I posted this yesterday. I gave it to some, directly. But it seems to be too much for some to read an article and this is stunning information, it is important details about how we got this nightmare Trump/MaGA government today.
Maybe, just maybe this will help, but it's only the surface. I highly recommend reading Heather Cox Richardson's Letters From An American on Substack, where I also reside now.
This is her piece on Substack that is similar to the podcast that got me all fired up on this. “History exposes MaGA: a movement built on denial, not precedent.” - August 20, 2025 - by Heather Cox Richardson
This is the Pod Save America episode that amazed me so much, she doesn't really get going on what I'm concerned with here until about seventeen or so minutes in: Heather Cox Richardson on Donald Trump, MaGA and How We Fight Back. I get it for some, Pod Save America and Crooked Media are pretty liberal, too liberal for some. But everyone should hear this episode and just skip to wherever she is talking. Honestly, deal with it just listen to the entire thing, it's not THAT long and not that liberal orientated as the usual Pod Save America podcasts.
Someone else I should give a shoutout to on Substack (there's a few, but for now...) Mary Geddry.
This is what 9/11 should always mean to us: honoring the lives lost, the courage of first responders, and the resilience of families forever changed. It was a moment when Americans of every background stood together, however briefly, in grief and resolve.
But what makes the lies and distortions from Trump and MaGA...so desperate for power they embraced QAnon fantasies to prop up their cause...so corrosive is how completely they betray this spirit. Instead of unity, they spread denial. Instead of truth, they invent enemies. And instead of learning from history, they weaponize it for power...dragging down our Constitution, our freedoms, and America’s reputation with them.
Trump himself spread falsehoods about 9/11:
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He claimed “thousands in New Jersey cheered” as the towers fell — no evidence supports this.
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He claimed he “predicted 9/11” in his 2000 book — he did not.
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He claimed he sent “200 workers to Ground Zero” — no proof this ever happened.
These weren’t slips of memory; they were part of a pattern. Deny facts. Inflate the self. Invent enemies. MaGA has built its politics on this same foundation of lies and grievance, and that is the ultimate insult to the memory of 9/11.
Anyway, in the hope this might make someone read her piece or listen to that podcast, I made a timeline to give you the idea of why this is so interesting, and important to know about. But this only scratches the surface, she will go into it all much deeper with more interrelationships.
From Military.com: Fear and Uncertainty Followed the Sept. 11 Attacks. What Was Real and What Was a Good Headline?
The main point is that we must come back together as a nation, as a democracy, not as Trump’s toxic, hijacked GOP, but as a cohesive people grounded in truth, decency, liberty, real freedom, and conscience, as our Founding Fathers actually intended.
How MaGA Was Allowed to Fester: A Timeline of Denial
When Heather Cox Richardson wrote that MaGA is “a movement built on denial, not precedent,” she wasn’t talking about something born in 2016. She was pointing to a much longer arc in American history. What we’re living through today has deep roots, going back to Reconstruction and resurfacing at key moments whenever democracy expanded to include more voices.
This is the story of how that denial metastasized into the MaGA movement we know now.
Reconstruction: The Birth of Denial (1865–1870s)
After the Civil War, Black men and poor white men voted for leaders who promised schools, hospitals, prosthetics for veterans, and railroads. It was a vision of government as a tool for public good.
Former Confederates hated it. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited racial discrimination in voting, and the Department of Justice began prosecuting the Ku Klux Klan. But elite Southerners pivoted: instead of arguing against Black rights openly, they claimed these voters were ushering in “socialism.” Building schools and hospitals, they said, meant stealing tax dollars from hardworking whites.
To counter this vision of government for all, they romanticized the cowboy — a myth of rugged independence and racial dominance that conveniently ignored how much the West relied on federal aid.
The Liberal Consensus and Its Enemies (1930s–1950s)
The Depression and World War II created a broad “liberal consensus”: government should regulate business, provide a safety net, and support global cooperation. Most Americans, including Southerners, embraced this.
But some wealthy businessmen despised it. They wanted deregulation and lower taxes, but their rhetoric didn’t take hold until civil rights cracked the consensus.
Civil Rights and the Southern Strategy (1954–1968)
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Eisenhower’s defense of Black students in Little Rock (1957) gave segregationists their opening. Federal protection of equal rights became “socialism.”
The cowboy myth resurfaced with Barry Goldwater in 1964, South Carolina delivering the final push for his nomination. By 1965, the Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voters. That gave parties a choice: court these new voters or their opponents. Nixon chose the latter. His “Southern Strategy” courted white supremacists, planting seeds of today’s Republican base.
The Culture Wars and Reagan’s “Welfare Queen” (1970s–1980s)
Facing declining popularity, Nixon demonized feminists and racial minorities. Ronald Reagan doubled down, claiming minorities and women were bankrupting the nation. His infamous “welfare queen” symbolized this attack — a fictional Black woman supposedly living large off taxpayers.
By this point, Republicans had reframed federal programs as handouts for undeserving groups, while championing tax cuts and deregulation for the wealthy.
Delegitimizing Democracy (1990s–2000s)
As women and minorities leaned Democratic, right-wing media blasted them as socialists. After the Motor Voter Act (1993), Republicans increasingly claimed Democrats relied on fraud to win elections.
In 2000, GOP operatives rioted in Florida to stop a recount that might have given Al Gore the presidency. The Supreme Court handed the victory to George W. Bush, further normalizing the idea that Republican power should be preserved at any cost.
The Obama Era and Structural Manipulation (2008–2010s)
Barack Obama’s election was a breaking point. Republicans launched Operation REDMAP (2010) to gerrymander statehouses and lock in control of Congress.
The Supreme Court’s Citizens United (2010) decision unleashed unlimited corporate money into politics. In 2013, the Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, removing key protections for minority voters.
The pattern was clear: if expanding democracy hurt Republican power, the solution was not persuasion but suppression.
Trump and “Stop the Steal” (2016–2020)
Donald Trump built his brand on delegitimizing elections. Even before 2016, Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website. A judge had to stop him from intimidating voters.
When Trump lost in 2020, he weaponized that rhetoric into an assault on democracy itself. Fox News hosts admitted privately the fraud claims were false, but pushed them anyway — because outrage meant ratings.
MaGA Today: Confederacy Rebranded (2020s–2025)
In just forty years, Republicans moved from disagreeing with Democratic policies to declaring Democrats illegitimate, to rigging elections, and finally to openly attacking democracy itself.
Gerrymandered maps now guarantee white minority rule in places like Texas, where it takes 445,000 white voters to elect a member of Congress, but 1.4 million Latino or 2 million Black voters to achieve the same.
Trump’s message — that history overstates slavery’s horrors, and that women and minorities must be pushed from the public sphere — is the same argument Confederates made to defend oligarchy over democracy. MaGA is simply the latest mask.
Closing Reflection
MaGA did not appear out of thin air. It is the culmination of more than 150 years of backlash against the idea of multiracial democracy. Each time America expanded its promise of equality, reactionaries branded it “socialism,” resurrected the myth of rugged white individualism, and worked to suppress the voices of those who demanded more.
History shows us this movement isn’t precedent. It’s denial. And denial, left unchecked, has a way of festering into something that threatens the very core of democracy.
Charlie Kirk’s murder does not make him a martyr—despite President Trump’s attempt to sanctify him with talk of a posthumous Medal of Freedom, a travesty for both America and democracy. Nor does it erase the toxic role he played in elevating Trump’s brand of anti-democratic denial into the mainstream. Like Trump, Kirk thrived on division, grievance, and the embrace of authoritarian myths that corrode the very foundations of our republic.
To watch Republicans now twist his death into an indictment of liberals for daring to name fascism for what it is is to see, again, the very denial Heather Cox Richardson warns us about: a refusal to confront the movement’s own legacy of extremism. If America is to pull itself forward, it won’t be by sanctifying those who helped drag us into this nightmare, but by facing the history, understanding how denial metastasized into MaGA, and recommitting to the democratic promise Kirk and his allies worked so hard to undermine.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
