Is ‘Blue MAGA’ really a thing, or just a fever dream of young progressives?

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Americans don’t fit neatly into ideological boxes, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try to make others fit into them. Case in point: the conversation about “Blue MAGA.”

What is “Blue MAGA?” Nobody seems to know, but people are using the term — as a pejorative.

This is a change from last year, when Rep. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, was saying that his party needs a “Blue MAGA” movement, which he later loosely defined as “economic patriotism.” The idea was that Democrats needed to reclaim their party for the working man and woman.

As Gitanjali Poonia summarized Khanna’s thinking for the Deseret News last year, “He’s used several names, but it’s all the same agenda: Bring back manufacturing to America, and better jobs for working and middle class Americans.”

There are far worse ideas on the table, and this certainly worked for Donald Trump as a campaign strategy.

But somehow between then and now, “Blue MAGA” has become an insult, according to a recent piece in The New York Times, which noted that the term is “a call-out increasingly used online by young progressives,” particularly those who scorn more conventional Democrats and their politics.

YouTuber Hasan Piker told the Times that “Blue MAGA is about cultlike loyalty to the Democratic Party, but unlike MAGA, it isn’t centered around one person. It’s centered around the image of a party that consultants and lobbyists have carefully crafted.”

This would be the same Hasan Piker who, over the weekend, dressed in the style of Mao Zedong and told a gathering of college students: “No more to Trumpism, but no more to the Democrats who compromise, who conciliate, and who betray us. … No more to the Democrats who will collaborate and cooperate with the fascists, who will fund ICE, who will fund Israel, who will help poison the planet, who will stiff workers and help bosses.”

So in those terms, “Blue MAGA” represents establishment Democrats like James Carville, who are decrying the state of the party and blaming progressives for it. “Is their solution to beat Republicans to run against Republicans? No. Their solution is to beat Democrats like they’re part of the problem,” Carville recently said.

It would also represent Van Jones, the CNN commentator and self-described “strong Democrat” who has been writing on X about far-left Democrats hijacking the party with “insane, outlandish and nutty ideas.”

All in all, it seems like the only thing that Blue MAGA and Red MAGA have in common is a propensity for infighting. And Blue MAGA, however one defines it, lacks two essential ingredients of Red MAGA: an inspirational leader and originality.

It’s a lesson straight out of marketing 101: Knockoffs rarely work.

But this is America, and people are free to learn the hard way, as one entrepreneur did when he tried to sell Blue MAGA hats in 2020. Good luck finding one in the wild.

The rise of skeleton culture

It’s late July, so that means it’s time for … skeletons, of course.

They’re already in stores, to the horror of all right-thinking people, who prefer Halloween to stay confined to October.

But increasingly, 12-foot skeletons have become a year-round fixture, a phenomenon explained by the Los Angeles Times in a very Los Angeles way.

The writer myopically called the skeleton craze “a natural byproduct of Los Angeles — a city filled with the creative and the bohemian, with people who want to make a splash, get a laugh or simply be noticed.”

Actually, year-round Skellys can be seen across the U.S., to the chagrin of neighbors who don’t appreciate the comedy of, say, a 12-foot skeleton grilling out in July or wearing a child’s inflatable and looking like he’s about to step into a pool.

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The Times suggests that year-round skeletons are a byproduct of homes having too little storage space, which seems a stretch, given that the median house size in the 1950s and ’60s was about , compared to 2,405 square feet last year.

The writer also seems pro-skeleton, quoting one fan of the trend as saying, “People say they’re making home values drop, or claim skeletons are part of the devil. Crazy stuff like that. But there’s always gonna be those people.”

“Those people” — kind of like the “these people” that Stephen King wrote about disdainfully on X last week. Is there a less congenial way of speaking about your neighbors than calling them “those people”?

Meanwhile, despite the best efforts of cities and homeowners associations, the giant skeletons sell out every year, and in a horrifying new development, this year’s model has the capacity to talk.

The only silver lining that I can see in all this is that with Halloween decorations already in stores, that means the Fourth of July merch is half-price.

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Samuel J. Abrams believes that young people are rejecting capitalism because they haven’t been taught how markets work and because socialism is offering them community.

“If we look honestly at what the Democratic Socialists of America can offer a lonely 24-year-old, it is not primarily a policy program. It is membership and meetings, canvassing and organizing with friends on a Saturday morning, along with a shared vocabulary, a common enemy and the feeling of mattering to something larger than oneself.”

Don’t fear the socialists. Fear the conditions that produced them

Before Amazon was primarily associated with Jeff Bezos, the word evoked the warrior women of Greek mythology who intentionally lived in a society without men. Young women today seem to want to re-create this culture even if it comes at the cost of their own happiness, Maria Baer and Brad Wilcox write.

“It’s a small tragedy that today’s cult of Amazonian independence talks too many young women out of leaving room for the risks and rewards of finding a good man, marrying and starting a family. But for those who want to maximize their odds of building a life that’s happy and meaningful — and, yes, sometimes messy and chaotic — the three pieces of advice that Suzanne Venker offers are worth taking seriously.”

The Amazonian trap

Jay Evensen takes a semi-serious look at the unsatisfying information being released by the federal government with regard to UAPs, UFOs or whatever we’re calling them this week.

“My skeptical meter about all of this is on high alert, however, after reading a Wall Street Journal investigation last year. It turns out some of the best-known stories about crashed aliens and other close encounters may have been planted by the government as a diversion. A now-retired Air Force colonel confessed to the Pentagon in 2023 that he handed a Nevada bar owner photos of flying saucers many years ago to fool the Soviets.”

Latest UFO data dump doesn’t provide what we really want — an alien

End notes

In last week’s Right to the Point subscriber poll, we considered what makes a state the best place to live, in light of a CNBC list with some head-scratching criteria.

There’s no one thing, as it turns out. (Which surprised me — I’d expected the proximity of family and friends to top the list.) But shoutout to everyone who voted for plentiful Chick-fil-As.

Finally, earlier this month, the Washington Post had an interactive feature called “The 25 most influential works of American culture.” It was collectively written by the newspaper’s staff, in consultation with “consulting historians, curators and other experts” who chose one influential work per decade of America’s existence.

It wasn’t so much the final list that interested me as the interactive part, in which readers could click on a link to say whether they had read or seen something that was listed.

Half of the people who participated, for example, said they had read Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” while 47% said they had read “The Federalist Papers” and 70% said they had read “Moby-Dick.”

Which seems an indictment of our public school system, if true.

The list raises other questions. Is “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” really the most influential work produced in the U.S. between 1956 and 1965, Julia Child’s popularity notwithstanding? This era, after all, also saw the publication of “Atlas Shrugged,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Feminine Mystique.”

More importantly, did “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” belong anywhere near this list?

But to me, the biggest affront was giving the time period of 1976-1985 to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” rather than the obvious selection: Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky.”

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Fans of “Star Wars” might be even more indignant than I was.