Unmasking MAGA, Intermission: The Illusion of Change
The Song Hasn’t Changed—Only the Mix
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From the outside, it looks like today’s right-wing movement is something new.
The fascist memes.
The billionaire tech barons.
The rage streamers.
The militia podcasts.
The paranoid anti-vaxxers.
The fake influencers screaming about "trad wives" while shilling crypto.
It feels like a different era.
Different tone. Different tools. Different chaos.
But don’t let the noise fool you.
This isn’t a new movement.
It just sounds different now.
Think of the four factions we’ve covered—Fascists, Corporatists, Warhawks, and Fake Christians—as knobs on a stereo: bass, mids, treble, and gain. The song has always been the same. But the mix keeps changing.
Fifty years ago, fascism was turned down. America had just been forced—violently and incompletely—through the Civil Rights era, and overt white supremacy had been pushed underground—though never extinguished.
Corporatism, meanwhile, was gearing up for its resurgence. Still bruised from the New Deal, it began clawing its way back—deregulating markets, crushing unions, and dismantling the social contract piece by piece.
The Warhawks were near their apex. Vietnam was a scar, but the Cold War gave them purpose. The Soviet threat kept them central to policy, budgets, and national identity.
And the Fake Christians? They were just beginning their climb. Reagan gave them legitimacy, but their true influence crested decades later—first in the fight against same-sex marriage, and now in the crusade against trans rights and theocratic rule.
But here’s the truth:
It’s not as if someone’s been standing over the stereo, adjusting the knobs by hand.
There’s no conductor. No central engineer.
What we’ve seen is something closer to a metamorphosis.
The dials shift through struggle—internal contests for dominance, external pressures from culture, economy, and crisis.
They self-adjust to suit the moment. To survive. To evolve.
What rises does so not by plan—but by opportunity.
The song never stops.
Only the spotlight shifts.
The same monster—just a different limb in view.
So let’s take a look at how the balance of power has shifted among the four founding factions—decade by decade—through crisis, adaptation, and the endless fight for control.
The 1970s: The Opening Struggle
The 1970s were a decade of fallout and recalibration.
The Civil Rights Movement had forced fascists underground—but not out. Overt white supremacy was no longer politically fashionable, but it didn’t disappear. It repackaged itself in terms like “law and order,” “busing,” and “neighborhood schools.” The energy was still there—just waiting for a new invitation.
Corporatists, still stung by the New Deal and the economic constraints of the postwar consensus, began laying the groundwork for a counterattack. Inflation and recession gave them an opening. So did rising frustration with labor and bureaucracy. They built new think tanks, launched new publications, and tested new language. They weren’t dominant yet—but they were preparing for a long war.
Their war wasn’t just domestic:
As labor became more empowered at home—and New Deal regulations held the line—the Corporatists began looking abroad. Globalization wasn’t a buzzword yet. But the idea was already in motion: if you couldn’t extract as much from American workers, you could go find workers elsewhere.
Cheaper. Unprotected. Unorganized.
What started in the late 1970s as a workaround—outsourcing pieces of production to foreign markets—would quietly evolve into something much bigger:
A model.
A system.
A global supply chain optimized to break the power of domestic labor without ever firing a shot.
The Warhawks, for their part, were still central—but bleeding trust. Vietnam had shattered illusions of American military righteousness. The draft sparked generational revolt. The Pentagon’s decisions no longer carried automatic deference. Still, the Cold War kept them relevant. The Soviet Union remained a looming threat, and the military budget kept growing.
But while their foreign policy credibility was eroding, the Warhawks served a different—less obvious—purpose at home.
Again and again, their interventions abroad created economic and political crises that slowly undermined public confidence in the very government they served.
The pain of Vietnam wasn’t just measured in lives lost. It was the broken trust in government, the disillusionment with authority, the sense that promised freedoms came with fine print—and a draft card.
When the U.S. backed Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the result was the OPEC oil embargo—and gas lines that stretched for miles. When we overthrew Iran’s government and installed the Shah, it led to another embargo, another crisis, and eventually the Iran hostage debacle. Inflation soared. Unemployment spiked. Stagflation became the defining word of the decade.
And around the edges, distrust festered in stranger forms—JFK conspiracies, whispers about moon landings, shadow governments.
The kind of people you rolled your eyes at.
But they were watching.
Whatever one believes about the necessity of these foreign interventions, the domestic consequences were clear:
Freedom became the draft.
Prosperity became the gas line.
Security became inflation and economic anxiety.
And this was the pain the Corporatists and Fake Christians would later weaponize.
By the end of the decade, they had a story to tell: that the government—the very institution that built the New Deal, won World War II, and built the American middle class—had failed. Not because of deregulation. Not because of greed. But because it had grown too large, too weak, too secular, too liberal.
Meanwhile, the Fake Christians were finding their political identity. When the IRS came after segregationist “Christian academies,” white evangelicals rallied around the idea that government was no longer neutral—it was hostile. Roe v. Wade added fuel to the fire. But the real ignition point was integration—and the growing sense among white conservative Christians that their dominance was slipping.
And quietly, another creed was taking shape.
The Libertarians weren’t a faction yet—not in the coalition. But they were building something ideological. Something “pure”.
They rejected the Cold War militarism of the Warhawks.
They rejected the culture war moralism of the Fake Christians.
They even rejected the corporatist addiction to subsidies, bailouts, and control.
What they wanted was radical freedom—economic, personal, and absolute.
No draft. No regulation. No war without end.
Gold over fiat. Guns over government.
A republic of sovereign individuals.
They didn’t have power.
But they had philosophy.
While the Libertarians didn’t yet have numbers or influence, their rhetoric had power—and others noticed.
Small government. Lower taxes. Second Amendment rights. These weren’t just philosophical talking points. They were tools.
The broader coalition, still under construction, began borrowing their language—not out of shared belief, but because it worked.
Just as abortion would be weaponized to manipulate the Fake Christians, the libertarian gospel was repurposed to win elections—but never to be truly fulfilled.
Fifty years later, many still haven’t realized they were never the beneficiaries of the movement they helped build.
They were the bait.
By the end of the 1970s, the four factions weren’t fully fused. But they were beginning to align.
The fascists were rebranding.
The corporatists were organizing.
The Warhawks were weathered—but still powerful.
And the Fake Christians were falling into formation.
Reagan was waiting just over the horizon.
The 1980s: The Fusion
The 1980s weren’t just a resurgence.
They were the synthesis.
Reagan didn’t just win an election—he built the prototype. The modern right-wing coalition took shape under his banner, not as a collection of allies, but as a machine—each faction doing its part, each feeding the others, each rewarded in turn.
The corporatists got their revolution.
Reagan slashed taxes, deregulated industries, broke the back of organized labor, and made “government is the problem” the new national motto. It was the formal end of the New Deal era—and the beginning of a 40-year corporate ascendancy.
But the revolution didn’t stop at the water’s edge.
This was the beginning of the end for the Blue-Collar middle class—though few realized it at the time.
As Reagan busted unions and deregulated industry, corporations began quietly shifting production abroad.
The trend didn’t make headlines.
It was incremental. Technical. Wrapped in talk of efficiency and competitiveness.
And yet, something had changed.
Fewer hours. Fewer raises. Less security.
The American worker hadn’t failed the system—the system had started letting go of the American worker.
But the blame didn’t fall on the corporations.
They had a new scapegoat ready:
Welfare queens. Lazy liberals. Big government. The “undeserving.”
It wasn’t outsourcing or profit-chasing that gutted opportunity—it was someone else’s imagined freeloading that got the spotlight.
And the resentment was real.
But it was misdirected.
The Warhawks got their Cold War back.
The Vietnam hangover was fading. Reagan poured money into the military, reignited the arms race, and declared the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” Proxy wars raged across Latin America and the Middle East, justified by anti-communism and wrapped in patriotic fervor.
The Fake Christians were brought fully into the fold.
Reagan handed them symbolic victories, language about “Judeo-Christian values,” and a seat at the table. They got public prayer, moral panic, and the legitimization of white evangelical grievance as a political identity. For the first time, pastors weren’t just preaching—they were endorsing.
And the fascists?
They got subtlety.
Reagan didn’t shout racist slurs—he didn’t have to. He launched his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. He spoke of “welfare queens” and “strapping young bucks,” not lynchings or cross-burnings. The base understood the message.
No one captured the shift better than Reagan strategist Lee Atwater, who openly explained the logic of coded racism:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff... Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
This was the decade fascism became ambient.
Not hidden—just diffused.
No longer loud enough to indict, but always clear enough to rally.
Even the slogan gave it away.
“Make America Great Again” wasn’t born in 2015.
It was Reagan’s.
And like everything else in this coalition, it was just waiting to be turned back up.
Conspiracists weren’t central to the coalition. But they were always listening.
The UFO crowd. The New World Order obsessives. The “secret globalists” types.
They weren’t on the main stage.
But they were always just outside the door.
This was also the decade the coalition took control of the airwaves.
When Reagan repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, it didn’t just end equal time requirements on public broadcasts—it opened the floodgates.
Rush Limbaugh stepped through.
Fox News would soon follow.
And soon, the coalition had something it never had before:
A full-time propaganda arm that didn’t need to hide behind objectivity.
This was the decade the machine learned to speak with one voice.
Not because it agreed—but because it had common enemies:
The government that dared to regulate capital
The liberals who defended civil rights
The unions who slowed down profits
The journalists who told too much truth
The secularists who questioned the church
And the multiracial electorate that couldn’t be trusted to keep them in power
The alliance wasn’t perfect.
But the framework was set.
It was giving the right a cause,
by making the left the nation’s villain.
And it was giving power back to those who believed it had slipped too far from their hands.
By the time Reagan was done, no one remembered that it was their foreign interventions that triggered inflation, oil shocks, and national humiliation.
No—the blame had been reassigned.
It wasn’t the CIA or the Pentagon.
It was the welfare queens.
The high taxes.
The liberals.
Twenty years in, and the song is still the same—just a little more polished in the mix.
Corporatism and Warhawkism crept up from mid to upper-mid.
Fake Christians came off mute—rising from low to mid.
And fascism? It didn’t vanish.
It just slid under the surface—still pulsing, just below the threshold.
The 1990s: The Culture War Takes the Mic
If the 1980s fused the machine, the 1990s gave it a voice—and something to devour.
By the end of the Reagan era, the right had won so completely that the Democrats no longer knew what they stood for. They had been crushed in three straight presidential elections. Their New Deal identity—economic justice, labor solidarity, multiracial coalition-building—had been gutted. What remained was a shell, unsure how to speak to the country, and terrified of looking weak.
Into that vacuum stepped the corporatists.
They didn’t have to take over the Democratic Party.
They just had to offer it a way to survive.
Bill Clinton took the deal.
He deregulated Wall Street.
He signed NAFTA.
And with that, he committed the first true betrayal of the Blue-Collars—the very backbone of the New Deal coalition.
For decades, jobs had been drifting overseas—quietly, incrementally, under the radar.
But NAFTA changed everything.
It didn’t just allow offshoring.
It legitimized it. Accelerated it.
And worst of all, it sold it as progress.
The factories didn’t close overnight—but the countdown had started.
Entire industries would vanish.
Union towns would hollow out.
And the working class—the class that had built America, fought its wars, and trusted the Democrats to protect them—was sacrificed in the name of “free trade.”
But they weren’t told the truth.
Instead, they were handed scapegoats: immigrants, “welfare queens,” and “big government.”
The real betrayal wasn’t just economic.
It was narrative.
Clinton “ended welfare as we know it.”
He embraced mass incarceration and the War on Crime.
And he did it all in the name of “pragmatism.”
It was the first betrayal.
But it wouldn’t be the last.
The corporatists now had two parties competing to serve their agenda—and no major party standing firmly for Blue-Collars.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, a different kind of betrayal was being forged—one that wouldn’t just shift policy, but rewrite political discourse itself.
Though Newt Gingrich didn’t invent the culture war, he turned it into the default setting for Republican strategy. He weaponized words. Turned compromise into weakness. Branded Democrats not as opponents—but as enemies. He taught a generation of Republicans that governing was less important than scorched-earth messaging.
There is no Trumpism without Gingrich.
If Reagan had opened the floodgates, Gingrich broke the levees.
As for the rest of the coalition, each faction found its role in the newly radicalized environment:
Right-wing media—unleashed by Reagan’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine—exploded. By the mid-90s, Rush Limbaugh had already become a kingmaker. Fox News launched in 1996 and built a self-contained universe of grievance, disinformation, and identity politics. The coalition no longer needed mainstream legitimacy. It had its own megaphone.
Fake Christians grew more aggressive. “Family values” became the political wedge of choice. Abortion, gay rights, and “moral decline” were turned into existential threats, while televangelists raked in millions selling outrage as gospel.
Fascists began to reemerge. Ruby Ridge. Waco. Oklahoma City. These weren’t isolated incidents—they were the bleeding edge of a larger movement, fueled by white grievance, paranoia, and armed anti-government ideology. They still operated at the edges—but now they had media platforms and political language that made them feel just close enough to legitimacy.
Warhawks were relatively quiet—but not irrelevant. The Cold War was over, but the U.S. was still intervening abroad. Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq. They weren’t headline-makers, but they kept the military industry alive—and the ideology warm.
And threading through all of it was a growing ecosystem of conspiracists.
Black helicopters. FEMA camps. Chemtrails.
The stories got wilder.
But the audiences kept growing.
In 1998, a disgraced British doctor named Andrew Wakefield published a fraudulent study in The Lancet, falsely linking vaccines to autism.
It was quickly debunked.
But the damage was done.
The modern anti-vax movement was born—and at the time, it gained the most traction on the left.
Not among militias or evangelicals, but in affluent, liberal-leaning enclaves—wellness circles, environmentalists, and the alternative medicine crowd.
Back then, conspiracism wasn’t partisan.
You could find it at Whole Foods and gun shows alike.
It wasn’t driven by ideology.
It was driven by distrust—of institutions, of elites, of truth itself.
They weren’t shaping the coalition yet.
But they were learning how to speak to its growing sense of betrayal.
The 1990s weren’t the breaking point.
They were the entrenchment.
The corporatists solidified their dominance—across both parties.
The Fake Christians matured into a political bloc with media muscle and moral authority.
The fascists got a taste of visibility—and survival.
And the Warhawks, though sidelined, kept their machinery oiled.
The coalition wasn’t evolving.
It was metastasizing.
And the center wasn’t holding.
It was being sold.
Thirty years in, and the track is louder—but the structure hasn’t changed.
The Corporatist knob was nearly maxed—dominant in every measure.
Fake Christianity climbed again, from mid to upper-mid—no longer a background choir, but a lead vocal in the mix.
Warhawks faded down low—still present, but barely audible.
And fascism?
Still humming beneath it all—steady, patient, waiting for its moment.
By the end of the decade, the corporatists were king.
But not for long. The world was about to change.
The 2000s: Catastrophes Are Just Opportunity in Disguise
The world did change.
On September 11, 2001, the sky broke open—and every faction of the coalition reached for the wheel.
The Warhawks seized it first. The playbook was ready. Within hours, the vocabulary of fear was converted into strategy: invasion, preemption, dominance. Afghanistan was the opening salvo. Iraq was the ambition. The War on Terror became a blank check—and a blank slate on which every ambition could be written.
The Fake Christians anointed it. This wasn’t just national defense—it was spiritual warfare. The enemy wasn’t just Al-Qaeda—it was Islam. Good versus evil. Crusade by another name. Their language of moral panic now had a battlefield.
At home, they launched a new domestic crusade: same-sex marriage. It became the defining cultural battleground of the decade. Ballot measures. Boycotts. State constitutional amendments. For a time, they won—state by state. And every win reinforced their belief that the government should reflect the church, not the Constitution.
The Corporatists cashed in. Defense contracts exploded. Security spending surged. The newly created Department of Homeland Security became a feeding trough. War wasn’t just policy—it was profit. Iraq wasn’t about democracy—it was about deregulation, privatization, and sweetheart deals. Wall Street grew fat off the blood of war.
And the Fascists? They found their rhythm. Muslims were the new scapegoat. Civil liberties were painted as vulnerabilities. Dissent was unpatriotic. The Patriot Act and warrantless surveillance became tools of control. Anti-immigrant rhetoric began to boil again. For the first time in decades, fascism wasn’t hiding. It was wearing a flag pin.
This wasn’t a conspiracy.
It was instinct.
Each faction acted on reflex. The trauma of 9/11 didn’t forge a new coalition—it gave the old one a new justification. Catastrophe didn’t cause the drift. It revealed how far they'd already gone.
They built black sites.
Normalized torture.
Waged war on two fronts with no exit strategy.
And at home, they built the surveillance state—a turnkey authoritarian apparatus with bipartisan support and zero accountability.
And then came Abu Ghraib.
The images didn’t just show abuse.
They showed America’s reflection.
Hooded men. Leashed prisoners. Smiling guards.
It wasn’t just the cruelty—it was the casualness.
The shame was immediate, global, and irreversible.
It was a moment that echoed My Lai in Vietnam. A photograph that stripped away myth and forced the country to confront the truth: this is what happens when you hand the machine a license to do anything in your name.
I still remember seeing the pictures in the paper on my way to school. I was in high school back then.
They changed me.
The words I write here today were born that day.
As a first-generation immigrant, the illusion of what America was shattered in an instant.
But something else took its place:
A mission. A hope.
That one day, this country could become the thing it claimed to be—
a place where pictures like that could never happen again.
But there was no reckoning.
No reversal.
No collapse of public support.
It would not be long until those pictures were collectively forgotten.
Even Democrats signed off on the wars.
Even civil libertarians went quiet.
Even liberal media recycled the talking points.
And online, something darker was congealing.
9/11 truthers. Anti-vaxxers. Deep state paranoia.
The conspiracists had found the internet—and the internet was listening.
By the time the public realized what had been done in its name—by the time WMDs turned out to be fiction and “Mission Accomplished” turned into insurgency—too much had already been built.
The Warhawks had their empire.
The Fake Christians had their holy war.
The Corporatists had their record profits.
And the Fascists had their first taste of legitimacy.
Meanwhile, right-wing media was no longer insurgent. It was dominant.
Fox News defined the narrative.
Talk radio defined the mood.
And the idea of a shared American reality was already starting to collapse.
But beneath it all, something else was brewing.
A younger generation—raised in war, surveilled without consent, radicalized by betrayal—was beginning to see the cracks.
The myth of American virtue was unraveling.
And when the financial crash came in 2008, it wasn’t just the banks that collapsed.
It was trust.
Trust in government.
Trust in capital.
Trust in war.
Trust in order.
And into that vacuum would step two men with very different visions:
One offering hope.
The other offering revenge.
But that part comes next.
As we headed into the 2010s—
We would soon see what happens when the war machine runs out of enemies abroad.
And starts looking inward.
By the 2000s, the volume didn’t just rise—it spiked.
The Warhawks were maxed out—drums at full blast, drowning everything else.
Fake Christians hit the limit too—sermons turned to sirens, morality weaponized into law.
Corporatism held steady near the top—tight, polished, dominant in every chorus.
And fascism?
It started climbing. No longer buried in the mix—now rising into the mids, claiming its verse.
There’s still more below, I just need a moment of your time.
The American Manifesto isn’t backed by corporations. There are no ads, no paywalls, no billionaires funding it.
It’s just one person, fighting like hell to expose the truth and give you the weapons to push back.
If you value this work—if you want this movement to keep growing, keep calling out fascism without fear, and keep fighting for the future we deserve—then I need your support.
Join the fight. Become a supporter. Every contribution keeps this mission alive.
Because silence is surrender. We do not surrender. We are #TheRelentless.
The 2010s — Part I: The Collapse
Before the dam broke, there was one last glimpse of what the Warhawks had once represented.
At a town hall during the 2008 campaign, a woman told John McCain she couldn’t trust Obama “because he’s an Arab.”
McCain shook his head, took the mic, and said:
“No, ma’am. He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
It was brief. Quiet. Civil.
And it was the end.
The kind of honor that once gave birth to the Warhawks would fade with him—
and find no one left to carry it.
Then came November.
America elected its first Black president.
And the right snapped wide open.
Some saw a milestone.
Others saw a threat.
Something cracked.
And the country began to split.
The Missed Redemption
The 2008 crash didn’t just devastate the economy.
It exposed the rot.
It gave Democrats a rare and fleeting moment—an open path to reclaim their identity as the party of Blue-Collars.
But they didn’t take it.
Obama saved the banks.
People across the country lost their homes.
Wall Street executives got bonuses.
Families got foreclosed on.
The people who broke the system were rescued.
The people living in it were left behind.
At the time, it felt like this betrayal might go unchecked.
But history has a way of keeping score.
And this one would be paid back—even if it took eight years.
Not everyone waited.
In 2011, a new cry erupted in the streets:
“We are the 99%.”
Occupy Wall Street wasn't just a protest.
It was a reckoning.
Against bailouts.
Against austerity.
Against a system rigged to reward failure at the top and punish honesty at the bottom.
But it had no party.
No billionaires.
No infrastructure.
So it was kettled, surveilled, ridiculed—
and left to dissolve.
The left could have risen then.
But it had no pipeline.
To his credit, Obama also passed the Affordable Care Act, the most significant health care reform in decades.
It brought insurance to millions.
But it also brought record profits to the insurance industry, pharmaceutical giants, and hospital conglomerates.
Premiums skyrocketed.
Deductibles ballooned.
And for many working people, the promise of “affordable care” still felt like a hollow one.
To be fair, this wasn’t entirely the Democrats’ doing.
From the moment Obama took office, Mitch McConnell declared war on governance.
He vowed to block everything.
Republicans filibustered, stalled, and sabotaged—even when policies were watered down to win their votes.
Bipartisanship became a one-sided ritual.
Democrats kept reaching for compromise.
Republicans kept swinging for the throat.
But politics isn’t about intention.
It’s about consequences.
The Mirror Breaks
By his second term, the cracks were impossible to ignore.
Obama promised change.
But Guantanamo stayed open.
Drone strikes escalated.
Kill lists were real.
Civilian deaths became “collateral damage,” and oversight vanished.
And on the home front?
He was dubbed “Deporter-in-Chief”—presiding over the most deportations in modern U.S. history.
Families were torn apart. Detention centers swelled.
Hope and change became metal fences and armed ICE raids.
Corporate profits soared, while the Blue-Collars continued to struggle—even those who survived the crash without losing their homes now had to work harder than ever to make ends meet.
And yet—there were victories.
He stood against the fascists—not just through policy, but by existing in the White House as a symbol of multiracial democracy.
He championed dignity, civility, and rule of law—even when those around him abandoned it.
And under his presidency, same-sex marriage was legalized—a devastating blow to the Fake Christians’ vision of Christian theocracy.
But functionally?
The only real change Obama delivered
was finishing what Clinton started—handing the Democratic Party to the Corporatists and Warhawks.
The Libertarian Gamble
On the right, the first to act were the Libertarians.
In the wake of the crash and the bailouts, they launched the Tea Party—a movement born of anger at the state, the debt, and the idea that government could save the economy by picking winners and losers.
They spoke in the language of revolution:
Freedom. Sovereignty. Responsibility. Tyranny.
And for a while, it looked like they might take control of the GOP for the first time since their creation in the mid 20th century.
They had momentum.
They had grassroots rage.
They had primary victories.
And they claimed to be the principled answer to corruption in both parties.
But that’s not what the coalition heard.
What the base heard was permission to be angry again.
And what they wanted wasn’t liberty.
It was vengeance.
The Libertarians opened the door.
The fascists came storming through it.
Birtherism spread.
“Take our country back” became a chant—not a policy.
And the Tea Party’s identity shifted—from fiscal conservatism to white grievance in a tricorn hat.
The Libertarians thought they were leading a movement.
But they were only building a pipeline.
They wanted revolution by white paper.
But the war was already digital.
While they argued over deficits and departments,
the algorithms had chosen new champions.
And the ones arriving next…
didn’t care about liberty.
They wanted dominance.
Gamergate and the Birth of the Red Pillers
It started with video games.
Or at least, that’s what they told themselves.
But Gamergate was about a different kind of game.
It was about control.
A test run for what came next:
coordinated harassment,
narrative warfare,
and the transformation of the internet into a battlefield.
From its ashes, the Red Pillers rose—
armed not with policy,
but with grievance, mockery, and a lust for power.
It was the birth of a new kind of political identity—one not rooted in policy, but in personal bitterness and manufactured victimhood.
And for a generation of disaffected young men, it offered something addictive:
A narrative that blamed their pain not on capitalism, inequality, or power—but on women, “wokeness,” and the left.
Gamergate didn’t just radicalize individuals.
It trained them:
How to swarm.
How to dox.
How to claim persecution while engaging in mass harassment.
And the broader coalition noticed.
Steve Bannon—a fascist-aligned corporatist—called Gamergate a goldmine.
He recognized it as a recruitment engine.
He saw in it the same raw material the libertarian wave once offered:
Disillusioned people misdiagnosing the cause of their suffering—ripe for hijacking.
Where libertarianism rose in the 20th century blaming “big government” for the failures of capitalism, the Red Pill movement rose blaming “feminism” and “wokeness” for the collapse of purpose and power in a generation of young men.
And just like before, the Corporatists moved in.
They platformed it.
They monetized it.
They merged it with influencer culture, finance grifts, and algorithmic rage.
It became a pipeline—not just to misogyny, but to economic fatalism, political cynicism, and authoritarian flirtation.
And so a new faction began to form—one we’ll return to later.
But it started here.
In the ashes of trust.
In the adrenaline of outrage.
And in the silence of institutions that let it happen—because it made people click.
This wasn’t just a shift in tone.
It was a shift in structure.
The Digital Wildfire
Social media was no longer just a tool.
It was a structural shift in human communication.
It killed the gatekeepers.
Flattened institutions.
And handed the microphone to anyone who could generate clicks, outrage, or conspiracy.
For the coalition, it was a gift.
Corporatists turned platforms into profit centers.
Fake Christians built massive followings through algorithmic sermons and digital moral panics.
Fascists found each other—and their audience.
Warhawks, now sidelined, watched as the system they built was repurposed—not to defend the country, but to radicalize it.
Meanwhile, the Conspiracists—no longer fringe—began weaving their stories into every crack the internet exposed.
They had no structure.
No doctrine.
Just distrust—weaponized and contagious.
Back in 2007, in a strange corner of the internet, a man named Curtis Yarvin began publishing under the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug.
It looked like just another elitist blog—dense, academic, obsessed with monarchy and engineered order.
But by the 2010s, this blog contained the seeds of something darker:
Anti-democracy.
Engineered hierarchy.
“Exit” over reform.
A vision of society run by CEO-kings and optimized like software.
It didn’t go viral.
But it reached the right people.
Tech billionaires. Platform architects. Venture-funded fascists.
No one in the mainstream was paying attention.
But the people who were would soon become some of the most powerful people in the world.
The Cracks Spread
By the mid-2010s, the consequences were clear:
The Blue-Collars no longer trusted Democrats or believed the system would protect them.
The institutions supposed to serve the public had been hollowed out by decades of deregulation, obstruction, and betrayal.
And the only people still fighting for New Deal values were pushed to the margins.
The 2010s weren’t just a time of backlash.
They were a time of unraveling.
Most people still ignored the conspiracists.
They sounded too strange.
Too fringe.
But every time an institution failed—
they gained ground.
The 2010s began in drift—but ended in collapse.
The Warhawks slipped down the mix—less doctrine, but still dominant.
Corporatism surged past the redline—11 out of 10, saturating every channel.
Fake Christians lost some clarity—still powerful, but no longer the dominant voice.
And fascism?
It crept upward—layer by layer, verse by verse—until suddenly, at the decade’s end, it spiked.
Not background. Not buried.
Front and center—raw, unfiltered, and ready to take the mic.
The levels were peaking.
All it needed now—was a frontman.
And in 2015, it came.
Not from a general.
Not from a pastor.
Not from a senator.
But from a reality TV star
descending a golden escalator.
The 2010s — Part II: Coronation
I still remember it like it was yesterday.
Trump had just descended the escalator.
He called immigrants rapists.
He called himself a genius.
And he promised a wall.
Sitting at the dinner table, I told my family he would become president.
Some of them laughed.
But history has a long memory—and a cruel sense of irony.
And soon enough, that laughter would turn into cult membership.
Bloodletting
Trump knew something—not from books, not from think tanks, but in his gut.
He knew that American politics hadn’t been a battle between left and right.
It had been a long, tired song—an unresolved power struggle between factions who’d never fully gotten what they wanted.
The Corporatists had rigged the economy—but they wanted more.
More tax cuts.
More deregulation.
More agency capture.
More deference from the courts.
The New Deal had never been fully undone—and they wanted every last piece on the table.
The Fake Christians had turned pulpits into campaign offices—but Roe still stood.
Their moral crusade had brought them to the edge of power—but never across the threshold.
They wanted judges. They wanted retribution. They wanted holy war by legal decree.
The Fascists had simmered underground for decades—pushed to the margins, reduced to whispers and dog whistles.
But they were still waiting for a leader who would say the quiet part out loud.
The Blue Collars?
Once the bulwark of the Democratic coalition—betrayed not once, but twice—
First by Clinton, with NAFTA,
Then by Obama, who saved Wall Street while Main Street drowned in foreclosure,
For decades, neither party had seriously promised them deliverance.
Not real jobs. Not real dignity. Not real power.
Just slogans. Just scraps. Just silence.
They were up for the taking.
And the Warhawks?
He offered them up as a sacrifice.
After all, someone had to take the fall for the $6 trillion lie in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And in any good scheme, you need a patsy. It was perfect too—because everyone else in the GOP primary was drenched in Warhawk blood and contractor money.
Trump understood the coalition was tired.
Tired of euphemisms.
Tired of losing.
Tired of waiting.
And most of all—tired of no meaningful change, administration after administration.
Trump didn’t write a policy platform.
He offered deliverables.
And for the first time in decades, each faction heard the thing they’d been aching to hear—not platitudes, not symbolism, but promises:
To the Corporatists: the lowest taxes since the New Deal.
To the Fake Christians: judges who would finally end Roe.
To the Fascists: a Muslim ban, a border wall, mass deportations.
To the Blue Collars: vengeance—against China, elites, trade deals, immigrants, and the government that left them behind.
And to the Warhawks: silence. A knife in the back, gift-wrapped in populism.
And here’s where Theodore Roosevelt’s wisdom comes in:
“The best thing you can do is the right thing.
The next best thing is the wrong thing.
The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
For decades, America’s political establishment—on both sides—had chosen “nothing.”
No vision. No deliverables. No attempt to even try.
Trump didn’t have to do the right thing.
He didn’t even have to do the wrong thing well.
He just had to try—or put on a convincing-enough show.
Because in a country that had been taught to accept failure from those in power, trying became sacred.
Even if it was fake.
Even if it was grotesque.
Even if it was reckless.
Especially if it was reckless.
And so, as the 2016 Republican primary unfolded, every obscene statement, every half-baked policy, every threat to law and tradition—wasn’t a weakness.
It was proof of intent.
The spectacle was the promise.
The cruelty was the appeal.
And the rage was the product.
One by one, the other candidates fell—not because they lacked ideas, but because they lacked the will to offer real power to the factions that wanted it most.
Again, Trump didn’t campaign on ideology.
He campaigned on deliverables.
And the base didn’t care whether he’d follow through.
They only needed to believe that he might.
He wasn’t running for office.
He was auditioning for executioner.
And by the time the primaries ended, the old guard wasn’t just defeated.
They were irrelevant.
Because the movement didn’t want a president.
It wanted a weapon.
And its name was Donald Trump.
The Standard Bearer
When Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee, it was over.
Not because she was uniquely villainous—in fact, if nothing else, she was overly qualified.
But because she was perfectly symbolic.
She was the wife of the man who had signed NAFTA—the original betrayal of the Blue-Collar class. She was the Secretary of State for the President that delivered the second.
And now, not a decade later, she stood not just as a continuation of that legacy—
but as the living embodiment of how far the old coalition had fallen.
She didn’t just tolerate the rise of Corporatists and Warhawks within the Democratic Party.
She represented them.
She owed them.
And nothing made that clearer than the contrast with Bernie Sanders.
Bernie represented the last gasp of what the party used to be:
New Deal values, labor solidarity, working-class uplift.
Hillary represented what it had become:
Technocratic, corporate, globalized, hawkish, elite.
And regardless of what one believes about how that primary played out—
whether the scale was tilted or not—
once she became the nominee, the die was cast.
It was as iconic as it was ironic.
For fifty years, the Corporatists and Warhawks had ruled the right.
But in 2016, it was the Democratic nominee who carried their banner.
And across the aisle?
A man controlled by the former while backstabbing the latter.
The only thing that surprised me
was how close the results were.
The Presidency Was the Rehearsal
The Muslim Ban came first.
Not a dog whistle. Not a trial balloon.
An executive order—signed on camera.
Seven majority-Muslim countries banned.
Refugees detained at airports. Families torn apart mid-flight.
The courts fought back. Protesters flooded terminals.
But for the base, the message had already landed:
He meant it.
Even if it didn’t work the first time.
Even if it got struck down.
He tried.
Then came the press.
He called them fake.
He called them enemies.
He tried to strip their access, their protections, their very legitimacy.
It wasn’t just messaging.
It was doctrine.
For fascists, truth is a liability.
For Fake Christians, only one truth matters.
And for Corporatists, the less scrutiny, the better.
Then came the tax cuts.
Massive.
Historic.
A gift-wrapped feast for the rich.
Corporatists got exactly what they wanted—again.
Blue Collars got scraps.
Not checks. Not uplift. Just the illusion of inclusion.
But they bought the con anyway—because it came with a flag, a villain, and a promise to fight.
Then came the cages.
Family separation wasn’t an accident.
It was a strategy.
Kids were ripped from their parents, caged in freezing cells, and lost in a system that treated human beings as numbers—then forgot the numbers.
Some were never reunited.
Some died.
And the administration lied.
Over and over again.
But again:
He tried.
To be cruel.
To be strong.
To show the fascists that law didn’t apply anymore.
Then there was the fever.
With every failure of government—every lie, every betrayal, every broken promise—something else was rising:
Conspiracism.
It had always been there, simmering at the edges.
But the worse things got, the hotter it burned.
Each institutional failure acted like a thermometer spike.
Iraq. The Crash. Benghazi. Epstein.
The colder reality became, the more heat conspiracy generated.
And if conspiracy was the fever, then QAnon was the seizure.
The break from reason.
The hallucination of justice in a collapsing system.
The deep state. The Satanists. The storm. The awakening.
It didn’t have to make sense.
It just had to make meaning.
Fascists weaponized it.
Fake Christians sanctified it.
And the GOP let it metastasize—because it was easier to ride a delusion than fix a system.
Then came the protests.
Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery.
Not the first names. Not the first killings. But a tipping point.
Years of police killings had accumulated like rot behind drywall.
The Ferguson uprising. The deaths of Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Philando Castile.
And then, in 2020, came the spark— George Floyd.
The video of a man suffocating under a cop’s knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.
The streets erupted.
Not in chaos—but in purpose.
Millions marched. In every state. In every major city.
Holding signs. Singing names. Kneeling in silence.
Black Lives Matter had become more than a slogan—it was a movement.
And Trump?
He didn’t mourn.
He didn’t lead.
He cleared Lafayette Square with tear gas and rubber bullets—
not for safety,
not for peace,
but for a photo.
He held a Bible upside down like a club,
posed in front of a church he didn’t attend,
and declared dominion over pain he didn’t understand.
The generals flinched.
The pastors winced.
But the coalition stood firm.
Because the image wasn’t a mistake.
It was the point.
Then came COVID.
A pandemic that demanded leadership—he offered lies.
A crisis that demanded science—he offered bleach.
A tragedy that demanded unity—he offered blame.
He downplayed.
He dodged.
He deflected.
And he told his base what they wanted to hear:
It’s overblown. It’s political. It’s fake.
But it wasn’t fake.
And by the time the virus would run its course, over one million Americans would be dead.
Hospitals overrun.
Funerals held on Zoom.
Teachers begging for masks.
Workers were called essential, then treated as disposable.
The economy cratered.
Small businesses shuttered.
And still, the spectacle continued.
Trump didn’t stop campaigning.
He didn’t stop rallying.
He didn’t stop trying to look strong—even as the country bled.
Because even in the face of death, chaos, and collapse—
the coalition held.
He was trying.
He was fighting.
He was promising vengeance.
It was almost time for the coronation.
The Coronation
It didn’t happen on Election Night.
It didn’t happen with the inauguration.
And it didn’t happen in the quiet, ritualistic transfer of power that had defined American democracy for over two centuries.
It happened on January 6, 2021.
When the flags were turned into weapons.
When the slogans became marching orders.
When the lies became gospel.
And when the coalition, in all its broken glory, turned on the very republic that made it possible.
For four years, Trump had tested every boundary, broken every norm, and punished every attempt at accountability.
He’d mocked the press, ignored laws, corrupted courts, and praised dictators.
He’d turned the presidency into a performance—and the performance into power.
But even he understood that power, once tasted, demands renewal.
And when the voters told him no—he refused to hear it.
When the courts told him no—he refused to accept it.
When his own officials told him no—he called them traitors.
Because for Trump, there was never a distinction between the presidency and himself.
To lose the office was to be diminished. To be humiliated. To be powerless.
And in Trump’s mind, that was the greatest crime of all.
So he summoned them.
He summoned the believers, the broken, the armed, the angry.
He summoned the QAnon disciples who thought they were fulfilling prophecy.
He summoned the grandmas who thought they were saving America.
He summoned the politicians who still thought they could ride the tiger.
And he summoned the fascists who knew exactly what they were doing.
He told them the election had been stolen.
He told them the system was rigged.
He told them to fight like hell.
And then he pointed them toward the Capitol.
What happened next wasn’t a protest.
It wasn’t a riot.
It wasn’t even a coup attempt in the traditional sense.
It was a coronation.
Not in marble halls, but in broken glass.
Not with a crown, but with a gallows.
Not with a choir, but with a chant: Hang Mike Pence.
This was the moment the movement dropped the mask entirely.
It was no longer about values, or policies, or even identity.
It was about dominion.
And the right to seize power through force, if the voters wouldn’t give it willingly.
The Confederacy had tried it with cannons.
This one tried it with memes, livestreams, and zip ties.
But the spirit was the same.
And what made it so dangerous wasn’t whether they succeeded.
It’s that they tried—and that millions cheered them for it.
That when they failed, they still believed they were righteous.
That when the system survived—they took it as a sign they should’ve tried harder.
For hours, they wandered the halls of Congress like pilgrims on a holy mission.
They smeared shit on the walls, carried crosses through the rotunda, and posed for photos in the seats of power.
They beat cops with American flags.
And one of them—Ashli Babbitt—was shot trying to breach the House chamber.
She died.
The right would turn her into a martyr.
The rest would go home thinking they’d done something righteous.
And Trump?
He watched.
He smiled.
He told them they were loved.
Because this wasn’t an aberration.
It was the climax.
This was the movement he had built—not from scratch, but from the bones of every betrayal, every grievance, every lie the right had been feeding its base for half a century.
It was the fascists with their dream of domination.
It was the Fake Christians with their fantasy of holy war.
It was the Corporatists who thought they could ride the wave without drowning.
It was the Blue Collars who had been promised vengeance.
It was the Conspiracists who mistook delusion for destiny.
And it was the Warhawks, watching helplessly, as the machine they built for foreign wars began to be turned inward.
This wasn’t just the death of democracy.
It was the attempt to replace it.
Not with monarchy. Not with dictatorship.
But with something worse:
A democracy-shaped shell filled with obedience, violence, and myth.
They didn’t want a system anymore.
They wanted a sovereign.
And Trump gave them one.
Himself.
No matter the cost.
No matter the blood.
He was now their king.
Beneath the Surface
For all the noise of the last 50 years—for every rebrand, every pundit pivot, every viral clash over left and right—nothing fundamental has changed.
The coalitions remain.
The machinery hums.
The incentives still reward destruction over repair.
What looked like evolution was just mutation.
A new coat of paint on the same collapsing house.
Because the real story of American decline isn’t one of sudden reversals.
It’s a story of slow corrosion—of institutions hollowed out not by coup or revolution, but by something quieter:
a belief that government itself should not exist.
This marks the end of our transition between Act I—the factions fighting for control—
and Act II: a descent beneath the power struggle, into the systems, dogmas, and broken philosophies that made this coalition possible in the first place.
And it begins with the ideology that didn’t seize the reins—
but convinced us to throw them away.
Next: Part 6 — The Libertarians
From the Gospel of Free Markets to the Ashes of a Failed State
Thank you , thank you, thank you for writing what we all needed !!!
I've lost count of how many times someone has tried to explain the phenomenon of Trump's rise and continued sway over his base. Many make good points, many miss the mark spectacularly. I don't think anyone has hit the nail on the head the way you did here.