John Bellamy Foster apresenta uma galeria de ideólogos fascistas que insidiosamente promovem a agenda MAGA, desde a Heritage Foundation e seu Projeto 2025 até YouTubers neonazistas e influenciadores culturais. "Os sucessos políticos e ideológicos do movimento MAGA", escreve Foster, "foram possíveis em parte por uma esquerda liberal que abandonou a classe trabalhadora econômica e politicamente".
John Bellamy Foster
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| Volume 77, Number 01 (May 2025) |
Uma semana após a posse de Donald Trump em 20 de janeiro de 2025 em seu segundo mandato como presidente dos EUA, Matthew J. Vaeth, diretor interino do Escritório de Administração e Orçamento (OMB), emitiu um memorando aos departamentos e agências federais ordenando uma pausa temporária nos gastos com agências, subsídios e empréstimos e assistência financeira em todo o governo federal. Este foi o tiro inaugural do que a direita chamou de “Guerra Fria Civil “.1 A ordem de congelamento geral dos gastos civis federais foi provavelmente escrita pelo novo diretor do OMB em 2025, Russell Vought, que à época aguardava confirmação do Congresso. Para Vought, “a dura realidade na América é que estamos nos estágios finais de uma completa tomada marxista do país” e que esses inimigos “já possuem as armas do aparato governamental”, que “eles apontaram … para nós.”2 Vought chefiou o OMB durante o primeiro governo Trump e foi um dos principais arquitetos do Projeto 2025, o plano para a transição para um novo executivo absolutista, publicado em 2022 pela Heritage Foundation, de direita.3 Ele escreveu o capítulo sobre o “Gabinete Executivo do Presidente dos Estados Unidos” para o Projeto 2025 e fundou o Center for Renewing America, um ramo ativo do Projeto 2025, que foi encarregado de redigir centenas de ordens executivas com antecedência para serem implementadas imediatamente após a ascensão de Trump à Casa Branca. O Projeto 2025 incluía planos para fechar departamentos federais inteiros, cortar maciçamente a força de trabalho federal e reduzir de forma drástica os gastos federais, forçando estados, governos locais, universidades e a mídia a se alinharem com os ditames do regime de Trump.4
A ordem do OMB, de congelar os gastos do governo civil federal, afetou os gastos que no ano fiscal de 2024 totalizaram cerca de US$ 3 trilhões, enviando ondas de choque por todo o país. Em 31 de janeiro de 2025, o juiz-chefe John J. McConnell Jr., do Distrito de Rhode Island dos Estados Unidos, emitiu uma ordem de restrição temporária das ações do OMB. Em resposta, o OMB cancelou seu memorando. No entanto, o governo Trump, aderindo à “teoria do represamento” que afirmava que o Poder Executivo tinha o poder de não aplicar fundos alocados pelo Congresso, recusou-se a cumprir integralmente a ordem judicial de McConnell. A decisão subsequente do Tribunal de Apelações dos EUA para o Primeiro Circuito, que apoiou a decisão de McConnell, apontou para uma crise constitucional iminente. Figuras importantes do movimento Make America Great Again (MAGA) formularam antecipadamente estratégias justificando que o presidente pode fechar departamentos e bloquear gastos autorizados pelo Congresso, ignorando os tribunais, com base no poder absoluto do executivo e na proposição de que tudo o que o presidente faz é legal. Se necessário, pode declarar estado de emergência, suspendendo os direitos constitucionais.5 O Departamento de Eficiência Governamental (DOGE) de Elon Musk atropelou o governo federal, aparentemente com poderes para assumir e fechar agências inteiras à sua vontade. Enquanto isso, o governo Trump afirma ter poder total sobre as agências reguladoras independentes dentro do governo federal, como a Federal Trade Commission, o National Labor Relations Board, a Federal Communications Commission e até mesmo o Federal Reserve Board, com base na que é chamada de “autoridade executiva unitária”, uma teoria constitucional controversa.6
Se a ordem do OMB e as ações do DOGE de Musk criaram um pântano legal, a intenção ideológica das ações do governo Trump era, no entanto, bastante clara. De acordo com o memorando Vaeth / Vought, o objetivo do congelamento dos gastos federais do governo era acabar com o “woke” e a instrumentalização do governo, opondo-se ao “uso de recursos federais para promover a equidade marxista, o transgenerismo e as políticas de engenharia social do green new deal”. O congelamento inicial, ou “pausa” nos gastos, foi projetado para permitir que o governo identificasse os gastos dedicados a “DEI [programas de diversidade, equidade e inclusão], ideologia de gênero “woke” e o green new deal“, juntamente com gastos com ajuda externa, que foram considerados usos fraudulentos de recursos federais.7 Na ideologia de direita, a categoria abrangente é o “Marxismo Cultural”, que é visto como incluindo a defesa da teoria crítica da raça (CRT); iniciativas ambientais, sociais e de governança (ESG); DEI; direitos LGBTQ+; ações de mudança climática; fronteiras abertas; assistência médica universal; e energia verde.8 Este ataque ao chamado Marxismo Cultural estava de acordo com a Agenda 47 da campanha Trump e J.D. Vance, que visava “remover todos os burocratas marxistas de diversidade, equidade e inclusão” e perseguir os “maníacos marxistas que infectam instituições educacionais”.9
A lógica geral por trás desses movimentos foi fornecida por outro documento da Heritage Foundation, também publicado em 2022, intitulado Como o marxismo cultural ameaça os Estados Unidos – e como os americanos podem combatê-lo, de Mike Gonzalez e Katharine C. Gorka, que escreveram NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (2024).10 O Marxismo Cultural, que segundo a direita MAGA permeia as universidades e o Estado, assim como penetra as corporações, é visto como tendo sua gênese nos Cadernos do Cárcere, de Antonio Gramsci, que rompeu com o economicismo do marxismo clássico. Nessa visão distorcida, o novo “marxismo cultural” foi levado adiante por marxistas da Escola de Frankfurt como Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse e Erich Fromm. Recebeu mais tarde uma conceituação mais ampla por pós-modernistas como Michel Foucault, que levaram, em última instância, à teoria feminista radical e à CRT. O trabalho de Gonzalez e Gorka não demonstra a menor atenção à pesquisa acadêmica genuína. Seu objetivo não é promover a investigação intelectual, mas sim um Novo Macarthismo. Em seu livro, eles afirmam que Joseph McCarthy, na caça às bruxas anticomunista da década de 1950, realizou um “trabalho importante”, mas cometeu o erro de fazer acusações que “não pôde comprovar”. Na Guerra Fria Civil de hoje, sugere-se que o macarthismo precisa ser ressuscitado em bases mais sólidas para não cometer os erros do passado – embora, na verdade, o Novo Macarthismo seja tão desprovido de substância quanto seu antecessor dos anos 1950.11
A ideologia MAGA que agora está abrigada na Casa Branca, e que também avançou em grande medida para os tribunais e o Congresso, tem pouco a ver com o próprio Trump, para quem serviu como uma arma conveniente em sua ascensão ao poder. Sua base material pode ser encontrada, em vez disso, no crescimento de um movimento neofascista mais amplo, que, como todos os movimentos do gênero fascista, está enraizado em uma tênue aliança entre setores da classe dominante capitalista monopolista no topo da sociedade e muito abaixo um exército mobilizado de adeptos da classe média baixa. Estes últimos veem como seus principais inimigos não os escalões superiores da classe capitalista, mas os profissionais da classe média alta imediatamente acima deles e a classe trabalhadora abaixo deles.12 A classe média baixa, principalmente branca, se articula com as populações rurais e adeptos do fundamentalismo religioso ou evangélico, formando um bloco histórico revanchista de direita.
A atual mobilização da classe média baixa pela direita do capital monopolista, particularmente os representantes dos interesses tecnológicos, financeiros e petrolíferos, visa inicialmente desmantelar o atual “Estado administrativo”, substituindo-o por um mais propício a um projeto neofascista. No entanto, no processo, uma lacuna política cada vez maior já está se abrindo entre os governantes bilionários em cima e seu exército MAGA embaixo, entre diferentes elementos dentro do movimento evangélico e entre aqueles que apoiam uma ditadura política e aqueles que desejam manter as formas constitucionais liberal-democráticas.13
Em consonância com todos os movimentos do gênero fascista, o atual regime inevitavelmente trairá os apoiadores de massa do MAGA na direita radical, buscando relegá-los a um papel cada vez mais subserviente e controlado e negando quaisquer políticas em conflito fundamental com seus objetivos capitalistas-imperiais. No entanto, surgiu uma massa de think tanks e influenciadores que buscam racionalizar o irracional, utilizando-se dos elementos ideológicos que atraem uma classe média baixa branca, mas, em última análise, atendendo às necessidades da classe capitalista bilionária. Compreender a base desse novo irracionalismo e as formas de domínio de classe associadas a ele é crucial na luta contra-hegemônica por um futuro democrático, igualitário e sustentável – e, portanto, socialista – para a humanidade como um todo.
A ideologia neofascista do MAGA
“O antônimo de fascismo”, escreveu o economista marxista Paul M. Sweezy em 1952, “é a democracia burguesa, não o feudalismo ou o socialismo. O fascismo é uma das formas políticas que o capitalismo pode assumir na fase monopolista do imperialismo.”14 Na definição clássica originada com os teóricos marxistas – e empregada, como no caso do Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, de Franz Neumann, nos julgamentos de Nuremberg – esses movimentos e regimes pertencentes ao gênero fascista têm seus fundamentos materiais em uma tênue aliança entre o capital monopolista e uma pequena burguesia ou classe média baixa mobilizada. Estes últimos foram referidos por C. Wright Mills como os “guarda-costas” do sistema capitalista devido à sua ideologia geralmente regressiva, um produto de sua posição de classe contraditória.15
Essa mobilização da classe/estrato média e baixa instigada por setores do capital monopolista ocorre quando os escalões superiores da sociedade se veem ameaçados por uma variedade de fatores internos e externos que colocam em risco sua hegemonia. Isso leva a ataques ao Estado democrático liberal e à tomada do poder do Estado por um setor da classe dominante, apoiado por um exército de adeptos de baixo – muitas vezes inicialmente por meios legais, mas logo cruzando as fronteiras constitucionais. O poder está concentrado nas mãos de um líder, um duce ou führer, por trás de quem estão os gigantescos interesses capitalistas. A chave para o governo fascista, uma vez que ganha sua ascendência sobre o Estado, é a privatização de grandes partes do governo favorecendo o capital monopolista, um conceito articulado pela primeira vez em relação à Alemanha de Adolf Hitler.16 Isso é acompanhado por extrema repressão de segmentos inferiores da população, muitas vezes como bodes expiatórios. Tais movimentos inevitavelmente buscam garantir seu domínio ideológico, ganhando o controle de todo o aparato cultural da sociedade em um processo que os nazistas chamaram de Gleichschalthung, ou alinhamento.
Essa compreensão geral do fascismo foi dominante nas décadas de 1930 e 40, estendendo-se até o final do século XX. No entanto, o fascismo, como formação política, acabou sendo reinterpretado no discurso liberal em termos idealistas como uma ideologia pura, conceitualmente dissociada de seus fundamentos de classe e materialistas e reduzida à sua forma externa como racismo extremo, nacionalismo, revanchismo e o crescimento de personalidades autoritárias, todos vistos como desconectados do próprio capitalismo. Muito disso estava de fato implícito na crítica ao “totalitarismo” desenvolvida por figuras da Guerra Fria como Hannah Arendt, que apresentava o fascismo como um sistema extremo à direita conceitualmente divorciado do capitalismo, e antônimo do comunismo à esquerda.17 O fascismo, portanto, foi reinterpretado na ideologia hegemônica como uma forma de autoritarismo / totalitarismo violento e afastado do capitalismo, que foi então identificado exclusivamente com a democracia liberal. Sem quaisquer fundamentos histórico-materiais reais e ignorando as realidades de classe, tais reformulações foram meros meios de escorar a própria noção de capitalismo e se mostraram inúteis nas tentativas de entender o ressurgimento das forças fascistas e neofascistas em nosso tempo.
Ao abordar o neofascismo atual, é crucial vê-lo como um produto das relações materiais/de classe/imperiais do capitalismo tardio, que não deve ser entendido simplesmente em termos de suas formas externas “populistas”, hiperrracistas, hipermisóginas ou hipernacionalistas, mas sim em termos de uma crítica substantiva baseada em classes.18 O fascismo é sempre um ataque à democracia liberal e a sua substituição pelo tacão de ferro de uma ordem política na qual reina o capital financeiro monopolista. Sua ideologia revanchista não surge principalmente do próprio capital monopolista, mas é principalmente um mecanismo para a mobilização de forças de direita retiradas predominantemente da classe média baixa, alistando um exército de tropas de assalto (“stormtroopers”) reais ou futuros (vestindo camisas pretas, camisas marrons ou bonés MAGA) e fornecendo a justificativa para o desmantelamento do estado liberal-democrático.
Embora sejam as reais forças de classe material, e não a ideologia desencarnada, que devem ser levadas em consideração em primeiro plano, é verdade que as ideias, uma vez que surgem, podem se tornar forças materiais. “A ideologia”, escreveu Georg Lukács, é “a forma mais elevada de consciência [de classe]”.19 Se quisermos entender a natureza do regime emergente do MAGA, temos que explorar sua ideologia governante e suas formas de organização política. Muito pouco disso, deve-se ressaltar, emana do próprio Trump, que é frequentemente descrito dentro do movimento MAGA como um instrumento um tanto defeituoso, embora útil, da nova ordem.20
Apesar de sua importância na publicação do Projeto 2025, o principal “think tank” do movimento Trump não é a Heritage Foundation, mas sim o Claremont Institute, fundado em 1979 em Upland, Califórnia. O Instituto Claremont foi originalmente uma base para o pensamento straussiano (derivado do teórico político ultraconservador Leo Strauss), mas evoluiu para ser o centro nervoso do MAGA. Seu financiamento vem de megadoadores, incluindo o Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund (um fundo multibilionário administrado pelo banqueiro de investimentos Thomas D. Klingenstein, presidente do conselho do Claremont Institute), a Fundação Dick e Betsy DeVos (administrada pela bilionária ex-secretária de educação de Trump, Betsy DeVos), a ultraconservadora Fundação Lynde e Harry Bradley e a Fundação Sarah Scaife.21 Suas duas principais publicações são The American Mind e Claremont Review of Books. O Instituto também tem uma filial adicional, o Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life, localizado em Washington, DC, em frente ao Capitólio. Acadêmicos e especialistas associados ao Claremont Institute dominam o Hillsdale College, em Michigan. Hillsdale publica Imprimis, essencialmente uma publicação MAGA do Claremont Institute. O Instituto oferece várias bolsas, incluindo a Lincoln Fellowship. Seu site rastreia o chamado “financiamento BLM” (referindo-se ao movimento Black Lives Matter, ou BLM) por corporações, alegando, por cálculos extremamente questionáveis, que 82,9 bilhões de dólares foram direcionados por corporações para a causa CRT / Woke / Marxista Cultural. Como na ideologia MAGA em geral, as corporações são condenadas como moralmente corruptas por dar lugar ao Marxismo Cultural, mas raramente são criticadas economicamente. Isso é consistente com toda a história da ideologia pequeno-burguesa, refletida nos escritos do século XIX de figuras célebres como Thomas Carlyle e Friedrich Nietzsche, cujas manifestações ideológicas, como observou Lukács, refletiam “uma tendência dupla contraditória” de uma “crítica da falta de cultura capitalista”, ao mesmo tempo em que apoiavam uma ordem “localizada no capitalismo”.22
Em 2019, Trump concedeu ao Instituto Claremont a Medalha Nacional de Humanidades. Em 6 de janeiro de 2021, o advogado John Eastman, membro do conselho do Claremont Institute (onde permanece até hoje), apoiado por outros associados desta instituição, desempenhou o papel principal na organização do ataque MAGA ao Capitólio em Washington, DC. Ele também escreveu os memorandos principais direcionados a pressionar o vice-presidente Mike Pence a invalidar a eleição de 2020 na tentativa de reverter a derrota de Trump para Joe Biden. Tudo isso rendeu a Claremont a reputação de “cérebro confiável” da tentativa de golpe de 6 de janeiro.23
O Instituto Claremont se tornaria o principal íncubo intelectual de Trump II. Mais de uma dúzia de especialistas associados à Claremont e ex-bolsistas da Claremont aparecem regularmente na Fox News. Isso inclui, além de Eastman, luminares como Michael Anton, membro sênior da Claremont e um nomeado para posição de alto nível do Departamento de Estado de Trump; Christopher Caldwell, editor colaborador da Claremont Review of Books e comentarista da supremacia branca; Brian T. Kennedy, ex-presidente da Claremont e atual membro do conselho e presidente do Comitê sobre o Perigo Presente, que promove um novo macarthismo; Charles R. Kesler, editor da Claremont Review of Books e principal proponente de uma “Guerra Fria Civil “; Charlie Kirk, ex-Claremont Lincoln Fellow e fundador/CEO da Turning Point USA (TPUSA), com sua “Lista de Observação de Professores” e seu ramo evangélico, TPUSA Faith; John Marini, membro sênior da Claremont e principal crítico intelectual de direita do “Estado administrativo”; e Christopher F. Rufo, ex-Claremont Lincoln Fellow e notório especialista anti-CRT.
Anton, ex-diretor-gerente de investimentos da BlackRock e atualmente pesquisador sênior do Claremont Institute, atuou como vice-assistente do presidente e vice-conselheiro de segurança nacional para comunicação estratégica no Conselho de Segurança Nacional no primeiro governo de Trump.24 Ele agora é diretor de planejamento de políticas no Departamento de Estado dos EUA, sob Marco Rubio. Foi Anton, mais do que qualquer outra figura, que conectou o Instituto Claremont ao MAGA e à extrema direita alternativa (“alt-right”). Seu artigo de 2016 na Claremont Review of Books “The Flight 93 Election” – usando a metáfora dos passageiros que correram para a cabine de comando no voo do atentado terrorista em 11 de setembro de 2001 – se tornaria viral e desempenhou um papel importante na mobilização de apoio militante para a campanha de Trump. Nele, Anton declarou que a eleição de 2016 era uma “eleição de correr para a cabine de comando ou morrer”, na qual “você pode morrer de qualquer maneira” na tentativa, mas que na hipótese de Hillary Clinton ser eleita, “a morte é certa”. Embora a narrativa fosse desconexa, incoerente e ilógica, a metáfora pegou, catapultando Anton para o status de celebridade de direita e levou à sua nomeação para o Conselho de Segurança Nacional de Trump com o apoio do bilionário de tecnologia de direita Peter Thiel.25
Em 2019, Anton publicou Após a eleição do voo 93 … E o que ainda temos a perder, que enfatizou a necessidade de uma guerra contra toda a esquerda, ganhando elogios de Trump. Isso foi seguido em 2020 por seu livro, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, no qual ele propôs que a imigração deveria idealmente ser interrompida por completo, enquanto a cidadania por direito de solo (cidadania em virtude de simplesmente ter nascido nos Estados Unidos, mesmo que não seja de pais cidadãos americanos) deve cessar imediatamente. A China era o principal inimigo, enquanto a paz deveria ser feita com a Rússia. Esta última, explicou Anton, pertencia à mesma “‘seita’ civilizacional” dos Estados Unidos e da Europa, “de uma forma que a China nunca seria”. O livro de Anton, The Stakes, no entanto, é mais conhecido por sua defesa explícita de um “cesarismo vermelho [isto é, republicano ou de direita]”, no qual a presidência se tornaria uma “forma de monarquia absoluta” ou “governo de um homem só” exibindo amplo apoio popular – uma posição que foi seguida imediatamente depois em seu livro com a exortação para “reeleger Trump!” Somente quando eleito Trump se declararia César.26
Em uma resenha sobre "Draining the Swamp" na Claremont Review of Books, Anton popularizou o livro de Marini Unmasking the Administrative State. A análise de Marini é vista como uma validação da versão conservadora de Alexandre Kojève da filosofia idealista alemã de G. W. F. Hegel, que na visão de direita é vista como uma justificativa para o governo burguês autocrático como o fim da história. Aplicados às instituições contemporâneas, as autoridades burocráticas do Estado administrativo devem ser vistos como a “classe dominante”. Marini e Anton, portanto, argumentam que é necessário que Trump esmague o Estado administrativo e o substitua por um governo mais centralizado. Essas mesmas opiniões levaram o juiz da Suprema Corte dos Estados Unidos, Clarence Thomas, que em um estágio anterior de sua carreira havia empregado Marini como assistente especial, a exclamar “Devemos ler Marini!”27
Anton declarou que, para vencer, “precisamos de blogueiros, criadores de memes, trolls do Twitter, artistas de rua, comediantes, propagandistas, teólogos, dramaturgos, ensaístas, romancistas, jornalistas e relações públicas desonestos (“hacks, flacks”), e intelectuais” – bem como Trump e capitalistas de pensamento de direita.28 Seu ato mais iconoclasta dentro do próprio Instituto Claremont foi escrever um artigo sobre o propagandista nietzscheano-fascista da extrema direita alternativa Perverso da Idade do Bronze (conhecido como BAP, agora revelado como o romeno-americano Costin Vlad Alamariu, que recebeu um PhD de Yale), o autor de Mentalidade da Idade do Bronze. O papel de Anton, em um artigo de 2019 da Claremont Review of Books intitulado “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?“, foi trazer o BAP/Alamariu para o mainstream do MAGA em um esforço para atrair jovens brancos desencantados para o movimento neofascista. Observando que o BAP forneceu em sua publicação Mentalidade da Idade do Bronze um “pastiche simplificado de Friedrich Nietzsche”, que “quebrou o top 150 na Amazon – não, veja bem, em alguma categoria dentro da Amazon, mas no site como um todo“, Anton argumentou que representava uma oportunidade para a direita do MAGA dominar o discurso da juventude underground. O BAP caracterizou as elites liberais, os intelectuais, os pensadores de esquerda e a população em geral como “homens-insetos”, sem heroísmo, semelhante ao “Último Homem” de Nietzsche. Os seres humanos em geral foram retratados como pertencentes à vida de mero “fermento”. A solução estava no fisiculturismo masculino por meio do levantamento de peso e no cultivo da imagem dos heróis gregos da Idade do Bronze. BAP é um supremacista branco, enfatizando a pureza ariana e ataques vis a diversas populações em todos os lugares. Como o próprio Anton admitiu, “as objeções mais fortes e fáceis de fazer à Bronze Age Mindset é que ela é ‘racista’, ‘antissemita’, ‘antidemocrática’, ‘misógina’ e ‘homofóbica'”, tornando-a mais “ultrajante” do que Nietzsche. No entanto, ele finge que o BAP é “mais gentil” do que pensadores como Karl “Marx, [V. I.] Lenin, Mao [Zedong]… [Che] Guevara, [Saul] Alinsky e Foucault, ou dos numerosos fanáticos cujos discursos são ensinados nas universidades de elite. No final, Anton ressaltou a importância dos ataques do BAP aos “homens-insetos” e aos “tempos de insetos”, incorporando seus pontos de vista dentro do MAGA.29
Um estudo do próprio Bronze Age Mindset revela referências venenosas às “favelas do Terceiro Mundo de Bosta (Turd World, no original inglês) e ataca, citando Nietzsche, “modos de vida pré-arianos, o retorno do socialismo, da maloca, do feminismo” e “seitas marxistas satânicas”. O general ateniense Alcibíades, os conquistadores Hernán Cortés e Francisco Pizarro, Napoleão Bonaparte, Theodore Roosevelt, Alfredo Stroessner (ex-ditador do Paraguai) e, especialmente, Bob Denard (um brutal mercenário francês do século XX ativo no Congo e nas Ilhas Comores) são os modelos do BAP do retorno aos tempos modernos dos humanos arianos da Idade do Bronze. O presidente favorito do BAP, antes de Trump, é James K. Polk, que lançou a Guerra Mexicano-Americana. A “população branca” nos Estados Unidos, escreve ele, tomou o México “por seu valor”. O feminismo é visto como uma abominação. “Nada tão ridículo quanto a libertação das mulheres”, declara BAP / Alamariu, “já foi tentado na história da humanidade”, que ele descreve como uma tentativa de “retornar ao matriarcado pré-ariano”. Ele acrescenta: “A justiça social é um parasitismo nojento”. As cidades de hoje, sujeitas a ondas de imigrantes, são “povoadas por hordas de zumbis parecidos com anões que são importados para trabalho escravo e agitação política das latrinas varridas por moscas do mundo”. Ele afirma abertamente: “Eu acredito no fascismo ou em algo pior”. Por todas essas razões, de acordo com o BAP, Trump deve ser apoiado em sua conquista do governo. “O Leviatã” do Estado administrativo dominado pelos “homens-insetos”, ele insiste, deve ser esmagado para criar uma nova “ordem primordial”. Com o apoio de Anton e outros, BAP foi reconhecido como uma espécie de influenciador nietzscheano do submundo por trás do movimento MAGA, atraente para homens brancos jovens e regressivos. Ele se tornaria uma leitura virtualmente obrigatória para jovens funcionários brancos no primeiro governo Trump.30
Anton foi encorajado a ler BAP pelo autodenominado pensador do “Iluminismo Sombrio” Curtis Yarvin, um neofascista próximo a Anton e Vance (o herdeiro aparente do MAGA). Como Vance e Anton, Yarvin é fortemente apoiado por Thiel, bilionário do Vale do Silício. Yarvin também é abertamente admirado pelo conselheiro de Trump e capitalista de risco do Vale do Silício, Marc Andreessen, por suas visões antidemocráticas. Vance chama Yarvin, a quem ele também se referiu em brincadeiras amigáveis como um “fascista”, de “minha influência política número um”. No mundo MAGA, Yarvin continua sendo uma figura sombria, apesar do fato de ter articulado as estratégias mais reacionárias do regime de Trump. Ele é um ex-programador de computador e blogueiro de direita, escrevendo sob o pseudônimo de Mencius Moldbug e defensor de um “Iluminismo Sombrio” ou movimento neorreacionário (“NRx”). Tucker Carlson dedicou um programa inteiro para entrevistar Yarvin em 2021. Ele é mais conhecido por seus argumentos antidemocráticos e sua insistência de que o presidente pode se estabelecer como um “CEO nacional” ou mesmo “ditador”, concentrando todo o poder no poder executivo e substituindo o sistema legal e os tribunais, enquanto muda de um “Congresso oligárquico” para um “presidente monárquico”. Os americanos, ele insiste, “terão que superar sua fobia de ditador”.31
Yarvin instrumentalizou o Senhor dos Anéis de J. R. R. Tolkien, categorizando a elite esquerdista ou a classe profissional-gerencial como uma “aristocracia elfa”, a “classe média baixa” como “hobbits” e “elfos negros” como ele como defensores dos hobbits. Como Steve Bannon, ex-chefe de gabinete da Casa Branca de Trump, com quem ele se identifica, Yarvin se vê como um defensor do MAGA; mas, ao contrário de Bannon, ele não enfatiza a contradição entre as forças do MAGA de classe média baixa e os bilionários capitalistas monopolistas no topo. As verdadeiras lealdades de Yarvin são para com os bilionários, e não para a classe média baixa. De fato, ele nega que seja um verdadeiro fascista, apesar do fato de ter aplicado o rótulo de fascista a si mesmo, caracterizando-se como um defensor mais direto da ditadura (ou da monarquia), já que tem desprezo absoluto pelas massas. No entanto, Yarvin afirma ironicamente: “francamente, Hitler se parece muito comigo” – mas, ele reconhece, mais talentoso e mais malvado.32
Amplamente visto como uma figura em grande parte clandestina que ajudou a manipular o sistema para Trump, Yarvin forneceu o plano geral para uma presidência imperial. Ele argumenta que o poder real é mantido “oligarquicamente” (distinto da noção clássica de oligarquia baseada na riqueza) por pessoas que controlam a mídia e as universidades, constituindo a “Catedral”. A Catedral só pode ser derrubada por um monarca ou ditador, atuando como CEO. Uma vez eleito, afirmou Yarvin, Trump poderia expurgar a burocracia federal (o que Yarvin chama de “RAGE” – “retire all government employees” – aposentar todos os funcionários do governo) alegando que tinha um mandato eleitoral que lhe permitia transgredir a lei e subjugar os tribunais e o Congresso. Todas as ordens judiciais que exigem que o presidente desista devem ser ignoradas. As grandes corporações de mídia e as universidades devem ser fechadas. Em um podcast, Anton disse a Yarvin: “Você está essencialmente defendendo que alguém – em uma velha jogada – ganhe poder legalmente por meio de uma eleição e depois o exerça ilegalmente”. Yarvin respondeu: “Não seria ilegal. Você simplesmente declararia estado de emergência em seu discurso de posse. O presidente poderia aplicar isso a todos os estados e assumir “todas as autoridades policiais”. Como Anton, Yarvin declarou sobre o presidente: “Você vai ser César”.33
Anton afirmou que as universidades são “más”, uma posição fortemente apoiada por Rufo, ex-diretor do Discovery Institute do design inteligente (criacionista) e bolsista do Claremont Lincoln.34 Rufo é amplamente celebrado nos círculos do MAGA por suas grandes façanhas propagandísticas em transformar a teoria crítica de raça (CRT) e programas de diversidade, equidade e inclusão (DEI) em concepções tóxicas na mente do público. Atualmente, ele é membro sênior do Manhattan Institute for Policy Research e editor colaborador do City Journal. Em “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It” para Imprimis de Hillsdale, Rufo argumentou que a CRT era o produto do Marxismo Cultural e do “marxismo baseado na identidade”. No que se tornou um elemento fundamental da ideologia MAGA, ele afirma que os marxistas de hoje são todos teóricos da identidade e se opõem à “igualdade”, substituindo-a por “equidade”, que é “pouco mais do que marxismo reformulado”. O CRT, ele pronuncia, promove a “neo-segregação”, viola o princípio dos direitos civis e é discriminatório por meio de suas políticas anti-brancas. Desta forma, a lei de direitos civis deve ser redirecionada contra as minorias raciais. Rufo associa CRT e BLM (Black Lives Matter) ao anticapitalismo e ao racismo reverso. Seus ataques ao CRT influenciaram os ataques de Trump em seu primeiro governo.35
Mais recentemente, Rufo defendeu “sitiar as instituições”. Isso inclui atacar quaisquer corporações que instituíram políticas de DEI, vistas como produto do Marxismo Cultural, CRT e BLM (Black Lives Matter) – uma visão neo-macarthista compartilhada pelo governador da Flórida, Ron DeSantis. Os principais alvos são a “teoria radical de gênero” e o que Rufo chama de “império transgênero”. Ele afirma que “devemos lutar para colocar o império transgênero fora do mercado para sempre”. Rufo e a direita MAGA disparam contra o “cartel universitário” (“college cartel” no original) e argumentam que a educação anterior à universitária deve começar com a promoção da “Civilização Ocidental”.36
Um dos críticos mais inflexíveis da diversidade na direita do MAGA é Caldwell, que em seu artigo “The Browning of America” argumenta que “‘Diversidade’ [sempre] foi um atributo das populações subjugadas”. Portanto, reconhecê-lo como base da política social vai contra os princípios dos fundadores da Constituição dos Estados Unidos. Em um artigo sobre Robert E. Lee, Caldwell argumentou que as críticas de esquerda ao comandante das forças confederadas como defensor do Sul escravista e, portanto, da escravidão, visavam eliminar Lee como “a força moral de metade da nação”.37
O editor da Claremont Review of Books, Kesler, membro da Comissão 1776 sobre a História dos EUA designada por Trump para combater o Projeto 1619 sobre a história da escravidão nos EUA, tem sido uma figura importante na promoção da noção MAGA de uma Guerra Fria Civil entre a direita e as chamadas forças dominantes da esquerda. O termo “woke“, que surgiu pela primeira vez no movimento pelos direitos civis, foi massivamente invertido pela direita desde 2019, contando com o comando conservador da mídia, para se referir de forma depreciativa a todas as causas políticas e culturais progressistas contemporâneas. É empregado como um meio de menosprezar as lutas por justiça social contra o racismo e a desigualdade de gênero, enquanto seu uso mais comum é como um apito de cachorro racista.38
Christian nationalists are also being enlisted in the Cold Civil War/New McCarthyism. Kirk’s Turning Point USA became notorious in 2016 for its Professor Watch List, singling out mostly left academics across the country to be targeted by the right in a McCarthyite manner. Kirk, who also served on Trump’s 1776 Commission, has now become known as a mega “whisperer” to youth, in which he bullet points the “war on white people” and encourages white nationalism. His organization, working with the Claremont Institute, bussed MAGA supporters to the January 6, 2021, protest and assault on the Capitol. Yarvin, who has described slavery “as a natural human relationship” and promoted biological determinism and monarchy, was effusively praised by Kirk on his radio show and podcast, along with white supremacist Steve Sailer. Kirk is the author of Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West, published in 2024. According to the publisher’s blurb, “America…is under threat from a lethal ideology that seeks to humiliate and erase anyone that does not bow at its altar…. Kirk drags wokeism out of the shadows and details the exact steps needed to stop its toxic spread,” which “has already seeped into every aspect of American society.”40
More recently, Kirk has transformed himself into the leading promoter of evangelical Christian nationalism within the MAGA movement, establishing a division of Turning Point USA called TPUSA Faith aimed at white evangelicals. He argues that the U.S. founders created a Christian nation and advocates the Seven Mountain mandate of extreme evangelical Christian nationalism, in which believers are required to seek to dominate all of reality, including family, religion, education, media, arts, business, and government. This is tied to endism and religious apocalypticism (Second Coming) views. Kirk has sought to promote hatred of LGBTQ+ and transgender people in order to motivate the evangelical movement to take on a more direct political role.41
OMB director Vought is undoubtedly the most powerful Christian nationalist within the Trump administration itself. Writing in 2022 for the Claremont Institute’s The American Mind, Vought claimed that the Center for Renewing America, which he founded in 2021, had demonstrated on so-called legal grounds that “illegal aliens coming across” the U.S.-Mexico border constituted “an invasion,” thus allowing state governors, who, according to Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, are not allowed to “engage in War unless actually invaded,” to act forcibly against these “invaders,” independent of the federal government.42 As a Christian Nationalist organization, the Center for Renewing America is adamantly anti-Palestinian, opposing any attempt to allow Palestinians to immigrate to the United States, arguing that “One would be hard-pressed to identify a people or culture more fundamentally at odds with the foundations of American self-government than Palestinians,” who have “a culture poisonous to the health of and integrity of American communities,” and whose ideology, despite the counter-claims of “intersectional Marxists,” has as its aim the total annihilation of Israel. Vought’s Center for Renewing America is strongly in favor of the removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza and their resettlement in the lands of the Arab League.43
Movements in the fascist genus have often relied on opportunistic shifts from left to right. A classic example of this is the Italian leftist thinker Enrico Ferri, a reactionary pseudo-socialist who was strongly attacked by Frederick Engels, and later became a follower of Benito Mussolini.44 The main intellectual vehicle for so-called “leftist” cooperation with MAGA ideology, operating in what is presented as a common anti-liberal vein, is Compact magazine, cofounded by Iranian-American rightist and former Trotskyist Sohrab Ahmari, a close associate of Vance and now the U.S. editor of UnHerd, and by national-populist Edwin Aponte, editor of Bellows, a MAGA-style publication. Compact magazine was once described in Jacobin as a “syncretic” magazine of both left and right.45 However, rather than representing some sort of meeting point of left and right, it is strongly supportive of Trump and Vance while successfully drawing in erstwhile leftist contributors, such as Christian Parenti and Slavoj Žižek (a contributing editor) into a publication in which pro-MAGA views are hegemonic.46 Yarvin, Anton, Caldwell, and Rufo have all written multiple articles for Compact on such topics as the nihilism of the left-wing ruling class, Cultural Marxism, CRT, dismantling the administrative state, and support for Viktor Orbán’s ultra-conservative government in Hungary and the neofascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany.47
Parenti, once a well-known leftist journalist, writes regularly for Compact. His columns have supported Trump’s nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health. He has also written columns claiming that Trump is an anti-imperialist and that “‘Diversity’ Is a Ruling Class Ideology.” Since Trump’s reelection, Parenti has presented Trump and some of his department heads (Kennedy, Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence) as potential opponents of the “deep state” or surveillance-intelligence state, and thus in line with the left in this respect. However, this is a gross misperception of the nature of the Trump/MAGA regime itself, which has nothing to do with openness or democratic control, but which is establishing the basis for its own direct rule.48
Žižek has used Compact as a venue in which to engage in the most reactionary themes. Thus, in an article titled “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” he presented a transphobic argument in which he declared that “the use of puberty blockers is yet another case of woke capitalism.” In this same anti-woke article, Žižek generalized from the experience of a Black professor who was strongly criticized by students from an Afro-pessimist standpoint (as detailed in a different Compact article). From there, Žižek went on to make the extraordinary racially charged statement, directed at a mainly white reactionary readership, that, “The black woke elite is fully aware that it won’t achieve its declared goal of diminishing black oppression—and it doesn’t even want that. What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which to terrorize all others.”49
Compact magazine managing editor Geoff Shullenberger has specialized in bringing the ideas of BAP into the MAGA mainstream, both within Compact and elsewhere. Shullenberger also is the coeditor of COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear, opposing lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and masking in response to COVID-19 as due to the extremism of the left. Meanwhile, Compact columnist and MAGA “populist” supporter Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2021), was appointed in 2025 deputy opinion editor of Newsweek.50
The MAGA think tanks are a product of funding by big capital interests, often promoting, in this respect, a libertarian ideology, but melding this with the need to reach the white lower-middle class with its reactionary, nationalist-populist, revanchist, racist, misogynist, and anti-socialist perspective, as a way of developing a mass constituency. The resulting MAGA ideology is disseminated through wider media such as Fox News, talk radio, social media, YouTube videos, blogs, and podcasts. The influential infotainment site Breitbart, once headed by Bannon, has published numerous articles attacking Cultural Marxism, and specializes in sensationalized shock attacks on the left. Breitbart’s senior technology editor, Allum Bokhari, a former Claremont Lincoln Fellow, has written for Hillsdale’s Imprimis on the need for the right to control big tech, along the lines subsequently implemented by Musk at X.51
Claremont Lincoln Fellow Raheem J. Kassam, a former chief of staff to Brexit leader Nigel Farage and a Bannon ally, is the former editor-in-chief of Breitbart London. More recently Kassam had cohosted Bannon’s MAGA radio show/podcast “War Room.” In 2018, Kassam became editor-in-chief of the Trumpist news website National Pulse, and appears frequently as an “expert” commentator on Fox News, where he has discussed “How Did America Fall to Marxism?”52
MAGA analyses are also disseminated by way of conservative book publishing. Rufo’s best-selling America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023) and Kirk’s The MAGA Doctrine (2020) were both published by Broadside Books, HarperCollins’s imprint for ultra-conservative nonfiction, which absorbed the Fox News book brand. The big five English-language book publishers all have distinct imprints devoted entirely to ultra-conservative books aimed at white supremacist Republicans/MAGA.53 Anton’s After the Flight 93 Election, Kesler’s Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness (2021), Kennedy’s Communist China’s War Inside America (2020), and Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News were all published by Encounter Books, established by the right-wing Bradley Foundation, a funder of the Claremont Institute. Established in 1998, Encounter Books deliberately took its name from the pseudo-left-liberal journal Encounter, which was exposed in the 1970s by Ramparts as a CIA-funded publication. Kirk’s Right Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (2024) was published with Winning Team Publishing, cofounded in 2021 by Donald Trump Jr.54
All the new right concepts and talking points end up on social media. As Fox News host Jesse Watters stated, “We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left. It’s like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media, Musk retweets it, [Joe] Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it and by the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.”55
Division in the Ranks
The most extreme MAGA ideologues such as Bannon, Yarvin, and Anton are distinctly aware that the nationalist-populist MAGA movement is rooted in lower-middle class whites (whom the neofascist movement in both Europe and the United States is accustomed to referring to as “hobbits”), and only secondarily in privileged elements of the working class. MAGA think tanks often present a barely disguised contempt for the “lumpen,” “pitchfork-bearing proletariat,” or “proles,” namely the working class.56 Almost no positive references to the working class or attempts to approach the underprivileged are present in the mainline MAGA literature, which is understood as rooted in a fragile national-populist alliance between the billionaire class and the lower-middle class, both of which see the working class as their most dangerous enemy (exceeding their hatred even for the upper-middle class professional-managerial stratum). Funded by the mega-rich and dedicated to the idea, as Anton says, that “race trumps class,” the MAGA pundits and influencers are unable to address directly the question of the working-class majority without undermining their claim to a broad populism. The result is that they appeal primarily to whiteness and “middle America.”57 Occasional references are made to MAGA hat-wearing truck drivers and other workers, but this only constitutes a vain attempt to elude the reality of a political bloc that consists largely of the lower-middle class and a relatively small number of privileged workers. Although Bannon, representing MAGA’s radical right, refers to workers, it is always in a context where the lower-middle class looms larger.58
This fundamental class division will remain. Although Trump made some gains with blue-collar workers in the 2024 elections, particularly in rural areas, his political base remains the lower-middle class, which is in large part hostile towards the working class below. The Trump program is destined to hit the working class hardest economically.59 It was Anton who was to make the most serious ideological attempt to escape this trap in an article in Compact titled “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” in which he sought to examine Marxist theory and turn it on its head. Thus, he characterized Silicon Valley billionaire oligarchs in alt-right fashion as the “left,” the enemy of right-wing populism. Moreover, while the MAGA movement, he recognized, was fundamentally based in the lower-middle/middle class/the poor, its “natural” basis ultimately was to be sought in the majority that he sardonically referred to as the “proles.”60 His whole endeavor in this respect, however, was to fall flat in the face of the inescapable reality of a neofascist alliance between the billionaires and the lower-middle class—both of whom see the diverse working class as the ultimate enemy. Moreover, Anton’s contradictory attempt to create a right-wing populism that incorporated the working class and targeted billionaire oligarchs was at odds with his own role as a member of the national security establishment, dominated by the mega-capitalist class, which had him hobnobbing with some of its biggest players. He therefore quickly mended his ways. Although he persisted in criticizing “oligarchs,” they were refashioned in conformity with the hegemonic MAGA ideology as the members of the administrative state, no longer big money interests.
Yet, if the mass MAGA movement with its racism and its small-property-based outlook is inherently anti-working class, even if it has attracted significant numbers of working-class voters, it also finds itself in conflict with the ultra-wealthy interests that have funded and mobilized it, making it a dangerous movement from the standpoint of monopoly capitalism itself. Once political power is achieved in regimes in the fascist genus, divisions quickly emerge between the top echelons of monopoly capital and its army of lower-middle class adherents. Having obtained control of the state and of the military and police powers, the ultra-wealthy ruling class has every reason to discard the more militant nationalist—often partially anticapitalist—elements of its “radical right” base. The classic historical instance of this was the Night of the Long Knives in Hitler’s Germany, from June 30 to July 2, 1934, in which the Nazi party’s paramilitary brownshirt wing, the Sturmabteilung, or “Assault Division,” known as its stormtroopers, were subjected to a bloody purge. The purge was aimed specifically at the Strasserism (named after Otto and Gregor Strasser), deeply embedded in the brownshirts within the Nazi movement, which was both antisemitic and, to a considerable extent anticapitalist, and belonged to a milieu of militant mass action or “revolutionary” nationalism. Elimination of Strasserism allowed the consolidation of fascism as a reactionary monopoly-capitalist state, repressing and regimenting its mass petty-bourgeois base.61
In the very different conditions of the neofascist MAGA movement in the United States today, these same general contradictions appear, though minus the extreme violence. Many among the MAGA faithful were startled to see their lack of representation in the Trump cabinet following the 2024 election, a sharp contrast from the 2016 election. The Trump regime today has a cabinet of billionaires, surrounded by still further billionaires. Although there are extreme rightist operatives whose views are similar to those of the MAGA masses in the second Trump White House—such as Stephen Miller, who, despite being Jewish, appears to support white Christian nationalism, and is currently deputy chief of staff for policy—they are overshadowed by the mega-capitalists. Right from the start, it was clear that high-tech financial capital rather than the MAGA hat-wearing base was to be in charge. As Gary Stout, a Washington attorney, wrote in Pennsylvania’s Observer-Reporter, Trump “is now creating a new political elite of oligarchs that has no accountability to Congress or loyalty to his own MAGA movement.”62
This contradiction, splitting the MAGA movement/Trump regime, was immediately apparent in the conflict over H-1B visas for foreign workers. These visas are widely used by multinational corporations to hire foreign technical workers in specialty occupations, especially high-tech, bringing in relatively low-paid skilled workers from India, China, and elsewhere. H-1B visas have been heavily criticized within the MAGA movement, since they undercut relatively high-paid U.S. jobs. Voicing the outrage of the MAGA faithful, Bannon declared prior to Trump’s inauguration that Musk, who came out strongly for the H-1B visas, was “evil” and that he would have him driven out of the White House. Bannon raged in national-populist terms against wealthy “oligarchs,” not only “the lords of easy money,” but more importantly the tech overlords of Silicon Valley, representatives of “technological feudalism,” who were now dominating the MAGA movement, and were opposing “the populist, nationalist revolution.” MAGA militant Laura Loomer presented racist arguments in which she declared: “Our country was built by white Europeans…. Not by third world invaders from India.” Openly attacking Musk on X, Loomer suddenly found herself demonetized on the platform.63 The fact that this represented a fundamental division between billionaire monopoly-finance capitalists and high-tech oligarchs at the top and the lower-middle class MAGA base was evident in an article by Kevin Porteus of Hillsdale College titled “Putting Americans First,” published in The American Mind. He advanced the argument that “America First” should mean “Americans…first.”64 Breitbart likewise ran story after story against H-1B visas. The rebellion over this issue, however, was soon put down by Trump, who, himself a billionaire, sided with Musk, indicating that his own companies employed foreign workers on H-1B visas. Faced with a division between monopoly-finance capital and his own militant MAGA movement, Trump chose the former.
The fissure between a capitalist ruling class of billionaires and the neofascist movement on the ground will only widen. The MAGA movement expects lower taxes under Trump, which will no doubt be partially forthcoming, but paid for to a significant extent by drastic cuts in social services. Expectations of lower prices, especially with new tariffs being instituted, will be dashed. Moreover, like all tax reductions under monopoly capitalism, the new Trump tax cuts will be highly regressive, benefiting the rich most of all and further widening the gap between the top and the bottom of U.S. society. The cutbacks on civilian government will hurt the vast majority of the population, including the lower-middle class. With nearly all social spending that benefits the bottom 60 percent of the population, including Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security now in the crosshairs of Musk’s DOGE, the carnage is likely to be severe. Although the MAGA movement is characterized by extreme nationalism, monopoly-finance capital and its high-tech overlords are geared to accumulation on a world scale and global financial expropriation. They rely on the exploitation not only of the global proletariat, but also the increased exploitation and expropriation of U.S. workers. Implementation of ruling-class policies on globalization, financialization, imperialism, war, and hyperexploitation under the new regime will inevitably push much of the U.S. lower-middle class back into the working class, polarizing and destabilizing the society still further.
Trump’s neofascist regime is a desperate act of a declining empire. It has supplanted neoliberalism only in the sense that the right wing of the ruling class itself is now in direct and open command of the state, seeking to restructure it as a vehicle of resurgent hegemony. The conflict between neofascism as a more regressive global capitalist project designed to preserve and enhance the power of the ruling capitalists with their global interests, on the one hand, and the national-populist movement of the MAGA radical right focused primarily on the conquest of the administrative state, on the other, means that the mega-capitalist interests will continually betray the MAGA “populist” base, viewed as mere cannon fodder in the Cold Civil War.
Trump appointed billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy as the codirector of DOGE along with Musk. Ramaswamy is the founder of the giant pharmaceutical company Roivant Sciences and author of the bestselling 2023 book Woke Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. He resigned from his DOGE position to run for governor of Ohio. With Ramaswamy departing, Musk was left as the sole power at DOGE. Ramaswamy has played a leading role in attacking corporate ESG and DEI. Recognizing that corporations had increasingly introduced limited ESG and DEI programs in response to environmental and social issues, pundits on the MAGA right, including the opportunistic plutocrat Ramaswamy, were able to make the existence of such programs a popular “anti-corporate” moral issue. The result is that many corporations now have, not unwillingly, reversed themselves in line with Trump. Some have dropped the “diversity” and “equity” from DEI while hypocritically retaining “inclusion.”65
The sheer arrogance of the capitalist oligarchs and their managers can be seen in the rise of Thiel as a dominant figure in the Trump orbit, undoubtedly the most powerful figure connected to the regime with the exception of Musk (and the president himself). In 2022, Thiel characterized himself as leader of a “Rebel Alliance,” as in Star Wars, fighting the “imperial stormtroopers” of the U.S. establishment and engaged in a struggle aimed ultimately at China.66 In 2009, he declared “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” causing him openly to reject the latter.67 He is currently tied to six members of the National Security Council who are beholden to him financially and politically and are part of his industrial network: Vance (whose political campaigns were financed by Thiel), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth (who is associated with Thiel’s military-tech network), Secretary of Energy Chris Wright (who sits on a board of the energy startup Oklo, in which Thiel is a major investor), National Security Advisor Mike Waltz (whose 2022 Florida campaign was funded by Thiel), Rubio (whose 2022 reelection bid was financed by Thiel), and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (who is on the payroll of the Thiel-funded Saving Arizona PAC).68
Thiel, like Musk, Ramaswamy, and Trump himself, stands for the interests of the “masters of the universe.”69 Despite libertarian ideology and a neofascist ethos, there is little to connect the financial plutocrats materially with the lower-middle class. Given that the so-called destruction of the administrative state is leading to more centralized monopoly-capitalist control of the state in the interests of the plutocrats, the selling out of the MAGA movement on the ground is palpably obvious.
A further contradiction in the MAGA movement lies in its promotion of its Christian white nationalism, splitting the evangelical movement. Exit polls indicate that some 80 percent of white evangelical voters support Trump. Yet, the freezing of USAID by Trump and Musk generated strong opposition from Christian affiliated aid groups. The resulting deep division in conservative circles undoubtedly affected the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the stoppage on foreign aid. Trump’s establishment of a White House Faith Office headed by the controversial televangelist Paula White-Cain, known for her promotion of the capitalist-oriented “prosperity gospel,” together with his creation of a task force headed by Attorney General Pam Bondi, aimed at ending “anti-Christian bias,” have upset the traditional separation of church and state. This weaponization of evangelicalism to reinforce a Christian nationalism directed at supporting the MAGA state has led to widening criticisms within the evangelical and wider Christian communities.70 Trump’s redoubled support for Israel’s extermination of Palestinians is unpopular with younger evangelicals, who are increasingly rejecting Christian Zionism.
The most potent attack from within evangelicalism has emerged from preachers such as Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, assistant director for partnerships and fellowships in Yale University’s Century of Public Theology and Public Policy, in his 2018 book Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from the Slaveholder Religion. Working closely with Protestant minister Reverend William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, Wilson-Hartgrove was motivated by his opposition to the Trump movement to address the “original sin” of the dominant white evangelicalism in the United States, which, rather than simply an evangelical movement as such, was from the first a “slaveholder’s religion.” Emerging within the evangelical community itself and receiving considerable acclaim, Wilson-Hartgrove’s critique of the slaveholder’s religion has served to bring into the open the most acute contradictions of the Christian nationalist ideology.71 As he wrote,
The sad reality is that we [evangelicals] chose a side in the 19th century and our movement is still infected by the slaveholder religion that was funded by plantation owners. That faith did not go away after the Civil War; it doubled down and prayed for “redemption” from Reconstruction. And it rejoiced when white supremacy campaigns across the South regained power and established Jim Crow segregation. Mid-20th century, when the balance of power was again challenged by America’s civil rights movement, slaveholder religion reasserted itself, criticizing Dr. King for “politicizing” the gospel and favoring “law and order” systems that perpetuated inequality. The Southern Strategy aimed to harness slaveholder religion by creating a Moral Majority that would feel righteous for their support of the status quo.
Donald Trump did not create the crisis we now face, but his presidency is exposing the truth about who we are as evangelicals—not a movement divided between left and right, but a people of faith who must now choose between slaveholder religion and the Christianity of Christ.72
For “400 years,” slaveholder religion, Wilson-Hartgrove argued, has taught people to fear people of color. “Because slaveholder religion’s god ordained white supremacy, white people learned to fear equality and the black political power that challenged the social order they were taught to value.” It is not a return to the politics of “redemption” that is the answer, he argues, but completing the politics of Reconstruction.73
Betrayal and Revolt
The Trump regime is a regime of betrayal. It is already leading to the abandonment of the lower-middle class, which through the MAGA movement brought it into power, as well as the working-class majority.74 What it offers to its core lower-middle class constituency is a kind of nationalist culturalism, which is a mere veil for a system of far more centralized capitalist control of the state in a White House now filled with billionaires, ultimately leading to the increased economic exploitation and expropriation of the underlying population. The material betrayal of the working class will be absolute, economically and politically. For such a regime of capitalist overlords to continue, it will have to increase its repression of the body politic at every step. Its greatest fear is that the enraged masses, especially the working-class majority, would mobilize and rise up in resistance, bringing with it all of those in the society as a whole who are committed to democratic rule and to the survival of humanity in the face of growing environmental perils.
The political and ideological successes of the MAGA movement were made possible in part by a liberal-left that abandoned the working class economically and politically under the mantle of postmodernism and identity politics, severed off from questions of exploitation, poverty, and economic and social decline. This requires a return to what Marx called the “hierarchy of…needs,” emphasizing within this real material needs, including jobs, health care, housing, free human development, community, the environment, and the right to control one’s own body—needs vital to the population as a whole, and ultimately inseparable from democratic control of the society.75 Viewed in this way, the only way to combat the current reactionary trend is based on socialist principles of substantive equality and ecological sustainability, putting the needs of the population as a whole, and those most oppressed, first. This struggle will have to emanate in the main from a resurgent, reunited working class, historically the most diverse, democratic, and revolutionary section of society, the guarantors of humanity’s future.
Notes
1 Matthew J. Vaeth, “Memorandum for Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies/Subject: Temporary Pause of Agency, Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs,” Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President, January 27, 2025; Travis Gettys, “‘Reads Like a Hostage Note’: Trump Order Flagged as ‘Mass Fraud’ by Ex-Official,” Raw Story, January 28, 2025; Charles R. Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War,” Imprimis 47, no. 10 (October 2018).
2 Vought quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings,” New York Times, February 4, 2025.
3 For a leading MAGA proponent of “Caesarism” as constituting the inner telos of the Trump regime, see Michael Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2020), 303–18.
4 Max Matsa, “Senate Confirms Project 2025 Co-Author as Trump Budget Chief,” BBC, February 6, 2025; Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash, and Kyung Lah, “Hidden Camera Video Shows Project 2025 Co-Author Discussing His Secret Work Preparing for a Second Trump Term,” CNN, August 15, 2024; Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency,” Center for American Progress, October 1, 2024.
5 Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs”; Melissa Quinn, Richard Escobedo, and Kristin Brown, “Trump Administration Rescinds Federal Funding Freeze Memo After Chaos,” CBS News, January 29, 2025; Daniel Barnes, Chloe Atkins, and Dareh Gregorian, “Appeals Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Immediately Reinstate Funding Freeze,” NBC News, February 11, 2025; Bill Barrow, “How Donald Trump and Project 2025 Previewed the Federal Grant Freeze,” Associated Press, January 28, 2025.
6 Cass R. Sunstein, “This Theory Is Behind Trump’s Power Grab,” New York Times, February 26, 2025.
7 Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.”
8 Lance Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories,” Revolution of Man (blog), August 31, 2023; Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Cornell Gorka, NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (New York: Encounter Books, 2025), 15, 238, 265–69. The current right-wing attack on “Cultural Marxism” is derived from attacks on “Cultural Bolshevism” in Nazi Germany. Ari Paul, “‘Cultural Marxism’: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 4, 2019, fair.org.
9 Trump/Vance Campaign, “Agenda 47: Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions,” July 17, 2023.
10 Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It, Special Report No. 262, Heritage Foundation, November 14, 2022; Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism; Tanner Mirrlees, “The Alt-Right’s Discourse of ‘Cultural Marxism’: A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate,” Atlantis Journal 39, no. 1 (August 2018); Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories.” All of these works are poorly researched, poorly documented, unscholarly, and shallow, not conforming to academic standards in any way. As Baruch Spinoza said, “Ignorance is no argument.”
11 Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism, 17–18, 148–99, 242.
12 See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 20–22, 121.
13 For criticism of how white evangelical Christians in the United States have embraced a “slaveholder religion,” capitulating to the religious views propounded in the Antebellum South and in the Jim Crow period, see Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (Lisle, Illinois Inter-Varsity Press, 2020); Darrell Hamilton II, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion,” Baptist News, September 17, 2020.
14 Paul M. Sweezy to Paul A. Baran, October 18, 1952, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 86–87.
15 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); Doreen Lustig, “The Nature of the Nazi State and the Question of International Criminal Responsibility of Corporate Officials at Nuremberg: Franz Neuman’s Behemoth at the Industrial Trials,” Working Paper 2011/2, History and Theory of International Law Series, Institute for International Law and Justice, 2012; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 350–54. On the lower-middle class/monopoly capitalist alliance in societies belonging to the fascist genus, see also Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 455; Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 54; Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 134–76; Paul A. Baran (Historicus), “Fascism in America,” Monthly Review 4, no. 6 (October 1952): 181–89.
16 Maxine Y. Sweezy (see also Maxine Y. Woolston), The Structure of the Nazi Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941), 27–35; Gustave Strolper, German Economy, 1870–1940 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940), 207; Germá Bel, “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 3 (2006): 187–94; Foster, Trump in the White House, 27–43, 65–66.
17 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017); Reuven Kaminer, “On the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’ and Its Role in Current Political Discourse,” MR Online, August 15, 2007; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 2–3.
18 Baran, “Fascism in America,” 182.
19 Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 151.
20 Christopher Caldwell, “Speaking Trumpian,” Claremont Review of Books 24, no. 19 (Fall 2024): 19–22.
21 Andy Kroll, “Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust,” Rolling Stone, January 12, 2022; Influence Watch, “Thomas D. Kligenstein Fund,” influencewatch.org (n.d.).
22 Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 730. Lukács’s reference to Carlyle here is directly relevant to the present. Leading MAGA ideologue Curtis Yarvin writes: “I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.” Matt McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy: Curtis Yarvin Is too Elitist for Fascism,” Commonweal, January 27, 2023.
23 Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute Triumphed in the Trump Years. Then Came Jan. 6,” Washington Post, July 30, 2022; Elisabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” New York Times, August 3, 2022; Kroll, “Revealed.”
↩ Kate Brannen and Luke Hartig, “Disrupting the White House: Peter Thiel’s Influence is Shaping the National Security Council,” Just Security, February 8, 2017.
↩ Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books (online), September 5, 2016.
↩ Michael Anton, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose (New York: Encounter Books, 2019); Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (see especially section on “Caesarism” in chapter 7 and the sections on “Immigration,” “Reelect Trump!” and on “Foreign and Defense Policy” in chapter 8.
↩ Michael Anton, “Draining the Swamp,” Claremont Review of Books, 19, no. 1 (Winter 2018/19).
↩ Anton, “Draining the Swamp.”
↩ Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?,” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019). On Nietzsche’s “last man” see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Modern Library, 1917), 10–13 (prologue, section 5).
↩ Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Vlad Alamariu), Bronze Age Mindset (self-published, 2018), 12, 14, 40, 44, 52, 56, 72, 76, 80, 84, 92, 104, 110, 112–14, 118, 120–22, 126, 132–36; Ben Schreckinger, “The Alt-Right Manifesto that has Trumpworld Talking,” Politico, August 23, 2019; BAP quoted on fascism in Ali Breland, “Is the Bronze Age Pervert Going Mainstream?,” Mother Jones, October 2, 2023; Sophie Nicolson, “Bob Denard: French Mercenary Behind Several Post-Colonial Coups,” Guardian, October 15, 2007.
↩ Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ‘Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” Guardian, December 21, 2024; Ian Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025; Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico, July 18, 2024; Jacob Siegel, “The Red-Pill Prince: How Computer Programmer Curtis Yarvin Became America’s Most Controversial Political Theorist,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin interviewed by David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” New York Times, January 18, 2025; “Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) on Tucker Carlson Today,” YouTube video, 1:15:35, September 8, 2021,
↩ Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022; McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy.”
↩ Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump”; Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe”; Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual World View”; Curtis Yarvin, “The Cathedral or the Bizarre,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin, “The Nihilism of the Ruling Class,” Compact, December 16, 2022. On the classical notion of oligarchy, see Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
↩ Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” Compact, July 21, 2023.
↩ Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis 50, no. 3 (March 2021).
↩ Christopher F. Rufo, “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” Imprimis 51, no. 4/5 (April/May 2022); Christopher F. Rufo, “Inside the Transgender Empire,” Imprimis 52, no. 9 (September 2023); Scott Yenor, “Repeal and Replace Today’s Education Cartel,” Law & Liberty, March 28, 2024, lawliberty.org; Frederick M. Hess, “Challenge the College Cartel,” The American Mind, July 2, 2019; Giancarlo Sopo, “Trump Must Break Up the College Cartel,” The American Mind, December 6, 2024.
↩ Christopher Caldwell, “The Browning of America,” Claremont Review of Books 15, no. 1 (Winter 2014/15); Christopher Caldwell, “There Goes Robert E. Lee,” Claremont Review of Books 21, no. 2 (Spring 2021).
↩ Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War.”
↩ Brian T. Kennedy, “Facing Up to the China Treat,” Imprimis 49, no. 9 (September 2020).
↩ Ali Breland, “Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism,” Mother Jones, February 13, 2024; Robert Draper, “How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right,” New York Times, February 10, 2025; Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (Lewes, Delaware: Winning Team Publishing, 2024); Foster, Trump in the White House, 40.
↩ Mike Hixenbaugh and Allan Smith, “Charlie Kirk Once Pushed a ‘Secular Worldview.’ Now He’s Fighting to Make America Christian Again,” NBC News, June 12, 2024.
↩ Russell Vought, “Renewing American Purpose,” The American Mind, September 29, 2022; U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sect. 10, Cl. 3.
↩ Center for Renewing America Staff, “Primer: Palestinian Culture is Prohibitive for Assimilation,” Center for Renewing America, December 1, 2023; Miles Bryan, “The Christian Nationalist Legal Scholar Behind Trump’s Purges: Russell Vought and His Racial Philosophy Explained,” Vox, February 20, 2025.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 263–64.
↩ Matt McManus, “Social Democracy and Social Conservatism Aren’t Compatible,” Jacobin, August 22, 2023.
↩ On Žižek, see Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch, January 2, 2023.
↩ See Michael Anton, “America Against the Deep State,” Compact, September 16, 2022; Christopher Rufo, “What Conservatives See in Hungary,” Compact, July 28, 2023; Christopher Caldwell, “Germany Considers the Alternative,” Compact, February 10, 2025. In a curious statement, Žižek wrote: “I love Compact for a simple reason: because it’s precisely not compact—it is a battlefield of ideas in conflict with each other. Only in this way can something new emerge today.” In fact, Compact is a publication where the MAGA philosophy is hegemonic, and which includes some former leftists moving right.
↩ Christian Parenti, “The Left Case for Kash Patel,” Compact, December 31, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Why RFK Must Take on the CIA,” Compact, December 11, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Diversity is a Ruling-Class Ideology,” Compact, January 19, 2023; Christian Parenti, “Trump’s Real Crime is Opposing Empire,” Compact, April 7, 2023; Christian Parenti, “The Left-Wing Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Theory,” Compact, February 28, 2025. Aside from the contradictory nature of an argument that sees Trump as the enemy of the deep state, this concept, which played so centrally in the Trump I administration, has been largely dropped in MAGA ideology as self-defeating, while Trump II has focused on slashing the administrative state.
↩ Slavoj Žižek, “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” Compact, February 22, 2023; Vincent Lloyd, “A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell,” Compact, February 10, 2023; Melanie Zelle, “Žižek Has Lost the Plot,” The Phoenix (Swarthmore College), March 2, 2023.
↩ Geoff Shullenberger, “What BAP Learned from Feminism,” Compact, September 22, 2023; Geoff Schullenberger, “The Philosophy of Bronze Age Pervert,” Mother Maiden Matriarch with Louise Perry, Episode 35, October 15, 2023; Elena Louisa Lange and Geoff Shullenberger, COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear (London: Routledge, 2024).
↩ Allum Bokhari, “Who Is in Control?: The Need to Rein in Big Tech,” Imprimis 50, no. 1 (January 2021).
↩ Rosie Gray, “Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam Is Out: The Editor of Site’s London Bureau Was One of the Last Steve Bannon Allies Left within the Organization,” The Atlantic, May 23, 2018; “The National Pulse’s Kassam: How Did America Fall to Marxism?,” Grabien, June 6, 2020; Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).
↩ Amanda Crocker, “F*ck Big Book,” Canadian Dimension, February 20, 2025.
↩ Anton, After the Flight 93 Election; Charles R. Kesler, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness (New York: Encounter Books, 2021); Brian T. Kennedy, Communist China’s War Inside America (New York: Encounter Books, 2020); Kirk, Right Wing Revolution. Peter Collier, the founder of Encounter Books, was a former leftist and coeditor of Ramparts magazine along with David Horowitz, when they uncovered Encounter magazine’s CIA funding. He afterward moved to the far (together with Horowitz).
↩ Jesse Watters quoted in David Siroto, “How to Combat the Information War,” The Lever, February 24, 2025, levernews.com.
↩ Steve Bannon, “America’s Great Divide: Interview with Steve Bannon,” PBS Frontline, March 17, 2019; Michael Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” Compact, November 30, 2022; Foster, Trump in the White House, 32–33, 72; Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires,” NPR, January 19, 2025; Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022.
↩ Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
↩ On the lower-middle class basis of the MAGA movement, see Foster, Trump in the White House, 19–21, 63; Les Leopold, “The Myth of MAGA’s Working Class Roots,” UnHerd, February 16, 2024; Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 14, 243–47; David Doonan “Alienated, Not Apathetic: Why Workers Don’t Vote,” Green Party US, August 5, 2019, gp.org; Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Class Conflict (London: Reaction Books, 2018), 36–37. There are of course no hard lines between the working class and the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie. Not income and property alone, but also urban/rural divisions and education play a role in the determination of classes in the political sense. The lower-middle class is far more significant politically than it is demographically because of its higher voter turnout when compared to the working class.
↩ Taylor Popielarz, “An Old Steel Town Highlights How West Virginia Went from Deeply Blue to Trump Country,” Spectrum News NY1, May 24, 2024.
↩ Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
↩ Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration’ (Gleichschaltung): The Consolidation of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934,” in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York: Vintage, 1972), 124–28; Foster, Trump in the White House, 25–29.
↩ Gary Stout, “The Marriage of MAGA and Billionaires Is Already Rocky,” Observer-Reporter, January 25, 2025.
↩ Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires”; Rana Foroohar, “MAGA vs. the Billionaires,” Financial Times, January 5, 2005; Nia-Malika Henderson, “Trump Inauguration: Old MAGA vs. New MAGA’s Cage Match Begins,” Bloomberg, January 20, 2025; Thomas D. Williams, “Steve Bannon: I Will Do Anything’ to Keep Elon Musk Out of the White House,” Breitbart, January 11, 2025.
↩ Kevin Porteus, “Putting Americans First,” The American Mind, January 8, 2025.
↩ Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (New York: Center Street, 2023); Steve Rattner, “What Big-Business Leaders, Including Democrats, Say Privately About Trump,” New York Times, March 3, 2025.
↩ Peter Thiel interviewed by Peter Robinson, “Peter Thiel, Leader of the Rebel Alliance,” Uncommon Knowledge Podcast, Hoover Institution, November 9, 2022.
↩ Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.
↩ Max Chafkin interviewed by Belinda Luscombe, “Who’s Afraid of Peter Thiel?: A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be,” Time, September 21, 2021; Deborah Veneziale, “Trump’s Nationalist Conservative White Christian Agenda,” MR Online, February 28, 2025; Jessica Matthews, “How Peter Thiel’s Network of Right-Wing Techies Is Infiltrating Donald Trump’s White House,” Fortune, January 17, 2025; Brannen and Hartig, “Disrupting the White House.”
↩ Rob Larson, Mastering the Universe (Chicago: Haymarket, 2024), xi.
↩ Ed Kilgore, “”Trump is Dividing Evangelicals Now, Too,” New York Magazine, February 13, 2025; Sam R. Schmitt, “‘Give Cheerfully, Give Abundantly’: White American Prosperity Evangelism, Financial Obedience, and Religious Corruption in the Trump Era,” Activist History Review, May 11, 2018; James Bohland, “The Truth About MAGA: Plutocrats in Populist Clothing,” Fair Observer, October 29, 2024; Jessica Washington, “How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians,” The Intercept, February 22, 2023.
↩ Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel, 33–35; Hamilton, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion.”
↩ Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, “In the Age of Trump, a Moment of Decision for Evangelicals,” Durham Herald Sun, April 26, 2018.
↩ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Fear Is the Slaveholder Religion’s Tool of Control,” Sojourners, April 22, 2019.
↩ Sharon Parrott, “Well, That Was Quick: Trump’s Total Betrayal of Working People Is Now Complete,” Common Dreams, February 26, 2025.
↩ Karl Marx, Texts on Methods (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 195
.
2 Vought quoted in Thomas B. Edsall, “‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings,” New York Times, February 4, 2025.
3 For a leading MAGA proponent of “Caesarism” as constituting the inner telos of the Trump regime, see Michael Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2020), 303–18.
4 Max Matsa, “Senate Confirms Project 2025 Co-Author as Trump Budget Chief,” BBC, February 6, 2025; Curt Devine, Casey Tolan, Audrey Ash, and Kyung Lah, “Hidden Camera Video Shows Project 2025 Co-Author Discussing His Secret Work Preparing for a Second Trump Term,” CNN, August 15, 2024; Michael Sozan and Ben Olinsky, “Project 2025 Would Destroy the U.S. System of Checks and Balances and Create an Imperial Presidency,” Center for American Progress, October 1, 2024.
5 Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs”; Melissa Quinn, Richard Escobedo, and Kristin Brown, “Trump Administration Rescinds Federal Funding Freeze Memo After Chaos,” CBS News, January 29, 2025; Daniel Barnes, Chloe Atkins, and Dareh Gregorian, “Appeals Court Rejects Trump Administration Bid to Immediately Reinstate Funding Freeze,” NBC News, February 11, 2025; Bill Barrow, “How Donald Trump and Project 2025 Previewed the Federal Grant Freeze,” Associated Press, January 28, 2025.
6 Cass R. Sunstein, “This Theory Is Behind Trump’s Power Grab,” New York Times, February 26, 2025.
7 Vaeth, Memorandum, “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.”
8 Lance Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories,” Revolution of Man (blog), August 31, 2023; Mike Gonzalez and Katharine Cornell Gorka, NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It (New York: Encounter Books, 2025), 15, 238, 265–69. The current right-wing attack on “Cultural Marxism” is derived from attacks on “Cultural Bolshevism” in Nazi Germany. Ari Paul, “‘Cultural Marxism’: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 4, 2019, fair.org.
9 Trump/Vance Campaign, “Agenda 47: Protecting Students from the Radical Left and Marxist Maniacs Infecting Educational Institutions,” July 17, 2023.
10 Mike Gonzalez and Katharine C. Gorka, How Cultural Marxism Threatens the United States—and How Americans Can Fight It, Special Report No. 262, Heritage Foundation, November 14, 2022; Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism; Tanner Mirrlees, “The Alt-Right’s Discourse of ‘Cultural Marxism’: A Political Instrument of Intersectional Hate,” Atlantis Journal 39, no. 1 (August 2018); Cashion, “How to Recognize Cultural Marxism and Critical Theories.” All of these works are poorly researched, poorly documented, unscholarly, and shallow, not conforming to academic standards in any way. As Baruch Spinoza said, “Ignorance is no argument.”
11 Gonzalez and Gorka, NextGen Marxism, 17–18, 148–99, 242.
12 See John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 20–22, 121.
13 For criticism of how white evangelical Christians in the United States have embraced a “slaveholder religion,” capitulating to the religious views propounded in the Antebellum South and in the Jim Crow period, see Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion (Lisle, Illinois Inter-Varsity Press, 2020); Darrell Hamilton II, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion,” Baptist News, September 17, 2020.
14 Paul M. Sweezy to Paul A. Baran, October 18, 1952, in Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, The Age of Monopoly Capital, eds. Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 86–87.
15 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942); Doreen Lustig, “The Nature of the Nazi State and the Question of International Criminal Responsibility of Corporate Officials at Nuremberg: Franz Neuman’s Behemoth at the Industrial Trials,” Working Paper 2011/2, History and Theory of International Law Series, Institute for International Law and Justice, 2012; C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 350–54. On the lower-middle class/monopoly capitalist alliance in societies belonging to the fascist genus, see also Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany (New York: Pathfinder, 1971), 455; Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 54; Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1974); Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (New York: Doubleday, 1960), 134–76; Paul A. Baran (Historicus), “Fascism in America,” Monthly Review 4, no. 6 (October 1952): 181–89.
16 Maxine Y. Sweezy (see also Maxine Y. Woolston), The Structure of the Nazi Economy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941), 27–35; Gustave Strolper, German Economy, 1870–1940 (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1940), 207; Germá Bel, “The Coining of ‘Privatization’ and Germany’s National Socialist Party,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20, no. 3 (2006): 187–94; Foster, Trump in the White House, 27–43, 65–66.
17 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: Penguin, 2017); Reuven Kaminer, “On the Concept of ‘Totalitarianism’ and Its Role in Current Political Discourse,” MR Online, August 15, 2007; Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 2–3.
18 Baran, “Fascism in America,” 182.
19 Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic (London: Merlin Press, 1978), 151.
20 Christopher Caldwell, “Speaking Trumpian,” Claremont Review of Books 24, no. 19 (Fall 2024): 19–22.
21 Andy Kroll, “Revealed: The Billionaires Funding the Coup’s Brain Trust,” Rolling Stone, January 12, 2022; Influence Watch, “Thomas D. Kligenstein Fund,” influencewatch.org (n.d.).
22 Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (London: Merlin Press, 1980), 730. Lukács’s reference to Carlyle here is directly relevant to the present. Leading MAGA ideologue Curtis Yarvin writes: “I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.” Matt McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy: Curtis Yarvin Is too Elitist for Fascism,” Commonweal, January 27, 2023.
23 Marc Fisher and Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Claremont Institute Triumphed in the Trump Years. Then Came Jan. 6,” Washington Post, July 30, 2022; Elisabeth Zerofsky, “How the Claremont Institute Became a Nerve Center of the American Right,” New York Times, August 3, 2022; Kroll, “Revealed.”
↩ Kate Brannen and Luke Hartig, “Disrupting the White House: Peter Thiel’s Influence is Shaping the National Security Council,” Just Security, February 8, 2017.
↩ Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books (online), September 5, 2016.
↩ Michael Anton, After the Flight 93 Election: The Vote that Saved America and What We Still Have to Lose (New York: Encounter Books, 2019); Anton, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return (see especially section on “Caesarism” in chapter 7 and the sections on “Immigration,” “Reelect Trump!” and on “Foreign and Defense Policy” in chapter 8.
↩ Michael Anton, “Draining the Swamp,” Claremont Review of Books, 19, no. 1 (Winter 2018/19).
↩ Anton, “Draining the Swamp.”
↩ Michael Anton, “Are the Kids Al(t) Right?,” Claremont Review of Books 19, no. 3 (Summer 2019). On Nietzsche’s “last man” see Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (New York: Modern Library, 1917), 10–13 (prologue, section 5).
↩ Bronze Age Pervert (Costin Vlad Alamariu), Bronze Age Mindset (self-published, 2018), 12, 14, 40, 44, 52, 56, 72, 76, 80, 84, 92, 104, 110, 112–14, 118, 120–22, 126, 132–36; Ben Schreckinger, “The Alt-Right Manifesto that has Trumpworld Talking,” Politico, August 23, 2019; BAP quoted on fascism in Ali Breland, “Is the Bronze Age Pervert Going Mainstream?,” Mother Jones, October 2, 2023; Sophie Nicolson, “Bob Denard: French Mercenary Behind Several Post-Colonial Coups,” Guardian, October 15, 2007.
↩ Jason Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump: The Obscure ‘Dark Enlightenment’ Blogger Influencing the Next US Administration,” Guardian, December 21, 2024; Ian Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe. Now They’re Coursing through Trump’s Washington,” Politico, January 30, 2025; Ian Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual Worldview,” Politico, July 18, 2024; Jacob Siegel, “The Red-Pill Prince: How Computer Programmer Curtis Yarvin Became America’s Most Controversial Political Theorist,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin interviewed by David Marchese, “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening,” New York Times, January 18, 2025; “Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) on Tucker Carlson Today,” YouTube video, 1:15:35, September 8, 2021,
↩ Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022; McManus, “Yarvin’s Case against Democracy.”
↩ Wilson, “He’s Anti-Democracy and Pro-Trump”; Ward, “Curtis Yarvin’s Ideas Were Fringe”; Ward, “The Seven Thinkers and Groups that Have Shaped JD Vance’s Unusual World View”; Curtis Yarvin, “The Cathedral or the Bizarre,” The Tablet, March 30, 2022; Curtis Yarvin, “The Nihilism of the Ruling Class,” Compact, December 16, 2022. On the classical notion of oligarchy, see Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
↩ Michael Anton, “The Pessimistic Case for the Future,” Compact, July 21, 2023.
↩ Christopher F. Rufo, “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It,” Imprimis 50, no. 3 (March 2021).
↩ Christopher F. Rufo, “Laying Siege to the Institutions,” Imprimis 51, no. 4/5 (April/May 2022); Christopher F. Rufo, “Inside the Transgender Empire,” Imprimis 52, no. 9 (September 2023); Scott Yenor, “Repeal and Replace Today’s Education Cartel,” Law & Liberty, March 28, 2024, lawliberty.org; Frederick M. Hess, “Challenge the College Cartel,” The American Mind, July 2, 2019; Giancarlo Sopo, “Trump Must Break Up the College Cartel,” The American Mind, December 6, 2024.
↩ Christopher Caldwell, “The Browning of America,” Claremont Review of Books 15, no. 1 (Winter 2014/15); Christopher Caldwell, “There Goes Robert E. Lee,” Claremont Review of Books 21, no. 2 (Spring 2021).
↩ Kesler, “America’s Cold Civil War.”
↩ Brian T. Kennedy, “Facing Up to the China Treat,” Imprimis 49, no. 9 (September 2020).
↩ Ali Breland, “Charlie Kirk Doesn’t Really Seem to Mind White Nationalism,” Mother Jones, February 13, 2024; Robert Draper, “How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right,” New York Times, February 10, 2025; Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Revolution: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West (Lewes, Delaware: Winning Team Publishing, 2024); Foster, Trump in the White House, 40.
↩ Mike Hixenbaugh and Allan Smith, “Charlie Kirk Once Pushed a ‘Secular Worldview.’ Now He’s Fighting to Make America Christian Again,” NBC News, June 12, 2024.
↩ Russell Vought, “Renewing American Purpose,” The American Mind, September 29, 2022; U.S. Constitution, Art. 1, Sect. 10, Cl. 3.
↩ Center for Renewing America Staff, “Primer: Palestinian Culture is Prohibitive for Assimilation,” Center for Renewing America, December 1, 2023; Miles Bryan, “The Christian Nationalist Legal Scholar Behind Trump’s Purges: Russell Vought and His Racial Philosophy Explained,” Vox, February 20, 2025.
↩ John Bellamy Foster, The Return of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 263–64.
↩ Matt McManus, “Social Democracy and Social Conservatism Aren’t Compatible,” Jacobin, August 22, 2023.
↩ On Žižek, see Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” Counterpunch, January 2, 2023.
↩ See Michael Anton, “America Against the Deep State,” Compact, September 16, 2022; Christopher Rufo, “What Conservatives See in Hungary,” Compact, July 28, 2023; Christopher Caldwell, “Germany Considers the Alternative,” Compact, February 10, 2025. In a curious statement, Žižek wrote: “I love Compact for a simple reason: because it’s precisely not compact—it is a battlefield of ideas in conflict with each other. Only in this way can something new emerge today.” In fact, Compact is a publication where the MAGA philosophy is hegemonic, and which includes some former leftists moving right.
↩ Christian Parenti, “The Left Case for Kash Patel,” Compact, December 31, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Why RFK Must Take on the CIA,” Compact, December 11, 2024; Christian Parenti, “Diversity is a Ruling-Class Ideology,” Compact, January 19, 2023; Christian Parenti, “Trump’s Real Crime is Opposing Empire,” Compact, April 7, 2023; Christian Parenti, “The Left-Wing Origins of the ‘Deep State’ Theory,” Compact, February 28, 2025. Aside from the contradictory nature of an argument that sees Trump as the enemy of the deep state, this concept, which played so centrally in the Trump I administration, has been largely dropped in MAGA ideology as self-defeating, while Trump II has focused on slashing the administrative state.
↩ Slavoj Žižek, “Wokeness Is Here to Stay,” Compact, February 22, 2023; Vincent Lloyd, “A Black Professor Trapped in an Anti-Racist Hell,” Compact, February 10, 2023; Melanie Zelle, “Žižek Has Lost the Plot,” The Phoenix (Swarthmore College), March 2, 2023.
↩ Geoff Shullenberger, “What BAP Learned from Feminism,” Compact, September 22, 2023; Geoff Schullenberger, “The Philosophy of Bronze Age Pervert,” Mother Maiden Matriarch with Louise Perry, Episode 35, October 15, 2023; Elena Louisa Lange and Geoff Shullenberger, COVID-19 and the Left: The Tyranny of Fear (London: Routledge, 2024).
↩ Allum Bokhari, “Who Is in Control?: The Need to Rein in Big Tech,” Imprimis 50, no. 1 (January 2021).
↩ Rosie Gray, “Breitbart’s Raheem Kassam Is Out: The Editor of Site’s London Bureau Was One of the Last Steve Bannon Allies Left within the Organization,” The Atlantic, May 23, 2018; “The National Pulse’s Kassam: How Did America Fall to Marxism?,” Grabien, June 6, 2020; Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (New York: Encounter Books, 2021).
↩ Amanda Crocker, “F*ck Big Book,” Canadian Dimension, February 20, 2025.
↩ Anton, After the Flight 93 Election; Charles R. Kesler, Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of America’s Greatness (New York: Encounter Books, 2021); Brian T. Kennedy, Communist China’s War Inside America (New York: Encounter Books, 2020); Kirk, Right Wing Revolution. Peter Collier, the founder of Encounter Books, was a former leftist and coeditor of Ramparts magazine along with David Horowitz, when they uncovered Encounter magazine’s CIA funding. He afterward moved to the far (together with Horowitz).
↩ Jesse Watters quoted in David Siroto, “How to Combat the Information War,” The Lever, February 24, 2025, levernews.com.
↩ Steve Bannon, “America’s Great Divide: Interview with Steve Bannon,” PBS Frontline, March 17, 2019; Michael Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism,’” Compact, November 30, 2022; Foster, Trump in the White House, 32–33, 72; Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires,” NPR, January 19, 2025; Jeremy Carl, “Beyond Elves and Hobbits,” The American Mind, July 22, 2022.
↩ Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
↩ On the lower-middle class basis of the MAGA movement, see Foster, Trump in the White House, 19–21, 63; Les Leopold, “The Myth of MAGA’s Working Class Roots,” UnHerd, February 16, 2024; Dennis Gilbert, The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 14, 243–47; David Doonan “Alienated, Not Apathetic: Why Workers Don’t Vote,” Green Party US, August 5, 2019, gp.org; Phil A. Neel, Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Class Conflict (London: Reaction Books, 2018), 36–37. There are of course no hard lines between the working class and the lower-middle class or petty bourgeoisie. Not income and property alone, but also urban/rural divisions and education play a role in the determination of classes in the political sense. The lower-middle class is far more significant politically than it is demographically because of its higher voter turnout when compared to the working class.
↩ Taylor Popielarz, “An Old Steel Town Highlights How West Virginia Went from Deeply Blue to Trump Country,” Spectrum News NY1, May 24, 2024.
↩ Anton, “Why the Great Reset Is Not ‘Socialism.’”
↩ Karl Dietrich Bracher, “Stages of Totalitarian ‘Integration’ (Gleichschaltung): The Consolidation of National Socialist Rule in 1933 and 1934,” in Republic to Reich, ed. Hajo Holborn (New York: Vintage, 1972), 124–28; Foster, Trump in the White House, 25–29.
↩ Gary Stout, “The Marriage of MAGA and Billionaires Is Already Rocky,” Observer-Reporter, January 25, 2025.
↩ Steve Inskeep, “Steve Bannon Says MAGA Populism Will Win—as Trump Is Surrounded by Billionaires”; Rana Foroohar, “MAGA vs. the Billionaires,” Financial Times, January 5, 2005; Nia-Malika Henderson, “Trump Inauguration: Old MAGA vs. New MAGA’s Cage Match Begins,” Bloomberg, January 20, 2025; Thomas D. Williams, “Steve Bannon: I Will Do Anything’ to Keep Elon Musk Out of the White House,” Breitbart, January 11, 2025.
↩ Kevin Porteus, “Putting Americans First,” The American Mind, January 8, 2025.
↩ Vivek Ramaswamy, Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam (New York: Center Street, 2023); Steve Rattner, “What Big-Business Leaders, Including Democrats, Say Privately About Trump,” New York Times, March 3, 2025.
↩ Peter Thiel interviewed by Peter Robinson, “Peter Thiel, Leader of the Rebel Alliance,” Uncommon Knowledge Podcast, Hoover Institution, November 9, 2022.
↩ Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009.
↩ Max Chafkin interviewed by Belinda Luscombe, “Who’s Afraid of Peter Thiel?: A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be,” Time, September 21, 2021; Deborah Veneziale, “Trump’s Nationalist Conservative White Christian Agenda,” MR Online, February 28, 2025; Jessica Matthews, “How Peter Thiel’s Network of Right-Wing Techies Is Infiltrating Donald Trump’s White House,” Fortune, January 17, 2025; Brannen and Hartig, “Disrupting the White House.”
↩ Rob Larson, Mastering the Universe (Chicago: Haymarket, 2024), xi.
↩ Ed Kilgore, “”Trump is Dividing Evangelicals Now, Too,” New York Magazine, February 13, 2025; Sam R. Schmitt, “‘Give Cheerfully, Give Abundantly’: White American Prosperity Evangelism, Financial Obedience, and Religious Corruption in the Trump Era,” Activist History Review, May 11, 2018; James Bohland, “The Truth About MAGA: Plutocrats in Populist Clothing,” Fair Observer, October 29, 2024; Jessica Washington, “How Trump Twisted DEI to Only Benefit White Christians,” The Intercept, February 22, 2023.
↩ Wilson-Hartgrove, Reconstructing the Gospel, 33–35; Hamilton, “It’s Time to Break the Chains of Slaveholder Religion.”
↩ Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, “In the Age of Trump, a Moment of Decision for Evangelicals,” Durham Herald Sun, April 26, 2018.
↩ Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Fear Is the Slaveholder Religion’s Tool of Control,” Sojourners, April 22, 2019.
↩ Sharon Parrott, “Well, That Was Quick: Trump’s Total Betrayal of Working People Is Now Complete,” Common Dreams, February 26, 2025.
↩ Karl Marx, Texts on Methods (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 195
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