Super Duper Maga
Apparently the new phrase during jour, “ultra-maga” came out of a concerted political study. And we understand and to some degree do agree with political strategy in running against a Trump who is not on the ballot — a dividing or defining line is the question of “True or False: Biden won the 2020 election” — a divining question to figure out who is terminally lost in too closed an epistemology for salvaging or dealing. Because after that, the politics of the individual become — for good or bad, for good and bad — ordinary.
But no. The defined maga characteristics are policy and perhaps even some of the petty acts of demagoguery that do indeed predate Trump, and frequently are representations of real travails in the electorate’s lives. We have the the Virginia race again — where the candidate is blasted away with the Never Trumpets incoherently making a stink about Confederate marchers — leaving a public scratching its head as they instead lean in to focus on the Republican candidate’s political mix of honest and dishonest discourse on school curricula. (Yes, the graphic novel “Gender Queer” has too graphic images for laying about the school library. BUT No, Toni Morrison’s book is not too much for your Advanced Reader class kid — and McAullife’s impolitick response was in essence correct in this matter.). Matters that predate Trump, one time pro-choicer, as Joseph Biden, one time Abortion rights fudger, makes the claim that these antiabortion people on the cusp of a victory they’ve been openly seeking these past five decades represent some new scary maga thingy.
The new boogeyman of maga is … Um… Rick Scott. Alrighty then.
For the word “ultra-maga” to have any meaning, it needs to get splayed more circumstantally. Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate Primary race lends itself to a case study. The “Maga” candidate, by definition of Trump’s endorsement, is Mehmet Oz — also “maga” defined by the lines of candidacy sprung out of show business celebrity and hucksterism. Except that at a rally, Trump’s introduction of him was met with boos. Not maga. So you have to move into “ultra-maga” territory to meet the Maya hordes — surging in the polls is Kathy Barnette. Running afoul of the party as a whole, a party that Biden is campaigning as having been “taken over” and “it’s the maga party now”. But if such is the case, who in this Senate race is maga and who is “ultra-maga”?
Well, make the case every which way. Currently the Trump backed candidate is blasting Barnette for past tweets — tweets that whatever else you can say about them, would suggest she would be Foursquare behind Trump’s policy in limiting and excising immigration from a bunch of Muslim countries. Very Ultra Maga. And an attack not becoming of maga from the “Maga King” selection. Political correctness run amok. And what does this mean?
While Oz has been viewed as a top contender for weeks, especially after the Trump endorsement, his surrogates have increased their attacks on Barnette in recent days. Fox News host Sean Hannity spent significant time criticizing Barnette on Thursday night, arguing that her controversial tweets — including one calling former president Barack Obama “a horrible gay Muslim” — could possibly make beating a Democrat in a general election difficult.
Maybe. Or maybe she is the new Trump. Note too, only in that this slides a bit of shade on identity politics presumptions.
Ric Grenell, an Oz supporter who was Trump’s acting national intelligence director, has criticized Barnette’s old tweets suggesting that the conservative Christian is homophobic.
“Unfit for office,” Grenell, the first openly gay person to serve at a Cabinet level, tweeted on Wednesday.
It has been a recurring question — what the heck does a figure like Roy Moore (again, politics predate and exist outside Trump) — who in the ecosystem came to be a thumping cause against Republican Party establishment by some sort of “maga” hordes — have in common with some trolling figures for Trump — other than support from Steve Bannon?
And did the money poured into political strategy dump “mega maga” as being akin to putting a hat on a hat — destructive in its alliteration? “uber-maga” unusable due to litigation threats?