One Last Ride….
=It’s been a long time coming, hasn’t it MAGA? What a ride it’s been for you.
As people like me were arguing with Bernie bros about the 2016 nomination for president and were caught up in our unending phantasmagoria about a “reality TV star” who was rising in the ranks on the Right, you were being verbally and physically attacked already, bullied at rallies, spit on, kicked, called racists, Nazis, fascists, bigots. It would only get worse.
How far you’ve come from the last inaugural when so many protesters burned cars and smashed windows, screaming, “Not my president.”
The beautiful and elegant Melania Trump never graced the cover of any magazine. They mocked her Christmas decorations and called her an uncaring Nazi.
But almost no one got it worse than Ivanka Trump, although all the Trump kids were put through the dehumanizer the Left had become. They were called ugly and inbred. There were jokes about Trump sleeping with his own daughter just because he was proud of her and praised her, as he does all of his kids. This was mainstream on the Left, dehumanization on a grand scale.
As long as that was the version we told ourselves — that they were the rich, hollow, power-hungry elites like the cast of Succession, we could convince ourselves we were the hard-scrabble people lifting up the minority class and making the world a better place one marginalized group at a time. But what of the majority?
It would eventually lead to the government and their media lying about you on January 6th, riding the hysteria to ban the social media app Parler from Amazon’s web server and the then-sitting president of the United States from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
It seemed there was no place for you in America anymore. But what did you do in the face of that kind of social and political oppression? You rose up, and you fought back. You didn’t have to do it by smashing windows or protesting. You did it with true grit, organizing, fundraising, and keeping the MAGA spirit high. You never lost your faith because you knew exactly what you were fighting for and what you were up against.
And most of all, your unbreakable loyalty to Trump kept hope alive that one day there might be fairness in government, in our culture, and in our major institutions that decided it was perfectly fine to treat you like hostile invaders in your own country.
But people like me had no idea that it was happening. What we heard was that Trump’s rallies were violent, that his supporters were beating up Black people, and that his rallies were like Hitler’s. If you scare people enough, they’ll go along with anything.
We were the side that had all of the power. We were the empire. We were never the resistance. That we turned our helplessness and fanaticism into dehumanizing half the country is a shame we should never live down.
I didn’t realize it until 2020. I was so trusting of people like Rachel Maddow. I listened to NPR without even thinking about their political bias. We were the side that told the truth, I believed. We weren’t fooled by Fox News and Breitbart. How could anyone not trust NBC News? How could I ever think that what they told me on CNN might not be the whole story?
I didn’t realize until the Tom Cotton op-ed disaster at the New York Times that my information was being carefully curated. I watched all of my friends and colleagues crucify Bari Weiss on Twitter for allowing the Cotton piece to be published in the New York Times. It was harm, they said. It would get people killed, they said. It terrorized their staff, they said.
Tom Cotton was a United States Senator who merely reported what most Americans already believed. The protests were violent and destructive. A majority of Americans wanted the military to be brought in. Bari Weiss was trying to give the majority a voice in the paper of record.
But as we’d done with almost every news story since the beginning of the Trump era, we stretched the truth like taffy to suit our needs. Trump was Hitler, and this was fascism— we’d all convinced ourselves to believe, and with the help of the military “experts,” they trotted out to agree.
The truth? They needed the protests to be as violent and chaotic as possible. They encouraged them to make Trump look bad.
By 2020, I’d already been the target of so much abuse from the Left. I was called a “white supremacist,” a bigot, a racist, and a transphobe. Many on the Left now just assume it’s true —that I “went to the dark side.”
Not a day goes by that someone from my former side does not lob me with some kind of hateful insult. Just yesterday, I was told by a long-time follower of my film site that I was a “vile person,” and they regretted ever following me for all of those years. “Enjoy MAGA,” he said.
So maybe that is partly why, in 2020, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take watching so much collective hatred, so much sustained rage all aimed at one man and his supporters. It felt familiar to me, and my empathy began to rise. All I wanted to know was how true it was. Had we all been lying about Trump and MAGA? Did the media lie for that long?
I remember my daughter wandering into the living room one time and hearing someone verbally trash Trump as he gave a speech. My daughter said, “Poor guy.” It caught me off guard. Her empathy was still intact. She could see what I couldn’t. But I knew I had to change that because I knew what I was engaging in was wrong.
It felt like shaking the cold hand of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. He’s about to make a deal to save the Building and Loan, but that cold hand stops him and reminds him of who he is and what he’s about to give up. It was that cold hand on my side that made me take a step back. What are you doing, I thought.
Escaping my ideological feedback loop was not easy. I had to make a conscious effort to cut off all input from mainstream media and my own social media feeds. Then, I had to allow news only from the Right. I watched Fox News and Tucker Carlson and listened to Steve Bannon, Dan Bongino, and Ben Shapiro. I was like an Amish teenager stumbling on a pile of nudie magazines in the barn. It was contraband, and I couldn’t get enough.
What is this world I had no idea even existed? They were saying things we weren’t allowed to say. They were unafraid of our cultural leaders.
And then, I began watching Trump’s rallies. I watched all five a day heading into the election.
Watching those rallies, I saw the real Trump, the one MAGA sees and knows. I saw a man who was nothing like the one depicted in the press and among my friends. Their hatred, our hatred, was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and yes, that is the result of social media algorithms on our brains. But how could we control it if we weren’t even allowed to talk about it?
Empathy is what drove me to want to get to know the people I’d been conditioned to hate, and even Trump himself. We can’t allow social media to take empathy and humanity from us, and they’ve already got a big head start.
What I saw in those rallies and why I came to look forward to them then and still do today is that they were not driven by hate. They were driven by love. The media had it exactly backward. They saw his flaws, understood his weaknesses, and in him they saw themselves.
Everything the Democrats did in their attempts to stop Trump was exactly the wrong play. They built a trap for themselves and walked right into it. Doubling down on the persecutions, the hysteria, the rage, and the mass delusion about this version of Trump they invented only helped Trump and hurt them.
I am in awe when I think of this journey from 2016 to now, everything you’ve gone through and endured, your refusal to accept their version of you or Trump, and your unwillingness to give up your right as an American to participate in this people-run government.
When I see someone plant the MAGA flag in the middle of a hurricane, as many of you have, I can’t help but smile - there’s that MAGA spirit, I think to myself, knowing almost no one in my world would even begin to understand what that meant. They’d just think, there’s that radicalized crazy terrorist who used to be one of us.
The MAGA spirit is wearing that hat when everyone glares at you in the supermarket. It’s standing tall and proud as people hurl insults at you. It’s holding onto your character and knowing who you are when you are kicked out of restaurants just for working for or supporting Trump. And it’s how you stand in the cold for hours just for a glimpse of your hero.
This is your happy ending, a tribute to your unwavering flame.
As Walter Kirn said, this is a rewrite of January 6th.
We got our happy ending. Now you have written the narrative and you have written the history. They can’t take it from you now.
This isn’t about the Left anymore, and all the ways they tried to destroy you and everything you believe in. This is finally about you, MAGA. This is your moment, at long last, to celebrate.
Take it all in. What a time it is to be alive. Let’s make America great again.
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