How To Treat MAGA Face Injuries

Reader S sent in this piece about MAGAts cheering the firing of their relatives.

There’s a picture of Kristin Jenn in the piece, and she looks like a lot of the fresh-faced, eager, National Park Service Rangers that I’ve encountered in our travels. They are the best of us — they love the parks, they love helping people, and their excitement is infectious.

There is nothing wrong with noting that her relatives are the worst of us. The National Park Service is underfunded and, if her relatives pay taxes (an open question), only pennies of their tax dollars go to pay for rangers and upkeep of the Parks. This summer is going to suck at the National Parks — understaffed parks will have dirty campgrounds and tourons will probably do damage. Those MAGAts might even have the gall to complain about it, as long as Fox stuffs the right information into their willing ears.

Let’s turn to the FAFO crowd. One person who I correspond with on BlueSky, handle keynesaddiction, got into it with Marci Wheeler yesterday over a story about a West Virginia woman who voted for Trump and got fired from her federal job. Here’s that woman, Jennifer Piggott’s, story:

Wheeler’s response is that she hopes that someone tells this person that they’re a victim of their media diet, and when my correspondent clapped back, this was her response:

Let’s get my view of Marci Wheeler out of the way: she’s not a lawyer, she writes extremely long pieces about court cases that try to construct a narrative that may or may not reflect an understanding of the law, and she also is a big Merrick Garland defender. I can’t say I read her much or get much out of her pieces when I read them. So, that said, I think she’s wrong here, and its worth considering a couple of points:

• Piggott not a good prospect. There’s big pressure on the part of the media and so-called “centrists” to spend an inordinate amount of time understanding, and then catering to, any hard-core Trumper who shows a bit of regret. Piggott is a three-time Trump voter who only cares about what Trump has done because she was harmed. She flew a Trump flag until she got fired. Then, she got a ton of media attention for her supposed renunciation of Trump. What’s going to stop her from voting Republican again on the flimsiest premise? Politically, I think time spent on more persuadable voters is a far better investment.

• These stories ignore Democrats. Piggott was one of a few Republicans at a demonstration with at least 100 Democrats. Every person interviewed by Reuters was a Republican, as far as I can tell. There’s an immense amount of attention to be had if you appear to be a Trumpy victim of face eating leopards, which increase my skepticism about whether these people are persuadable or just like attention.

• BlueSky isn’t the real world. We aren’t all knocking on doors in West Virginia when we post on BlueSky. I’m not a big FAFO poster, but this woman FA and now she’s FO. It’s not enabling fascism for someone with no political office to point that out, get a grip.

• We should care more about alienating Democrats than flattering Republicans. If we are going to talk about the risks of alienating this woman with FAFO rhetoric, let’s at least acknowledge the risk of alienating the solid base of the Democratic Party by pretending that she’s some kind of completely innocent victim. She knew what she was voting for: sexism, racism and homophobia. MAGA isn’t shy about that, and it’s extremely unlikely that a flag-waving Trumper would have been crying about federal job cuts if she hadn’t been personally affected. Unfortunately, a lot of big names in the party are still gathering around a false narrative of the Harris campaign as being too “woke”. Those Democrats (like Gavin Newsom) are falling all over themselves trying to rectify the wokeness by embracing garbage like anti-trans narratives on women in sports. There’s a tiny audience for that bullshit: they all live in DC and they all write for the DC rags or DC bureaus of big media. There are a lot of Democrats who have been harmed by MAGA. When they look at their flags and their “Fuck Your Feelings” t-shirts, they think of women dying in hospital parking lots, trans kids being harassed to the point of suicide, and black and brown people being told that their achievements are all DEI, not hard work and ability. We cater to MAGA at risk of alienating these solid supporters.

In short, let the media worry about the Jennifer Piggotts of the world. She’ll get plenty of attention. If she wants to burn her MAGA flag and start volunteering to elect Democrats in West Virginia, welcome aboard. But we’re not going to start embracing her MAGA hatreds just because she decided to join the party. And, yeah, the better rhetoric here is “Trump lied to you and you didn’t vote for Musk” if we talk to her in person. But she did FAFO and the Leopards feasted.

Also, if we’re going to talk about Jennifer Piggott, let’s also have plenty of stories like the first one above: where the anger and hatred of MAGAts is even directed towards their own kin. One proven way to fight fascism is to show how odious the fascists are, and turn people against them.