'Fetish for hierarchy': Ex-GOP strategist says MAGA text leak revealed 'loyalty oath'
A political strategist says that the leaked GOP chat filled with racist jokes and rape fantasies reveals a "fetish for hierarchy" and "loyalty oath."
Rick Wilson outlines how the Telegram chats ripped off the mask on MAGA in a new Substack essay Wednesday titled "Meet the Master Race."
"If you’ve followed the Trump movement, you’ve seen this movie a hundred times," Wilson writes. "He didn’t invent authoritarian fandom and racial conspiracy culture; he licensed it, scaled it, made it hot. He made it glamorous to be cruel. He turned the taboo into a loyalty oath. The core lesson to aspiring strivers was simple: say the thing decent people won’t say, then win because what you said shocked and horrified the normies. The cruelty signals membership; the shamelessness proves it."
MAGA — the movement and people infatuated by it — fell for this language and promise, he explains.
"The MAGA operating system rewards cruelty, honors shamelessness, and elevates performative transgression as a test of in-group loyalty," he writes. "If you want to show you’re 'real,' you say the unsayable, and then, crucially, refuse to be shamed when normal people recoil. The goal isn’t persuasion; it’s domination, ritualized through humiliation."
Wilson describes the "private chat populated by state and national elite Young Republican leaders, men and women in their 20s and 30s already working in politics, already drawing government paychecks, already courting donors and staffing offices, casually swapping 'I love Hitler' riffs, Holocaust gags, rape 'jokes,' and racist slurs like they’re passing canapé trays at a fundraiser."
He also dives into why this culture is "marinating in bile."
"Because the party’s incentive structure pays out to the worst actors. The last decade taught ambitious young Republicans that if they shock the normies and RINOs, punch down, and never apologize, there’s a future in it," Wilson writes.
And, "the chat wasn’t an aberration. It was a window," he explains, adding that "it’s an endless parade of soft, doughy tough guys who cosplay as master race conquerors while wheezing after a walk to the break room. The spirit may be willing, but the core is… under construction."
That's the reality, he adds.
"That gap is a perfect bridge between the MAGA fantasy of power and the MAGA reality of mediocrity, and it’s precisely why the rhetoric turns so venomous. When you can’t command respect, you learn to demand submission. When haven’t seen your own junk in a decade past the jiggling wall of FUPA…well, you get more Hitlery," the analyst wrote. When you can’t carry yourself like a leader, you rehearse cruelty as a shortcut to authority. The adoration of Hitler isn’t an intellectual position; it’s a fetish for hierarchy that flatters their egos, a dream that even the obese Hermann Göring could have a flattering uniform. And given that none of these men has ever once either taken or delivered a punch, you know it’s their dream that someone else’s boot will do the stomping while they collect the lanyards and job titles."