April 17
MAGA Maoism
The Cultural Revolution and The Culture War
MAGA Maoism is the fusion of Maoist loyalty hiring with capitalist rapacity. Where Mao purged the credentialed class and replaced it with a cadre class trained in Mao Zedong Thought and tasked with running a centralized party-state, the Trump administration has purged the credentialed class and replaced it with billionaires, family members, Fox News hosts, Trump’s personal criminal defense attorneys, figures who supported the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and a scattering of young operatives affiliated with the Department of Government Efficiency. The operational functions that the credentialed class used to perform are being sold off to private equity, defense contractors, surveillance firms, Medicare Advantage plans, charter school operators, and the network of institutions aligned with the Project 2025 blueprint. Mao’s cadres believed and did not extract. The current administration’s cadres believe and extract.
What are their tenets? Greed is good. Greed is God. Poverty is weakness and shameful. Admitting inadequacy or failure is shameful. Experience and intellect and education are not just inadequate; they are bad and harmful.
The Cultural Revolution and the Culture War. What an American twist, Americans love their profitable wars. Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to purge counterrevolutionary contamination from Chinese schools, media, civil service, and the arts, mobilizing student Red Guards who hauled their own teachers onto stages in dunce caps, forced them to confess invented crimes, shuttered universities for years, and burned books and smashed religious sites as part of a campaign against the Four Olds. The American version purges woke contamination from American schools, media, civil service, and the arts. Our Red Guards file lawsuits against universities and cut their research funding rather than beat professors in the streets. The enemies lists would be legible to any veteran of 1966 who woke up today and picked up a newspaper. Bourgeois revisionism has been renamed DEI. The targets are the same.
The Great Leap Forward and the Tariff War. Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958 to catapult China past Britain in steel production by ordering peasants to melt their pots and pans in backyard furnaces and reorganizing rural life into massive communes with impossible grain quotas. Local party cadres reported the harvests they knew Mao wanted to hear rather than the harvests that had actually been grown, because reporting the truth meant being denounced as a counterrevolutionary. The state requisitioned grain from villages based on the inflated figures. Villages were stripped of the food they had actually produced. An estimated thirty million Chinese peasants starved in the resulting famine, with some historians putting the toll as high as forty-five million, a catastrophe Mao’s inner circle concealed from him for as long as they could because no one wanted to be the one who told the chairman his plan had failed.
Today, American agricultural exports to China fell roughly sixteen billion dollars in 2025, with another one-point-three-billion-dollar decline to Canada, the two largest export market collapses in a single year. USDA projects exports to China will fall to nine billion dollars in 2026, the lowest level since the last Trump trade war. Beef exports to China fell more than ninety percent after Chinese regulators quietly let the export licenses of hundreds of American beef plants expire. Soybean exports to China collapsed by seventy-two percent in volume, and Brazil and Argentina have now permanently captured the market share American farmers lost. Canadian provincial liquor boards pulled American alcohol from store shelves, and US wine exports to Canada fell seventy-eight percent in a single year. Farm bankruptcies rose forty-six percent in 2025, the second consecutive annual increase, and the median American farm household lost money on its farming operation, running a negative $1,498 in inflation-adjusted terms.
In North Dakota, farmer Randy Richards’s soybeans sat in storage through November because Chinese buyers had turned to Brazil. Caleb Ragland, a ninth-generation Kentucky farmer and president of the American Soybean Association, told reporters that without storage his harvest would rot in the field. These are farmers who voted for the president who imposed the tariffs. If they criticize the party, they risk social rejection in their own rural communities. When you read the interviews, they do everything they can not to blame Trump, and often just retreat into confusion.
The parallels are there because this is how the thing works. You take over a country by brainwashing the masses, dismantling education, removing institutional safeguards, taking from the many to give to the few so you have powerful people keeping you in power, rewarding loyalty over competence, and creating chaos to make it more difficult for people to rise up and also easier to obfuscate during crisis. Starving, overworked, and propagandized masses are easier to control. MAGA Maoism is just another Chinese import that Trump slapped his name on.
So why did I write this?
Because every wall falls. Mao died and while things aren’t good in China they are nowhere near what they were during the rule of Mao Zedong. The Soviet Union ended. That also didn’t solve their problems. Things change, they stay the same, we try to learn lessons, and maybe things get better. Or they at least get better for a while until we have time to forget the lessons of the past.
The biggest takeaway here is that if you want to know how to defeat authoritarianism, you look at what they attack.
Ignorance allows fascism to fester while education creates freedom and democracy as a natural emergent effect.
Want to stop fascism? Learn something. Then share it with others. Repeat.
So what do you do next as one of The Existentialist Republic’s two to three million monthly readers? We have three full length books and a dozen booklets all available for free with download links below. You can also check out our four pieces of model legislation that are shared directly with legislators and activists.
Everything I just described runs on ten subscribers per article, about twenty cents per article for a subscriber.
You and I and 53,274 others have hit that minimum number of subscribers now for 20 articles in a row after missing it for several weeks. That’s 20 of the 30 days we need this month to keep everything moving.
Don’t let this be the reason you miss rent or skip a meal. For everyone else, you can be one of the ten today and make sure the articles, books, legislation, and training keep coming for everyone.
Thanks for being here.
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download
Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download
Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download
Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download
More Free downloads:
Subscribe by email →