Crazy Trump supporters won't believe the new # DarkMAGA brand

Using the hashtag # DarkMAGA

A small group of Donald Trump followers are asking the former president to return to the highest level of American politics angrily.

Dark MAGA is a post-alt-right style that calls for an authoritarian version of Trump in gloomy cyborg images. It's more of a political phrase. In some, Trump Tower is completely dark, and the former president can be seen hacking the screen with blue laser eyes.

The hashtag originally appeared on Twitter on January 21

• By March, his popularity had grown. It can now be found in tens of thousands of memes on Telegram and TikTok.
• Action aesthetics are instantly recognizable: images modified in red, black or red and blue, where people with blue laser eyes often carry weapons or stand in front of neo-Nazi logos.
• Other similarities between this desperate small group are their tendency to equate # DarkMAGA and Trump with the racist concept of eye colour and power.

Dark MAGA followers want ruthless evil Trump to avenge his political opponents in the 2024 election

Despite the fact that Trump did not recognize or approve the movement in any way. The former president has yet to publicly confirm his intention to run for president in 2024.

According to the Global Network for Extremism and Technology (GNET), the creator of the hashtag # DarkMAGA depicts "Napoleon, who is exiled.

"# DarkMAGA is an aesthetic demand that Trump take a more serious and focused approach to the role that he can only fill.

According to GNET, no single known organization or clear philosophy leads the movement. Many statements by Dark MAGA supporters urge violence and include sexist and/or racist remarks.

According to Tim Squirrell, head of communications and editorial at the Strategic Dialogue Institute, the movement is full of early online trolling techniques in the alt-right tradition after Charlottesville, which has been trying to reunite this loose coalition of white supremacists and white nationalists under the same group since the deadly Unite the Right march in Virginia in 2017.

He explains: What we see is many attempts to unite those factions again, to some extent.

The dark MAGA, to some extent, is the latest attempt to try to do this, to bring these things together and try to unite Trump and the kind of people who are more on the sidelines behind this hardline image of Trump returning as a kind of revenge leader, having been taken off, removing all kindness and compassion from his heart, in this kind of anime arch," says Squirrell.

According to Squirrell, Dark MAGA's concept of "this glorious leader who was punished and kicked away, dislocated and humiliated, needs to go back and stiffen his heart" will be home in games like Warhammer 40k or Japanese anime.

However, in Dark MAGA, the inability to separate what is cynical from dangerous is part of the movement's strategy to win public attention.

The point of a campaign like Dark MAGA is that it's outrageous. It's melodramatic, it's a little silly. Trump has been highlighted in red with blue laser eyes, and the part they do is create that ridiculous aesthetic as a way of attracting attention. "

According to Alice E. Marwick, associate professor of communication at the University of North Carolina and lead researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, the dark MAGA is a development of the disappointment and deprivation felt by many Trump supporters after the 2020 election.

There is a certain group of people who were very disappointed with the 2020 election and there is a sense that what precipitated the attacks on the Capitol on January 6 is the idea that the election was stolen, a message prepared by key Republicans for months before the election. "

I spend a lot of time on the internet in far-right groups.

• There is a growing sense of persecution there. There is a growing sense of urgency. There is a growing sense of anger over things like the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, COVID lockdowns and COVID restrictions.
• I think in many societies, there has been a entrenchment of ideas that the Biden regime or the left generally engages in these widespread conspiracies to suppress truth or the Conservative opinions and actions are being suppressed by the Trump administration.
• According to Marwick, as a result, some Trump supporters have a "heavy victim mentality."

Public messages that Democrats are evil, that children are threatened, that people may need to take extremist actions, even political violence to protect their children and their values, I think is consistent across the spectrum (far-right), "Marwick says.

Marwick explains: Now, what this does is it allows this speech to exist about an account where these bad guys will get their result.

Marwick wrote that if you were a "major Republican"

Your strategy for dealing with this "risk" will be to support anti-LGBT actions and, in 2024, to vote for a candidate who better matches your principles.

If you're more involved in this extreme environment, as indicated by the Dark MAGA hashtag, the premise is that children are being kidnapped and slain by this terrible bunch of elites. 

Dark MAGA, according to Squirrell, tries to bring these organizations together behind the same goals, as a way to unite key conservatives with hard white nationalists and white supremacists.

According to Marwick, the threat of political violence from far-right groups such as Dark MAGA is real, but now it is relatively restricted by the group's lack of popular support.

I think the Biden administration has been more attentive than the Trump administration to recognize potential violence from far-right groups. "

But that doesn't mean the alt-right has disappeared. The far right, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers still exist.

Marwick argues that the ideologies that fuel the Dark MAGA movement are already causing harm in American society after infiltrating the mainstream political debate.