MAGA’s Comfort in Injustice
Those who trade liberty for comfort will lose both.
Introduction: The Comfort of Injustice
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned of a danger more insidious than outright hatred: the preference for "a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice." He understood something many still resist: that injustice often survives not through violence alone, but through the quiet seduction of comfort. It's easy to look away, to find relief in believing that conflict is disorder, rather than the engine of progress. When injustice does not scream in our ears or bleed in our streets, we are tempted to believe it does not exist. Thus, the absence of visible tension, not the presence of real justice, becomes our measure of peace.
But peace without justice is the stillness of the graveyard.
Today, that danger comes not from the fringes, but from a movement that proclaims itself the champion of "freedom.” MAGA. It is no longer merely rhetoric or misplaced grievance; it is a wholesale retreat from liberty into the arms of authoritarian comfort. Through their support of illegal deportations, courthouse intimidation, and sweeping executive orders that seek to rewrite history and gag free thought, MAGA has made its choice clear: they would rather have the appearance of order than the reality of justice. And history shows exactly where that path leads.
Part 1: Freedom Requires Tension, Not Comfort
The liberal democratic experiment has always been precarious. True freedom demands discomfort: dissenting voices, inconvenient facts, painful histories. As Cass Sunstein writes in #Republic (Sunstein, 2017), democracy depends not merely on the absence of censorship, but on a culture of curiosity and openness. A nation cannot remain free by retreating into curated bubbles where only comforting myths survive. The tragic wager of liberalism is this: to be free, a society must live with discomfort, friction, and the tension of clashing ideas.
History confirms this hard truth. Every major leap toward liberty, the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, labor protections, civil rights, was born in the crucible of discomfort. Each victory for human dignity was denounced in its time as chaos, as a threat to "order," as an unsettling of the natural scheme. Martin Luther King's marches were called "provocative." Suffragists were beaten and jailed for "disrupting" public life. The Freedom Riders faced mob violence not because they were wrong, but because truth always feels like disorder to those invested in injustice.
MAGA has rejected that wager. In their world, patriotism requires silence about America's sins, justice demands no messy complications, and freedom means obedience to an ideology, their ideology.
Part 2: MAGA's Comfortable Betrayal of Liberty
Consider Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, deported illegally despite a judicial order forbidding it (The Atlantic, 2025; Al Jazeera, 2025). The government's excuse? An "administrative error, “ an error that landed a husband and father into the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador, stripped of due process and his lawful rights. The MAGA movement did not flinch; they cheered.
Consider the ICE courthouse arrests that judges themselves warned were destroying public trust in the justice system (Washington Post, 2025). Victims of domestic violence, witnesses, and even parents seeking custody of abused children were terrified to enter a courthouse, fearing ICE agents more than the criminals they fled.
And consider the widespread celebrations when peaceful protesters were tear-gassed outside the White House to clear a path for a photo-op. In each case, MAGA celebrated power, not principle. They mistook the sight of others being trampled for a reaffirmation of their own security.
This is not mere political disagreement. It is a comfort bought at the price of someone else's terror. Injustice, once seen as something to be corrected, has been rebranded as strength, virtue, and the proper exercise of authority. The cheering is not incidental. It is the point.
Part 3: The Rise of Authoritarian Comfort
Social psychologists like Hetherington and Weiler, and Pettigrew, have shown that authoritarianism thrives in environments of fear (Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; Pettigrew, 2017). Fear reshapes values. It encourages people to prioritize order over fairness, obedience over rights. Fear tells us that "safety" requires silence, that "patriotism" demands submission, and that "freedom" is best protected by the suppression of those who make us uncomfortable.
MAGA has fully embraced this mindset. Slogans once meant to inspire, "law and order," "make America great again,” have become rallying cries not for justice, but for dominance. They have accepted, even demanded, that due process, open inquiry, and dissent be sacrificed if it soothes their anxieties.
In doing so, they have hollowed out the very freedom they pretend to defend. The flags they wave are less an emblem of liberty than a banner of tribal allegiance, signaling not a love of freedom but a demand for conformity.
Part 4: Ethical Violations and Wrongful Deportations in Trump’s Second Term (Jan–Apr 2025)
Critics warned that Donald Trump's second-term mass deportation campaign would inevitably sweep up American citizens and legal residents. Within the first 100 days of 2025, those warnings proved grimly accurate.
In Chicago, Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was arrested by ICE during a January raid despite presenting valid identification (ACLU of Illinois, 2025). He was detained for more than 10 hours without charges and released without formal record, an unlawful act under a 2022 court settlement.
In Florida, Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S.-born citizen, was pulled over and jailed under a state anti-immigrant law despite presenting proof of citizenship (PBS NewsHour, 2025). Authorities later falsely claimed he "self-identified" as undocumented, a lie Lopez-Gomez vehemently denied.
Even individuals with green cards and pending citizenship applications were swept up. Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian American and Columbia graduate, was detained for "supporting Hamas,” a charge based solely on his pro-Palestinian campus activism (The Guardian, 2025). Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested outside his naturalization interview in Vermont without charges (The Guardian, 2025). Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Fulbright scholar in Massachusetts, was abducted in an unmarked vehicle after criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a student newspaper (The Guardian, 2025).
Most chilling of all was the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident granted withholding of removal years earlier due to credible fears of death in El Salvador (Al Jazeera, 2025). Despite a standing judicial order protecting him, ICE deported Garcia under a sweeping Alien Enemies Act invocation. He was delivered into El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison without hearing or charges (The Atlantic, 2025). When federal courts ordered his return, the Trump administration fought tooth and nail, arguing that deportations, even illegal ones, could not be reversed once executed.
Alongside Garcia, hundreds of Latin American men were deported without due process under accusations of "gang affiliation," despite many having no criminal record (Washington Post, 2025). Internal documents later revealed that ICE agents had been under extreme political pressure to meet an unofficial deportation target of one million removals in 2025.
These cases are not isolated errors. They are the logical outcome of policies that prize speed, spectacle, and vengeance over legality and humanity. Trump’s own remarks, complaining that due process "takes too long" and should be "bypassed" (PBS NewsHour, 2025), gave open license for such abuses.
As one federal appellate judge warned in the Abrego Garcia ruling, the government’s actions reflected a "willful and bad-faith refusal" to respect judicial authority.
When a government declares itself above the law, the descent into authoritarianism is not theoretical, it is underway.
Part 5: The Authoritarian Executive Orders — Rewriting Reality
Trump's early 2025 Executive Orders did not merely alter policy. They assaulted memory itself.
"Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" (White House EO, 2025) demanded that museums and educational institutions only promote "solemn and uplifting" public monuments and eliminate exhibits that "inappropriately disparage Americans past or living." It attacked institutions like the Smithsonian for presenting exhibits acknowledging systemic racism, labeling such perspectives as "improper ideology."
Similarly, "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling" outlawed what it called "discriminatory equity ideology" and demanded a patriotic curriculum that was "accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling,” so long as it suppressed any historical narratives that acknowledged America's imperfections.
These mandates were not about education. They were about mandated memory, controlling how a people sees itself by erasing any record of injustice. It is a classic authoritarian move, mirroring regimes that rewrite history to sanctify the state.
Part 6: Global Parallels: The Authoritarian Playbook
This strategy is not uniquely American. It echoes a global pattern.
In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte rose to power pledging to protect the public from crime. His "war on drugs" soon turned into thousands of extrajudicial killings of the poor, defended by manufactured narratives of national purity (Human Rights Watch, 2021).
In Hungary, Viktor Orbán consolidated power by systematically rewriting history textbooks, restricting NGOs, and declaring that "liberal democracy is over", replacing it with what he called an illiberal state where dissent equaled betrayal. (Nordlinger, J., 2024, May 3).
In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro weaponized patriotism to attack indigenous groups, LGBTQ citizens, and political opponents, all under the guise of defending traditional values
Each case followed the same blueprint:
Demonize dissent.
Rewrite history.
Reward conformity.
Erode independent institutions.
MAGA’s trajectory, from the illegal deportations to ideological schooling mandates, is not an exception. It is an imitation.
Part 7: When Freedom Becomes Conditional, It Dies
Freedom is not a selective reward. It must be the bedrock principle for all, or it ceases to exist.
Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) research shows that when people prioritize conformity, loyalty, and punishment of "outsiders," they rationalize abuses in the name of order (Altemeyer, 1996). Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) research demonstrates how groups justify hierarchical oppression if it secures their perceived status (Pratto et al., 1994).
MAGA’s embrace of deporting citizens, punishing protesters, and gagging historical truth reveals the deep psychological need to trade liberty for the illusion of safety. Motivated reasoning and collective narcissism amplify this dynamic, convincing supporters that defending injustice is itself an act of patriotism (Kunda, 1990; Cichocka, 2016).
But history is unambiguous: when freedom becomes conditional, when it is granted only to the loyal and denied to the dissident, it ceases to be freedom at all. It becomes domination.
Conclusion: The True Defense of Freedom Requires Discomfort
Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that oppressor consciousness "tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination" (Freire, 1970).
MAGA has chosen the easier path: comfort over conflict, myth over memory, obedience over liberty. They mistake the absence of tension for peace, but that is the peace of the prison yard.
A truly free society must be brave enough to confront its failures, courageous enough to tolerate dissent, and wise enough to understand that true patriotism lies not in hiding our flaws, but in striving to correct them.
In the end, history will record who fought for liberty, and who fled from it. Because a nation that mistakes comfort for freedom will one day awaken to find itself with neither.
References
ACLU of Illinois. (2025). ACLU of Illinois - Immigration Enforcement
PBS NewsHour. (2025). April 24, 2025 – PBS NewsHour Full Episode
The Atlantic. (2025). The Atlantic - January 2025 Issue
Al Jazeera. (2025). Will Countries Be Forced to Pick a Side in the US-China Trade War?
The Guardian. (2025). Denied, detained, deported: High-profile cases in Trump’s immigration crackdown
NPR. (2024). Elections 2024: NPR Coverage
Supreme Court documents, Noem v. Abrego Garcia (2025).
White House Executive Orders (2025).
Cass Sunstein. (2017). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media.
Hetherington, M., & Weiler, J. (2009). Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics.
Pettigrew, T. F. (2017). "Social Psychological Perspectives on Trump Supporters."
Paulo Freire. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Kunda, Z. (1990). "The Case for Motivated Reasoning," Psychological Bulletin.
Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L., & Malle, B. (1994). "Social Dominance Orientation," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Cichocka, A. (2016). "Understanding Defensive and Secure In-Group Positivity," Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Human Rights Watch. (2021). Philippines Events of 2020.
Nordlinger, J. (2024, May 3). The Era of Liberal Democracy Is Over. National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-era-of-liberal-democracy-is-over/