Editing America For Content

The MAGA Cultural Revolution wants to fix America in post-production.

Hey there, friendly readers. We have made it to Day 150 of this administration, with only a skooch over 1300 to go.

It’s been a particularly wild year of news since we chatted last week.

Last Tuesday, June 10th, America’s 47^th President and most popular cryptocurrency grifter, Donald John Trump — a Commander-in-Chief with such immense self-control that he only sometimes signals his belief that members of the military are dummies, suckers, chumps, and losers — gave a speech in North Carolina as part of Army 250, a celebration of the branch’s 250th anniversary, or “semiquincentennial”.

Hey now, look here, I’m not throwing out that five dollar word just to be brainy and sound smart — though I am and I do, but it’s not, y’know, the only reason — but ‘cuz it’s a word we might as well get used to hearing a lot, maybe even saying once or twice, before the barbecue-and-beer-bust breaks out for America’s semiquincentennial on July 4th, 2026 (should we make it that long). Technically speaking, it’d be the “sesquicentenary” celebration, with “sesquicentennial” referring to the actual 250 year time period, but that’s NOT how it went down for the bicentennial in 1976, so…yeah, okay, okay, I’m done now. I’ll just turn off these sweet, sweet italics and get back to…

…Trump’s speech, about which military.com noted:

It was supposed to be a routine appearance, a visit from the commander in chief to rally the troops, boost morale and celebrate the Army's 250th-birthday week, which culminates with a Washington, D.C., parade slated for Saturday.

Instead, what unfolded Tuesday at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, bore little resemblance to the customary visit from a president and defense secretary. There, President Donald Trump unleashed a speech laced with partisan invective, goading jeers from a crowd of soldiers positioned behind his podium -- blurring the long-standing and sacrosanct line between the military and partisan politics.

While the lines between the military and the political were “blurred” (or even maybe sanded down and repainted in MAGA red), some fresh, new lines were being drawn by the Trump administration, lines that circumscribe what an Army loyal to Trump ought to look like, which is to say, it should be fit, male, and passionately committed (as Trump has no consistent political ideology) to anything and everything that might spout from the President’s facehole.

To that end, the “audience” in Fort Bragg was edited for content and the Army itself was formatted to fit a very MAGA screen.

Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male.

One unit-level message bluntly said "no fat soldiers."

"If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out," another note to troops said.

This is nothing new for politics; indeed, it’s standard practice for Trump rallies where the podium behind Trump is always engineered to show zealous faces. The fans behind him serve as formatted messages meant to inscribe very specific signals about the MAGA vision of society, and therefore about the legitimate subjects of real and proper American culture. After ticking the “very devoted Trump supporter” box, that most often means pretty people and white people. But should the occasion necessitate it, the signal can be altered to feature young people or veterans and even minorities —like “Michael the Black Man”, aka Maurice Woodside, a Trump enthusiast often placed behind the podium at rallies during the 2016 and 2020 campaign.

All this posturing, framing and signal editing is, however, very new for the armed services. Traditionally, the Pentagon has provided strict guidelines to the military concerning partisan activity among service members, particularly at media events. Respect of that norm has been so thorough and widespread that, until Trump 2.0, even the barest hint of a crack in the wall between post and politics could generate criticism. In 2022, President Biden caught grievous hell from reporters and various elected Republicans for having the unbelievable temerity to bring up Trump’s autocratic aspirations in the presence of… gasp… the United States Marine Corps. Well, not the whole Corps, but some Marines. Okay, two Marines, anyway. No, Biden wasn’t on a military base — just giving a regular public speech in the presence of an honor guard. Of two dudes. Three short years later and those Pentagon guidelines, those norms, and that GOP outrage have all been edited from the nation’s story of itself.

Snip here, cut there. Norms, rules, Constitutional bulwarks, the economy, the global order, and, sigh, lots and lots of people — edited right out in the open — as if the MAGA Cultural Revolution, at ever deeper and more disturbing levels, is prepping a brand new 4k remaster of The Birth of a Nation by recasting, reframing and reformatting exactly who gets screen time in the moving picture that is America.

On Thursday, one of California’s Senators, Alex Padilla, was manhandled to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents at a press conference held by the current commandant of America’s favorite masked singer secret police force — the puppy-murdering former Governor of South Dakota, full-time Lara Croft cosplayer, and noted understander-of-the-Constitution, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem.

Noem later claimed that Padilla didn’t identify himself. (There’s loads of film showing otherwise.) DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin tweeted that Padilla “lunged toward Secretary Noem”. (Yeah, no. Again, there’s copious video.). Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a man so bedeviled by his desire to consume pornography that he partners with his son to monitor his intake, reckoned that Padilla “charged” Noem in a manner so grievous that it deserved congressional censure. (Have I mentioned that the whole thing was caught by cameras and preserved for posterity? No? I haven’t? Well, gosh, it turns out there’s miles and miles of film.)

Folks like Johnson and McLaughlin are equivocating in order to make political hay. Dumb, malicious, embarrassing-the-country hay, but hay nonetheless.

The claim of Noem on the other hand — that no one knew who Senator Padilla was — is a smidgeon more worrisome. As I see it there’s two ways to interpret her claim that the Senator was just some energetic, brown-skinned interloper who randomly bumbled into the room begging to be intercepted with extreme prejudice by the Secret Service.

First, she could be telling the truth.

If so, it is yet another signal that… hmmm, how to put this most adroitly? … right, okay, that Noem totally sucks at her job. I suppose I could have gone with “is flatly unprepared and unqualified for the work of a cabinet level appointment”. Either way, without the need to indulge in nostalgia, we should all mourn the loss of an age in American politics when the most powerful figures in the executive branch were competent political operatives and, by necessity, were able to identify most Senators (and many, many Representatives), by name, on sight, and likely at improbably great distances.

One might expect that a qualified and able Secretary and her staff would certainly have some passing acquaintance with the Senators of the state they were speaking in (yep, all…checks notes… both of them), perhaps especially if that state was the 4th largest economy on Earth (behind the US, China, and Germany) and that Secretary was there to “liberate” it from evil, “burdensome" socialists with the help of the Marine Corps. Truly, if no one at that press conference in Los Angeles knew Padilla then we we are further into the Fall of America than lots of folks thought… and most of us are already too damn close to maxing out the meters on jaded cynicism.

Unfortunately, it’s much more likely that Noem is, per MAGA style and custom, a lying Liar McLiarface whose tactical-athleisure assault-leggings are very much en fuego, and not in a complimentary way.

And, as with so much about Trumpworld, we are light years beyond the problem being the lie itself. No, the real issue is the gross and malignant illiberalism for which the lie stands as substitute and symbol.

What Noem is saying when she lies about an unidentified and unidentifiable Senator Padilla is that Padilla — a Democrat, one elected by Democratic voters in a solidly electoral blue-state, and a Hispanic man — does not deserve recognition, is not eligible for identification, and will not, should not, be afforded the legitimation that being identifiable might confer. After all, viewed through MAGA populist calculus, Padilla is not only a political exile barred from authentic Real America™ by virtue of being a “coastal elite” elected by hordes of un-real, un-Americans (whose votes are without worth or value), he is also of the same complexion and othered heritage as those invading hordes of vermin that Noem vows to kidnap and force into exile by the millions. Objectified by the radical identity politics of the MAGA Cultural Revolution, everything about Padilla — his political affiliation and authority, his culture and his appearance — is not only oppositional, but illegitimate, unjustifiable, and profane. No amount of identifying himself would have been enough because Senator Alex Padilla, D-CA, is not worthy of identification, not legitimately entitled to an identity.

An elite, a Democrat, and a person of color, Alex Padilla is unhuman.

In the end, whether Noem is competent or not, she did not recognize the Senator not because she couldn’t place him but because he is not eligible for a place. No amount of self-identification is ever sufficient to confer recognition upon those who do not qualify to be seen and known.

Padilla — like the immigrants and people of color that Noem, Stephen Miller and Trump want erased from the plot of the American blockbuster film franchise — can never be more than an extra in their movie. An NPC, or Non-Player-Character.

And should the lens linger too long on an illegitimate subject of American politics, if the screen should portray an NPC like Padilla as a valid identity, as a character with a name and worthy of appearing in the credits (forget about being the good guy, the white-hat or the hero) then that film can be — is being — recut. All the right-populist talking points about law and order, easing economic anxiety, or re-instituting meritocracy are nothing more than notes from the studio bigwigs saying “we can fix this in post”.

Fixing America in post-production — a little CGI here, some reshoots there, and a whole lot of celluloid sliced away to rot on the cutting room floor — is the narrative project of people consumed by surprise and resentment upon finding that this American movie is no longer their biopic. What’s more, they are discovering that they are, as the common meme goes, the baddies. Who are these non-entities getting what until recently was their screen time, their choice one-liners, their place atop the call-sheet? How the hell did this movie become Starship Troopers all of a sudden and what’s with all the sympathy for these monstrous, invading alien bugs?

MAGA is, at its root, the bloody embodiment of a narrative rebellion against pluralism.

Their Cultural Revolution is what happens when immense state power and its monopoly on violence is wielded by the political equivalent of that shocking cohort of Star Wars fans who fumed with barely contained blood-lust about Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, raging to find the young, messianic, white male decentered and humbled, the capitalists and wealthy war-profiteers jeered at and scorned. (That might sound flippant — but only if you haven’t met those Last Jedi-haters online. What a bunch.)

The populist right certainly is… ummmm, a little funny about their fantasy stan-doms.

This time a year ago, writing at VOX, Alex Abad-Santos noted “there’s something fascinating happening with the fourth season of The Boys.” (It’s a TV show on MAX about the varieties of yuck! to be found at the intersection of comic book superpowers and neurotic sociopathy.)

Since premiering to critical praise on June 13, alleged fans have been review-bombing the show’s latest season on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. The most vocal and eye-catching of these takedowns pronounce that the show has gone “woke” or is so obviously “anti-Donald Trump.”

They’re not wrong, but they’re excruciatingly late to this observation.

Since the show’s inception in 2019, The Boys has been a superhero allegory about Trump, dangerous authoritarianism, political fanaticism, Nazis, and America’s sway toward fascism.

And,

These angry public admissions from conservatives that they've spent the previous seasons cheering on this horrible character — only to now realize they're the butt of the joke — have become bigger than the show itself. It’s a testament to our culture’s ever-diminishing media literacy.

Like conservatives who see MAGA populism embodied in Star Wars’ “Rebel Alliance” and not, correctly, in “the Empire”, or like Texas Senator Ted Cruz identifying with violent anti-hero Rorshach from Alan Moore’s Watchmen, an enormous number of “woke”-hating viewers utterly failed, for several years, to notice that the heroes they idolized in The Boys were… well, not the heroes of the story at all. Instead, they seem to have wholly whiffed on the extraordinarily obvious: that their favorite characters were the show’s murderers, rapists, and plain-Jane Aryan Nazis (all stuff that the show’s creative team has been frankly open about since the show first aired). Furthermore, as film and literature critics have pointed out for decades, there’s always been a patently fascist element to the one-in-a-billion, chosen-one superhero figure — a malignancy deeply seeded within the archetype that The Boys allows full expression, letting it blossom into logical, yet wildly grotesque (and, again, patently obvious) extremes.

And yet, somehow, a not-insignificant number of conservative viewers had their ever-lovin’ minds blown.

We’ve gotten so good at watching things that fit with our political leanings, and being served things that fit with our politics, that we can’t even identify when something is built to challenge those beliefs. What if it’s hard for conservative and alt-right viewers to comprehend that The Boys wasn’t made for them because they’re so used to everything in their sphere being for them?

Homogenizing, hierarchical narratives, like the story of patriarchy, whiteness and capital, can be read as a treasure map — when it is the only story one reads. But the singularity of that story means someone has to constantly mediate the plot and police the cast of characters; each additional legitimized subject disrupts the homogenizing narrative by its downright inconvenient and annoying insistence upon having a universe of it’s own. Other people are so icky like that.

If MAGA is a narrative rebellion, then it is an uprising against a culture which has merely become aware that the many threads of it’s narrative inheritance are woven into a cloth of collective story — fiction, art, poetry — a tapestry which, read backwards, seems pretty plain about warning its heirs against tribalism, greed, and exclusion, alerting us to the dangers of the anti-social strongman, and prioritizing a collective good written in the weft and warp of our common fabric.

Call that way of reading and that emerging awareness “woke” if it suits you. By whatever name, the more pluralism has become the weave of this collection of American story, the more dangerous, destructive and deadly Trumpist populism has been about trying to remake it.

And that’s why this MAGA Cultural Revolution is so desperately ham-fisted and so grotesquely cruel. Editing our stories means editing people. And that’s to say that, from every possible perspective, it is, in one way or another, eugenics — inside and out, all the way down.

It’s my fervent prayer that more story could be our way through… to that end, here’s a tall glass of possibility from a favored font of cool water, Tressie McMillan Cottom:

I’m Milo Baynes. Thanks for trusting me with your time.

@milobaynes.bsky.social