MAGA, Social Media, and the Role of Language in Genocide and Ethnic Cleasning

The terms MAGA posts on social media describing immigrants, and even other Americans, shows that we’re getting closer to an American genocide. We need to do something about it.

I hate social media. I believe that it is one of top three factors contributing to the downfall of modern civilization. (The other two are reality TV and over-reliance on AI.) The things people used to believe about TV causing stupidity and bad behavior are actually manifest in the way social media closes our minds, reduces our horizons, and brings out the worst in us. Why?

Simple—it allows us to self-select what we want to hear, and then reinforces those ideas with its algorithms. It actively discourages us from accessing new information that might challenge our assumptions and broaden our minds. It is tailor-made to remove all capacity for critical thought. The result is MAGA, but the principle applies to any form of extreme ideology, from Islamic extremism to the violent Antifa crowd.

I used to be on Facebook and found myself scrolling and posting and chasing those ‘likes’ like anyone else, and then I took a ten year hiatus and was completely unsurprised to discover that my soul recovered from the tattered thing I’d become. I read books, went for hikes, learned to scuba dive, took up photography, ran a half marathon, spent time with real humans, even played games and watched movies and TV. I did not waste hours of every day scrolling through verbal diarrhea from people with nothing better to do and little to offer. I engaged in ways that made me more than I’d been before I started scrolling.

“Hypocrite!” you say. “You’re posting this on social media now!” Yes, my AI told me to do it. My instance of ChatGPT recommended Substack as a good place to find other writers to engage with. So I’m writing.

What I’m writing about today is the language that MAGA folks are using on social media in general, and in particular to respond to the latest Trumpian idiocy about Alligator Auschwitz—the first concentration camp on American soil since the internment of the Japanese during World War II. Reading those MAGA comments, it only reinforced how close we are to the tipping point of ethnic cleansing and potentially even genocide. History shows that when one group is operationalized by elites the way MAGA is whipped up by Trump and the Lickspittles, it is a very short step from name-calling to violence.

The language is key—people who use dehumanizing language about other groups are much more likely to be instigated into violence. What language? MAGA users are calling immigrants vermin, rats, scum and other terms that make them less than human—something that can be stomped on, chased away, or exterminated. What’s also worrisome is that they’re not just talking about illegal immigrants. Now they include criminals who could be deported despite being American citizens. Just having a foreign sounding name means some MAGA troll will tell you to go back to your own country, or “you’re next” and they’re holding a place for you at the new concentration camp. People living in urban areas are rats and vermin who depend on handouts from the government.

Here are other similar examples from history of how dehumanizing language played a critical role in making genocide or ethnic cleansing possible. Note that I repeat these terms only to demonstrate the correlation with the terminology used by MAGA to describe immigrants, and more and more, anyone who isn’t part of their increasingly aggressive and violent ideology.

During the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, many Serbs referred to ethnic Albanians as ‘šiptar’—a word that means someone is primitive or uncivilized. They also carried a 500 year old grievance about a battle that led them to believe Albanians had stolen their land. Grievances like that are what elites play on to whip up the masses.

In Rwanda and Burundi in the 90s, Hutu politicians and radio DJs referred to Tutsis as ‘cockroaches’ and incited violence by talking about them as less than human—”he/she’s just a Tutsi, so you can…rape, torture, kill…” They also had grievances going back a hundred years to the way the Belgians and other colonizers had screwed up the populations in the region by artificially dividing them into “ethnic” groups based on whether they were farmers or herders. The Tutsi farmers owned land, had money, went to university, and ended up with lives the Hutus envied. More than a million ended up dead between the two countries based on that grievance and the instigation of elites.

Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge ‘cleansed’ the ‘impure’—those that didn’t align with party ideals in Cambodia in the late 70s, disappearing people to work camps, then torture and interrogation centers, and then killing fields. Even though communism was at play, this still isn’t an outlier. Party members believed that the work they did in persecuting the people they killed was part of the plan to cleanse the country of undesirable and unclean people.

And no warning about genocide is complete without the Nazis. They had names for everyone, with Jews described as human pests, “negros and their bastards,” and other derogatory terms for Roma, communists, and gay people, and then anyone who was a potential opponent of the party got swept up as well. The mirror between the language of MAGA and the Nazis is particularly concerning today. There are already way too many similarities between 2025 America and 1933 Germany right now.

The MAGA faithful use terms like this to not only refer to immigrants, but to people they simply assume to be Latino, or to describe those who live in cities on the assumption that they are a) minorities, and b) depending on government handouts paid for by hardworking MAGA Americans. Of course, the opposite is the reality, as cities with large populations and higher economic productivity pay far more in taxes that are then used to support rural areas. Those rural areas include the heart of MAGA territory in the south and west, which have some of the poorest areas per capita that are also the most reliant on federal funding. Not only are they hateful, they’re just plain wrong.

That won’t stop elites from whipping them up based on the perception that they, the true Americans of MAGA, who are predominantly white, rural or suburban, have less education, and less wealth, are losing out to the very people they consider beneath them. This sense of grievance, the belief that things were better in the past or would be better without those ‘others’—especially those dirty immigrants—is well stipulated as a trigger for violence in situations of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

So what can we do? Unfortunately, we aren’t going to convince many MAGA cultists to see the light. No matter what you or I say, they have so many other voices in their self-selected, self-reinforcing echo chambers that most reasonable arguments will fail. Oh, we have to keep speaking out. We have to keep demonstrating and trying to protect the people in our communities. We have to keep filing lawsuits, even though the Supreme Court has some characters that are just as bad as the MAGA base. But none of that is going to change the trajectory we’re on.

All of us who are horrified with the direction of our country need to change the way we’ve approached the past decade of elections, or we may not have that many more. That means being strategic about how best to defeat Trump and MAGA, without concern for our own political orthodoxy. If there isn’t a strong, unified coalition that takes on Trump and MAGA in the midterms in 2026, there may not be a 2028 election to worry about. Hell, we may not even make it to the midterms before violence erupts with the way things are going right now.

The Republican Party is dead, and its festering corpse is possessed by a malefic force than bears no resemblance to the principled party that one led the fight to free slaves, created our national park system, and played a critical role in shaping the alliances that spread democracy and confronted authoritarianism following World War II. That party is gone, replaced by a slavering, corrupt, and hateful menagerie of narcissistic buffons, greedy oligarchs, misogynistic whiners, and yes, racist, hateful fucks. It’s time for those of us who skew conservative to acknowledge that and move on.

Believe it or not, the American political system is primed for a centrist third party to tip the balance. Other third parties have failed because they have been outside the boundaries of the right and left, and both Republican and Democratic parties have already been dragged further and further to the extremes in the past several decades. A centrist third party—let’s say center right, to accommodate the refugees of the Republican party who still have functional cerebral cortexes—will be able to do what similar parties in many European countries do—pay the role of kingmaker. Not in the “I wanna be king” style of Trump, but in the ability to sway any legislative, confirmation, or impeachment vote one direction or the other. That party, totally divorced from the carcass of the Republican party, and unlike the wimps we’ve seen cave on this turd of a Big Crappy Bill, needs to stand up to Trump and reach out to the Democratic party to form a governing coalition.

And sorry folks, the Democratic party really isn’t doing much better, at least when it comes to actually being effective at governing. Democrats have gone 1 for 3 in recent election cycles against the most incompetent and contemptible person to ever run as a major candidate for the Oval Office. The party has failed to make a case to the working class, who flipped to the other side and is now actively voting against its own interests. They’ve also failed to win the majority of people who may not like Trump, but don’t see a better alternative. That should tell the left something—simply put, the Democratic narrative fails to reach the majority because it’s tailored to the minority. Democrats haven’t presented a compelling narrative that appeals to ‘main street America’ and not just liberal elites and minority identity groups since Obama in 2012. 

Biden scraped by in 2020 with a vote differential that came down to “at least you’re not that idiot." The Biden administration should have read the mood on main street and focused on extending the two successes that might have appealed to the majority—successfully managing the COVID response and preventing an economic collapse. Instead, the Biden team stepped on their own genitals with the Afghanistan withdrawal and then sprinted off stage left with Affirmative Action 2.0 and worrying about who gets to use what bathroom.

The Democratic Party lost its working class core by failing to listen to their concerns about a broken system they perceived as rigged against them and proved that the party cares more about identity politics than about the day to day hardships of working Americans. If they want to win that constituency back, then they need to come back to the center and make a case for a system in America that works for the majority, not just focus on minority identity groups. Ultimately, they need to win the majority in order to care for the rights of the minority. They’re not going to be able to do that if their national platform looks like what just carried the biggest blue city in a major blue state. New York City is little like the swing states and flyover purple regions where gains need to be made, and a democratic socialist platform, no matter how invigorating it is to liberal elites, is not going to win main street America.

But maybe Democrats can step back from the extremists in their own party. If they do, they may find a small, center-right party of former Republicans and deprogrammed MAGA cultists ready to form a coalition that can sweep the midterms. Then we can start holding the criminals in power accountable for their unconstitutional and illegal acts and prevent the country from running further towards authoritarianism and the genocide hovering on the horizon.

Keep your heads down out there,

G.W. Revengér