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One of the things I find most repulsive about the MAGA faction is their gleeful meanness. I listen to and watch right-wing media sources in order to stay informed about the issues they’re concerned about and narratives they’re promoting. Laura Ingraham is one of the most off-putting conservative media pundits I occasionally force myself to tune in to. In my experience the main purpose of her show, aside from spreading right-wing talking points, is to tear down and criticize anyone that might be viewed as a political opponent.
Several weeks ago I saw a piece on Ingraham’s show on FOX from inside the horrifically overcrowded CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador. I felt uncomfortable watching it, viscerally understanding that this was cruel voyeurism. The piece covered an independent journalist who had been permitted into the prison to video the many inmates stacked behind bars with no privacy. Nearly all of them bore massive tattoos and were in on charges of horrific, usually gang-related violence. The piece covered these people like zoo animals, a spectacle to be gawked at.
Some of these men did indeed look dangerous; others looked more like little boys. I’m sure I’ll be criticized as a bleeding heart or “snowflake” when I say I found myself wondering why Ingraham and other right-wing pundits had no curiosity about the horrors a person might have faced that led to a life of gangs and violence and why they had no empathy for the fact that those people would never see sunlight again.
Two weeks ago, the Trump regime starting sending detainees from the U.S. to this very prison in El Salvador. The regime accuses them of being members of a violent Venezuelan gang, though many have denied this and have witnesses to back up their claims. Even the U.S. government has confirmed that many of the detainees do not have any gang-related or criminal records. None of them received a deportation hearing and all are still in the overcrowded foreign prison.
The MAGA cult has eaten this up. And now the regime has said that even U.S. citizens who commit felonies may be sent to this prison. Inside men are held 23.5 hours a day in cells containing about 80 inmates each, with no programs for rehabilitation. The lights are on twenty-four hours a day except in solitary confinement, where it’s pitch black. Salvadoran government officials say no prisoner who enters the prison will ever leave. Human rights groups have been calling out abuses at this facility.
Two days ago, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary, Kristy Noem, visited this prison. She stood outside the cell stacked with men, wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, threatening Americans and immigrants, saying that if we screw up this horrific prison could be our fate.
In some ways the Musk/Trump regime’s approach to federal employees has been similar. Government employees have been belittled, vilified, and demeaned. Russell Vought, the regime’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget has openly expressed that his goal is to put career civil servants, “in trauma,” to make them seen as the enemy and so demoralized and traumatized they don’t want to show up to work. This has generated laughs and cheers from MAGA crowds, though their glee is dissipating as MAGA folks find themselves being fired from such federal jobs. Vought is also one of the key authors of Project 2025 and claims to be Christian, specifically an adherent of Christian nationalism.
Marjorie Taylor Green has said publicly that federal employees, “don’t deserve their paychecks”. Boy, is that the kettle calling the pot black. She gets $174,000 per year of our tax dollars to pay for her position in Congress, from which so far she has not added any positive legislation or programs but has used her platform to attack. Recently, trying to deflect from questions about the Signal-gate leak of war plans, she added reporters to her attack list. Green doesn’t come across strong, but rather mean, crude and lost.
Trump himself is consistently nasty and mean to people he disagrees with or views as lesser than. He calls people ugly names, mocks those with hearing impairment or other disabilities, laughs at victims of sexual abuse, demeans leaders of other nations, and on and on …. and his base loves it. How can that be?
Musk, on the Joe Rogan podcast, stated, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” He went on to say liberals were, “[E]xploiting a bug in western civilization which is the empathy response.” You can’t make this stuff up.
What is this about? Why do right-wingers, who largely claim to live by Christian values, take glee in attacking and meanness? Did Jesus teach a message of empathy as a flaw? The hypocrisy is so blatant, it shouldn’t continue to surprise me, but it does.
What this regime is doing is an affront to Jesus’ teachings and actual American values and I believe this ugly approach is being driven by fear, power-drunkenness, and pathology.
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