Manufactured Outrage: MAGA keeps its base armed, afraid, and shockingly deceived

Lots of reported evidence shows that governance under Trump and his MAGA authoritarianism has degenerated into, among other awful things, an irrationally extremist pro-gun, anti–public health project. MAGA’s authoritarian-kleptocrats treat gun death and injury, drug addiction, and other health threats and harms as acceptable collateral damage. The point is to maintain a a weaponized, white-hot culture war. A major part of MAGA’s project to deceive and manipulate the American people depends on hiding existing data and analysis, suppressing collection of inconvenient new data and analysis, fomenting social division, and keeping the MAGA base in a permanent state of irrational moral outrage, grievance and fear. An article the NYT recently published (not paywalled), Trump Administration Guts Efforts to Prevent Gun Violence, Suppressing Reports, and earlier NYT reporting (not paywalled), Trump Administration Announces Moves to Sharply Curtail Gun Regulations, exemplify reporting about this.

Corruptly pro-gun with public health damage

Trump and elite MAGA goons in power have intensified efforts to deregulate guns. They have obliterated dozens of federal rules on background checks, assault-style weapons, and accessories that make semi-automatic weapons more lethal. Meanwhile, gun violence remains a leading cause of premature death in the US. Public health analyses repeatedly show that gun violence is a major public health threat, costing hundreds of billions annually and imposing heavy burdens on emergency medicine. The data consistently shows that lax gun laws and higher firearm deaths go together. To keep Americans polarized, upset, and disinformed, MAGA policy is to weaken gun violence preventions. Trump and MAGA elites have targeted agencies like CDC that support gun-violence research. Trump has cut funding and reduced efforts to establish evidence-based violence interventions.

Deliberate polarization around guns

Survey research on MAGA Republicans finds elevated acceptance of political violence and dehumanizing rhetoric. Those attitudes help make firearms in political and civic spaces more dangerous. Right-wing authoritarian demagoguery media and elites frame even modest gun regulations as existential assaults on “real Americans”. The point is to feed a perpetual outrage cycle among rank and file MAGA supporters by providing irrational, evidence-contradicted rationalizations for mass shootings and blocks gun safety laws and regulations that majority public opinion supports. MAGA’s tactic to weaponize identity on this issue is intentional. That is how MAGA’s wealth and power movement helps maintain supporter cohesion, and keep disinformed supporters mobilized against imagined internal enemies. The real internal enemies here are corporations and ideologues profiting from deregulation or defending indefensible authoritarian ideology.

MAGA’s policy of hiding inconvenient truth

When honest, good faith public health experts describe gun violence or overdose deaths as crises requiring evidence-based responses, Trump and MAGA-aligned organizations attack the experts and their inconvenient science as partisan “propaganda”. They simply work to strip funding or authority from health agencies and fire people who sound the alarm about gun violence. The same pattern applies to Covid, mental health, and social harm reduction generally. Experts are always smeared, data collection is attacked as lies, and programs that reduce gun violence, overdoses or suicide risk are caricatured as coddling criminals. In MAGA’s morally rotted, demagogic information ecosystem, public ignorance is not a byproduct or accident. It is a core policy goal. An informed public might start asking why “pro-freedom” politics keeps producing such measurable, preventable carnage, cost and misery.

Source

Radicals and crooks blocking inconvenient research isn’t new: For context, pro-gun anti-violence data extremism predates Trump and the modern, authoritarian-kleptocratic MAGA wealth and power movement. An early research paper in 1993 on gun ownership, Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the Home, discussed evidence that gun ownership was associated with increased domestic gun violence. That single paper triggered a vehement backlash from the NRA and gun manufacturers. That single paper triggered (1) propaganda that conned idiot ideologue politicians in congress, and (2) “campaign contributions” that bought corrupt politicians. The gun industry with its ruthless lobbyists bought what amounted to a federal ban on funding gun violence research. For decades federal funding for gun violence research was severely limited, despite some key idiot players in congress saying that wasn’t their intent. Trump and MAGA elites in power have choked off and gun-violence research through budget cuts and political threats. So in practice we are still in a functional ban on research. So here we sit in 2026, a far more ignorant society than if the gun-ammo industry had not bought their gun violence research ban from congressional crooks and idiots.

Q: Are Trump and his MAGA elites right to dismiss public health experts as liars and inconvenient public health science as lies, or are they mostly just trying to honestly inform us in good faith?

Info sources:

Gun Control for Health: A Public Health of Consequence, December 2022

CDC Data Is Helping Combat Gun Violence. But It’s at Risk of Disappearing.

Preventing Armed Insurrection: Firearms in Political Spaces Threaten Public Health, Safety, and Democracy

Opinion: The MAGA-gun lobby’s rationalization of mass shootings

MAGA Republicans’ views of American democracy and society and support for political violence in the United States: Findings from a nationwide population-representative survey

Politics v. science: How President Trump’s war on science impacted public health and environmental regulation

Scientific Integrity Losses and Lessons for the 116th Congress

Trump administration restricts CDC research and messaging with layers of oversight