Has America been made great again enough for you yet?

I asked that question back in May of last year in a column titled The Godzilla Window. It didn’t go over very well at the time, at least not with my conservative readers. Here are a couple excerpts …

Personally, I don’t know how much more greatness I can handle. I mean, you got the Salvadoran gulag thing, the crackdown on free speech thing, the threats to suspend constitutional rights because of the latest “state of emergency” (i.e., the “invasion” of America by squads of “Tren de Aragua assassins” that Biden conspired with Maduro to unleash on God-fearing heterosexual white families), the luxury resort and theme park Trump wants to build on the ruins of Gaza once Israel gets done liquidating it, the Qatari “Trump Force One” jet, the Saudi weapons-deal money, the Silicon-Valley transhumanist guys, the neo-fascist “remigration” faction, the Musk Cult, and … well, I’m sure I’m leaving something out, but who can keep track of all this greatness?

The thing is, it isn’t 2016, or 2018, or even 2020 or 2022 anymore. A lot has happened since the days when Trump was under attack as both a “Russian agent” and “literally Hitler.” Twitter has been bought and successfully whitewashed and rebranded as “free-speech X” by Elon Musk—the Military-Industrial-Complex-embedded transhumanist multi-billionaire who is literally a key member of the US government—and is now the meticulously visibility-filtered mouthpiece for MAGA and the international “populist” movement. It is an official propaganda organ more sophisticated and insidious than anything Orwell could have imagined. The MAGA movement has joined forces with far-right ethno-nationalist movements and parties like the AfD here in Germany, and together they are fomenting racial hatred around the clock, and selling their hapless supporters pipe dreams of “the end of globalism,” the “rebirth of the sovereign nation-state,” or something … as if the global-capitalist empire were going to just surrender and wither up and die because Trump issued an executive order at it. In short, the MAGA demographic and the ethno-nationalist right believe they have “won,” or are about to “win,” and they are power-drunk, and reckless, and appear to have forgotten how episodes like this end.

And now, here we are, eight months later, just over one year into The Golden Age of America Made Great Again, and … well, you know what’s happening.

Masked ethno-nationalist goon squads are terrorizing US cities, randomly detaining people of color and demanding that they show their papers, brutalizing, threatening, and murdering protesters, conducting unwarranted raids of people’s homes, and just generally projectile-shitting all over the US Constitution and the rule of law.

I’m not going to go on and on about all the details of the MAGA authoritarianism on display in the USA currently. It would take an entire column to do that, and you have access to the same news that I do.

Instead, I want to urge you to step back from the intense political polarization of the moment and focus on the fundamental forces at play.

There are exactly two of them: (1) neoliberalism, a/k/a global capitalism, and (2) neo-nationalism, or rather, the simulation of neo-nationalism. I addressed this in detail in one of my very early columns back in 2016, The Blood-Dimmed Tide of Neo-Nationalism and Other Scary Simulacra. Here’s an excerpt …

The blood-dimmed tide of neo-nationalism currently sweeping the Western world is a simulacrum in the classical sense. It isn’t a deceptive (i.e. “fake”) alternative concealing an authentic (i.e. “real”) alternative to globalized neoliberal capitalism, but, rather, an all-too-real phenomenon concealing the fact that there is no alternative, and that, at present, an alternative is unimaginable … literally unimaginable, in the sense that we are not yet capable of conceiving a credible alternative system, or a way to get there. The global capitalist ruling classes are extremely fond of this simulacrum, as it distracts us from facing where we actually are, and from working together to conceive that alternative, or even just asking the kind of questions that might help us actually get there, someday. It also keeps everyone afraid of terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, neo-fascism, populism, Trumpism, and pretty much any other variety of “extremism” they can possibly think of … as if there were the slightest chance of any of these “movements” actually succeeding, and toppling global capitalism.

Notwithstanding everything that has happened over the last ten years, fundamentally, nothing has changed. The essential conflict remains the same, its outcome a foregone conclusion, now more than ever, actually.

In my Godzilla Window column last May, I quoted Matt Taibbi’s piece Ode to Scum …

Trump’s in the White House, but his power base is still mostly all voters, and I’m not sure his people are wrong to think they’ve got maybe a year to smash big law, academia, the media, the DC nomenklatura, the EU, and everything else on their shit list before those entities send the hammer right back. They’re probably also right that if Trump fails, we’ll be back to where we were at the moment of the record scratch seven months ago, staring at a more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism, with more sophisticated plans for higher “guardrails.”

I did that, not because I wanted to “attack” Matt—believe it or not, it is still possible to disagree with people’s views and continue to like and respect them—but because I think Matt’s belief that Trump & Co. are capable of stopping the relentless advance of that “more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism” is a belief shared by a lot of Americans, namely the hardcore MAGA demographic.

I understand and empathize with people who hold that belief, that hope. I am all too familiar with that “more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism.” For more than two years, I have been criminally investigated, prosecuted, and recently had my apartment raided by that “more organized and cynical effort at authoritarianism” … because I wrote a book and tweeted a couple of tweets. So I get it. I get the desire to take revenge on the “woke,” or “globalists,” or “Covidians,” or “libtards,” or whatever you want to call them. It’s childish, and self-destructive, that desire, but I get it.

It isn’t going to happen, folks. There isn’t going to be a thousand-year MAGA Reich. No “Golden Age of America Made Great Again.” The ethno-nationalist party is over. The guests just haven’t realized it yet. It will be a while before they do. They’re fairly shitfaced on “power” at the moment.

Matt just published a new piece, Forget Trump and Greenland. Howard Lutnick Gave the Davos Speech that Mattered, which I urge everyone to read and reflect on, because Matt is zeroing in on the fundamental conflict of our historical epoch (i.e., neo-nationalism versus neoliberalism, and globalism.) Obviously, I disagree with Matt’s understanding of globalism, which I understand as an integral aspect of the evolution of the global-capitalist power system that we all live under, not a set of policies that can or will be reversed, by MAGA or any other administration, but Matt’s article is important and refreshing in that it focuses on the bigger historical picture. We don’t get enough of that these days.

Unfortunately, the “populist” rebellion against globalization that Matt refers to, and that I’ve been writing about for the past ten years, has been captured, contained, and neutralized. Any actual potential it may have had to alter the evolutionary trajectory of the global-capitalist system has been extinguished. The power-drunk totalitarian theatrics of MAGA/The Musk Cult/the AfD, et al. currently on display are the death throes, not of globalism, but rather, of any “populist” opposition to it. Basically, the “populist” insurgency has morphed into precisely the monster the global-capitalist system needed it to become in order to immunize itself for the longer-term future.

Again, if you don’t understand what I’m talking about, that’s OK … you will in a few years.

The point is, I hope my readers will take a break from the noise and hatred and mass hysteria that we are all being inundated with on a daily basis, and read and reflect on Matt’s piece, and my pieces, and attempt to understand the context of current events, as opposed to just scrolling through the never-ending torrent of lies and propaganda and slop and spewing mindless insults at each other like the subjects of some twisted Pavlovian experiment.

I know that’s a lot to ask, currently, but I had to at least try.

Addendum: This column was originally published on Substack, a few hours before MAGA goon squads murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

###

CJ Hopkins
January 24, 2026

Photo: Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Minnesota Star Tribune

---

DISCLAIMER: The preceding essay is entirely the work of our in-house satirist and self-appointed political pundit, CJ Hopkins, and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Consent Factory, Inc., or its staff, or any of its agents, subsidiaries, or assigns. If, for whatever inexplicable reason, you appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to support it, please go to his Substack page, or his Patreon page, or send a contribution to his PayPal account, so that maybe he’ll stop coming around our offices trying to hit our employees up for money. Alternatively, you could purchase his satirical dystopian sci-fi novel, Zone 23, or Volumes I, II, III, and IV of his Consent Factory Essays, or any of his subversive stage plays, which won some awards in Great Britain and Australia. If you do not appreciate Mr. Hopkins’ work and would like to write him an abusive or threatening email, feel free to contact him directly.