Tom Byers
2 min readMay 30, 2024

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Thank you for engaging. 🤠 Your question deserves a thoughtful reply.

MAGA is not a political party. It's a social disease. One unhealthy strand of it is to dismiss most accusations of racism as snowflake oversensitivity. One of its chief recruitment methods is to support people who feel they've been unjustly accused of racism. Eight of ten MAGA hatters would ridicule my responses to bigotry and reject my conclusion that avoiding Blacks is racist.

Some MAGA hatters are Democrats who voted for Trump and plan to vote for him again. I know these people personally. Nonetheless, MAGAism is obviously afflicting the other party way more heavily. It may, tragically, ruin the party of my parents despite resistance from a minority of courageous people like Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, George Will, Joe Scarborough, David Frum, David Brooks, my father, and other conservatives I've long respected.

Staying silent in the face of MAGAism would be immoral. Speaking out against it is morally good. The movement is nowhere near as toxic as Naziism in late 1930s Germany, but it's close to Naziism in the early 1920s.

I'm condemning MAGAism, not MAGA people or even Nazis for that matter. I agree with Trump that there are fine people on both sides . I take that as a general rule. For instance, the Israelis and Palestinians murdering one another's children are good people. I don't believe in bad people. Our shared depravity does not reach all the way to the core.

Oh dear, this long reply was hard to edit. I only got rid of maybe three dozen words and then added almost as many back in. 🤯 I'll wrap up by recommending the anti-MAGA book Losing Our Religion by our fellow Christian, Russell Moore.

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Tom Byers
Tom Byers

Written by Tom Byers

Seeking and often finding sacred love, peace, joy, confidence, and gratitude.

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