MAGA's July 4 Euro-cination
On America's 250th, longing for the grotesquery of yesteryear.
Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture and memory.
– Trump, in 2017, reminding Poles about the good ol’ days.
What began nine years ago as a friendly presidential suggestion to a European ally to keep on being Christian and white, or face the worst, has become an onslaught. Nine years later, the administration’s crème de la goon have been out on a European lecture tour warning, with breathtaking ignorance, how the EU is destroying Western Civilization.
Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth alleged NATO has ceased to defend Europe. “The focus has been on gender equity and climate change and defense austerity. Europe’s borders flew wide open, welfare states expanded, defense budgets cratered, along with Europe’s belief in itself and its civilization.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio advised European countries to barricade “doors to an unprecedented wave of mass migration that threatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.
“Mass migration … was and continues to be a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.” As for other self-destructive liberal snowflakery, he chided his audience that in embracing naive environmental regulation to “appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people.”
Jesus, what a cavalcade of creeps.
The big star of Euromaga, though, is Vice President J.D. Vance, who got to the xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist heart of the matter by equating immigration from “culturally incompatible regions” with “civilizational suicide.” Chant along with MAGA: “The Jews will not replace us! Or the Pakis! Or the wogs and darkies. Or the law mongers. Or the fake Christians who won’t shut up about compassion and love! Those estrogen-poisoned libtards!”
(One postscript to the vice president’s critique is a bit of digression, but also too nauseating and illuminating to ignore: namely his characterization of a proper democracy: “In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society.” Self-own much, JD? It was as if, mid-speech, the ayahuasca kicked in.)
But let us return to the Trumpsketeers’ European Vacation. Here’s the gist of their demagoguery: As our own American racists are obliged to honor our founding European values, versus the contaminated mongrel culture we have become, shouldn’t Europe, too? How can they bestow on us these priceless gifts and then betray our shared history? Shouldn’t they take off their Birkenstocks, climb into a UFC cage and kick some Somalis in the groin?
Only one thing wrong with their thinking on this matter, apart from its sheer cruelty. They literally do not know what they’re talking about. They have all the history backwards.
We did not get our values from Europe. What we got from Europe was mass immigration by people who understood far too well European values from the previous three millennia: century after century of unimaginable barbarism, followed by 1,000-plus years of perpetual war between rival monarchies, genocidal Crusades to obliterate the swarthy infidels and, even in the ostensibly glorious Renaissance, 99-1 concentration of wealth among kings, clerics and aristocrats. As for modern history, the 20th century was dominated and forever scarred by European wars turned World Wars that killed 56 million people. Half of the continent was enslaved by the Evil Soviet Empire. Mid-century it was enslaved and butchered by the Third Reich. Western dictatorships in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Yugoslavia lingered into the 1970s and 80s. Thereafter in Croatia and Serbia they survived the Millennium. Belarus is a dictatorship still. Russia? Well, not to offend Trump’s crush, but …
Even speaking of just Western Europe, it has been largely democratic for only 81 years following the defeat of the Nazis. Only then did it embrace the liberal democracy that was decreed (if not exactly instantaneously fulfilled) on July 4, 1776. Indeed, considering slavery, the Native American genocide, the Gilded Age of economic tyranny, the lack of women’s suffrage, Jim Crow and gaping holes in legal due process, it was only after WWII that our founding principles evolved from a largely notional Bill of Rights to their present shape — or at least the shape they had before Trump began to systematically demolish them.
Human rights, civil rights, voting rights, marriage rights, abortion rights, respect for cultural and political differences, the application of laws, regulations and taxation to tame the excesses of the amoral free market — that’s what so nauseates the MAGA zealots. The dictatorship, violent nationalism, genocidal Christian crusades and feudalism they could live with. Because they further enriched the rich, because they were cloaked in religion and because they were lily white.
Those are Trump’s “bonds of history, culture, and memory.” Just as the dream of returning to a halcyon “morning in America” that never actually existed, these grotesque bigots celebrate a Europe whose legacy was chaos, war and tyranny. To them, injustice is also a dream. A wet dream. Think about that on Saturday when the fireworks go off.