Alex Hinton at The Conversation:
As an anthropologist of U.S. political culture, I have been studying the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement for years. I wrote a related 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here.” And I continue to do MAGA research at places like this year’s CPAC, where the mood has been giddy.
Here are three reasons why the MAGA faithful believe a golden age has begun. The list begins, and ends, with Trump.
1. The warrior hero
Trump supporters contend that after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attacks, which they consider a “peaceful protest,” Trump became a political pariah and victim.
Like many a mythic hero, Trump’s response was “never surrender.” In 2023, he repeatedly told his MAGA faithful, “I am your warrior, I am your justice.”
Trump’s heroism, his supporters believe, was illustrated after a bullet grazed his ear during an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024. Trump quickly rose to his feet, pumped his fist in the air and yelled, “Fight, fight, fight.”
The phrase became a MAGA rally cry and, in February 2025, it has been stamped on CPAC attendees’ shirts and jackets.
After Trump’s 2024 election victory, many Trump supporters dubbed it “the greatest comeback in political history.” MAGA populist Steven Bannon invoked this phrase at a pre-CPAC event on Feb. 19.
When Bannon spoke on the CPAC main stage on Feb. 20, he led the crowd in a raucous “fight, fight, fight” chant. He compared Trump with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington and called for him to run again for president in 2028.
This is despite the fact that Trump running for a third term would violate the Constitution.
More here.
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The nine Sámi languages still in use have an extensive vocabulary for snow — everything from åppås, untouched winter snow without tracks; to habllek, a light, airy dust-like snow; and tjaevi, flakes that stick together and are hard to dig.
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On one of her signature songs, the restless, almost phosphorescent 1976 anthem 
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In the novel, El Akkad disturbs his readers by projecting America’s present into a terrifying vision of what their familiar homeland might look like many decades hence. Here, he seeks to discomfit us by doing the opposite — asking us to look back on the present from an imagined future: “One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. … One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence.”
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