Empire of Fear

Notes on MAGA Sadism

By G.J. Nelson

Every day, the far right’s assaults on democracy, the rule of law, civil rights, and basic human decency inches us closer to authoritarian hell. For all its novelty, MAGA has already exhausted its creativity, and are now just telling the same sad twentieth century story of resentment, cruelty and violence with few revisions. We’ve already seen this movie.

Conservatives and right-wingers used to trumpet the rights of states and individuals and proclaim they were protecting Americans from government tyranny. Of course, what they meant was a very specific kind of state and American: people who look, talk, and think like they do. They obscured the influence of racist ideologues and conspiratorial crackpots by maintaining a bright line between establishment Republicans and the talk radio circuit.

That era is dead and buried. Now it’s all just the sadistic exercise of rich, white male power over the rest of the population. The party of individual rights has done nothing since the 2024 election but trample on people’s rights.

They’re not just bulldozing through the rights of individuals and states, checks and balances, federal agencies, and judicial oversight because of their ideology; they’re doing it because it causes others pain, because it hurts people. It’s a 24-hour spectacle of contempt and MAGA is all but daring the rest of us to do something about it.

Necessary Evil?

MAGA’s loudest and most disruptive act of organized sadism is their heavy-handed immigration crackdown. Los Angeles has served as a test case for what the regime will soon roll out in all urban communities that harbor immigrants or just dislike Trump.

With the newly bloated DHS and ICE budgets, we may see this same story play out in every major city under non-Republican leadership: the rollout of the military to play backup to indiscriminate raids and arrests of immigrants and activists. The number of trumped-up charges the feds have already been forced to drop in L.A. is frankly embarrassing, but don’t think for a second that that will stop them from hitting repeat.

They will stage the occasional roundup of migrants working at farms or meatpacking plants to shore up their anti-immigrant credibility, but their focus will be on occupying and bullying blue cities and the minorities who live in them. Trump has already signaled his aspirational desire to put New York City under direct federal control. So much for states’ rights.

If it were up to Trump’s lizard-man adviser Stephen Miller, every immigrant in the country, legal or otherwise, would be rounded up, imprisoned in concentration camps, and deported to their deaths. He is impeded only by pushback from the lower courts, the general incompetence or apathy of the DHS, and Trump’s own obsession with punishing political enemies rather than executing a consistent deportation policy.

Let’s dispense with the lies about “complexity” and “nuance.” The MAGA agenda is evil. No one person in it is intrinsically evil, of course, but the regime itself is rotten to the core.

The mainstream press may treat MAGA with gray zone equivocation (every newish political development reported as some fascinating novelty) without realizing or refusing to realize the evil—both banal and radical—it represents. Its leadership is comprised of grifters, racketeers, tabloid gossips, sex pests, Nazi sympathizers, and racist crackpots. They are united only in their desire to do harm to others and parlay that into power and wealth.

They are building a Holocaust-scale deportation machine complete with concentration camps and eliminationist rhetoric (rats, infestation, etc.). Their vile language has become so normalized, it’s barely noticed anymore.

Any just or lawful effort to remove dangerous undocumented immigrants would weigh individual cases. It would identify productive, law-abiding immigrants and refugees and offer them a roadmap to citizenship or at least more permanent residency.

But this isn’t that. This is a draconian, one-size-fits-all immigrant removal system. And the regime’s idea of who gets to be a citizen or even a person with rights tightens every day. Stories emerge daily of ICE’s excesses: wrongful arrests, physical attacks on suspects, detaining people without charges, warrantless searches.

This machine doesn’t care who you are, whether you’re young or elderly, healthy or infirm, working or unemployed, a beloved member of the community or a petty criminal.  If you or your parents are from somewhere else and non-white you’re an automatic target. If you help or support immigrants, you’re a potential target.

You can be abducted off the streets, sent to be a slave or death row inmate in a faraway country, dumped in the swamps of Florida, arbitrarily separated from your family, or disappeared into a black hole. If you’re lucky, someone will notice, and a federal court will step in. But someone must know you’ve disappeared and where you ended up.

MAGA has tried to render an entire population stateless and deprive them of their God-given rights. A judge may force the DHS to release individuals they wrongfully detain; but the moral stain cannot be removed. And we will all be judged for it.

It should be obvious that policing on this scale, controlled by a single would-be dictator against a domestic population, could easily mutate into a secret police organization. Frivolous lawsuits and DOJ “investigations” against opponents seem to be enough for Trump for now, but the regime can barely contain its enthusiasm for pushing further.

Just pick the brain of the MAGA’s culture war hack in chief, Christopher Rufo, who has taken time off from his anti-woke higher education beat to suggest that the regime discretely remove agitators (leftists, liberals, people who believe in democracy and constitutional rights, etc.) from the street using unmarked vans to neutralize opposition. These ideas are common among MAGA’s Pinochet-loving hacks, and Trump doesn’t hide his approval.

MAGA treats all this brutality, real and proposed, as bedrock conservative principles made flesh. But I still remember when the conservative icon President Ronald Reagan signed the bipartisan Immigration Reform and Control Act back in 1986. While it was mostly focused on border controls and employment checks, it also legalized three million immigrants and offered amnesty to thousands of families with children—and a pathway to legal citizenship.

The IRCA failed to curb illegal border crossings, but it opened the door to citizenship to millions of hardworking and taxpaying immigrants. It’s amazing to me how far mainstream American Republicans have sunk since then. The racist, nativist spirit of Pat Buchanan, regarded as a dangerous joke in the early nineties, has taken full possession of the party.

Suffer the Children?

Its telling to me that after all the destruction MAGA have wrought in just six months, the one thing that finally outraged a big chunk of the base was Donald Trump’s alleged (and likely real) coverup of his involvement with noted child sex trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein. We’re now in week three of this media circus, and the liberal press can’t get enough of it.

But a lot of the outrage has nothing to do with Trump himself. The Qanon-addled parts of the MAGA base are absolutely obsessed with the idea that Democrats and powerful liberal elites are engaged in child sex trafficking, blood libel, and ritualistic abuse of children. The fact that Epstein was Jewish makes it even more perfect to them. This is an old template.

So now Trump simply covering his own ass looks like a massive coverup, especially since the regime has spent so much time building up a yet-to-materialize dossier of politically convenient Epstein associates. It’s not so much Trump’s own documented and as-of-yet unknown sexual crimes that matter; it’s the imaginary ones he’s hiding from the base.

Many rich, powerful and ostensibly untouchable people were certainly vacationing on Epstein’s pederast island, likely including some registered Democrats and Republicans. But until real evidence (preferably the unfabricated variety) emerges from Pam Bondi’s dungeon keep or a third source, most of this is hearsay.

Who one thinks is on that list largely comes down to their own partisan biases. Culture war always trumps class war in our reactionary age. It’s not the rich that are unaccountably evil; it’s their rich. It’s not my elites, it’s your elites.

What pisses me off is that the same people up in arms over these crimes against children, real and alleged, don’t care one bit about the millions of children whose lives will be ruined or snuffed out by MAGA’s brutal attack on foreign aid, public health, or the social safety net.

The regime went out of its way to block a law in Washington State that would have made clergy responsible for reporting sexual abuse of minors—on the specious grounds of religious freedom, of course. The same right-wingers worried about alleged crimes against children had nothing to say about this. 

They clearly don’t care about LGBTQ kids who will no longer have specialized counselors to talk to when calling the national suicide hotline because of politically motivated DOGE cuts. They’ve been too busy celebrating MAGA’s defunding of health care for trans kids. We wouldn’t want to help the “wrong” kind of kid, would we?

And it just gets worse. 500 metric tons of USAID food supplies that would have fed thousands of families have been destroyed rather than be distributed by USAID (RIP). Twenty-six million people across the world, including children, will not be receiving lifesaving HIV treatments from this administration. Not a peep.

Anti-vaccination hysteria will prevent safe and effective vaccines from reaching children all over the world and is already resurrecting deadly childhood diseases (like Measles) long vanquished in the US.  Cuts to Medicaid and school food assistance, including proposed cuts to SNAP, will gravely impact the health of kids across the country. Crickets.

The same contempt for kids can be seen in MAGA’s overhaul of the EPA, redefining toxic pollution and greenhouse gases as safe and environmentally beneficial and shuttering the agency’s science division. The result will be less information on water, soil and air quality in places children live. But don’t worry. HHS Director, RFK, Jr., and his staff is hard at work protecting kids from food coloring and chemtrails.  

This is all perfectly fine because it falls outside the MAGA mythology of white Christian children abused for Satanic ends. I don’t want to downplay the very real and disgusting crimes of Epstein and his ilk, but MAGA’s leaders are very selective about what victims matter. It’s always their children—hypothetical or real—that matter. Not yours or mine. Certainly not the children of immigrants. They’re expendable.

The real villains are cosmopolitan elites and wealthy Jews; not MAGA’s own political leaders who will gladly deport, detain, and kill through neglect millions of poor or nonwhite children for little more than racist spite—and the horrified reaction it inspires in decent people.

It’s strange to live in a time when kids are separated from their parents and detained in private prisons, systematically abused by our system, while a third of adults in the country are angry about hypothetical crimes against children in an unseen dossier. They’d rather indulge in an occult fantasy than save a living, breathing child.

Burning the Past, Stealing the Future

For me personally, one of the most offensive moral crimes of the MAGA regime is its brazen theft of both this country’s past as its future. They are disposing of and looting public goods and services that lifted millions of people out of rural and urban poverty and underpinned this country’s rapid economic development since World War II.

I don’t want to put on the rose-tinted glasses and pretend everything was wonderful before MAGA ruined it. Far from it. But when a country is in dire need of fair-minded reform and upgrades, destroying the institutions and programs that work (“burning it all down”) is not a wise or productive step, no matter how uninformed the public happens to be about it.

MAGA has all but dismantled the Education Department that supports public school programs to help children escape cycles of poverty and violence and attain an education essential to a functioning democratic society and modern economy.

MAGA is robbing future generations of clean water, breathable air and a chance at healthy existences free from preventable disease and ailments (all the RFK quackery about toxins in the world can’t make up for that loss) by murdering the EPA’s capacity to do science.

By attacking NOAA, they not only blind us to imminent dangers such as extreme weather events and flooding, but they also effectively obscure the reality of climate change, robbing tens of millions of people of a safe, healthy, and relatively conflict-free future.

And the future is not the only thing they’re trying to steal. They are also trying to take over what’s left of the commons and rob us of our shard history and natural heritage.  

They are killing the already weakened national park system through budget cuts and neglect, threatening the epic landscapes that generations have loved and venerated. We can expect more unchecked wildfires, more over-tourism, more poaching, and more illegal ranching and mining. A slow, bitter death, and for what?

They also want to dispose of our public lands, lands that we all own, and turn them over to a resource extraction free-for-all. They want to open vast western expanses of federal land to more exploitation and housing development even though western states don’t have nearly enough water to expand endlessly into prairie and desert.

The feds have long sold off or leased public land for economic use but have tried to balance it with recreation, education, camping, hunting, and exploration. Selling it off in a fire sale to private industry, housing developers, or worse, private equity would be a massive giveaway at the public’s expense. All to line their cronies’ pockets.

History and the humanities are also on the chopping block. Everything from PBS to the Smithsonian to national monuments to the Kennedy Center must be reshaped to reflect MAGA’s narrow and propagandistic America First agenda—one that would prefer one big whitewashing lie to a million smaller truths. They want to steal our shared sense of pride, our heritage, and turn it into a 24-hour MAGA aggrandizement machine.

They couldn’t even resist using the “big, beautiful bill” to steal the Space Shuttle Discovery from its rightful owners at the Smithsonian and give it to political allies in Texas at a cost of at least $85 million. Sure, it will be housed at the space center in Houston, but it doesn’t belong to Texas. It belongs to the American people.

MAGA’s leaders don’t believe we should own these things. In fact, the plebes shouldn’t own anything. All our treasures are just financial assets, monetizable tokens, or pieces for a private collection. They don’t believe in the commons, in civic space, or historic value. It’s their world. We’re just the serfs who work here.

And nothing pleases them more than how much their looting angers the rest of the country, how much it insults people, or kicks them when they’re emotionally down. They know it makes us all just want to give up, go home, and forfeit everything. But these things are not their treasures. They belong to us, and we need to take them back.

Join the Non-Resistance!

Since MAGA took office, we’ve seen the federal agencies that help people chopped up and sold for scrap and over 100,000 dedicated experts and public workers dumped in the streets so the far right can more effectively loot public resources and turn the government into a propaganda and enforcement machine.  

Right now, public servants are dazed, but when the smoke clears there will be enough policy experts, scientists, lawyers, prosecutors, educators, budget wonks, officers and soldiers, etc. to form an alternative shadow government or opposition movement.

But I’m not holding my breath that this motley collection of federal careerists will come together to form a dedicated resistance. Most of them will either change careers, enter the corporate workforce, or go into exile. And the administration would have no problem suing, investigating, or siccing their thugs on whoever’s left.  

We’ve lost a century of accrued wisdom and knowledge, and convincing anyone in the future to reenter and rebuild what can be so quickly torn down will be immensely difficult. I am afraid this damage is permanent.

Just as depressing has been the lack of any real pushback from our intellectual institutions, with the most elite absorbed in trying to claw back federal funding. Harvard may have taken Trump to court, but they still quietly folded on their diversity and inclusion efforts.

The University of Virginia surrendered before any shots were fired after trustees forced the resignation of their president. Darthmouth immediately shut up and did what they were told. Brown and George Mason are in the process of bowing out too. Perhaps no elite university was so cowardly as Columbia, which summarily suspended and expelled dozens of students for daring to protest Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians.

MAGA’s cynical political game of exploiting concerns over real antisemitism to punish colleges and advance their own ideology on campus has born them much rotten fruit. A movement rife with antisemites has cleverly weaponized the concept to stick it to Muslims, international students, progressive activists and the institutions that enroll them. It’s a hostile takeover. And an effective one.

Less surprising is how major television networks like CBS and ABC quickly settled their differences with Trump, essentially handing over stacks of cash to avoid embarrassing legal entanglements. If CBS owner Paramount needs Trump’s favor to approve their merger with Skydance, they’re perfectly happy to gag 60 Minutes’ critical news coverage, sack a liberal late-night host, and prostrate themselves before the president.

And even after all these concessions, the regime still assigned an FCC hall monitor to ensure that CBS remains “unbiased,” which means never saying a mean thing about Trump. When you invite the devil in, he never leaves. Giving in only invites more demands. 

Meanwhile, the major still-solvent newspapers have either become mouthpieces for libertarian corpos like Jeff Bezos, “diversity of opinion” op-ed machines like the New York Times or are currently being sued by Trump (WSJ). They’re still producing essential reporting, but when news is presented alongside a slurry of lifestyle junk food, predictable culture war musings, and apologia for fascists, finding the signal in the noise is like identifying asteroids with binoculars. Major news sources have largely been neutralized.

The surrender of pure profit-seeking corporations is barely noteworthy. They go where the money is, and if their so-called DEI hiring and management practices are a liability, so long to all that. Many companies seem delighted by their liberation from pretending to care. If they receive tax cuts, see regulations and environmental laws slashed, watch labor lose its negotiating edge, what do they care if the country becomes a despotic hellhole?

Naturally, many DEI consultants are happily adapting to the changing mores to keep their grift going, replacing lip service about respecting women, minorities and LGTBQ people with whatever new lip service makes the execs feel better about themselves without having to do anything. DEI politics may be dead in the workplace but feel good woo will never die.

With government agencies, universities, news providers, and corporations all deeply diminished or in the process of surrendering, we’re running out of checks on MAGA’s mad dash to end democracy. We still have the nonprofits, but many of them are watching their grant money evaporate and may soon find themselves defending their tax-free status and facing costly investigations for their “woke” agendas.

My question is what kind of leadership class do we have? Where are the people who live for the fight, who are confident and stubborn enough to take on the powerful? Where are the charismatic preachers and social leaders who can mobilize the masses? Where are the people willing to go down with the ship rather than resign?

So many of our institutions have been taken over by profit seekers, middle managers and careerists. We have allowed the wrong types of people into leadership roles, prioritizing resumes over character and ambition over integrity, creating little rulers who just want their own little fiefdom free of politics or personal costs. This is fatal for democracy.  

I don’t mean to diminish the work of thousands of people who are fighting the administration in the courts and on the streets. I know there are millions of people and hundreds of nonprofits out there doing more than me every day. But it’s not enough.

We all need to step up, work together to fill the leadership vacuum, break through political apathy and fight back the creeping darkness. No one else is going to do it for us.

Empire of Fear

MAGA doesn’t quite have the totalizing mass politics of classic European fascism. They’re pursuing the lower end of the market somewhere between Juan Peron and Augusto Pinochet. They have no interest in indoctrinating the rest of us and, frankly, they’d rather not have to deal with most Americans at all. All they want from us is fear and compliance. 

If we shut up and do what we’re told, or better yet, praise Trump, they’ll condescend to and ignore us (as long as we’re white citizens, of course). If we oppose them, we’re to be sidelined, dismissed, doxed, or outright crushed. In MAGA and the Cult of Trump, you’re either a useful pawn, a mindless NPC, or an obstacle to be tossed aside like a bad grape. 

MAGA elites believe they’re owed our fealty not because they narrowly won a national election against an unpopular incumbent, but because of their wealth, “genius,” and sadistic projection of power. They don’t want citizens; they want subjects.

What the true believers don’t understand about this attitude is that, aside from its money-making grift-and-graft potential, it’s a political dead end. Countries that are worn down in such a way produce cynical people who are divested and uncommitted, a population that just counts the hours and days while avoiding the wandering eye of the ruling class.

You see it in Russia, you’re starting to see it in Hungary, and the US has been trucking down the road in this direction for a while now. It’s a slow national suicide where the civic spirit is replaced with dead-eyed compliance. A divested people will not die to defend this country. They certainly won’t make America “great” again.

MAGA gives us the choice of a slow death or a fast one. It all comes down to how quickly we accept their terms. Our democracy can die in a fascist explosion or an authoritarian gas leak. Or we can put fear behind us, strengthen our moral resolve, and bravely refuse their offer.

The good news is that MAGA are still, like all wannabe fascists, fundamentally cowards. They like to put on a show, like DHS Secretary Kristi Noem strutting around in makeup and tactical gear before raiding a civilian house with several ICE agents armed to the teeth to find one person. They think displays like this are powerful and intimidating. All I see is over-militarized idiots cowed by the most threadbare possibility of resistance. If there was any real danger, Noem wouldn’t have been anywhere near the place.

We are living in an empire of fear. The real question is who’s more afraid: us or them?