The MAGA Crack-Up Is Overrated. MAGA Is Here to Stay.

Sure, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson are squabbling. But the underlying ideology remains as powerful as ever.

https://newrepublic.com/article/204494/maga-carlson-shapiro-owens-crackup-overrated

https://archive.ph/6FCrC


Tucker Carlson at the public memorial service for right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona, on September 21

There is an emerging conventional wisdom that MAGA is eating itself alive with internecine warfare between various politicians, pundits, thought leaders. People also point to the diminution of Trump as a tired, spent force as a reason for celebration. They want hope in a time when there seems like none, and this jockeying for the crown even as the king falls asleep in his chair while his minions fawn over his vitality and vigor seems to offer it. Conservative powerhouses Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson are at each other’s throats over Israel. Open antisemite and fascist Nick Fuentes (who hates Shapiro and the late Charlie Kirk) is quickly becoming a mainstream enough thought leader to be a subject for The New York Times, while Rolling Stone proclaims that Fuentes has “won.”

At the same time, disgraced alt-right and self-proclaimed ex-gay Milo Yiannopoulos has accused Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson of being gay. Some will point to Republican politicians bucking Trump as a reason to believe that the whole circus tent is about to collapse. Marjorie Taylor Greene is leaving Congress, and it is rumored that Nancy Mace (who seems to be struggling with mental health issues) will soon follow. There are Trump’s health concerns, and the obvious vying by Cabinet members like JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio to be seen as the natural successor to the president in the MAGA movement. However, this does not mean that MAGA is disintegrating.

What defines MAGA is still there, and won’t go away for the foreseeable future. If you reduce the equation to the simplest terms, you have the Trump voters who pay attention to the chaos and those who don’t. No matter how you slice it, neither group is going to suddenly start voting for Democrats, regardless of which monkey wins the poo-flinging contest. When you look at the element of MAGA that pays attention to the likes of Carlson, Fuentes, Kirk, Matt Walsh, etc., they are dyed-in-the-wool true believers. The only real difference between them is that when they discuss which groups of people should be loaded into a rocket and fired into the sun, some of them would put Jews on the rocket with the transgender people and immigrants, and some of them wouldn’t.

Effectively, there aren’t a lot of foundational differences of opinion between them, other than which of them should ideologically rule the country after Trump nods off for the last time. Then you have people like my parents. I doubt either of them would recognize any of these far-right figures except Tucker Carlson, and that’s only because he was on Fox News. I fully expect my father to expire in his Barcalounger with Fox News (or Newsmax, or OANN) playing at 120 decibels in the background. My parents have also made it perfectly clear that they’d rather never see their kids or grandkids again than see a Democrat in office and are rather proud of not voting for one since Jimmy Carter in 1976.

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