A MAGA Crack-up?

Right-wing political commentator Candace Owens speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2023. Zach Roberts/NurPhoto via AP

Often political movements end up as circular firing squads, especially when there’s a competition for leadership. The same can be true for cults. With Trump’s misnamed Make America Great Again cult movement, the firing squad is shaped more like a Möbius strip. In the past year or so, MAGA World has been racked with a series of cross-cutting feuds, with incoming and outgoing fire ricocheting across the Trumpian landscape in all directions, causing chaos and confusion, as multiple conspiracy theories clash and vitriolic accusations pile up. An outsider cannot keep track of the infighting without a program or a wire diagram that would make Carrie Mathison proud.

You may have caught particular episodes in this sweeping saga. One of the main ones occurred when Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and commentator Tucker Carlson got into a dust-up last year over Israel, with Carlson, an America First anti-interventionist, decrying Cruz for being a pro-Israel warmonger and Cruz slamming Carlson for hosting on his show Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic white nationalist and Hitler fanboy. Cruz accused Carlson of being “complicit in…evil” for platforming Fuentes. This tiff led to a civil war inside the influential Heritage Foundation between those who backed Carlson (including its president) and those who found his association with Fuentes despicable.

This row reflected a deepening fault line among Trump followers between isolationists and hawks, with Israel as the fulcrum and antisemitism (actual or false charges of) imbuing the debate. With this baseline split, it was no surprise that the Iran war has led to more MAGA-on-MAGA catfighting. Fox News loudmouths Sean Hannity, Brian Kilmeade, and Mark Levin, along with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, have been cheerleaders for Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Tehran, with Carlson and Megyn Kelly blaming Israel for dragging Trump and the United States into this conflict.

Kelly complained the war was sold to the American public by “Israel firsters, like Mark Levin.” He retorted by calling Kelly an "emotionally unhinged, lewd and petulant wreck." Then it got nasty. Kelly asserted that Levin had a small penis. He said she was a slut. I’m not making this up:

Adjacent to this fight over Israel and the Iran war, much of the internecine warfare within MAGA has been driven by an absurd conflict between commentator Candace Owens and Erika Kirk, the widow of Turning Point USA chieftain Charlie Kirk. Owens used to be a hotshot at The Daily Wire, a conservative media operation co-founded by Shapiro. But she and Shapiro had a bitter falling out two years ago, as Owens blended her criticism of Israel with explicit antisemitism. She departed and started her own podcast, where she built a massive audience of millions promoting extremism and conspiracy theories.

After Charlie Kirk was shot in September, Owens, who once worked at TPUSA, devoted hours of her show to promoting the conspiracy theory that he had been betrayed by close colleagues and killed by Egypt and France. Or maybe Israel. Or maybe the US government. She suggested that Kirk was about to leave the pro-Israel cause, and this led to his execution by one or more of these nefarious powers. And it gets more bizarre: Owens insisted she had proof that Egyptian military planes had been tracking Erika Kirk for years. I will spare you more of the bonkers details; there are plenty of them. (Another one of Owens’ prominent conspiracy theories is that French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife is really a man, and she alleged Macron had ordered her assassination for outing this secret.)

Erika Kirk begged Owens to cease her conspiracizing about her husband’s death. Owens didn’t. After all, as she peddled this cuckoo narrative, her audience grew. Shapiro called Owens a “vampire.” Laura Loomer, the Islamophobic MAGA influencer and 9/11 conspiracy theorist close to Trump, branded Owens a “grifter” and urged Erika Kirk to sue Owens.

On the other side, Carlson saluted Owens’ search for the truth. And Joe Kent, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Center who recently resigned to protest the Iran war, tried to investigate supposed foreign involvement in the Kirk murder when he was in the Trump administration—and pissed off FBI Director Kash Patel by digging through the FBI files on the case without being authorized to do so.

Appearing on Carlson’s independent internet show two weeks ago, Kent, who has past ties to Fuentes (the antisemitic white nationalist Carlson respectfully interviewed), insinuated that Israel killed Kirk. “When one of President Trump’s closest advisers, who is vocally advocating for us to not go to war with Iran and for us to rethink, at least, our relationship with the Israelis,” Kent told Carlson, “and then he’s suddenly publicly assassinated and we’re not allowed to ask any questions about that, it’s a data point. It’s a data point that we need to look into.”

Kent has long been an avid conspiracy theorist, and he has championed the claim that the FBI orchestrated the January 6 riot—a notion that Patel, too, advanced before he became the bureau’s director. But now these former comrades in conspiracy are on the outs. An FBI spokesperson called Kent a “dishonest hack” and assailed him for spreading “baseless conspiracy theories” about Kirk’s murder, adding, “If he had any shame, Joe Kent should be ashamed of himself.”

The night after he was on Carlson’s show, Kent spoke at a gala fundraiser for Catholics for Catholics, a far-right organization that feted…you got it, Owens.

Back to Loomer: She’s been feuding with Marjorie Taylor Greene (who got into a tussle with Trump over the Jeffrey Epstein files), and last month she referred to Carlson as a “vile Jew hater.”

Are you dizzy yet? I haven’t gotten to the nuttiest part.

Last week, Alexis Wilkins, a MAGA-ish country singer and Patel’s girlfriend (for whom Patel has assigned an FBI SWAT unit as a security detail), took the suspicion and paranoia to a new level. In a 13-part thread on X, she claimed she was the victim of an operation mounted against her by a “foreign-linked influence network” that was also conniving to create “chaos in the Republican Party” so the GOP loses the midterm elections and Trump’s agenda is subverted.

Her posts were convoluted, but she cited a bunch of familiar names as seeming participants in this diabolical scheme, including Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who has become a Christian nationalist champion, Catholics for Catholics, Owens, Kent, and RT, the English-language Russian propaganda outlet.

Presenting an analysis of social media posts—she did her own research!—she insisted that RT and the “Flynn network” were both promoting overlapping messages asserting that MAGA was dead. “The goal of this operation,” Wilkins said, “is not to win a political argument, but to make the fractures feel permanent. To make Republicans believe their movement is over. To make soldiers feel the war isn't worth fighting.”

Not long ago, Wilkins was accused by a MAGA influencer of being a “honeypot” for Mossad, assigned to influence Patel. Now she contended that Owens’ claim that Israel killed Kirk was part of the same operation that had falsely tagged her as an Israeli spy.

By this point, your head may be hurting. Mine is. And I’ve not covered the entirety of all the MAGA mud-wrestling. Nor have I mentioned the death of Jeff Webb, the so-called “father of modern cheerleading” and a mentor of Charlie Kirk, who expired last week at the age of 76 due to a pickleball accident. Could that be a coincidence?

As I noted above, leadership vacuums can heighten tensions within a movement. Charlie Kirk is gone, and some of this internal bickering can be attributed to the fight for his following of young conservatives. And Trump presumably will be out of office in 34 months. Who inherits what’s left of MAGA? Will the post-Trump cult be anti-interventionist? Or pro-Israel and hawkish? Will it be led by or include antisemites? Much of this combat is propelled by that.

Let us not forget, this is not only about power and influence. There’s much money at stake. Most of these right-wing warriors are competing with each other for eyeballs and ears in the MAGAverse. With an audience of more than 7 million, Owens is raking it in. Her crazy is crazy profitable.

Conspiracism has always run deep in the veins of modern American conservatism, ever since Joe McCarthy claimed everyone other than him and his supporters were secret commies trying to destroy America. The tea party said that Barack Obama had a secret scheme to destroy the economy so he could become emperor (and set up concentration camps for conservatives). Trump pushed the racist birther conspiracy theory. His supporters promoted Pizzagate. He embraced QAnon. Election denialism and Deep State conspiracy theories are articles of faith for MAGA and the GOP.

During transitional phases, underlying tensions in a movement will surface. And when a movement is predicated on deranged notions, what emerges will be batcrap bananas. That’s what’s happening now in Trumpland. These volcanic eruptions triggered by MAGA’s shifting tectonic plates are spewing lunacy.

Will any of this impact politics in the real world? It certainly won’t boost the GOP’s prospects in the midterms. (I’m not sure it matters, but Fuentes told his followers to skip the midterms or vote for Democrats to protest the Iran war.) As jockeying for 2028 begins, these scuffles might shape the GOP battlefield. Fundamentally, what’s happening is that MAGA is revealing its animating forces: extremism, nastiness, paranoia, and madness. And when you let loose the crazy, there’s no telling where it will flow.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland.corn@gmail.com.

Paradise. There’s no way to write about Paradise, the well-executed Hulu thriller, without revealing spoilers. If you have any intention of watching the series as if you just awoke from a coma, stop here.

The show begins with a classic premise. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) is killed in his home in a Middle America town named Paradise that’s full of white picket fences and clean streets, and Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), fearing a conspiracy is afoot, is compelled to pursue his own private investigation of the murder. But here’s the twist: This isn’t an ordinary Middle America town. It’s an underground city with an artificial sun that was built to house survivors of an extinction event.

In this case, a supervolcanic eruption in Antarctica caused a giant tsunami that inundated much of the world and created a globe-encircling cloud of ash that blocked out the sun for years and provoked some nuclear powers to launch their missiles. Responding to the latter of these calamities, Bradford set off an electromagnetic pulse bomb to prevent the detonation of the nukes, but this move fried all the circuits of modern-day life. Long story short: Much of the world is destroyed, but a group of elites led by tech billionaire Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) and all the workers they need to run a manufactured community escaped to this superbunker in Colorado, where life appears to be rather pleasant.

Of course, Paradise ain’t you-know-what. The assassination of Bradford sets off a chain of intrigue suggesting that all’s not well in the underground city—and that life outside the bunker might not be so bad. That is, there may be survivors, including Collins’ wife, who was separated from him the day the Earth went kaput. In the second—and current—season, Collins, who’s suspected of being Bradford’s killer, leaves Paradise to find her, and the show shifts from a political thriller to a post-apocalyptic thriller—with many scenes in Graceland.

The series’ creators did a masterful job of envisioning how such a town buried in the Rockies would operate—both technically and politically. The very quick collapse of society when the volcano goes boom is all-too-realistically depicted. The doom is very anxiety-inducing. So much so that I had to look up the science behind this scenario and was relieved to learn that we need not fear such a conclusion to human civilization. We still have other potential disasters to worry about.

Multiple underlying mysteries propel the series forward, as the real leaders of Paradise steer toward authoritarianism to protect the make-believe town and as a band of survivors on the outside threaten the city. This is a smart popcorn series, with thrills and chills. As the second season heads toward its finale, you might wonder whether it would be best to be in or out of Paradise.

Maggie Rogers. On Friday, I attended an uplifting event. Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and other artists and writers held a protest in front of the Kennedy Center to decry the Trump administration’s assault on free expression and artistic and cultural institutions. The event was mounted by the Committee for the First Amendment, a recently launched outfit that harkens back to an organization of the same name that was created by activists in Hollywood during the McCarthy era to oppose government persecution of American dissidents.

Speaking in the drizzling rain to assembled reporters and a small crowd of supporters—including people who have been fired from their jobs at the Kennedy Center—Fonda said, “We’ve chosen to hold this action today in front of the John F. Kennedy Center because this beloved citadel of the arts has become a symbol of what is happening. The Center has been effectively silenced after artists refused to bow to ideological demands.” She added, “The Committee for the First Amendment felt it was time to expose the range and depth of the attacks on the bedrock of our democracy—the First Amendment—and encourage you, the press, and American citizens in general, to understand that it’s time to break your silence and stand tall against the authoritarianism that is taking hold and consolidating fast.”

Other speakers included former MSNBC host Joy Reid, former CNN reporter Jim Acosta, novelist Ann Patchett, and comedy writer Bess Kalb. Actors Sam Waterston, Griffin Dunne, and Billy Porter performed a dramatic reading of Paul Robeson’s defiant 1956 appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee—to compare the present threat to that of the Hollywood Blacklist of the 1950s.

A touching moment occurred when singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers brought out Baez for a duet on Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Rogers, a 31-year-old phenom, was obviously overwhelmed to be on the stage with the 85-year-old legend. Baez noted that she had considered turning in the Kennedy Center Honor she was awarded in 2021. But, she said, “It would mean that we’d given into a bully and a tyrant who is doing his best to strip us of our freedoms, to strip us of our joy.”

Though I had heard of Rogers, I was not familiar with her music. She’s had an intriguing arc. While a student at NYU, she wrote and recorded folk music and then began incorporating elements of dance music into her songs. When she played her song “Alaska” for Pharrell Williams, an artist-in-residence critiquing students’ works, he was visibly moved. Fortunately for Rogers, that encounter was videoed and went viral. That led to a record deal and an explosive rise in her music career. (“Alaska” has more than 317 million listens on Spotify.) She also went on to attend Harvard Divinity School—not the usual course for a pop star. So I’ve been listening to her stuff these past few days. “Different Kind of World” off her 2022 Surrender album—with its ethereal vocals and blending of simple folk and grunge—is my favorite so far.

The day after the Kennedy Center protest, Rogers sang that song at the No Kings rally in Minneapolis. Then she and Baez, joined by Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, performed the Dylan tune. (You can see that here.)