- Has MAGA’s morality collapsed, or has it always been this way — immature?
- With references to that hierarchy of morality, and Peter Singer’s expanding circle of morality;
- Karoline Leavitt says Democrats are made up of “Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.”
- Andrew Egger at The Bulwark spells it out: Trump and his fans live in a world of black and white;
- Another preemptive attack on “No Kings” rallies as being un-American;
- How Trump’s crypto scandal is bigger than Teapot Dome and Watergate (while no one notices);
- Shorts items about a Christian Nationalist defending slavery, stupid things people say about Antifa, Trump’s innumeracy about his Venezuelan boat strikes, and how the autism spectrum is too broad.
The Atlantic, George Packer, 17 Oct 2025: The Depth of MAGA’s Moral Collapse, subtitled “How we got to ‘I love Hitler.'”
A nice summary of recent events.
When leaders of Young Republican groups around the country exchange texts that say “I love Hitler”; that joke about gas chambers and rape, approve of slavery, sneer about “watermelon people” and monkeys in zoos, and throw around words like faggot and retarded, they aren’t just exposing their own anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, and misogyny. To see only the varieties of bigotry with which we’re painfully familiar is to miss the depth of MAGA’s moral collapse. Professing love for Hitler is more than anti-Semitic—it’s antihuman. It’s a proud refusal to be bound by the most basic standard of goodness, a deliberate expression of contempt for everything decent. The texts degrade all of us.
And they’re hardly surprising. Cruelty and humiliation have become the Trump administration’s common currency. With permission from President Donald Trump’s coarse rhetoric and vows of hatred, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute, Tucker Carlson’s flirtation with Holocaust denial, and Stephen Miller’s rage-filled threats, the young loyalists who wrote the texts were speaking the language of the people they admire most. Nor was it surprising when, the day after Politico revealed the texts’ existence, the image of an American flag altered into the shape of a swastika appeared on the cubicle wall behind a staffer in the Capitol Hill office of a MAGA congressman. In that culture, the rehabilitation of the man who stands for the worst in humanity was inevitable.
I suspect the “collapse” here is only public; these people have been, rather, morally immature all along. This fits with themes I’ve been developing here, especially the idea of “tribal” morality, which is basically extremely self-centered.
An infant sees itself as the center of the world, later accommodating parents, then neighbors, then one’s whole community. Beyond that, everyone is a heathen, as in the OT. Perhaps others who subscribe to one’s same religion might be granted common humanity, but everyone else is suspect. Beyond that, the circle of moral concern stops for many people — who become what we describe as conservatives. They never get to a more mature view of the world, the understanding that people in other towns with other religions think *theirs* are the best too; that, realistically, it’s nonsense to think that you or yours are the best in any particular way; that, pragmatically, it’s counter-productive for everyone to judge others harshly. Theirs is a zero-sum, black-and-white view of the world.
(Whereas mature morality enlarges Peter Singer’s expanding circle to include more and more swaths of humanity, and even, by the late 20th century, certain types of animals, even all animals. Because we’ve learned that aspects of humanity like learning, compassion, and tool use, are not unique to humanity. And that there is value in retaining the diversity of life on the planet. Thus the Endangered Species Act, which conservatives are doing their best to dismantle, in favor of short-term gains.)
A similar summary of the past week is here:
The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 16 Oct 2025: It’s Not a Dog Whistle If Everyone Can Hear It, subtitled “A week of ostentatious bigotry in American politics”
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This us vs them duality infests the highest realms of the current administration.
“The Democrat Party’s main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals.” How many kinds of idiot, or bigot, is she? (The post is by Jamelle Bouie of the NY Times.)
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And again:
The Bulwark, Andrew Egger, 17 Oct 2025: A Noun, A Verb, and Antifa
“Those who love Trump are the devout, virtuous patriots that must be protected no matter what; those who hate him are the vile demons who must be destroyed by any weapon to hand.”
…
It’s all right there in black and white, isn’t it? If you’re a Trump-backing Republican, there is nothing you can say vile enough that the party will cut you loose. If you’re publicly opposed to Trump, on the other hand, it doesn’t matter how peacefully and patriotically you express that opposition—it’s an article of faith on the right that you’re an America hater at best and a literal terrorist at worst.
How can this go on? It’s not just that the president of the United States looks at literally half the country with the purest disdain and hate—it’s that he has now built a movement around himself that makes that disdain and hate its organizing principle.
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Similarly:
The Washington Post, 17 Oct 2025: GOP tries to brand anti-Trump ‘No Kings’ protests as un-American
Subtitled: Ahead of the more than 2,600 rallies planned for Saturday across the U.S., Republican officials cast the protests of the president’s policies as “hate America” rallies.
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Living in history. But when big things happen, most people don’t notice it’s happening.
NY Times, Jacob Silverman, 17 Oct 2025: Teapot Dome. Watergate. They’re Nothing Compared to This.
We’ve never seen anything like this before. You can tick off notorious executive branch scandals — President Ulysses S. Grant’s rogues’ gallery of corrupt advisers, Teapot Dome’s bribes for oil leases in the Harding administration, Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon — but none of them featured this scale of mixing of personal and government interests, much less the sheer accumulation of profit, of Mr. Trump’s multibillion-dollar crypto windfall.
Future textbooks will have to add an entire chapter just to cover Trump’s scandals.
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Short items.
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 17 Oct 2025: Christian Nationalist Commentator Joshua Haymes Says ‘Slavery Is Not Inherently Evil’ — This is the most basic, literalist morality, based on whatever it says in whatever holy book you choose. (Recall the Hierarchy of Morality. On this scale, the Young Republicans are operating at about level 2 or 3.) Also quoted at JMG here; is he making excuses for the Founders who owned slaves?
- The Bulwark, Cathy Young, 15 Oct 2025: 9 Stupid Things People Are Saying About Antifa, subtitled “A terrorist organization? A fiction? All Democrats? None of the above.”
- PolitiFact, 16 Oct 2025: Regarding boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, “Every boat that we knock out we save 25,000 American lives.” — More innumeracy from Trump. The article states: “If Trump’s statement were accurate, five boat strikes would have saved nearly double the number of lives that were lost to overdoses in a year.”
- NY Times, guest essay by Emily May, 16 Oct 2025: The Autism Spectrum Is Too Broad — Similar to an earlier piece. The definition of autism has grown so broad it distracts attention from the portion of “profound autism” cases.
