Why MAGA Can't Silence The Resistance

Morality maintains its voice throughout history

Tom Homan has repeatedly blamed protesters and Democrats for the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Petri, who ICE agents publicly executed. This was a new low for someone who collects bags stuffed with cash.

“I begged for the last two months on TV for the rhetoric to stop,” Homan said during a press briefing. “I said in March if the rhetoric didn’t stop, there was going to be bloodshed, and there has been. I wish I wasn’t right. I don’t want to see anybody die. Not officers, not members of the community and not the targets of our operations.”

Homan sounds no better than a common gangster shaking down frightened people for protection money, which he’d probably accept in a Cava takeout bag. Worse, it’s how domestic abusers speak to their victims: If you complain too loudly or make me look bad, you’re entirely to blame for what happens next.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder last year, Republicans claimed that any posthumous criticism of Kirk — including simply quoting his own repugnant statements — was an attempt to “justify” his death. Donald Trump directly blamed leftist “rhetoric” for Kirk’s shooting. Of course, despite relentless personal attacks against Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump felt no responsibility when one of his deranged supporters tried to assault her at a public event. We shouldn’t expect intellectual consistency or moral integrity from MAGA. However, their tiresome persecution complex and total lack of self-awareness have a historical precedent.

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Why MAGA Is Just The Confederacy With Newer Red Hats

In the years leading up to what I fear we’ll soon refer to as the first Civil War, Southern enslavers felt like their Northern neighbors were unfairly judging them simply because they owned people. Southerners argued, presumably with straight faces, that when abolitionists passionately advocated for ending slavery, they were putting enslavers’ lives at risk. After all, if slavery was truly a moral offense — a perpetual human rights violating machine — then that would justify violent slave uprisings. Yes, this particular argument should sound familiar.

Author and historian Gordon Rhea wrote in his 2011 article, “Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought.”

The South felt increasingly beleaguered as the North increased its criticism of slavery. Abolitionist societies sprang up, Northern publications demanded the immediate end of slavery, politicians waxed shrill about the immorality of human bondage, and overseas, the British parliament terminated slavery in the British West Indies. A prominent historian accurately noted that “by the late 1850’s most white Southerners viewed themselves as prisoners in their own country, condemned by what they saw as a hysterical abolition movement.”

Some enslavers even complained that thanks to the abolitionist movement the people they enslaved suddenly hated them — right out of the blue. ICE agents have invaded Minneapolis and terrorized its residents, but Republicans insist that elected Democrats criticizing ICE is the reason why we think they’re a bunch of violent thugs — as though people wouldn’t naturally come to that conclusion while watching their neighbors dragged out of their homes or vehicles and smacked around.

Alex Pretti, John Brown, And Nonviolent Resistance

Even in the North, vocal abolitionists were derided as “dupes, fanatics, foreign agents, and incendiaries.” Their anti-slavery signs were probably considered too perfect, as well. In his 1860 Cooper Union speech, Abraham Lincoln rejected the accusation that his anti-slavery Republican Party (yes, times have changed) encouraged violence against the enslavers.

You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilt in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander.

It wasn’t enough that enslavers could still legally own people and hunt them like dogs if they dared escape. Like today’s MAGA, enslavers demanded total moral submission, as well. Stay quiet and don’t hurt their feelings or they’ll have no choice but to “defend” themselves from your brutal First Amendment assault. This justifies any resulting violence.

Gordon Rhea continued:

As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming more strident in defending slavery. The institution was not just a necessary evil: it was a positive good, a practical and moral necessity. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Curfews governed the movement of slaves at night, and vigilante committees patrolled the roads, dispensing summary justice to wayward slaves and whites suspected of harboring abolitionist views. Laws were passed against the dissemination of abolitionist literature, and the South increasingly resembled a police state. A prominent Charleston lawyer described the city’s citizens as living under a “reign of terror.”

You see, it can happen here, because it’s already happened. The former Confederacy would later adopt the phrase “War of Northern Aggression,” a perverse description of the Civil War, especially considering that they defined “aggression” as simply taking a moral stand against slavery. I grew up hearing “War of Northern Aggression,” an example of how effective propaganda can set like concrete. The term is rooted in the “Lost Cause” myth, which depicted the Confederacy as the noble resistance against a tyrannical government. (The emphasis on “states’ rights” in particular only gained prominence during the Civil Rights Movement.) Confederate troops might’ve fired on U.S. troops at Fort Sumter, but Northern abolitionists actually fired the first shots — metaphorically speaking, of course — with their “fiery rhetoric and agitating.” Historically speaking, this is all bullshit. In reality, the Confederacy was an imperialist power whose objective wasn’t just maintaining slavery in the South but spreading the evil institution throughout the nation. Ironically, the “Lost Cause” narrative best fits the brave Minnesotans who are resisting Trump’s regime. They are the ones truly defending their sovereignty and “way of life” from a federal invasion.

The “Lost Cause” is primarily built on lies — that Abraham Lincoln was a radical abolitionist who deliberately initiated military conflict to impose his views on the South. Although Lincoln personally opposed slavery, he repeatedly stated that he didn’t believe he had the constitutional right to end slavery where it currently existed. He did strongly oppose territorial expansion of slavery. This is what the Confederacy has most in common with MAGA — it can’t tolerate compromise or even the tamest dissent.

Trump’s regime believes it can bully more than half the nation into resigned silence as its own reign of terror continues unchallenged. Less than a year before the first Civil War, Lincoln stated with his usual eloquence why such tactics are doomed to fail.

Human action can be modified to some extent, but human nature cannot be changed. There is a judgment and a feeling against slavery in this nation, which cast at least a million and a half of votes. You cannot destroy that judgment and feeling — that sentiment — by breaking up the political organization which rallies around it. You can scarcely scatter and disperse an army which has been formed into order in the face of your heaviest fire; but if you could, how much would you gain by forcing the sentiment which created it out of the peaceful channel of the ballot-box, into some other channel? What would that other channel probably be? Would the number of John Browns be lessened or enlarged by the operation?

ICE agents can abuse and even execute those who resist, but they only enlarge the operation against them.