I’m late to this. I’ve been offline, living like it’s 2003. No news alerts, no rage-scrolling, no exposure to a single influencer or pundit. It was glorious. But then I plugged back in and saw it: Young Republican leaders caught in group chats saying “I love Hitler,” joking about gas chambers and rape, sneering about “watermelon people,” and casually tossing around words like “faggot” and “retarded”—like they were just swapping fantasy football picks.
A decade ago, even whispering something like “I love Hitler” would have ended your political career, your public life, your dating prospects, your gym membership—hell, even your WiFi password might’ve stopped working out of pure moral inertia. Now? You get a wink, a shrug, and maybe a spot on someone’s podcast.
This isn’t just about antisemitism, although it is deeply, virulently that. It’s deeper. It’s a willful rejection of decency itself. Like they’ve looked straight at the moral floor and said: “Nah. Let’s keep digging.”
And look—racism isn’t exactly a new bug in the human operating system. It’s baked into our wiring. Infants as young as six months show preference for faces of their own race. One study even found that children tend to trust people who sound and look like them. Tribal bias is an evolutionary leftover—like the appendix, or Twitter.
But the whole point of civilization is to override our worst instincts. We educate. We empathize. We evolve. We try to beat that tribal lizard-brain back into its cage, one generation at a time. Or, in the more cynical version of human progress, we just wait until all the bloodlines blend into one and racism becomes logistically impossible.
MAGA seems uninterested in either path.
I have MAGA friends—smart ones—who are slowly, quietly backing away from Trump. They don’t say it aloud, but I can see it. They’re starting to wince at the Proud Boys merch and the screaming matches at school board meetings. But they still can’t quite let go. They’ve convinced themselves MAGA is the “lesser of two evils,” that the left is so deranged that they must cling to the burning ship out of duty.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: while one of those “evils” is arguing over pronouns, the other one is now literally flirting with Nazi ideology. Not metaphorically. Not “like Nazis.” Actual Nazi language. Actual Nazi aesthetics. One staffer literally put a swastika-shaped American flag on his Capitol Hill office wall, like it was an ironic dorm poster.
The GOP took a hard right, blew past Reagan, sideswiped Goldwater, and now fishtails somewhere between Franco and full-blown fascism, headlights off, tiki torch on.
And still, my MAGA friends won’t change the channel. Even when they know they’re being lied to. Even when they feel the disgust in their gut. Tribalism is a hell of a drug. It overrides reason. It punishes doubt. It turns moral nausea into partisan loyalty.
That’s how people who never would’ve said the word “Hitler” outside a history class end up defending it as a “joke.” That’s how the descent happens—not in a single leap, but in a thousand rationalizations, one meme, one tweet, one group chat at a time.
This isn’t just a MAGA problem. It’s a human problem. We are all wired to pick sides and defend them, even when the facts rot out from underneath us. The only antidote is constant moral clarity—across the board, not just when it’s convenient. When you see people celebrating cruelty, racism, and violence, you don’t stay quiet. You don’t look for whataboutisms. You say: No. That’s not who we’re supposed to be.
Because once the tribal drums drown out your conscience, you’ll look up and realize you’ve been goose-stepping for a while—and didn’t even notice the rhythm change.
Mike McCready 
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