Tag Archives: MAGA

The Right Side Of History

In response to the growing, undeniable fascism of MAGA and the Trump administration,  good people have been asking an anguished question: What can I do?

For many of us, the answer is murky. We can–and. must–protest. We can–and must–refuse to sane-wash or ignore what is, after all, before our eyes. We can–and must–support candidates opposing the trashing of our constitution and the rule of law, by volunteering, voting and donating what we can.

But some people are in a position to do more. Some of the universities and law firms that have been targeted have “bent the knee” and opted to be on  the wrong side of history, but others have chosen non-compliance. And recently, that refusal to go along has gathered steam.

Some examples:

The Washington Post, among others, recently reported that Chris Madel, a Republican candidate for governor of Minnesota, dropped out of that race, posting to social media that ICE operations had been an “unmitigated disaster” and that he “could not support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.” He said that continuing to identify as a Republican would mean he could not look his young daughters in their eyes.

That high-profile rejection was important, but the resignations of scores of federal workers took even more courage, because many of these people are walking away from careers and financial security.

Tracee Mergen, a supervisor in the FBI’s Minneapolis field office resigned after she was pressured by higher-ups in D.C. to abandon a civil rights investigation into the fatal ICE shooting of Renee Good. The call for her to end her inquiry came from aides to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Lawyers, I am relieved to note, have been prominent among the resigners. Several career lawyers had already fled the Department of Justice, in reaction to Trump’s remake of that department, but resignations from DOJ increased after the murders in Minnesota. Six career prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division announced they are leaving the department in response to the administration’s edict that there would be no civil rights probe into the fatal shooting of Renee Good.

These resignations come from people who have chosen to be on the right side of history. So has David Jolly, a  former Republican who is now a Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, who abandoned traditional political “civility” in a speech that should be echoed by every Democrat (and by the few Republicans who, like Jolly and Madel, have chosen to put country before party).

I am cutting this post short in hopes that readers will click through and watch Jolly’s speech. It deserves widespread distribution.

The bottom line is that we can all do something to be on the right side of history. Increasingly–and thankfully– the people who can do more, the people who can refuse to bend the knee or obey in advance, are doing it. It’s a welcome sign.

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Cutting Through The C**p

If I see another “study” attempting to describe the different motives of those who support Donald Trump, I will once again engage my (not-so-inner) potty-mouth.

The most recent example I’ve come across was a description of a study purporting to describe four different varieties of Trump voter. Here’s the crux of the study’s “scholarly” conclusion:

About 29 percent of 2024 Trump voters are what we call the “MAGA Hardliners.” These are the fiery core of Trump’s base, mostly composed of white Gen Xers and Baby Boomers, who are animated by the belief that God is on their side in America’s existential struggle between good and evil. Then there are the “Anti-Woke Conservatives” (21 percent): a more secular and affluent group of voters deeply frustrated by what they perceive as the takeover of schools, culture, and institutions by the progressive left. Another 30 percent are the “Mainline Republicans”: a more racially diverse group of middle-of-the-road conservatives who prioritize border security, a strong economy, and cultural stability. Finally, we have the “Reluctant Right” (20 percent). Members of this group, unlike the other three, are not necessarily part of Trump’s base; they voted for him, but have ambivalent feelings toward him. Only half identify as Republicans, and many picked Trump because he seemed “less bad” than the alternative.

Any reasonable look at those “differences” will note the common thread that unites them, the overwhelming grievance that allows them to ignore–or even cheer–Trump’s ignorance and venality, his increasing dementia, and his destruction of America’s constitution at home and influence abroad. 

That common thread is a deep-seated racism. 

Let’s look at all four of those categories. The first, the MAGA Hardliners, are described politely; they are rather clearly White “Christian” nationalists. Project 2025 mapped out their preferred society–a society where God has installed  White males in positions of authority, where women are returned to the kitchen and bedroom, and people of color who are allowed to remain in the country are properly subservient.

“Anti-woke conservatives” are assigned to a second, presumably separate category. Everything we need to know about them is in the “anti-woke” descriptor. They are only different from the White “Christian” nationalists because they don’t attribute their racism to a god. They may be more educated and more secular, they may even be more circuitous when expressing their hatreds, but they are every bit as racist as the MAGA Hardliners.

Calling the third group “Mainline Republicans” is a slur on those who could formerly have been described that way– genuinely traditional “mainline” Republicans have mostly departed from today’s GOP, leaving the “mainline” moniker to those who were formerly on the fringe. They are, according to the description, concerned with “border security, a strong economy, and cultural stability.” Border security and “cultural stability” are the give-aways here: securing the border means “keep Black and Brown folks out of the U.S.” “Cultural stability” is code for keeping White Christian male status dominant.

And that fourth group–the voters who chose to give the nation’s nuclear codes to a clearly unfit buffoon who had been found guilty of multiple felonies and rape because he was the “lesser of two bad choices?” Come on! Kamala Harris was only a lesser choice to people who could not bring themselves to vote for a Black woman (a Black woman married to a Jew, no less!)

These aren’t different constituencies. At most, they’re different varieties of racists.

And credit where credit is due: the one promise Trump has kept is his promise to emulate the Nazis. He hasn’t brought down the price of eggs or other groceries, hasn’t kept America out of foreign military engagements, and certainly hasn’t made America great. He and Stephen Miller and the assortment of clowns, misfits and outright psychopaths he has assembled have pursued an unrelenting attack on DEI, on “wokeness,” on accurate history, and on anyone perceived as an enemy of the would-be King of (some) White folks.

Now, Trump’s administration has unleashed its very own Gestapo–directed at cities in Blue states that failed to vote for him. Actually, Trump has gone one better than Hitler– Gestapo thugs didn’t wear masks.

Sane-washing takes lots of forms. For far too long, the media has tried to portray insanity and corruption as just one set of political positions, while academics have attempted to “slice and dice” MAGA supporters into more and less reprehensible categories. Those efforts are another kind of mask–one that keeps us from seeing the extent of the fascism we face.

Purveyors of “making nice” need to cut the crap and face up to the very ugly evidence of where we are right now.

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I Have A Litle List…

Given the fire hose of illegality, unconstitutionality and immense stupidity coming out of the Trump administration on a daily if not hourly basis, people might be forgiven for failing to notice the effort to access and amass all kinds of data.

But control of data is important–and the nature of the information the administration is stockpiling is chilling.

As the Bulwark recently reported, the administration isn’t just compiling lists of immigrants in order to unleash ICE on them. It is busy collecting a wide variety of other information– lists of people with developmental disabilities, lists of “dissidents”—and lists of Jews.

The administration’s effort to collect such data may seem counter-intuitive; after all, it has been busy deleting and censoring any information that it finds inconsistent with its efforts to promote White Supremacy. (As a political science friend recently pointed out, the only campaign promise Trump has kept is his promise to MAGA to re-institute racism.) In addition to its ideologically-motivated elimination of statistics on climate change, hunger, trade and sexual orientation, it has methodically deleted photos of nonwhite people who have excelled in various areas, and even photographic evidence that nonwhites have served in the military from government websites. 

But now it’s becoming clearer that some of the most disturbing developments don’t involve data the administration is suppressing, but rather data it’s collecting—in some cases illegally—and the ways those data can be weaponized against perceived enemies.

It isn’t only nonwhite folks who are being targeted, it’s any group that MAGA fears and/or hates. The administration has actually sued the University of Pennsylvania because that institution has refused to hand over a list of its Jewish faculty, staff, and students. (Penn quite correctly has refused, but last year, Barnard complied with a similar demand.)

As the Bulwark article points out–and as every Jew knows–there are good historical reasons to worry when an authoritarian  leader is trying to compile a registry of Jews–especially when that leader has referred to Jews as “disloyal,” and that leader’s coalition has many outspoken Jew haters and Holocaust deniers.

It isn’t simply an effort to compile a list of individuals that MAGA considers “Other.” The administration’s war on diversity–on people and places that aren’t lily-White “Christian” enclaves–extends to entiire Blue states–states that Trump obviously considers enemy territory. The AP has recently reported that executive branch agencies have been ordered to compile a list of monies being sent to Blue states.

President Donald Trump’s budget office this week ordered most government agencies to compile data on the federal money that is sent to 14 mostly Democratic-controlled states and the District of Columbia in what it describes as a tool to “reduce the improper and fraudulent use of those funds.”

The order comes a week after Trump said he intended to cut off federal funding that goes to states that are home to “sanctuary cities” that resist his immigration policies. He said that would start Feb. 1 but hasn’t unveiled further details.

The obvious purpose of these lists–the only reason to acquire this data–is to differentiate between those MAGA considers “real Americans” (Whites, certain “Christians,” residents of Red states) and those who must be considered enemies. Other.

There are a number of recent “remakes” of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “I have a little list…”  In all of them, the chorus is the same: “They never will be missed”….

Shades of Joe McCarthy.

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MAGA’s War On Education

Yesterday, I posted about the threat to higher education spearheaded by a Florida organization that proposes to redefine education as job training and to defund college courses that don’t promise graduates good salaries. 

The fact that the sponsoring organization is located in Florida shouldn’t surprise us: under DeSantis, that state is leading the way when it comes to MAGA’s war on education. He has already destroyed New College, which offended him by being “woke.”

As one observer recently wrote, DeSantis’ goal was to convert a liberal institution into a conservative one by using government money and purges. But by 2023, one third of its faculty had departed for jobs elsewhere, students were unable to find classes, and those with housing contracts were living in an airport hotel.

Today, New College spends more per student than any other institution of higher education in Florida–but the “return on investment” that so fascinates the Right has failed to materialize. The school has dropped 60 spots in the US News & World Report rankings, and its administration is currently trying to turn things around by–wait for it–recruiting student athletes and eliminating all-gender bathrooms. (In all fairness, maybe it will work. Indiana University’s winning football team has succeeding in diverting attention from the widely-criticised performance of IU’s president.)

Efforts to replace education with indoctrination aren’t limited to Florida. An article in Talking Points Memo notes that, when it comes to waging war on education, Trump appears to have taken yet another a page from the Confederacy.

In the early twentieth century, devotees of the ahistoric Lost Cause (it was all about state’s rights, not slavery) like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) used their considerable political influence to revise history curricula. As the article reports, “For the next several decades, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.” The article traced the numerous efforts that commandeered state-level commissions and controlled the “history” taught to generations of students, particularly–but not exclusively– in the South.

Under President Donald Trump, this blueprint is being adapted and disseminated directly from the White House. The president in September announced the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of conservative and far-right organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in schools across the nation.” Among the administration’s priorities? “Renewing patriotism,” and “advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”…

Trump II is leaning heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan by pushing policy that propels the nation backward. Experts told TPM that by partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans. With groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation at the helm, the Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come, and to revive the highly politicized, and ahistorical, curriculum campaigns of the early- and mid-20th centuries.

The linked article goes through the history of these (undeniably successful) efforts to distort history, and is very much worth reading in its entirety. It also highlights Trump’s partnership with PragerU, a conservative, anti-DEI media nonprofit, to produce “educational materials” about the Revolutionary War. 

PragerU has published materials with false claims about slavery and racism, echoing the ethos of the UDC, in the name of “American values.” Like the UDC and other 20th century education activists, the group has been lobbying to get its materials in schools for years. Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and charter and private) schooling appear to be right-wing groups like the PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.

If that isn’t chilling enough, a glance through the administration’s wider efforts to control what Americans learn is instructive. 

The administration’s numerous threats to museums and libraries are part of that war. At the end of December, The New York Times reported the destruction of NASA’s largest research library, described as “a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.” According to a NASA spokesman, while some materials would be stored in a government warehouse, the rest would simply be tossed away. That library’s closure followed the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, including three this year. 

I think it was Santayana who warned that those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it…

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Harnessing Hate Only Goes So Far

When the Electoral College installed Trump in the Oval Office in 2016–allowing Red states to overrule his loss by some three million votes cast largely by voters in Blue ones–it seemed clear to me that his appeal rested largely on his willingness to abandon “dog whistles” for out-and-proud bigotry. The people who had been appalled by the presence of a Black man in the White House applauded Trump for “telling it like it is”–and took his “candor” for permission to express sentiments that “political correctness” had  suppressed.

Those of us who immediately made that connection ran up against the protests of (far nicer) folks who wanted to attribute Trump’s electoral success to economic distress, or other, more typical political reasons, but by the end of his first term, political science research had largely confirmed that “racial resentment” motivated most votes for Donald Trump.

 By the conclusion of 2025, the first year of Trump’s second term–there was no longer room for doubt.

As an article in Lincoln Square recently put it, overt racism and antisemitism are the defining features of what is now Trump’s  GOP.  That article listed several examples, but the one that managed to astonish me was language included in the administration’s recently published National Security Strategy.

That document said, among other things, that the NATO treaty was signed with Europe when Europe was overwhelmingly white, and that since immigration has changed the continent, the NATO treaty might no longer be valid. The strategy joined naked racism to a pro-Putin approach to Europe and appalled the entire foreign policy establishment. The publication of the strategy shined a bright new light on the ugly bigotry that had been in plain sight all along. A few weeks later, at a meeting of Turning Point USA, J.D. Vance gave a speech where he invited Nazis, Groypers, and other hate-groups into the administration’s political coalition.

I’ve previously reported on the administration’s numerous domestic efforts to turn back the clock to a time when racism and misogyny were considered “normal” and “Christian,” and I won’t repeat that litany here. Suffice it to say that most sane Americans (a somewhat smaller percentage than I’d previously. hoped, but still a majority) are now fully aware that continued support for MAGA and Trump is grounded in hate of the “Other.” 

As that awareness has grown, comparisons with Nazi Germany have also proliferated–but increasingly, with an interesting twist. Historians and pundits who previously highlighted the measures that allowed Hitler to come to power have begun focusing on the decisions that ultimately defeated him. 

I no longer recall where I read this, but one historian has pointed to a fatal error in judgment: as the tide on the battlefields was turning against Germany, the Nazis increasingly deployed their scarce strategic resources toward the destruction of the Jews. Trains that could have moved troops, for example, were used instead to deliver human beings to death camps.

The parallel is instructive.

To the best of our knowledge, Trump, Miller, et al aren’t yet establishing death camps, but they are creating horrific “holding areas” like Alligator Alcatraz, throwing humans in foreign dungeons in places like El Salvador, and spending enormous amounts unleashing ICE thugs on Americans who don’t present as lily-white.  The administration is redoubling efforts to re-legalize discrimination against women and minorities, and increasingly engaging in language demeaning those who aren’t White Christian males. Their hatreds consume them.

As the linked article noted, the administration is ramping up its cruelest race-based policies at the very moment when the forces of resistance are turning the tide.

At a time when majorities of Americans are deeply opposed to all of this–a time when polling and survey research confirm that Trump and MAGA are deeply unpopular, a time when millions of citizens keep taking to the streets in protest and Republicans have been losing election after election–the Trump administration is doubling down on the bigotry, cruelty and stupidity that have powered the resistance and been responsible for their plunging approval ratings.

I am increasingly convinced that we are at an important turning point–that 2025 was the low, and that 2026 will see the growth of a resistance that not only takes advantage of the daily missteps of a monumentally inept administration, but that –especially–rebels massively against the bigotries that fuel Trump and MAGA.

A number of pundits scorn those of us who insist that “America is better than this.” But we are better than this–and I am increasingly convinced that this is the year we will prove it.

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