Most of us have friends or family who are MAGA. They spend all their time watching Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, or on social media with Facebook and Reddit. They’ve fallen down meme-rabbit holes, they support QAnon and PizzaGate and J6Gate and “Hunter Biden’s Laptop” or whatever.
It’s bad out there, we all know it is.
The entire problem is that these people support the destruction of other people’s lives. They support Mass Deportation, they support Christian Nationalism, they support LGBTQ persecution, they support Gender Censorship, Historical Censorship and religious indoctrination.
It’s not just a difference of opinion. It’s a completely different moral compass. Most of us believe that people are individuals, that they should be held responsible for their own individual choices and actions. We believe that justice requires presuming someone is innocent until legal and constitutionally valid evidence proves them guilty.
This may be generalizing, but I don’t think most MAGAs give a shit about any of that. They’re incapable of empathy for anyone unlike themselves. Most of them revel in other people’s suffering, and the ones who don’t — those who only supported him for economic reasons — didn’t find that any of that suffering to be a deal breaker. They blame other people for all their problems and refuse to take responsibility for anything. They get upset when we say that they’re “Racist” and “Fascists,” but I actually think they’re something worse. They’re Confederates. People with their mindset taught the Nazis how to be bigots and commit genocide. Hitler learned it all from the KKK, Manifest Destiny, the original “America First” and Eugenics movements, which massacred the Native Americans, enslaved, mass imprisoned, persecuted, tortured, terrorized and mass murdered Africans with impunity and used to perform forced sterilization on Asians, Latinos and Eastern Europeans. All that happened right *here* for centuries. Some of it is still happening.
MAGAs believe in collective guilt and punishment. They believe that certain types of people, from other nations, with other religions, with different sexual or gender preferences, with different ideologies or political perspectives, are to be treated as if they are all the same, are all “out to get them”, and are guilty of being in some kind of wild criminal-socialist-terrorist conspiracy. If just one of them has done something wrong, all the rest of them are somehow also responsible and guilty.
The entire MAGA movement is built on the idea of “Collective Guilt.” That’s why they constantly proclaim that they are the “Real Americans” and the rest of us, somehow, are not.
This doesn’t require evidence. They don’t give anyone else the benefit of the doubt. They don’t wait until they have evidence to prove each individual case, and they don’t accept any evidence to the contrary. We all “Hate America.” We’re all “migrant criminals.” We’re all “rapists.” We’re “Gang Bangers.” We’re “Child Abusers.” We’re “Socialist, Marxist, Communists. Anarchists.” We're “Antifa.” We’re “eating the cats, eating the dogs.”
It’s just decided. It’s just accepted. It’s a done deal.
And, somehow, those people expect everyone else to be just fine with this. They expect to still be buddy-buddy with all their pals. They still think they’re invited for Thanksgiving. They expect their friends and other members of their family won’t hold the fact that they support the active persecution, assault, arrest, detention and deportation of innocent — untried — people by the millions. They don’t care that it violates reasonable suspicion, probable cause, or due process. Those are just “loopholes” and “excuses” to let criminals go free.
Why are you so upset? Why are you taking all this so personally? Why are you blocking me?
Yeah, any of this sound familiar?
When we say that “America is Great” what we mean is that it’s not supposed to be the country that engages in mass bigotry. We are supposed to be the country that protects individual liberty, that protects the freedom of individuals to be whoever and whatever they wish to be, that limits the power of the government in order to preserve that sacred individual liberty and freedom.
But MAGAs think America was “Great” when only one culture, social, gender, and religious perspective exists. They literally don’t even believe in what America was promised to be, and they refuse to admit or face what it actually is.
They just want America to pander to them, only.
I’ve already written about the litany of crimes that the Trump regime has committed, but here is a handy video which also summarizes this very long list.
Many of us have a huge problem with all of this. It’s not just that we don’t like Trump personally, he himself was already found to be a criminal felon, but just about his entire administration, from just about the first day, have been committing corrupt crimes and implementing bigoted policies right from the start.
We don’t like him, but we hate the bullshit he’s doing even more.
Many of us have had enough, and we’re cutting his supporters off. Here are a few examples of stories.
This is also happening with part MAGA families.
I myself have been fortunate. I’ve only one MAGA friend that I had to kick to the curb. But I didn't do it because he was MAGA, I did it because he couldn't remain civil. He became an abusive asshole when I challenged his accepted narratives. He accused me of having “TDS” which pretty much pissed me off and ended things right there. Nobody calls me “deranged,” that’s a fucking insult, particular when I go far out of my way to be reasonable and fair to everyone, even Trump.
And when I reached out recently with a video about people removing themselves from abusive friends and family, he immediately attacked me for being a “Bigot” because he assumed my objection to him was his politics.
No, my objection was him. He had simply become an arrogant cynical fucking dick.
I’ve always reached out to the people in the other aisle. I’ve usually found that if I have something I don’t know, I can only discover it if I engage with people with a different perspective and a different view. I don’t know what I don’t know — and I’ve almost always only been able to find that unknown something from other people who have that information. It’s not about convincing them of anything, it’s about challenging with I already think, testing my own limits, and closing my own blindspots.
Not that I expect their minds to be changed or educated after decades of strategic disinformation paid for by RIght-Wing oligarchs like the Murdochs, Mercers, Kochs, Wilks and Adelsons, but without our influence, they are left with nothing but reinforcing echoes within their bubble. That’s not good.
Now, across the entire country, these lines of communication are being cut off and shut down. I don't think this is a good trend.
I think we’re going to suffer from the break. If we can’t test and challenge our own ideas, how are we going to discover where they are flawed? How are we going to improve those ideas?
The problem is, how do you maintain contact with someone who is an abusive threat?
Is the friendship and family connection more important than the risk of personal and emotional harm?
Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. That’s the decision we all have to make individually.
I think millions are finding that it isn’t worth it. People are retreating into neutral corners. It may be the right decision for our own individual peace of mind, but is it the best position for us to be in as a country? Should we paint a stripe down the middle of the nation and pick a side? Maybe the states on the coasts, Maine, Vermont, New York, Washington, Oregon and California should all secede and join Canada. Or maybe Mexico, for the Western states.
Then those states self-deport all the MAGAs to Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama. They can keep flyover country. And Florida. We’ll keep our 4th and 8th largest economies in the world, our federal tax surpluses, migrants, and our Gays and our minorities, while they can “Get the Fuck Out.” and keep their federal tax deficits, rampant crime, growing teen pregnancies, failing schools, Measles, Whooping Cough, rising infant and maternal mortality.
Yeah, that would be sweet, but we all know that's not gonna happen.
Even when Trump is finally out of office and he and all his minions are up on charges, again, we’re still going to be a single country. We’re still gonna have all these MAGA friends and family living here. A few of them might realize that they were duped and lied to the entire time. They might renounce MAGA and repent, but most won’t.
We are going to have a lot of cleanup to do. We’re going to have to fix all that they’ve destroyed, if we can. It’ll be like going all the way back to the beginning, when we still had Slavery in place, when we were in the midst of destroying the First Nations. We’re going to have to rebuild everything again from scratch.
Meanwhile, they’re still going to be MAGAs, permanently. They’re still going to be giving us this gaslighting, illogically, bigoted, deficient self-aggrandizing bullshit. It’s going to be spewing out of them for the rest of their, and likely our, lives.
This nation may be permanently broken. Permanently divided.
It’s a sobering thought.
