How the MAGA Right is Manufacturing its Own Reality
And becoming more and more like the woke left every day
A new thing I’ve noticed about our political landscape this year is that the right, at least the part of it that likes to engage in online culture wars, is increasingly living in a reality that it has manufactured for itself. While isolated incidents of fake news spreading in online right-wing circles is nothing new (like the claim that certain immigrants are eating cats and dogs, for example), what I’ve been seeing this year is on another level altogether. Rather than just spreading isolated pieces of fake or distorted news to rile up emotions, influencers on the ‘right’ are now actively creating a comprehensive cultural narrative out of thin air, to justify their own political program. Let me explain with a few examples.
The first example, indeed, the original example, was the right’s refusal to acknowledge that wokeness died down under Biden. All objective data points to the fact that the 2010s woke wave ended some time between 2021 and 2023 (even if there are arguments about the exact turning point). Cancel culture and talk of ‘systemic oppression’ were largely gone in the mainstream by 2024. Yet MAGA-aligned influencers refused to acknowledge the clear shift in the cultural vibe during Biden’s term, because they wanted to paint the Biden administration as part of the ‘woke problem’. Lately, they have been belatedly claiming victory over wokeness, only willing to do so after Trump had returned to power, because for them it had to be Trump who defeated wokeness. Biden ending wokeness wouldn’t fit their long-running narrative of left-vs-right tribalism after all. For these people, it’s never about studying the objective reality. It’s all about creating and maintaining the perfect narrative, even at the cost of denying or distorting reality.
The next example is related to the first. Remember the ‘controversial’ Sydney Sweeney ad from earlier this year? The one that talked about jeans (and genes)? It really wasn’t that controversial for most people across the political spectrum, except for a few people in the extremely online left. I personally thought it was a piece of smart advertising, and ultimately not something that was of much importance. Yet right-wing influencers wanted it to be controversial. They even declared it to be the ultimate proof of their victory over the ‘woke left’ (which ties into their aforementioned aim of belated claiming victory over wokeness under Trump in order to build a certain narrative). Hence for the extremely online right, one of their major culture war ‘victories’ of 2025 was actually something that most people didn’t even care about!
And then there’s the claim about trans shooters, often conflated with claims about left-wing political violence. Firstly, while there have been a few shooters who might have identified as trans in the past 5–10 years, there have been many, many shootings across America in that timeframe, and the vast majority of those cold blooded murderers were clearly not trans. The data appears to show that trans people are statistically no more likely to be behind such shootings than the average person. Secondly, not all trans people are left-wing! Some trans people like Caitlyn Jenner and Blaire White are even strong supporters of the Republican Party. It would be truly ironic if their party ended up taking away their guns. (The fact that this could even be contemplated also proves that the Republicans are not libertarian at all, and libertarians were absolutely right to make Trump unwelcome at the US Libertarian Party conference last year.) The fact is, right-wing influencers are conjuring up an imaginary enemy of an army of ‘trantifa’ activists coming for Christians, which is objectively untrue. Why would they want their listeners to fear something that’s not actually there? History is full of such examples, and I think the answer is clear from a study of those examples.
Finally, we need to talk about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Right-wing influencers keep talking about people on the ‘left’ who celebrated Kirk’s death. While I don’t deny that such pro-violence extremists do exist, they certainly don’t represent the majority of the people who are left of center. Indeed, Gavin Newsom, often considered the current front-runner for the 2028 Democratic Presidential nomination, invited Kirk on for the first episode of his podcast, chatted with him in friendly terms, and had only good things to say about Kirk’s work of having conversations with people who disagree after his death. Wouldn’t you think that Newsom would be more representative of the center-left than some random extremist you found on X?
The overall picture here is that certain right-aligned, or should I say MAGA-aligned influencers are painting a picture of a heroic struggle between MAGA culture warriors and far-left ‘trantifa’ activists who hate Christians, who embrace political violence to the point of celebrating the assassination of their political opponents, who have a problem with normal people saying normal things, and who were supposedly allowed to run amok under Biden. Most importantly, under their narrative, it is only with Trump that they can defeat this scary enemy. This narrative, of course, implicitly justifies every move made by Trump, no matter how authoritarian. However, the far-left that they describe are a small minority of society (and I’m living proof that not all trans people support them either!). In objective reality, the more important divide is between those who support Trump’s every move even as he gets more and more illiberal, versus those who still care to stand up for classical liberal values. MAGA influencers want to paint a picture of a battle between themselves and the far-left, to obscure the true nature of those who have concerns about Trump and the movement that supports him.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m no fan of the far-left, and my regular audience would know this very well. I believe it’s important that moderates, including the center-left, hold the far-left accountable, especially over their instigation of cancel culture and divisive ‘oppressor vs oppressed’ politics during the 2010s. Similarly, the few who celebrated Kirk’s assassination need to be condemned unequivocally. However, the far-left’s actions do not give license for the MAGA right to embrace illiberalism. Indeed, the two brands of illiberal politics are similar in one important way: they manufacture an objectively untrue narrative in order to further their illiberal politics. For the far-left it’s the theory about ‘interlocking systems of oppression’. For the MAGA right it is the battle between them and the far-left enemy, with no middle ground. Both are objectively untrue, and both are vehicles to justify an illiberal politics. Those who still believe in freedom really need to push back (in both directions).
Perhaps most importantly, if different political factions lived in their own constructed false reality, and refuse to acknowledge the objective truth, there would be no way people with different views can come together to have rational conversations again. It would be the final death of liberal democracy as we have known it. This was one of the biggest things that worried me in regards to the postmodern-inspired left. Now that the right is joining in, we have double the trouble, and half the chance of recovering from this disaster. The future might yet still be saved, but it’s time to work hard if we really want to save it.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Progressive Conservative Manifesto, the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series. She is also the author of her autobiography The TaraElla Story.
