MAGAReport for 12/3/24 - Bad Faith and Hunter Biden
Hunter has long been a bad-faith focus of the MAGA community, and that won't end with his pardon
The MAGA community, like all of us, is in an odd liminal state these days. They have spent the last 4 years in a victim mindset, raging about the 2020 election being stolen and following the hate topics that right-wing media fed them - drag story hours, trans women in sports, migrant crime, and, of course, Hunter Biden’s Laptop. Hunter has, in fact, become a perfect lens to look at a defining characteristic of the MAGA movement: bad faith engagement.
If you have been lucky enough to have missed the details, Wikipedia has good articles on the laptop controversy and the Biden-Ukraine Conspiracy Theory. As is common in the MAGA community, evidence against the conspiracy theory did not make it go away. They celebrated when Hunter was convicted of gun charges earlier this year. They vowed to keep going after him for the crimes at the heart of the conspiracy theory once the Trump justice apparatus is in place.
Skip ahead to a few days ago when Joe Biden gave Hunter a blanket pardon despite earlier promises that he would not. This has been the hot topic of discussion on MAGA forums. There are three main points that have emerged from their dialogue:
Pardons show that President Biden is corrupt.
This gives Trump a green light to pardon all Jan 6 defendants.
People who backed President Biden’s previous promise not to pardon Hunter should be humiliated.
One could make a variation of any of these points from a good faith perspective, but that’s not what’s happening here. If Trump were exercising this power and pardoned a family member, the MAGA fans would celebrate and mock any anti-Trump comments about corruption. Trump has already promised to pardon all the Jan 6th defendants, so President Biden’s actions here don’t matter much. And when Trump changes his position on something, they move easily with him, laughing at anyone who expects consistency from them.
A stark difference between the MAGA faithful and many on the left is that liberals value ideological consistency, sometimes to a fault. But criticisms about consistency are utterly useless against Trump and MAGA because the far right does not value it. MAGAs will use inconsistencies - even intentional misrepresentations that make something appear inconsistent - to mock the other side, but only because they care about scoring points.
This nihilistic, truth agnostic worldview is one of the hardest things to explain about MAGA to people on the outside. It is threaded through every discussion and interaction. That, combined with a desire to belittle their opponents, leads to a pattern of bad faith interaction. There is no action someone can take on the left that is good; MAGA will twist it into something problematic without actually caring about what was done and while excusing anyone on their own side who has done the same thing. For me, it emphasizes why conversation with the far right is rarely useful for connecting. You can learn about what they think, but they are unlikely to try to understand you back.
There are no plans for rallies or demonstrations coming, but as always, I will let you know if that changes.