Listen to Jamelle

Trump's tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-more bill* — which contains so many evil parts it's not possible to list them all – has been called the MAGA Murder bill on BlueSky. Much as I like that name, it only covers the cuts to important programs. It doesn't touch the parts that extend his fascism, for instance stripping courts of their powers and funding ICE with more money than the entire Bureau of Prisons.

Jamelle Bouie wrote a column in the New York Times yesterday that isn't about the bill specifically, but is about the larger vision that underpins the MAGA movement and therefore fits with Project 2025, DOGE, and the bill, too. Here's a gift link: The MAGA Movement’s Empty Vision of the Future.

As usual, I can't say anything better than he can, so please read it.

Here are two quotes:

Trump and his allies are fighting a war on the future and, in particular, on the idea that our technological progress should proceed hand in hand with social and ethical progress — on the liberal universalism that demands an expansive and expanding area of concern for the state and society. And they are fighting a war for the future insofar as this means the narrowing of our moral horizons for the sake of unleashing certain energies tied to hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.

The vision is also hyper-masculine, he says, ridiculing anything opposed to it as feminized.

At the end of the column, Bouie briefly describes what our counter to the MAGA vision needs to be:

We have, in this country, a powerful movement eager to summon an authoritarian future. What we need is a movement dedicated to an egalitarian one, to a future in which all Americans can live the lives they choose to make for themselves — a country that rejects walls and rigid hierarchies in favor of the democratic virtues and universalist ideals of this country’s best traditions.

That movement needs to tell the egalitarian story — refuse the MAGA framing — and be heard, somehow, in the cacophony and big-money-controlled media environment we live in. 

Most people don't want this MAGA vision when they understand what it is.

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* I refuse to refer to it by the BBB name Republicans and the media are using for it. It's sickening to repeat Trump's puerile framing, and we shouldn't do their job for them.

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Here's a bonus picture of Backwards Kristi I made... since her understanding of constitutional rights is exactly backwards:

The bill also funds her luxury jet, by the way. Of course.