-Americans and Muslims and carry out illegal invasions, it’s only a matter of time before the lawlessness returns to the home front, where executive over-empowerment has already taken root in domestic affairs.

Paralyzing hyper-partisanship, the abdication of congressional powers to the president, the growing reliance on executive orders, and emergence of unitary executive theory among right-wing judges have made the imperial presidency as all-powerful domestically as it was abroad.

It’s Not Illegal When You’re the President

There was once a time when the Nixon administration’s break-in at Watergate and subsequent coverup was viewed as the gold standard of executive abuse of power, but now it would just be another day at the office, a mere 24-hour news cycle to power through.

Richard Nixon should not have been pardoned. He should have been tried and sentenced. Because his successors let him off the hook, real accountability was irrevocably lost, and Nixonian abuse became precedent rather than a red line. Far from containment, Watergate established a new baseline of acceptable criminality.

Later scandals like the Iran-Contra Affair were brushed off by the president while their underlings faced only minor consequences (and careers as pundits). The lies leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 should have sunk George W. Bush and the neocons, but instead they handily won reelection and never answered for anything. Some guy throwing a shoe at a press conference was the closest they ever got.

In 2021, Trump sent his most fervent cult members to ransack Congress and pushed every button he could to overturn the 2020 election results. By all rights, January 6 should have led to the immediate collapse of MAGA and its treasonous ringleaders. But nope. Trump’s continued power and wealth shielded him long enough to replant himself on the imperial throne, protected by a complacent high court.

Not only did he skate past any real consequences on his way to reelection in 2024, but he also managed to get the January 6 rioters off the hook while punishing the public servants who prosecuted them.

Our Supreme Court, whose conservative majority reflects the ideological interests of the Federalist Society (a right-wing lawfare org), has actively worked to block executive power when yielded by Democrats while brazenly defending or deflecting challenges to Trump’s seizure of increasingly dictatorial powers and privileges.

In MAGA Land, the external enemy has become the enemy within. American citizens who disagree with them need to be sued, investigated, detained, tortured, humiliated or defeated utterly. Post-Charlie Kirk, we are all in danger of falling under the gaze of the dumbest, most distractible version of the Eye of Sauron.

Right Makes Might

Centrist Democrats have, since the Reagan revolution, treated leftists in their midst as a whimsical distraction, occasional annoyance and, at times, a graver threat than the right. But they’ve spent a lot of political capital over the years extending an olive branch to the Republicans only to have it broken in half and thrown back in their faces.

That’s because since the days of Lee Atwater, the Republicans have consistently treated politics as a winner-takes-all contest for control over the entire country. Surely, you might say, isn’t that what all political parties want? Yes, a healthy political party wants to win and govern.

But for the modern GOP, it’s not a collegial competition. It’s total war. And that win-at-all-cost attitude has mutated over the years into a totalitarian drive for complete control. They don’t see Democrats as healthy competition; they regard them as the enemy, and the existence of a viable center-left as anything other than a bogeyman is intolerable.

Any trick, bad-faith argument, or lie against the Democrats and the broader left is considered a legitimate tactic. And while the Democrats have at least ostensibly rallied around precedent, democratic processes, rule of law, and decorum, the Republicans have waged an all-out battle against all these things.

The Republicans weren’t always this rabid. There was a time when a creature called liberal Republican existed alongside conservative Democrats, when the party was willing to cross the aisle, compromise, seek common cause and work hard to pass bipartisan legislation.

This began to change with the Southern Strategy period of the late 1960s and 70s when national Republican candidates like Nixon and later Reagan wooed southern Democrats hostile to Civil Rights and desegregation into their own ranks and effectively ended the Democratic Party as a major power in the South.

Within a decade, the party got hooked on feeding the part of their base once considered extremists: the Moral Majority, white nationalists, anti-government militias, anarcho-capitalists, and leftover John Birch conspiracists. Talk radio and television rabble-rousers, religious broadcasters like the 700 Club, and an expansive print media ecosystem bonded these disparate discontents with the Republican Party.

As this part of the base’s worldview became more extreme and apocalyptic—fed by the ideological media onslaught—they adopted a more warlike stance in politics, even lambasting moderate Republicans. Eventually, what began as an electorally useful fringe became the party itself. Not just rank-and-file, but their actual leaders.

During the Tea Party years, conservative activists, Fox News reporters, and talk radio personalities pilloried Obama (remember the birthers?) and tried to kill his agenda in the crib, siccing constituents on elected officials to ensure they didn’t give an inch on the Affordable Care Act, stimulus, or anything else they deemed “socialism.”

Republican politicians willing to compromise with the Democrats were labeled RINOs and often primaried by more radical candidates. This was the point where GOP efforts to defeat the enemy became the core feature of the party. Compromise, pragmatism, and good faith debate were out. Lying, insults, and propaganda were in.

By time Trump showed up in 2016, his narcissistic heel style had become the norm, even if a lot of conservatives of the time pretended otherwise. He was the right man at the right moment: a wannabe dictator for a pugilistic, post-democracy party. Solutions to real problems no longer win elections.

Cruel and extreme solutions to made up problems designed to “own” the Democrats and the “woke” left became the only game in town.

Bedtime for Democrats

Most Democratic leaders never quite understood the threat of a revised and revanchist Republican Party. After the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the election in 2000, they should have been wary. Instead, after 9/11 they largely backed the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses, ultimately becoming the heirs and overseers of the neocon wars.

With the Great Recession, Barak Obama and the Democrats had an opportunity to impose serious costs on Wall Street for their role in the housing crisis (ignoring the government’s own role in it). Millions of Americans, including progressives in the party, wanted it.

But instead, the insolvent banks were deemed too big to fail and bailed out at taxpayer expense. The economy limped to a soft recovery, but working Americans were diminished. The housing market rebounded, the banks came roaring back, and the one percent accrued more assets while the American dream slipped further away.

This response to the recession reflected the neoliberal shift that began in the Clinton years, a suspicion of any popular solution that reeked of socialism or redistribution. Thankfully we did get the ARRA, a stimulus package that kept the wheels from coming off completely, so credit where credit is due.

And yet, Obama, branded a socialist by the right, received no credit for saving the market and restoring financial solvency. Just like he earned no points for ruthlessly prosecuting neocon wars and human rights abuses abroad. Instead, the right simply shifted the blame from their own leadership to the Democrats.

Obama’s one truly progressive accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, was treated by the Tea Party as the resurrection of Joseph Stalin, and the man who campaigned on hope and change and reaching across the aisle, ended up being enemy #1 of the militarized Republican Party steeped in birther conspiracy theories.

I’m not trying to stoke old debates, but rather provide an example of how the Democrats treating the Republicans as reasonable, good faith competitors has never worked out quite how they hoped.

No matter how many “welfare moms” the Clinton-era Democrats trotted out or pro-market reforms and deregulations they championed, the right never viewed them as anything other than political foils, and eventually a barrier to flatten.

Since the 1990s, mainstream Democrats and their preferred donors have gotten very good at telling Americans that they can’t have what they want. Politics isn’t just the art of the possible; it’s also redefining what is possible by building new consensus, listening to the people instead of wealthy donors and “centrist” scolds.

This is not entirely fair because it leaves out political realities, like the fact that Democrats must please a wider and more diverse range of interests, and getting votes means compromising. Add a Supreme Court willing to call plays, razor-thin majorities, and procedural monkey wrenches during the best of times, it is very hard to mount an effective bulwark against a radicalized enemy.

But whether it’s wholly their fault or not, the Democrats are the weaker party—even when they’re ascendant.

They simply do not possess the ideological or strategic cohesion of the Republicans (even with all the right-wing infighting) nor their ruthless disposition. If you start with the premise that real change is impossible and offer only half measures, the final product is not going to please your constituents or advance your own lines.

If you tell people the status quo is wonderful when it’s not, you’re not going to win over people on the fence. You’re certainly not going to win over or intimidate the far right. You just make the party willing to break rules, hand down blatant partisan rulings, and ridicule and “own” its enemies seem stronger.

The Democrats have spent years playing “the adults in the room,” the sticklers for procedure and precedent. But now, faced with a true existential threat, they don’t have a clue what to do other than wait for the storm to pass and pray for a hugely successful mid-term election—based purely on opposition to Trump rather than new ideas. And no, Abundance isn’t a new idea.

For too long they ridiculed rather than acknowledged the MAGA threat to the nation. Even January 6 wasn’t quite enough, prosecutions notwithstanding. Instead of fighting a rear-guard action against MAGA, Joe Biden spent his political capital on Build Back Better, great legislation easily undone by a victorious Trump.

The Biden dropout fiasco and Kamala Harris’ campaign seemed to be based on the premise that a majority would never vote in the “crazies” of the far right again. Look at their lousy crowd sizes! Look at the Haitians eating dogs silliness! Look at how weird they all are! This was the fatal desperation of a party that had run out of ideas.

All throughout the 2024 election the Democrats kept pointing and laughing at Trump and his associates, but who’s laughing now?

Feel the Hate

The sad reality is racism didn’t end in the 1960s, homophobia didn’t stop when gay marriage became legal in the 2010s, misogyny didn’t go away when women entered the workforce and Roe v. Wade became the law of the land (for a time).

Racism and xenophobia are a big chapter in the American story. Anti-Black and anti-indigenous racism was one of our earliest core ideologies, one that survived the end of slavery and later Jim Crow segregation. And immigrants have always been popular targets of outrage and violence delivered by nativists. This is all true no matter how much MAGA bullies colleges and museums to rewrite and distort history.

Homophobia remained open and intense long after Stonewall, and the Christian right has never stopped preaching against gay people. A lot of evangelical Christians haven’t even fully accepted interracial marriage. It should come as no surprise then that trans people would be swept up in the vortex of homophobia, especially since their increased visibility made them seem like a novel new threat.

Women have been treated with scorn, skepticism and harassment since before they got the right the vote, really. And since they entered the workforce their rights have been under endless attack from religious conservatives and macho, macho men. The manosphere and trad wife conservatives have practically turned hatred of single working women into a renewable energy source.

Any multicultural republic based on mass participation, where all adult citizens are granted a vote, you’re going to have this kind of tribal attitude from the historically dominant group: in this case, white men. Especially in a republic that is rooted in conquest and slavery. That’s a stain you can’t wash out with a rag and some bleach.

Anytime things get a little hairy in the U.S., when White, straight (cis if you like) men feel insecure and at the mercy of forces outside their control, the reactionary tide rolls in, and all that bigotry suppressed during the good times floods the entire county.

It happened during the conspiracy-fueled paranoia of the early republic; it happened during the radical presidency of Andrew Jackson; it happened during the Civil War; it happened during the backlash to Reconstruction; it happened during the Great Depression and WWII; it happened during the early Cold War and its Red Scares; it happened in the years following Civil Rights amendments and desegregation.

And now it’s happening again. Only this time it’s all being directed by an authoritarian demagogue, his cadre of sociopaths, the Supreme Court and a sizable chunk of the federal government. There are no “adults” left in the room to push back. For the first time since the Civil War, bigotry is an existential threat to the republic.

Starting with the birther backlash, MAGA has surfed the hate wave. Instead of appealing to better angels, shared values or universal humanity, MAGA have fully weaponized the toxic stew or white male resentment, turning a gormless horde of second-rate influencers, failed comics, and angry young men (and the women who love them) into propagandists and foot soldiers in their rabid kulturkampf.

The white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2007 was not the wave cresting on bigotry; it was the opening volley in an evil onslaught that has continued to this day. Far from a day of reckoning, it was when the faucet of unrestrained bigotry was tuned back on.

The right wasn’t going to play by the politically correct rules anymore or bother with dog whistles. MAGA ended the period of respectful dialogue around race and sex, however disingenuous, and made the Republicans the party of white revenge.

ICE’s operations, the occupations of blue cities, the attack on institutions that serve minorities, women and LGBTQ people, this entire onslaught is just the laundering of Unite the Right’s core ideology into official policy. And it must be stridently opposed.

Mass Hysteria and Moral Panics

The republic has experienced waves of communal freak-outs, moral outrages and witch hunts since the Puritans arrived and Salem put witches on trial. A big part of MAGA’s electoral success rests on non-stop moral panics. It’s a way of life.

In times of uncertainty, many people reach for fantastical and conspiratorial explanations to make sense of it all, usually blaming the nearest convenient scapegoat. It’s also a highly profitable business model for grifters and political angle for opportunistic demagogues. Make up the problem; sell the fake solution.

Over the last century we had no shortage of alleged evils to lose it over: communism and comic books, horror movies and heavy metal, Dungeons and Dragons and daycare satanists, trans athletes and secret sex cults. Notably, these panics have also sold a lot of books and guest spots on speaking tours.

In the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, fundamentalist Christians claimed that kids were turning to Satanism because they liked scary music and played scary games. Claims of demonic cults operating in secret gripped communities who became convinced that daycare staff were sexually abusing their children as part of satanic rituals.

Outlandish accusations flew, kids were manipulated into giving false testimony, lives and careers were ruined, and when the smoke cleared these panics produced zero evidence of abuse in nearly every case and even less evidence of Satanic influence.

The Satanic Panic is the most recent well-known example of this kind of hysteria taken to outrageous levels, but our contemporary culture is steeped in this kind of “think of the children” social freak-out. You can find this kind of collective delusion across the political spectrum.

A frayed educational system, the siloing of people into partisan factions and online communities, and pervasive anti-intellectual, anti-expertise culture makes it very easy for people to slide down the rabbit hole, to be “red-pilled” into some alternative reality.

Despite the presence of the word “moral” (a misnomer), these panics have very little to do with morality. Instead, they reflect an obsession with harm and danger, hyper-vigilance against unlikely threats and desire to identify easy culprits and solutions.

Morality is only involved when it comes to the self-righteousness of the mob and their choices of targets. Evil must be vanquished, the witch must be burned, the social contagion must be stamped out, whether it’s on a library shelf or drag show stage.

Qanon is perhaps the movement that most closely follows the old template of shadowy satanic forces harming kids just out of view. They take a kernel of truth, like a small minority of wealthy people sexually abusing children, and turn it into a gothic horror story about political rivals harvesting adrenochrome from kids under a pizzeria.

This might sound outrageous but it’s scarcely stranger than all the other panics that have emerged on the right and across the culture generally since the rise of the social media—many borrowed from the more left-coded natural foods, alternative medicine and new age movements that emerged in the 1970s and 80s. Ironic, give how much fundamentalist Christians panicked about these very movements in the 1980s.

One panic that has become scarily prominent, with adherents now in charge of public health, is the furor around rising autism diagnoses. The idea is that a nefarious profit-driven medical establishment is lying about the causes of autism, the safety of vaccines and prevalence of toxins, and worse, scaring parents off real remedies that could “cure” their kids.

The vaccine-autism panic is part of a larger social hysteria over modern medicine and its supposed suppression of effective “natural” treatments that are assumed to be “purer.” The far right is obsessed with purity and likes to think of itself as the natural order, which is likely why they find this kind of thinking so attractive.

People who advocate for it act like they’re on a righteous crusade for truth. Just ignore the morally questionable attitude of parents who see autistic kids not as a source of happiness but instead a cross they are forced to bear. Or worse, the dehumanizing and immoral notion that kids on the spectrum are defective—as RFK, Jr. would have it.

Quack cures and pseudo-scientific medicinal crap have become one of the major MAGA grifts, so it makes sense that Donald Trump—who likely knows that RFK, Jr. is full of it—would quietly nod along with his outrageous claims. Trump relies on an army of grifters and moral crusaders to keep the conspiracies churning.

Besides there are a lot of other panics to stoke, like library books turning kids gay, “woke” pop culture indoctrination, Palestinian rights activists supporting terrorism, antifa super soldiers invading our small towns, Jews replacing white people with immigrants, and a long line of other fabricated concerns the far right loses sleep over.

MAGA, like all reactionary regimes, exists in a post-truth space where a barrage of lies is always preferable to any examination of the facts. To the fascist-type, “knowledge” is just a product you pull out of thin air when you need it. Actual expertise, when inconvenient to your goals, must be dismissed as lies or propaganda.

This lack of concern over legitimate knowledge or how its formed makes far-right political movements friendly to crank theories. Moral panics about evil forces in society corrupting the youth or drinking their blood—which really got started with medieval antisemitism—are a perfect complement to the politics of demonization.

As for the kids, the biggest purported “victims” of these occult conspiracies, they can freely live in poverty, die in school shootings, be separated from their families, be sentenced as adults, work in factories, suck down pollution, and die of a preventable childhood disease.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: MAGA’s leadership does not think, nor care, about actual living children. Only their own brood and the unborn matter. All the structured water, crystals and horse tranquilizers in the world aren’t going to change that.

Part Three: Media Matters

While the presidency was powered up and right-wing ideology became more extreme, conservative capitalists built a massive media apparatus to disseminate and reinforce toxic ideas for fun and profit. Initially this included radio, magazines, tabloids, local and cable news, but grew to encompass online news sites, web forums, content farms and the whole influencer/grifter ecosystem.

Since this process began in earnest with the repeal of the fairness doctrine in 1987 and the rise of cable networks, the right-wing media machine has amassed an empire of platforms to pump out 24-hour-a-day propaganda and slanted news designed to engage and enrage conservatives with culture war saber rattling and resentments.

Right-wing media can reach their audience virtually anywhere online or off with bad-faith arguments, conspiracy theories, and violence-tinged rhetoric. No matter how one receives their news, there is a steady stream of toxic content waiting for them. And the deeper you go, the worse it gets.

It’s so pervasive that even people who actively try to avoid it can’t. In fact, the more it rattles everyone else, the better. It just means more eyes on the screen. And if the right is talking about something you can bet the “liberal” media is too. Because it gets clicks and ratings.

Ideology alone could not have made this happen. Above all, moguls, media companies and tech barons want to make money with ads and selling user data to sponsors, marketing firms, data miners, and political operatives. It’s like Greed itself manifested a political movement, knowing that yellow journalism and outrage increase market share.

Instead of pursuing high-quality, “objective” reporting, you offer entertainment value and membership to an ideological cult bigger than yourself. Make your audience feel like insiders sharing in dark truths of their hated enemy. Envelop them in the political equivalent of exciting genre fiction, a fantasy with dangerous real-world implications.

Why don’t they pander to the left? Leftwing beliefs aren’t profitable, and their ideas are adversarial to corporate interests. The owners and shareholders have a vested interest in not paying taxes, getting regulators and environmentalists off their back, neutralizing unions, and making more money. They very much see the left as a threat.

They need business friendly conservatives (and liberals too), libertarians and far-right politicians to keep them fat and happy. It’s not just ideology; it’s good business sense. And right now, the down-market fascists of MAGA are offering them the best deal—even if it comes with inconveniences like federal predation and crippling tariffs.

Trump is the perfect president for these people because he spends so much time running his mouth and tweeting out new content designed to appeal to their market demos and irritate everyone else. And that means money.

It’s a massive pyramid, with the president, politicians, think tanks, cable news, and major websites at the top, a middle layer of social media bloviators on X, run-of-the-mill right-wing news aggregators, conservative magazines, and major podcasts, and a lower but much broader layer of bottom feeders: sleazy YouTube influencers, grifters, Qanon types, and Laura Loomer.

These bottom feeders are not passive consumers, but produce new hot takes, lies, and propaganda which percolate to the top for refinement. What they all share is a desperate desire for political access, brand notoriety, and above all things, cash money.

Tied up in all this is the dark money streaming out of super PACs, a revenue stream that ensures the existence of a large collection of media figures, activists, influencers and bots spreading the latest talking points far and near.

Despite the right’s often shambolic appearance, they effectively speak with one giant booming voice, and right now that voice belongs to MAGA. Whatever the Big Lie is this week, there is army of media hacks, activists and sycophants ready to echo it. Yes, they fight among themselves, but when they rally they act as one.

Liberals and leftists have a superficially similar media apparatus as the right, but it lacks the ideological unity, high profitability, and all-encompassing largess of what the right has built. It’s more of a loose network of everyone who isn’t a committed conservative or right-winger.

Unlike the more lockstep right, liberals and leftists spend a lot of time debating each other over differences both trivial and deep, practical and ideological. But since no one on the right cares about it or even hears it—they basically live in a different reality—most of the rhetorical ammo is wasted on friendlies.

This isn’t necessarily all bad. The range of viewpoints found in centrist, liberal and leftwing media is a good thing in a functioning democratic society (which we are not). After all, the whole point of having an open society is presenting and debating ideas and solutions, so things get fixed.

But it can also be incredibly demoralizing to see people pedantically bickering over water conservation when the house is on fire. The rise of American fascism requires clear and consistent response. If the center and left can’t cohere, MAGA’s tentacles will happily probe the fissures with divisive propaganda.

As for the traditional mainstream “liberal” (by which I mean centrist) news sources, the prognosis isn’t great. Despite being scorned by the far right, these entities have happily platformed far-right agitators because they know it attracts views and online chatter and keeps their content relevant in a reactionary age.

CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post (and countless local newspapers) normalize the horrors of this political moment by reporting on it in a bloodless, “unbiased” way, feeding endless both-sider debates among self-appointed centrists. It’s great to have conservative voices and genuine debates in these spaces. It’s core to democracy.

But for MAGA it’s just another front to advance their lines, another place to launder their lies in an all-out war against liberal democracy. And lately, a lot of these news organizations are surrendering before a shot is fired. CBS and Paramount have all but bowed before MAGA to avoid FCC meddling and frivolous lawsuits. It’s all business.

This is all to say that while physical reality may or may not have a liberal bias, the media landscape most certainly does not. And that’s where public perceptions are largely formed.

The Internet

Remember the late, great World Wide Web, that utopian project that grew out of the early Internet and was—according to its boosters—going to lower national borders, liberate human expression and free speech, and turbocharge democracy and civic participation? Everyone was going to have their own space online, and people from all over would come together, making the world smaller and more integrated.

Now, 35 years later, the Internet is a giant noise machine, largely run by corporate monopolies, that is very good at generating and spreading disinformation, propaganda, racist memes, clickbait and rage bait. A digital landscape of partisan echo chambers, pop culture diversions, porn—and increasingly, AI slop and deepfakes.

I don’t like playing the technological panic game, blaming the whole of the Internet for every social problem under the sun. It’s too easy to lay all societal failures at the feet of online platforms. There is so much great stuff online, so many useful applications and enjoyable (even educational!) user-created content. There is a lot to love.

But sadly, social media has a problem with quality control and moderation. And with an aggressive right-wing push globally against democracy willing to use the cudgel of free speech to bolster toxic content, it has become the top facilitator of extremist ideas and conspiracy theories across the globe. The Internet provides quasi-social spaces where people can marinate all day in whatever inane nonsense makes them feel good.

Social media algorithms have done a fantastic job spreading dangerous crackpot ideas and selling snake oil (see anti-vaxxers) to sometimes fatal results. Racism and Christian Nationalism run naked and free, normalizing and weaponizing people’s worst impulses. Small online communities cheer on mass shooters and extremists of the right and left.

Meanwhile, the apolitical can while away their days in endless pop culture reaction videos and commentary. Their hourly investment in mindless lifestyle entertainment makes television—once a source of moral and social decline panic—look like a quaint curiosity.

Very early in its life, the web was captured by capital and commerce. Since the dot com bubble burst in 2000 and the rise of the app, the Internet very quickly got chopped up by a handful of monopolistic companies (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, etc.) who acquired every platform they could get their hands on, sucking up untold zettabytes of user data to be monetized.

Even as Trump and MAGA transform the country into an authoritarian nightmare, the right continues to flood the online zone with political junk food. They have turned all efforts to effectively regulate or moderate content on its head, opening the flood gates of toxic waste under the guise of protecting conservative speech—even while dismantling free speech protections in communities, schools and universities in meat space.

As in traditional media, capital won. Tech behemoths need users to generate content to get other users to look at ads, click links, offer up their personal data for resale, and pay rents on premium content. This is their whole business model, and LLMs and other generative content is about to make it worse, much worse, at least in the near term. The content churn will be relentless.

Part Four: Is this the End? No.

It can seem a little hopeless looking at the sheer size and scale of the machine holding up MAGA. There is a nearly overwhelming array of organizations, media, special interests, movements and capital tied up in this. It’s hard to disentangle it all.

We need to rid ourselves of any assumption that when Trump dies, the machine will fall apart as his successors squabble over his legacy. It’s a tempting possibility to cling to, but it’s far from assured. The machine is designed to move the entire Republican party in lockstep, which means MAGA’s floor of support is rock solid and their leaders’ propensity to lie about their successes and failures will keep them in play. Republican turnout remains high, at least for now.

People who question J.D. Vance’s charisma are right—the man is a piece of cardboard—but if the machine wants him to carry on the MAGA agenda, he will be well positioned to run and win. And whatever happens in the mid-terms or next presidential election, it will be very hard to claw back checks and balances, the rule of law, and public-serving agencies—especially if the right and its courts continue to undermine these efforts at every turn.

No matter what, we have decades of work ahead of us. It will likely become a more fraught and dangerous endeavor as MAGA ramps up their attacks on political threats real or imagined. But we have no choice if we want to live in a democracy with civil and human rights under the law and under God.

The good news is if we can trace the steps to how we got here, we can find our way back out. I have shown part of the path that brought us to this point. It can be reversed in time provided there is willingness to wage a long political struggle to build a more perfect union, a republic less susceptible to corruption and demagoguery. I believe there is. I have to.

That means fighting and winning short-term political and economic battles until there is enough of a popular groundswell that MAGA cannot survive even with their gerrymandered districts and voter restrictions. Without creating a new majority, we will not be able to carry out the political changes required to restore and bolster democratic institutions and carry out reforms to neutralize the anger and nihilism that fuels far right movements like MAGA.

We need popular leaders, we need social movements, we need an alternative moral vision, and we need make the case for rejecting the poison pill of false security that Trump and his sadistic cult offer. I know that’s a tall order. But if we cannot succeed in this, this nation will perish in civil war, personalist tyranny, or nationalist isolation.

Bear in mind that the coalition of powers and people that keep the MAGA cult humming along do not agree on everything, or even most things. They’re united by what they hate, not what they love. They are mortals just like us, but quicker to anger, more impatient and sensitive to slights, and prone to unforced errors. Eventually they will turn on themselves.

Democracy may be on retreat now, but that won’t always be the case. MAGA’s leaders may think of themselves as the end of American history, the final word on the republic, but history has a funny sense of humor and is just as prone to punish the wicked as the weak. It’s precisely when demagogues think they have a handle on things that they lose control. The twentieth century is littered with their failed states.

Physics still exists. The material world still exists. So much of our discourse happens online, but we don’t live in a virtual world. We don’t breathe virtual air or eat virtual food. We are constrained by our bodies, our cities, our ecosystems, our food supply. And the decisions being made today, that are being allowed to be made against all sense, will impact us in the real world. We can’t hide online.

There are consequences to our actions: economic ruin, wars, health care disasters, disease spreading unchecked, climate-driven floods, fires, and failures. Once these maladies play out—and they most certainly will—even the base will likely collapse and what’s left will divide and mutate into smaller, more virulent strains.

MAGA cannot lie, censor, intimidate and repress their way out of this reality, and the facts on the ground will win out. And their deceptions can only keep the flock walking in a straight line for a while; they will stray.

I’m not saying this is going to be easy or even safe but it’s a fight that must be won. We cannot return to monarchism, feudalism or nineteenth century imperialism. The planet cannot survive it; humanity can’t endure it. If we fail, it’s lights out on the democratic experiment.

Remember, MAGA isn’t governing us, not We the People. They are acting on behalf of a captive audience and alienating everyone else. They can’t control millions of people who don’t want to be controlled. On Earth as in Heaven, judgment is coming.

Notes on MAGA Sadism

By G.J. Nelson

Every day, the far right’s assaults on democracy, the rule of law, civil rights, and basic human decency inches us closer to authoritarian hell. For all its novelty, MAGA has already exhausted its creativity, and are now just telling the same sad twentieth century story of resentment, cruelty and violence with few revisions. We’ve already seen this movie.

Conservatives and right-wingers used to trumpet the rights of states and individuals and proclaim they were protecting Americans from government tyranny. Of course, what they meant was a very specific kind of state and American: people who look, talk, and think like they do. They obscured the influence of racist ideologues and conspiratorial crackpots by maintaining a bright line between establishment Republicans and the talk radio circuit.

That era is dead and buried. Now it’s all just the sadistic exercise of rich, white male power over the rest of the population. The party of individual rights has done nothing since the 2024 election but trample on people’s rights.

They’re not just bulldozing through the rights of individuals and states, checks and balances, federal agencies, and judicial oversight because of their ideology; they’re doing it because it causes others pain, because it hurts people. It’s a 24-hour spectacle of contempt and MAGA is all but daring the rest of us to do something about it.

Necessary Evil?

MAGA’s loudest and most disruptive act of organized sadism is their heavy-handed immigration crackdown. Los Angeles has served as a test case for what the regime will soon roll out in all urban communities that harbor immigrants or just dislike Trump.

With the newly bloated DHS and ICE budgets, we may see this same story play out in every major city under non-Republican leadership: the rollout of the military to play backup to indiscriminate raids and arrests of immigrants and activists. The number of trumped-up charges the feds have already been forced to drop in L.A. is frankly embarrassing, but don’t think for a second that that will stop them from hitting repeat.

They will stage the occasional roundup of migrants working at farms or meatpacking plants to shore up their anti-immigrant credibility, but their focus will be on occupying and bullying blue cities and the minorities who live in them. Trump has already signaled his aspirational desire to put New York City under direct federal control. So much for states’ rights.

If it were up to Trump’s lizard-man adviser Stephen Miller, every immigrant in the country, legal or otherwise, would be rounded up, imprisoned in concentration camps, and deported to their deaths. He is impeded only by pushback from the lower courts, the general incompetence or apathy of the DHS, and Trump’s own obsession with punishing political enemies rather than executing a consistent deportation policy.

Let’s dispense with the lies about “complexity” and “nuance.” The MAGA agenda is evil. No one person in it is intrinsically evil, of course, but the regime itself is rotten to the core.

The mainstream press may treat MAGA with gray zone equivocation (every newish political development reported as some fascinating novelty) without realizing or refusing to realize the evil—both banal and radical—it represents. Its leadership is comprised of grifters, racketeers, tabloid gossips, sex pests, Nazi sympathizers, and racist crackpots. They are united only in their desire to do harm to others and parlay that into power and wealth.

They are building a Holocaust-scale deportation machine complete with concentration camps and eliminationist rhetoric (rats, infestation, etc.). Their vile language has become so normalized, it’s barely noticed anymore.

Any just or lawful effort to remove dangerous undocumented immigrants would weigh individual cases. It would identify productive, law-abiding immigrants and refugees and offer them a roadmap to citizenship or at least more permanent residency.

But this isn’t that. This is a draconian, one-size-fits-all immigrant removal system. And the regime’s idea of who gets to be a citizen or even a person with rights tightens every day. Stories emerge daily of ICE’s excesses: wrongful arrests, physical attacks on suspects, detaining people without charges, warrantless searches.

This machine doesn’t care who you are, whether you’re young or elderly, healthy or infirm, working or unemployed, a beloved member of the community or a petty criminal.  If you or your parents are from somewhere else and non-white you’re an automatic target. If you help or support immigrants, you’re a potential target.

You can be abducted off the streets, sent to be a slave or death row inmate in a faraway country, dumped in the swamps of Florida, arbitrarily separated from your family, or disappeared into a black hole. If you’re lucky, someone will notice, and a federal court will step in. But someone must know you’ve disappeared and where you ended up.

MAGA has tried to render an entire population stateless and deprive them of their God-given rights. A judge may force the DHS to release individuals they wrongfully detain; but the moral stain cannot be removed. And we will all be judged for it.

It should be obvious that policing on this scale, controlled by a single would-be dictator against a domestic population, could easily mutate into a secret police organization. Frivolous lawsuits and DOJ “investigations” against opponents seem to be enough for Trump for now, but the regime can barely contain its enthusiasm for pushing further.

Just pick the brain of the MAGA’s culture war hack in chief, Christopher Rufo, who has taken time off from his anti-woke higher education beat to suggest that the regime discretely remove agitators (leftists, liberals, people who believe in democracy and constitutional rights, etc.) from the street using unmarked vans to neutralize opposition. These ideas are common among MAGA’s Pinochet-loving hacks, and Trump doesn’t hide his approval.

MAGA treats all this brutality, real and proposed, as bedrock conservative principles made flesh. But I still remember when the conservative icon President Ronald Reagan signed the bipartisan Immigration Reform and Control Act back in 1986. While it was mostly focused on border controls and employment checks, it also legalized three million immigrants and offered amnesty to thousands of families with children—and a pathway to legal citizenship.

The IRCA failed to curb illegal border crossings, but it opened the door to citizenship to millions of hardworking and taxpaying immigrants. It’s amazing to me how far mainstream American Republicans have sunk since then. The racist, nativist spirit of Pat Buchanan, regarded as a dangerous joke in the early nineties, has taken full possession of the party.

Suffer the Children?

Its telling to me that after all the destruction MAGA have wrought in just six months, the one thing that finally outraged a big chunk of the base was Donald Trump’s alleged (and likely real) coverup of his involvement with noted child sex trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein. We’re now in week three of this media circus, and the liberal press can’t get enough of it.

But a lot of the outrage has nothing to do with Trump himself. The Qanon-addled parts of the MAGA base are absolutely obsessed with the idea that Democrats and powerful liberal elites are engaged in child sex trafficking, blood libel, and ritualistic abuse of children. The fact that Epstein was Jewish makes it even more perfect to them. This is an old template.

So now Trump simply covering his own ass looks like a massive coverup, especially since the regime has spent so much time building up a yet-to-materialize dossier of politically convenient Epstein associates. It’s not so much Trump’s own documented and as-of-yet unknown sexual crimes that matter; it’s the imaginary ones he’s hiding from the base.

Many rich, powerful and ostensibly untouchable people were certainly vacationing on Epstein’s pederast island, likely including some registered Democrats and Republicans. But until real evidence (preferably the unfabricated variety) emerges from Pam Bondi’s dungeon keep or a third source, most of this is hearsay.

Who one thinks is on that list largely comes down to their own partisan biases. Culture war always trumps class war in our reactionary age. It’s not the rich that are unaccountably evil; it’s their rich. It’s not my elites, it’s your elites.

What pisses me off is that the same people up in arms over these crimes against children, real and alleged, don’t care one bit about the millions of children whose lives will be ruined or snuffed out by MAGA’s brutal attack on foreign aid, public health, or the social safety net.

The regime went out of its way to block a law in Washington State that would have made clergy responsible for reporting sexual abuse of minors—on the specious grounds of religious freedom, of course. The same right-wingers worried about alleged crimes against children had nothing to say about this. 

They clearly don’t care about LGBTQ kids who will no longer have specialized counselors to talk to when calling the national suicide hotline because of politically motivated DOGE cuts. They’ve been too busy celebrating MAGA’s defunding of health care for trans kids. We wouldn’t want to help the “wrong” kind of kid, would we?

And it just gets worse. 500 metric tons of USAID food supplies that would have fed thousands of families have been destroyed rather than be distributed by USAID (RIP). Twenty-six million people across the world, including children, will not be receiving lifesaving HIV treatments from this administration. Not a peep.

Anti-vaccination hysteria will prevent safe and effective vaccines from reaching children all over the world and is already resurrecting deadly childhood diseases (like Measles) long vanquished in the US.  Cuts to Medicaid and school food assistance, including proposed cuts to SNAP, will gravely impact the health of kids across the country. Crickets.

The same contempt for kids can be seen in MAGA’s overhaul of the EPA, redefining toxic pollution and greenhouse gases as safe and environmentally beneficial and shuttering the agency’s science division. The result will be less information on water, soil and air quality in places children live. But don’t worry. HHS Director, RFK, Jr., and his staff is hard at work protecting kids from food coloring and chemtrails.  

This is all perfectly fine because it falls outside the MAGA mythology of white Christian children abused for Satanic ends. I don’t want to downplay the very real and disgusting crimes of Epstein and his ilk, but MAGA’s leaders are very selective about what victims matter. It’s always their children—hypothetical or real—that matter. Not yours or mine. Certainly not the children of immigrants. They’re expendable.

The real villains are cosmopolitan elites and wealthy Jews; not MAGA’s own political leaders who will gladly deport, detain, and kill through neglect millions of poor or nonwhite children for little more than racist spite—and the horrified reaction it inspires in decent people.

It’s strange to live in a time when kids are separated from their parents and detained in private prisons, systematically abused by our system, while a third of adults in the country are angry about hypothetical crimes against children in an unseen dossier. They’d rather indulge in an occult fantasy than save a living, breathing child.

Burning the Past, Stealing the Future

For me personally, one of the most offensive moral crimes of the MAGA regime is its brazen theft of both this country’s past as its future. They are disposing of and looting public goods and services that lifted millions of people out of rural and urban poverty and underpinned this country’s rapid economic development since World War II.

I don’t want to put on the rose-tinted glasses and pretend everything was wonderful before MAGA ruined it. Far from it. But when a country is in dire need of fair-minded reform and upgrades, destroying the institutions and programs that work (“burning it all down”) is not a wise or productive step, no matter how uninformed the public happens to be about it.

MAGA has all but dismantled the Education Department that supports public school programs to help children escape cycles of poverty and violence and attain an education essential to a functioning democratic society and modern economy.

MAGA is robbing future generations of clean water, breathable air and a chance at healthy existences free from preventable disease and ailments (all the RFK quackery about toxins in the world can’t make up for that loss) by murdering the EPA’s capacity to do science.

By attacking NOAA, they not only blind us to imminent dangers such as extreme weather events and flooding, but they also effectively obscure the reality of climate change, robbing tens of millions of people of a safe, healthy, and relatively conflict-free future.

And the future is not the only thing they’re trying to steal. They are also trying to take over what’s left of the commons and rob us of our shard history and natural heritage.  

They are killing the already weakened national park system through budget cuts and neglect, threatening the epic landscapes that generations have loved and venerated. We can expect more unchecked wildfires, more over-tourism, more poaching, and more illegal ranching and mining. A slow, bitter death, and for what?

They also want to dispose of our public lands, lands that we all own, and turn them over to a resource extraction free-for-all. They want to open vast western expanses of federal land to more exploitation and housing development even though western states don’t have nearly enough water to expand endlessly into prairie and desert.

The feds have long sold off or leased public land for economic use but have tried to balance it with recreation, education, camping, hunting, and exploration. Selling it off in a fire sale to private industry, housing developers, or worse, private equity would be a massive giveaway at the public’s expense. All to line their cronies’ pockets.

History and the humanities are also on the chopping block. Everything from PBS to the Smithsonian to national monuments to the Kennedy Center must be reshaped to reflect MAGA’s narrow and propagandistic America First agenda—one that would prefer one big whitewashing lie to a million smaller truths. They want to steal our shared sense of pride, our heritage, and turn it into a 24-hour MAGA aggrandizement machine.

They couldn’t even resist using the “big, beautiful bill” to steal the Space Shuttle Discovery from its rightful owners at the Smithsonian and give it to political allies in Texas at a cost of at least $85 million. Sure, it will be housed at the space center in Houston, but it doesn’t belong to Texas. It belongs to the American people.

MAGA’s leaders don’t believe we should own these things. In fact, the plebes shouldn’t own anything. All our treasures are just financial assets, monetizable tokens, or pieces for a private collection. They don’t believe in the commons, in civic space, or historic value. It’s their world. We’re just the serfs who work here.

And nothing pleases them more than how much their looting angers the rest of the country, how much it insults people, or kicks them when they’re emotionally down. They know it makes us all just want to give up, go home, and forfeit everything. But these things are not their treasures. They belong to us, and we need to take them back.

Join the Non-Resistance!

Since MAGA took office, we’ve seen the federal agencies that help people chopped up and sold for scrap and over 100,000 dedicated experts and public workers dumped in the streets so the far right can more effectively loot public resources and turn the government into a propaganda and enforcement machine.  

Right now, public servants are dazed, but when the smoke clears there will be enough policy experts, scientists, lawyers, prosecutors, educators, budget wonks, officers and soldiers, etc. to form an alternative shadow government or opposition movement.

But I’m not holding my breath that this motley collection of federal careerists will come together to form a dedicated resistance. Most of them will either change careers, enter the corporate workforce, or go into exile. And the administration would have no problem suing, investigating, or siccing their thugs on whoever’s left.  

We’ve lost a century of accrued wisdom and knowledge, and convincing anyone in the future to reenter and rebuild what can be so quickly torn down will be immensely difficult. I am afraid this damage is permanent.

Just as depressing has been the lack of any real pushback from our intellectual institutions, with the most elite absorbed in trying to claw back federal funding. Harvard may have taken Trump to court, but they still quietly folded on their diversity and inclusion efforts.

The University of Virginia surrendered before any shots were fired after trustees forced the resignation of their president. Darthmouth immediately shut up and did what they were told. Brown and George Mason are in the process of bowing out too. Perhaps no elite university was so cowardly as Columbia, which summarily suspended and expelled dozens of students for daring to protest Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

MAGA’s cynical political game of exploiting concerns over real antisemitism to punish colleges and advance their own ideology on campus has born them much rotten fruit. A movement rife with antisemites has cleverly weaponized the concept to stick it to Muslims, international students, progressive activists and the institutions that enroll them. It’s a hostile takeover. And an effective one.

Less surprising is how major television networks like CBS and ABC quickly settled their differences with Trump, essentially handing over stacks of cash to avoid embarrassing legal entanglements. If CBS owner Paramount needs Trump’s favor to approve their merger with Skydance, they’re perfectly happy to gag 60 Minutes’ critical news coverage, sack a liberal late-night host, and prostrate themselves before the president.

And even after all these concessions, the regime still assigned an FCC hall monitor to ensure that CBS remains “unbiased,” which means never saying a mean thing about Trump. When you invite the devil in, he never leaves. Giving in only invites more demands. 

Meanwhile, the major still-solvent newspapers have either become mouthpieces for libertarian corpos like Jeff Bezos, “diversity of opinion” op-ed machines like the New York Times or are currently being sued by Trump (WSJ). They’re still producing essential reporting, but when news is presented alongside a slurry of lifestyle junk food, predictable culture war musings, and apologia for fascists, finding the signal in the noise is like identifying asteroids with binoculars. Major news sources have largely been neutralized.

The surrender of pure profit-seeking corporations is barely noteworthy. They go where the money is, and if their so-called DEI hiring and management practices are a liability, so long to all that. Many companies seem delighted by their liberation from pretending to care. If they receive tax cuts, see regulations and environmental laws slashed, watch labor lose its negotiating edge, what do they care if the country becomes a despotic hellhole?

Naturally, many DEI consultants are happily adapting to the changing mores to keep their grift going, replacing lip service about respecting women, minorities and LGTBQ people with whatever new lip service makes the execs feel better about themselves without having to do anything. DEI politics may be dead in the workplace but feel good woo will never die.

With government agencies, universities, news providers, and corporations all deeply diminished or in the process of surrendering, we’re running out of checks on MAGA’s mad dash to end democracy. We still have the nonprofits, but many of them are watching their grant money evaporate and may soon find themselves defending their tax-free status and facing costly investigations for their “woke” agendas.

My question is what kind of leadership class do we have? Where are the people who live for the fight, who are confident and stubborn enough to take on the powerful? Where are the charismatic preachers and social leaders who can mobilize the masses? Where are the people willing to go down with the ship rather than resign?

So many of our institutions have been taken over by profit seekers, middle managers and careerists. We have allowed the wrong types of people into leadership roles, prioritizing resumes over character and ambition over integrity, creating little rulers who just want their own little fiefdom free of politics or personal costs. This is fatal for democracy.  

I don’t mean to diminish the work of thousands of people who are fighting the administration in the courts and on the streets. I know there are millions of people and hundreds of nonprofits out there doing more than me every day. But it’s not enough.

We all need to step up, work together to fill the leadership vacuum, break through political apathy and fight back the creeping darkness. No one else is going to do it for us.

Empire of Fear

MAGA doesn’t quite have the totalizing mass politics of classic European fascism. They’re pursuing the lower end of the market somewhere between Juan Peron and Augusto Pinochet. They have no interest in indoctrinating the rest of us and, frankly, they’d rather not have to deal with most Americans at all. All they want from us is fear and compliance. 

If we shut up and do what we’re told, or better yet, praise Trump, they’ll condescend to and ignore us (as long as we’re white citizens, of course). If we oppose them, we’re to be sidelined, dismissed, doxed, or outright crushed. In MAGA and the Cult of Trump, you’re either a useful pawn, a mindless NPC, or an obstacle to be tossed aside like a bad grape. 

MAGA elites believe they’re owed our fealty not because they narrowly won a national election against an unpopular incumbent, but because of their wealth, “genius,” and sadistic projection of power. They don’t want citizens; they want subjects.

What the true believers don’t understand about this attitude is that, aside from its money-making grift-and-graft potential, it’s a political dead end. Countries that are worn down in such a way produce cynical people who are divested and uncommitted, a population that just counts the hours and days while avoiding the wandering eye of the ruling class.

You see it in Russia, you’re starting to see it in Hungary, and the US has been trucking down the road in this direction for a while now. It’s a slow national suicide where the civic spirit is replaced with dead-eyed compliance. A divested people will not die to defend this country. They certainly won’t make America “great” again.

MAGA gives us the choice of a slow death or a fast one. It all comes down to how quickly we accept their terms. Our democracy can die in a fascist explosion or an authoritarian gas leak. Or we can put fear behind us, strengthen our moral resolve, and bravely refuse their offer.

The good news is that MAGA are still, like all wannabe fascists, fundamentally cowards. They like to put on a show, like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem strutting around in makeup and tactical gear before raiding a civilian house with several ICE agents armed to the teeth to find one person. They think displays like this are powerful and intimidating. All I see is over-militarized idiots cowed by the most threadbare possibility of resistance. If there was any real danger, Noem wouldn’t have been anywhere near the place.

We are living in an empire of fear. The real question is who’s more afraid: us or them?

The MAGA Revolution

By G.J. Nelson

The second phase of MAGA is well underway. If the first term of Donald Trump was hobbled by the creaky legacy machinery of the republic—sound and fury signifying nothing—the second is one of unrestrained action. The brakes have come off and the MAGA revolution is hurtling ahead full bore.

We are witnessing an all-out assault on American civic institutions, rule of law, global trade, and basic human decency. This regime is the ludicrous culmination of decades of right-wing attacks on government, civil rights, internationalism, and pluralistic democracy.

MAGA believes they are on the cusp of total victory. Only their arrogance, shortsighted incompetence and modest pushback from what’s left of an independent judiciary are checking their mad dash to absolute power. It’s only a matter of time before they stop humoring judges.

With the failure of our system to contain their criminal enterprise, it will be up to the us—the American people—to decide if we’re going to stand up for decency, humanity and democracy or submit to the reactionary and dictatorial tide that seeks to bury what’s left of the republic.

We may cross the point of no return sooner rather than later, the time when small-d democratic resistance is no longer possible, and settle into a cynical, silent complicity as everything worth fighting for sinks into ruin and apathy wins the day.

Every American who believes a better world is possible has a moral choice to make. Will we be humane, thoughtful, compassionate? Will we treat others with decency and respect because of their intrinsic God-given value? Will we base our society on principles like justice, self-governance, and good-faith debate?

Or do we give into the dark side of America and embrace greed, bigotry and brutality? Do we let dog-eat-dog capitalism make societal decisions for us while democratic institutions crumble into dust? Do we accept repression and state violence employed against anyone who questions MAGA? Do we submit to the spiritual death of the republic?

It’s tempting to ignore the tumultuous news and turn inward, hoping that the moment will pass. But time will not save us. We can tune it all out if we want, escape into entertainment culture, ignore the victims, forget what it means to be a citizen. But one day each of us will have to make a real choice.

The Republic is Dead. Long Live the Republic?

There is one silver lining to all this. We finally see with open eyes what America has become. All the myths of exceptionalism—the land of opportunity, a nation of immigrants, champions of democracy and human rights on the global stage—have been violently upended.

Our republic has succumbed to a near-terminal disease of endless greed, lust for power, and a cruel hierarchical world view—the poisons that kill all democracies. The post-Cold War era is over, buried by two decades of fruitless wars, an insidious recession, and a barely contained pandemic. And now the worst of the 19th century is slithering back.

We see broken-down dreams from sea to shining sea. Grifters and snake oil salesmen, religious fanatics and charlatans, conspiracy theorists and armed thugs, corporate monopolists openly buying government access, technofascist “libertarians”, a seething manosphere who view women as chattel for breeding, and “don’t tread on me” individualists groveling for a tyrant’s favor.

We see inane lifestyle influencers on YouTube with trad wife hobby farms and pump-and-dump schemes, mercenaries creeping into criminal justice roles, rich doomsday preppers building luxury bunkers to wait out the end of the world, private equity buying up every bankable asset, venture capitalists plugging meme coins, and the mass dehumanization of whole populations.

All this has been aided and abetted by a corporate media that comes in two flavors: MAGA propaganda and “centrist” insiders fixated on increasing clicks, scared to death of seeming biased, skeptical of progress and reform, and far too credulous of the opinions of power and money.

Newspapers and cable news channels have helped normalize MAGA, sane washing its leaders, patting its followers on the back and chiding anyone criticizing it too harshly as “out of touch.” Before the election was even over, mainstream newspapers were already backing off from critical Trump coverage while repeating every lie Trump told in the campaign ad nauseum.

Social media—that great vacuum of personal data and destroyer of braincells—is now controlled almost in its entirety by tech barons who support MAGA. Incensed by regulations, federal investigations of their monopolistic practices and pressure to curb the toxic disinformation on their platforms, they’ve embraced the reactionary politics of the moment.

An open sewer of fabrications, conspiracy theories, violent racism, vomitous misogyny, and AI garbage flows freely online, poisoning the minds of a generation.

We see a Democratic party unable to act decisively to counter the MAGA regime, to call for collective action or protest or civil disobedience. They don’t have majorities, but they have the pulpits, organizational infrastructure, and media resources of a major political party. Unfortunately, they don’t have a unified rallying cry because their leadership doesn’t have any core moral beliefs.

(Note: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sen. Bernie Sanders and other progressives have tried to create a cohesive counternarrative to MAGA, and liberal organizers can take some credit for the first large-scale protests.)

Liberals claim they value democratic institutions and federal agencies, but they aren’t very good at explaining why. Why should the federal government help people? Why should it protect the rights of minorities and marginalized people? Why should Americans stand up for immigrants? Why should we oppose unshackled executive power and partisan courts?

It’s not for the sake of tradition, decorum, checks and balances, or plain pragmatism (social stability). It’s because democracy is government by and for the people, not an elite cadre of billionaires. Every human being born in this world is precious and valuable and everyone is of equal worth. And if they don’t have rights, neither do you. If their lives are expendable, so is yours.

The imperfection of these United States isn’t the result of it being wimpy, emasculated, or weak—as Trump and his minions would suggest. It’s because we haven’t fully embraced what it means to be endowed by the creator with equality and inalienable rights. The US has forgotten that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are fundamental to American democracy.

We have given rich reactionaries the key to the castle, are they are now moving us at light speed towards further inequality, cruelty, hierarchy, stupidity and economic ruin. We’ve veered off the democratic road onto a strange detour of personalist authoritarianism.

Progress is never inevitable, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., and it’s precisely when you start to believe that it is that the great stone of history rolls back down the hill, crushing everything in its path. So here we are, at the end of all things. Or, maybe, the beginning of something better.

Greed, Power, Sadism

With all their inconsistency, stupidity and chaos, it can be hard for people who rationalize things for a living to pin down MAGA. But if we strip away the rhetoric of reclaiming past “greatness,” I think we can formulate a clear bumper sticker idea of what MAGA is: GREED, POWER, SADISM.

“Make America Great Again” means putting right-wing oligarchs and their servants in charge of everything, abusing power to boost their own egos and crush anyone who opposes them, and dehumanizing any group that doesn’t fit into their racial, sexual or economic hierarchy. Whether dealing with adversaries, activists, minorities, or other nations, it’s all stick and no carrot.

This evil is supported by a rogue’s gallery of warmed-over ideologues who offer similar ideas. Government doesn’t exist to serve the people or the public interest; its role is to assert political control over people and protect wealth from redistribution.

Donald Trump himself has the MAGA cult, the small core of true believers who regard him as a god king. Personal power is attained by unquestioningly serving his. If his whim is to cripple the global economy with pointless tariffs, so be it.

The oligarchs and tech barons have an anarcho-capitalist—or more accurately, techno-feudalist—notion that democratic checks on their power are obsolete and just get in the way of their revolutionary technologies and profit-seeking.

The Project 2025 thinktank apparatchiks are small government ideologues who believe in reducing the state to little more than a security apparatus that defends private property and little else, a “government small enough to drown in a bathtub.”

The Christian nationalists, “trad” Catholics, and evangelists want to build a fundamentalist order to control the bodies and sex lives of women and LGTBQ people. Many of their leaders, adherents of the prosperity gospel, also believe that God wants them to live rich and tax-free.

While this coalition is rife with contradictions, they all revel in the dehumanization of people. They forego humility and self-awareness for a constant stream of self-aggrandizement, lies, and egoist musing. They reject tolerant pluralism, partitioning every type of person into friend or enemy, winner or loser, creator or parasite.

Ideas like fair elections, human rights, free speech, due process, and public accountability are tolerated only insofar as they bring about the desired outcomes. MAGA is already dispensing with the lip service to these liberal democratic ideas, and it’s only a matter of time before they snuff out what’s left of the messy civic spirit that republics need to survive.

This is not just a failure of institutions or constitutional norms. It is a moral and spiritual collapse. And we’re running out of time to push back against the avalanche.

Greed Is (Not) Good

A democratic republic cannot run on vibes. We need shared civic values to thrive, concepts like collective responsibility, general welfare, public service, neighborliness, and civil society. Not the mindless pursuit of disruptive innovation, rampant materialism, and the accumulation of capital for its own sake.

The dissonance between capital and democracy has always been a part of American politics, but it is now the dominant chord. The stock market has become a quasi-religious oracle.

The United States of today is what happens when society fully bows before mammon, when the flood of money in politics and corporate think tanks overwhelm the walls of democratic governance. We’ve seen the monetization of people’s personal data, the dumbing down of legacy media to attract more clicks, and an endless parade of material culture in our popular artforms.

Our culture has primed us to accept the authority of these ostentatious, self-aggrandizing fakes. We’ve internalized their way of thinking about the world: a zero-sum game of winners and losers. If you aren’t rich or rich-adjacent, you’re a loser, and wearing the red hat is never going to change that.

Most of us are not rich but we want to be. And if wealth is how we measure intelligence and success, it’s only natural we would look to the one percent to save us. It’s why so many believe that a stunted manchild like Elon Musk was fit to decide which government programs should live or die.

This is what has made MAGA’s assault on government employees so easy to justify to their supporters. We are just atomized individuals engaged in endless conflict over wealth and resources. Serving the public for lower pay makes you a sucker, or a tax-stealing parasite.

Dedicating yourself to a life of helping other people is unfathomable to people like Trump. Leaders in the MAGA era aren’t meant to give of themselves, but aggressively take, even steal, what they want from others, and bully or cajole anyone in their way.

Sensing a change in political winds, a retinue of groveling Silicon Valley bosses kissed the royal ring at Trump’s inauguration, choosing to dispense with progressive pieties to protect their platforms and profits or because they’re now true believers.

Luminaries included Jeff Bezos of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO and self-styled bro Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Not present was Marc Andreessen, cowriter of Oracle, investor, and Democrat-turned Trump donor. He glommed onto Trump partly because the president is bullish on AI and sketchy crypto schemes.

Also missing was PayPal and Palantir cofounder and noted right-wind donor, Peter Thiel. The man who paid to put JD Vance on the political map is one of the more pernicious and weird tech barons. A “Dark Enlightenment” acolyte, Thiel asserts that messy democracy should be replaced by rational tech monarchy to keep the little brains from interfering with technological progress.

This brings us back to South-African-born Elon Musk. Let’s start by dispensing of any notion that Musk is a brilliant genius or savior of humanity. He is most certainly not.

Musk didn’t discover penicillin or build a revolutionary new product. His great talent is for selling himself by making bold claims: we’ll be colonizing Mars in a few short years, self-driving cars and hyperloops will perfect transportation, Tesla’s AI will bring about a robotics revolution, we’re going to make the government more efficient. He’s a fantastic hype man for himself.

I’ll ignore his crude brand of juvenile racism, his awful jokes and cringy efforts to be liked, his creation of male “heirs” using women as breeders, his stunted gamer persona, his Hitler salute and far-right politics, his meddling in foreign elections, and his terrible truck. These idiocies are just the meme-ready quirks of a grotesquely wealthy person who lives almost entirely online.

If all Musk cared about was money, he’d be happy on the cover of Fortune Magazine. But his success has given him a Caesarian sense of self-worth, a belief in himself that borders on insanity. He’s the textbook case of a person who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, as unwise as he is unscrupulous.

Fundamentally, Musk doesn’t understand how the government is, or was, supposed to work—he sees the whole concept through his own self-serving filter. He doesn’t relate to people or care about how his ideas and actions might hurt them, both online and in his capacity as federal hatchet man.

He doesn’t sympathize with people who might rely on federal assistance to live. He doesn’t care about public employees. He does not consider for a moment the consequences of breaking the government. Any pain he causes us is for our own good; it just happens to advance his interests.

Musk doesn’t comprehend the work of experts. But he pretends to, running his mouth about things he doesn’t have the first clue about. He fancies himself an all-knowing visionary who can “fix” government and “stop fraud” despite knowing nothing about good governance or why these public institutions came about in the first place.

If he wasn’t fixing government, what exactly was he doing?

Musk’s first objective was to take an ax to agencies that dared limit him with taxes or unfavorable labor rulings and regulations, and to preclude any legal action against him. The second was to grant himself lucrative government contracts, circumventing any fair, competitive process. His third was to wreck other people’s lives to feed his own monstrous ego.

Musk isn’t alone. The entire cadre of tech billionaires who support Trump share this personalist, all-about-me approach. They’re smart, they’re rich, no one should force them to contribute to the collective good. They chafe at government oversight. They made their fortunes selling questionable technologies that traffic in other people’s personal data and monetize other people’s creativity.

They have bought into every line of hyperbole the fawning business press has fed them. They are “saviors of humanity” who don’t seem to care much about human beings. Their solutions don’t solve substantive problems—like poverty, hunger, inequality—but instead create conditions that further empower and enrich themselves, usually causing new problems along the way.

We are in the fourth decade of the online era. Some things are no doubt better—faster and more efficient—but have we made the United States or the world safer, kinder, freer, happier? Have any of the challenges this country faces been solved?

Climate change is the one true existential threat of our age that might be solved with technological innovation. But instead of a renewable energy revolution, our leaders are ramping up the burning of fossil fuels to feed AI and cryptocurrencies. If this is the future, it’s bleak.

The Power and the Glory

In this time of greed, nihilism and reactionary chaos, it may be tempting to look to faith to offer some comfort and moral direction. Unfortunately for us, most of the religious rhetoric we’re hearing is from decidedly un-Christlike evangelicals, trad Cath ideologues, and racist nationalists.

Christian leaders in this country who’ve embraced MAGA love putting on a show of how meaningful their lives are, how enriched and fulfilled they are by Christ’s everlasting love. They spend their days basking in material comfort while exhorting us to fear and repent and judging our private lives.

While waiting for the next world, they want the good things in this one: money and power. They have a shortcut: demonizing sexually active or single women, LGBTQ people, librarians peddling “pornographic” material (any book they don’t like), secular liberals, Muslims and other religious minorities, and even Catholics like Pope Francis who urge them to treat people with kindness.

They spew bigotry as easily as you can turn on a faucet. They don’t care about Jesus. And they don’t care about you. There’s a gaping absence in their hearts where love should be.

Capitalist greed is not only tolerated but endorsed through the prosperity gospel, which offers the idea that God rewards the worthy with wealth and prestige and punishes the wicked with poverty and failure (the meek shall not inherit the Earth). Humility and charity are optional. It’s Christianity warped by capitalist ideology into something that would make pagan Greeks blush with shame.

They’ve staked their version of Christianity to their support of a moldering grifter and his cronies who don’t believe in much of anything. One of our most visible trad Catholics is none other than the vice president. JD Vance converted because he liked the medieval trappings, authoritarian tendencies, and reactionary views of the old church.

And because he’s an autodidactic know-it-all, he believes that attending mass a few times and reading a handful of books by right-wing Catholics gives him the authority to take on Pope Francis and other well-meaning Catholics who have dedicated decades to ministry, service, and study to the church. This is the arrogance of America’s capitalist brand of Christianity in a nut shell.

MAGA Christians have worked to destroy public education and foist “school choice” (whatever parochial or charter school they tell you to attend) on parents whether they want it or not. Since COVID, they have preached against public health and life-saving vaccines, one of the greatest public health achievements of the modern age.

In their capacity as lawmakers, they have weakened child labor laws, slashed environmental and public safety rules, further militarized police departments, expanded the sentencing of minors as adults, and led crackdowns on immigrants that separated children from their parents.

The regime’s current assault on federal social safety programs will cause grievous harm to children, deny children with special needs access to crucial educational support, and increase preventable deaths from malnutrition, infectious disease, natal complications, and the wages of poverty.

MAGA Christians deny the gravest threat to future generations, environmental collapse. They believe our dominion over the earth means we can trash it, all other life, including the lives of our descendants, be damned. Judgement Day nears so why bother worrying about the planet?

If they’re right about the end times, they should be worried. A just God might look upon their actions in life harshly.

Organized Sadism

The way MAGA asserts power is through cruelty, directed against people lower on the pecking order. Every rung of society is a hierarchy of dehumanization. Anyone unlucky enough to be deemed an out group exists to humiliate, dominate or destroy.

Solidarity is impossible by design. If you want your allies close and your enemies divided, pitting them against each other is an age-old strategy. As long as they’re busy tearing each other down, they won’t look up. The far right knows that the left’s weakness is its factional nature and tendency to police ideological purity among members without regard to their own interests or objectives.

For MAGA, a person isn’t valuable because of their existence, their God-given rights, or the fact that like you and me they are human beings. It’s how they look or talk, their sexual organs, where they’re from, the pigment of their skin, the accidental details of their birth. They have no intrinsic value and exist to scapegoat and oppress. They are political playthings.

Trump and MAGA have mastered the art of picking vulnerable groups to vilify. We hear that immigrants are rapists and thieves. Blacks have lower IQs and live in urban warzones. Gay people are pederasts. Trans people are menacing women in bathrooms. Muslims are a fifth column seeking to undermine Christianity. The left hates America.

Immigrants are draining social services. Haitians are eating pets. Liberals are sex-traffickers and secret Marxists. Single women are destroying the family. Federal workers are foisting “woke” culture on the American public. Even MAGA officials who stray from the official line get called RINOs (Republicans in name only). The litany of denigrations goes on. It’s the core sermon of MAGA.

No person can feel truly good about this kind of politics because sadism is insatiable. You must constantly look for a new thrill even as the last hollow triumph fades. When sadists run out of victims, they turn on themselves.

When you deny whole categories of people their humanity, their dignity, their right to define themselves, when you treat them as disposable political pawns because of their physical or mental traits, you are murdering your own humanity. You are calling into question your own value as a human being. It’s an act of evil, an act of violence to yourself and others.

“Wait,” you may interject, “aren’t you dehumanizing MAGA?” Not at all. I see MAGA’s leadership as all too human, all too flawed. They have made a very human choice to hurt other people, including their own supporters who stand to gain little or nothing from it. Whatever the determining factors, evil is always a choice people make.

Immigrant Song

Foreigners, including undocumented immigrants, migrants, refugees, and even people legally residing and working in the US have become the go-to punching bags. Because their status ranges from illegal to contingent, they are highly vulnerable and hence easier to bully and brutalize.

Undocumented immigrants have been treated as non-people by MAGA (and too many other politicians) from the beginning. The same vulnerability that made them an ideal source of cheap labor is now the primary means of terrorizing them.

The regime has since expanded their targets to include legal visitors and residents who don’t meet MAGA’s ideal profile. Supporting Palestinian rights, having the wrong tattoos, crossing the border as a tourist, listening to the wrong cleric, committing a misdemeanor, or simply being a nonwhite person driving somewhere can be cause for detention and deportation.

Whatever you think about immigration, illegal or otherwise, it is repugnant to watch politicians and their social media toadies casting immigrants—not just men, but whole families—as enemy aliens. This has led to the deportation of friends, family and community members, the abuse of children, and shattered lives.

Human beings are being sent to overseas prisons and labor camps for made-up reasons, against judges’ orders, because of how they look and where they were born. Not content to simply deport their victims, they’ve made an authoritarian spectacle of parading them around for the cameras here and in El Salvador. How long before they do the same thing with their political enemies?

Race to the Bottom

For much of American history, a dominant major theme has been the superiority of white people, white men especially, to justify enslaving Africans and displacing indigenous people. This isn’t a “woke” claim. It’s a historic reality. Even after the abolition of slavery, segregation and white vigilante violence against Black people persisted until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

The success of that movement and its offshoots pushed many Democratic and Republican politicians toward policies to redress racial inequalities resulting from centuries of organized terror —guaranteed voting rights and representation, desegregation of schools and businesses, fair housing laws, workplace antidiscrimination laws, affirmative action, etc.

The overall efficacy of these policies is mixed, but progress was made. Slowly but surely, non-whites and women have taken their seats in positions of power and privilege. The far right has never been happy about this and has been working hard for nearly 60 years to undo this progress.

MAGA is now using constitutional amendments designed to protect minority communities to smear them as “diversity hires” and push them out. Why?

Because rich and powerful white men and many of their constituents don’t like seeing more minorities in well-paying jobs in business, academia or government. They have embraced the popular racist notion that white people are being discriminated against.

This claim is absurd on its face. Look at the average Fortune 500 executive, affluent professional, Chamber of Commerce member, investor, or large business owner. This is not a knock against white people, just an observation that they are still dominant in positions of affluence and power.

Instead of accepting that non-whites have worked hard to achieve their due, MAGA sees them as immediately suspect. The only exception MAGA makes is for nonwhite reactionaries, celebrities, and rich people who support them.

The fact-free foundational belief is that any non-white person or woman in a position of prestige or expertise is only there because of a handout. Some sad, overlooked, and highly qualified white man doesn’t have the job they deserve. They turned this myth into policy and broke the government.

The anti-DEI and critical race rhetoric have a been a non-stop noise machine for the last five years, the driving justification for sloppily slashing agency budgets and eliminating contracts based on the presence of key words. It is an engineered moral panic cooked up by party hack Christopher Rufo.

Supporting this is a slate of discredited theories about race and sex. Race realism, biotruths, great replacement theory, social Darwinism, IQ-based eugenics—you name it and it’s being talked up in a respectable publication somewhere. This is all nineteenth-century junk science given a fresh coat of sickly yellow paint.

Second Sex

Women have also made incredible strides over the last five decades, due mostly to their own efforts and hard-fought policy wins. Things have been far from perfect—wage gaps, glass ceilings, unfair social expectations—but the basic trajectory has arced toward gender equality.

Women have eclipsed men in higher education and now dominate certain career tracks. With more clout outside the home, they made overdue demands of male partners—that they treat them with respect and share equally in childcare and household duties. Women reasonably demanded consequences for abusers and rapists in the short-lived Me-Too moment.

MAGA has responded to all this with predictable hostility. Men are the real victims because women are succeeding where they’re failing. There have been many studies and conversations around why boys are falling behind and it’s a serious problem, but in the manosphere the whole issue has been boiled down to discrimination against men and emasculated boys refusing to dominate women.

Women, they argue, are entering male-dominated fields they aren’t “qualified” for such as programming and hard sciences, sidelining men. “Real” women, they assert, shouldn’t want to achieve independence or success; they should be confined to the home with the kids or working the trad wife lifestyle in the idyllic countryside.

The ideal woman is conventionally attractive, stands by her man no matter what, and polices other women who refuse to conform to the same ridiculous non-standard. Women should stifle their dreams to produce more heirs for their white husbands.

MAGA leaders like the Vice President, JD Vance, pathologize single women focused on career as unhappy and unfulfilled because their purpose in life is to produce children. Of course, they never assign men any real responsibility for being single. It’s cat ladies refusing to breed with them that’s the holdup.

In the world of MAGA, men should be tough, violent, and treat women as subservient. If men want women, they should just take them. “Grab them by the pussy” as Trump puts it. That the regime went out of its way to rescue noted manosphere rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate from Romanian authorities is a clear signal of their views on gender equality.

While men are told to take what they want, women have seen control over their own bodies seized by the religious right with draconian anti-abortion laws that stigmatize, humiliate, and harm pregnant women in red states, placing them in the crosshairs of far-right vigilantes. Maternity wards and OB-GYN teams have refused to treat pregnant women to avoid liability for miscarriages. Some mothers have died; others have been charged with murder.

While this drama has played out, right-wing Christians have doubled down on their opposition to contraceptives and sex education that help prevent pregnancies and abortion. Some prolife Christians have argued that low-income mothers should have access to financial assistance and other services but have remained silent as Elon Musk has cut off federal funds for such programs.

Queer Folk

While there are gay people involved in MAGA (Peter Thiel, for example), extreme homophobia is the norm. The ascent of MAGA has given the religious right an opportunity to turn back the clock on LGTBTQ rights.

With SCOTUS’ overturn of Roe v. Wade and ruling in favor of businesses discriminating against gay couples, conservatives see a state’s rights pathway for attacking federal LGBTQ protections. States like Idaho are working hard to roll back hard-won civil rights victories like marriage equality with the hope of a favorable SCOTUS ruling.

One grotesque aspect of this has been how the far right demonized and turned public support—even among liberals—against trans people. Christopher Rufo and other Republican cynics manufactured a new culture war outrage by picking on a very small minority that, due to its increased visibility could be packaged as a threatening new novelty.

MAGA and their allies have lied and exaggerated and endangered the lives of trans people. They’ve claimed trans women are male pederasts and rapists invading schools and women’s restrooms, gender reassignment treatments are mutilating children, parents are abusing their own kids by trying to help them, and librarians are grooming children with books for and about trans people.

A tiny minority have decided to live their lives openly, claim autonomy over their own bodies, express their identities—as people with human rights. But because they force the majority to reckon with uncomfortable questions about gender, they must be driven out of society.

Never mind their happiness or their humanity. Never mind that they have the same depth of feeling and intelligence as you and I. No, they must be policed into acting like everyone else, and if they refuse, bad things must happen.

Trump moved quickly to remove federal protections for trans people. Both kids and adults have been denied treatments that helped them live in their own bodies, trans people have been denied passports with their chosen gender, trans women inmates have been sent to fend for themselves in men’s prisons, and “unfeminine” women have been scrutinized for “male” features.

Too many of us have decided that because trans people are few, they are of no significance. But human worthiness is not derived from demographic breakdowns, and squeamishness is not sufficient grounds for erasing an entire population.

Revenge On the Nerds

Contempt for the professional class—lawyers, doctors and nurses, scientists, academics and specialists—has been a staple of right-wing politics for decades. MAGA have enshrined it as a sacred tenant of their cult.

Since desegregation, the right has waged war on public education. Their efforts to siphon resources from public schools to private and parochial schools are well documented. For them, the ideal public-school teacher is an underpaid, non-union babysitter whose sole political purpose is to be scapegoated for failures that inevitably arise when you slash education budgets.

During COVID, they were able to aim parental anger and frustration at teachers, who were expected to risk sickness and death to keep kids in school. In a bit of political jujitsu, MAGA were able redirect the rage at schoolboards and libraries with accusations of “woke” indoctrination and grooming.

This distaste for educators extends to higher education, where whole departments have been deemed left-wing indoctrination centers. It’s not just DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) programs MAGA are after; it’s any academic field that can challenge or undermine their claims.

As Trump has shown, their solution to academic freedom debates isn’t encouraging a wider range of views, but rather silencing voices that support any idea they don’t believe helps their cause or reinforces their power. This is why they’re dismantling the Education Department and letting states set their own standards; it’s why Trump is threatening federal funds for major universities.

MAGA doesn’t believe that education is about making more well-rounded citizens exposed to a wide range of ideas and perspectives, capable of making deliberative choices. It’s about producing a pliant and limited workforce, stripped of any ideas, soft skills or critical thinking that might cause them to question their employers or the economic pecking order.

Any topic or area of research that clashes with MAGA orthodoxy is treated as an existential threat to America. Not just the social sciences but also hard sciences that threaten the bottom lines of oil and gas companies. Climate scientists working to educate the public and stave off the worst effects of a changing climate are a favorite target of sinister conspiracy theories.

The regime has targeted public health and medical science, shutting down critical research and nixing programs that save lives. Since Covid, MAGA has railed against health officials, doctors, and nurses, accusing them of causing intentional harm during the pandemic with vaccines, masks and social distancing. They have opened the floodgates to quack medicine and miracle cures.

It’s hard to overstate the regime’s arrogance. To them, the hard work of building knowledge and proposing evidence-based solutions to problems is egghead shit. They believe their intuitive, or socialized, feelings and beliefs are more real and valid than any well-supported theory or empirical data.

It’s no mystery why these masters of the universe believe it. Many were born into lives of wealth and privilege, attended elite schools, and had near-automatic access to capital and resources necessary for generating more capital. They have rarely ever had their ideas tested, and people have said “yes” to them their whole lives. This has given them the illusion of mastery.

Witness Robert Kennedy, Jr., the wealthy crank who now runs the Department of Health and Human Services. His unfounded vaccine skepticism may doom millions of children and older adults to sickness and death from preventable disease. His unscientific calls to ban antidepressants like SSRIs may subject thousands of people to crippling mental pain.

He is a rich, out-of-touch narcissist who comes from political royalty. He has been given second, third and fourth chances for his entire life. It’s why an eccentric former junkie is still alive and in a position of unearned power. Living a life free of consequence, surrounded by yes men, he doesn’t have to ponder what he doesn’t know or how his ignorance might hurt other people.

People like RFK, Jr. can’t stand being questioned. When they and their most ardent followers see an expert who refutes or simply disagrees with them, the knives come out. The victim’s value to society is minimized, their motives questioned, their expertise discredited, and their lives threatened.

Labor Pains

For a movement that has relied on blue collar workers, MAGA enthroned has shown little or no interest in helping them, opportunistic support from major unions notwithstanding. They’re a “pro-labor” regime that wants to put to bed forever a labor movement that can demand better.

Trump claims his tariffs will resurrect manufacturing jobs, but his war on global trade has only made life harder for workers. Blanket tariffs against the rest of the world are having a deleterious effect on the US economy, which relies on international markets for importing goods and materials and exporting finished products. Prices are rising and economic retraction is inevitable.

Meanwhile, MAGA has gutted the National Labor Relations Board to weaken unions’ negotiation power and crush nascent efforts or organize. They have decimated agencies that enforce workplace safety, fair pay and anti-discrimination laws as well as corporate watchdogs charged with protecting economic competition and consumer rights.

MAGA’s contempt for everyday Americans is depressingly clear. When campaigning, they made a lot of promises about putting an end of Biden-era inflation and bringing consumer prices down. All lies. And now that prices continue to rise, they’ve changed their entire story: we must all struggle to live within our means while they carry out their glorious revolution.

It’s still striking to me how MAGA have sold themselves as champions of working-class and lower-class white people. All they offer are empty promises of future manufacturing jobs and trickle-down prosperity that will magically appear because of corporate tax cuts, tariffs and deregulation. No one in the regime has offered a plausible roadmap.

Never mind what working-class and underclass life is like in deep red states, where high poverty rates, rampant pollution, lower life expectancies, desiccated public schools, and a host of other issues gives the lie to any notion that unregulated and untaxed wealth creation trickles down.

A Fortress Built on Sand

We are early in the second Trump administration, and MAGA has already slashed and burned their way across most federal agencies, bulldozed institutional opposition, and detained and deported legal residents without due process. They have shattered the post-WWII international order, coddled dictators abroad, and turned former allies into adversaries overnight with crippling tariffs.

Given the tide of destruction and relatively muted pushback so far, it would be easy to overestimate MAGA’s grip on power. But their apparent might is a fortress built on sand, and they are far from unstoppable. They may govern like they have a popular mandate, but their majority is slight and tenuous. And as the popular revolt against Tesla shows, their rule is deeply resented.

Their “mandate” has led them to drop a bomb on the global economy with painfully high, near-universal tariffs. This will not bring back manufacturing because the US doesn’t have the resource base or domestic supply chains to rapidly reindustrialize the country. This is exactly the kind of stupid thing dictators do when they overestimate their grip on power.

MAGA is like a Hoberman sphere, outwardly impressive but full of dead space. Naked greed, lust for power and sadism are not meaningful ideas. You can destroy a democracy with them, but they cannot help you build anything good or worthwhile. A nihilistic vacuum might attract cultists and opportunists, but it cannot inspire nor unify a republic. Its banner is a blank canvass.

MAGA has no end game, no final vision of the country to justify what they’re doing. It’s all means and no ends because their unstated goal of making the country whiter, crueler, more stratified isn’t very appealing to most people.

MAGA underestimates you. They think you’re weak and stupid. They think you’re craven, self-serving, and spineless. Bullies, narcissists and authoritarians project all their worst traits onto their adversaries and victims. They are craven, self-serving, and spineless. They are weak and stupid.

They are cynical about human nature, seeing every person as either a master or a mark, but there are far more marks than masters in their ranks. They are insecure, desperate to prove themselves, and easily prodded into in saying and doing self-destructive things in a bid to seem confident and powerful. They’re as easily flattered and duped as their most diehard supporters.

Trump and his inner circle are fundamentally cowards. They will go at adversaries—real or imagined—when the other party is in a weaker position. That’s why they’ll never invade Canada despite tough talk but will shake down smaller countries like Ukraine. It’s why they target minorities domestically and flatter authoritarian superpowers abroad.

They are weak. Hiding beneath the veneer of power is a movement rife with contradictions, a confused collection of ideologies with overlapping goals. Only Trump’s cult of personality is holding it together. Without it, MAGA would fissure into warring factions tomorrow.

MAGA cannot maintain their grip through democratic means. This is why the right has spent so much time trying to take control of state elections; it’s why they’re overhauling federal elections oversight. But they will be opposed, and as outside opposition mounts and the global economy falls apart, the only way that MAGA will hold onto power is through increasingly repressive measures.

We know they are willing to use all tactics on the table to intimidate and shut down opposition: litigation, retaliatory investigations, doxxing, withholding funding, siccing their most uninhibited supporters on enemies, and leaning on law firms and media companies to stifle critical voices.

The regime has signaled its willingness to use state violence against rioters (a term slippery enough to use on nonviolent protesters), augmented with civilian paramilitaries acting above the law. The military has been evoked on more than one occasion as a possible solution to social unrest.

An Opportunity

The risk of failure is high for MAGA. They know that a return to the status quo of 25 years ago might see many of them imprisoned or ruined. Reverting to old norms would destroy them so they must keep advancing. There is no turning back for them—or for us. The damage is done.

But we must reject the doomer proposition that it’s all over, that American democracy is forever shattered. Instead, we should see the moment as an opportunity to rethink and redefine what a democratic republic can and should be. We must create a new moral vision powerful enough to cut through the noise and put MAGA on the defensive.

We must stop saying “yes” to them, stop complying with their dictatorial directives, stop accepting the idea that nothing can be done. We need to act as responsible citizens in a democratic republic and take back full ownership—in the statehouses, in the courts, in Washington, and on the streets.

If you don’t care what happens to yourself, at least think of the next generation, the children of today subject to a daily barrage of violent political fantasy, tribalism, and frankly immature and antisocial behavior from people who are supposed to be leaders and role models.

Whatever mischief the “adults” have gotten up to over the last dozen or so years, most of us have tried to instill in our children values like honesty, kindness, sharing, self-reflection, compromise, patience, sticking up to bullies, the value of learning and problem solving.

And yet MAGA’s leaders lie constantly, hoard wealth, double down on topics they know nothing about, take contrarian positions regardless of how ludicrous they are, bully and mock the weak and powerless, insult teachers and experts, and pass the buck whenever possible.

Is this the model you want to present to future generations?

What values will the children of today hold tomorrow, raised on a steady died of cruelty, naked greed and contempt for other people’s lives and welfare? How will rule by self-dealing thieves influence the life choices they make?

How will kids who don’t fit the racial and sexual hierarchy navigate a country that endlessly dehumanizes them? Will they or their children even understand what democracy is or comprehend the rights they have lost? Do you owe future generations clean water and air, a livable climate, access to health care and safety, a say over what kind of society they live in?

These questions are sincere and need to be answered. You owe it to your children, and you owe it to every other human being who must live with the decisions we make today.

MAGA can present themselves as fighting to make America great again, they can claim the mantle of the working class, they can call themselves champions of free speech, they can talk game about restoring religious morality. But none of it’s true. They’re thugs and thieves who just want wealth and power for themselves and their cult. They are the opposite of every good thing they say they are.

We need to see with clear eyes the grotesque and violent nature of MAGA, unwind the fantasy cocoon its dehumanizing propaganda has weaved around us. It’s time to stop projecting our wants and desires onto this empty screen and see it as people with a conscience. MAGA cannot be the future. It must be consigned to our past.

We must learn to love and respect ourselves enough to love and respect other people—regardless of differences. We must value our fellow citizens and equal participants in a democratic society. Basing our politics on misanthropic sadism, doomer cynicism, and schadenfreude is a hollow exercise that will only deepen our fall.

Now is the time to rise.