Bloodthirsty Rhetoric and Overt Racism: How MAGA Discourse Hit New Lows This Week

This Week’s Alarming Erosion Of Decency And Norms

This week saw an unsettling convergence of violent rhetoric, explicit racism and risky handling of military information from prominent figures associated with the MAGA movement. President Donald Trump’s public attacks on Somali immigrants, media personality Megyn Kelly’s call for prolonged suffering after a reported drone strike, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of boat attacks — alongside a Pentagon inspector general report about his misuse of a private messaging app — together mark a troubling decline in political discourse and respect for the rule of law.

What Happened

Megyn Kelly: On her podcast, Kelly defended U.S. military actions in the Caribbean and dismissed criticism as a "manufactured" controversy. She then advocated for intentionally prolonging victims’ suffering in connection with reports of a Sept. 2 drone strike in which two people were reportedly killed in a "double-tap" attack after surviving an initial strike. Kelly said, "I'd really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time so that they lose a limb and bleed out a little." Those remarks openly champion inflicting pain and raise serious ethical and legal concerns.

President Trump: In comments that drew unusually strong language from normally restrained outlets, Trump described Somali immigrants as "garbage" and said, "we don't want them in our country," adding that Somalis had "destroyed our country" and linking the change to the presidency of Barack Obama. These comments coincided with an ICE removal operation targeting Somali immigrants in the Minneapolis area, giving the remarks a menacing and consequential context.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: Hegseth shared a cartoon meme celebrating the Caribbean boat attacks he publicly defended as necessary for national security. A Pentagon inspector general report released this week also found that his use of a private messaging app to share operational details risked endangering U.S. forces and exposing sensitive information.

Why It Matters

The combination of dehumanizing rhetoric, praise for extralegal or brutal tactics and carelessness with classified information corrodes public trust and weakens democratic norms. When influential figures normalize cruelty and racialized attacks, they lower the bar for acceptable public discourse and make it more difficult for institutions to uphold legal and moral standards. The inconsistent application of accountability — for instance, the insistence on strict rules for political opponents in prior years compared with the reluctance to hold allies to the same standards now — further undermines credibility.

"These words and actions are dangerous and should be disqualifying for serious public participants," the author writes. Public officials, commentators and political allies should explicitly repudiate racist and cruel statements or risk implying tacit approval.

What Should Happen

The piece argues for clear, cross-partisan condemnation of racism and advocacy of cruelty. It calls for thorough investigations where wrongdoing or mishandling of classified information may have occurred and suggests accountability measures — up to impeachment if warranted — for senior officials who endanger troops or endorse unlawful conduct. It also urges mainstream conservative voices to reclaim moral leadership by denouncing dehumanizing rhetoric from figures within their own ranks.

Comparisons to historic episodes of dehumanizing propaganda — such as the Radio Rwanda broadcasts in 1994 — are invoked as a stern warning: language that encourages cruelty and dehumanization should not become normalized. The author’s central appeal is simple: restore standards of decency, demand accountability and resist the normalization of brutality and racial animus in public life.

Originally published by MS NOW. This version improves readability and structure while preserving the facts and quotations reported in the original piece.