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Conservative group leader calls MAGA a “rotting carcass” that has already lost the culture war
According to one longtime politico, team MAGA is not doing well.
Rick Wilson – author, political consultant, lifetime conservative, and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project – said we need look no further than Super Bowl weekend to observe “the rotting carcass of the MAGA era, its shrieking insecurities, its pathetic resentments, its festering hatreds, and that distinct, metallic tang of panic rising in the back of its throat behind the soft wattle.”
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In a blog post, he told Americans that while we remain in a terrifying moment, it is important to remember that “the evil men at the heart of this evil movement” are not bulletproof.
“Fascism wants to scare you into silence,” he wrote, “but sometimes, fascism trips on its own lies and absurdities and pratfalls onto its sneering face.”
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He said Bad Bunny’s halftime show performance appears to be “the culture war hill on which MAGA wished to die.”
And, he said, “die they did.”
Despite the fact that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory and Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, folks on the right claim the choice of Bad Bunny is somehow un-American. This, despite the fact that many actual non-Americans have headlined Super Bowl halftime shows in the past.
The fury has only gotten worse and more bizarre in the aftermath of the show. On Monday, right-wing commentator and former Fox News host Megyn Kelly threw an epic tantrum over Bad Bunny’s performance in which she declared, “Football is ours!”
One Republican, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN), inexplicably claimed the performance included “gay pornography.” It’s not clear what he was referring to since there was nothing resembling gay pornography during the show.
“Imagine being so fragile, so spiritually hollow, that a global superstar performing in a language you refuse to learn feels like a personal assault,” Wilson wrote. “They want the Super Bowl to be a 1954 newsreel, all crew cuts, marching bands, and a vibe that screams ‘segregated country club.’ Anything else, anything vibrant, global, or, God forbid, fun is labeled ‘woke’ or ‘degenerate.'”
Wilson argued that at this point, furious MAGA mouths are basically shouting into a void.
“Here’s the cold, hard truth for MAGA: Bad Bunny doesn’t know who you are, and he doesn’t care. The NFL doesn’t care. The advertisers definitely don’t care. You are shouting at a tide that went out three decades ago. You’re losing the culture because your ‘culture’ is a stagnant pond of grievance, gas station boner pills, Lee Greenwood covers, of a be-jorted Kid Rock lip-syncing in a nearly-empty sound stage.”
He added, “The future is dancing past you in better clothes and with sexier music, and your only response is to scream into the void of Truth Social. It’s not a political stance; it’s a geriatric temper tantrum.”
Wilson also talked about how the GOP’s unusual redistricting efforts are backfiring as Hispanic voters turn on the party and as blue states fight back with redistricting decisions of their own.
“The Texas dummy-mander assumed Hispanic voter behavior would look much like
He said he was enjoying “a delicious glass of ‘25 Chateau Schadenfreude as the same GOPers who cheered for Texas playing a crooked redistricting plan have discovered they’ve been hoisted on their own petard.”
“The moment the Democrats in Sacramento and Richmond decided to play by the very ‘burn-it-all-down’ rules Donald Trump demanded in Texas and North Carolina,” Wilson wrote, “using the same mid-decade surgical tools to excise GOP incumbents like a cancerous mole, the MAGA sphere erupted in a spasm of hypocritical garment-rending.”
Republicans know they can’t win a fair fight, he said, explaining that he was once a part of the GOP conversations surrounding gerrymandering.
“They’re terrified of even neutral maps,” he said, “because a neutral map is a death sentence for the collection of dunderheads, conspiracy theorists, failed used-car-salesman-types, and soon-to-be-arrested-for-pedophilia so-called youth pastors they’ve recruited to run based on loyalty to Trump and nothing more.”
He also mocked the GOP’s excuses – calling them a “masterclass in creative writing” – as they continue to lose special elections and polls show them tanking in the midterms. “It’s the deep state,” Wilson mocked. “It’s immigrants. It’s the phase of the moon.”
“Anything to avoid looking in the mirror and realizing that Donald Trump is the political equivalent of a lead life vest,” he added. “He energizes the people who would already vote for him, but he increasingly sends everyone else, independents, women, Hispanics, chordates…running for the hills.”
Right-wingers, he said, know that their efforts are failing, that tariffs backfired, that ICE is deeply hated, and that the president’s promise of no wars was clearly meaningless.
“The culture war is over, and MAGA lost… But like a gambler who’s down a hundred grand at the craps table, they just keep doubling down on the same losing hand.”
And of course, there are the Epstein files. “You can’t shout ‘fake news!’ at a deposition,” he said. “You can’t meme your way out of a federal investigation. The mythology is cracking, and the panic in the Trump White House is palpable enough to track on radar.”
“They are a shrinking, shrieking rump of the American experiment,” he concluded, “clinging to the hope that if they just yell loud enough, the rest of us will stop moving forward. Their leaders and puppet masters are hoping that those of us on the pro-democracy, pro-constitution side of the political divide will panic and capitulate in advance.”
So “keep the waterworks coming,” he said, because we all know that “the cut hog squeals loudest.”
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