MAGA is living in Jonestown, Drinking the Kool Aide — That’s Right, It’s a Death Cult!

“My People are Happy because They are Free!”

Way back in the halcyon days of the #COVID19 pandemic, before Kosplay Kristi was allegedly lusting after Corey Lewandowski in the bedroom of their luxury Boeing 737 Max,she was the lowly governor barely eking out a decent grift in South Dakota. But, she declared to the CPACers, “My people are happy because they are free!” While South Dakota led the nation in per capita #COVID19 deaths.

This was after ICU nurse, Jodi Doering started a shit storm when she tweet stormed about how her MAGA #COVID19 patients insisted, sometimes to their dying breath, that they wouldn’t have #COVID19 because it was a hoax! They have to have pneumonia or lung cancer or anything other than #COVID19, and no, they are not going to FaceTime with their family as they die because they weren’t dying, they can’t be dying, it was all a hoax. If the hospital would just treat them with ivermectin or shine a light up their ass or use one of the proven cures for the disease that is a hoax that they wouldn’t have, they’d be fine.

From the inception of the pandemic, Noem had insisted that “the people themselves are primarily responsible for their safety.” By December 2020, South Dakota led the nation in per capita deaths and several times had led in daily infections and hospitalizations. She repeatedly doubled and tripled down on her lax handling of the pandemic, falsely insisting that South Dakota was doing better than Democratic states like Illinois, New Jersey, and California.

After vaccines became widely available on 1 May 2021, a strange divide between red and blue states began to emerge. Areas that had lower vaccination rates correlated with red states, and excess death rates were higher. This was a trend that was repeated over and over again all over the country. Noem wasn’t a Republican outlier, she was the Republican norm. It was almost as if Republicans wanted their constituents to die.

The conclusion is unmistakable. MAGA is a death cult.

Letting the Grim Reaper Out of the Bag

Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick carried the bold Republican tradition of saying the quiet-part-out-loud when he declared loud and proud in front of Trump, the American people, and gawd, “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.” Of course Patrick had access to the best healthcare his station as lieutenant governor could allow. He was, in reality, volunteering your parents and grandparents, not himself of his own.

Five short weeks later, he was back on Tucker Carlson’s show clarifying what he had meant, just in case there was any mistaking it. “And what I said when I was with you that night, there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us,“

There are more important things than living.

Dan Patrick on coronavirus: ‘More important things than living‘ on NBC News 21 April 2020

His remarks betray more than just a willingness to make blood sacrifice to billionaires, it was a willingness to release the chaos of a rampaging deadly pandemic stampede across the country. As it was there were just over a million excess deaths attributable to the cofefevirus, hospitals and mortuaries were over run. There were massive disruptions to supply chains and commerce. If we had abandoned all mitigation efforts, the number of resulting deaths would have devastated the economy and social fabric of the country. Yet, that is what Republican governor, legislature, and mayor urged upon us across the country.

MAGA doesn’t just tolerate death as a side effect of its policies. In area after area, death and destruction appear to be the point. We’re going to visit three major Republican policies to see how they affect the diminishing mortality rate of the country and then conclude by briefly revisiting Freud’s Death Drive theory.

Gun Deaths

Nowhere is this death wish clearer than in MAGA’s fierce defense of the Second Amendment. In MAGA world, only conservative white men qualify as good guys with a gun. Ask Alex Pretti. Ask Philando Castile.

Let’s take a quick and deeply depressing spin through America’s love affair with gun violence. In 2023 — the most recent year the CDC has fully processed, because even counting the dead takes time in this country — approximately 47,000 Americans died from gun-related injuries. One every eleven minutes. The CDC tracks five categories: murder, suicide, police shootings, accidents, and the charmingly bureaucratic “undetermined.”

Suicide by Gun

The number that should grab you by the ass is that nearly 60% of gun deaths are suicides. Not drive bys. Not mass shootings. Suicides. One every eleven minutes. The rate has climbed steadily for two decades while every other suicide method has fallen. The only difference — for those keeping score at home — is the gun.

Who is pulling the trigger on themselves? Older rural white men overwhelmingly. Men are seven times more likely than women to die by gun suicide. White men represent 68% of gun suicides, with the rate accelerating sharply after age 55. And where do these men live? The five states with the highest gun death rates — Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Wyoming — are reliably red. The lowest — Massachusetts, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut — reliably blue. It’s almost like gun regulations actually work. Inspite of driving guns over state lines Hunh.

The New Lynching?

Stand Your Ground laws — enacted in 29 states, almost exclusively red — are associated with an 8-11% increase in homicide rates per a 2022 JAMA study. That’s approximately 700 additional deaths every year. And in Stand Your Ground states, homicides where white shooters killed Black victims were ruled justifiable FOUR TIMES more often than when the gun were pointed the other way round. In Michigan that disparity was twelvefold. An armed society isn’t more polite. It’s just more violent and more racially unjust. But sure. Good guys with guns.

Worst of All?

Since 2020 — the pandemic lockdown, remember? — guns surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death among children (people 19 years old or younger). Over 3,500 children a year die from gun-related injuries. Since mass shootings still make up a minority of gun deaths, these are suicides, murders, and accidental shootings.

If anything else in the country killed 50,000 Americans a year, we would treat it as a public health crisis and get to work trying to reduce the number of deaths. We’ve done it with lots of things, like seatbelts and motorcycle helmets, tobacco sale restrictions, speed limits, pool safety regulations, and other ways of regulating public dangers. Instead, Trump has consistently made access to guns easier, penalties lighter, and gun accessories easier to acquire. He’s made background checks harder to obtain and returned guns to felons and domestic abusers.

The Second Amendment doesn’t as much protect our rights to keep and bear arms as it does our right to die horrible violent deaths as a result of a gun.

Abortion and Reproductive Health

After the Dobbs decision, Democrats said that abortion won elections. That was true, until it wasn’t. In 2024 Trump and the Republicans won the trifecta of the federal government, and they immediately set about challenging abortion access. The effects on maternal mortality was immediate.

In the states that have restricted abortion, maternal mortality rates have skyrocketed, while in non-restricted states, it has declined. It’s like Ye Olde Blogger always said, assume the policy outcome was the goal. In states that banned or restricted abortion access, women were twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or shortly after than in states that did not. Put another way, maternal mortality fell by 21% in states that support access to safe and legal abortion services while it rose by 56% in Texas. As if that weren’t bad enough, Black women were three times as likely to die in abortion restricting states than white women. You know, hurt them first and worst, y’all.

The death and misery being dealt in the conservative pro-life states didn’t stop there. Infant mortality was up by 30% in banned states and Black babies were three times as likely to die than white ones. It wasn’t just immediate harm, either. Teenage pregnancy was twice as high in ban states, condemning those girls to a life of poverty., depending on the dreaded welfare state. Lucky for them, they don’t give welfare preferring instead to build volleyball courts with that money instead.

The maternal mortality rate in the US was higher than in any of the developed countries BEFORE the Dobbs decision when abortion was the law of the land, safe, and legal. Compared with other countries, the US has more in common with developing and low income countries than with our peers where some high income nations have all but eliminated maternal mortality because of the support they offer expecting mothers. Think about that.

We have the biggest economy in the world, and we have the highest maternal mortality rate of the developed countries, with an estimated 80% of those deaths PREVENTABLE. That, siblings, is a policy choice. That is a decision to condemn women to death.

Other Policies of Death and Destruction

The Trump administration has shown its devotion to inflicting death and suffering upon the American people in a number of unique and inexplicable ways. We’re actively discouraging vaccination for common childhood ailments like measles and whooping cough, both of which are increasing in frequency. They’ve cut funding to science and health research laying waste to the national research infrastructure that once led the world. New DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullins suggested that states and mayors were better equipped to respond to natural disasters than the federal government. And, he said it with a straight face! The deregulations to industries and environmental protections and defunding to the ACA and Medicaid will lead to healthcare deserts.

Freud’s Death Drive

While Freud has been much maligned — and deservingly so in the fascinating modern world we live in — he got many things surprisingly right, at least in the broader strokes. One of them may have been his thoughts on Thanatos or the death drive. Freud struggled to reconcile the death and destruction that World War I meted out and his thoughts on the life affirming Pleasure Principle as the primary human drive.

Freud took the tendency of people to live their lives in repetitive patterns with some living very destructive patterns. You might’ve heard something like this from your therapist. Like I said, he got the broader strokes right. He posited that there had to be a deep instinctual urge towards dissolution, rest, and a return to the inorganic state of our origin. A kind of entropy similar to that championed by the Existentialists after the other big self-destructive event in human history, World War II. As Freud put it, “the aim of all life is death.”

When this drive towards death is turned inward, it manifests as suicidal ideation and self-destructive behavior. Outward, aggression, cruelty, murder. To Freud, human violence, including war, was the death drive projected onto the world.

Given Trump’s predilection for violence and war in his second term, and the Republican platform of whatever the hell Trump wants, is it any wonder that all Republican policy roads seem to end in senseless avoidable destruction, misery, and death? Trump, MAGA, and the Republicans can only be seen as a party of death, a death cult.

Image Attribution

This image was found on Clotho98’s Flickr and has a Creative Commons license.