As they wait for Trump to return and Make America Groan Again, the MAGA-fied Republican Party has adopted the internal dynamic of its fellow terrorist organizations worldwide: constantly savaging one another for insufficient extremism.
Take Dan Crenshaw, the rising young fascist Congressman from Texas. He and his staff were just assaulted at a Texas Republican event by a small mob of Proud Boys who called him “eyepatch McCain,” an insult coined by TuKKKer Carlson, who was angry that Crenshaw supports military aid for Ukraine against that great “conservative” and “Christian” hero, former KGB agent Vladimir Putin.
Now, let’s unpack this, shall we? McCain may have had a “maverick” reputation, but he was a very conservative politician for his entire career in the Senate (for example, he was anti-abortion and wanted to make Shrub Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy permanent instead of letting them expire), and such a loyally partisan Republican that he supported Trump as the Party’s 2016 nominee even after the Very Stable Genius sneered at him for getting captured in Vietnam. It’s true that McCain was an American first, and he did turn against Trump, and had he still been alive and in the Senate during the January 6 putsch, he would have had to be physically restrained from personally taking on the mob. But make no mistake: the MAGAs revile his memory because he dared to cross the Leader, and more fundamentally because he was a patriot whose first loyalty was to American democracy.
Crenshaw is much harder right, by temperament and reputation. He did disavow the January 6 putsch, in gentle tones, while not blaming Trump and partially endorsing the Big Lie. But it’s his pro-Ukraine stance that has proven the last straw for TuKKKer and the Proud Boys, the official fascist paramilitary of the Leader himself. Why? Because helping Ukraine blurs the focus on destroying the internal enemy? Because Putin is the leader of the Nationalist International? Because Crenshaw is “charismatic” and might conceivably pose a threat one day to the Leader or his spawn? Probably all of the above. Who knows?
The point is, this is not the normal dynamic for a political party in a democracy. The Democrats fit that description, with their fierce battles between “progressives” and “moderates,” who usually have the upper hand but are unable to completely vanquish the left wing. The dynamic of extremists constantly attempting to outflank each other, though, is quite familiar from the world that is meant to be the MAGAs’ bête noire, that of Islamist terrorism. In its day, Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization promised to expel all the Jews “from the river to the sea,” but with an exception for those who had lived in “Palestine” before the British conquered the territory in 1917. Sure, the PLO hijacked planes and murdered Israeli civilians, but it was constantly being outflanked by more extreme groups like Abu Nidal’s, infamous for pushing a wheelchair-bound Jew from New Jersey off a hijacked cruise ship. But Arafat was not above striking deals with the hated Zionists, even while continuing to commit terrorist atrocities on the side, and so his movement has been eclipsed by Hamas and Hezbollah, Islamist fanatics with ambitions to exterminate all Jews worldwide. Further to the East, the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan has been overshadowed by terrorist attacks from ISIS. This is the type of infighting we now see within the MAGA-tized Republican Party. The day is coming when someone will denounce Marjorie Taylor Greene as a RINO in the pay of George Soros. Don’t laugh, it will happen.
Once they gain absolute power over a nation, terrorist leaders become totalitarians, and then the extremist spiral stops and changes over to whatever the Leader’s needs are at the moment, which is how you get a Stalin destroying first “left deviationists” and then “right deviationists,” fanatical Communists all, or a Hitler in the “Night of the Long Knives” slaughtering the “brownshirt” stormtroopers lest they someday pose a threat to him. So don’t enjoy the spectacle of MAGA fascist infighting too much, dear reader. They’re only squabbling over whose jackboot gets the first kick at our heads.
Emanuel Goldstein 