MAGA's war on "woke" has a long history -- like 400 years [View all]

MAGA’s war on “woke” has a long history — like 400 years
Trump and Stephen Miller don’t just want to erase the 20th century. Their dream is much bigger than that

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published February 8, 2026 6:45AM (EST)


(Salon) One explicit goal of the second Trump administration, if not its defining mission, is to undo the recent past and rewrite history to fit its own master narrative. By now it’s axiomatic that making America “great again” has never referred to any fixed point in the actual American past; it’s more like a mashup or highlight reel of random images taken from eras before any living American was born. We can see that vision embodied with startling literalness in the propaganda posters recently concocted by the Labor Department, such as the depiction of a whites-only church picnic apparently taking place in Uncanny Valley. If the rise of Donald Trump preceded the advent of AI slop, it may also have conjured it into existence: Never in cultural history have form and content been so perfectly matched.

We already know that Trump and his inner circle — which mostly means Stephen Miller and Russ Vought, the high priests of MAGA ideology — want to erase the gains of the civil rights movement, LGBTQ equality and feminism. But their true goals are far more ambitious, if less easy to define. This is a fake presidency devoted more to creating viral memes than shaping policy, and there’s no coherent or consistent narrative at work. Honestly, that’s less a flaw than a feature: The wholesale rejection of reality is central to the brand.

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But the question we should ask is how far these fantasies go. Reversing nearly all the immigration of the last six decades? Absolutely. Overturning Brown v. Board of Education? Probably, but on the DL. Rolling back the entire New Deal and all the labor reforms of the 20th century? Hell to the yes. Undoing women’s suffrage and birthright citizenship and the Civil War and most of the Constitution? Yeah, maybe,. Let’s change the subject.

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Admittedly, even the most articulate MAGA ideologues — not that there are many — haven’t gone that far. But that’s where the collective brotastic idiocies of Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson and Curtis Yarvin and Andrew Tate and Pete Hegseth and whomever else all converge: Somewhere in the recent or distant or mythical past, everything totally ruled and “we” (a term of art, I hasten to add) never felt bad about any of it. Guys were guys and women were hot and there was lots of feasting and stuff. There was no wokeness, no political correctness, no gender-neutral bathrooms. Nobody used pronouns or talked about inequality or intersectionality or was gay (except sometimes in the locker room) or tried to make us ashamed for being awesome. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/08/magas-war-on-woke-has-a-long-history-like-400-years/