I have a number of kind, well-meaning, “Never Trump” friends who tell me I’m painting with too broad a brush when I characterize the MAGA movement as racist to its core. These nice people (granted, lots nicer than me) are loathe to attribute Trumpism simply to hatred of those “Others”–Blacks, Jews, Muslims, immigrants (ok, Brown immigrants–not those from Norway or Canada), LGBTQ+ folks, and those detested “libruls.”
Sorry, but after coming across a recent news item from the Guardian, I rest my case. The headline really tells the story: “Anti-woke’ dog food and pro-America lipstick: US sees rise in rightwing stores.”
Mammoth Nation and Public Square are among the most prominent in the movement, both offering an Amazon-esque service, but stocking only goods which they claim are made by companies which have “conservative values”. Mammoth Nation makes its values clear on the homepage of its website: “Join Mammoth Nation to fight against Radical Left agendas,” booms a message, with the company claiming to stock only “brands who align with your beliefs”.
“When all of this wokeness started to happen and cancel culture, and then you start to see these companies stand up and say, ‘We’re not supporting this conservative or this Christian value any more,’ and just really lines in sand were starting to get drawn,” Drew Berquist, the national spokesperson for Mammoth Nation, told The Need to Know Morning Show, a North Dakota-based rightwing radio show, in December.
“And a lot of people were trying to figure out: OK, well, who are the good companies? Who are the companies that share our values, that support our constitution, support our troops or, you know, our Christian values as a country.”
Evidently, the Right’s “Christian values” are limited to “anti-woke” commitments. PublicSquare – which touts itself as Amazon for the right wing– claims to list products from more than 70,000 businesses. Unlike Amazon, however, PublicSquare’s merchants tout their allegiance to Republican causes, including opposition to abortion and an ahistorical version of the Constitution.
Evidently, efforts by companies to embrace diversity and inclusiveness–Target carrying Pride merchandise, Bud Light collaborating with Dylan Mulvaney (a trans media personality) – enraged rightwing consumers, creating a market for companies like Mammoth Nation and PublicSquare.
The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet, launched a range of razors in 2022, after the company’s CEO deemed a rival razor brand to have “canceled” conservatives. The publication has since branched out into chocolate, soap, floor cleaner and, earlier this year, “manly green vitamin capsules”.
“Do you want to buy your men’s health products from a company that partners with drag queens and supports radical organizations that push gender procedures on children?” the Daily Wire asked readers in an article announcing the multivitamin – which at their launch cost 10 times more than Centrum-branded multivitamins.
According to the Guardian, most of these efforts have thus far failed to show a profit.
What they have shown, however, is the real motivation behind right-wing attacks on “woke culture.” Not that anyone paying attention will be shocked, or even surprised.
The word “woke” originally meant “awareness”–awareness of social injustices. The term has been co-opted by the Right, and become shorthand for a raft of cultural changes that enrage MAGA folks: efforts to be inclusive, efforts to combat racism, applications of the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, even mainstream Christian teachings about loving one’s neighbors and welcoming the stranger–in other words, for the America that a majority of citizens want to inhabit. “Woke” is thus the antithesis of White Christian male dominance and superiority, and a favorite epithet of a MAGA movement that is reactionary, racist and misogynistic.
My kinder and gentler friends insist that it is unfair to paint the entire MAGA movement as racist. I think the fairness of that accusation depends upon how one defines MAGA–whether it includes the small Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wing of the party. We are now seeing that it doesn’t (despite Musk’s own neo-Nazi sympathies), and I’m willing to concede that there is a faction of uber-wealthy “bros”–mostly Silicon Valley techies– whose motives for supporting a mentally-ill felon are purely financial and transactional. (The incompatibility of that faction with Trump’s GOP/MAGA base is currently playing out in real time.)
Non-bro MAGA Americans are replaying the Civil War, albeit thus far with less bloodshed. They are unwilling to share the civic table with those “Others” they insist cannot be “real Americans.” The war against “woke” is a contemporary battle for White “Christian” Supremacy.
It’s an ugly, embarrassing reality, but let’s call it what it is…..
The reality of all this idiocy also captures the “mind” of the right-wing zealot. Anyone who buys stuff simply because it favors this or that wing of a political spectrum has REAL mental problems.
Hopefully, as with most misbegotten foolishness, this flare of farce will burn out and leave the ashes of their stupidity, ignorance and misguided idol-worshipping vapidity on the surface of the sewer from which they originally sprang.
There has always been we and them. In my earlier life, I was mostly a we. According to some friends, now they are we, and I am them.
Maga isn’t a political party but a re-branding machine stationed in Mar-a-Lago. The old them hang out there and yak on screen media to sell to its consumers that those @Maga have conquered the new them and become the new we.
We vs. them are both multi-dimensional cohorts. Race may be a very prominent dimension, but there are many others.
It is refreshing to read current headlines and stories about President Carter and his enduring legacy that has pushed Trump off the front page. Carter was indeed the most consequential former President our country has ever had. May he rest in peace.
Does anyone else see the irony in the name “Mammoth Nation” for a conservative, Christian-oriented organization? LOL
Mammoths never existed in the bible, just like Trump is not a conservative – just an old-fashioned con man, just like paying a monthly, annual, or lifetime membership fee charged to buy American products, including the Trump Store.
What’s interesting is that while they are proud to be “Christian” and “Conservative,” they are not so proud of their ownership, which is buried somewhere in Wisconsin. Still, I’ve gone several pages deep in Google Search and can’t find the owners. It’s a grifting scheme, just like the televangelists and Trump. They are making a killing off idiots in the marketplace.
Capitalism’s marketplace is supposed to consist of two informed participants – a buyer and a seller. These scammers are looting the dopes/racists on the right. Please spend a few minutes looking over their Facebook page, and yes, Sheila, they target and obtain racists!!
Curious … so I read this morning, the website for Mammoth Nation. Amazing number of vanity products not surprising. But take a closer look at the number of ‘Patriot’ organizations supported from proceeds of sale … none of which include the two veterans organizations ran by Pete Hegsmith, the President Elect’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. Imagine. A Secretary of Defense who does not have the coveted Good Mammoth Seal of Approval. I shiver in my tusky drawers!
“The war against “woke” is a contemporary battle for White “Christian” Supremacy.”
Only in America can a political election outcome hinge on one simple word which definition into a war-cry that has turned family members and friends against one another and turned the election against the meaning of democracy and what it means to be an American. We are looking at the future Germans and all of Europe faced in the 1930s with one deranged man deciding what they shall believe and who shall live and who shall die.
It is racism and money which led to WWII, the first Civil War with only our own “boots on the ground” and the deranged man’s call to turn the current Cold Civil War into actual WAR. His deranged mind and his followers will lead us who are “woke” enough to recognize it into the nuclear war we are against which he has been striving to set off globally and now has been given the power by our own government to take action.
It is using Capitalism to support sedition and treason if you need to name it. There is nothing “conservative” in what is coming any more than the Nazis were conserving mass burials by using ovens to dispose of the remains of their “Final Solution”.
Jimmy was “woke.” A truly great human being.
So glad his state funeral will be held before the Orange One takes office. It may be the last dignified ceremony we will see for a long time.
This isn’t the first time that the right put out lists of businesses who support them. There used to be (may still exist) a “directory” called the Blue Book that listed local businesses and small contractors who were “Christian”. You could find it at stores and businesses on the south side of Indianapolis. I once picked up a free copy so I would know where NOT to spend my money. That’s a two edge sword they are swinging there.
If they are selling tRump products, they need to take a closer look. Unless, I suppose, it’s okay because China certainly isn’t “woke”.
I wonder why they keep pushing for a civil war, though. Is it because they own all the guns? I’m one of those who believe that guns are a greater danger to the owner and his or her family than to perceived enemies.
It’s well past time to tell it like it is. A pig wearing lipstick is still a pig.
In the Age of Trump, there is something fitting and unsurprising about Right-wing extremists turning hate into various commodities. Right-wing politics, and by extension, Republican politics, have descended into one gigantic con; it’s grifters all the way down.
I need to take a minute to say something about James Earl Carter. He was a terrible politician but he was a great and good man. Even Orange Jesus wasn’t snarky in his post after Carter’s death. He was truly Christian.
If Americans had any foresight and listened to him, Reagan wouldn’t have been so emboldened as to remove the solar panels from the White House roof and we would have a forty year head start to address climate change.
I could not agree more!
So, have a quick look at this piece, from “Raw Story,” about the bigotry running the MAGA folks: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-vigilante/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Dec.30.2024_12.53pm
Pres. Carter, for whatever political failures one might claim, was the best president we’ve had since JFK’ days, and there are those who would not worship him. Though he was supposedly working to get us out of Viet Nam. Reagan, aside from being a traitor, and going behind Carter’s back to negotiate with the Iranians, took down the solar panels and initiated the emptying out of the middle class. He, and the fools who still worship him, will never understand that “Thriving is mutual.”
Mitch, the election of Reagan following the Carter administration is kind of what we’re seeing from 2024’s disaster – as well as the vomitous 2016 election. A terrible Republican following a functioning Democrat to the White House where initiatives that actually helped American citizens live better lives.
When Reagan picked Donald Regan to be his SecTreas., they embraced the Milton Friedman idiocy of trickle-down economics – which won Friedman a Nobel Prize in economics (Incredible) as well as a Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by Bush I (He didn’t know any better.).
There are too many sinister operations from Republicans to count, but Republican presidents seem to be the antithesis of democracy and representation for anyone but the rich donors. EVERYTHING Republicans touch dies.
History tells us the truth unless it’s written by a Republican. Then, it’s just another lie.
Only thinking of Jimmy Carter as a great ex-president ignores the his achievements while in office. He was the first President to recognize the existential danger of climate change, averted another “Vietnam” in Panama, and hammered together the only peace agreement in the Middle East that has stood the test of time. History will treat him well.
Well said, Jim. Jimmy Carter (1) the incumbent President; (2) the former President; and (3) in death, pushed Trump and the Mumpets off the front page!
I tend to agree with those who suggest calling all Trump supports White Christian Nationalist racists is wrong…Black and Hispanic people voted for Trump, and they would not fit in the WCN definition. As for the folks like Mammoth Nation…fine. So be it. I didn’t buy pillows from Lindell, and try to limit my business with those companies who have abandoned DEI. Or anything tied to Elon Musk. We spend our dollars where we hope they will do good, not just in providing us goods and services, but in taking their profits and benefitting someone other than the WCN crowd.
Excellent summary Professor. The comments are a kick too.
My first POTUS vote was for Jimmy Carter in 1980. He was just an honest decent man that was set up to fail by Reagan who, I will never forgive. What President Carter did after he left office was the embodiment of Jesus’ service to the poor. He worked in Indiana a couple of times and I know some of my friends that met and assisted building a Habitat home in my area with the Carters. If I could be anything like that couple in life, I will die a happy woman. May he forever rest in peace and may his memory be a blessing. I’m so happy that I lived while he lived.
Read any of the books currently out about Ku Klux Klan activities 100 years ago. You will think they are reporting current events. Seems that racism is right up there with apple pie. Hard to fathom when laid up against the values we have come to accept as exceptionally American.
As usual, the MAGAs try to co-opt patriotism exclusively for themselves, claiming the right (no pun intended) to own the status and loyalty to country that entitles them to the privileges to rule.
Today my flag is at half-staff to honor the life of President Carter. His time in the Oval Office was short compared to the decades of service both he and Rosalyn devoted to making the world a better place, no just for U.S. residents but for people everywhere. From the most humble of beginnings, in opposition to the politics of his father, he walked the talk. I voted for him twice and have no regrets about that. Yes, he had flaws as do we all, but he never seems to have stopped trying to live his life as a servant to others.
May his memory be a blessing. And a model for us all.
How will the incoming president feel about sharing the inauguration with the MLK Jr holiday??? LOL
Vernon, you are spot-on, as usual!
It’s fascism. As Orwell observed, the pursuit of power, total absolute and unquestionable power, is the only true belief of fascists. Some in the movement are true believers in the racism, religious bigotry, pseudopatriotic jingoism, etc, but to the ones at the top they’re just a collection of Greatest Hits that can conveniently be used to whip up a Two Minutes Hate to manipulate and distract the rubes. To the Masters of the Universe, it’s power, and power, and power. Everything else is kayfabe.
Well put, Felix!
Sheila, a simple word –
Thank you for putting quotation marks in your last sentence around “Christian”.