[Guest Post] Living in the Now: Why MAGA Will Fail to Build Anything

Vacation time! God has a way of answering prayers. Three weeks of content in advance!!! I was one piece short. Desir approached me with this article and I had a slot available. Enjoy!

In 2024, we witnessed one of the greatest political comeback stories in contemporary history. Donald Trump thoroughly triumphed over all challenges to his reign. He overcame political persecution, media slander and, in a moment that could only be described as divine intervention, an assassination attempt. This is a narrative that many have enjoyed. I am not exempt from this euphoria. I was filled with feelings of personal vindication, having predicted both Kamala Harris becoming the democratic party nominee and a Trump victory long before anyone else. Now that the dust has settled and the endorphins have calmed, it is time to take a step back and view things long term. The outlook is not promising. Despite how wonderful the comeback has been, I predict MAGA will not accomplish any long-term victories and will fail to build or accomplish much of anything.

MAGA began as an attempt to revive American excellence, both in terms of economic power and world prestige, at a time when China and Europe both looked to overtake it. This charge has been led by Donald Trump, who is himself an icon of America in the 1980s. It was an era of American financial and cultural dominance that many look back on fondly. Even people who never lived in that era feel a hunger for its optimism. The brief online music scene “Vaporwave” from the 2010s was made up of sounds and images from the 1980s. It was made by Zoomers who were born long after that era ended. It makes sense, then, that MAGA as a movement revolves around a harkening back to a golden past which embodied feelings of optimism. As Jonathan Haidt has explained, humans act on feelings first and then rationalize their actions afterwards. All political movements are ideological, and MAGA is no different. MAGA’s ideology is a return to a specific place and time when America was dominant.

This is not to say that those who are part of MAGA do so without any logical reason. It is smart to favour economic policies that protect and promote your economy over others. Only a soulless bugman globalist who values empty materialism and numbers on a spreadsheet more than the health and well-being of their fellow countrymen would object (Ben Shapiro). It is also smart (and natural) to want to live next to people who share your values/culture and who also speak your language. If your country cannot communicate effectively or agree on what the good of society is, it will never accomplish anything.

The political system will inevitably become a battleground between different ethnic groups vying for power for their own interests rather than the well-being of the state as a whole. While MAGA was never explicitly a movement for white nationalism, it did originally entice many people in that sphere to look at Trump favourably. Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor were both initially pro-Trump. Given Trump’s anti-illegal immigration rhetoric, along with comments on how H1-B visas hurt American workers, it’s fair to see why those groups originally thought Trump was their guy. The irony is that since its inception in 2015, MAGA has grown to become the most multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-sexual movement in American politics. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, male or female, straight or gay; all that matters is you love America, love the flag and hate “The demons in Davos”.

Just as Trump harkens back to a feeling of American optimism and triumph, MAGA in its current multiracial form and mindset, harkens back to the feeling many Americans felt in the 80s and 90s, specifically a feeling that America had moved past racism and racial conflict. In our current day, filled with never-ending protests from different ethnic groups claiming oppression and stoking the flames of ethnic conflict, one can understand a longing for a return to an era that produced Will Smith’s “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” and Paul McCartney’s “Ebony and Ivory”. From the perception of the “Average Joe,” the 80’s did seem seem like a better time for race relations. This, of course, was a fantasy, as anyone who observed the O.J. Simpson trial can tell you. At the end of that trail, one ethnic group openly celebrated a member of their tribe murdering a member of another tribe without facing any penalty. The true image of American race relations in the 90’s were the LA riots where different ethnic groups shot at each other in broad daylight. The idea of racial harmony that many in the MAGA movement yearn for was never really there; it was a mirage no different than one produced by desert heat. MAGA’s view of racial unity never existed, it was an illusion built up by Hollywood and other American elites and was in no way natural or even true, but we feel good about it now man.

The racial problems in America have not gone away and can still be felt today. The BLM riots of 2020 have left many American cities desolate with many small businesses destroyed, while nepotistic hiring practices from certain ethnic groups deny good high paying jobs to white men (especially in the tech sector), and every other week Jews and Palestinians are coming into conflict with one another protesting actions the American government is taking in the Middle East. MAGA has grown to include all of these ethnic groups and more. As a result, seldom is anything actually being done to address these issues. As with all organizations, problems with mass and scale impede its ability to act swiftly, but also creates indecision about what it will act on. By including so many groups, MAGA must either refuse to act on certain issues (i.e. matters of race) or choose a side and end the coalition. Choosing the latter while necessary for any real action, would kill the good times and feelings we’re experiencing right now man. This inability to act or to make important decisions will lead MAGA to accomplish nothing.

This inability and refusal to act could be seen on full display on social media, especially on Twitter. People who pointed out fair criticisms of Trump and his policies were dismissed and told to “get in the crystal”. While some of the pushback was valid — as some of those who criticized Trump did so as a means to encourage others to vote for Kamala Harris (old school Neocons) — a fair amount of it was nothing more than political cheerleading akin to rabid sports team fans. If you are going to reward politicians who make it clear they will inevitably betray you, then you are setting yourself up for failure, simple as. If you shoot down those who (correctly) point out rough waters ahead on the basis of “we’ll sort that out later, focus on right now” then you cannot act surprised when you find yourself in rough waters. If you do not plan for the future, then like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fables, you will find yourself in for a long and cold winter. To give MAGA its due, it is a fair strategy to argue that these issues can be resolved after Trump is in office, so it is necessary to get him in office first. Once the power is obtained, the house can be better organized and structured. This is an acceptable strategy, but only if MAGA follows up on its promise to sort out its house at a later date after achieving power.

This leads to the big reason MAGA will fail to accomplish anything: MAGA’s obsession with instant gratification and dopamine hits on Social Media. “Living in the now”. Social media has always been a big part of MAGA. Whether it was YouTube, twitter or 4chan instant messaging and instant news have been key to Trump’s popularity and MAGA’s growth. It is not surprising that a reality TV star would know the importance of keeping an audience engaged and on the edge of their seat, wondering what will happen next. People are always thirsting for knowledge, and to know what is happening. Multibillion-dollar 24-hour news networks like CNN have proven that. While MAGA may hate the 24-hour news media for its ludicrous slander against Trump, that hasn’t stopped them from taking a page out of CNN and traditional media’s playbook. Any journalist student in their first class will learn the importance of the headline to an article. In today’s social media landscape, the headline and the intro are specifically designed to get you to click and engage with the content. In an age where information is constant and never-ending, you have to make your work appear as important and enticing as possible in order to cut through all the noise and garner attention.

Multiple MAGA accounts engage with these practices by using words like “Breaking,” other attention-grabbing words, or emojis to get you engaged. This has always been a problem with news media. If your job is to sell a story to people, then you have to advertise to them that the story you're telling them is the most important story that they have read. This leads to many stories being blown out of proportion for the sake of sensationalism and getting sales, thus making mountains out of molehills. “You've got to know what’s happening now” In the past, this was at least limited to the daily newspapers, which only came out once or twice a day, or the evening news program on TV that would only air once a day. Even 24hrs news was limited to a few cable channels, and even then, the news was formed by a team of writers and editors, which naturally slowed the process down somewhat.

We now live in an age where content can be made by one person and can be made quickly. MAGA has fully embraced this. This has given rise to “Slop” accounts that prioritize getting content out to their audience quickly without a concern for quality. They play the same game as the legacy media they claim to despise. A quick glance at the Twitter accounts of Benny Johnson, Jack Posobeic, and Russel Brand will quickly make this clear. Despite how much they hate CNN, they have become slaves to the same methods that CNN and others employ. They have, as Oswald Spangler warned, become technic slaves just as much as the insufferable MSNBC host has.

When your job is to report the news your base wants to hear, then suddenly everything becomes a news story that your base needs to hear. As established above, MAGA is an ideological movement based on reclaiming the supposed good times of America’s past, where things seemed better — even though they weren’t — and people were optimistic. Because your base is obsessed with optimism — “good vibes” — then the story you tell must enforce those feelings lest you lose the attention, and the money that comes with it, of your audience. Stories that lead to uncomfortable conclusions — i.e. Elon Musk is in favour of increasing legal immigration and isn’t our guy — are never brought up. Everyone wants to be informed, and everyone wants to know what’s happening now, but they want to hear stories that reinforce their worldview — a longing for classic American optimism — and keep the good vibes going.

Slop is profitable because it tells the viewer exactly what they want to hear/read. It tells the reader that they are winning and their opponents are losing. It tells them that they are patriots who are fighting back against the evil globalists. It tells them that Donald Trump will save them and they can just sit back and do nothing, save vote every two years for the “based” republican. Instead of encouraging their supporters to organize and build networks or organizations that support their interests, the slop tells them that everything is fine and not to worry. It is an unearned arrogance that gives those who view it a sense of superiority over their opponents, no different from the haughty cosmopolitan progressive who thinks reading the New York Times or the Washington Post makes them better than the people in the middle American small town they left long ago.

Slop forms a narcissistic echo chamber for Red America, no different than CNN, MSNBC and the New York Times, etc., forms for Blue America. It also serves as a beacon of hope for others. While many engage with slop on a narcissistic basis to have their views validated, there is a large section of people who engage with it because they need hope. Many people can see that their communities have fallen apart and are not getting better. These people are desperate for any kind of hope. They want to believe things will get fixed. For these people, the slop tells them that they can save their country by voting for the correct candidate in a way not dissimilar to a medium who claims that they can speak to dead relatives. Both the medium and the slop merchant ghoulishly prey on people who are suffering from genuine grief and offer solutions to those people. Neither one will actually help the person in distress. But both the slop merchant and the medium walk away from the interaction with a bigger bank account. While some may view those who work in slop in this way more favourably, I have zero respect and I hold disdain for them. They are offering failed solutions to desperate people. They sell a false hope to their followers, a false hope that will eventually lead them to further despair and ruin when the politicians they voted for inevitably fail and let them down.

MAGA has morphed into a movement of people obsessed with feeling good who go online to see stories that reinforce their wanting to feel good, made by people who make money producing content that makes MAGA feel good. It is a never ending cycle of “Trump said this, Joe Rogan said this, Elon did this, the Dems are freaking, etc., etc., etc.” This worldview, the worldview of wanting to live off good feelings in the moment and not asking questions about the future or even working to build something that lasts long into the future, is the mindset of a heroin addict.

This obsession for dopamine hits will not build greatness. It is incapable of doing so as greatness requires concentration, time, delaying gratification, effort, planning and enduring hardship. To quote Sam Hyde, “I think anti-depressants are a great way to destroy your brain forever…If these were scenes from the movie of your life, you would want to edit them out.” Instead of investing the necessary time and energy to hone one's skill and craftsmanship to build something that lasts, MAGA instead rewards quick content and quick rewards.

In the 9 years of its existence, what has MAGA produced that will stand the test of time? What art has come from it that will not age like milk? The only things that come anywhere close to art have been the “New Norm” one-shot cartoon on Twitter. Even the contemporary MAGA memes have drastically gone down hill in quality. The introduction of AI “art” has completely ruined the vitality of memes produced by MAGA. The creativity and basic level of artistic ability necessary to create even a simple Wojack meme has been displaced by a deluge of soulless images created by lazy people who, instead of taking the time and effort to create memes, simply type words into a computer and outsource the beauty of creation to a soulless machine. If your movement is made up of people unwilling to create even a basic, simple meme on their own, what hope does it have to build something more substantial?

This unwillingness to build is not just limited to art and culture. MAGA has failed to establish institutions that could help produce a counter-elite to the mainstream. If anything, the mainstream has absorbed MAGA, domesticated it, completely cutting off any of its bite. When Ben Shapiro is endorsing your guy, it should come as an obvious warning that something has gone horribly wrong. Sadly, no one in MAGA is bothering to ask why or how this happened, as doing so would kill the vibes. Why ask uncomfortable questions when you can just retweet a story of Trump dunking on SJW’s?

MAGA’s inability to ask these important questions will impede it from asking other important questions. Questions such as: “How do we build up an elite who will maintain our goals long-term?” “How are we going to deal with the inherent differences of racial groups?” “Is America an ethnicity or an idea?” No one in the MAGA movement is asking these questions as it would require one to mull it over in one's mind instead of enjoying the endless good vibe cycles in that moment. It would require difficult thinking and self-reflection which cannot be accomplished by typing a prompt into ChatGPT. This is starting to sound uncomfortable. Steve Turley has a new video they need to watch and retweet that will lift their spirits.

MAGA, as it currently stands, has grown too big with too many differing voices under its tent. With so many groups under one tent in its desperate attempt to be “Not racist”, it has grown in scale to the point that its core message is meaningless and no hard questions can be asked in fear of splintering the coalition. It has grown so big that it has absorbed all the masses of America and represents the mass man, which is exactly the problem. MAGA has morphed into the mass man incarnate. The mass man doesn’t build anything special or unique, as it is too busy fulfilling its base desires, as can be seen in the social media and the infinite hype cycle vibe session they all live in. The mass man does not ask big, important questions, as he is incapable of understanding these concepts. The mass man simply exists to mindlessly consume until his time on this earth ends. As I often say on Twitter, MAGA is a spiritually bankrupt movement with no high civilizational goals or ideals. It is simply a desire to return to the 90’s — as Tucker Carlson has openly expressed is his political end goal — with good action movies and girls with big tits — Amber Rose who organized the LA slut walk opened the 2024 Republican convention praising Trump. Even if it wins, it will accomplish nothing as the worldview it harkens to is what led us to our current moment in the first place. It is simply kicking the can down the road 30 years rather than putting it in the trash. A great society plants the seeds of trees whose shade they themselves will never enjoy, not one that ignores problems for instant gratification. The society that lives for the moment instead of the future will have no future. This is the fate of MAGA. MAGA will fail to accomplish anything.

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This essay originally ended here when I wrote it on Dec 23rd 2024. Events have transpired over the past few days however, that deserve mention.

On December 23rd 2024, Donald Trump appointed Sriram Krishnan to his cabinet as Senior Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence (AI). Laura Loomer was quick to point out that Sriram has advocated for the removal of green card restrictions/caps in the past. Venture Capitalist David Sacks who has also been appointed to the Trump administration as a bitcoin czar (and is himself an immigrant from South Africa) called the attacks on Sriram “crude, and not in the holiday spirit.” Sacks went further on Dec 24 clarifying Sriram’s problem with the H1-B visa program ( a program that allows American companies to bring in and sponsor foreign workers to work for them) is that it discriminates against Indians who must wait 11 years as opposed to other countries who don’t and wishes to reform the program to reward “merit”. On Dec 25th (Christmas day) Elon agreed with Sacks comments saying that the Visa program helps to keep America competitive on the world stage. If successful, this plan has the potential to make it easier for American companies to hire foreign workers. This of course would lead to higher levels of immigration, leading to inevitable wage stagnation at best and wage decrease at worse due to higher competition in the labour market. When MAGA complained Elon called them insufferable fools and retards telling them to “Take a step back and FUCK yourself in the face, I will go to war over this”. Vivek Ramaswamy who was a vocal and early supporter of Trump early on in the 2024 election, chimed in, chastising American culture for celebrating mediocrity and not greatness. He argued the reason non white immigrants are over repersented in high ranking postions is not due to DEI programs (despite acknowledging those programs existance and campaigning against them months prior) or nepotistic hiring practices (someting Vivek has personally done at his previous pharmaceutical company hiring Indians in his own family over whites) but due to Non white immigrants simply working harder than Native born white Americans.

Elon and Vivek are set to launch the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in Jan 2025 once Trump is sworn in. This department would cut “inefficient” government spending and cut government departments deemed “unnecessary” You don’t need to be Sherlock Homes to think Elon and Vivek will use their new positions to cut certain government regulations that harm the bottom lines of their companies at the expense of Americans well-being. Elon could gut motor vehicle safety regulations, making it easier and faster to get new Tesla cars to market. Vivek could remove necessary testing for pharmaceutical drugs, making it easier for drugs to reach the market (as he did in the past with his drug that supposedly cured alzheimers that failed to pass phase 2 testing). This, in addition to the rising presence of Silicon Valley tech bros in Trump’s administration, who wish to make it easier to hire cheap foreign workers instead of Americans. MAGA has loudly rejected this message and has bombarded Musk, Vivek and other techbros with social media posts. As stated above, Musk has not taken the criticism well and has lashed out harshly, far more harshly than anytime in the past when the left went after him. He has even gone so far as to remove the verification checkmarks from accounts that ratioed him on Twitter and change the algorithm to make posts that disagree with certain verified accounts harder to see. Social media censorship is back on the menu lads. Some voices, such as Steve Bannon and Jack Posobeic have joined in the pushback to Musk and Vivek while many other figures in MAGA have been silent. On Dec 28th at 9:19PM EST Musk promised to increase the yearly salary of H1B visas holders drastically, in addition to a yearly tax for companies that use H1B visas. This would significantly raise the cost of hiring foreign workers as opposed to American workers, making it economically unviable for companies to hire foreign workers en masse as opposed to American workers. As I type this on Dec 29 2024 neither Trump nor JD Vance have publicly commented on the situation.

This fight between MAGA and the tech bros was inevitable. As mentioned in my original essay, MAGA has formed into a massive tent that includes many groups, all of whom have different ideas and goals. This big tent has already started to fracture, and Trump has yet to even take office. My prediction that MAGA would fail to address inner-party issues after the election seems to have been wrong. For the moment, it appears the tech bros are in retreat, with Musk making public concessions to the core MAGA base. The original 2016 core MAGA base has gained a victory I did not expect. Time will tell if they can keep the momentum up. The issue of immigration still remains. Far too many important people in MAGA were silent during this event. Whether the silence was due to choosing not to rock the boat and to keep the good vibes going (as is the norm with them) or due to this issue occurring during a time of the year when many opt to take a break from the news to enjoy with family (Christmas to New Years) remains to be scene. I still doubt MAGA will accomplish anything, but the past few days have proven that even the smartest and most powerful people can be proven wrong and forced to take an L.