Six reasons MAGAs now love cancel culture
Hold space to recognize their agency, identity, and lived experience
Jeffrey Denny
As President Donald Trump wields supreme censorship power, over 99% of his MAGA voters approve because “it’s happening to other Americans and the media and speech I hate,” according to a new ABC News poll.
The poll also found that nearly all MAGAs approved of Trump’s plan to use the government to cancel speech the administration deems “verboten.”
As top aide Stephen Miller outlined the plan in his eulogy of slain free-speech advocate Charlie Kirk, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.”
As a liberal who fears Trump, I agree that the mainstream media fails to treat the president with the respect he’s earned. And I’m irked that my media too often depicts MAGAs who empower and guide Trump as poor, ignorant, orange Kool-Aid-guzzling fools for backing a fascist autocrat and destroying America and democracy at their own peril.
MAGAs, indeed, have at least six good reasons for canceling speech they don’t appreciate:
1. Traumatized by jokes
It’s hilarious when Fox late-night comedian Greg Gutfeld, a U.C. Berkeley grad who reportedly takes home $7-14 million a year and owns a $10 million Soho Manhattan loft and an upstate NY lake house, mocks poor, marginalized people whom Jesus loves the most. All to delight his MAGA audience that claims to love Jesus the most.
But it’s emotionally devastating when ABC late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel has the toxic gall to mock MAGAs for spreading hate and sending death threats against fellow Americans they disagree with under the cowardly veil of anonymity. Hey! MAGAs have feelings, too!
2. Turnabout is fair play
It’s “consequence culture,” stupid. The liberal media, controlled by a cabal of socialist billionaires, canceled innocent bigots for exercising their Constitutional right to speak their hate without anyone calling them out. MAGAs now are merely “trumping” the libs by censoring biglier.
3. Revenge and retribution are reparation
DEI has enslaved, marginalized, and held back white Americans for nearly five years since George Floyd, for over 60 years if you count the Civil Rights Act, and for over 160 years if you count emancipation.
As liberals denied MAGAs the reparations they deserve, it’s no wonder they’re crying, “We shall overcome!” From J6 at the U.S. Capitol to the 101st Chairborne Division of online chicken hawks, from the Barcaloungers to the basements across Real America, MAGAs are fighting for their white birthright privilege.
4. “Woke” is hate
Every time you turn around, some radical leftist Antifa lunatic is schooling MAGAs to “do the work” and “check their privilege” to “decenter themselves” and “hold space” for the “trauma-informed” and “center marginalized voices” to express “allyship” and honor the “identity,” “agency,” “intersectionality” and “lived experience” of BIPOCs, AAPIs, LGBTQs, and other DEI people.
This exclusionary lingo that only progressive SJWs understand marginalizes MAGAs who didn’t occupy an Ivy League university over the latest social justice outrage.
5. Liberal schools fail to teach civics
Don’t blame MAGAs for canceling free speech that challenges their president. Public schools run by liberal America-haters never taught them that the Constitution prevents U.S. presidents from ruling like dictators who, like progressive students at elite colleges, can’t abide dissent.
Unlike immigrants who study the American system to qualify for citizenship, native-born MAGAs shouldn’t be expected to understand liberal Constitutional buzzwords like “rule of law,” “separation of powers,” “checks and balances,” and “limits on executive power.”
6. Only Trump tells the God’s truth
When the internet rapture proved to be a hoax like climate change, the Trump Media and His devout MAGA Christians who follow Trump more than Jesus said, “Whew — dodged a bullet! Like a school kid with a teacher who shot the shooter!”
With God as their witness, MAGAs would never say Trump is truthful if it weren’t true. Whatever he cancels needs canceling.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
