What Happened to MAGA?

How have we gone from being the party of free speech, the movement of free debate, and the world-altering force that called out the insanity of establishment politics to a divided imitation of the same dangerous rhetoric and ideology we claimed to oppose?

I am conservative with some libertarian views, but more than anything, I am conservative. I was hesitant to take Trump seriously at first, but like many rational-minded, unindoctrinated, free-thinking Millennials and Gen Xers, when we saw what he could do and realized that his actions to improve the country weren’t just campaign slogans, we were fully on board.

I loved Trump, but more importantly, I loved MAGA and all it stood for. To a regular American like me, it stood for the transparency we were all seeking from our government. It stood for the American Dream we had all been promised but that always seemed just out of reach. It stood for common sense, morality, and draining the swamp that seemed to believe it had the right to control us instead of represent us. Most importantly, it was a movement for the forgotten American.

Many liberals seem to confuse this with a movement for the white American, but that was just divisive mainstream-media slander. Those of us who truly believed in making America great again were simply tired of watching our country fall apart as we focused on giving certain groups more rights and attention because they were considered the least among us, while all of us became worse off. We were tired of identity politics turning everyone against each other and stripping our country of merit-based success. Instead of achieving something great because you were great at it, if you weren’t a minority, it didn’t matter what you did—you would never get ahead.

This toxic mentality worked its way into every aspect of our lives, creating a hole that seemed impossible to climb out of. We were tired of states like New York and California claiming they spoke for the whole country, no matter how insane or out of touch with the rest of us they were. They said, “Jump,” and we were all supposed to ask, “How high?”

The truth is, people didn’t follow Trump in overwhelming numbers because he was divisive or because they were bigots who hated gay people or Black people. They followed him because his movement preached principles that united people across the artificial boundaries we had been forced to believe in. It highlighted the real forces stealing our American dreams: the corrupt government and establishment elites who decided that we were simply pawns to be played with.

He promised something no one else ever had: to drain the swamp. He spoke to us like human beings who deserved respect, and he didn’t focus on how we looked or whom we had relationships with. He focused on our problems and how to actually fix them.

They came after him, of course, because elites couldn’t have their system exposed, oligarchs couldn’t have ordinary people unite and stop arguing with each other, and they definitely couldn’t have us knowing what was going on in the shadows. So they used every tactic they had. They brought out dangerous, divisive rhetoric. They lied. They said everyone who supported MAGA was a racist. In debates and interviews, they trained one half of America to hate with heated words intended to provoke a specific reaction.

They made false claims about Russian collusion that they knew could be proven false, but it wouldn’t matter because the damage they intended to inflict would be greater than any retraction or proof of innocence. They intentionally shamed people for supporting the movement. Using these tactics, along with their power and money, they ensured that he would not be reelected through suppression, censorship, fraud, and political manipulation.

Whether you believe the election was stolen outright or not, you cannot deny that unusual events occurred, and that Biden’s campaign was based on hatred of Trump rather than the quality of his own campaign or leadership skills.

We all remember the trials, the shaming, the high gas prices, the inflation, and the dementia. It became extremely obvious that the president did not have the power we thought he did and that, at least in this instance, he was not in control of what was happening in our country. This further highlighted the out-of-control influence that our elites and bureaucratic agencies had over the future of the country.

Even as a lower-middle-class, uneducated mother, I could see that things had changed. The people behind the scenes were becoming more dangerous, and they no longer cared whether we believed the lies. We no longer mattered. They had won, so why bother playing the game?

Desperate economic hardships, along with this blatantly obvious deception and the disdain for the average American that appeared in every piece of legislation, political speech, and idea coming from that administration, combined with a large group of conservative leaders taking campaign responsibilities into their own hands instead of relying on the useless and flaccid establishment RNC to do its job. Together, these forces brought the America First movement back with a vengeance.

This initiative included Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, Tucker Carlson, and conservative and libertarian influencers speaking out about the common-sense principles the movement supported. They showed average Americans from across the country—big cities and small rural towns, Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, gay, straight, women, and men—that everyone was sick of our country’s elites and the endless number of unelected bureaucrats controlling our government and us.

We wanted transparency. We wanted common sense. We wanted morality. We wanted God. We wanted the American Dream. We wanted to focus on our country and escape these endless wars that served no purpose or offered no gain. We wanted to know where our tax dollars were going and why. We were all ready to be “We the People” again.

So, in an overwhelming mandate, Trump defeated Kamala Harris. After the prior four years, it was obvious that, when choosing between the two, Trump had real action to back up his words, while she offered only the same played-out, distorted, hateful rhetoric and never-ending political spin of the controlled establishment politician.

We were thrilled. People were celebrating in the streets and crying with relief. We had saved our country. Now we could drain the swamp, prosecute the pedophiles, and make the evil oligarchs and bureaucratic overlords pay for their crimes. Their reign over us would end. We could bring back the American Dream, peace, and prosperity for our country. Our children would have a good future.

This is how I felt. My husband and I watched TPUSA’s coverage of the election on one screen and Tucker Carlson’s coverage on another. Throughout the entire night, we were nervous and worried that they would try to “steal” the election again, or that Georgia would close the polls because the plumbing had exploded and then roll out a bunch of ballots from under a table. You just didn’t know whether we had overwhelmed the vote enough to stop the cheating.

Amid all this chaos, I looked at my husband and said, “Babe, what if we’re the baddies?” He replied, “The Democrats were giving abortions at their convention. They want late-term abortions and to cut children’s genitalia off. We’re not the baddies.” His answer comforted me, and I celebrated as we won.

But I still had the same thought. I kept thinking, “What if we are voting for something bad? What if we think this is going to save the country, but it’s already too late, and Trump from 2016 is not going to be this Trump?”

It’s strange how accurate the intuition God gives us can be if we actually listen to it.

How have we gone from this monumental, amazing American populist movement that would save our country from falling into more endless wars and create smaller gaps between the rich and poor, to burying transparency and dressing it up as “nothing to see”? How did we go from being so united to being so divided?

I think there are a few key events we can look to in order to understand why the movement became divided: the Epstein files, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the military interventions that began in Venezuela and culminated in the Iran War.

The Epstein files were the true catalyst for division, but most MAGA people weren’t ready to accept the betrayal at that point. Despite how obvious it seemed—and regardless of the fact that this was an issue the entire world was paying attention to, including overwhelmed working-class people like me, who have to listen to alternative media in increments on the way to work or while picking up our children—we still wanted to believe there was a plan.

Someone must have pressured Trump. There had to be an excuse. The files could have been manipulated. They could have been desperately trying to verify what was real and what was false. But after all the excuses and the strange commentary, some of us began to grow concerned.

When Trump claimed he didn’t need supporters who were still focused on the Epstein files and completely dismissed the concerns we had about the ruling class that seemed to hate regular people, I think we all knew there was something dark there.

All the while, we were receiving visits from Israel, and people began highlighting AIPAC and Miriam Adelson. I became nervous when I started hearing about figures such as Larry Ellison leading hundreds of billions of dollars in Stargate, a U.S. artificial-intelligence infrastructure project. The alignment with tech oligarchs and the apparent lack of oversight gave me literal chills.

But then there was the argument about competing with China, and at the time, I wanted to trust “the plan.” We started hearing more about tensions with Iran and claims that we would take over Greenland. I will be honest: I was all for that because I would have been on the first flight there to work and try to find a better-paying job, or whatever incentives they offered families to participate. I love the cold.

Then there was Venezuela. We invaded Venezuela under the guise of a humanitarian effort to stop the drug trade and captured its president, replacing him with his female, progressive, and strongly pro-Israel vice president. We used weapons that the United States denied existed and unveiled the horrors our own country could unleash not only on the world but also on us.

This was a quick military campaign, and many of us were willing to accept it. We were willing to believe that it was for crude oil and to accept the lie that we were protecting Americans and democracy, of course.

As tensions grew with Iran, more people began speaking out against the obvious influence Israel seemed to have over many of our legislators, and the movement began to crack. Our greatest “glue person” was Charlie Kirk. He and Tucker Carlson shared the view that they supported our president but that he needed outside counsel because he was clearly being manipulated by people such as Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz.

They were more in touch with the average American than many other pundits, and we all wanted to believe the same thing: Trump would listen to reason. He would have to see that this was not America First.

Then the tragedy happened. After speaking out against the pressure being placed on him by Israel First donors and people who called themselves his friends, Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated, and the event was allowed to be displayed across the internet for all of us to witness.

The brutality and sadness seemed to unite us for a moment, but that unity quickly changed. When foreign leaders began making statements claiming Charlie was Israel’s biggest fan, and when leaders such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an unprompted statement saying he had nothing to do with Charlie’s murder, people who still had common sense said, “Something is wrong.”

Then the FBI did what the FBI has done under every other administration: It gave us almost no information, identified one suspect—a random teenager—and expected us to believe the story. Just as in Butler, this was presented as a lucky attack by a deranged shooter, a triggered lone liberal. There was no help from an outside agency, and the FBI shut the matter down.

Everyone, including Charlie’s widow and his entire organization, acted suspiciously in my opinion and in the opinion of many other Americans. They not only accepted the official story and refused to question it, but they also seemed to actively twist and betray everything Charlie stood for.

In his final months, Charlie had demanded that we hold Israel accountable, put America first, and stop intervening on its behalf. He had also supported keeping mothers in the home with their children and allowing everyone—including people whose opinions we hate—to speak freely and debate openly with logic and facts, rather than simply screaming, “You’re a racist,” or, in this case, “You’re an antisemite.”

Then, while we were trying to hold ourselves together and grieve for Charlie, Trump and his Department of War—an apparently convenient name change that many working Americans didn’t notice or take seriously enough—decided to bomb Iran and start another foreign regime-change war.

They followed this by calling it a detour from America First, saying that Israel had forced our hand, then backtracking and saying that we were in control. They claimed it would last only a few days, then a few weeks, and then a few months. They dangled an end to the war in front of us several times, only to resume bombing when they couldn’t reopen the Strait of Hormuz, blaming China in the process. All the while, they kept telling us to “trust the plan.” That had always been the promise.

Fast-forward to now. Those of us who have remained true to the original America First principles have been pushed out of MAGA and replaced with neoconservatives and establishment Republicans who resemble George W. Bush more than Trump in 2016.

We are now called America First conservatives by our own people, while establishment Republicans pretending to be MAGA call us “antisemites,” “Islamists,” and “socialists.” That’s right: If you remain true to the populist philosophy presented by the Trump campaign, you are now supposedly against capitalism and may even be called a socialist or a communist.

If you don’t want any more intervention in foreign wars—especially wars we cannot win and that offer no real benefit to us beyond the false promise of protection from a threat that never existed, such as a “nuclear-armed Iran”—you are an Islamist.

If you dare to question the Israeli government or Israeli donor money in our politics, or even notice it, you are called an antisemite.

 If you call for government transparency or mention the Epstein files, you are dismissed as a conspiracy theorist who hates MAGA.

The parallels between the rhetoric and actions of the Democrats—rhetoric and actions that the current administration claimed to hate and promised to end—and the new MAGA philosophy are astonishing.

When did MAGA become the new Democrats?

When did MAGA become the establishment deep state we were all trying to eliminate?

When did MAGA become the swamp?

If you’re digging in your heels right now, take a breath. You have made it this far, so stay with me and think about it.

The Trump team and Fake MAGA—which includes establishment Republicans, pundits no one ever cared about such as Laura Loomer and Mark Levin, and other influencers who claim to be “MAGA conservatives”—went from screaming about censorship to demanding it. Now they want to go so far as to suppress any mention of criticism of the government of Israel by labeling it “hate speech.” If you criticize Israel, you must be an antisemite. You must be the new Hitler.

They have even come up with cute names such as “Woke Reich” to refer to the few influencers who have remained true to the original MAGA movement, such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.

The problem with speech restrictions is that the definition is subjective. The person making the determination gets to decide whether something qualifies. That is a dangerous precedent to set, especially for regular Americans.

Think about January 6 and what happened to people who were simply in the Capitol that day. Think about the years some spent in jail for crimes they did not commit.

Original MAGA supporters hated it when Democrats screamed “racist” to shut down an argument because they did not have a rebuttal or a point to make. Whenever a liberal could not defend a position or a ridiculous social-justice cause, they would scream, “You don’t support transgender surgery on a four-year-old boy who likes to play with Barbie dolls with his sister? You’re transphobic,” or, “You just said George Floyd overdosed, and the facts and reports prove that to be true. You’re a racist.”

New MAGA has simply replaced “racist” and “transphobic” with “antisemite” and “Islamist.” Now the accusations sound like this: “You just said that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and supported it with the definition of genocide and documented examples. You’re an antisemite,” or, “You think Trump is being influenced by Israel and should end the war. You’re an Islamist.”

We used to call for government transparency. We all agreed that the establishment labeled anyone who asked legitimate questions and pointed out obvious facts as a conspiracy theorist—facts that anyone could identify with a little common sense and research. We called for the JFK, 9/11, and Epstein files to be fully released, and Trump supported that transparency.

Now Fake MAGA calls anyone who thinks it is strange that the FBI allegedly destroyed the crime scene and returned all physical evidence from Charlie Kirk’s person in less than 24 hours a conspiracy theorist, an Islamist, and a Jew-hater. That is a strange connection to make. I’m sure there is no connection to Zionism at all.

Anyone who questions AIPAC or asks why we received only a limited release of the Epstein files is labeled and shamed as a conspiracy theorist.

Trump was horrified by censorship, endless wars, and, more importantly, the senseless loss of American lives for another country’s gain. Now, all of a sudden, he is completely fine with all of it and is actively banning media organizations he dislikes from the White House.

He praises pundits who call for censorship and uses the Democratic playbook to attack fellow conservatives who question anything involving the Israeli government. Yet we are all expected to accept this and support it.

We have aligned ourselves with tech billionaires who control everything from artificial intelligence and social media to the cloud. At the same time, the internet and social media have become places where online polls show that everyone overwhelmingly supports the war. Either everyone online is over the age of 75, or our voices are being shut out and replaced with bought and paid for bots whose fake opinions are fluffed with propogandist podcasters and influencers. Accounts with five followers and no profile photo flood comment sections with pro-Israel rhetoric and the new MAGA ideology. However, when I go outside a touch grass, and talk to human beings I do not encounter one person with a favorable view on either.

All of these influencers seem to attack the same three things: questions about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, opposition to the Iran War, and anyone who speaks out against Israel. They are also extremely supportive of data centers, artificial intelligence, and Flock cameras.

If you support the Iran War, you definitely believe Tyler Robinson did it, and you most certainly support censoring anyone who speaks out against Israel because those people must be antisemites. Of course, you’re also completely on board with the United States winning a war with China over artificial intelligence, even if that race destroys the world and extinguishes humanity—at least those of us who don’t have billions of dollars to survive in a bunker at home.

The last thing I will mention briefly is that the silence from the left is deafening. We should take note of it because it means something. Take note of the lack of large protests lined with bought-and-paid-for Antifa members. We should find it questionable that we don’t have anyone lining the streets of DC with protests against the war; but we do have protests filled with ANTIFA members and three letter agencies for social justice causes like, transgender rights, BLM, abortions…If the establishment democrats were against this war, they would have the streets lined with pro gaza protests, but instead they half heartedly go on some podcast and say Trump has made a mess in Iran, and then stand in unity with the neocons when Bibi Netanyahu walks into congress.

The establishment, the uniparty, and the globalism we were originally united against were never defeated. If you feel that this isn’t the Trump we once knew and that the movement has gone off the rails, but you don’t want to admit it, I understand. I hate going against a movement that I once supported so strongly.

But then I remember why I supported it in the first place.

Because I wanted to create a better world for my children. I wanted to protect their future so they could have the American Dream that now seems out of reach—or impossible to preserve—for most Americans.

When you’re online, remember that the internet is not the real world. Polls and statistics can be faked, and influencers can be paid just like politicians. You have intuition and instinct for a reason, so trust them. Trust the voice in your head telling you, “I cannot be alone. This can’t be something everyone supports. This is not creating a better future for America. It seems to be a plan to actively destroy it.”

This administration seems more aligned with Bush-era globalists, establishment uniparty elites, tech billionaires, and the World Economic Forum than with working Americans, Christian morality, and the conservative populism that originally attracted so many of us. There is a reason for that.

I do not know what happened to Trump, but MAGA was never just about him. It was about saving the American Dream for our children. It was about protecting the country from an extinction-level nuclear event or an artificial-intelligence takeover. It was about saving the working and middle classes, not empowering billionaire oligarchs and solidifying their control over us.

Most importantly, it was about protecting the future of our children and providing an America in which “We the People” still had power.

I’ll say it one more time: Touch grass. Talk to people. Ask what is important to them without bringing up the war. I think you’ll find that what everyone really cares about is a future that is positive and bright for the next generations. I think you’ll find that we are all united in that belief.

Then ask yourself: Is the path we’re on going to bring about a positive future in which the American Dream is safe, or could it cause apocalyptic-level destruction? If you made it this far, I think you know the answer.

Never let a machine or a rich man take away your instincts. We should never simply “trust the plan,” and we should never blindly follow a leader. MAGA was about the principles, philosophy, and movement—not one man.

We are MAGA, not them.

America First.