Adam Serwer

They've replaced every redeeming quality of traditional masculinity or the traditional masculine ideal that they talk about, heroism, sacrifice, bravery.

And they've replaced it with, you know, a capacity for violence and domination.

That's it.

I've had loved ones who have been on multiple deployments.

But what is a reality is you cannot have people with masks and guns who are not accountable to the public because we don't know their identities, who have total, quote unquote, total immunity to use lethal force.

That is just not compatible with a democracy.

Because the lifeblood of democracy is accountability.

And if you give someone ultimate power, the power over life and death, and you say they can never be held accountable under any circumstances, then you've defeated the purpose of democracy in the first place, which is to find what the will of the people is and execute it.

Yeah, look, I think when a lot of MAGA-aligned people talk about the West, they're not talking about great literature.

They're not talking about great art, although they may sometimes invoke classical literature or classical art that they haven't read or cannot appreciate in order to defend what they really mean, which is the West is a racially defined thing.

It's defined by white people in the presence of people who are not white is therefore an attack on the West.

But what the people in Minnesota are defending,

are the actual Western values, individual liberty, due process, free speech.

It's sort of extraordinary how much the people aligned with the Trump administration either don't understand, as you pointed out, or don't like these things.

You know, when I was at the march, there was a young man I spoke to whose family was from Uganda.

And he mentioned that, you know, his mom had like made sure he knew where her passport was in case she got picked up by ICE.

And what he said to me was like, you know, my parents are scared because the country they fled had men in the street with masks and guns and they never thought it would happen here.

So when you think about Stephen Miller saying, oh, you know, these third world migrants recreate the conditions of their broken homelands.

No, you're doing that.

That's what you are doing.