Tag: #maga
I Dream of Greenland

Why Greenland Became The Ultimate Fascist Dreamscape

Ever since Don Jr. and his “Trump Force One” team of bobblehead doll righties landed at Nuuk Airport a day after the fourth anniversary of January 6, we’ve all been scratching our heads. It’s hard for normies like us to comprehend the deranged, anachronistic white supremacist lunacy behind the Greenland fantasy. Yes, there’s the newly melted Arctic and its soon-to-be-contested waterways, yes, there are rare earth minerals, and yes, it’s sparsely inhabited by indigenous people that Trump and MAGA seem to regard as lower races.

But going to the mat for it, with Trump browbeating and insulting the prime minister of Denmark? JD Vance flying over uninvited with his wife by his side? During my process of researching a long article for New York magazine about Donald Trump Jr., it became clear that the Greenland play is, on one level, a giant dog whistle to the white fascist extremist base.

Greenland has been – for decades – a neo-Nazi fantasy. Julius Evola, a mid-20th-century Italian philosopher and now “the internet’s favorite fascist,” proposed Greenland as “the primordial homeland of a highly civilized prehistoric white race … sufficiently civilized to be conceived as ‘divine’ by the ancients.” (Evola’s explanation for how these divines could morph into actual non-white indigenous inhabitants is that their divinity was perhaps diluted by, you guessed it, breeding with lower orders.)

The online intellectual fascist influencers followed and amplified by Vance, Junior, Musk, Marc Andreessen, and countless Trump administration minions (who we have covered in previous Freakshows) are deeply attached to this mythology.

An anon called Plethonist (who seems to have now deleted his X account after we started writing about fascist Xitter) writes in an online white supremacist-friendly rag called IM1776. The magazine is published by The Arts & Literature Foundation, an outfit that bills itself as the “leading publication of the New Right.” It is housed in the same building near Capitol Hill as other hard-right, well-funded conservative outfits, including the Conservative Partnership Institute and the extreme Zionist Christians United for Israel (CUFI), and ironically, was home to far-right Liberty Lobby (founded by notorious anti-Semite Willis Carto). Its editor-at-large writes and tweets under the pseudonym Benjamin Braddock, the character played by Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Here is Plethonist in IM1776 waxing hysterically Rudyard Kipling about Greenland, a month before Trump started to publicly lay claim to it:

“Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.” (Palingenesis is an ultranationalist concept of racist rebirth.)

Don Jr.’s pal Jack “Jack P” Posobiec wasn’t on the trip to Greenland, but he was definitely in on the joke. Two days before Christmas and more than two weeks before Junior and his posse landed in Nuuk, he posted on Xitter a long letter to Greenlanders which reads in part:

“Dear Honored Residents of Greenland, Imagine a Greenland where the promise of your land's vast potential is not just a dream but a reality. A Greenland where your children can dream bigger, your economy can grow stronger, and your voice can resonate louder on the world stage. This vision can become your reality by joining the United States of America.”

Posobiec (who has called Democrats and progressives “unhumans” and named dictators as political role models) has been grifting off Trumpism since 2016. The longtime neo-Nazi collaborator is so highly regarded among Trump cabinet members that Treasury Secretary Bessent invited him to Ukraine. Hegseth reportedly wanted to bring him to Europe (but Posobiec, clearly a man in demand, declined the latter invitation).

On Xitter, extreme right Passage Press publisher Jonathan “Lomez” Keeperman amused himself after Junior’s visit by proposing that sacked DEI federal employees could be sent to Greenland to mine rare earth minerals. (America’s Siberia, for now, appears to be ICE’s swamp gulag in Louisiana.).

Another Greenland dreamer is Dryden Brown, a Peter Thiel acolyte, who designs for building utopian cities for the tech elites in a project called Praxis and who was covered rather fawningly not long ago in the New York Times.

Brown was moved to advertise his own white nation fantasies the same day Junior landed in Greenland, in a giddy tweet that included a map (see below) of a new American empire encompassing all the white-led nations on the planet.

For a while after Junior’s expeditionary assault, MAGA tried to claim Greenlanders really want America to invade (which is a lie). Of course, what Greenlanders might actually want is of no real concern to men seeking a new homeland from which to “re-breed” Aryans.

In his Pulitzer-winning The End of the Myth, Yale historian Greg Grandin proposed that Trumpism, and the big beautiful border wall of the first MAGA regime specifically, signaled the end of the nation’s founding ethos. He proposed that only endless expansion had kept the violence at the heart of the American experiment at bay. Now, with the oil wars lost and the nation too broke to conquer farther frontiers, we were shut in together, with no steam valve for the hate.

A white nationalist beachhead in Greenland buys more time for us, perhaps.

The fantasy is one-half X-Box sword-wielding hero homunculus and one-half emulation of Hitler – the essence of tech-bro fascism, if you think about it. The bros read their Tolkien. Their thumbs were weaned on the controllers moving heroic medieval knights and sorcerers. For the Millennial fascists in Junior’s set, Greenland promises manly ardors and challenges where a new race might emerge from the chrysalis of the 21st-century American Everyman, waddling between SUV and front door with a Diet Coke in hand.

Donald Trump might be a vulgar marketer of money-laundering condos and cheesy merch – but when they squint, he’s the vessel by which the white philosopher-priests that inhabited Hyperborea might return.

Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from COURIER'S American Freakshow.


 Laura Loomer

'Real Power': Trumpist Kook Laura Loomer Lights A Five-Alarm Fire

President Donald Trump’s abrupt apparent removal of the general who oversaw U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency at the reported behest of the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer, a notorious bigot and conspiracy theorist, is a five-alarm fire for national security and good governance. The move demonstrates that the only qualification for service in the administration is personal loyalty to the president as determined by his most zealous sycophants.

Top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees said on Thursday night that Gen. Timothy D. Haugh had been removed from his positions as director of the NSA and head of the military’s Cyber Command. According to The New York Times, “a U.S. official briefed on the matter said Laura Loomer, a far-right activist and outside adviser to President Trump, called for General Haugh’s removal during her Oval Office meeting on Thursday. Mr. Trump ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire General Haugh, the official said.”

Loomer subsequently appeared to take credit, writing on X that Haugh and his deputy had been “fired” because they were “disloyal to President Trump” and thanking the president “for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you.” She gave no evidence of Haugh’s purported disloyalty in her post — nor any critique of his service in his positions — instead criticizing him as “a Biden appointee” who “had no place serving in the Trump admin given the fact that he was HAND PICKED by” former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.

Haugh is not the only apparent casualty of Loomer’s efforts. His seeming removal comes amid a firestorm caused by the revelation that Hegseth had provided precise details about an imminent U.S. military strike in Yemen in a Signal messaging group of top Trump officials assembled by national security adviser Mike Waltz, a move experts said endangered the lives of U.S. service members.

Waltz and Hegseth still remain in their posts — but as that story continued to metastasize, Loomer met with Trump in the Oval Office and provided him “with opposition research on [National Security Council] staffers whom she views as neoconservatives or not sufficiently loyal to the president.” The White House purged at least six NSC staffers following that meeting.

Trump surrounds himself with and takes counsel from a litany of right-wing media figures because he appreciates their fervent public support, particularly though not exclusively on Fox News. Those individuals wield immense power over every aspect of governance despite their total lack of relevant qualifications or temperament.

Even among the MAGA movement’s constellation of grifters, con artists, bigots, and loons, Loomer shines brightly. Here’s what I wrote about her in September as her presence accompanying Trump on the campaign trail triggered concern even from some of his other close allies:

Loomer is a self-described “proud Islamophobe” who is “pro-white nationalism.” She has claimed there is a “genocide” of “native white populations,” which she says are “being replaced in this country by third-world invaders,” and accused “so many rich Jews” of having “a fixation on trying to destroy America.” She has accused the Biden administration of seeking to assassinate Trump; called for the execution of unnamed “Democrats who are guilty of treason”; said that “all of these communist secretaries of state who try to rig our elections” against Trump “belong in jail for election interference”; and shared a video which claimed “9/11 was an Inside Job!”
...
Loomer has in recent weeks described [then-Vice President Kamala] Harris, whose parents immigrated from India and Jamaica, as “a brain-dead bimbo who sucked so much c**k in order to get to the political position that she's in today,” said she “is NOT black and never has been,” said her election would ensure that “Ebonics will replace English as the language of our land,” and said that if she’s elected “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center and the American people will only be able to convey their feedback through a customer satisfaction survey at the end of the call that nobody will understand.”

Loomer is nonetheless unusually influential because Trump apparently appreciates her personal, fanatical loyalty. “I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer told The Washington Post last year. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”

She apparently has something now — enough influence to impose her own loyalty tests on high-ranking government officials and see them cashiered by the president (and, she claims, to help shape his foreign policy). And so the country turns on the whims of someone once described by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), herself no stranger to bigoted and unhinged conspiracy theories, as “mentally unstable and a documented liar” who “can not be trusted” and is “toxic and poisonous.”

If you had said in October that if Trump were elected he would end up firing the NSA director and purging the NSC on the advice of someone like Loomer, you’d have been accused of having a terminal case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And yet here we are, careening up to worst-case scenarios before the president’s 100-day mark.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

What Was Behind The MAGA Republicans' Florida Stumble?

What Was Behind The MAGA Republicans' Florida Stumble?

Is the 2024 MAGA magic fading already?

Don’t bet on it. And yet, Tuesday’s special election results in Wisconsin and Florida were…not terrible for the Democrats.

Let’s start with Wisconsin, where the news is good. Liberal Democrat Susan Crawford pulled out a State Supreme Court win [in a "nonpartisan" election] by a healthy ten points, despite tech billionaire Elon Musk having sunk $25 million of America PAC money into the race. Jill Underly was also re-elected as State Schools Superintendent, defeating education consultant Brittany Kinser by a comfortable five points. Kinser, who was running on the Republican ballot line, described herself during the campaign as a “blue dog Democrat.”

In fact, OpenSecrets identifies Kinser as a consistent Democratic donor. That said, she supports school choice and ran a public charter school network. She outspent Underly more than 2-1, much of the money from the Wisconsin GOP, and I am sure she had nothing to do with the mailers and texts targeting blue districts that falsely identified her as the actual Democrat in the race.

However, our main focus today is Florida, where the Democrats did not win either congressional race, but demonstrated potential Republican weaknesses as we make the turn into 2026.

These two special elections, on opposite sides of the state, were in solid GOP districts: the job was to restore two votes to Speaker Mike Johnson’s whisper-thin Congressional majority. FL-06, in northeast Florida, was vacated by Mike Waltz, who is now Donald Trump’s national security advisor and the genius who let The Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg into the Signal chat. FL-01 is Matt Gaetz’s former seat, which he vacated to become Trump’s attorney general. Except that didn’t work out. Long-suppressed evidence of Gaetz’s bottomless yuckiness finally became public, and even Republican Senators found themselves unable to vote for him as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.

Democratic Party messaging had held out no hope that either of these seats were winnable, and they weren’t. And yet, here is what I want you to notice. In FL-06, with more than 95 percent of the vote in, State Senator Randy Fine beat Democrat Josh Weil by 14 points. Yet five months earlier, in November 2024, Waltz won the seat by 33 points.

Those 19 points shifting into the Democratic column are, some pundits argue, the victory. But there’s more. Let’s take a look at the county-level margins. Here are Waltz’s numbers from five months ago:

Courtesy of The New York Times


And here are Fine’s margins from Tuesday:

Courtesy of The New York Times

You see disproportionate gaps in two places: Volusia County and St. Johns County, both popular destinations for Canadian snowbirds (these are not birds, but actual people who come to Florida in the winter months.)

Like other Florida property owners, these folks have faced escalating insurance costs and HOA fees, which they are paying with weaker Canadian dollars that will decrease further in value as the Trump tariffs go into effect. Then, as one insurance industry site noted a week before the election, there’s the general Canada-hatred, which has caused Canadians who rent or stay in hotels and resorts to cancel their vacations too.

But, you say, Canadians don’t vote in American elections! Right you are.

However, the many Floridians who rely on snowbird home ownership, rentals and tourism for their own income do vote. And what they are seeing is not good: 25 percent of Florida real estate sales in the past year have been Canadians dumping their property.So, pay attention to that. We may be seeing something similar in FL-O1, where Gaetz trounced Gay Valimont by 32 points in November 2024. His replacement, Florida’s chief financial officer Jimmy Patronis, beat Valimont yesterday by less than half of that. Here’s the part that intrigues me: in Escambia, Florida’s most western county, Valimont—who lost to Gaetz by 14 points—beat Patronis by 3 points.

People, 20 points is a lot of ground to make up in five months.

There’s more: according to Tobie Nell Perkins at First Coast News, Escambia has not voted for a Democrat in the last eight gubernatorial cycles, and last voted for a Democratic president in 1960, when it went for John F. Kennedy. This area, anchored by Pensacola, is also a popular snowbird destination. What may be more significant is how heavily military the area is: Pensacola contains over 16,000 active-duty troops, and 7400 civilian employees, an estimated 5-8 percent of whom will get the axe any day now. Greater Pensacola boasts more than 35,000 retired military, contributing to the largest concentration of veterans in any congressional district in the country.

You see where I am going here? During her campaign, Valimont hammered on the cuts to veterans’ services and federal employees. “Trump’s executive orders and the slash-and-burn tactics of billionaire Elon Musk ’s DOGE take aim at federal agencies that serve the region’s veterans,” AP political reporter Kate Payne observed last week; “the faith of some of the district’s conservative voters is being tested.”

Heather Lindsay, a Republican and the mayor of Milton, Florida, in neighboring Santa Rosa County, called the cuts “disastrous,” saying they’re a threat to services that veterans like her brother rely on.

“We have a demonstrated need in this area. And yet they’re going to cut VA services,” Lindsay said in an interview.
Jason Boatwright, a former staffer for Gaetz, said Patronis should be defending the Pensacola VA.“

He needs to stand up and say: ‘You want to make cuts? That’s fine. But don’t do it here. We can’t afford it here,’” Boatwright said.

Lindsay said she doesn’t understand “why more questions haven’t been asked” by Republican leaders like Patronis.

A reliable Republican political consultant I contacted is taking the Escambia results with a grain of salt. Although the GOP had to spend $4 million in FL-06 to beat back Josh Weil, Ryan Girdusky doesn’t see these contests as a referendum on Trump by Republicans, only an energized Democratic one. “I just don’t think people were that engaged,” he told me. “Also, Republicans spent less than $1 million” in FL-01, while Democrats spent $6 million. Republicans “knew it was in the bag so they just didn’t invest in it,” Girdusky explained, and reliably red active-duty military did not make a special election a priority.

So, what have we learned in the last 24 hours?

First, yesterday’s results reinforce what we know: there are Trump voters and there are Republican voters. While the two categories overlap, Trump voters don’t necessarily get off the couch to vote in other elections, even when Elon Musk leaps around the stage in a foam cheese hat handing out checks.

Second, Musk might have been a negative factor in the Wisconsin race, and this is something to watch. As Reid J. Epstein, Julie Bosman, and Emily Cochrane report at the New York Times, the $25 million and massive social media posting Musk invested in the State Supreme Court race did not move the needle—at all. “Even more than Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk emerged in Wisconsin as the primary boogeyman for Democrats,” they write about a billionaire whose approval rating took a steep dive the day before the election. “Instead of making the race an early referendum on Mr. Trump’s White House and abortion rights, Wisconsin Democrats pivoted to make Mr. Musk their entire focus, while Republicans rode the wave of his largess.”

In other words, because Elon Musk is tied to Donald Trump, here is the unexpected opportunity. If attacking Donald Trump doesn’t work, attacking his policies does. Elon Musk has become the face of that. So, if this election had accomplished nothing else, it gives Donald Trump a choice: risk failure by sticking with Musk, or dump Musk and risk having ripped the federal government to pieces for no gain whatsoever.

Fourth, Musk’s unpopularity might also have cut GOP margins in Florida. We don’t know whether Florida veterans voted in significant numbers, but we do know that they—and their dependents—are getting it from two directions: the direct DOGE cuts to the Veterans Administration, and the cuts to other federal agencies and services that disproportionately employ veterans.

Finally, despite the high media focus on how much money is being raised and spent, it appears there are limits to how much a sea of money can accomplish. Can billionaires buy elections? Sometimes, and sometimes not. If voters either do not like the candidate, or they do not like the candidate’s high-profile supporters, they’ll take the money—and then run.

Claire Bond Potter is a political historian who taught at the New School for Social Research. She is a contributing editor to Public Seminar and wrote the popular blog Tenured Radical from 2006 through 2015. Please consider subscribing to Political Junkie, her Substack newsletter.

Reprinted with permission from Political Junkie.



In Idaho, MAGA Party Official Snitches On GOP Legislator For Hiring 'Illegals'

In Idaho, MAGA Party Official Snitches On GOP Legislator For Hiring 'Illegals'

One Republican state representative in Idaho was recently caught off-guard when a far-right political activist had Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents sent to her potato farm.

According to Newsweek, Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen — who is serving her second term in Idaho House District 32A — is now publicly railing against Ada County, Idaho Republican Party vice chairman Ryan Spoon in an op-ed. Mickelsen recalled in a recent essay for the Idaho Statesman that Spoon had ICE agents deployed to her farm, which resulted in them arresting one farm worker roughly a week after Spoon tweeted at President Donald Trump's border czar, Tom Homan. She didn't mention Spoon by name but referred to him as "someone working remotely for an insurance company who thinks he knows Idaho values and the [agriculture] business better than you do."

"Could you please send some illegal immigration raids to the businesses owned by Idaho state Rep. Stephanie Mickelson," Spoon wrote on January 21, misspelling Mickelsen's name. "She has been bragging about how many illegals her businesses employ."

Mickelsen wrote in her op-ed that her farm "complies with all applicable laws regarding employment and immigration," though she would also "welcome improvements to the laws and enforcement." But she didn't spare her critics among the GOP base who criticized her for acknowledging that large and influential sectors of the economy like agriculture are heavily reliant on immigrant labor.

"As a state representative, I’ve experienced this firsthand," Mickelsen wrote in her op-ed. "For honestly discussing real issues relating to immigration policy — recognizing both the need for border security and the reality that critical aspects of our economy depend on foreign workers — I’ve become the target of intimidation tactics designed to silence me."

On his social media channels, Spoon has repeatedly targeted Mickelsen over her comments about the outsized role undocumented labor plays in the American economy. He's also amplified content from an account called "Stop Idaho RINOs" [Republicans In Name Only] including a floor speech in which she cautioned her fellow Republicans against immigration measures that could harm the Gem State's economy. Newsweek also reported that a University of Idaho study found that roughly 35,000 undocumented immigrants work in Idaho's agriculture, hospitality and construction industries.

"If you guys think that you haven't been touched by an illegal immigrants' hands in some way, either your traveling or your food, you are kidding yourselves,' she said earlier this month.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World