MEDIA MONDAY / WHAT IS THE MAGA MINDSET / KNOW THY ENEMY

 

PILLAR TO POST.ORG OPINION ESSAY / By Holden DeMayo   

Every so often, a reader of this blog asks a question that deserves more than a quick answer. A few days ago someone leaned in and asked, “What is the MAGA mindset?” The tone wasn’t accusatory or partisan. It carried the curiosity of someone who genuinely wanted to understand what has been roiling American politics for nearly a decade. So I answered the way any journalist with a few gray hairs should—by stepping back and looking at the landscape as it is, not as we wish it to be.   

The MAGA mindset is not a policy sheet, nor a political theory, nor even a tidy ideology. It is an emotional posture—one built from grievance, nostalgia, and distrust. At its heart is a conviction that America has slipped away from its rightful owners, culturally and politically, and that only a blunt-force outsider can wrestle it back. This is politics as reclamation rather than governance. It’s a desire to return to a country that either used to exist or is fondly imagined to have existed.   

To see it clearly, you must understand the loss that fuels it. Many MAGA supporters believe the nation’s institutions stopped listening to them long ago—Washington, the press, the courts, universities, corporate boardrooms. They see themselves as the unseen backbone of the country, people who built their lives on service, work, and modest expectation, only to discover the rules were changed by others. That sense of being left behind hardened into identity. Being MAGA is less about the candidate and more about belonging to a tribe that tells them, “We know what they’re doing to you—and we won’t let it stand.”   

There is also a natural attraction to simplicity. The world has grown noisy: technology races ahead, demographics shift, culture churns. MAGA offers a cleaner script—heroes and villains, patriots and traitors, clarity over the messy compromises of democratic life. That is why conspiracy theories find oxygen within the movement; they reduce complexity into a story with recognizable shapes. And once you distrust the institutions that sort fact from fiction, the only voice that matters becomes the one you’ve chosen to trust.   

Then comes the cultural anxiety. America is changing quickly—faster than many communities can absorb. Jobs globalize. Traditions fade. Familiar anchors wobble. For some, those changes feel like a gradual erasure of the world they grew up in. Donald Trump didn’t invent that unease. He repackaged it, branded it, and gave it a permission slip. Suddenly grievance became patriotic, suspicion became virtue, and the old confidence that tomorrow would look like yesterday snapped.   

Finally, the MAGA mindset depends on its central figure. It is a movement built around a leader who promises not just to represent his followers, but to avenge them. Loyalty becomes the highest measure of belonging. To question the standard-bearer is to step outside the tribe. This is why the movement behaves less like a traditional political coalition and more like a devotional circle—one animated not by platforms, but by faith in a single, unyielding personality.   

You don’t have to praise or condemn it to describe it honestly. You only have to recognize it as a fusion of grievance, nostalgia, identity, and loyalty—an emotional structure far stronger than any policy proposal. Understanding the MAGA mindset matters because it is not disappearing. It will shape elections, conversations, and families for years to come.   

And if we’re going to keep this Republic standing, we owe ourselves the discipline to understand the forces moving beneath our feet—even the ones we disagree with.

And urge all like minded souls we know to vote in every election.  These are not times we can afford to take a vacation from the ballot box.    

Illustration by PillartoPost.org art director F. Stop Fitzgerald.

SUNDAY REVIEW / PICASSO'S BRUSH WITH LAW BEFORE HIS BRUSH WITH FAME

OF COURSE, HE DIDN'T STEAL THE MONA LISA? 

"Je ne sais Pas, mon ami."

Pablo Picasso was, in fact, arrested in 1911 during the investigation into the theft of the Mona Lisa — though he was entirely innocent of the crime. That is if you can accept as receiving stolen property as blameless. 

The painting disappeared from the Louvre on August 21, 1911. Its absence stunned Paris and electrified the international press. For two years the masterpiece was simply gone, and suspicion drifted through the city’s bohemian quarters as easily as cigarette smoke. Picasso’s involvement was accidental and indirect. 

A small-time Belgian thief named Honoré-Joseph Géry Pieret had stolen several Iberian sculptures from the Louvre prior to the Mona Lisa’s disappearance. Those sculptures found their way into the hands of Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and close friend of Picasso. Some were eventually sold to Picasso, who admired their raw, archaic force and drew inspiration from them in shaping his early modernist work. When Pieret later bragged publicly about his Non-Mona Lisa Louvre thefts, the police traced the sculptures back to Apollinaire and then to Picasso. 

In September 1911, both men were arrested and interrogated. Picasso, still a young Spanish expatriate in Paris and not yet the titan he would become, reportedly broke down under questioning and even denied knowing Apollinaire, fearing deportation or worse. 

Authorities, however, found no evidence linking either man to the stolen Leonardo. They were released. The true thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had previously worked at the Louvre. He concealed himself inside the museum overnight, removed the Mona Lisa from its frame, and simply walked out with it hidden beneath his coat. He kept it for more than two years before attempting to sell it in Florence, where he was arrested in 1913. 

Picasso’s brush with the scandal remains one of the more curious footnotes in art history — a moment when the future architect of modernism briefly stood in the shadow of the world’s most famous missing painting. 

Picasso, left, before denying he ever knew his friend, Apollinaire.

DOUBLE STOOL PIDGEONS.

Poet Apollinaire

 After finking on Picasso to the Paris cops and Picasso lying he ever heard of Apollinaire the friendship did not end. It was strained in 1911 during the Mona Lisa theft scandal, when Apollinaire was arrested and, under pressure, mentioned Picasso to police. Picasso was questioned in the presence of a judge. The episode embarrassed and frightened both men, but they continued their relationship afterward. The real separation came with World War I. Apollinaire enlisted in the French army in 1914. Picasso, as a Spanish citizen, did not serve. In 1916 Apollinaire suffered a severe head wound from shrapnel and never fully regained his health. Apollinaire died in November 1918 during the influenza pandemic, weakened by his war injury. Picasso attended the funeral. So the friendship did not end in a quarrel. It faded under the strain of war, injury, and changing lives, and finally ended with Apollinaire’s death. For more on Picasso and Apollinaire sobbing before a Paris judge click: https://inmediaciones.org/la-ultima-historia-feliz-el-robo-de-la-gioconda/ and... https://criminocorpus.org/en/exhibitions/les-prisons-de-guillaume-apollinaire/le-poete-incarcere-reconstruction/