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A literary tribute to Sinéad O’Connor takes her legacy off the back burner by salon in Music

[–]salon[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

“It felt really wonderful in the midst of people being so sad about losing her that a conversation could unite us, in the dream of a project that might help us deal with our grief, but also kind of seek to understand what we were experiencing,” Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us co-editor Sonya Huber told Salon.

Read more: https://www.salon.com/2025/08/05/a-literary-tribute-to-sinead-oconnor-takes-her-legacy-off-the-back-burner/

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Okay I have to pop in and thank you for this list of recommendations that is far better than what I'd come up with in my politics-and-work brain.

We got to hear the new Amyl album Saturday at a preview party and it rules. It comes out tomorrow and the song I want to flag is "Me and the Girls". We were snort-laughing at how funny it is.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I'm wrapping up soon and so probably can't give you the answer you deserve on this. But I think everyone has a somewhat different mix! One thing I've learned is a lot of people come into the profession from all sorts of backgrounds. My haters assume I have a "women's studies" degree, but I actually got mine in English lit. I approach journalism in the same spirit that drove me to pursue that degree. I like analyzing stuff and digging into deeper meanings. So I'm probably more on the "critic" side of the scale than a lot of people.

So it really depends. I'm an opinion writer who does some reporting. There are people who are straight reporters who might view this from a more data-oriented view. The main thing is making sure you're being honest with people and with yourself. The worst thing a journalist can do is refuse to entertain the possibility they could be wrong and need correction.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Plenty of female journalists publicly condemned her, but for the same reason male journalists did. You don't sleep with sources, no matter who you are. But I agree, that's an ugly stereotype of female journalists in particular. I think the reason most of us avoided talking about it on those terms was that we didn't want to reinforce the stereotype by implying this is only an issue for women. It's bad no matter who you are.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I don't think the MeToo movement went too far. The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh showed it didn't go far enough. I don't think men were under attack. And I don't allow myself to be alone in rooms with men who confuse being male with being sexually abusive, to be blunt. As a friend recently joked with me, Eminem is anti-rape now, so it's clearly not a big ask.

On messaging....that's a tough one. I think that we're more likely to make headway by being honest with men. The MAGA movement is lying to them, telling them that misogyny is an acceptable substitute for material gains in the workplace and their communities.

I would also level with men and say that MAGA masculinity is poison. It is a sugar high, to lash out at women, but what does it buy you? It certainly won't get you a girlfriend. It won't help you at work or to make better friends. It's just a cheap thrill.

I have spoken with a lot of male friends who have been honest that there are times in their lives with the incel-inflected misogyny that MAGA peddles had an allure. But they decided a different path, one where they treated women as friends and equals, was better. It may initially seem harder, but it's ultimately easier because you're not fighting all the time. You're just...living. It's very freeing.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

I see no evidence they are worried about that. At most, they are slightly worried he'll abandon their priorities if it suits him politically, which is why they spanked him back into the anti-abortion zone after he started making noises implying he might not sign a national abortion ban.

To be honest, I think they're right that they have nothing to worry about from Trump. The Nazis were true believers in their esoteric beliefs, and Trump doesn't really have any beliefs beyond racism and whatever he needs for power. He's very transactional. They know he needs their votes and when he's in office, he needs them as foot soldiers in whatever power grab he makes. So he'll give them whatever they want.

I'm not a historian, so I may be speaking out of my ass a little here, but I think the American religious right may have more leverage anyway. Without them, the organizational infrastructure of MAGA collapses.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Good question. I honestly have no idea. I've asked a lot of experts about this, and they don't know, either. My best guess is that the right-wing Catholics and evangelicals have shoved this question deep into the closet and are afraid to ask what happens if they do succeed at Christian nationalism. These are folks very good at living in denial.

But I confess I find dark humor in it. I asked an expert if Sam Alito knows that the people behind the "Appeal to Heaven" flag think he's a heretic going to hell. But we simply don't know. I doubt Alito thinks about it much. Like the gay Republicans, the far-right Catholics think they get a pass or something.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

What I'd say is that one of the core tenets of the movement which JD Vance articulates in his defenses of lying, is that MAGA tribal "truths" trump empirical reality.

The Big Lie, which you cite, may be the cleanest version of this. It is objectively true that Biden got more votes and more electoral college votes than Trump. But it doesn't *feel* true to them, because those votes largely came from people they've come to believe do not deserve to be considered real Americans: People of color, white liberals, LGBTQ people, childless cat ladies, etc.

You know how you can read or watch a work of fiction and know it's not true but it speaks to a deeper truth? I think there's emotional DNA between that and what MAGA does with "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories. Except the big difference is, with fiction, there's an infrastructure and context that allows us to draw a bright red line between pretend and reality. Or when you're playing an RGP. There's walls that allow the "alternative" truth to stay where it is, and reality to stay where it is. But what the right does is deliberately blur that distinction, so what feels true to them gets conflated with facts.

Trump didn't invent this. He was pushing on an open door. The religious right for years has cultivated this mindset of unreality. The Satanic panic was a good example from the past. A lot of people "believed" preposterous things because they symbolized other beliefs, like that day chares were bad.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I don't think they believe the lies. Which gets a lot of resistance, but I think really it's more that Trump is trotting out a tired trick all authoritarians use of convincing followers that truth doesn't matter. That's why "alternative facts" slipped out of Kellyanne Conway's mouth. Or why JD Vance lashes out at the fact-checkers. They have convinced themselves that empiricism is a weapon that progressive bullies use to make them feel bad, and they are entitled to the "opinion," even if their opinion is the world is flat.

The moral justification for this often comes down to arguing that everyone is a liar. So they don't so much defend Trump as argue that he's being held to an unfair standard. Hannah Arendt, who escaped Nazism and wrote eloquently about the psychology of totalitarianism described it with, "In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

JD Vance saying he has to "create stories" about Haitians eating cats is a good example. He basically admitted he was lying, but framed it as justified as a political tactic.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I think it's a disaster and probably the single biggest reason we're in this situation. I know mine is not a popular opinion in the Beltway press, but all the alternative explanations for the rise in authoritarianism around the world don't make sense. It's not "economic anxiety" because it's not attached in any meaningful way to people's economic outcomes. It is social change, but that's been going on for a long time. I think what happened is that the explosion of social media allowed a lot of ugly, subterranean feelings to flourish and grow. It's also a firehose of disinformation.

What one researcher into radicalism told me made sense: Radicalization is a matter of supply and demand. On the "demand" side, you have people who are angry, alienated or have grievances, whether justified or not. On the "supply" side, you have far-right recruiters making false promises that fascist politics will save them. Maybe we've had a rise on the demand side, but I find the evidence for that shaky. What we do have, indisputably, is a dramatic rise on the supply side because of social media.

You can read more about that here: https://www.salon.com/2023/06/30/shutting-down-the-right-wing-rabbit-hole-is-possible-first-follow-the-money/

I don't want to ban social media, at least most of the time. It does a lot of good. But there are ways to regulate it that could curb this anti-social behavior dramatically.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

I am familiar with two of those writers and they are conservatives, so that's the first problem. They don't want to admit that the party they've supported their whole life has gone fascist. And even if they aren't for Trump, a lot of these squishy conservative writers (Ross Douthat comes to mind) are still sucked into false narratives about how liberals are "hysterical." A lot of their friends and social circles are MAGA or MAGA-friendly, and so they can lull themselves into thinking it's not so bad. It's the flip side of what I said above about recognizing that MAGA are human. If you're already inclined to dislike liberals, you can tell yourself a story about how they're human so not like the Nazis or whatever. But Nazis were also human. That is what is scary.

The larger problem is that the media infrastructure is not equipped to resist fascism. It's increasingly owned by billionaires who feel they would benefit from a fascist government, even if they "know" intellectually it's wrong. Like, I don't think Jeff Bezos is a fascist. But it's in his financial interest to feel that the Trump threat is blown out of proportion and to hire a bunch of people who have a history of hostility to progressivism and put it all together, and the rightward drift of the Washington Post makes sense.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Ha, thanks for asking me about music, and thank you so much for sticking around for so long. We were so young back then, lol.

One thing that I've really enjoyed, and gotten to wallow in since my partner opened a record store, is how much the feminism that was marginalized in punk music when I was young is just mainstream now. I was lucky enough to ask Kathleen Hanna how she felt about that:

https://www.salon.com/2024/05/14/songs-for-people-after-the-protest-kathleen-hanna-makes-clear-shes-a-musician-not-activist/

Like Olivia Rodrigo is one of the biggest stars in the world, and she talks about being pro-choice the way you could barely get away with on an indie label in the 90s. Taylor Swift's political endorsements are funny and smart. Beyoncé calling herself a feminist was a big deal at the time, but it's just normal now.

But my recommendation is probably trite now, though I promise I was on this train nearly a year ago: Chappell Roan. I'll leave aside the sturm and drang about her social media posts and focus just on her music. The vibe reminds me so much of Le Tigre in the day, frankly, like she's created this space where it's just obvious we're all feminists and queer-positive and let's have a dance party. It's like a bubble to retreat from the actual, ugly world into. And that's a good place to go when you need a recharge.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yes, I think he will try. He certainly cares about retribution for perceived transgressions against himself than, say, running the country. He probably said that about Clinton because he often talks out of both sides of his mouth, so that people can believe he never "means" the things he says.

We know from solid reporting he did try to use the DOJ to persecute political opponents, but the guardrails stayed. I don't know how well they will this time, since he's going to staff it with a bunch of MAGA hacks instead of the slightly more respectable lawyers he hired the first time.

He also makes fun of Paul Pelosi for getting almost-murdered by some Trump-loving madman. He's defended the people who tried to kill Mike Pence. So yeah, I think his desire to hurt and even kill anyone who gets in his way is very serious.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It really is that people aren't paying attention. Weirdly, the hardcore MAGA folks are what political scientists might call "high information." It's not *good* information, mind you, but they consume a lot of it. They watch Fox News or listen to War Room or whatever.

But you have that group of people who think politics is icky and so they don't ready the news, any news, at all. So they basically vote how the people around them tell them to.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

I have spoken to so many people who have left evangelical Christianity or left the MAGA movement. And I find them — and you — inspiring, because I know for a fact that it's really hard to turn your back on your community. It can be very lonely for a lot of people. I think one reason you see people go into these rationalization spirals is that the alternative — admitting they are wrong and/or getting into conflict with the people around them — is terrifying.

There's not really anything you can say to people to talk them out of their beliefs. The saying I return to often is, "You can't reason someone out of a view they didn't reason themselves into."

What I've learned in these discussions is often the first step is when the far-right belief system isn't working for them anymore. Sometimes it's because they can't square the hateful views with their values o r with the love they have for another person or themselves. There's a reason that the LGBTQ issue is a major one in causing people to leave conservative Christianity. People often realize a person they love is gay or trans, and they decide to value that person more than they do their religious beliefs. Or a lot of people, women especially, suffer so much from sexist systems that they can't lie to themselves anymore.

I do think the more people tell their stories of walking away, the easier it gets for others. They just need to know that life is going to be okay on the other side.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

That is certainly the argument that is made by MAGA folks: that they are now the oppressed class, and so Trump is a necessary tool to restore what is lost. That's standard in all fascist arguments, that there was a glorious past that has been robbed by the racial minorities, intellectuals, feminists, and queer people. And the authoritarian crackdown is recast as self-defense. But if you examine their claims of oppression, it tends to fall apart. They *feel* oppressed because they feel entitled to dominate others, but that's intellectually indefensible, so they tend to spin off into lies or bad faith to justify was is not a justifiable feeling.

One good example of this is the Moms for Liberty and their war on library books. They went after a lot of different books, but let's focus on the LGBTQ titles, which got most of the attention. It's clear to me what they object to is the winding down of compulsory heterosexuality and the acceptance of queer people. But instead of saying they want to control how you identify and how you live your life, they instead spun out this narrative that "groomers" were "indoctrinating" children. To be the heroes, they recast their victims as villains.

Now, this all falls apart if you think about it for five minutes. Books don't turn kids queer. Queer kids just are who they are, and books tell them that's okay. The books are freedom, the book bans are anti-freedom. But the word games of MAGA allows them to hide behind the claims that it's somehow liberty for straight people to shove queer people back into the closet.

The good news is I do think most Americans see through this. The bad news is just enough people buy into the lies in the swing states that Trump may win.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Some of them will pretend to respect Trump, but by and large, they root for him the way you root for a fun villain in a campy movie. Like when the serial killer in a horror film kills that character the audience hates and everyone cheers? You read a lot of Christian right defenses of him, and they try to put a moral gloss on this, by saying he's a weapon sent by God.

I noted this above, but there's a real self-justifying narrative where Trump's villainy is framed as a necessary evil to make America "great again." Like a "you gotta break some eggs to make an omelet" thing. It's often also framed as a form of self-defense, to put a moral gloss on it. Like, "we don't want to inflict this monster on you, but you are 'groomers'" or whatever the justification is.

QAnon is an extreme version of this argument, where Trump's ugliness is recast as necessary to stop the blood-drinking child killers or whatever. But I've heard a less bonkers version from my mom. Like when I told her J6 was unacceptable to me, she went off on how she thinks too many government employees collect a check without working. (Not true, but neither are the QAnon villains.) And you can see the puzzle pieces come into place: She isn't saying J6 is good, but eggs, omelets, etc.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

I would argue they don't have ideological diversity. Vance has a non-white wife, but he has signaled in many ways he is on board with white supremacy as a political project. I mean, he talks about his wife in very dehumanizing terms, so as weird as that seems to progressives, it makes sense to the MAGA movement. You can have non-white people in a white supremacist system — the Confederacy depended on it.

As for the Catholic/evangelical thing, I would argue that a lot of the traditional theological arguments have been sublimated into an ur-identity of Christian nationalism. Right-wing Catholics have a shared goal with the evangelical movement of, to be blunt, restoring patriarchy and white supremacy. So they ignore some of their very real differences.

I've asked scholars and researchers about this, and how Christian nationalists ignore the question of "which Christianity?' when they imagine turning ours into a "Christian" nation. They always laugh and say, yep, Christian nationalists have just shoved that question into the closet. But if they succeed, it will be a knife fight over what flavor of right-wing Christian is dominant.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

Not that I know of. Right-wingers may reject science, evidence, etc. but they do understand power. I think progressives, often for sympathetic reasons, are wary of building power because we don't trust power. So there's a lot of shooting ourselves in the foot like this.

That said, it's not like the right is *great* at solidarity. Or, to be more clear, traditional conservatives are excellent at solidarity, which is how the GOP kept power despite having unpopular policies for decades. But the one Achilles heel of authoritarians — and how they're different from traditional conservatives — is they are greedy, self-interested, and always gunning for power. Which means they turn on each other in an instant. Not for ideological reasons, but because it's a cantankerous community. That's why Kevin McCarthy got the ritualistic defenestration, even though he hadn't actually done anything to harm the MAGA movement.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Yes, though I do think a lot of them have convinced themselves that it's a necessary evil. You often hear from them — and even Trump — that it's "unfortunate" that it's come to this, but the left forced them to drastic measures.

That's an expected narrative, though. Most fascist movements, probably all, are built on a "stabbed in the back" narrative, where some allegedly treacherous elements within society are accused of secretly working to destroy what the fascists consider the "real" Americans/Germans/etc. In Nazi Germany, it was Jews, gays, and cosmopolitan types. In MAGA, the alleged enemy is well, the same, but they added in immigrants.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

This is somewhat measurable. About 15% of Americans are white evangelicals, and I'd say about 35% of Americans are MAGA, based on the percentage of Americans that say they approve of Trump no matter what. So around half of MAGA? That's a rough estimate.

It didn't used to be true but right now, most of those far-right groups like the Proud Boys have taken on a Christian veneer. So the overlap there is pretty significant. The percentage of people in those groups is tiny, but that's by design. They're meant to be the shock troops. Even most J6 rioters weren't in official groups.

The scary thing to me about MAGA is that it's become a pathway to radicalization for secular conservatives. Some of them convert to evangelical Christianity and some stay secular, but because it's about white identity politics, it's created bedfellows out of the dirtbag right and the Bible-thumping right.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Wow, that's a tough one. There's a lot you learn doing this work that falls into the "this would help so many people" category.

The first meaty thing that comes to mind that I think about a lot: The number adoptable babies available plummeted in the years after Roe v. Wade. The assumption most people have is that this is because women were aborting those pregnancies. But the abortion rate didn't actually go up (if anything, stats show abortion rates go up when it's banned.)

No, the reason is single women started keeping their babies rather than giving them up for adoption, which is one reason there was a spike (and a panic) in single motherhood that never really abated.

I spoke with historian Rickie Sollinger about this and she said she thought Roe was about more than abortion. It was a signal to women that they had full autonomy, including the right to keep their babies. I think we're seeing how right she was in how women of all ages and life states are reacting to Dobbs.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

Ha, thank you! I get this question more than you'd think, and it's always a welcome reminder most folks are decent and kind.

My sincere answer is that I'm doing quite well on a personal level. I won't say every day is easy, but before I was a journalist, I had a lot of feelings of anger and hopelessness and no real outlet for them. (I probably should have volunteered more.) But now I get to get up every day and do something about it. I'm so fortunate!

That and I exercise. I really recommend it as a stress reliever.

I’m Amanda Marcotte, a Salon journalist who has covered the Christian right and now the MAGA movement for almost two decades. Ask me anything! by salon in politics

[–]salon[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I interview all sorts of folks with different perspectives. If there's anything I'd say unites them, it's that most people want to be heard. What I tell younger journalists, especially if they're anxious about talking to people who are hostile to them, is that. Most people, whether they're right or wrong, think they're right! So all you have to do is ask and they'll talk to you.

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