Manning: MAGA Transcends Left and Right Wing Labels and It’s Our Only Hope

Well here we are in 2026.

The entire left wants to obliterate “whiteness” and everything associated with it (particularly Western civilization, which is their real target anyway). That appears to mostly include white people themselves, and strangely enough by whites themselves who are certain that for their lifetimes their money and privilege will protect them.

The extreme right, on the other hand, wants to eradicate all non-white influences in the United States. They too want Western culture displaced because it finds its beginnings with the Greeks (who they might grudgingly accept) and even earlier the Jooooos (who they hate more than any other minority).

So where does that leave us — MAGA, traditional Americans, evangelicals, and normies? It leaves us perhaps irreducibly and uncomfortably in the liberal camp.

I know. I dry-heaved for an hour after realizing it.

Gross as that corrupted version of the term “liberal” is, it’s fitting here. We MAGA and normie Americans desperately want lives liberated of the ancient evils — tyranny, exploitation of the poor by those in power, multi-tiered justice, and hatred on the basis of genetics or appearance.

For a while, America made some incredible progress, but as we retreat from the 1990s and the End of History, the old evils are coming back — particularly hatred based on genetics and appearance. The extermination of whiteness comprises a massive amount of the left side of the political spectrum. The excision of all things non-white comprises a larger portion of the right side of the spectrum than it has in decades.

There are complex reasons for all of this, but I keep going back to a discussion from Star Trek of all things.

The scene is a bar during a brutal war. On one side are the humanoids we’re used to in Star Trek — you know, humans and the aliens that somehow always have two arms, two legs, and one head. On the other is a vast race of shapeshifters who are basically puddles of goo in their natural form. Both sides historically persecuted and exploited each other.

The bartender is chatting with the only shapeshifter on the humanoids’ side, who is experiencing bigotry.

Bartender: “You’re smart enough to know that people don’t want to be reminded that you’re different. Who wants to see somebody turn into goo?”

Shapeshifter: “Why shouldn’t I?”

Bartender: “Don’t you get it? We humanoids are a product of millions of years of evolution. Our ancestors learned the hard way that what you don’t know might kill you. They wouldn’t have survived if they hadn’t have jumped back when they encountered a snake coiled in the muck. And now millions of years later, that instinct is still there. It’s genetic. Our tolerance to other lifeforms doesn’t extend beyond the two arm, two leg variety. I hate to break this to you, but when you’re in your natural state, you’re more than our poor old genes can handle.”

Sitting here at 3:30 a.m., having sifted through the ravings of a trans Nazi madman who earlier today shot his family at a hockey arena and who the media and Democrats are 100 percent certain to dishonestly try linking to MAGA, I’m depressedly wondering if ol’ Quark the Deep Space Nine bartender was right. What if appearance is more or less fatalistic?

Cultures are more or less sets of rules for how the game of life is played. Cultures develop among people who are close to each other geographically. For whatever reason, human genetics are such that over generations, separate breeding groups produce offspring with lots of disparate traits. That’s how we have pale people with straight blond hair in the Netherlands and dark people with coily hair in Uganda.

And it turns out that due to the vast distance between the Netherlands and Uganda, different rules for life were developed in each place. In other words, different cultures came to be. And that has happened a thousand different ways at different levels across thousands of years and more than 50 million square miles of land.

For better or worse, the easiest marker we humans have for quickly identifying whether someone plays by the same rules we do is whether or not they look like us. After that it’s whether or not they sound like us — language, dialect, and then accent.

Assessing whether someone plays by the same rules is vitally important because if you run into someone and don’t know the rules they play by, a mistake can be deadly. As our DS9 bartender Quark said, “Our ancestors learned the hard way that what you don’t know might kill you… and [those who are markedly different] are more than our poor old genes can handle.”

Instinctively race is fundamental. Fighting back against that instinct is a small-L liberal exercise. By the 1990s, racism had reached a nadir no one in history could have imagined. It wasn’t gone, but it was on its way out in America. That was a product of the small-L liberal project of America — to realize the truth that all men are created equal.

But the 90s had something that the 2020s don’t – a largely intact, widely d Western American culture. See, if you the same culture with someone, it doesn’t matter what they look like, which makes getting past race much easier.

Think about being a football fan. It’s freezing outside, the snow has been coming down for hours. You’re bundled up in your team’s colors, on your team’s side, and kickoff is five minutes away.

A guy of another race plops down next to you. He’s wearing the same colors. In fact, he’s wearing a jersey with the same number you’ve got on your jersey. In his hand is a beer. You look down and realize your beer could use a refill. He has nachos with him, the kissing cousin of the hotdog you just polished off. You start talking about your team, its strengths, its weaknesses, its history.

You disagree on some of the ownership’s decisions, but that only makes your conversation more fun. You both boil with rage when you think of your team’s ancient rival — those jerks who stole that playoff game from you two decades earlier on a bad last second call by the refs.

After the final whistle, you both get up to leave. You car stops just as you’re about to pull onto the interstate for your ride home. A minute later a truck pulls up behind you. It’s your new buddy, offering you a hand or a ride, whichever you need.

Your d culture regarding a football team wholly overcame the visible, ancient racial differences between you. That’s one of the key functions of culture — it unites across traditional boundaries.

After 9/11, the fragmentation of American culture exploded. We won’t go into all of it. Suffice it to say that a suicidal desire on the part of big-L Liberal (progressive) Americans frantically welcomed in Islam to prove that they’re nice people. Obama’s entrance brought Critical Race Theory to the fore (it had lurked in law schools going back to the 80s) and laid the foundations for DEI and ESG. Political opportunists used Obama’s race to defend him, casting all critics as racists. And the New Atheists continued to hammer away at faith in public and private.

A shatter pattern shot through the glass of our once unified Western/American culture, creating infinite weak spots for intersectionality to push through and balkanize Americans. We were no longer all men created equal. We were straight, gay, female, cis, black, lesbian, sighted, disabled, abled, autistic, male, diabetic, neurodivergent, 2-spirit, and skoliosexuals — yes that is a real term.

Now here we sit. At each other’s throats because the bonds of that common culture have been critically degraded by decades of constant attack. And without that culture, what do we have to work with but the most ancient tool there is — appearance, more technically known as race. The truth is, that’s humanity’s natural state.

Another truth is that America’s goal was to overcome that. Not just anyone can be German, English, Chinese, or Congolese. But anyone could become an American.

The only hope to reposition race as incidental instead of fundamental — to stop appearance from being fatalistic — is to embrace America’s version of Western culture. That’s the only way to a colorblind society where judgement is based on the content of character, not the color of skin.

So what’s our best hope of getting to that small-l liberal, uniquely American society? That’s easy. It’s MAGA and normie Americans.

We’re not leftists — we neither hate whites nor want totalitarianism. We’re also not right-ists — we don’t hate non-whites and want authoritarianism. We love America and want our constitutional republic. We want freedom, independence, basic Christian values, judges who punish bad guys, elections that are safe, and no perverts messing with our kids. And we welcome anybody else who agrees.

We’re not lefties or righties. In the greatest plot twist ever, it turns out we — MAGA — are the liberals. An America made great again is the world’s only hope to create true equality and secure true freedom.

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