I was a kid when the movie Gandhi with Ben Kingsley came out in 1982.
At my school, it was mandatory for every class to go see it in the theater.
A three-hour history epic about some far away place that preteen me couldn’t care less about.
About a guy who goes on hunger strikes. Oh yeah! Sounds great! Kill me now.
But the movie was actually pretty good.
At some point half way through the movie, something dawned on me:
“Wait… wait a minute. Wait. The brown people are the good guys in this movie? And the white guys are the bad guys? What? Am I getting this right?”
That was the moment in my life when I realized, that up to this point, in every movie I had ever seen so far, the white guy was always the hero, and brown guys were always the bad guys.
The movie Gandhi in 1982 was literally the first time in my life that I saw the roles reversed.
That opened my eyes to a lot of things.
The way we see the world is shaped, or tainted, by what our trusted sources tell us about the world. And for a lot of people, movies and TV are a trusted source.
A lot of red state MAGA yokels are still on the wrong side of that Gandhi moment.
For them, that moment of clarity hasn’t happened yet.
They haven’t figured out yet that sometimes the brown guys are the good guys, and the white guys are the bad guys. Because that’s not something their trusted TV has ever told them.
But they’ve never even noticed it.
And when they’re suddenly confronted with “woke” movies where a woman or a brown guy plays the hero, they’re repulsed by it. It’s some crazy upside down world to them. Does not compute.
Remember how they freaked out about an all-female Ghostbusters?
And how mad they were about a female lead in Star Wars?
And the meltdown they had over a black mermaid?
And they lost their fucking minds when a trans person appeared in a beer ad.
That’s why they want to go back to the time before the civil rights era in the 1960s.
Before women and black people and gay people got human rights, and before red state MAGA yokels were suddenly forced to treat them as equals.
When they say “make America great again,” MAGA Nazis mean they want to turn the clock back to before the 1960s. The good old days to them was when women and black people didn’t have equal rights, and it was still ok to rape your wife, and hit her if she stepped out of line.
To the racist MAGA Nazi cult, America was great when it was still ok to use the N word when addressing black people. And when gay people were sent to prison.
In the 1950s, racism out in public was still perfectly ok. In fact, it was illegal to not be racist.
In the 1950s, before women were allowed to have bank accounts, interracial marriage was still illegal. People went to prison for marrying someone of a different race.
Then, during the civil rights movement, the racist anti-interracial-marriage-laws from the slavery days were called unconstitutional, and interracial marriage was finally legal in red states too.
That was in the 1960s, when America turned to shit, according to MAGA Nazis.
Here, watch these short video clips of MAGA Nazis explaining in their own words, what “Make America Great Again” means to them.
Watching these videos might be your Gandhi moment.
1. MAGA Nazis want to ban women from voting, because most women vote for Democrats.
2. Christofascist MAGA Nazis want to exterminate gay and trans people, just like German Nazis did.
3. Hitler, the KKK, and MAGA Nazis claim there’s a global “Great Replacement” conspiracy to replace white people with inferior brown people
4. MAGA Nazis in their own words: They want to end democracy and make Trump a God-like dictator with unlimited power to kill his enemies
Related: MAGA = NAZI. It’s literally the same ideology of hate.
