A Weird Time for MAGA

And a thank you.

You might have noticed a slight change in my tone, either on X or here. I would be lying if I said I was all the way through the grief of losing my dog, Jack. I didn’t think in a million years it would cut that deep and hurt so bad. But it did, and it still does. The new dog, Jasper, is a sweet little bundle of joy.

He is helping to thaw out a wounded heart. The hardest thing about bummer days is interfacing with the mania of social media and feeling that white-hot rage that comes at you and bubbles up inside you. It’s never the right place to be when you’re not 100%. I should not spend so much time doomscrolling.

The assassination attempt on Trump also seemed to hit harder than I thought it would. I’ve never lived through anything like what we’ve seen. Trump’s attempted assassination in Butler, the murder of someone so prominent as Charlie Kirk. Then, another vigilante spouting the same messaging we hear on the mainstream Left with only one objective: to kill everyone inside.

What is emotionally confusing is how we are immediately greeted by the daily churn. The “both sides” lie by the Left. The icy coldness. All because we do not have a brave or honest press corps to set everyone straight about reality vs. fantasy.

A friend of mine sent me this message:

Wow you have some TDS deranged lunatics on your Facebook! It’s interesting that they still hang around. It’s like they’re just waiting for you to post something so they can say something terrible. What a bunch of losers. They should get a hobby or a life. I can’t believe anyone would celebrate acts of violence towards anyone in office.

There is no fixing it. They don’t seem able to rest until their non-compliant enemies are locked away in a gulag somewhere and Trump is finally assassinated for real. Would even that shake them out of it? I’m not so sure. They’d probably celebrate.

The conspiracy theories. The jokes. The sanctimonious op-eds. I know this media machine we’ve all had a hand in building is separating us from our humanity, from our natural emotional response to real trauma. And the hits just keep on coming.

For all of the flashes of decency, like Bruce Springsteen calling for prayer, or the odd person on the Left pausing, even for one minute, from their unending, decade-long campaign of hate, there is never time to take a breath, to remember we’re all Americans. They want to blame Trump for everything. They should look in the mirror for once.

One of the reasons I still support Trump is that when he is tested, he comes through. It’s in the more casual moments where he gives the Left their necessary fodder to double down on their hate. It’s never in times of crisis.

But I would be lying if I put it all on the Left. This is something we all know. What’s happening on the Right is the thing we don’t know, or at least I don’t know. People I thought I knew have changed. Or maybe they haven’t changed. Maybe I just didn’t know them. Or maybe there had to be some kind of inflection point to bring it out.

I didn’t expect the Series Finale of the Trump Show would mean some of his most prominent and vocal supporters turning on him over Israel and Iran. I didn’t expect such a deep fracture, or for the daily fight to be in-fighting. It isn’t just politics, either. People are being blocked, unfriended, and turning into enemies almost overnight as everyone takes to their own side, like a turf war in West Side Story.

It doesn’t help that most of us can’t control ourselves on X, and we say things we would never say in real life. It’s like being in a trance. You respond to what cascades down the timeline, trigger after trigger, and by the end of the day, you barely know what even happened.

I didn’t start this Substack to be a pro-Trump or pro-MAGA propaganda outlet, and I don’t see it that way now, even if I get accused of it often. I have felt the existential crisis of stopping the Left being more important than anything because they’ve fixed nothing. They’ve changed nothing. They are still as terrible today as they’ve ever been.

I’m not sure day to day where any of this is going, where I’m going, or where I will land when this is all over. I still feel politically homeless and without a tribe. I hope that if I start to write about things other than politics, you’ll be okay with that. And if not, that’s okay too.

All of this to say that I’m grateful for you, dear readers, for being here, even if I don’t respond to comments and am late in getting to messages. I feel like I have a tribe, it’s here, on this Substack. Maybe I don’t say thank you enough. So thank you. Thank you for reading, for liking, for commenting, for sharing. Thank you for the subscriptions, paid or otherwise, as well as the donations and tips.

Mostly, thank you for being what Oasis once called a Wonderwall. Someone to save me from myself. If this were a podcast, this is how I’d end it.

I do have a few long pieces I’m working on that I will post soon. XOXO