The Catalog of Imaginary Demons

The Fake News, Insane Conspiracies, and Outright Lies The MAGA Media Uses To Keep Republicans Terrified

As I’ve moved farther and farther away from the once-conservative, now MAGA media ecosystem, their reliance on a catalog of almost wholly imaginary political demons has become increasingly absurd. This first chapter is accessible to the public but will become available only to supporting readers after this.

This started life as a book proposal — and still might be one someday — but until then, I’m starting this new series to give folks a window into the mad world of MAGA insecurities, night terrors, fever dreams, and triggers. It is most certainly meant as a homage to Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary.

With that, I present:

THE CATALOG OF IMAGINARY DEMONS

The Fake News, Insane Conspiracies, and Outright Lies The MAGA Media Uses To Keep Republicans Terrified

Introduction

American conservatives live today in a world of imaginary demons.

The catalog of horrors that haunts their lives each and every day is fed to them by the most magnificently crafted media infrastructure in the history of mankind. It’s an edifice of mis- and dis-information with Fox News at its peak, Elon Musk’s Twitter fever swamp, the boomer hellscape of Facebook, the endless horde of zombie Rush Limbaugh-manque talk radio hosts, and an exploding matrix of podcasts, YouTube streamers, Telegram and Discord channels, -chans of all kinds, astroturf fake news sites, and of course, the new monster of disinformation landscape, TikTok.

If something this sophisticated existed on the left, the MAGAverse would immediately declare the dark hand of George Soros or Bill Gates or the Deep State was behind it. While there are some control nodes here and there, the horror of this right-wing communications machine is that it is now both a culture and a business model.

Up-and-coming right-wing influencers navigate the waters of this system because they grew up in it as my generation worked with print and online reporters to make our cases for candidates. The best way for these MAGA media wannabes to rise in the system is to generate controversy, promote conspiracies, or play to the existing fears that haunt the MAGA base.

They’re not pushing stories on policy differences between left and right. That’s so 2000-and-late. Today, the format is “Liberals are doing X because they want to kill you, burn your church down, force your kids into gender reassignment surgery, and convert your dog to Islam. Nothing can stop this evil; please like and share. Click here to donate.”

Every bit of it is dedicated to warping the reality Americans would otherwise experience. This mighty tool of political disinformation and its sweeping influence is something any authoritarian in history would’ve cut off an arm to possess.

Democrats and everyday Americans have no frame of reference to understand the hermetic seal placed around the minds of over 100 million Americans. The outside manifestations of the madness are evident everywhere we look. The deadly impacts of misinformation during the Covid pandemic, the deeply held belief that the government is controlled by a cabal of cannibalistic pedophile child sex traffickers, the lie that Trump won the 2020 election, and the saving emergence of the most hideous antisemitism and racism. This country has seen in the modern era.

Why does this machine exist? Why does the content factory of populist and far-right conspiracy-driven disinformation work double shifts? Why does Fox News continue to lie even after facing multi-billion dollar defamation losses?

It works. It holds GOP voters tight in the grip of terror, a constant drip of terror into their amygdale.

It works better than you could imagine. Rational, sane people, exposed to the kind of endless agitporn provided by the system, lose their grip on reality, replace hard truth with vividly drawn conspiracies, and create entirely new subcultures based around beliefs that even a moment of reflection and consideration would dismiss.

It works because once those people have broken from reality, they’re easier to manipulate not just by a masterful con man like Donald Trump, but by political campaigns, marketers, advertisers, and the darkest forces in the roughest neighborhoods of our body politic.

This is a catalog of imaginary demons, a roadmap to what you might not understand or know about except in passing references. The language, presentation, certitude, and cadences of these fear points in the hearts and minds of millions and millions of Americans should illustrate the vast division in this country more than polling, focus groups, or intuition about who and what Americans are.

The world has changed and changed radically. More than half of this country lives in this bubble, convinced that their Patriotic Patriots Against Satanic ChiCom Sharia Infiltration 5G Covid Nazis Facebook page is a more genuine and credible source of information than the legacy media.

Conspiracies give people without broad education and cognitive abilities a way to process information that gives them a sense of coherence and rationality in an irrational world. The people who “do their own research” often drink from a poisoned well.

The algorithmic rabbit holes that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok create for users have been perfectly exploited by the worst actors at home and abroad.

Get one hook in, and the algo will feed you more and more poison after the first dose, not less. The arc of these conspiracy theories ranges from ancient to postmodern. Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have been with us for over 2000 years. The idea that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci secretly conspired to inject people with 5G chips is as modern as could be.

This is not a solution to these problems. This book isn’t a cure for misinformation and disinformation. But when taking apart a complex issue, building a guidebook of the symptoms, systems, and ideas misinforming a massive population of Americans is at least a start.

The value of truth in the political markets has been plunging since before 2015, when Trump descended the crapulous faux gold escalator. It’s sold short by this massive propaganda enterprise on the right. In the age of deepfakes, AI-generated content specifically designed to feed the paranoia, insecurities, and fears of a certain segment of Americans, truth has been replaced by what Trump poster Kellyanne Conway globally referred to at the beginning of the Trump Hell years as “alternative facts.”

The entries in this book are not meant to be exhaustive or scientific. One of the market advantages of the right-wing media ecosystem is that it moves quickly from punching one fear button to another, creating a coherent and clear mosaic.

One final note: feel free to suggest additional entries for this effort! You can expect additions to pop into existing chapters occasionally.

A IS FOR…

Academic Indoctrination

If there’s one thing that MAGA media voters are sure of, it’s that every campus in America is stocked to the gills with socialists, communists, Satanists, and globalists. These academics (said with a snarl, of course) have only one agenda in mind: the hypnotic indoctrination of their helpless charges into a rabid army of Marxist shock troops ready to burn capitalism and patriarchy to the ground.

The specter of "Academic Indoctrination" looms large in the conservative imagination. Colleges and universities are portrayed not as a marketplace of ideas but as factories churning out legions of latte-sipping, Foucault-quoting automatons, ready to tear down the foundations of Western civilization with their critical theories and disdain for anything predating the Summer of Love.

At the heart of this narrative is the idea that universities across the land have become monolithic echo chambers where a chorus of progressive dogma drowns out conservative voices. Every course catalog, from Gender Studies to Environmental Science, is a minefield of indoctrination, each syllabus another brick in the ideological wall separating the enlightened from the not-woke-enough.

Amidst the quads and the cafeterias, the specter of censorship looms, with safe spaces and speech codes ensuring that only the approved narratives thrive. The marketplace of ideas has been replaced with a cafeteria of comfort food for the soul, where every dish is gluten-free, non-GMO, and guaranteed not to challenge your preconceptions.

Yet, for all the sound and fury, the real story of higher education is far more complex. Yes, campuses lean left, but they are also places where debate and dissent are alive and well, where students are not so much indoctrinated as invited to challenge and be challenged. Culture war maniacs have decided the solution to left-leaning campuses is to end academic tenure and freedom and replace it with Republican legislative supervision. What could possibly go wrong?

It transforms the pursuit of knowledge into a political proxy war.

We’re seeing a slight dropoff in this one since Ron DeSantis based much of his doomed Presidential effort around his War On Woke, which he chose to wage primarily against Florida’s universities.

Affordable Care Act, The

This one is slowly becoming an oldie-but-goodie. Remember Death Panels? Remember how Obama would personally scan your records to decide if you lived or died? Remember how every doctor in America would refuse to cover anyone, ever again?

At the heart of the ACA fear factory was the specter of socialism, lurking behind every coverage mandate and subsidy. "Socialized medicine!" the town criers shouted from every cable news rooftop, suggesting that before you knew it, Uncle Sam would be bedside, taking both your temperature (rectally, of course) and your freedom. The ACA was portrayed as a Trojan horse, a gateway drug to full-blown communism, where the state not only decides your doctor but your diet too.

The masterstroke of this macabre mythology is death panels. These, the tales told, were committees that would decide who gets to live and who must die because, apparently, the ACA also granted the government the power to play God. This grim fairy tale was accompanied by predictions that the ACA would plunge the nation into a financial abyss.

The actual provisions of the ACA — expanded coverage, protections for pre-existing conditions, and efforts to curb healthcare costs — were lost like a fart in a hurricane.

The pièce de résistance of the ACA saga is the great irony that, once the dust settled and the smoke cleared, many of its fiercest critics found themselves begrudgingly accepting, if not outright benefiting from, its provisions.

As it turns out, removing the threat of bankruptcy from medical bills and ensuring that a sudden illness doesn't equate to a financial death sentence aren't such detestable ideas after all. A Florida note: Miami Cubans are America’s most passionate haters of socialism in all its forms; ironically, they also lead the nation in Obamacare signups.

But even today, you’ll still see it appear from time to time on the MAGA GOP’s agenda, and it remains one of their cited examples of horror.

I feel terrible for those poor, struggling insurance companies, don’t you?

Afghanistan Withdrawal, The

I was told that leaving the graveyard of empires would unleash World War III, and that Joe Biden’s decision to rip off the band-aid in the Longest War was the last straw in American decline. The cottage industry of “Afghanistan withdrawal is Biden’s Saigon” sprang up almost overnight, totally ignoring that Biden made the best of the crappy hand dealt him by Donald Trump’s decision to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

It’s an article of faith by the MAGA believers that somehow we left behind nuclear weapons, B-2 Bombers, a few wings of F-22 Raptor fighters, 2000 Abrams tanks, and a world-class arsenal for the Taliban when we left. The reality, as in all things, is much more pedestrian. Almost none of the helicopters we left behind are functional or operable by the Taliban.

Most of the MRAPS and many of the Humvees left behind were deliberately disabled before we left. We did leave about 5,000 M-4 rifles in the hands of the Afghan government that the Taliban took, but you may have heard there’s no shortage of weapons in that part of the world.

So, no, don’t expect the Taliban to come ashore any time soon armed for a fight with the U.S. Military.

Agenda 21

This is one of the ur-conspiracy theories of today’s far-right. So, so many right-wing conspiracy theories revolve around the ludicrous belief that global organizations, such as the United Nations, seek to exert control over national governments and undermine national sovereignty.

Agenda 21 was, like so much UN twaddle, was a set of goals and aspirational bleating about environmental sustainability and land-use planning. So, of course, Glenn Beck and a broad claque of whackjobs immediately mischaracterized and misrepresented in various ways, including the absurd false claims that it advocates for forced relocation, population control, or the creation of a global totalitarian government.

From “let's grow more sustainable crops” to a global government that ends personal property rights, regulates all land use, and imposes environmental regulations from the UN Death Tower on Turtle Bay is a lunatic leap of illogic, but here we are. Aside from the literal misreading of the text, the idea that the United Nations today has the power, authority, and organizational wherewithal to organize a two-car motorcade is risible.

(See the later entries in this series on UN Troops In America, Blue Helmets, the World Economic Forum, and Klaus Schwab.)

America's Standing In The World

Ah, "America's Standing" in the world—once the uncontested heavyweight champion of the geopolitical ring, now seemingly on the ropes in the eyes of MAGA’s fearmongers and Trump flag-wavers. This is a favorite of the America First crowd, but Trump’s idea of muscular reassertion of American exceptionalism was taking Russian help in the 2016 election, tweeting, trade wars, and tariffs.

Suppose you've tuned into the grand old chorus of doom. In that case, you've likely heard the lament: America, humbled, belittled, and laughed at by friends and foes alike, all thanks to the nefarious dealings of the America Last globalists. We’re headed into World War III. (Or Two, if you ask Trump). The narrative is as flexible as it is apocalyptic.

It is, of course, hot garbage.

Here’s the irony: After Trump’s term, America’s allies and adversaries were in a near panic. Trump’s pro-Putin fellation of the wee ex-KGB thug was a constant, and the Russians exploited it from the start. He praised dictators and autocrats and tried to turn NATO into a mob-style protection racket. He put American military forces and leadership down on every occasion, notably after they rejected his demands for a North Korean-style missile parade.

Yet, the narrative of American decline in the world persists, fuelled by a media machine that knows outrage and disaster sell more ads than nuance and normalcy. The portrayal of America's place in the world becomes less about the complexities of international relations and more about vibes. While Trump frittered away actual global strength, both military and diplomatic.

Trump’s consultants want a rematch with Jimmy Carter, but they won’t get it.

Joe Biden’s strength in confronting Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, rebuilding NATO’s confidence in American intent, and restoring a Pacific alliance to confront a rising Chinese military threat are the polar opposite of Trump’s feckless dictator-curious diversion is notable. We’re stronger than we were under Trump.

Just don’t expect to see it on Fox News.

Amnesty

Here, we dive into the abyss of what I call “amnesty anxiety,” where right-wing prophets foretell the doom of the American workforce, overrun by caravans of job-stealing, tax-evading rapey invaders. This narrative, as fantastical as a science-fiction novel, conveniently ignores the complexities of immigration while painting a picture of the U.S. under siege, with only a Trumpian wall standing between civilization and chaos.

Underneath it all is race, of course. “Amnesty” is where the Great Replacement Theory puts on a show for the rubes, telling them anything wrong in their lives is the fault of people coming to America to build a better life. Regardless of the truth, the idea that White America will be bred out of existence by fecund foreigners is the driving force of this trope, pushed by everyone from Tucker Carlson to Elon Musk.

Never mind that job loss has much more to do with technology, automation, and McKinsey than Mexico. The old, deep fear well that swarthy men from faraway lands are here to rape, kill, and defile Nice White Girls is stoked by an endless series of “Caravan” stories on Fox and elsewhere.

Anti-Conservative Bias

One of American politics's most successful long cons is the endless, screeching complaint about media bias. Is the media demographically and socially to the left of the red hat bros screaming at Trump rallies? Yes.

Do they get on a daily Zoom with Deep State Soros Globalist Agenda LLC reps to plot out the ways they’ll attack American patriots on the right? Grow up. Such calls do exist — I spent many years on them — but mainly on the right. Ever wonder how every Republican is on message all the time?

It’s simple.

Since the 1950s, the GOP idea that the media was a convenient boogeyman has been a very profitable — and politically powerful — strategy. Entire think tanks and media outlets exist to convince Republican voters that everything those liberal, cosmopolitan, elite, left-wing, coastal (yes, much of it is a code for “Jewish”) propagandists say is a filthy lie meant to harm them.

This entire cottage industry of Republican and conservative organizations found the social media era a new way to feed this narrative claptrap into the vulnerable minds of the MAGA base.

In a world where Newscorp’s dominance in cable news and the sweep and scale of the MAGA media world is vastly beyond any identifiable progressive media, to say nothing of Elon Musk’s right thumb pressing heavily on the scale of Twitter, anti-conservative media bias is one of the most prominent and ludicrous examples of the Catalog of Imaginary Demons.

Antifa

Ah, Antifa, the all-purpose scarecrow dressed in black, supposedly lurking on every corner of America, poised to attack you, seize the means of production, and burn down your suburb to ashes…at least according to prime-time MAGA punditry. The mythic rise of Antifa from a fringe element to the ultimate GOP bogeyman. The mere whisper of "Antifa!" sends shivers down the spines of the MAGA suburbanites, as if a masked anarchist might leap from their arugula at Whole Foods.

It’s a term that conjures images of masked agitators and left-wing violence. If you believe what MAGA says, Antifa is universal, massive beyond imagining, and has reduced both Portland and Seattle to smoking ruins where the living envy the dead. Further, the idea that Antifa is somehow aligned with the Black Lives Matters movement adds some additional fear seasoning to the gumbo, even though the average Antifa member is a tiresomely dull suburban white boy.

The reality is more pedestrian.

One of the most prominent exaggerations is the characterization of Antifa as a unified and organized terrorist organization. In reality, Antifa is a very loosely affiliated and decentralized group of local loudmouths primarily based in Portland and Seattle. The Black Bloc types and the rest aren’t people I’d invite to a garden party, but they’re not about to scale beyond the walled ideological gardens of a few places in the Pacific Northwest.

Unlike the portrayals by right-wing drama queens Andy Ngo and Jack Posobiec, Antifa couldn’t organize a two-car motorcade, they’re not swimming in millions in Sorosbucks, and they’re certainly not as dangerous to the future of America as the 3%-ers, the Proud Boys, and the vast constellation of alt-right hate groups empowered and emboldened by Trump’s “no enemies to my right” philosophy.

The MAGA narrative on Antifa is textbook projection; they attribute any incident of political violence to Antifa — including January 6th — that is utterly obvious as a MAGA or alt-right attack and blame Antifa. (Process this MAGA claim: the people who stormed the Capitol were definitely Antifa. Or Feds. Or heroic patriots. No, it doesn’t even get close to making sense.)

In addition to its persistent presence on the screens of the MAGA Media, there is a small but vibrant world of alt-right books and films about Antifa. Their work is our time's Reefer Madness over-wrought, absurd, and breathlessly laughable.

AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was portrayed as Lenin in a skirt from the early coverage and its ensuing outrage. In fairness, she had everything to frustrate culture-war Republicans. She was a sleek, gorgeous, clever social media native, seemingly created in a lab to outrage the Fox News MAGA audience. From their coverage, you’d think she arrived in a sealed train from the Finland Station.

A deep-blue progressive, to be sure, MAGA saw her as a perfect foil, a leader of the infamous Squad of hyper-progressives perfect for inducing simultaneous anger and arousal in the minds of their largely right-bro audience. It was an effort that worked for their audience…until Nancy Pelosi (another member of their Nightmare Closet) took her to school.

Now, AOC is still reviled by the right, but she seems to have taken on a more profound appreciation of her role as a Member of Congress, and it’s driving the GOP crazy.

Authoritarianism, Left Wing

In the grand theater of American political discourse, where every act is more dramatic than the last, the narrative of the left's march toward authoritarianism plays out like a dark comedy penned by a writer with an overzealous fondness for irony and projection. In the MAGA media, every policy proposal, no matter how benign, is a Trojan horse for socialist tyranny, and every progressive leader is a would-be dictator in vegan-friendly organic clothing.

Even though Democrats aren’t masters of the kind of sinister plotting needed to undermine American freedoms and pave the way for a totalitarian state, this one is remarkably persistent on the right.

You know the drill: shadowy figures pull the strings of puppet liberal politicians, orchestrating a silent coup against the republic. It’s such a terrible screenplay that it wouldn’t make the cut on a 4th tier streaming service. The narrative is as nuanced as a sledgehammer, reducing complex policy debates to simple tales of good versus evil, freedom versus oppression.

Like all apocalyptic visions, the climax of this narrative is always just around the corner, a perpetual state of near-crisis where freedom is always one election, one law, and one executive action away from extinction. This endless state of emergency serves not just to galvanize the base but to cover for the only people proposing an authoritarian state: MAGA politicians.

The real flirtation with authoritarianism comes not from the left's imagined lust for control but from the right's embrace of strongman tactics. The narrative, so focused on the shadows of alleged liberal tyranny, misses the daylight march of democratic erosion in the name of power, control, and Trump.