Last night, whilst casually doomscrolling Elon Musk’s weird hatesite Twitter (if he can deadname his daughter, I’ll deadname his propaganda engine), I randomly came across a long screed from a MAGA True Believer that I screencapped, because it offers such an interesting insight into the alternate reality of MAGA.

Here it is for the benefit of screen readers:

No one in my family who voted for Trump owns any stocks

For all the rich Democrats panicking today- you now know how it must have felt

When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs

When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot

When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis

And When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”

If you see this post, I hope you look in the mirror at some point today and recognize the destruction your own party has played in the lives of working class Americans

This is what liberation day is all about

No one is going to weep for your stock portfolio

Where were you when we lost our American dream?

If this isn’t the perfect example of self-sabotaging, “hurt myself to own the libs” alternate history narcissism, I don’t know what is. It’s absolutely fascinating.

And the thing is, it’s not completely bonkers. It starts with a kernel of truth. Yes, the American dream did bypass a lot of people, especially poor, uneducated workers who were told that factory job would always be there for them after they dropped out of high school, and for generations it was…until it wasn’t any more.

They woke up one day to a bleak landscape of poverty, unemployment, drugs, and complete irrelevance. They have few prospects and no path forward.

They’re angry, reasonably. They’re suffering. They feel neglected and passed over because they are neglected and passed over. They’re unable to put food on the table, they’re spiraling into drug addiction, and whenever they try to say anything about it, they’re treated as the butt of standup comedy jokes, if anyone pays any attention to them at all.

And in their rage, they’re shooting themselves in the gut with a shotgun in the hopes that some of the splash will make life worse for the liberals they blame for all their woes.

So, let’s talk about this post.

This is too long to fit in a Tweet, thanks to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: it always takes more work to counter bullshit than it takes to vomit it up in the first place.

So from the top:

Yes, she’s correct that her MAGA family doesn’t own stock. It’s quite likely her MAGA family can’t really explain what the stock market even is or how it works. When you live in, say, rural Kentucky, Wall Street seems like it’s on another planet, utterly unconnected with you or your life. It goes up, it goes down, who cares? Doesn’t affect you. If some rich people (not sure why they say rich Democrats, the people who make money in the stock market tend to be Republicans) lose money, what of it? Doesn’t affect them!

They actually believe this, because they don’t understand how the stock market works, so they see no connection between the price of stocks on Wall Street and the construction of a new factory in Louisville.

But more than that, they are hurt and angry, and their pain and rage has been manipulated to point at the wrong target. (This is easy to do; angry people are always vulnerable to manipulation.)

I’m going to go from the bottom up, because the first bit, the one about Jimmy Carter “destroying trucking jobs,” is especially delicious and ironic, cutting right to the heart of the intellectual dysfunction of MAGA.

So:

When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”

…he was right.

One of the fundamental conceits of the MAGA movement, which is first and foremost a populist movement of low-information voters, is that the President is somewhere between a king and a dictator, with a bunch of buttons on his desk that control everything from the price of eggs to the number of jobs at the local Piggly Wiggly.

To them when Obama said “those jobs aren’t coming back,” he wasn’t stating something that was already true, he was making it so. He decided those jobs wouldn’t come back, and then did…whatever it is they imagine that presidents do to make it happen.

They genuinely don’t get that their jobs disappeared because their boss outsourced to China, not because Obama made them go away. They genuinely don’t get that this is fundamental to how capitalism works. They genuinely don’t get that coal mining is done by machines today, not by dudes in overalls carving coal from dark tunnels. They genuinely don’t get that fewer people want to buy coal now.

It’s easier to blame the brown person than to learn basic economics. They genuinely don’t get that the president doesn’t decide how many people the mines hire.

Given a choice between the person who said “your coal mining jobs will never come back, but I will pay you to learn something else!” and the person who said “durr, I love coal, durr,” they chose the latter.

And guess what?

The jobs didn’t come back. Obviously.

When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis

This is a common narrative on the Right. “Bill Clinton signed a law that stopped banks from redlining Black people to keep them from buying houses. A bunch of Black people with no money bought houses they couldn’t afford and boom.” Simple, easy to grasp, easy to understand if you don’t have an education.

Problem is, that’s not what happened. For one thing, if it was all Bill Clinton’s doing then why did the housing crisis happen everywhere in the world, not just in the United States? (Easy answer: MAGAs tend not to know or care what happens in the world, the USA is the only thing they know about.)

For another, if it was all about those dumbass poors buying houses they couldn’t afford, how come it overwhelmingly affected lenders who weren’t covered by Bill Clinton’s law? And how come the overwhelming majority of foreclosures happened in suburbs, not inner cities?

There’s a whole dive into this here, but the tl;dr is: It wasn’t Clinton. The truth is complicated; “Clinton did it” fits on a bumper sticker. If you’re poorly educated, bumper sticker logic wins every time.

When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot

Classic MAGA, right here.

The idea of a free trade agreement between the US, Mexico, and Canada started in 1984 with Ronald Reagan. In 1988, Reagan signed the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement.

But what about NAFTA?

One of the things we see among MAGA over and over is this idea that the president who signs a bill is the president who made it. They don’t understand how laws or agreements work; they don’t know how long it takes to egotiate complex treaties.

Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. He did not negotiate it. NAFTA was negotiated by…

…wait for it…

…wait for it…

…George H.W. Bush.

Ah HA ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

After the signing of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, the administrations of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed to negotiate what became NAFTA.

Mexican President Carlos Salinas (L), President George H.W. Bush (center), Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (R), October 7, 1992, negotiating NAFTA: The photo MAGA doesn’t want you to see

Typical MAGA, blaming Democrats for what Republicans do, and too incurious, too fundamentally uninterested in understanding the world we live in, to do even the tiniest bit of research. A Google search turns this up in ten seconds, which is nine seconds longer than MAGAs typically want to invest in their knowledge of politics.

And finally, the pièce de résistance:

When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs

One of the articles of faith amongst the right, one of the pillars of the right-wing ideology, is “government bad, m’kay?” As the holy Prophet and Saint Ronald Reagan, peace be unto him, said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

So in light of that, let’s talk about “Jimmy Carter destroying 400,000 trucking jobs,” because oh, man, this is delicious. MAGA doesn’t know what it wants.

Let’s talk about shipping before 1980. Specifically, let’s talk about how the government regulated shipping:

• Trucking companies could only use routes approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the government agency overseeing trucking
• Truckers could only apply for new routes if they could demonstrate that nobody served those routes, and the ICC approved
• Truckers could not add new stops to existing routes without ICC approval
• Trucking companies could not take over another company’s route without ICC approval
• Sales of one route to another company demanded astronomical prices
• Truckers could only charge rates approved by the ICC; requests for rate changes had to be submitted to the government for approval at least 30 days in advance
• New trucking companies could not start shipping without government approval; you could not start a shipping business unless the government allowed it
• Shippers in an area could object to new companies trying to get started in that area, and could object to new routes being added in their area—which they often did

In other words, trucking was pretty much the exact opposite of what conservatives wanted: No competition, no free enterprise, nobody allowed to start a business without government permission, government approval required for any changes, government setting the price.

The thing about MAGA is it wants what it wants until it wants something else.

There’s too much government regulation in oil drilling! We need to cut the red tape! Drill baby drill!

There’s too much regulation in home mortgages! We need to end government meddling in free markets! Redline, baby, redline!

There’s not enough government regulation in trucking! We need to bring back those old regulations! Protect our truckers’ jobs!

MAGA trying to decide if government regulation is good or bad today

Wait until next Tuesday and they’ll want something else. The only thing all their conflicting, contradictory desires have in common is it’s all the liberals’ fault.

No, that’s not fair. That’s not the only thing these conflicting desires have in common. The other thing they have in common is you have to be utterly ignorant of the basics of how the world works to believe any of this garbage. My God.

This is the fundamental contradiction of populism: populists don’t know what they want, but they sure are passionate about having it.

So there you have it. Insight into the MAGA mind, from a MAGA. Rage, fear, spite, all wrapped up with a neat bow of fundamental ignorance and incuriosity, weaponized against targets they truly do not understand.

Where were we when you lost your American dream?

We were telling you that your anti-intellectualism, your hatred of education, would destroy you in an advanced, technological society.

We were warning you that the world was changing and anyone who didn’t change with it would perish.

We were offering you free education and free training to make your lives and the lives of your children better.

That’s where we were.

The people who destroyed your dream are the ones telling you to blame the libs.