Amanda Marcotte, Salon

After President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on Tuesday, it was generally agreed across the media that Joe from Scranton had won the evening by masterfully baiting Republicans into showing their asses. The second star of the night, however, was also indisputable: The brillantly white wool coat with an alpaca fur trim that had the misfortune of being draped over the body of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Look, it was a lovely coat, but its proximity to such a repulsive person created an unmistakeable air of comic book supervillainy. It served as a stark reminder that, despite her classless and illiterate demeanor, Greene is actually a wealthy heiress who spent her pre-political life as a woman of leisure. She got compared to a Stephen King monster, a gangster's wife in a mob movie, and, of course, a campy Disney villain:

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Alas, even though Greene made the unusual choice of wearing a coat inside, all too many folks assumed she must not know how she looked. "Why is she wearing a white fur coat to the State of the Union address?" Seth Meyers asked on his late night comedy show. He went on to compare her to "a Long Island dance mom about to get her final warning."

The MAGA movement is about glorying in their own self-image as political scoundrels.

But, of course, it's wiser to assume that Greene knew exactly how she looked. Moreover, her ridiculously out-of-place outfit did exactly what it was meant to do: Get her photo on the front of every newspaper and website imaginable. Also intentional: Drawing scorn from people like Meyers, which she can then repackage as "proof" that she's a victim of the "coastal elite," defined not by money, which she has plenty of, but the fact that they know the difference between the Nazi police and cold tomato soup. Above all else, she wanted to look the part of the villain. Far from being people who are unaware they're the baddies, the MAGA movement is about glorying in their own self-image as political scoundrels.

Greene is far from the only one. Despite their hatred of actual drag queens, the modern GOP has a robust interest in using costumes to create fantasy versions of themselves — and almost always, that fantasy is of someone who is a proud scalawag. The current trend of Republicans dressing like Batman villains can be traced back to dirty trickster and shameless Nixon fan Roger Stone. For instance, he dressed like the antagonist of a Charles Dickens novel for Donald Trump's inauguration.

Trump is more married to his badly fitting suits than he ever has been to one of his wives. However, the White House staff understood the value of sinister costuming choices and used the body of Melania Trump to often send a message of cackling evil.

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Since then, the Bond villain method of self-expression has started to really spread through the GOP. Rep. George Santos of New York has a background as a drag queen, but the current fantasy he's serving is "malevolent prep school student in an 80s movie." (Are those even prescription glasses?) After successfully evading an FBI investigation for sex trafficking of minors, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida's hair only seemed to grow taller, turning him into a dead ringer for Cesar Romero's version of The Joker. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, whose fabricated background is drawing Santos comparisons, favors dramatic makeup paired with shiny menswear that looks very much like a cheap knockoff of Annie Lennox's dominatrix stylings in the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" video.

If this was "RuPaul's Drag Race" and the category was "Sinister Visions," most of these folks would be strong competitors. But they are politicians in D.C., a town where a lot of people deliberately dress terribly so that the voters keep buying the humble-servant-of-the-people routine. For Republicans, especially, looking too stylish has always been a dangerous proposition. Vanity is associated with femininity, and "feminine" is the worst thing you can be in GOP land. Even the women tend to dress more like church ladies than people with real money (which they usually are), lest someone accuse them of having airs.

More Republicans look the part of cartoon villains because that's what they've turned themselves into.

But MAGA is not interested in the traditional false humility of American politicians. It's a movement dedicated to the darkest desires of American right-wingers. It's about dispensing entirely with pretensions of morality and giving themselves permission to be proud villains. Trump, of course, started things by bragging about how good he is at getting away with crime, from sexual assault to tax fraud. He was backed by an online army of trolls with Pepe-the-frog avatars, who relished their newfound freedom to use politics as cover to harass and abuse people.

By the time the pandemic rolled around, Republicans were so caught up in their Trump-era self-image as vainglorious evildoers that they didn't even hesitate to reject masks, vaccines, or any measures to save human lives. Basic decency has been redefined as being "woke." People like Kyle Rittenhouse and Alex Jones are held up as heroes. One of their most popular pundits is a guy who calls himself "Cat Turd." More Republicans look the part of cartoon villains because that's what they've turned themselves into.

To a certain degree, I get it. Playing the part of the villain can be thrilling. I've long been a fan of goth and punk fashion, both of which get their glamour through transgression. The bad guys in movies are often way more fun than the heroes, from Ursula in "The Little Mermaid" to the characters in pretty much every Martin Scorcese film. The Satanic imagery in Sam Smith and Kim Petras's Grammys performance drew fake outrage from the right, but most people watching it had a good time with the playful blasphemies. Even a shiny good girl like Taylor Swift likes to play at being bad occasionally.

The problem with Republicans, of course, is they aren't actually playing. Their goals are straight evil, from forced childbirth to turning away political refugees to slashing the retirement benefits of seniors to decimating health care. What's shifted in the past few years is a willingness of GOP leaders to wink knowingly about the immorality of their own views. Sure, there's still plenty of effort put into pretending that they want to do heinous things for good reasons. So we still have to sit through disingenuous conservatives feigning "pro-life" reasons for abortion bans, for instance. But, led by shameless criminals like Trump, there's just a lot more trollish approach on the right, one that treats evil like it's just an impish good time. Once "triggering the liberals" became the main political goal, gleeful wickedness became inevitable. Of course, many of them want the costuming to match their self-congratulatory attitude about being the worst.

After President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on Tuesday, it was generally agreed across the media that Joe from Scranton had won the evening by masterfully baiting Republicans into showing their asses. The second star of the night, however, was also indisputable: The brillantly white wool coat with an alpaca fur trim that had the misfortune of being draped over the body of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.

Look, it was a lovely coat, but its proximity to such a repulsive person created an unmistakeable air of comic book supervillainy. It served as a stark reminder that, despite her classless and illiterate demeanor, Greene is actually a wealthy heiress who spent her pre-political life as a woman of leisure. She got compared to a Stephen King monster, a gangster's wife in a mob movie, and, of course, a campy Disney villain.

Alas, even though Greene made the unusual choice of wearing a coat inside, all too many folks assumed she must not know how she looked. "Why is she wearing a white fur coat to the State of the Union address?" Seth Meyers asked on his late night comedy show. He went on to compare her to "a Long Island dance mom about to get her final warning."

But, of course, it's wiser to assume that Greene knew exactly how she looked. Moreover, her ridiculously out-of-place outfit did exactly what it was meant to do: Get her photo on the front of every newspaper and website imaginable. Also intentional: Drawing scorn from people like Meyers, which she can then repackage as "proof" that she's a victim of the "coastal elite," defined not by money, which she has plenty of, but the fact that they know the difference between the Nazi police and cold tomato soup. Above all else, she wanted to look the part of the villain. Far from being people who are unaware they're the baddies, the MAGA movement is about glorying in their own self-image as political scoundrels.

Greene is far from the only one. Despite their hatred of actual drag queens, the modern GOP has a robust interest in using costumes to create fantasy versions of themselves — and almost always, that fantasy is of someone who is a proud scalawag. The current trend of Republicans dressing like Batman villains can be traced back to dirty trickster and shameless Nixon fan Roger Stone. For instance, he dressed like the antagonist of a Charles Dickens novel for Donald Trump's inauguration.

Trump is more married to his badly fitting suits than he ever has been to one of his wives. However, the White House staff understood the value of sinister costuming choices and used the body of Melania Trump to often send a message of cackling evil.

Since then, the Bond villain method of self-expression has started to really spread through the GOP. Rep. George Santos of New York has a background as a drag queen, but the current fantasy he's serving is "malevolent prep school student in an 80s movie." (Are those even prescription glasses?) After successfully evading an FBI investigation for sex trafficking of minors, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida's hair only seemed to grow taller, turning him into a dead ringer for Cesar Romero's version of The Joker. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, whose fabricated background is drawing Santos comparisons, favors dramatic makeup paired with shiny menswear that looks very much like a cheap knockoff of Annie Lennox's dominatrix stylings in the "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" video.

If this was "RuPaul's Drag Race" and the category was "Sinister Visions," most of these folks would be strong competitors. But they are politicians in D.C., a town where a lot of people deliberately dress terribly so that the voters keep buying the humble-servant-of-the-people routine. For Republicans, especially, looking too stylish has always been a dangerous proposition. Vanity is associated with femininity, and "feminine" is the worst thing you can be in GOP land. Even the women tend to dress more like church ladies than people with real money (which they usually are), lest someone accuse them of having airs.

But MAGA is not interested in the traditional false humility of American politicians. It's a movement dedicated to the darkest desires of American right-wingers. It's about dispensing entirely with pretensions of morality and giving themselves permission to be proud villains. Trump, of course, started things by bragging about how good he is at getting away with crime, from sexual assault to tax fraud. He was backed by an online army of trolls with Pepe-the-frog avatars, who relished their newfound freedom to use politics as cover to harass and abuse people.

By the time the pandemic rolled around, Republicans were so caught up in their Trump-era self-image as vainglorious evildoers that they didn't even hesitate to reject masks, vaccines, or any measures to save human lives. Basic decency has been redefined as being "woke." People like Kyle Rittenhouse and Alex Jones are held up as heroes. One of their most popular pundits is a guy who calls himself "Cat Turd." More Republicans look the part of cartoon villains because that's what they've turned themselves into.

To a certain degree, I get it. Playing the part of the villain can be thrilling. I've long been a fan of goth and punk fashion, both of which get their glamour through transgression. The bad guys in movies are often way more fun than the heroes, from Ursula in "The Little Mermaid" to the characters in pretty much every Martin Scorcese film. The Satanic imagery in Sam Smith and Kim Petras's Grammys performance drew fake outrage from the right, but most people watching it had a good time with the playful blasphemies. Even a shiny good girl like Taylor Swift likes to play at being bad occasionally.

The problem with Republicans, of course, is they aren't actually playing. Their goals are straight evil, from forced childbirth to turning away political refugees to slashing the retirement benefits of seniors to decimating health care. What's shifted in the past few years is a willingness of GOP leaders to wink knowingly about the immorality of their own views. Sure, there's still plenty of effort put into pretending that they want to do heinous things for good reasons. So we still have to sit through disingenuous conservatives feigning "pro-life" reasons for abortion bans, for instance. But, led by shameless criminals like Trump, there's just a lot more trollish approach on the right, one that treats evil like it's just an impish good time. Once "triggering the liberals" became the main political goal, gleeful wickedness became inevitable. Of course, many of them want the costuming to match their self-congratulatory attitude about being the worst.

After being forced into submission by people like Donald Trump and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., one would think Speaker Kevin McCarthy would have downgraded his own self-assessment as a master negotiator. But no, ever since he finally secured his seat after 15 humiliating rounds of his own caucus voting against him, McCarthy has forged ahead with what he clearly thinks is a genius plan to trick President Joe Biden into destroying Social Security and Medicare for him: Mobster tactics.

As I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, McCarthy's strategy seems to be to threaten to force the U.S. into debt default and simply let Biden intuit the ransom McCarthy would like paid, i.e. the destruction of Social Security and Medicare. That McCarthy really thought this would work suggests that he is not faking his very public admiration for Trump, who loves to use insinuation to communicate his desires that, usually for legal liability reasons, he can't speak out loud. McCarthy, not known to anyone to be a bright man, appears to have really thought he could somehow trick Biden into not just decimating these long-standing health care and retirement programs, but that he could do so in a way to force Democrats to take the fall.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy's "clever" negotiation style of being silent about his demands backfired spectacularly.

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McCarthy allowed Biden the space during his State of the Union address to show the public that Republicans are gunning for these popular programs by provoking a defensive denial of yelling and heckling from Republicans that is so over-the-top that it ended up confirming the accusation. Now McCarthy is having to deal with the very thing he was trying to avoid: A news cycle dominated by talk about how Republicans want to steal away the money in accounts workers spend their lives paying into as security when they retire.

Just how badly did McCarthy's gambit backfire? So badly that even Republican-friendly outlets like Axios and Politico ran with stories about the GOP's secret yearnings to end Social Security and Medicare. Axios described Biden as "baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security." The New York Times, which is usually overly credulous to Republican talking points, used similar language. Here's how the Washington Post described the moment:

The president responded by professing surprise that they had changed their position and now liked those programs, saying, "I enjoy conversion." Adding that he would veto any effort to cut Social Security and Medicare, he added wryly, "But apparently it's not going to be a problem."

You don't "bait" people into saying something if they wanted to say it. Implicit throughout the press coverage is that the GOP designs on Social Security and Medicare are well-known. As Tara Golshan at Vanity Fair pointed out in a lengthy Twitter thread, Republican attacks on Social Security and Medicare aren't nearly as well-disguised as they seem to think they are:

It's once again proof that Republicans think voters are extremely stupid.

The euphemisms that Republicans use aren't nearly as ingenious as they think.

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Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., offered a hilariously typical example of how bad Republicans are at hiding their intentions. In trying to deny that the plan is to destroy Social Security and Medicare, he ended up tweeting confirmation that this is exactly what would happen:

Despite his flailing denials, it's been clear from the moment that Scott first released his 11-point plan that the main purpose of the "sunset" provision was so that Social Security and Medicare would expire, and a GOP-controlled Congress would just never get around to voting to keep it around. It's once again proof that Republicans think voters are extremely stupid. Scott really does seem to think that if Republicans just kill these programs passively instead of taking a vote against them, people wouldn't notice or blame the GOP. In reality, of course, people tend to notice when their checks stop showing up or their doctor won't see them anymore. And contrary to the fantasies of McCarthy and Scott, voters are not confused about what party, exactly, wants to slash these programs. As Heather "Digby" Parton reminded us at Salon recently, "Republicans have been trying to do away with these vital programs from the moment they were introduced."

The attempts to disguise their desires have grown more convoluted over the decades, of course. During the George W. Bush administration, for instance, Republicans thought they could smuggle Social Security destruction past voters by calling it "privatization." They soon learned that voters, who tend to be skeptical of politicians already, saw directly through that ruse. Democrats won the 2006 midterms by healthy margins. But the Republican dream that they can fool the public with flimsy code words never dies. Former Vice President Mike Pence, also never mistaken for the sharpest tool, has been out there putting the final nail in his presidential aspirations by talking up Social Security "privatization."

Swing voters will reward Republicans for their culture war nonsense up until the point where Republicans cause massive damage.

Being generous to Republicans for a moment, there is one reason for them to think a majority of Americans are stupid: They do keep voting for Republicans. Republicans, in fact, won more voters in 2022 than Democrats. That's hard evidence right there that a majority of Americans are easily snowed into voting against their own interests.

Those numbers are disappointing reminders that voters could definitely be smarter, of course, but it's not the slam dunk evidence of American imbecility that Republican politicians seem to think it is. The likelier explanation is that voters understand that Democrats will protect them from Republican efforts to decimate Medicare and Social Security. Perversely, that understanding freed some people up to vote GOP as a means to exercise their racist and sexist resentments, secure in the knowledge that Biden is in the White House to shield them from the worst consequences of electing a bunch of right-wing radicals.

We've seen this time and again: Swing voters will reward Republicans for their culture war nonsense up until the point where Republicans cause massive damage. Then they'll run back to Democrats, to fish the country out of the gutter. We saw this in 2008 when voters elected Barack Obama to bail them out of the disastrous Bush presidency. We saw it again in 2020 when Biden was brought in to clean up for Trump. Voters are irrational at times and prone to complacency — but they aren't as dumb as Republicans assume.

Biden is making a safe bet for his re-election: Remind voters that he's the only thing standing between them and Republicans ending these fundamental social safety net programs. That's why the Republican Party increasingly opposes democracy and is even embracing fascism. If they have to rely on democratic systems, their multi-generational scheme to finally end Social Security and Medicare will likely never come to fruition.

As I explained in the Standing Room Only newsletter, McCarthy's strategy seems to be to threaten to force the U.S. into debt default and simply let Biden intuit the ransom McCarthy would like paid, i.e. the destruction of Social Security and Medicare. That McCarthy really thought this would work suggests that he is not faking his very public admiration for Trump, who loves to use insinuation to communicate his desires that, usually for legal liability reasons, he can't speak out loud. McCarthy, not known to anyone to be a bright man, appears to have really thought he could somehow trick Biden into not just decimating these long-standing health care and retirement programs, but that he could do so in a way to force Democrats to take the fall.

Unsurprisingly, McCarthy's "clever" negotiation style of being silent about his demands backfired spectacularly.

McCarthy allowed Biden the space during his State of the Union address to show the public that Republicans are gunning for these popular programs by provoking a defensive denial of yelling and heckling from Republicans that is so over-the-top that it ended up confirming the accusation. Now McCarthy is having to deal with the very thing he was trying to avoid: A news cycle dominated by talk about how Republicans want to steal away the money in accounts workers spend their lives paying into as security when they retire.

Just how badly did McCarthy's gambit backfire? So badly that even Republican-friendly outlets like Axios and Politico ran with stories about the GOP's secret yearnings to end Social Security and Medicare. Axios described Biden as "baiting Republicans to agree with his push to protect Medicare and Social Security." The New York Times, which is usually overly credulous to Republican talking points, used similar language. Here's how the Washington Post described the moment:

The president responded by professing surprise that they had changed their position and now liked those programs, saying, "I enjoy conversion." Adding that he would veto any effort to cut Social Security and Medicare, he added wryly, "But apparently it's not going to be a problem."

You don't "bait" people into saying something if they wanted to say it. Implicit throughout the press coverage is that the GOP designs on Social Security and Medicare are well-known. As Tara Golshan at Vanity Fair pointed out in a lengthy Twitter thread, Republican attacks on Social Security and Medicare aren't nearly as well-disguised as they seem to think they are:

It's once again proof that Republicans think voters are extremely stupid.

The euphemisms that Republicans use aren't nearly as ingenious as they think.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., offered a hilariously typical example of how bad Republicans are at hiding their intentions. In trying to deny that the plan is to destroy Social Security and Medicare, he ended up tweeting confirmation that this is exactly what would happen:

Despite his flailing denials, it's been clear from the moment that Scott first released his 11-point plan that the main purpose of the "sunset" provision was so that Social Security and Medicare would expire, and a GOP-controlled Congress would just never get around to voting to keep it around. It's once again proof that Republicans think voters are extremely stupid. Scott really does seem to think that if Republicans just kill these programs passively instead of taking a vote against them, people wouldn't notice or blame the GOP. In reality, of course, people tend to notice when their checks stop showing up or their doctor won't see them anymore. And contrary to the fantasies of McCarthy and Scott, voters are not confused about what party, exactly, wants to slash these programs. As Heather "Digby" Parton reminded us at Salon recently, "Republicans have been trying to do away with these vital programs from the moment they were introduced."

The attempts to disguise their desires have grown more convoluted over the decades, of course. During the George W. Bush administration, for instance, Republicans thought they could smuggle Social Security destruction past voters by calling it "privatization." They soon learned that voters, who tend to be skeptical of politicians already, saw directly through that ruse. Democrats won the 2006 midterms by healthy margins. But the Republican dream that they can fool the public with flimsy code words never dies. Former Vice President Mike Pence, also never mistaken for the sharpest tool, has been out there putting the final nail in his presidential aspirations by talking up Social Security "privatization."

Swing voters will reward Republicans for their culture war nonsense up until the point where Republicans cause massive damage.

Being generous to Republicans for a moment, there is one reason for them to think a majority of Americans are stupid: They do keep voting for Republicans. Republicans, in fact, won more voters in 2022 than Democrats. That's hard evidence right there that a majority of Americans are easily snowed into voting against their own interests.

Those numbers are disappointing reminders that voters could definitely be smarter, of course, but it's not the slam dunk evidence of American imbecility that Republican politicians seem to think it is. The likelier explanation is that voters understand that Democrats will protect them from Republican efforts to decimate Medicare and Social Security. Perversely, that understanding freed some people up to vote GOP as a means to exercise their racist and sexist resentments, secure in the knowledge that Biden is in the White House to shield them from the worst consequences of electing a bunch of right-wing radicals.

We've seen this time and again: Swing voters will reward Republicans for their culture war nonsense up until the point where Republicans cause massive damage. Then they'll run back to Democrats, to fish the country out of the gutter. We saw this in 2008 when voters elected Barack Obama to bail them out of the disastrous Bush presidency. We saw it again in 2020 when Biden was brought in to clean up for Trump. Voters are irrational at times and prone to complacency — but they aren't as dumb as Republicans assume.

Biden is making a safe bet for his re-election: Remind voters that he's the only thing standing between them and Republicans ending these fundamental social safety net programs. That's why the Republican Party increasingly opposes democracy and is even embracing fascism. If they have to rely on democratic systems, their multi-generational scheme to finally end Social Security and Medicare will likely never come to fruition.

Oh yeah, and conservatives absolutely lost their minds in what may or may not be a sincere panic over a "Satanic ritual" performed by Sam Smith and Kim Petras, which was, in reality, a heavily stagecrafted performance of their hit song "Unholy."

Perhaps I'm overly cynical, but when people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., tweet stuff like, "The Grammy's featured Sam Smith's demonic performance and was sponsored by Pfizer," I'm disinclined to think the motivation is literal fear of the Prince of Darkness. After all, she made sure to include a grammatical mistake to maximize retweets and dunks from liberals. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex., was definitely trolling in bad faith when he tweeted, "This…is…evil," while amplifying some right-wing pundit disingenuously claiming that "demons are teaching your kids to worship Satan." (If only it was incest porn, Cruz would be popping a "like" on it instead.) That said, it was funny watching Daily Wire host Matt Walsh screeching about how "leftism is Satanism," before going down a weird rabbit hole about "theological Satanism" and his totally imaginary taxonomy of Satanism.

As an attention-getting device, performative panic about Satan is always a winner.

As demonstrated by the hysterics over the Grammies, religious right leaders think they have an angle that will make them popular again: Playing the victim.

The Satanic panickers were rewarded this time with lots of reposting and amplification, though mostly from people laughing at these fools. (Still, in the right's trolling economy, negative attention is a valued asset.) But the whole display can't be written off only as a bunch of attention whores grabbing anything they can for engagement. For one thing, as is generally the case with any kind of Satanic panic, it's a cover for a deeper and more sinister agenda — in this case, stirring up right-wing hatred towards trans and nonbinary people like Petras and Smith. Even more, Republicans are going all out on this Satan nonsense as part of a larger and more serious effort by the religious right to make themselves relevant again.

Yep, the fundamentalists seem to think now is their chance to revive not just their political but their cultural power. They seem to believe they can revive their halcyon days of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush years when their magical thinking about everything from creationism to Satanic messages in heavy metal music had real cultural sway.

Make no mistake: In many ways, the Christian right is as powerful as they ever were, having captured both the Republican Party and much of the federal judiciary. The overturn of Roe v. Wade last June and the onslaught of draconian abortion bans at the state level is a testament to how decades of organizing gave the Christian right a level of political power far beyond their numbers in the larger American population.

Republicans are going all out on this Satan nonsense as part of a larger and more serious effort by the religious right to make themselves relevant again.

Still, the Roe overturn has also exposed a very real weakness in the religious right's future grip on power: Most Americans hate them.

In election after election, voters turn out — even in deep red states — to vote down abortion bans. Post-election data shows that a major reason Republicans underperformed expectations in the midterms is their association with religious right. Most Americans support reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. They oppose the religion-driven efforts to ban books in school. It's arguable that one major reason Donald Trump won the 2016 election is that his personal lack of interest in Christianity lulled some voters into thinking he wouldn't be a big friend to fundamentalists. Instead, he gave the Christian right everything they wanted, including three Supreme Court judges. He then went on to lose the 2020 election.

As demonstrated by the hysterics over the Grammy's, however, religious right leaders think they have an angle that will make them popular again: Playing the victim. So they increasingly rely on false claims that having to live in the country with people who aren't like them makes conservative Christians an oppressed minority. The war on education being led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., for example, heavily relies on this narrative. He and his supporters routinely frame modern books as a direct assault on their supposed right to live in a world unexposed to people or ideas they don't like. The right's protest movement against drag shows is more of the same, an attempt to flip the script and portray LGBTQ people as somehow an "invasive" force harming Christian conservatives.

In 2018, the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) tried this "Christians are the real victims" argument before the Supreme Court, in Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The ADF argued that a baker who broke the law by refusing service to a gay couple was the "real" victim of discrimination, but failed to sway the court's majority. Now with three Trump appointees on the Supreme Court, they are trying again with a similar case arguing that "religious freedom" is under attack by anti-discrimination legislation. This time, the more conservative tilt to the court likely means they'll get a legal victory — but it certainly doesn't mean the plaintiffs will be seen as anything but mean-spirited homophobes by the public.

This whole "Christian conservatives are the real victims" argument is also about to get a big boost from House Republicans. Under the leadership of Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, the House Judiciary Committee plans to use subpoena power to push a conspiracy theory accusing the Joe Biden administration of "persecuting" conservative Christians. The main strategy will be amplifying false accusations that the Justice Department has been "spying" on Christian right activists who are pushing a pro-censorship agenda in schools.

As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post argues, however, this "woe is us" stance is unlikely to work as well as Christian conservatives hope. It's not just that most Americans reject the notion that federal agencies are biased against conservatives, he argues. It's that most people are repulsed by the "toxic atmosphere of threats and violence toward educators" that is being fueled by the religious right's book banning campaign. So Sargent recommends that Democrats lean into this, using Jordan's antics to remind voters of why they reject the war on teachers and librarians.

He is right. While the religious right had a surge of popularity during the George W. Bush years — remember the "purity ring" trend? — it's been in a dramatic decline for the past decade and a half. White Christians are now a minority of Americans, in no small part because right-wing politics and anti-science attitudes caused huge numbers of younger people to give up on organized religion entirely. Christian conservatives cry about how they're so oppressed, but it's unlikely to fool anyone. Abortion bans and protests against drag shows are just a reminder that the Christian right is the same as it always was: A bunch of busybodies and prudes who want to impose their sexual hang-ups on the rest of us.

The Grammy's tantrum is more of the same. Republicans can yell about Satan until they're red in the face, but all most people will hear is a bunch of jerks who using religion as a cover to steal your joy. Uptight prigs have never been less popular, and whining will not change that for the Christian right.

It's a truth that should be self-evident: If you are emasculated by a balloon, you weren't so tough to begin with. Last week, a balloon that U.S. officials believe to be a Chinese surveillance device was spotted floating over Montana, likely to take pictures of military assets. In the grown-up world where President Joe Biden and Democrats live, this was a situation that called for a thoughtful, careful response. While displeased with the predicament, adults recognized that freaking out was not the answer. Instead, they waited until the balloon wasn't a direct threat to people and property underneath and shot it down over the ocean.

Meanwhile, Republicans — many in elected office who could be doing something useful with their time — saw the Chinese balloon as an opportunity for cringeworthy tough guy cosplay. Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was just one of many, many Republicans who spent the Days of the Chinese Balloon ping-ponging between performative hysterics and childish games of dress-up where they pretended they were somehow going to shoot the balloon down.

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Truly, it's an insult to call this "cosplay." People who dress up like Thor at a comic book convention don't actually imagine someone mistakes them for a godlike superhero. But Republicans genuinely seem to think waving a gun around impotently at the sky while in a panic over a balloon somehow shows they are tough guys and Biden is not.

In truth, the whole debacle really just illustrated the opposite: Republicans are the epitome of overcompensation.

The gun-waving does not hide, but rather highlights how they are small, fearful, and painfully insecure —especially, it seems, when it comes to masculinity. The GOP is a political party singularly devoted to trying to shore up the fragile egos of a bunch of dudes who suspect everyone knows they aren't as manly as they claim to be.

Leading the pack, of course, was the small-fingered phony tough guy himself, Donald Trump.

"The Chinese would never have floated the Blimp ('Balloon') over the United States if I were President!!!" he screeched on his fake Twitter site, Truth Social.

Presumably, we're meant to believe his elaborate combover and spray tan would have created a manliness force field that repelled all floating objects. But, of course, it's a lie, as Jonathan Karl of ABC News reminded Sen. Marco "Once Pretended To Like Rap" Rubio, R-Fla., when he echoed Trump's lie on-air. In reality, U.S. officials claim the Chinese sent three balloons into U.S. airspace during Trump's presidency, none of which were shot down.

Trump reacted to this reminder like he always does, like a 5-year-old denying he's the one who drew kitty cat pictures on the wall on crayon, taking to Truth Social again to rave.

"China had too much respect for 'TRUMP' for this to have happened, and it NEVER did."

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That Republican voters mistake this man for John Wayne really showcases how it's a party built around the childish insecurities of people who really should be old enough to know better but who continue to confuse belligerence for grit.

The GOP is obviously a party of cowards who are constantly jumping at shadows. It's become exhausting to watch even an hour of Fox News and the long, long lists of all the things they expect their audiences to live in fear of, from "antifa" and Black Lives Matter to kids reading books with gay characters to big cities to transgender people to women who say rude things about anti-choice judges to "wokeness" to refugees seeking political asylum. They've complained when candy cartoons changed their shoe preference, Mr. Potato Head became just "Potato Head," women joined the Ghostbusters, people dyed their hair pink or purple and popular songs referenced female sexual arousal.

Of course, as fun as it is to laugh at these fools, there's a very real dark side to the politics of overcompensation. Quislings who want to pretend they're tough often do so in the most despicable way possible: Finding someone smaller to beat up on.

The first rule of MAGA: Never, ever pick on someone your own size.

As Melissa Ryan writes in the CtrlAltRightDelete newsletter, what really defines the MAGA base is that they "crave an authoritarian government that will punish their enemies" and "beat down vulnerable populations." So it's no surprise that they follow Trump, who bragged on tape about how he uses his status as a rich celebrity to sexually assault women, most of whom probably weigh less than half what he does. Or that they idolize Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who picks his targets mainly based on how powerless they are, which is why he's so focused on snatching books out of the hands of schoolchildren. Or that their new hero, Rep. George Santos, is a con man accused of stealing from old women and defrauding a disabled veteran. Or that they make excuses for the violence of David DePape, who is accused of trying to murder the elderly husband of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Perhaps the most pitch-perfect illustration of what MAGA is all about came during Trump's presidency when he hid in a bunker in the White House while police tear-gassed peaceful protesters outside. Unlike those protesters, Trump has no physical courage of his own. He is such a weenie that he couldn't even stand to walk outside where he'd be heckled by the crowd of unarmed, peaceful protesters. But he feigned strength by sending someone else to enact violence for him — on a group of people who couldn't defend themselves, naturally. The first rule of MAGA: Never, ever pick on someone your own size.

This Chinese balloon nonsense is just the silliest iteration of this mentality. Shooting it down prematurely only meant risking civilian lives. Of course, the same sociopathic Republicans who discourage COVID-19 vaccinations don't care how many people they get killed for their political theatrics. In grown-up land, however, you don't go crushing innocent people to death in an impotent display of anger towards a helium-fueled spy machine that likely gathered less data than TikTok does by the minute. But Republicans don't care about the hard-nosed choices actual adults make. All they care about is masculinity make-believe, no matter what the cost.

The political media fascination with Rep. George Santos, the New York Republican who appears to have faked approximately 95% of his life, is such that it was inevitable that it would draw a "savvy" backlash piece scolding the press about their priorities. The wannabe party pooper finally emerged last week at the Washington Post in an opinion column headlined, "Real people don't care about George Santos." In it, self-assigned buzzkill David Byler argued "America doesn't seem to care" about Santos, which he can tell based on Google search traffic.

Our nation was founded by puritans, so as soon as people had a laugh over Santos, inevitably someone would shake their finger disapprovingly. But there were some flaws in Byler's argument, starting with his assumption that Santos' own embarrassed constituents are not "real" people. There's also the fact that Google Trends isn't a very exacting measure of interest in a subject, as it only measures if people are searching out information. It doesn't capture people who read articles they saw on social media or directly on a news website. Traffic to stories about Santos is plenty healthy on that front.

But perhaps most importantly, this narrow-minded focus on search traffic ignores what a lot of the sneered-at political observers saw coming a mile away: The imminent George Santos makeover into MAGA's Next Top Superstar.

Santos may not matter to "average" Americans, but his story is being leveraged directly into the right-wing propaganda machine that currently controls the Republican Party. On Thursday night, for instance, Santos was sanctified into the echelon of MAGA saints by the Pope of neo-fascism himself, Tucker Carlson. In a typically dishonest segment on his wildly popular Fox News show, Carlson painted Santos as a hapless victim of the bigoted news media by pretending that the only thing Santos lied about was his volleyball career. (Which is one of the more minor fake careers and hobbies Santos has claimed on his resume.) Media Matters has a sample of the extremely silly diatribe:

It was a tissue of lies constructed to deceive the American people. There was no volleyball scholarship. There was not a single dollar of volleyball scholarship. George Santos made it all up out of whole cloth, out of thin air. George Santos is an ersatz volleyball player. A fraud, a ghoul. People voted for this man believing he had played collegiate volleyball on a scholarship and he hadn't.

And yet tonight ladies and gentlemen, this thief of volleyball glory strides the halls of the United States Congress unimpeded by law enforcement. It's like another insurrection.

Carlson doesn't really have arguments or evidence, but he does do a bang-up impression of someone sarcastically brushing aside nonsense. Except what he's brushing away is usually pretty serious stuff, such as fascist attacks on democracy, attempts to save lives during a pandemic, or, in this case, unbelievable amounts of fraud that look potentially criminal in many cases. With Santos, the number of lies Carlson is ignoring is truly staggering. Santos lied about his resume, his religion, his marriage, his family history, and claimed connections he doesn't have to the Holocaust, 9/11, the Pulse nightclub shooting, and an assassination attempt that appears fictional. It is really no exaggeration to say it's easier to list the things he hasn't lied about (his age and his birthplace in Queens).

But just as Catholic saints get their status through martyrdom, the saints of MAGAdom must get theirs through falsified tales of victimhood at the hands of "woke mobs" or the "fake news media."

People right-wingers hate are alarmed at Santos and his staggering trail of fraud. So if the "libs" have a negative reaction to Santos, in the troll-based logic that drives the modern GOP, that must mean he's their newest champion. And let's just state for the record that, while Byler may not see left-leaning news consumers as "real people," he probably wouldn't say the same about the millions of Trump voters whose entire worldview is shaped by the crap that Fox News pours into their heads every day.

Carlson didn't reach the conclusion that Santos is the latest MAGA idol all on his own. Practically from the moment that Santos's deceit was exposed by the New York Times, Steve Bannon, the Joseph Goebbels-wannabe who frequently sets the GOP agenda with his popular "War Room" podcast, was championing the pathological liar. Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia have also rallied to Santos' side, claiming he's only a target because he's a "fighter." It's unclear who he has ever "fought" for besides himself, but then again, the same could be said of most MAGA figures, from Donald Trump on down.

It's not a mystery why these leaders think the right-wing audience is ready to accept Santos as the next MAGA savior. All that matters to the modern right is "owning the liberals," and who better to do that than someone who lies constantly for no apparent reason other than the sheer thrill of it?

Certainly, Santos seems to grasp that the move that will take him from a low-level con man to the ranks of the richest MAGA grifters is to lean into trolling. So he's been rolling out the standard issue liberal-owning stunts for weeks now: Flashing the white supremacist-aligned "OK" hand signal during a House vote. (He even knew how to do it so it was clear enough to photograph but so quick he could pretend later it wasn't intentional.) Wearing an assault rifle pin while playing dumb about why it offends people to celebrate the preferred weapons of mass shooters. Feeding the press donuts and acting like they had somehow become complicit in the evil by eating them. Getting into Twitter fights with drag queens, who are the favorite punching bag of the authoritarian right. (Santos seems to have a past as a drag queen, as well, but this is just part of a favorite right-wing trolling tactic, to recruit members of a hated minority to speak out against their own.) Dunking on former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., for criticizing him by tweeting "cry about it."

Reports suggest Santos is delighted by all the negative attention he's getting in the press. An exceptionally short-lived aide recorded a conversation in which Santos was dressing him down, and right in the middle of it, Santos suddenly exclaims, "Don Lemon just texted me — I'm sorry, I'm listening to you — Don Lemon just texted me!" Getting his name on CNN, even during a story on how he is the worst, was just that thrilling to Santos.

Santos even hired former Steve Bannon employee and professional troll, Vish Burra, as a top aide. Burra's defense of Santos is cynical and self-congratulatory: The lying is a form of "shitposting," which is internet speak for saying outlandish things to draw outrage and attention. For the Trumpist right, aggressive trolling is what politics is all about.

Imagining that they're outraging the left is what the GOP audience gets out of this. (No one tell them that the left's reaction to Santos is more amusement than genuine fury.) But there's an even darker reason that Carlson, Bannon, Taylor Greene, etc. have decided to rally round Santos: He's very useful as a weapon in their larger war on truth.

As with Trump, it's overly simplistic to look at these people, with their non-stop disinformation, as mere liars. Liars are people who are sincerely trying to deceive people. In many cases, it's not at all evident that right-wing audiences actually believe the asinine B.S. that is rolled out by the likes of Carlson and Bannon. For instance, the "outrage" over M&M spokescandy shoe choices is less sincere anger than it is a collective bit of performance art. Both Carlson and his audience merely pretend to be mad as a way to keep ironic distance from their own weird sexual hang-ups. Similarly, conspiracy theories like Trump's Big Lie are often less about true belief and more about displaying fealty to their tribe.

There's a point to right-wingers constantly saying and "believing" things they know not to be true. It's about devaluing empirical reality. Fascists want "truth" to flow from what the right-wing authority figures say is "true," not from lived experience or verifiable facts. They are trying to construct a world where facts don't matter, and only power does. The first step is getting their tribal community to agree collectively to stop distinguishing between true and false and to only claim to believe what is convenient for their leaders or their cause.

For that goal, Santos is useful. He is living the fascist dream of a man whose entire existence seems unmoored from the power of facts. If the MAGA leaders can turn him into a hero, he'd be a living exemplar of their post-truth yearnings: "Truth" can be whatever you want it to be. After all, right-wingers already hate the way facts — Trump lost the election, COVID-19 is real, LGBTQ people exist — get in the way of their desires. They just need permission to let go of that last tendril of reality and start living purely in their authoritarian fantasy world. Santos shows the way. It's unlikely he will be going away any time soon.

David DePape seems proud of himself. On Friday, a judge ordered the release of video footage that appears to show DePape beating Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer after refusing to listen to police orders to drop the weapon. The video is hard to watch, showing the suspect tackling Pelosi to the ground and viciously pounding him with a hammer while the police attempt to pull him off the 82-year-old man. Bizarrely, however, in a phone call to a San Francisco reporter made the same day, DePape's only regret was that the violence wasn't worse.

"Now that you all have seen the body cam footage, I have an important message for everyone in America," DePape told KTVU's Amber Lee of. "You're welcome."

He then apologized that he "didn't get more of them."

Like many of the January 6 insurrectionists who have been arrested, DePape appears to have no interest in backing down from the Donald Trump-fueled conspiracy theories that led to his violence. Instead, the chilling audio hints at a man who feels confident in his false accusations and supported in his belief that the Trumpist agenda must be forced upon America through violence.

DePape appears delusional in many regards, but he is, sadly, right about one thing: His pro-violence views have a lot of support from Republicans, both politicians and voters. While he took it to the next level, DePape was only acting on a correct interpretation of Trump's implicit message: Since Democrats can't be beaten at the ballot box, power must be seized through violence. It's a view that, while they often avoid saying out loud, is widely backed by the rest of the GOP. The party, after all, has gone out of its way to reaffirm support for Trump in the wake of the deadly riot he unleashed on the Capitol two years ago.

DePage is getting support from Republicans in both fairly direct ways and in ways that are larger and more diffuse. The more direct approval comes in the form of "jokes" and conspiracy theories about the attack on Pelosi. Former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger tweeted a reminder of how many powerful Republicans engaged in this in the immediate aftermath of the attack. (He mistakenly attributes the Seattle Times, but it was in fact the New York Times that compiled this list.)

A lot of people on Twitter, desperate to muddy the waters around this, quibbled with the phrase "made fun," arguing that many of these people, uh, merely "asked questions" about the attack. This, of course, is nonsense. The "questions" were actually conspiracy theories, most of which were grossly homophobic, suggesting that the attack was something other than right-wing political violence. Nor is there a thick line between "making fun" and conspiracy theories, and not just because the latter often is accompanied by tasteless jokes. Both conspiracy theories and jokes are about minimizing violence for the purpose of sending the same implicit message of winking support — a message that DePape clearly picked up on.

Even after the disturbing footage of the attack was released, right-wing media figures continued to push asinine conspiracy theories implying that Pelosi somehow faked this or was complicit in his own attempted murder. It's unlikely that many if any, people actually believe this nonsense. The purpose of such conspiracy theories is to continue justifying a refusal to condemn this attack, i.e. just another way to signal support for DePage's alleged crime.

As gross as all of this is, it is sadly not surprising. This isn't just about a couple of dozen prominent Republicans finding ways to downplay Pelosi's suffering, either. In the two years since the January 6 insurrection, Republicans have made it clear that they have fully embraced political violence. Sure, they'll whine and fuss if anyone dares say so out loud because gaslighting the public is part of the abusive stance they've taken toward our democracy. But they're still the party of Trump, and after January 6, that means being the party of domestic terrorism.

That Trump is still the leader of the GOP should not be in doubt, no matter how much wishcasting is done on MSNBC about his "low energy" campaign events. Under Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans who control the House are gearing up to run a massive revenge campaign on anyone who took a stand against Trump's efforts to overthrow democracy. McCarthy has already removed two California Democrats, Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, from the Intelligence Committee, for the obvious purpose of punishing them for speaking out against Trump. All this sends a strong, unmistakable signal: McCarthy and House Republicans aren't just fine with what happened on January 6, but they will do everything in their power to shield him from consequences.

Despite wistful talk among some GOP elite about someone beating Trump in the 2024 primary, most signs suggest the party is still in Trump's thrall. Trump loyalist Ronna McDaniel won her race to continue being the head of the Republican National Committee. She did face some challengers, but by and large, they were people who didn't think she was Trumpy enough, a belief that runs up against the reality of her unswerving devotion to Trump.

It is true that Trump has some potential primary opponents in 2024, but notably, they tend to avoid criticizing him for the attempted coup. His biggest competitor right now, Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis, is focused on complaining that Trump isn't enough of a far-right authoritarian. They all know that a "political violence is bad" campaign platform is DOA with the Republican base. Acceptable opinions for Republican leaders can only fall in a narrow range between "I'm fine with right-wing domestic terrorism" and "I'm a big fan of murdering your political opponents."

Listening to the DePape tape, what's remarkable is how much he sounds like Trump. The only real difference is that DePape is more concise and coherent. Trump could never keep his remarks to a lean two minutes, preferring instead hour-plus stemwinders when he's whining, lying, and inciting violence. DePape's suggestions of a Democratic conspiracy against America are just Trump's Big Lie. DePape's complaints that he didn't go far enough echo Trump's post-January 6 rhetoric painting the insurrectionists as heroes, complete with false promises of money and pardons for those who have committed violence on his behalf.

As Heather "Digby" Parton noted at Salon on Monday, most of the coverage of Trump's newly invigorated 2024 run for president is delicately sidestepping reminders that he incited a violent insurrection. It continues to be difficult for the mainstream media to accept that the GOP has embraced violent fascism. The old Beltway framework around politics, which treats the two parties as roughly equivalent, has been false for a long time, but it's grotesquely so in the Trump era. Democrats are a normal center-left political party. Republicans have turned away from democracy and towards political violence. It certainly would be better for everyone if this were't true, but it is. DePape isn't some fringe character, but a reflection of who the Republicans have become in their MAGA iteration.

Wednesday in Philadelphia bore witness to one of those moments in politics where it's hard to avoid succumbing to pure cynicism. Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis made his way to the City of Brotherly Love to receive an "award" from a group called the Union League, a once-venerable institution that has turned itself into a right-wing country club. Unsurprisingly, he was most definitely not welcome in the very liberal, racially diverse city, especially after recent reports that DeSantis had banned African-American history courses on the grounds that they have no "educational value." Sure enough, his appearance was met with a robust protest that featured Black community leaders giving speeches denouncing racism and a crowd of people waving queer inclusivity flags and holding up Black Lives Matter signs.

Watching this spectacle on social media, I was torn.

Part of me was proud to see so many people braving the cold to stand up for democracy and against the authoritarian politics DeSantis peddles. But I also have no doubt that DeSantis was thrilled by this display, which was no doubt exactly what he hoped he'd get coming to Philly. The whole thing was an obvious troll, meant to "trigger the liberals" and get this angry reaction. The crowd heckled people going in and took their photos in hopes of "outing" them, but rather than react with shame, the attendees gloated, smiled, and laughed. As with the January 6 insurrectionists who filmed themselves, the face of modern fascism is proud and defiant. I will not be surprised if DeSantis uses footage from the protest in a campaign ad.

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Trolling, after all, is the entirety of the DeSantis campaign strategy. It's how he won Florida and how he clearly intends to win the White House, by dunking on one "triggered" liberal at a time. It's why DeSantis does stupid stuff like pretend to believe President Joe Biden is taking away a gas stove he likely has no idea how to operate. It's why he embraced the spectacle of showing up in Philadelphia, a city he has never lived in and has no real relationship to. Being seen protested by "the libs," especially if they are predominantly people of color, is the most surefire way to gain popularity with the MAGA base. It's pure tribalist warfare.

As Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times pointed out Tuesday, DeSantis doesn't just troll for attention, but also to distract Republican voters from the array of policies he supports that they very much do not want. "By leaning into high-profile battles as a culture warrior par excellence," Bouie writes, "DeSantis has made himself the hero of conservative elites and the bête noire of liberals and Democrats without so much as mentioning his radical and unpopular views on social insurance and the welfare state."

For instance, as Bouie points out, DeSantis has been a fierce opponent not just of the Affordable Care Act, but Social Security and Medicare, having voted in Congress to strip a quarter trillion dollars from programs that allow retired Americans to survive. Democrats would be wise "to spend less time on cultural conflict and more time making the clear case that if given the chance, he would slash what's left of the safety net and use the proceeds to help the rich stay rich," Bouie writes.

Being seen protested by "the libs," especially if they are predominantly people of color, is the most surefire way to gain popularity with the MAGA base.

Bouie, as always, makes a strong point. The reason DeSantis won Florida is because he successfully appealed to the state's influx of white retirees, by using racist and sexist stunts to appeal to their bigotries while distracting from the fact that he wants to steal their nest eggs from under them. But, despite all the trolls cackling with delight at "triggering" the residents of Philadelphia, I must admit I'm not as worried as Bouie that Democrats are making a mistake by reminding voters on the regular that DeSantis is a book-burning, queerphobic, racist authoritarian.

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For one thing, there's no tension in voters' minds between "he's a bigot" and "he wants to take away Social Security." On the contrary, as with the attacks on democracy and attacks on abortion rights being seen as tandem issues by voters in the 2022 midterms, the bigotry and anti-safety net fanaticism can be tied together to make a case that DeSantis is a MAGA nut. Democrats should surely highlight DeSantis' desire to destroy our retirement system, but that can be done while also drawing attention to how he's hateful in all sorts of ways.

There's no doubt, of course, that there are still a ton of voters that are being tricked with the culture war antics into ignoring the economic threat of Republicanism. We see this every time Democrats lose a state or local election while Democratic policies — such as legal abortion or minimum wage hikes or the Medicaid expansion — win on ballot initiatives. But, as the last few elections have shown, the "big government bigots" voter bloc is shrinking, while the "fed up with MAGA B.S." bloc is growing.

DeSantis is going to find there is not much of a constituency for people who want Trump, but with less charisma.

In the 2022 midterms, Republicans across the country ran the DeSantis playbook of using election denialism, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, race-baiting over crime and the border and other such antics to distract from their plans to gut the economic fortunes of Americans. As a result, the predicted red wave never materialized.

After all, the master at the use of trolling and bigotry as a distraction is Trump. He successfully concealed plans to end Obamacare, for instance, with his loud racism and relentless Twitter buffoonery. But, in the end, all that just made most Americans hate him more. Trump isn't a uniquely loathed politician because of his bog standard GOP hostility to fair taxes and health care spending. His skill at provocation is also what makes most people dismiss him, correctly, as a terminal asshole. Only MAGA blowhards think all the trolling is cute. Everyone else is increasingly grossed out by it.

Yes, DeSantis won in 2022, unlike a lot of Republicans in the midterms. But that was in Florida, where the retired Fox News addict demographic is overrepresented. Those folks are still sadly way too likely to be bamboozled with dumb culture war stunts into voting for people who want to cut them off from their Social Security checks and Medicare coverage. The rest of the country, however, doesn't look like Florida. Instead, there's an anti-MAGA majority that is sick of the clown show, sick of the conspiracy theories, and sick of hate for its own sake.

His hatefulness might make him a contender in the GOP primary, but if he makes it to a general election I suspect DeSantis is going to find there is not much of a constituency for people who want Trump, but with less charisma.

The "risk" from Trump, who was initially suspended from the social media platforms after he sent a violent mob to the Capitol in an attempt to install himself illegally in power, "has sufficiently receded," said Nick Clegg, president of global affairs a Meta.

On Facebook, Trump doesn't even have to bother with the mainstream media to get attention.

This is false.

It hasn't been three months since a violent home invasion targeting then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, which resulted in the assault of her husband, Paul Pelosi, who suffered severe injuries. The alleged attacker was motivated by Trump's Big Lie, the same one Trump used to incite the riot of January 6. Just this month, another Big Lie devotee, Solomon Peña, was arrested for arranging and participating in shootings at four homes of Democratic officials. One attempt got very close to taking the life of a 10-year-old girl. Trump's Big Lie continues to stoke very real political violence. The threat has not receded at all.

In his statement, Clegg pretends the problem with Trump is merely "his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021." In reality, Trump did more than passively admire these people. As the House committee that investigated the insurrection concluded, "the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump." He didn't merely praise the insurrection. He led it.

Trump makes liberals angry, makes his fans angry at liberals, causes fights and incentivizes dunks.

Clegg promises "new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses" from Trump, claiming, "Mr. Trump is subject to our Community Standards." While this cannot yet be called a lie, as Trump hasn't posted since his reinstatement, it's not overly cynical to believe that these words aren't worth the calories expended writing them.

As Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said in an emailed statement, "Trump's Truth Social account has shown us exactly how he'd use Facebook." As Media Matters documented, Trump "promoted what Facebook describes as a 'militarized' movement hundreds of times, and in the week after the midterm elections, nearly half (48%) of Trump's posts on Truth Social amplified QAnon-promoting accounts or pushed election misinformation." Trump can't get through a funeral or a campaign event for another candidate without turning it into a whinefest of violence-inciting lies about the 2020 election. The idea that he'll behave himself on Facebook is, at best, wishful thinking, or, more likely, just embarrassing B.S.

This isn't about fairness, free speech, or democracy — all values Trump has spent the past 8 years trying to destroy. It's likely not even that much about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's well-documented willingness to be bullied by right-wingers. This is almost certainly about one thing and one thing only: money.

It's not just the money that Trump's campaign will spend on Meta. Trump himself, by being the most famous and repugnant troll in the world, is just big business for social media. His fascism, his bigotry, his cruelty and even his poor spelling and grammar all draw attention from fans and haters alike, creating a whirlwind of clicks and engagement that more responsible content simply can't match. As tech journalist Kara Swisher notes, "Enragement equals engagement." Trump makes liberals angry, makes his fans angry at liberals, causes fights and incentivizes dunks. Every post generates huge numbers of reposts both praising and condemning him. Democracy can't stand a chance against the sheer profitability engine that is his unique combination of stupidity, ego, and hatefulness. He's the worst person imaginable, but that is all the more reason we can't look away.

It may be that Elon Musk's similar decision to reinstate Trump's Twitter account was rooted in Musk's own right-wing politics. But Musk then followed it up with a dumb meme pathetically begging Trump to come back, making it clear that it was all about the money. Trump was the main character on Twitter for 6 years, after all, a constant source of conflict and therefore traffic. Musk's swiftly eroding financial situation means not just Twitter, but his main company, Tesla, are in danger. Trying to get Trump back on to generate traffic smelled like a Hail Mary.

Democracy can't stand a chance against the sheer profitability engine that is his unique combination of stupidity, ego, and hatefulness.

Meta is in a similar boat. The company keeps bleeding money and laying off employees, as its daily active user rates fall and younger people skip its product altogether to go to places like TikTok. To compound the problem, Zuckerberg's solution to his company's woes — to create an unappealing "Metaverse" with graphic design that feels two decades out of date — is a joke. At this point, Facebook has little choice but to lean into the userbase it still has: aging Boomers who believed they were joining to share pictures of grandkids but end up spending hours of the day on the site further alienating themselves from their kids through their addiction to COVID-19 denialism memes and conspiracy theories about "antifa." Not injecting Trump into that situation is, from a profitability standpoint, like marketing a cruise line to retirees that doesn't feature an all-you-can-eat buffet. In this case, all they're eating is fascist propaganda.

The possibility of Trump returning to Twitter was aggravating because journalists dominate and are dominated by Twitter. Trump on Twitter is, in effect, the assignment editor for the Beltway press, with his every lie and provocation drawing lavish coverage. But frankly, his return to Facebook, which he is likelier to take advantage of sooner, is even more dangerous.

On Facebook, Trump doesn't even have to bother with the mainstream media to get attention. On Facebook, he plugs into the vast network of right-wing paranoia that has colonized the nation's elderly white people. There's a reason Facebook's daily top ten posts heavily feature garish content from sneering fascists. Even more than Fox News, Facebook is why your grandpa thinks the city you live in is a burned-out husk where BLM protesters and "antifa" won't let you out of your house unless you change your gender. From a purely business standpoint, leaving Trump out of that is like not stocking Coca-Cola in a grocery's soda aisle.

So far, Trump has resisted Twitter — but don't expect his claims to boycott Facebook will last long. As the old political saying goes, go hunting where the ducks are. In this case, the "ducks" are elderly racists and the hunting grounds are Dan Bongino's inexplicably popular Facebook feed.

To be fair, it may not be entirely about money. Zuckerberg probably doesn't want to be subpoenaed to sit in front of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., while she asks why he lets medical professionals promote the vaccine on Facebook without giving equal time to those who believe Jewish space lasers caused the Sandy Hook shooting. But mostly, it's that slowly killing the remaining brain cells of our nation's Republican voters is a reliable generator of cash.

Trump recently posted on Truth Social, the platform he launched after his mass social media suspensions, a call for "the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution." He hasn't toned down his fascist rants for the end of democracy but has instead grown even more belligerent. And thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, Trump's got an even bigger bullhorn for his lies. Lies which, we all remember quite vividly, led to a violent assault on our nation's Capitol — and still much more.

Crowder, for those who are lucky enough to have never heard his name, rose to fame by being especially cringeworthy in the crowded field of professional right-wing trolling. He plays heavily into the stereotype of the loudmouth ignoramus who spouts off in class about how slavery wasn't so bad or corners women at the bar to rave about how their entire sex is insufficiently grateful to men. He is, quite literally, the dude in that "debate me, bro" meme.

The original photo came from a stunt where he set up shop on a campus with a sign that read "male privilege is a myth" in hopes of baiting teenage girls into arguing with him. That sums up Crowder's schtick: He appeals to dudes who are so pathetic that they resort to politicized cat-calling in order to garner female attention.

There's a never-ending supply of deeply insecure men who want to believe toxic masculinity will save them.

Once again, we are looking at what I've deemed the "male insecurity-to-fascism" pipeline, where right-wing grifters appeal to men by suggesting the cure for self-doubt is turning yourself into a massive asshole. Once recruited into the toxic masculinity cult, of course, their audiences are directed toward far-right politics. Becoming a fully formed fascist is the final stage in the life cycle of a right-wing troll.

The fight between Shapiro and Crowder is very funny, of course, making any "Real Housewives" slap fight look like the battle of Algiers by comparison. At stake appears to be a standard issue far-right dispute, which can be summed up as, "Should we use racial slurs or just imply them?" Shapiro is Team Imply, correctly understanding that it helps one evade the social media censors, allowing fascistic content a further reach. Crowder, however, feels that kind of restriction is harshing his vibe. His principled commitment to sucking cannot be bought for a mere $50 million.

No, you did not read that number wrong. Shapiro really did offer Crowder a cool $50 million to bring his "get girls attention by telling them to make you a sandwich" act to the Daily Wire. Clearly, the world of exploiting deeply insecure men is quite a lucrative grift! And to think of how many men have never charged a penny for a "must be shark week" retort when a woman takes issue over a stranger pinching her butt.

Right-wing grifters don't want their audiences to experience personal growth and improved lives.

That number was so big that even I took pause — and I never underestimate how much cash you can squeeze out of dipshits who just want to blame their personal failures on feminism. Take, for instance, Jordan Peterson, who has overcome a creepy personal visage and voice that sounds like a Muppet, simply with incoherent ramblings about how feminism supposedly suppresses the virility of modern men. Or the recently jailed accused rapist Andrew Tate, who racked up billions of views on TikTok for videos peddling tired tropes about how women who have opinions should be met with beatings. Or Shapiro himself, whose self-confident declaration that a lubricating vagina is diseased is hilariously false, but has a certain appeal to those bitter over their lack of personal experience with sexually aroused women.

As that last example shows, there's one important thing to understand about these masculinity grifters: Their "advice" makes the problems bedeviling their audiences worse. So much of what drives men to listen to the Crowders, Petersons, and Tates of the world is their romantic, social, and professional frustrations and disappointments. But the model of behavior they're given — to act like pompous, overbearing, or even violent jerks — is a fast track to even more rejection on the dating market, in the workplace, and even when trying to find friends.

The cynical and likely accurate view is that is very much by design.

Right-wing grifters don't want their audiences to experience personal growth and improved lives. If their followers actually found love, meaningful employment, and supportive friends, then they wouldn't have holes in their hearts they tried to fill with Daily Wire content. Like any cult, the toxic masculinity racket requires keeping its people in a perpetual state of insecurity and therefore emotionally dependent on their leaders. Journalist Andy Campbell pointed this out to me when discussing his book about the Proud Boys. The group, Campbell explained, draws men in by promising to teach them how to attract women, but in reality, once they're in, the group actively prevents them from forming meaningful attachments to women.

Clearly, male insecurity is quite a natural resource. If only it could be mined for real energy to power cars and electric lights. Alas, the only thing it's good for is lining the pockets of con artists and creating political momentum for fascist movements. Crowder and Shapiro may very well end up working together, as there's a strong whiff of wrestling ring fakery to their public beefing. Or maybe they'll go their separate ways. Either way, both are set up to make an unbelievable amount of money because there's a never-ending supply of deeply insecure men who want to believe toxic masculinity will save them.

News coverage of failed GOP candidate Solomon Peña's arrest for allegedly orchestrating a plot to shoot up the homes of various elected Democrats has consistently highlighted one key detail: His claims to be the "real" winner of the race for New Mexico House District 14 are so ridiculous that it's hard not to laugh. Ever since Donald Trump's Big Lie about the 2020 election, there's been an assumption that election denialists would at least try to make their claims a little plausible by only crying "fraud" in relatively close elections. Failed Republican Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for instance, continues to proclaim herself the "real" winner of an election she lost last cycle by less than a percentage point. Peña, on the other hand, lost his bid for the New Mexico House of Representatives in the deep blue city of Albuquerque to Democrat Miguel Garcia by over 47 percentage points, garnering only 26.4% of the vote.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Prior to allegedly paying people to drive stolen cars to shoot at the homes of four Democratic officials, Peña was reported harassing various officials and insisting that he was the real winner of the race. Chilling video from the doorbell camera of former Bernalillo Commissioner Debbie O'Malley, whose home was later the target of an attempted shooting, shows an agitated Peña at her door, demanding a conversation about his delusions.

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The standard take on this is indisputable: This is the natural outcome of Trump's Big Lie. "What we're seeing now are the results of the way that Donald Trump opened the door," Lindsay Schubiner, programs director at the Western States Center told Vox. The conspiracy theories that led to January 6 are ongoing, and so, therefore, is the political violence they inspire.

But in another sense, the root cause of such political violence runs even deeper than that. Peña's alleged plot is the latest manifestation of a deeper and expanding malady affecting Republicans nationwide: A refusal to accept that their political views are simply unpopular. When faced with proof that they and their ideas are being rejected, rather than reform or at least try to recast their ideas, Republicans often turn to conspiracy theories about sinister forces working against them. In the right-wing imagination, the problem could never be that people have heard their ideas and decided they just don't like them. Blame is instead put on "woke" educators or Hollywood manipulators "brainwashing" the masses. The "deep state," meanwhile, supposedly steals elections. And the "globalists" (read: Jews) somehow pull all of the strings.

This week, Kaitlyn Tiffany of the Atlantic reported on one of the funnier headaches Tesla CEO Elon Musk invited into his life by buying Twitter to cater to right-wingers: Conservative users who insist dark forces are suppressing their god-given right to way more followers. Prior to Musk's takeover, conservatives routinely insisted that their failure to see tweets go viral must be due to "shadowbanning," a mostly-imaginary practice of social media companies reducing a tweet's weight in an algorithm to hide a toxic viewpoint. Musk promised he'd stop the "shadowbanning" — which, easy enough, since it's not really a thing — but, of course, conservative Twitter users are still claiming their low engagement rates must be due to these alleged shadowbans. Tiffany writes:

Musk recently added "View" counts to the bottom of tweets, presumably with the intention of equipping users with data and giving them greater insight into whether others actually are seeing their tweets and just not liking them. This effort appeared to mostly anger people: The numbers were smaller than expected, which served as more evidence of shadowbanning.

What else are they going to do? Admit that most people just don't like them? They're no more going to admit that than Trump admits he lost the 2020 election. Instead, a conspiracy theory is plugged in to explain how unpopular right-wing accounts are actually beloved by the masses.

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Watching Twitter users like "Catturd" whine that they'd be getting more retweets but for the "shadow-ban" is funny. Less so is this article from the New York Post about reactionary parents who are estranged from their children, and have chosen to blame "woke brainwashing" instead of their own bad choices. The Post, being a right-wing rag, is totally credulous in the face of stories of parents who want to hire "deprogrammers" to fix their supposedly brainwashed kids.

"While Peña took it to a near-deadly level, the basic premise he was working under is widespread on the right."

"I've had fights with some of my girls just because I wouldn't get myself a Rainbow pride Starbucks cup," one woman, who unconvincingly claims to be "a Democrat and a liberal," told the Post. One child hasn't spoken to her in four years and the other in a year, which she chalks up not to anything she's done, but to the kids being "politically correct."

Another woman claims that her daughter abandoned her "because we're conservatives and that we all should be against men."

If you're skeptical that you're getting the full story from these women, you should be — their children were not interviewed. (The Post says they reached out to two but got no response, which is likely not a sign of "woke brainwashing" but frustration with an overbearing mother who sicced a Rupert Murdoch-owned organization against them.) Both women tacitly admit that their daughters are lesbians while insisting homophobia is not at the center of the fight, leaving one to suspect that the fight over a Starbucks cup was not actually over a Starbucks cup.

Trump's narcissism is no longer just his individual psychological damage, but the systematic structure of the GOP.

Indeed, the article glowingly quotes self-proclaimed "deprogrammer" Ted Patrick: "You've got to get these kids alone. I've snatched people from Yale." Unmentioned in the article is that another word for "snatching" is "kidnapping," or that Patrick and his clients have a long history of legal battles stemming from taking adults against their will to "cure" them of behaviors like being in a same-sex relationship or joining more liberal churches than their parents liked. He's done time in prison for this crime.

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Tempting as it is to write these two off as truly deluded outliers, the truth is the New York Post ran this article because they thought a lot of readers would see sympathetic victims of "wokeness" where the rest of us see narcissistic bullies. It goes to show that, while Peña took it to a near-deadly level, the basic premise he was working under is widespread on the right. Conservatives increasingly feel emboldened to tell themselves that it's impossible that they or their ideas could be honestly rejected. Instead, they react to the word "no" like a stalker ex-boyfriend, as permission to use coercive tactics.

People who refuse to take "no" for an answer have always been a problem, of course. But in the era of Trump, that toxic behavior is being validated and mainstreamed as the standard Republican practice. Trump's narcissism is no longer just his individual psychological damage, but the systematic structure of the GOP.

Tarrio and four other Proud Boys are currently standing trial for attempting to overthrow the government. Most media coverage of their attorneys has been of a "get a load of these toolbags" variety. Joe Biggs, the Proud Boy whose pre-Jan. 6 activities included "jokingly" advocating using roofies to rape women, had a particularly high-drama defense team. One of his lawyers had his law license suspended right before trial, thanks to misconduct in defending another insurrection sympathizer, Alex Jones of Infowars. Another got into an ugly shouting match with the judge. Another lawyer for a different defendant, Zachary Rehl, has been late to court so often that she got scolded by the judge.

So maybe it's surprising that any defense attorneys for the Proud Boys have said anything coherent, let alone incisive. Yet right there in the opening arguments, Sabino Jauregui, who is defending Tarrio, went straight at the prosecution's weak spot: The government is putting the insurrection's foot soldiers on trial, while leaving the man who led and directed them, Donald Trump, not just untouched by the law but running for president again. (Supposedly.)

As defense strategies go, mind you, that's fairly weak. Even if we accept, as indeed we should, that Trump is the guiltiest of all people who were involved in Jan. 6, that doesn't mean the thousands of other people who were part of the insurrection are innocent. Those who acted on Trump's implicit orders are full-grown adults who had every opportunity to say no, as evidenced by the 258 million adult Americans who also heard the Big Lie but did not attempt the violent overthrow of democracy. "Trump made me do it" is a pathetic excuse.

But even more than the Oath Keepers convicted last year for their role in the insurrection, the Proud Boys now on trial face a likely insurmountable pile of evidence of their guilt. Not only is there photo and video evidence of most of them committing crimes during the riot, there's also an extensive catalog of text messages and other communications showing how much planning and intent there was before it all happened. So trying to blame Trump's incitement, and making the implausible claim that the Proud Boys just got swept up in the moment, is all they've got.

Notably, the Oath Keepers tried a similar defense last year: All their online chatter about insurrection was just macho bluster, and when they acted on those urges, it was a spontaneous impulse. But despite reports suggesting their defense team might try to pin the blame on Trump, at trial, their lawyers stepped carefully around the argument that maybe the ringleader should face harsher punishment than his minions.

What has changed to make the defense team for the Proud Boys speak out against Trump? It may just be a reaction to the outcome in the Oath Keepers trial, where all five defendants now face serious prison sentences. It might also be because the judge in this trial is allowing the prosecution to play the famous video clip of Trump calling on the Proud Boys to "stand by," implying that orders for violent action would soon be coming. With that in evidence, the defense may feel they have no choice but to redirect attention from those who followed the order to the man who gave it.

Ultimately, however, I suspect this shift in tactics between the two cases reflects a growing sense of frustration in the larger public over the continuing failure of Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice to hold Trump accountable for leading, quite literally, an attempted fascist coup.

Since the Oath Keepers trial ended, for instance, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has issued its final report, which did not shy away from imploring the DOJ to prosecute Trump. "The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump," reads the committee's executive summary. Accountability for this "can only be found in the criminal justice system," committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said during the panel's final public meeting.

While this is purely anecdotal, I've noticed an uptick in the past month of cable-news talking heads insisting that Trump must be indicted. Some of this is likely driven by hope, as Garland finally — arguably months too late — appointed special prosecutor Jack Smith, to deal with the Trump situation. But it's also driven by how effective the House committee was in showing not just that Trump incited and directed the insurrection, but that evidence of his guilt was always there, for those willing to look for it.

Polling data shows that 64% of Americans — basically anyone who isn't a Fox News junkie — put "a lot" or "some" responsibility for the events of Jan. 6 on Trump. That percentage is almost certainly higher in and around Washington, D.C., where this trial is being held. It's less clear whether that translates into sympathy for the peons who raided the Capitol at Trump's bidding. Certainly, the Jan. 6 committee, likely due to the influence of vice chair Liz Cheney, presented at least some of the insurrectionists as being gullible victims of Trump's machinations.

"They put their faith, their trust, in Donald Trump," Cheney said during a July committee hearing, in which one convicted rioter gave testimony expressing remorse for his role in the insurrection.

Ultimately, I'd be surprised if the "innocent dupes" argument gets much traction with a D.C. jury, whose members were close to the action and probably understand that the destruction was the result of people choosing to believe Trump's lies. Still there's some validity to the idea that it's unfair to convict the Proud Boys while Trump plays golf in Palm Beach. It will certainly make things uncomfortable for the prosecutors, who work for the same DOJ that has yet to file a single charge against the former president. That's likely not enough to lead to acquittals for the Proud Boys, but I wouldn't be surprised if at least some jurors flinch at convicting these nimrods on the most serious charges, while Trump plays his "Get out of Jail Free" card.

Of course, if Merrick Garland wants to relieve the tension created by this contradiction, I hear he manages law enforcement officers who have handcuffs and guns and all that stuff, and who arrest people all the time. "Why are you going after the little guys and not the boss?" suddenly loses all merit if Donald Trump is actually arrested. The Proud Boys trial is expected to last for several weeks. That's plenty of time for the defense to taunt the prosecution about the government's cowardice — and plenty of time for Garland to file an indictment against Trump and take that argument away for good.

Sexton spoke with Salon about how the toxic rejection of reality we're all witnessing now has long been an unpleasant feature of human societies, and how hopefully we can learn from this to do a better job in fighting back in our current moment. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You open this book with anecdotes about the power that paranoid Christian belief had over your family, especially your grandmother, when you were growing up. How much did your background inform your desire to write about the influence of conspiracy thinking on the American right?

I mean, completely. I grew up in a really problematic, radicalized environment. What we've watched over the past few years, not just QAnon, but with the rise of Christian nationalism and the conspiracy theories that they're telling themselves: It was very familiar. It was something that I used to think was contained within my family, or within my community, or within my church. What I had come to realize over the past couple of years is that extremist thinking has found purchase, not just with a political party, but with literally millions, if not tens of millions, of Americans and people around the world. It is, I'll be frank, scary as hell. The things that I had grown up with, that I had heard my family and community talk about — it's starting to hold sway over the political process and possibly over the future.

My family wasn't like that, but I grew up in a community with a lot of evangelical Christians who would talk about the end of the world, the Beast and 666, stuff like that. I barely believed that they believed it. Now it's mainstream.

My childhood was marked by incredible dysfunction and abuse. On top of that, a terror that is almost hard to communicate to people. When you take a look at these ideas and these conspiracy theories, one of the things you start to realize is if you believe these things, if these actually build the world around you or the way that you interact with politics or even your neighbors or your day-to-day life, you're living in literal terror. And when you feel that way, when you believe that you're in the middle of a supernatural battle, you literally will do anything in order to protect yourself and the people around you.

It isn't just the effect it has on individuals' mental health. When it becomes the political motivator, history has shown us it leads to incredible violence. It hurts democracy. It leads to everything from genocides to world wars. To watch that become the operating worldview of not just the major political party, but of a worldwide movement is really concerning. The more research I did about it, the more concerned I became.

A lot of people really grasped this on January 6, since it was based on the Big Lie. But I there's still a lack of understanding of how much apocalyptic Christianity fueled what happened that day.

When you take a look at January 6, it's really easy to see the insurrection. I think a lot of people now, dangerously, think of it as if it was a one-time event. They want to believe we've moved beyond it. Joe Biden was inaugurated. Donald Trump seems to be losing some sway over the Republican party. They think everything will go back to normal. But when you start to take a look at what actually happened on the ground, you start to realize that the apocalyptic mindset is just Republican orthodoxy at this point. It literally says, this is a life-or-death struggle.

The right says there is a conspiracy against them — an incredibly powerful, well-resourced sadistic conspiracy. Unless they do everything in their power, it is going to mean the difference between living and dying. Or, if you want to take it down the supernatural route, they worry about actually losing their spiritual power or spiritual vitality. It creates a story that these people can use to carry out previously unthinkable actions, including assaulting people, breaking into public buildings. There's a willingness to carry out full-fledged violence or anti-democratic actions. And when you take a look at it from that standpoint, you start to understand that these stories and these mindsets are precursors to something larger, as opposed to being the end result of something.

You write in the book that American history is largely "the story of paranoia." What do you mean by that?

Even starting with the colonialists, they felt like anti-Christian conspiracies were coming after them. And as a result, they needed to leave and find some place for themselves. And then you take a look at the actual [American Revolutionary War]: Everybody wants to believe that the revolution is this spontaneous uprising of patriotism. But a lot of the appeals were based on conspiracy theories, like that England was going to stir up uprisings among the enslaved population, or they were going to use Native Americans as an army.

Even if you move forward just a couple of years, to the first really contested presidential election of 1800: The Federalists said Thomas Jefferson is an Illuminati conspiratorial agent who's trying to destroy Christendom. The paranoid roots of this country run very, very deep.

Paranoia is far more associated with the right than the left. Why do you think that is?

From the very beginning of conservatism, it was based on the idea of natural hierarchies, that there is a natural elite that rises to the top of society, and as a result, they should be the ones who run the world in political affairs. This is a leftover from monarchical thinking. Edmund Burke and others looked at these revolutions, they saw an unnatural leveling. They believed democratic energies were very destructive. So conservatives ascribed these movements to the Illuminati, the Freemasons, and the Jews, supposedly overthrowing society as it should be.

Nowadays, never-Trumpers blame all of this conspiracy thinking on Donald Trump, right? That everything was fine before Donald Trump came along. In truth, the origins of that movement are hierarchical thinking that is bolstered and founded or founded in conspiratorial worldviews. They've always couched hierarchical thinking in an ideology that there is a conspiracy that has to be protected against. Conservative thinking always relies on those stories.

There's this widespread misconception out there that there's this meaningful difference between Christian nationalism and white identity politics. How should we understand the relationship between the two?

They are inextricable from one another. I ended up going back to when Christianity merged with state power, with the Roman Empire. There are really important parts of Christian mythology that are used by the powerful. It starts with a Roman empire, where there's a difference between citizens and barbarians, and later on between Christians and pagans.

Christianity is what provides the story: I have God on my side, I have the universe on my side, I have good on my side, and as a result, I should be able to do whatever I need to do to carry out God's vision. That has been inextricable with white supremacy from the very beginning. White supremacists say that they hold possession of so-called Western civilization or the progress of humanity. They've been able to say, listen, this is why I need to enslave people. This is why I need to colonize people. It allows them to carry out the processes that otherwise are indefensible. But because they have that story on their side, they can defend it and tell themselves the story.

So Trump's out of office. But as many of us predicted, Trumpism only seems to be metastasizing.

Trump was a symptom and not the disease. The problems that we are facing right now are the consequences of a cataclysmic crisis, in terms of both capitalism and this neoliberal era that it feels like we're reaching the end point of. Trump was an opportunist. He never meant anything that he said. He recognized the opportunity to go out and create this faux populist movement of Trumpism or MAGA or whatever we want to call it. It's merely an expression of something that is taking place within the political and social body that was always going to take place.

Trump was the type of person who could take advantage of it and also turn it into a consumer identity. Trump basically gave people products that they could wear and identities that they take on. It prepares people for a more concrete ideology. It's something that's happening all over the world. He created an opportunity for some really wealthy, dangerous people to recognize that the defenses and liberal democracy weren't there anymore. Trump was the right figure at the right time, the one a lot of people were looking for.

I'm assuming you wrote this book mostly when things were looking pretty bleak. But, in the past few months — I'm sure after it was edited and sent to the printer — there have been promising signs that people are turning against authoritarianism. The Ukrainian resistance seems to be holding its own. Brazil's kicked out Bolsonaro. The American midterms shut down a bunch of election deniers and damaged Trump's path to a coup in 2024. What do you make of all this? How are you feeling about everything these days?

You know, I'm actually really optimistic and I have been for a while. Sometimes when you take a large look at history, it can feel very crushing. It makes you feel very small and powerless. But the more that I looked at things, the more that I came to realize that there are an incredible number of things that are about to take place and synthesize into what I think is going to be a generational moment. There's gonna be some struggle. There's going to be some ugliness. But I will tell you, I'm very optimistic for a lot of the reasons you just brought up. Not just Ukrainian resistance. Look at how the regime in China is being challenged. You look at the protestors in Iran. I think Vladimir Putin is reaching a terminal point in his regime.

You have workers who are piling on victories against the largest corporations in the history of the world through organizing and labor actions. The illusion of the meritocracy, the illusion of American exceptionalism, I think those things are falling apart.

The difference maker here is whether or not we realize that the window is opening to change the world for the better. Or will the authoritarian right wing persuade people they have the solutions. And their solutions are terrible. Their solutions are making people work for cents on the dollar, relegating women to second-class birthing machines. But I think the window is open for a positive, generational change. And I think that's where we're going to go. I don't think it's going to be easy, but I do think that that is the direction we're heading in.

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This is so self-evident that most Republicans I know agree personally, despite belonging to a political party whose guiding ethos is to be deliberately unpleasant in hopes of getting a rise out of some liberal somewhere. Even people who think Fox News host Greg Gutfeld is funny have enough sense to know that it sucks to smell like an ashtray sucks. Or at least I thought they did.

I wrote an entire book about Republican trolling, so I'm ashamed to admit that I underestimated how pathetic it can get. With the GOP now in control of the House of Representatives, people are smoking indoors again in the Capitol, or at least the half of it governed by the oh-so-powerful Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Gross! I suppose Republicans can congratulate themselves, since they have successfully triggered me with this news. Of course, if they'd like to, they can trigger me even more — maybe by refusing to take regular showers or to wipe their butts after using the bathroom.

But in fairness, this isn't just about trolling. It's also about a close cousin to trolling, in the constellation of motivations that make right-wingers such baffling and exhausting people: Toxic masculinity. For about as long as supporters basic public health have argued for restrictions on tobacco use, conservatives have acted as if any regulations whatsoever on their foul-smelling phallic symbols literally amounts to prying the penises off their bodies. Before Rush Limbaugh died of lung cancer, the right-wing radio host who coined the term "feminazi" often portrayed smoking as a wholesome, manly activity that liberals wanted to take away from men purely to emasculate them.

"It's true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots," Limbaugh said.

He wasn't the only one. Former Vice President Mike Pence, when he wasn't denouncing the Disney film "Mulan" for teaching girls they could have military careers, also wrote a sneering 2001 op-ed portraying anti-tobacco regulations as "back handed big government disguised in do-gooder health care rhetoric" and making the blatantly false declaration that "smoking doesn't kill."

Years later, members of the Proud Boys filmed themselves smoking inside the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, a visual fuck-you to those who prefer not to smell like a bar's trash can. They each got four years in prison, where cigarettes are famously a form of currency, as well as a way to speed up your inevitable demise. But just as House Republicans have made the anti-democratic desires of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists the center of their political vision, this juvenile and offensive gesture of impotent rage at the "nanny state" has gone from the rioters to the offices of members of Congress.

Members of the Proud Boys filmed themselves smoking inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 insurrection — and once again House Republicans have felt it necessary to emulate juvenile and offensive trolls.

As the Limbaugh and Pence examples show, Republicans have long framed public health measures as a feminizing threat to their snowflake-fragile masculinity. But that rhetoric has gone into overdrive in recent years, as Donald Trump and then the GOP masses made dying of COVID-19 into a marker of partisan identity politics — and almost a noble sacrifice for the cause of so-called freedom. The deep irony of seeing a man behave pathetically while claiming to be "strong" was amply illustrated in Trump's attempt to deny that he nearly died from COVID by dramatically ripping his face mask off on a White House balcony. He definitely believed he looked confident, but that moment was uncomfortably reminiscent of Trump's repeated claims that his stubby fingers tell us nothing about what he's carrying in his pants.

So we've been forced to endure nearly two years of Republicans defending their masculine bona fides by claiming they're not afraid of COVID-19, often by acting very, very afraid of the vaccine. So many manly men running around declaring they will prove their toughness by refusing to get stuck with a little tiny needle! Joe Rogan, current king of the trying-too-hard culture of talk-radio masculinity, has been an avatar of this hilarious un-self-aware paradox of dudes who will thump their chests and claim they're too much man to be felled by a virus, before squealing like babies at the idea of getting the shot.

I don't know that the "good health = small dick" mentality has actually gotten dumber over the years, but man, it sure feels that way when you see Republicans like Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana complaining about liberals who carry around "Ziploc bags of kale" and pronounce that "kale tastes to me like I'd rather be fat." The gender politics of this stuff are never hard to suss out, as Kennedy also complained about "yoga mats" in that same speech, objects generally associated not just with blue-state exercise routines but also with women.

The crowd that witnessed Kennedy's rant — at a December campaign rally for soon-to-be-defeated Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker — ate it up, evidently never asking themselves how lion-hearted a man is if he's terrified of a vegetable. Women have long been subject to stereotypes about being afraid of mice and spiders, which supposedly makes us weak. But somehow the epitome of rugged manhood is to flee at the sight of a leafy green.

Almost nothing is funnier than someone with a massive gulf between the way they perceive themselves and the way they look to other people. I've witnessed decades of Republicans declaring themselves to be John Wayne heroes while acting like petulant kindergartners making faces because Mom told them to eat their broccoli. It never stops being hilarious. But there are real costs when conservatives seek relief from their yawning insecurities by sacrificing public health to partisan loyalty.

As Scientific American reported in July, there's "a growing gap in mortality rates for residents of Republican and Democratic counties across the U.S." Even before vaccine refusal led to huge numbers of Republicans pointlessly dying of COVID, the GOP hostility toward routine public health measures already meant that people in more conservative counties are likelier to die of many other causes, including suicide, heart disease, opioid overdoses and obesity-related illness. Some of this is cultural: Republicans are less likely to get enough exercise, for instance. But a lot of it is also due to policy decisions, such as poor access to health care, lax gun laws and inadequate road maintenance.

As nearly all sensible people understand, perfect health is not a realistic goal for any of us. There are always tradeoffs between the best possible health practices and actually living our lives. People are going to take sexual risks, stay up late, drink alcohol, do drugs, skip workouts and eat fattening food. Most of us have decided that the risks of post-vaccination COVID-19 aren't severe enough to live like shut-ins for the rest of our lives. Despite hysterical right-wing media claims to the contrary, the government is not coming to take away your gas stove. Contrary to right-wing stereotypes that Democrats will deploy secret-police tactics to make us all live like vegetarian monks, progressive health regulations always try to balance improved public health with ordinary people's understandable desire to decide how they want to live their lives.

When I was a teenager, more than a third of young people smoked. Now it's less than 9%, and continuing to fall. High cigarette taxes and prohibitions on smoking in most public and commercial spaces have contributed, but it's much more that people have realized that the temporary high of nicotine isn't even remotely worth it. You're risking agonizing disease and an early death for the payoff of smelling like an old shoe. There are just way too many other good times to be had, with nowhere near the danger. You can have non-procreative sex, take your friends to a drag show or read a book, for instance — which as you probably noticed, are all things the modern GOP would like to legislate out of existence. Smoking, by comparison, is just a bummer. Republicans' petty and self-destructive enthusiasm for it is just another reminder that they've become a party devoted to being terrible for its own sake.