An email exchange with a reader this week has me questioning my presumption that the smart people in the MAGA movement know that they’re spouting nonsense when they parrot the lies of their Dear Leader.
A man who identified himself as a lawyer engaged me in a back-and-forth over my AFP website bio, which reports that I’m a progressive, and tried to dunk on me on that, about “fairies and unicorns,” me being a supposed “Marxist” and the like.
Unfortunately for me, the exchange came to an abrupt end after I asked him if he thought it should be legal for MAGAs to break into my home and kill me with a hammer, because I’d wanted to ask him, Do you really believe all this nonsense your spewing at me?
I’ve thought since Donald Trump descended the staircase in 2015 that the intellectual wing of the MAGA set was aware that it was all a game intended to hoodwink the right-wing masses into voting against their interests.
Basically, that there’s no way the otherwise smart people in MAGA world believe that elections are stolen, that John McCain was a loser, that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, that immigrants are all murderers and pedophiles, that there is even such a thing as a good Nazi.
And yes, I doubt my new lawyer friend here would have copped to it.
I imagine, for the smart MAGAs, that it’s kind of like kayfabe used to be in pro wrestling: yes, wrestling is fake, but you never admitted that to outsiders, to protect the business.
Republicans who do admit to how fake the MAGA ethos is publicly end up being shunned – case in point, Dan Crenshaw, the once-rising star in GOP circles, who has fallen out of favor with the MAGAs since admitting publicly that the 2020 election was on the up and up.
But if breaking kayfabe gets you kicked out of MAGA world, is that because there’s an interest in protecting the secret that it’s all a lie – or because there’s nobody left in MAGA world who doesn’t believe the lie?
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Chris Graham
