February 8, 2026

Why is MAGA so hateful? (best concise explanation I've seen)

Why is MAGA so hateful?

I get asked this a lot. The short answer is: because hate is the point. But let me break it down.

Grievance as identity

MAGA isn't a political movement built on policy. It's built on resentment. The core message has always been "you've been wronged" — by elites, by immigrants, by cities, by universities, by the media, by women, by minorities, by anyone who isn't you.

This isn't a coalition that comes together to BUILD something. It comes together to tear things down. Hate isn't a byproduct of the movement. It's the fuel.

Zero-sum thinking

They genuinely believe that if someone else gains, they lose. Rights for gay people? That's an attack on Christians. Immigrants succeeding? They must be stealing from "real Americans." A Black president? He must be illegitimate.

There's no concept of shared prosperity or expanding opportunity. Just winners and losers. And they're terrified of losing.

The dominance hierarchy

A lot of MAGA is rooted in evangelical and authoritarian psychology. There's supposed to be a natural order: white at the top, Christian at the top, male at the top, straight at the top.

When you've been at the top of a hierarchy your whole life, equality feels like oppression. Giving others a seat at the table feels like theft.

The media ecosystem

Fox News → OANN → Newsmax → podcasts → Twitter/X. It's a 24/7 rage machine. Every algorithm rewards outrage. Every host competes to be more extreme than the last.

These people are literally addicted to anger. Neurologically. They get dopamine hits from feeling righteous fury. They wake up and immediately check their phones to find out what they should be mad about today.

Turn it off for a week and they go through withdrawal.

Economic anxiety — weaponized

Here's the thing: a lot of the underlying pain is real. Deindustrialization gutted their towns. Opioids killed their families. Wages stagnated while costs exploded. The American Dream stopped working for them.

But instead of blaming the corporations that shipped jobs overseas, or the billionaires that rigged the economy, or the politicians that deregulated everything — they're taught to blame immigrants. To blame welfare recipients. To blame Black people in cities. To blame trans kids.

Classic fascist playbook: take legitimate economic anger and redirect it at the vulnerable.

The permission structure

Trump didn't create the hate. He just gave it permission.

For decades, these people were told to keep the quiet part quiet. Be polite. Use dog whistles. Then Trump came along and said the loud part loud — and nothing happened. No consequences.

He showed them they could be openly racist, openly cruel, openly contemptuous of democracy — and not only survive, but win.

"He fights" doesn't mean he fights for them. It means he's mean to people they don't like. The cruelty is the point.

Community built on enemies

This is the part people miss: MAGA is a community. For a lot of these people — especially older, rural, isolated Americans — it's their entire social world. Their friends are MAGA. Their family is MAGA. Their church is MAGA.

The hate is the membership card. The shared enemies are what bind them together. Leaving the movement doesn't just mean changing your politics. It means losing everyone you know.

So they double down. And double down again. Because the alternative is being alone.

The bottom line

Why is MAGA so hateful?

Because scared people + relentless propaganda + permission to be cruel + community built on shared enemies = hate as a lifestyle.

They're not going to be reasoned out of it. They weren't reasoned into it.

The only thing that works is making it socially and politically costly to be part of it. Outvoting them. Out-organizing them. And building something better that gives people a different place to belong.


Source:
https://twitter.com/spooked75/status/2020511531885015373

January 28, 2026

The Blood-and-Soil Nationalism That Killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/tanehisi-coates-homeland-ice-minneapolis-trump


In the wake of poet and writer Renee Good’s killing, Donald Trump and his collaborators have done all they can to define her as an enemy of “The Homeland.” The administration claims, for instance, that Good was a “domestic terrorist,” a term it is now applying to Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse whom federal agents killed on Saturday. This rhetoric is employed to justify the state taking life, by associating the dead with national villainy. But the campaign against Good is different—because The Homeland takes particular and perverse interest in women deemed insufficiently reverent of hearth and home. Trump propagandists tell us that Good was part of a growing cabal of insolent white ladies turned violent; that she was a “lesbian agitator” in league with “68 IQ Somali scammers”; or that she was simply, as her killer apparently labeled her, “a fucking bitch.” For these and other sins, her castigation has extended into the afterlife: with Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, users churned out deepfakes of Good with bullets in her head and of her corpse in a bikini. This is all appropriate: In defending the undocumented, Good violated the sanctity of The Homeland, which is to say that she questioned the divine promise of American soil to a mythical and singular people.

For The Homeland is not “The State” or even “The Country.” The Homeland is not defined by simple geography. It exists beyond laws and norms. It is unconcerned with traditional American concepts like “liberty,” “freedom” or “pluralism.” The Homeland is that piece of earth providentially deeded to The Volk. The Homeland’s borders are drawn in untainted blood, its sanctity exemplified in proper gender conduct and the fulfillment of gender roles. It is The Homeland that ICE venerates in its recruitment posts festooned with victorious white settlers and vanquished indigenous Americans. It is The Homeland that Musk saluted (twice) at Trump’s inauguration. It is The Homeland that the late Charlie Kirk was fond of invoking:

I want to be able to get married, buy a home, have kids, allow them to ride their bike till the sun goes down, send them to a good school, have a low-crime neighborhood, not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school. While also not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.

It is often said that The Homeland is skeptical of immigrants, but more precisely, The Homeland is skeptical of aliens. Asylum-seekers from Gaza fleeing a genocide have no place in The Homeland; Afrikaners suffering the indignity of post-apartheid are welcome. The Homeland is covetous of Northern Europeans, but regards Somali Americans as “garbage.” “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?” Trump recently said. “But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” The criteria for these distinctions—between putative immigrant and indelible alien—are not complicated; for above all, The Homeland is a racist project.

Securing The Homeland is the central feature of the Trump administration. In Los Angeles and Chicago, Trump seeks to cleanse it. With Greenland and Venezuela, Trump seeks to expand and enrich it. Heterosexual men are the rightful defenders of The Homeland. Lesbian agitators, such as Good, are its nemeses. Christians are the lifeblood of The Homeland. “Stupid Muslims” are its cancer. A characteristic of The Homeland is that its foes must be subhuman—members of the LGBTQ+ community are “freaks,” disagreeable women are “ugly” pigs, and the residents of DC are “cockroaches.”

*snip*

January 27, 2026

The Smearing of Alex Pretti and NSPM-7

https://www.justsecurity.org/129797/alex-pretti-nspm-7/

Just hours after their son was shot and killed by federal agents on the streets of Minneapolis, Michael and Susan Pretti decried the “sickening lies” told by the Trump administration. “Please get the truth out about our son,” they wrote. “He was a good man. Thank you.”

The truth is that senior Trump administration officials quickly smeared Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who worked at a veterans’ hospital, as a “domestic terrorist.” They lied – repeatedly – before any investigation could be completed, and before Pretti’s parents, friends, and colleagues could testify to his kind character. The administration is, of course, attempting to deflect blame from its own culpability. But that is only part of the story.

Senior officials’ dishonest portrayal of Pretti as a domestic terrorist is not a slip of the tongue or impulsive idea.

Instead, it appears to be part of the administration’s campaign to demonize opposition to its anti-immigrant policies as “domestic terrorism,” and to weaponize powers of the federal government against such perceived political opponents. That plan is set forth in a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) and other official memoranda. It is a direct threat to First Amendment rights, as well as the lives of protesters opposed to the administration’s unconstitutional and increasingly violent anti-immigrant policies. Indeed, by falsely declaring Pretti to be a “domestic terrorist,” some officials are arguing, in effect, that the federal government was justified in killing him. It is a lie – one that Trump officials have told before, including after the killing of Renee Good. And it is part of a broader effort to smear everyone from other ICE observers to elected state and city officials as supporters of “terrorism.”

Consider how quickly the administration attempted to frame Pretti. Within three hours after his death, the DHS posted a picture of a 9mm semi-automatic that was reportedly found on Pretti’s person, claiming “this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” (Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and Secretary Kristi Noem would repeat that statement later in the day.) DHS added that Pretti was killed as “officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted.” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem alleged that Pretti “committed an act of domestic terrorism.” She elaborated: “When you perpetuate violence against a government because of ideological reasons and for reasons to resist and perpetuate violence, that is the definition of domestic terrorism.” Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller declared that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Miller also shared a post claiming that Pretti “likely intended to MASSACRE LAW ENFORCEMENT.”

*snip*

November 4, 2025

Bench Memo - The Trump Tariff Case: Separation of Powers, Delegation, Emergencies, and Pretext

https://www.justsecurity.org/123818/scotus-trump-tariff-separation-powers/

Introduction

Soon after taking office, President Donald Trump invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose a range of country-specific and global tariffs. These actions triggered legal challenges before lower courts, which consistently held against the president, including at the appellate level. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, the Supreme Court will decide two crucial questions:

(1) By enacting IEEPA, did Congress authorize the president to impose tariffs?

(2) If so, is that delegation of authority lawful?

Yet even before answering these two questions, a third threshold issue must be answered:

(3) Has IEEPA been lawfully triggered at all here? Has Trump lawfully unlocked IEEPA’s emergency powers by satisfying the necessary congressional prerequisites to invoke it? Or, as some amici assert, did Trump not only fail to meet those prerequisites, but also make an invocation of IEEPA that is pretextual and hence illegal for that reason as well?

Merits briefs have been filed by the parties and 44 groups of amici curiae: 37 in support of the challengers, 6 in support of the government, and 1 in support of neither (see here). Ahead of the Court’s oral argument on Nov. 5, 2025, this “bench memorandum” provides a concise reader’s guide to amici’s main arguments.

The Tariff Case Briefing: A Reader’s Guide

This case consolidates three separate challenges to the Trump Administration’s tariffs brought by Learning Resources and hand2mind, private companies including V.O.S. Selections, and several states (collectively “the challengers”). The challengers argue that Trump’s so-called “global reciprocal tariffs” and country-specific opioid “trafficking tariffs” are illegal, because IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs and cannot constitutionally delegate such power. The challengers also argue that the tariffs are invalid because the president’s justifications to impose tariffs do not meet IEEPA’s statutory requirements. The U.S. government rejects each of these arguments.

The Challenge to Trump’s Tariffs

The challengers urge the Supreme Court to reject the Trump Administration’s use of IEEPA to impose tariffs. They recall that the framers regarded the power to tax, which includes the power to impose tariffs, as the “most important of the authorities” held by the federal government. Accordingly, the Constitution vests that power exclusively in Congress. Although the president has significant foreign affairs powers, he has no independent constitutional authority to impose tariffs or taxes, so can impose tariffs only if Congress has specifically authorized him to do so.

• Text: The challengers assert that IEEPA makes no such specific authorization to impose tariffs. The text of the statute grants the president emergency powers to “regulate…importation or exportation” to deal with an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” emerging in whole or substantial part outside of the United States. The plain meaning of “regulate” in this context does not entail a tariffing power, according to the challengers. Because “regulate” applies to both importation and exportation, it cannot imply the power to tariff, since no branch of the federal government has the power to impose tariffs on exports. The judiciary requires Congress to speak clearly when delegating major authority to the Executive, and Congress has never delegated tariffing or taxing powers through these words.

• Legislative History: IEEPA’s legislative history also shows, the challengers argue, that Congress did not authorize the president to impose tariffs through that statute. When Congress was reforming its emergency legislation, including IEEPA, it adopted other statutes that explicitly delegated to the president limited authority to impose tariffs. They made no such provisions in IEEPA. In the 69 times that presidents have invoked IEEPA since its passage in 1977, none until Trump has attempted to use the statute to place tariffs on other nations.

• Nondelegation and Major Questions Doctrines: The challengers additionally argue that if the Court construed IEEPA’s authority to “regulate” as the power to tariff, such an interpretation would raise serious major questions and nondelegation concerns. The challengers contend that Congress has not clearly delegated the unprecedented and highly significant authority claimed by the government, raising issues under the major questions doctrine (which says that Congress must clearly authorize delegations of major economic and political significance). Additionally, the challengers submit, accepting the government’s interpretation would mean that Congress had granted the president virtually limitless authority to remake the national economy without any congressional limiting guidance or instruction — essentially usurping Congress’s full legislative power to tax, thereby raising significant nondelegation doctrine concerns.

• IEEPA Not Lawfully Triggered: Finally, the challengers address the third, threshold argument identified above: that even if IEEPA lawfully authorized the imposition of tariffs, Trump did not properly invoke it: i.e., he did not comply with the prerequisites of IEEPA that are legally required to access that statutory power. IEEPA mandates that to invoke emergency powers, the president must declare an emergency with respect to an “unusual and extraordinary” threat and can take emergency action only to “deal with” that specific threat. But here, the challengers argue, the U.S. trade deficit — the claimed emergency that the president invokes to impose the global reciprocal tariffs — is neither unusual nor extraordinary, but instead, a long-standing and persistent condition. Additionally, tariffs do not “deal with” opioid trafficking and thus fall beyond the statute’s scope.

*snip*

June 13, 2025

ICE agents get green light to make unjustified warrantless arrests

https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/ice-warrantless-arrests-castanon-nava

On Wednesday an email landed in the inboxes of all ICE employees with the subject: “Termination of Castañon-Nava Settlement Agreement.” For those unfamiliar, the settlement was the outcome of a class action lawsuit brought by people who had been subjected to unjustified warrantless arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the first Trump administration when now-Border Czar Tom Homan was Deputy Director. The parties involved entered into the agreement in May of 2022 wherein it became nationwide ICE policy that warrantless arrests must be documented in a specific manner to remain in compliance with the law.

The terms of the settlement were given a three year duration, meaning it —by ICE’s definition, at least—expired last month. The email on Wednesday—a copy of which was shared with The Handbasket—was sent by ICE’s Principal Legal Advisor Charles Wall, and it made one thing clear: Agents are no longer constrained by the need to justify their warrantless arrests.

“What they are encouraging is for all the officers to violate the law, and now you don't even have to document it,” Mark Fleming, the Associate Director of Federal Litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) who served as one of the attorneys on the case, told me on Thursday.

In Wall’s email he wrote: “Despite a pending motion to enforce the settlement agreement and a motion to extend the settlement agreement, it remains terminated. Accordingly, I hereby rescind the May 27, 2022, Castañon-Nava Settlement Obligation statement of policy.” Fleming disagreed with ICE’s assessment that the settlement is still terminated in the face of ongoing litigation.

*snip*

May 30, 2025

The MAHA Report Has Been Updated With Fresh Errors

https://www.notus.org/health-science/maha-report-update-citation-errors

No paywall link
https://archive.li/sqT8z

The Trump administration’s clean up of the “Make America Healthy Again” Commission’s hallmark and error-riddled report is opening new questions about how the report’s authors drew some of its sweeping conclusions about the state of Americans’ health.

At least 18 of the original report’s citations have been edited or completely swapped out for new references since NOTUS first revealed the errors Thursday morning. While some of the original report’s inconsistencies have been changed, a few of the new updated citations continue to misinterpret scientific studies.

One study NOTUS identified as misinterpreted in the original report was intended to support the claim that psychotherapy is more effective for children than medication for treating mental health concerns. That study was swapped out with a new “systematic overview” authored by psychologist Pim Cuijpers, who told NOTUS via email that MAHA’s new citation is also wrong.

Cuijpers said his referenced study doesn’t cover psychiatric medications in children at all — the research was focused on adults. The citation is located in a section of the MAHA report titled, “American children are highly medicated – and it’s not working.”

“Treatments of depression in adolescents have a different efficacy than treatments in adults, so they cannot be compared, and this reference is therefore not usable in adolescents,” said Cuijpers, one of Amsterdam’s most-cited psychologists. “It also fails to state that the combination of therapy and antidepressants is superior to therapy or antidepressants alone.”

He added that there is no evidence that psychotherapy is more effective than antidepressants in adolescents.

*snip*

May 30, 2025

Your guide to Cryptogate, Trump's $4 billion corruption scandal that's 10X bigger than Watergate

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/trump-cryptocurrency-scandal-corruption-billions-20250529.html

No paywall link
https://archive.li/8tcrR

Since Donald Trump became the 47th American president on Jan. 20, the White House has been up for sale to the highest bidder. And like most big-city real estate these days, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has an astronomical price tag.

You might have seen the report a couple of weeks ago that in 2025, the net worth of Donald Trump has increased by a whopping $2.9 billion, thanks to his recent plunge into cryptocurrency. That’s a shocking number, but it doesn’t capture the full extent of the worst presidential corruption in U.S. history.

It doesn’t include the $400 million jumbo jet from Qatar that Trump hopes to take home in 2029 as property of his presidential library, after a short stint as Air Force One.

It doesn’t include what for a corrupt and contented Trump must seem like the change under his couch cushions, like the $28 million that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is paying Melania Trump for a documentary no one is asking to see.

It doesn’t include the new “deals” that just keep coming, like a scheme for Trump Media to get into crypto.

*snip*

May 23, 2025

Kristi Noem's proud MAGA bimbo act builds on the legacy of Sarah Palin

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/23/kristi-noems-proud-maga-bimbo-act-builds-on-the-legacy-of-sarah-palin/

Does Kristi Noem know what habeas corpus is? One thing we know for certain: She would very much like Americans to believe she does not. On Tuesday, the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) used a Senate hearing to insist the legal term means the opposite of its actual definition. "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and suspend their right to," Noem said through her unnervingly Botox-inflated lips. She was interrupted by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., who explained to a smug-looking Noem that, no, habeas corpus "requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people" and is the reason it's illegal for Donald Trump to round up immigrants and imprison them in foreign gulags without offering a legal reason why.

Was Noem legitimately confused? Jonathan Chait of the Atlantic thinks so, writing that Noem's "ignorance appears to be utterly genuine." After all, "habeas corpus" is a Latin term used by lawyers but not much by laypeople, especially those, like Noem, who got a college degree through online courses at age 40. But I'm not so sure that Noem, who has been neck-deep in this debate about basic human rights for months, is as dumb as she seemed in that moment. Those who keep watching will notice that Noem doesn't act embarrassed when she's corrected, like normal people do when they get something so terribly wrong. Instead, she insists that "the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not." In this lie, Noem admitted that Trump is trying to suspend habeas corpus, not uphold it. It suggests that she knows full well what the actual legal battle is about.

There was much mockery of Noem for being so dumb in mainstream and left-leaning media, but notably, neither Noem nor her allies have shown any shame or defensiveness about her alleged mistake. Whether Noem comes by her confusion honestly or she was just play-acting, she's there to play the role of the proud MAGA bimbo, in the grand tradition of figures like Sarah Palin. The MAGA bimbo isn't just ignorant. She's contemptuous of people who actually know what they're talking about, especially if those facts-laden human beings are fellow women.

In the world of MAGA, stupidity is a badge of honor for both sexes, but the heads of women need to be thoroughly empty. Book learning, in MAGA-land, is for lesbians and cat ladies. Intelligence gets in the way of the true duties of MAGA womanhood: keeping up your highly artificial appearance and, crucially, defending the man you serve with your whole heart and soul. Especially if said man, in this case Donald Trump, is himself dumber than a box of rocks. It's so much easier to be a yes-woman for such a man if you turn your own brain off completely.

*snip*

May 20, 2025

Jay Kuo: The Cruelty Is The Point, But What's The Goal?

https://thinkbigpicture.substack.com/p/trump-administration-cruelty-goal

When I write about the latest horrific policy or action by the Trump administration, often a reader will comment, “The cruelty is the point.” We all sense, and in many ways accept, this as true. How could we not, given everything we have seen and experienced for years under Trump?

But there has always been something unsatisfactory and circular about this assessment. It asserts that Trump and his lackeys are cruel just to be cruel, presumably because that is their nature and they enjoy it.

That feels correct, but also incomplete.

Cruelty serves a number of other purposes beyond the sadism of those who inflict it. We’ve witnessed this wherever atrocities occur anywhere in the world. Soldiers not only kill enemy soldiers but systematically rape, torture, and execute innocent civilians. Vulnerable minorities, whether Jews in Nazi Germany or LGBTQs in Uganda, become targets for cruelty not only because they are easy targets and people are awful, but because the state has an agenda and the cruelty is a twisted part of it.

The United States is not somehow immune to this and never has been. Throughout our history, our government, acting through our military and our courts, has repeatedly inflicted intentional cruelty upon whole populations within our borders. This has led to the worst chapters of our nation’s story: Indigenous genocide, centuries of Black slavery, and the Japanese American internment.

*snip*

May 18, 2025

The Tariff on Hatred is Here, Trumpers. It's Time for You to Pay

https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/the-tariff-on-hatred-is-here-trumpers

It's time to pay up, Trumpers.

The deferred invoice for collectively selling your souls is here.

It's time to pay for every incendiary campaign boast you cheered,
every baseless diatribe you vigorously applauded,
every nonsensical middle-of-the-night tweet you boosted,
every dehumanizing stereotype and slur you shared,
every callous rally insult you passionately amen-ed.

It’s time to pay for every denial of Scientific evidence,
every terminated qualified conscientious objector,
every attack on factual, responsible journalism,
every vicious assault on objective reality,
every nepotistic Cabinet appointment,
every dog-and-pony show distraction,
every lazy xenophobic caricature,
every tired racist tirade.

This is how your beloved capitalism works, isn't it: someone was always going to pay for services rendered? Nothing is free, isn't that what you've been saying—no handouts? Well, dig deep, friend, because you are on the hook for this.

Many people have been footing the bill for a long time: migrants and Muslims and transgender people, young black men, refugees, the sick and the poor, already vulnerable communities pushed to the brink—and now past it.

You were paying, too, of course, you were just too willfully ignorant or intellectually negligent to realize it. Over and over we tried to tell you about the cost: the civil rights you were sacrificing too, the environmental protections you were losing as well as we were, the safety and security you were relinquishing alongside us. We tried to tell you that this hardship was not a partisan expense, that his moral bankruptcy would eventually hit you hard too.

*snip*