Repost: For White Supremacists, Rules Are For Others
MAGA Hypocrisy Explained
Author’s Note: As the election fraud trial, People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump, proceeds in New York, I re-post an essay which seeks to explain the MAGA insistence that rules be strictly enforced on others but not on themselves.
I argue that this apparent hypocrisy is easily understood if conceived within MAGA’s Neo-Confederate, white supremacist conceptual framework.
The dehumanizing myth of racial difference endures today because we don’t talk about it. As the Trump trial and MAGA movement demonstrate, as long as we refuse to confront our racist past it will remain part of our present.
Shameless hypocrisy is baked into the MAGA brand. We need look no further than the recent House Oversight Subcommittee’s vote to hold Hunter Biden in Contempt of Congress for refusing to testify while he was seated in front of the Subcommittee in which three GOP members (Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and Andy Biggs) refused to answer their own January 6th Committee subpoenas.
The volume of hypocrisy is overwhelming, including taking credit for infrastructure they opposed and threatening to shut down the government for excessive spending while dropping $40,000 on lapel pins.
Such behavior seems to display a shocking lack of self-awareness. Further, while it is routinely called out, the MAGA congressmen seem to face few consequences for their duplicity.
What is going on here?
I suggest that those of us who are frustrated by MAGA hypocrisy without consequence are forgetting a key conceptual truth we learned during the Civil Rights Era: for white supremacists, rules are for other people and not for “real” Americans.
To illustrate, I offer the iconic image above, an angry white mob dumping ketchup and sugar on students of Tougaloo College who sat at a “Whites Only” Woolworth lunch counter in 1963.
For three hours, the group endured insults and attacks by an increasingly violent white mob. Tougaloo student Memphis Norman was physically thrown from his seat and kicked in the head as he lay on the floor. The rest of the white mob slapped the protesters, hit them with items from the lunch counter, and even burned cigarettes on their skin. Others dumped drinks on the protesters or laughed as others covered them in sugar, mustard, and ketchup.
Note the visceral hatred and total lack of human empathy by what was a cross-section of young whites. As they inflict violence and humiliation on peaceful diners, they are enforcing a code of behavior memorialized in “Jim Crow” laws, created, policed, and enforced by white supremacists as part of a clear racial hierarchy.
White supremacists are terrified of losing their place at the top of the racial class system. They are terrified that one day they will be at the mercy of those whom they have so shamelessly oppressed, those “others” who are not — who cannot ever be — as “American” as they.
The white mob in the 1963 photo would, of course, sit down at the Woolworth counter in Jackson and expect to be graciously served. They would regard it as their privilege in the natural order and it would never occur to them that enforcing it was in any way hypocritical.
If we apply this conceptual worldview to the MAGA hypocrisy of today, it is easily explained. MAGA has adopted the racial hierarchies of white supremacy and regard themselves as the “Real Americans” at the apex, entitled to create, police, and enforce rules which they themselves have no intention of following.
In their mind they are protecting their place in the hierarchy, violently if necessary (note the AR-15 in the American Eagle’s talons), from the “others” who seek to usurp them. Those “others” in 2024 are not college students at a diner but rather Democrats, socialists, communists, drag queens, or anyone “deranged” enough to challenge them.
In white supremacy, rules are for others.
Terrifying but dead on. "MAGA has adopted the racial hierarchies of white supremacy and regard themselves as the “Real Americans” at the apex, entitled to create, police, and enforce rules which they themselves have no intention of following."