F*** Off MAGA
There are plenty of reasons why MAGA is proving to be terrible for Australians.
It's not hyperbole: MAGA's America is a burning tyre fire, and it's only getting worse.
So here’s the truth as I see it: If, on the day Trump was inaugurated, I had warned readers that in a few months law enforcement officers would be rappelling from helicopters like soldiers into civilian apartment buildings in Chicago; the military would be extrajudicially killing Venezuelans for alleged drug dealing; Americans would be getting arrested while being falsely accused of being here illegally; the Justice Department would be prosecuting the president’s political foes at his direction; and legal U.S. residents would be getting arrested, detained, and deported for protected speech; I would have been accused of having a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Yet nine months into this presidency, all of those things are happening. This isn’t hyperbolic fear-mongering — it isn’t sensationalist, or exaggerated. It’s literally just a list of the things the president has done, things I’m obligated to speak plainly about. Trump has, thankfully, largely obeyed court orders so far, but that may not be the case going forward — he’s gotten a lot of what he wanted from the courts so far, and he’s resisted or delayed obeying the major rulings that have gone against him.
https://www.readtangle.com/yes-things-are-pretty-bad-right-now/
The mind control is real. MAGA has convinced it's supporters it's better to go down with the MAGA ship than oppose the madness. Case in point: Farmers are being sent broke by MAGA, but don't dare stop supporting... MAGA.
We shouldn’t expect rural America to suddenly do a 180 and abandon Trump. Sargent sends us to a lament from one rancher who calls the idea of buying Argentine beef an “absolute betrayal” — but begins by saying to Trump, “We love you and support you.” The sheer extent to which rural Americans have been hoodwinked will make it hard for them to admit their error.
But there are at least hints of a rural awakening. And for the sake of the nation urban and rural Americans share, it can’t come fast enough.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/argentina-and-rural-americas-awakening
MAGA is a mental illness. It turns out the 'woke mind virus' MAGA liked to talk about was actually MAGA-tardation. And that form of retardation has been amazingly effective at destroying the worlds most powerful economy from the inside.
MAGA health conspiracies make Australia sicker
"There has always been a small section of the population, which is opposed to mainstream medicine, opposed to mainstream science, opposed to vaccinations and water fluoridation and particularly with water fluoridation," Dr Foley told 7.30. "They've been at it since the 1940s and 50s," Dr Foley said. In the 1960s it was claimed to cause acne, brittle bones, cancer, heart disease, left-handedness and even communism. In one interview aired on the ABC's Four Corners program in 1963, one dentist said he had received "letters from all over Australia telling us we're spreading communism via the water tap, and poisoning the water supply and all kinds of things". The claims are different today, but the anti-fluoridation crowd remains loud and prominent in the state. Helping facilitate the anti-fluoride argument are online groups with arsenals of letter templates and information dossiers, ready to be downloaded and signed. Dr Foley said the information is "a load of rubbish" but that the websites look convincing.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-22/queensland-fluoride-in-water-being-removed/105917056
MAGA stokes violence and division in Australia
Victoria Police succeeded in keeping nationalist and anti-racist demonstrations separate, but only by deploying immense violence against the left-wing rally as clashes erupted around the CBD.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/10/20/photos-police-violence-march-for-australia-left-wing-counterprotest/
The increased politicisation of crime often leads to a perpetual state of urgency and the introduction of increasingly punitive measures, such as Victoria’s new bail laws.
However, a deeper dive into the data actually reveals plenty of positive messages.
CSA’s regional mapping tool shows:
- across Victoria, homicides are broadly stable or tracking down, with 3.2 per 100,000 last year, compared to a high of 3.7 in 2017
- in Melbourne, homicides are at a ten-year low, with just 2.6 per 100,000, compared to a high of 8 per 100,000 in 2018. This is echoed by a fall in the use of weapons, including knives and firearms, at both state level and in Melbourne.
The real success story in these data, and rarely reported on in the media, are drug offences.
Across Victoria, drug use and possession is down 16.2% since 2020, with drug dealing and trafficking at a ten-year low, down 46.7% since 2016.
There is a similar picture unfolding in Melbourne, with drug use and possession down 7.5% and drug dealing and trafficking down 20.6% since last year.
Yet we rarely hear this messaging in media and political rhetoric.
https://theconversation.com/is-melbourne-really-the-crime-capital-of-australia-267861
Just as MAGA bails out Argentina over America, so too does MAGA Australia favour non-Australian companies
We know why Trump and Bessent want to help Milei. First, he’s a MAGA favorite, fond of posing with U.S. right wingers with a chainsaw as a prop. So the Trumpists want a right-wing, anti-government politician to succeed, no matter how much taxpayer money is required.
Second, some U.S. hedge-fund billionaires, personally close to Bessent, bet big on Milei and bought Argentine bonds. The bailout package almost surely won’t succeed in turning Argentina’s economy around and probably won’t rescue Milei politically. But it may buy enough time for Bessent’s buddies to get much of their money out before the bottom falls out of the Argentine economy.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/america-first-no-billionaire-buddies
While right wing politicians around the world usually win votes by demonising foreigners and promising to put their nation first, here in Australia there is bipartisan resolve to give our resources away for free to foreign companies who don’t even pay company tax. Even our so called ‘National Party’ supports the gas industry grift, and sides with the fossil fuel industry over farmers.
For Australians accustomed to being told that we are broke and can’t afford to spend more money on health, education or transport, it’s hard to comprehend just how generous Australian governments are to foreign-owned gas companies.
https://thepoint.com.au/opinions/251010-why-do-australian-nationalists-love-foreign-companies-so-much
Bill Browne, a director at The Australia Institute who specialises in digital technology and political advertising, says the comments beneath many of the videos show some viewers are confused about whether the people depicted are genuine.
“It is disturbing how easy it is to make convincing depictions of something that never happened and someone who never existed,” he says.
“I don’t think politicians, regulators or the public fully appreciate yet the implications of artificial intelligence or large language models.”
University of Sydney academic Fiona Martin has researched AI and the use of deepfakes and says the use of such avatars is likely to expand rapidly in the coming years.
She sees the goal of this kind of content as an attempt to heighten emotional reactions, play to confirmation biases and encourage people to recruit others to the cause.
“The problem is, even if we regulate against AI political personas in Australia, you’re seeing hostile state actors running operations out of countries that will never regulate this activity,” she says.
https://michaelwest.com.au/the-ai-avatars-pushing-claims-of-a-migrant-invasion/
De-MAGA your media!
One way to stop the MAGA takeover of Australia is to stop consuming MAGA influenced media.
Social media and Australian commercial media is more and more influenced by MAGA billionaires. You can't rely on media that MAGA controls (much as you can't rely on North Korean or Russian media).
Here are some outlets you can rely on to resist MAGA's attempts to suppress the news
https://www.abc.net.au/news - the more MAGA media and pollies hate on them, the more you know they're telling the truth.
https://www.crikey.com.au/
https://thepoint.com.au/
https://theconversation.com/au
https://michaelwest.com.au/
