The Dark Magic Behind the #DarkMAGA Movement
Art by Jordan Tanner
What is Dark MAGA, and does it have the “meme magic” required to summon another Trump presidency?
In March of this year, a new aesthetic appeared out of the cybernetic gloom. Calling itself #DarkMAGA, this vision of a new American politics captivated the online right with a speed and velocity not seen since the halcyon days of 2015-2016.
Its origins are murky. The most common explanation is that a Twitter user named @3rdincarnate (currently suspended) Tweeted an image a black and gold tower with the caption, “#DARKMAGA tower…Great orgone and electric concentrations are in the top floor apartment…”
Other accounts soon picked up on the idea of a blackhearted Make American Great Again movement. The general theme of many of these #DarkMAGA postings was and remains simple: in 2024, Donald Trump will enact his revenge on the Democratic Party and the Washington, D.C. elite who moved the heavens to deny him a second term.
#DarkMAGA means to many users a new politics of brutality. No more “playing nice”; no more appealing to a broad tent. #DarkMAGA means capital punishment, a proletarian uprising, or a sexualized esotericism. If the first run of MAGA was a glorious bald eagle, then #DarkMAGA is a death’s head.
Some on the left fear #DarkMAGA as something far more evil than mere political revenge. Twitter account @DonnieDarkened has penned numerous threads detailing why they believe Donald Trump is the Antichrist prophesied in the Book of Revelations. While @DonnieDarkened’s politics seem ill-defined—he or she uses the argot of right-wing conspiracy theorists while promoting the idea that the American right’s figurehead is a satanic globalist—the view of Trump as a demonic entity is fairly normal and mainstream among many on the left. For four years and more, he and his followers have been maligned as “fascists” and domestic terrorists, which, in our socio-political epoch, is akin to being labeled a heretic at the height of the Hussite Wars.
The mainstream center-left has unsurprisingly lumped #DarkMAGA in with every other right-wing online movement under the sun. Newsweek opened its rolodex and asked academics and think-tank types to describe #DarkMAGA for the masses. Some “experts” likened it to demanding a new Napoleon, with Trump raising an army post-exile to reconquer the United States. Others colored #DarkMAGA as the new alt-right.
Is this true? Is #DarkMAGA really the beginning of something evil and the actual, long-promised age of American fascism? Is it the opening to a portal of the occult, or a long-awaited reckoning with Fate? Will Caesar cross the Rubicon and establish the Empire? Or could it all just be edgy memes?
@EdenicJesus has an interesting Twitter thread about #DarkMAGA being the “final stage of American Conservatism.” “The message is clear,” he wrote. “#DarkMAGA is an exhortation for Trump to get his hands dirty in 2024. To, by any means necessary, make good on his promise to Drain the Swamp and crush our enemies once and for all. It’s the realization that there is no political solution beyond vengeance.”
@EdenicJesus further stated that the movement has a deeper purpose of reawakening America’s apocalyptic Christianity, especially its tradition of evangelical millenarianism. Such ideas are in-tune with other American thinkers on the right, many of whom have called for a religious revival and Third Great Awakening in order to pull America out of its rapid imperial decline. Only a renewed fire and brimstone Protestantism is the solution, they claim.
Countere contributor Dr. Benjamin Braddock echoed this sentiment, describing #DarkMAGA as “The desire for Trump to pivot from good-natured boomer with lingering faith in institutions to going scorched earth on his and our enemies.” When reached over Twitter DM, Braddock added “I think the Dark MAGA phenomenon is a reflection of the widespread disillusionment that now permeates the culture. People have been brutalized and beaten down by the past two years. The Establishment has inflicted suffering and death on an unimaginable scale. Learned helplessness has set in.”
“We have been rotting,” Braddock said. “The old political motivations, everything from love of country to self-interest, have now weakened and there remains one motivator: to see the people who carried out these atrocities punished. Dark MAGA is the memetic desire to see Trump become The Punisher.”
It seems America has entered a new, far more dangerous political era, and #DarkMAGA reflects that. It is not just anonymous Internet users who are proliferating the meme, either. Film director and documentarian Amanda Milius claims that she is in “Dark MAGA mode” at the moment, while National Pulse editor-in-chief and Bannon’s War Room co-host Raheem J. Kassam has similarly put on the dark cloak of the muted red and purple #DarkMAGA aesthetic via his Twitter profile picture.
Various Twitter profile pictures employing the Dark MAGA aesthetic.
Does #DarkMAGA have the “meme magic” required to inspire a return of a Trump presidency? It just might.
It may sound crazy to suggest, but the magic has been there from the beginning. As I wrote in my book Full Moon Reaction, magic, superstition, and the occult have been with the United States since its inception. Transplanting Northern Europeans onto an alien landscape alongside strange people dedicated to unfamiliar religious rites and gods produced horror.
Too often lost in current discussions about the Early Colonial period is the fact that so many of the settlers, whether English, Scottish, Dutch, Huguenot, or German, came from a Europe aflame with religious warfare. Prior to brutalizing the natives, the settlers had brutalized and been brutalized by their fellow Europeans. These deeply religious Protestants also knew about witch hunts and the violence that the state could deploy in order to root out blasphemy.
The Pilgrims of Plymouth, for example, experienced years of being outlawed, arrested, and executed for their religion prior to leaving for the New World. The scars of these experiences did not dissipate during their sea voyage. Nor did the Pilgrims, Puritans, and other groups renounce their apocalyptic visions. They lived in a world of devils and sin. And like the first Protestants, who reacted to not only the material scandals of the Catholic Church (the over-selling of indulgences, for example) but who also saw in the Renaissance an age of natural magic, court-funded occultism, and the birth of a Faustian individualism, the early European settlers felt bound by their duty to God to cleanse a fallen world. In some ways, this belief in continual spiritual warfare has never left the United States. #DarkMAGA is just another new addition to an old manuscript.
“Transplanting Northern Europeans onto an alien landscape alongside strange people dedicated to unfamiliar religious rites and gods produced horror.”
Other occultists have noticed this. John Michael Greer, a practicing druid and writer, published a fascinating book called The King in Orange in 2021 all about the strange energies surrounding not only the 2016 election, but also President Trump’s administration. In Greer’s rendering, the 2016 election was a showdown between two competing visions of magic. On the one hand stood Renaissance mages—workers adept at the art of selling things to the public and keeping the comfortable classes inoculated from the populist virus. These magicians were primarily in lockstep against Trump.
In echoing the work of the late Romanian scholar Ioan Couliano, Greer sees the elites of Washington, D.C. and their supporters in the American culture industries (media, entertainment, sports) as practitioners of a “reasonable” form of magic that relies on subliminal messaging to convince populations of certain “truths” and ideas that favor the already powerful. Their allies in the worlds of Wicca and the Church of Satan did their part by placing curses on Trump before and after the election. Some are still crafting sigils today.
The other magicians practiced a much older, less rational form of magic in 2016. According to Greer, the pro-Trump meme merchants, shitposters, and others practiced “chaos magick” in order to get the New York real estate mogul elected. Greer calls this the “magic of the excluded,” and in 2016, he claims, the elite found it impossible to fully suppress their workings. For example, online magicians used video images and photographic stills to plant doubts about Hillary Clinton’s health in the minds of millions of voters. Others penned apocalyptic screeds about what a Democratic victory in 2016 would look like, while one particularly powerful adept used Twitter to convince voters that Clinton planned on extending the military draft to women–a sincere proposal later lobbied by Democrats during the Biden administration in 2021.
The makers of these memes often used the image of Pepe the Frog as well his friends: Apu Apustaja, Groyper, and many other frogs. The ubiquitousness of these amphibians was on purpose. Forum users invoked the image of Kek, an Egyptian god of darkness usually depicted with the head of a frog, as their prophet. Many claimed Kek as a god of chaos magick, and they used hieroglyphs found on one ancient Kek statuette to claim a prophecy about Trump. That none of this had any basis in actual Egyptian magic didn’t matter; the decentralized online right won in 2016.
Since then, the practitioners of media magic have been on a warpath. Russiagate, the phone call with the Ukrainian government, COVID-19, the death of George Floyd and subsequent riots, the Kyle Rittenhouse case—all of these complicated matters were filtered through pre-selected narratives, almost of all which cast Trump supporters or anyone on the right as the villains. It proved highly effective while simultaneously corrosive to the American body politick. So, corrosive in fact that any future unity may be impossible. This is the stance that #DarkMAGA takes as well. They do not care about unity as much as winning and getting their revenge.
“Dark MAGA is the memetic desire to see Trump become The Punisher.”
The future is already being foretold. Writer @plzcallmechrist on Twitter has drafted President Trump’s first speech after his 2024 victory. It is a speech that invokes the Bible and Trump’s familiar bravado. Others have chosen a more fire and brimstone approach, with Trump as nothing less than the apocalypse incarnate.
The vast majority of Tweets and posts envision Trump (and increasingly Elon Musk) as future Caesars–men called by destiny to destroy a republic turned wicked. This is a form of magic; every new post, especially those that are aesthetically compelling and set to music, implants an ideal in the viewer’s mind. The 21st century is the age of image and information warfare. The purveyors of #DarkMAGA know this, and many also know that the radical movements of the 20th century, whether Fascist or Communist, were either art movements first or were movements that created art to reflect their socio-political desires.
Donald Trump is in many ways the perfect avatar for online alchemists. His outsider victory, penchant for cryptic commentary, and his disruption of the political machinery has created a cottage industry of online occultism, of which #DarkMAGA is merely the latest edition.
Where the United States goes from here is anyone’s guess. That said, given the acceleration (used here in the sense of Nick Land) of America’s internal conflicts and contradictions, 2024 is guaranteed to be a continuation of our age of interesting times. For as bleak and gothic as it seems, #DarkMAGA is, at its core, a cry out for a restoration.
Until then, the memes will continue to flow. The suggestions of diabolism will be traded back and forth. The magic will still be there, either in the foreground or background. In fact, it has never left. Occultism has merely gone online.
Read and buy Justin’s book, Full Moon Reaction, on Terror House Press’ website.
