The "MAGA Fluid" can't avoid choosing a binary civic gender

You're either MAGA or not-MAGA, my fellow GOPers. It's a binary choice; so I can't and won't give you any affirming care.

Choosing — yet again — to inflict a deteriorating, revenge-obsessed, 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities means inflicting — yet again — a deteriorating, revenge-obsessed, 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities.

I am surrounded in Lakeland, Florida these days by folks who have made this choice multiple times already, who pretend they’re in downcast denial about the self-evident facts of making that choice yet again, especially post January 6th. They’re pretending to believe that choosing to make a MAGA dictatorship and give it the nuclear codes and Department of Justice does not mean making a MAGA dictatorship and giving it the nuclear codes and Department of Justice.

But they know it does — while refusing to admit it. Essentially every civic conversation I have with them — and I have many — goes like this:

Them: How dare you tell me I am the type of person who inflicts a deteriorating 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon and sex abuser and his MAGA hordes on my friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities. How dare you tell me I’ll make a MAGA dictatorship and give it the nuclear codes and the Department of Justice.

Me: Because you are. Because you did; Because you do — and you will. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Them: Why are you so mean?

Longing to be something other than what they do

These folks are longing for a civic identity — a civic gender, you might say — that is something other than MAGA or non-MAGA. Call them the MAGA Fluid. They seem think their non-binary longing entitles them to some affirming care by non-MAGAs. It does not.

Most of the MAGA Fluids in November, without any ambiguity, will freely choose MAGA as their civic gender. Most MAGA Fluids will freely choose to end the basic, flawed, aspirational, pretty successful 250-year American experiment in self-government. Most MAGA Fluids will choose to turn the nuclear codes and Department of Justice over to a fake revenge-obsessed, deteriorating 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA Freaks.

The MAGA Fluid cannot even articulate why they are freely choosing to toss out 250 years of American efforts at self-government as casually as a Trump wife. But their half-muttered excuse will be some racist lie about non-MAGAs that Susie Wiles feeds them.

The MAGA Fluid don’t want the MAGA Freaks, including Trump and DeSantis, to win, exactly. But they don’t want openly non-MAGA normal people to win more. That would mean admitting we’re right and they’re wrong — morally, intellectually, civically, economically. And we have been all along. See forced birth as an example. That would mean all of this has been a terrible waste, which it has.

To avoid that admission, they will pretend to believe we libs suck and ruin their lives and country clubs with our godless Communist cat lady vaginas … or something. And they will blame us for trying to hold a thoroughly criminal president accountable as the criminal they know he is, while Tyreek Hill had it coming.

The 2024 MAGA Fluid excuse boils down to this:

You all just have it coming. Don’t ask me why, specifically. You just do, dirty lib. Just by existing, you made me impose a deteriorating 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his MAGA horde on everyone. And I’m really mad at you for that. You made me give MAGA the nuclear codes. It’s your fault.

But it is not our fault, which they already know.

Do not deadname the MAGA Fluid

The MAGA civil war against America the MAGA Fluid enthusiastically joined in 2015 was not, is not, in any way, the fault of the neighbors and fellow citizens the MAGA Fluid freely chose to help invade. Fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the MAGA Fluid, which they know.

Without the MAGA Fluid, MAGA freaks like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Greene and Kash Patel and Roger Stone and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and Rick Nolte get nowhere near power.

That’s why, when MAGA Fluids encounter genuine non-MAGAs like me in real life, they generally kill us with strategic personal kindness designed to pre-empt any personal discomfort they might feel in our presence over their personal guilt in the MAGA civil war they’re continuing to wage against us. I never feel warred against in my person-to-person experience with the MAGA Fluid. They prefer their war happen at a personal distance. One MAGA Fluid recently pointed to the fact we both voted for the excellent Blair Allen as 10th Circuit Public Defender as evidence of some shared civic value system. As if voting for the obviously better candidate in a local race is a mutual accommodation, rather than a choice made in basic self-interest.

This dumb happy dance will continue, whatever happens in November. Don’t confuse it for peace.

The MAGA Fluid who choose MAGA will wake up the next day, put an aggressively cheerful face, and pretend they didn’t freely choose — yet again — to inflict a deteriorating 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on our friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities. They will act as if we don’t both know what they’ve done. And they will continue to lie to themselves — and to us — to pretend that choosing that dictatorship of MAGA Freaks doesn’t matter at home, at the community and neighborhood level. They will pretend like it hasn’t mattered greatly already — for a decade.

If they “win,” they will absolutely close their eyes and ears to any human consequence their “victory” causes. We know this because they’ve done it already for a decade.

And then they will deadname themselves as normal, responsible non-MAGAs who never joined any MAGA civil war. They just have minor abstract “political” differences with the friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities on whom they chose, yet again, to inflict a deteriorating 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of abusive MAGA Freaks.

They’ll demand we deadname them, too.

Sorry, MAGA Fluids. I don’t deadname people — even when they ask me to. I’ll call you by the name you’ve chosen.

Can’t take the L; so national suicide is the only option

I promise everyone this: the MAGA Fluid are tired of the stupid, grinding Groundhog Day experience of the MAGA civil war they launched against America a decade ago. They’re just as tired as the vermin and the dirty libs and the non-MAGAs — more tired, I suspect, because they’re responsible for it.

Indeed, I think most MAGA Fluids are both planning to choose the MAGA dictatorship and hoping the non-MAGAs bail them out by defeating it.

It’s the same dynamic as the forced birthers who are seemingly silently rooting for the Florida abortion amendment to pass and let them off the moral hook for driving up abortions and harm for women with their cowardly, systemically shambolic cruelty. See Jennifer Canady.

Moreover, the MAGA Freaks often turn on their MAGA Fluid “allies” much harder than they do us non-MAGAs. See Lake Wales Charter Schools, which MAGA Freaks are gleefully destroying with impunity. See Saga Stevin in the 2021 Lakeland mayor’s race, in which we non-MAGAs saved the MAGA Fluid from the MAGA Freaks. We do that quite a bit, with no real reciprocation or respect, ever, from the MAGA Fluid.

And that’s fine. We non-MAGAS have become accustomed to aggressive moral, insurgent self-defense in the last decade. We’re beginning to win the MAGA civil war on the ground, socially, and at the community level, even in Florida. That’s why the real MAGAs aren’t having “lock them up” fun anymore. We non-MAGAs have kicked them in the teeth quite a bit while the MAGA Fluid hid in their personal bunkers of weakness.

When it’s in their narrow interests, when it elevates them, the MAGA Fluid will quietly help non-MAGAs kick the MAGA Freaks in the teeth. MAGA Freaks know this. Thus, Trump ‘24 is a purely spiteful alliance of people who despise each other and knife each other for petty power. It’s MAGA’s Battle of the Bulge, a final risk everything offensive to accomplish … what, exactly? Increase abortion and harm women even more the fake pro-life movement already has?

The MAGA Fluid certainly have no answer to that question of purpose; and they don’t really want to take part in this miserable MAGA offensive on American self-government. And yet …

Their sense of personal identity will not let the MAGA Fluid do the one thing they know they have to do to restore some sense of decent civic normalcy and end the cruel war they started in 2015, accelerated with January 6th, and are allowing to continue with varying levels of enthusiasm/misery.

To avoid doing that one thing, most of them will choose to attempt national murder-suicide rather than end their war honorably, which requires an implicit (not even explicit) admission of wrongdoing. They generally lack the strength to take the moral L even with themselves.

As William Faulkner once wrote:

What sets a man writhing sleepless in bed at night is not having injured his fellow so much as having been wrong; the mere injury he can efface by destroying the victim and the witness but the mistake is his and that is one of his cats which he always prefers to choke to death with butter.

We normal decent non-MAGAs are no match for this tortured psychology. So we’re at the mercy of the MAGA Fluids, who are the most important factor in whether MAGA (and American self-government) lives or dies.

They’re much more important than the addled “true believer” MAGA Freaks. The MAGA Fluids could have stopped MAGA and its freaks years ago. They chose not to. They chose to join them.

No persuading

I’ve seen no evidence whatsoever in the last decade we can reason even the best of the MAGA Fluids — the Bill Mutzes and Rob Arturis and Wesley Barnetts of our community — into choosing civic conscience over vague identity at a state and national level. (Much less Sheriff Grady Judd, the ultimate, and not best, MAGA Fluid.) It would have happened by now if we could. They always find a reason not to be reasoned. Believe me; I’ve tried, publicly and privately. I’m well-acquainted with the limits of my persuasive capabilities.

I’ve picked those three Lakeland names because I know and like these men — and because of the archetypes of MAGA Fluid manhood (a focus of mine these days) they represent. Respectively: deeply kind, personally-committed, anti-racist, serious Christian business/civic leader; thoughtful police officer-turned-institutional executive; well-meaning scion of great capital wealth, trying to be a good local citizen.

If those segments of our society had shown public leadership in crushing the MAGA civil war, rather then enthusiastically joining it, our shared community life — not to mention our shared American life — would feel quite different — and better — today. If Grady Judd had treated MAGA like the criminal-dominated movement it is, well … nevermind.

In Lakeland Mayor Bill Mutz’s case, MAGA Freaks on January 6th tried to lynch his family friend Mike Pence. Then MAGA Freaks and literal criminals slandered his family and parenting in the 2021 mayor’s race. And yet … even that can’t prompt Lakeland’s most popular and influential political leader to publicly renounce MAGA.

Any one of those three fine men are welcome to correct me publicly if I’ve slandered them here with their assumed MAGA Fluid status. If any of them want to publicly join me in choosing a clear anti-MAGA civic identity, I will publicly platform them with great joy.

That offer goes for any MAGA Fluid wants to publicly renounce the MAGA civil war. Don’t tell me in private. Tell your friends and family and congregations in public. Join me in the open — not on the downlow where you have no influence and face no risk from MAGA Freaks.

Alas, I find that MAGA Fluidity is a deep emotional and psychological question of identity that non-MAGAs cannot answer for the MAGA Fluid.

That is why I spend much time talking to them and making this psychology as painful for them as I can possibly make it. As a non-MAGA, with no moral qualms about my identity, making MAGA Fluidity feel worse for the MAGA Fluid than it does for me is my primary strategy of self-defense.

The ensuing personal stresses on relationships that I value are just the costs of fighting a non-violent civil war of existence — which I did not start or want — against aggressive invaders of my space, many of who claim to like and/or pray for me.

More importantly, those stresses are the cost of trying to protect people more vulnerable than me — in my own community — from the MAGA civil war against them.

It’s the cost of serving Team Vermin.

Leave it blank, MAGA Fluid. It’s your only non-binary shot at some sort of “they” status

What I most value about elections is that they force clear, unambiguous choices. The MAGA Freak dictatorship choice before us is the clearest and most obviously one-sided choice in the history of American self-government. Everyone knows this. The fact that the vote will be close on something so obvious says more about Americans than it does about the choice we face. MAGA doesn’t even have a fake economic or border argument to make.

I mean, at the most elemental level, I would be proud to call Kamala Harris friend, aunt, wife, mother, boss, co-worker Kiwanis Club president, mayor, minister. I would be disgusted and embarrassed to call the deteriorating 78-year-old MAGA dictator friend, uncle, husband, father, boss, Kiwanis Club president, mayor, minister.

And so would you, MAGA Fluids, on both accounts. You know this; and I won’t pretend for your sake that you don’t.

MAGA Freaks — the most ardent of which (contrary to what one of my regular “populist” commenters imagines) hang out with their inherited capital at Lone Palm or Grasslands or whatever country club J.D. Alexander haunts in his resentment of having everything (and nothing) — will cast spitefully enthusiastic votes on the wrong side of the obvious MAGA referendum. Lesser MAGA Freaks like Ed Shoemaker and Saga Stevin and J.C. Martin know their gross identity as clearly as I know mine. But they’re not enough, even coupled with the J.D. Alexander MAGAs of the world, to sustain the MAGA civil war.

So it comes down to you, MAGA Fluid. You possess the power to determine the fate of the country in 2024; I don’t. Again, I know the limits of my persuasive capabilities.

My only suggestion, if you can’t summon the courage to make the binary choice between MAGA and non-MAGA, is to leave your ballot blank. Leave yourself uncounted on the question of inflicting a deteriorating 78-year-old Capitol lynch mob inciting felon sex abuser and his horde of MAGA freaks on your friends, loved ones, neighbors, fellow citizens, and communities. Leave yourself uncounted on giving the nuclear codes and Department of Justice to a dictatorship of MAGA Freaks you didn’t want to run Lakeland.

Leaving yourselves uncounted would be a fittingly weak final act for your role in waging the MAGA civil war. But it might help end it.

It’s all on the MAGA Fluid

I find great peace in knowing myself morally and intellectually. I find great peace in choosing the obviously correct side of massive historical forces that I cannot control. These are easy decisions to make for someone who likes himself.

I feel no dread. No lamentation. No doubts about my identity. I won’t wake up November 6 having to fake or pretend anything. I will wake up with self-respect.

And I would share that with all my fellow non-MAGAs.

We are personally blameless for the MAGA civil war launched against us in 2015 and accelerated on Jan. 6. There is nothing any of us of the non-MAGA civic gender could have done to prevent the MAGA Fluid from choosing the MAGA Freaks, starting in 2015, and then again after Jan. 6, to bring us to this moment. Nothing. We know this because we tried everything except submission.

So if nothing else, my fellow dirty libs and vermin and non-MAGAs, allow yourselves to shed the burden of any personal responsibility for this moment. You have none. I think that’s why Biden’s retirement lifted such a weight from so many people. His personal frailty in presentation was a nagging reason to blame ourselves, as libs and non-MAGAs and vermin are too apt to do.

But it’s the MAGA Fluids who have been and remain catastrophically, world-alteringly wrong; and they know it. Nonetheless, most of them will run from their Groundhog Day shadows yet again. Most of them will condemn everyone — themselves included — to at least four more years of a MAGA civil war they don’t even want. Most of the MAGA Fluid will choose a national murder-suicide attempt rather than admit to themselves what they’re responsible for in the last decade. (Most of them supported the Iraq War, too.)

But only most of them.

Some will actually summon the strength to end the cruel, selfish MAGA civil war against their neighbors. I don’t know who. And to be bleakly, bluntly honest, I don’t know a single MAGA Fluid who has flipped to non-MAGA publicly yet. But some will when they’re alone with ballot and conscience.

I, for one, will welcome them back to normalcy and look forward to sharing a society fairly with them — without erasing history.

But will *enough* MAGA Fluid finally choose non-MAGA to end the MAGA civil war?

That’s the Nov. 5 question that matters most; and it’s entirely in the hands of the MAGA Fluid — of the Bill Mutzes, the Rob Arturis, the Wesley Barnetts, the Grady Judds.

Non-MAGAs can beat the MAGA Fluid/MAGA Freak alliance, as 2020 proved, by overwhelming them with turnout. But to truly end the MAGA civil war and create a shared future, the MAGA Fluid have to pick a the decent non-MAGA civic gender. Otherwise the war just grinds on, even with President Harris. The presidential election, in and of itself, isn’t the war.

See Florida, where the MAGA Fluid and the MAGA Freaks have conspired to create and sustain America’s most corrupt and inept state government.

Florida’s MAGA Fluid/MAGA Freak alliance is crippling and/or pillaging vital state (Ben Sasse was sooo MAGA Fluid) and local institutions and public lands; terrorizing innocent people with personal dictator “election police,” and making it impossible to live here if you’re not born with wealth. All this grifting and more will continue until the MAGA Fluid pick a non-MAGA civic gender. Breaking with gross old Trump isn’t enough; and it never has been.

So yes, this is all on you, MAGA Fluids.

This is your psychodrama to resolve, not mine. If you resolve it decisively, with a long-last moment of decency, I will quietly celebrate that day. But I don’t need to prepare for it. It will just be — peaceful, restful, hopeful.

I will get to focus more of my free time in the years to come on something other than the morally aggressive protection of my citizenship and the vulnerable people of my community from the vicious, pointless grifting and inhumanity of the last decade’s MAGA Freak/MAGA Fluid alliance.

Perhaps, MAGA Fluid, we can actually collaborate productively and openly to strengthen our communities without having to pretend you’re not at war with much of your community — because you actually won’t be.

By contrast, if we wake up November 6th in a second Trumpian shit show, because the MAGA Fluid chose — yet again — to impose a 78-year-old deteriorating felon with no impulse control and give him the nuclear codes, with a sociopathic cat-lady-hating toady at his side attempting to implement Project 2025, I will be needed — to protect my community again from the consequences of MAGA Fluid cowardice.

So I’m preparing for that — to make you own, every day, every moment of chaos and pointless civil war you were too weak to stop. You’ll own it all. And you hate owning unpleasant things, MAGA Fluid. It’s my only real weapon for shaping your behavior. I’ll keep using it; because I certainly will not submit meekly to your national murder-suicide attempt. The key word in that phrase is attempt.

The alternative to all this unpleasantness is just easy reconciliation — something the MAGA Fluids and MAGA Freaks alike know that I can always rise to because I never stop talking to them.

I’m ready either way. It’s your choice now, MAGA Fluids.

And it’s binary.