By Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
So, there you are, watching TV when you see one of several interchangeable sliver haired middle-aged angry dough boys ranting about how if only we let Trump be Trump then he could fulfill his role as the anti-Christ, Jews would be driven into the sea and the Rapture would occur like the Bible says America would be made great again. Here’s a list of the major actors in the racist, misogynistic, bigoted bullshit bad faith argument bullshit echo sphere that will dominate the lives of millions in the Fourth Reich for years to come. Oddly enough, they all kinda look the same, as if birthed from some sort of dystopian They Live podchamber.
Hugh Hewitt
Hewitt is notable for the lengths he will go to debase himself for Trump in a reasonably cogent fashion. He is the apologist’s apologist when it comes to Trump. It has started to seem as though he’s angling for some sort of apparatchik position in the Fourth Reich. Does he want to be gruppenführer of the new Washington Military District of Columbia or something? What is his deal? He is also notable for having sufficient respect among Twitter liberals that he pops up on the Sunday chat shows and the Washington Post babbling in the most obsequious manner possible that if only we’d leave Trump alone, he would, at last, make America great Again.
Dennis Prager
Prager does PragerU, which is a middlebrow bad faith and very formal online conduit of MAGA bullshit that a lot of otherwise reasonable people eat up because it gives them some sort of intellectual framework for being a Good American in the Fourth Reich. He conveys with great gravitas racist, misogynistic, ignorant and historically oblivious bullshit that conflates anything necessary to get your middle-aged mom to think somehow Trump is not so bad after all.
Glenn Beck
Beck is simply fucking insane. After having shown a modicum of principle at the onset of the Fourth Reich, Beck has switched gears and is just another fucking Trump cockholster in an pretty elaborate bullshit echo chamber of bad faith arguments. He’s completely unhinged and sees conspiracies under every rock. In a way, Beck’s change of heart about Trump is all you need to know about modern Trumpian conservatism.
Mark Levin
I don’t know what to tell you about this guy. He’s not as deranged as Beck, but he’s somewhere between Hewitt and Schlapp in intelligence and the ability to make a cogent badfaith argument. He’s very fascist friendly and you start to think he would be cool with American Killing Fields in update New York if Trump suggested it.
Matt Schlapp
Oh, Matt Schlapp. I see him as one of the most dangerous of these pasty white MAGA thought leaders because he’s the smartest and best educated of the bunch. He honestly believes that the racist and misogynistic bullshit he spews isn’t either one of those things. In an earlier time, he’d be the German somewhere in the east of the country who had an “overnight conversion” to Communism at some point in late 1945 when it became apparent the Soviets weren’t going anywhere and he still had mouths to feed.
Newt Gingrich
If the Fourth Reich was a video game, he would be the last guy you had to defeat to win the game. His MAGA rhetoric can’t be beat and he probably is far closer to The Dear Leader in private than any of us could possibly imagine. In fact, you could say that MAGA is nothing more than the deranged ideological child of Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. But Buchanan isn’t a pasty silver-haired dough boy, so he’s not on this list.