Breaking the Settler Pact: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of MAGA Communism

Red Is the Color of the Mask, Not the Movement

The return of socialism to the American imagination has brought with it a familiar ghost. It wears a red flag, talks about class struggle, and yells “Down with NATO!”—but refuses to say that the United States is a settler colony. It champions Palestine while dodging the words “land back.” It calls for multipolarity abroad but clings to the sanctity of U.S. borders at home. They call it MAGA Communism, but what we’re dealing with is not a novelty—it’s an update. This is settler socialism, 2.0. And it’s making a play to become the ideological software for a collapsing empire looking to reboot.

MAGA Communism does not lack coherence—it has a core logic. Its error is not that it fails to be consistent, but that it is consistently wrong about what the United States is. It sees imperialism as something the U.S. does, not what the U.S. is. To them, imperialism begins with Wall Street, not with Jamestown. They think you can wage anti-imperialist struggle without confronting the colonial land under your feet. But the empire didn’t become evil in Vietnam. It was born that way—in Plymouth, in the cotton fields, in the Trail of Tears. This country is not a nation that stumbled into empire. It is an imperial project built by settlers for the purpose of conquest. The colonizers of North America didn’t “immigrate”—they invaded. And they built a state on top of the nations they destroyed.

This is the contradiction MAGA Communists can’t reconcile. They wave the flag of anti-imperialism over Gaza but grow silent when it comes to Pine Ridge, Jackson, or the borderlands. They chant “Death to NATO” while defending the sanctity of U.S. sovereignty. They support resistance abroad—but dismiss national liberation within the empire as “woke identitarianism.” Their anti-imperialism is spatially constrained: it ends at the water’s edge. And in doing so, they reveal themselves not as revolutionaries, but as reactionaries rebranding settler nationalism in red.

But this isn’t new. It’s just louder now. Settler socialism has always operated this way. From Eugene Debs’ refusal to support Black self-determination to the CPUSA’s retreat from the Black Belt thesis, from the labor aristocracy’s betrayal of Reconstruction to the DSA’s silence on Indigenous land—this has always been the pact: class struggle for settlers, suppression for the colonized. Now, with the state in crisis and the empire in decline, MAGA Communism steps in to manage that contradiction. It promises American strength, masculine discipline, industrial revival, and patriotic socialism. What it offers is not emancipation—it’s settler restoration.

That’s why this intervention is not just a critique—it’s a declaration of struggle. We are not here to nitpick their tweets or play semantic games. We are here to bury settler socialism in every form it reappears. Not to debate it—but to disarm it. Not to unify with it—but to expose it for what it is: a loyal opposition to empire. And to speak directly to those it is trying to capture—disillusioned youth, angry workers, alienated radicals—before they are weaponized against the very people they should be standing beside. This isn’t about clout. It’s about clarity. It’s about drawing the line: between empire and the earth, between settlerism and socialism, between red flags and red masks. Our side is with the colonized, the proletariat, and the planetary majority. Where you stand now is up to you.

An Empire Born in Reverse: The Myth of a Domestic United States

The story they tell—the story we were all taught—is that the United States was born a free republic, corrupted only later by capitalist greed and military adventurism. That it was once a humble nation of farmers and craftsmen, hijacked by the Rockefellers and the Pentagon. This myth is the bedrock of American left nationalism. It’s what allows MAGA Communists to chant against imperialism abroad while defending the legitimacy of the settler state at home. But the truth is this: there was no fall from grace. The United States did not “become” an empire. It was one from the start.

The men who crossed the Atlantic weren’t immigrants. They were agents of empire. French, British, Spanish, and Dutch adventurers arrived in North America not to join existing societies—but to seize land, extract wealth, and eliminate Indigenous life. The first American economy was built on land theft and slave labor. The first American state was built to protect that economy. This wasn’t accidental—it was structural. The colonies were not democratic experiments. They were military outposts of imperial Europe, transplanted to a new continent. The United States emerged not from revolution against empire, but as a settler offshoot of it, continuing the project by other means.

Jefferson’s “small republic” was an engine of land speculation. The Louisiana Purchase was not a neutral expansion—it was a declaration of war on dozens of Indigenous nations. Manifest Destiny was not misguided patriotism—it was genocide with a smile. And the American working class, especially the white yeoman and skilled artisan, was never an oppressed class in the Marxist sense. It was a settler formation—granted land, wages, and whiteness in exchange for loyalty to the empire. The white worker did not build America. The colonized did. The white worker managed the plantation, cracked the whip, occupied the frontier, and guarded the stolen wealth.

To say this is not to dismiss class struggle. It is to ground it. Because in a settler colony, the class struggle is never just about wages—it is about land. It is about the very legitimacy of the state, the flag, and the legal property system that defines both. And this is where MAGA Communism breaks down. They want socialism—but only if it comes with restored national sovereignty, protected borders, industrial revival, and law and order. They want to resurrect the New Deal without touching the Indian treaties. They want to protect the settler working class without confronting that its very existence was built on genocidal accumulation. They want anti-imperialism in Gaza—but a ceasefire in Mississippi. They want to storm the Pentagon—but keep the White House. They don’t want revolution. They want a rebrand.

But there’s no going back. The world that built America is gone. The Global South is rising. The colonized inside the empire are not begging for a better deal—they’re demanding their nations back. The white working class must choose: it can remain loyal to the settler project and die with it, or it can defect, align with the colonized and the international proletariat, and be reborn as part of something new. There is no third way. There is no patriotic socialism. There is no “anti-imperialism” that begins in Moscow and ends at the Rio Grande. If we do not begin with the fact that the United States is a settler colony—then we are not fighting imperialism. We are protecting it.

The Loyal Left Wing of Empire

Settler socialism is not a deviation from the American left—it is its foundation. From its birth, U.S. socialism has been infected with the assumption that the settler nation is legitimate, that the land belongs to the state, and that white workers are its rightful heirs. The only thing MAGA Communism innovates is the algorithmic delivery system. Everything else—the nationalism, the labor chauvinism, the contempt for colonized people—is standard issue. Debs had it. The CPUSA had it. The DSA has it now. MAGA Comm just stripped off the academic polish and said it out loud.

Eugene Debs is still treated like a saint by the U.S. left. But look closer: he rejected Black self-determination, refused to challenge the color line in white unions, and campaigned on the dream of a “workers’ republic” without saying a word about the nations crushed to build it. He opposed Jim Crow—but only in principle. He never organized to dismantle it. To him, the race question was a distraction from the class struggle. But in a settler colony, race is class. The cotton plantation was a site of racialized accumulation. The reservation was not a rural policy—it was a prison for Indigenous labor. To ignore this is not to be neutral—it is to take the side of the settler.

The Communist Party did no better. In the 1930s, they briefly supported the Black Belt thesis—that African Americans constituted an oppressed nation in the South with the right to self-determination. But by the 1950s, under pressure from the U.S. state and white union leadership, the Party abandoned that line in favor of Cold War patriotism. The Panthers and Young Lords picked it back up—and were hunted for it. The white left never defended them. It mourned them like martyrs but never took up their line. Even the New Communist Movement, which had deeper ties to anti-imperial struggles, still could not fully break from the gravitational pull of settler legitimacy. They wanted revolution—but still imagined the U.S. as a nation to be saved, not dismantled.

Today, the DSA continues the tradition. It dreams of Scandinavian-style reforms—on land stolen from Lakota and Dakota people. It wants Medicare for All—but not freedom for political prisoners. It talks about housing justice—but not reparations. It sees Black and Indigenous liberation as single-issue distractions from a larger “universal” program. But the universal worker they imagine is always white, always urban, always within the borders of empire. DSA may not share MAGA Comm’s aesthetics, but it shares its assumptions: that socialism can exist on settler foundations, that class struggle can proceed without rupture, and that the U.S. is a project worth salvaging.

MAGA Communism is simply what happens when the mask slips. When the economic anxiety of a declining white working class fuses with the nostalgia of settler supremacy, the result isn’t revolution—it’s revanchism. A call not to build a new world, but to restore a mythical one. That’s why they want order, borders, flags, and steel. That’s why they hate “wokeness” and love Stalin—not for his socialism, but for his tanks. They are not confused. They are the immune system of empire trying to regenerate itself through the carcass of socialism. And if we do not name it—if we treat them as misguided comrades instead of ideological enemies—they will absorb a generation of disillusioned youth and march them into the next phase of American fascism.

Reactionary Reindustrialism and the Death Drive of the Settler Class

MAGA Communism isn’t a random ideological glitch. It’s the political expression of a very real, very dangerous class formation: the downwardly mobile settler labor aristocracy. These are not the lumpen masses. They are not the surplus population. They are not the globally exploited proletariat. They are the sons and daughters of settler colonial privilege watching their promised inheritance collapse. And like any declining class, they are willing to burn the world to the ground before they let go of power. They wrap themselves in the language of socialism not to build something new, but to restore what they lost. This isn’t revolution—it’s reindustrialized nostalgia.

Their program is straightforward: bring back industry, bring back order, bring back the nation. What they mean is: bring back the time when white workers could own homes on stolen land, earn wages from colonized labor, and live as the managerial caste of empire without needing a passport. They don’t want to abolish the American system. They want to reboot it—with better union jobs, stronger borders, and a red aesthetic to justify it. That’s why they fetishize Stalin but ignore Sankara. That’s why they praise Chinese infrastructure but fear Black autonomy. That’s why they can say “Free Palestine” and still believe in the legitimacy of U.S. sovereignty. Their anti-imperialism is export-only. They want to dismantle NATO but protect the Constitution. It’s not internationalism—it’s reaction dressed in multipolar drag.

This class formation didn’t come from nowhere. It was engineered. For generations, U.S. imperialism bought domestic peace through racialized class bribery. White workers got wages. Black workers got chains. Indigenous people got exterminated. The settler working class was allowed to become middle class—by managing, distributing, and guarding the spoils of empire. That was the American Dream: not equality, but entitlement. But that dream is collapsing. Automation, globalization, and financialization have eroded the old deals. The factories won’t return. The housing market is a scam. The dollar is losing its grip. And now the state is turning inward—using the tools of counterinsurgency not just against the colonized, but against its own base. The result? Panic. Rage. And the search for a new ideology to explain the pain.

MAGA Communism steps in to fill the void. It tells these workers: You are the real victims. Your birthright was stolen. The woke mob, the immigrants, the elites—they took your country. But don’t worry, you can take it back. With flags, factories, and fire. This is not a blueprint for liberation. It’s the death drive of a class that can no longer dominate the world—and refuses to be part of it. That’s why they hate the colonized. That’s why they fear multipolarity. That’s why they reject land back, reparations, or prison abolition. Because all of these would mean the end of their position in the world system—not just economically, but ontologically. And that is a line they will not cross.

So let’s be clear: MAGA Communism is not confused. It is coherent. It is class-based. And it is counterrevolutionary. It does not represent the future of socialism—it represents the empire’s plan B. A backup ideology to contain white discontent, redirect it into settler-nationalist projects, and repackage it as a populist revolt. If we don’t expose its class basis—if we don’t name the settler labor aristocracy as the dying heart of this formation—we will continue mistaking the enemy for a potential ally. And that mistake will cost us everything.

The Soft Counterinsurgency of Settler Socialism

This isn’t a sectarian dispute. This is a battlefield. Settler socialism is not just wrong—it is strategically dangerous. It doesn’t just dilute revolutionary politics—it actively works to defuse, absorb, and neutralize them. It is a form of counterinsurgency, not with bullets and tanks, but with memes and microphones. It offers enough anti-imperialist rhetoric to sound rebellious, enough class language to appear Marxist, and just enough patriotism to keep the settler state intact. That’s not a miscalculation—it’s the mission. In a moment of crisis, MAGA Communism is the ideological firewall between the empire and its most potentially dangerous internal threat: a unified, decolonized, internationalist left.

This is how counterinsurgency works in the age of optics. You don’t have to assassinate every revolutionary—you just have to preempt them. Give the youth a cheaper version. Give disaffected workers a scapegoat. Give anti-imperialists a rerouted line that stops at the border. MAGA Communism does all of this with algorithmic efficiency. It tells white workers they can be both victims and saviors. It tells young men they can fight empire without questioning masculinity. It tells alienated leftists they can keep their red flags without giving up their blue passports. It creates a “movement” that never threatens power, because it never questions the land beneath its feet.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. These formations are growing—precisely because they fill a vacuum. The liberal left has nothing to offer but NGO slogans and academic retreat. The revolutionary left has been scattered by decades of surveillance, repression, and ideological confusion. MAGA Communists exploit this void. They speak with confidence, offer clarity, and name enemies. But they misname the system. They misidentify the class forces. And they redirect rage toward the very people who’ve borne the brunt of empire’s violence—Black people, Indigenous nations, migrants, and colonized workers. In doing so, they make themselves useful to capital and indispensable to the state.

Make no mistake: if a real rupture were to emerge—if the colonized rose in rebellion, if a multinational revolutionary front took root, if the border regime cracked or the dollar collapsed—MAGA Communists would not stand with the oppressed. They would join the counterrevolution. They already have. They mock Black nationalism. They smear trans liberation. They scoff at reparations. They frame Indigenous sovereignty as identity politics. They attack anti-racist theory with the language of the Right, then retreat behind Lenin quotes when challenged. This is not political confusion. This is ideological discipline—in service of settler supremacy.

That’s why this confrontation is not optional. We are not splitting hairs—we are drawing lines. Because if we do not expose settler socialism as the ideological soft-core of fascism, we leave our base unarmed and our struggle undefended. We let empire manage its own crisis by reinventing itself as rebellion. We watch our potential allies get pulled into formations that prepare them for war—not against the ruling class, but against us. And we will lose. Not because our ideas weren’t right—but because we let the enemy speak louder in our language than we did.

Anti-Imperialism Begins at Home

There’s no socialism in America without confrontation. No revolutionary program without rupture. No “anti-imperialism” that begins in Gaza and ends at the border patrol. If your vision of socialism doesn’t start with land back, doesn’t name the Black nation, doesn’t demand abolition, doesn’t break the colonial contract—then it’s not socialism. It’s settler reformism dressed up as resistance. That’s the line we draw. Not to moralize, but to clarify. Because clarity is strategy. And our strategy begins where theirs refuses to look: with the fact that the United States is a settler empire, and it must be dismantled—not repaired.

Revolutionary socialism in the belly of the beast means aligning with the very forces that this empire fears the most. It means centering the struggles of the internal colonies: the Black proletariat, Indigenous nations, undocumented workers, and the growing multiracial, multinational class locked out of settler prosperity. It means siding with the political prisoners still rotting in cages for resisting this system. It means standing with Palestine, yes—but also with Puerto Rico, Jackson, Pine Ridge, Ferguson, Standing Rock, and every occupied territory this empire claims as domestic. We don’t fight to revive the nation. We fight to bury it—and birth something new from its ashes.

Our line is clear: anti-imperialism begins at home. That means:

• Land back—not as a slogan, but as a program of material decolonization.
• Reparations—not as guilt, but as historical justice owed to the labor and life stolen.
• Abolition—not just of police and prisons, but of the entire colonial mode of governance.
• Internationalism—not charity, but strategic alignment with the global majority waging real war against imperialism.
• Refuge—not border enforcement. Sanctuary, not deportation. Solidarity with migrants as comrades in the same fight.

This is not idealism. It’s not “ultra-leftism.” It’s not some boutique politics of niche identity. It is the only road to actual emancipation. The capitalist class knows this. That’s why they invest in counterinsurgency. That’s why they promote controlled opposition. That’s why they’re perfectly comfortable with a movement that wants to nationalize oil but not return land. That’s why MAGA Communism and liberal wokeness both end up in the same place—managing empire with a different mask. One sells you identity. The other sells you industry. But both protect the settler state.

Our task is not to manage decline. It’s to make it revolutionary. To turn crisis into confrontation. To build an internationalist, decolonial, socialist movement that doesn’t ask empire for better terms—but dares to destroy it entirely. That means organizing inside the cracks. It means politicizing rupture. It means turning every site of abandonment—every eviction, every overdose, every prison yard, every food line—into a battleground. Because the fight isn’t coming. It’s already here. And the question is: who will name the enemy? Who will name the system? Who will show what it means to be free, not in theory—but in struggle?

Win the Base, Break the Formation

We are not writing this for Jackson Hinkle. We’re not trying to save the grifters. We’re writing for the people they’re trying to recruit. The kids who grew up on YouTube politics, saw through liberal bullshit, and started asking real questions. The white workers watching their world collapse. The disillusioned young men looking for meaning, for rage with direction. The exhausted anti-war voices who know something is wrong but can’t find an alternative. MAGA Communism didn’t create this base—it exploited it. If we don’t intervene, it will consolidate. And when the state needs a street army or a redwashed fascism, it will be ready.

Our job isn’t to “debate” these people into submission. It’s to break the formation that misled them. That means speaking directly, with clarity and conviction, not condescension. We don’t need to pander to their illusions—but we must offer something real. Not empty slogans. Not academic lectures. Not guilt trips. But an actual revolutionary worldview that makes sense of their condition—and names the true enemy: not migrants, not wokeness, not “degeneracy”—but the empire itself. The settler project. The colonial state. The wage system. The police. The landlords. The bosses. The military-industrial matrix. The border.

That means building Weaponized Information—not just as a media platform, but as an organizing tool. Propaganda is not a side hustle—it’s the front line of class war. Memes, essays, videos, conversations, reading groups, street teams, prison letters, digital networks—all of it is terrain. We need to flood that terrain with revolutionary clarity. We don’t argue with fascism—we expose its roots. We don’t chase internet clout—we build class loyalty. And when we speak, we speak not just to convince—but to recruit, to train, to prepare. Because what’s coming will not be won in comment sections. It will be won in motion.

We must also sharpen our organizational tactics. That means identifying where MAGA Comm forces are strongest—TikTok, disaffected online spaces, some union circles, pro-Russia social networks—and meeting people there with more rigor, more truth, and more strategy than the red-brown charlatans ever could. It means building alliances with anti-colonial forces around the world, showing our base that they are not alone, that the global majority already fights the same empire we live inside. It means grounding our analysis in the material conditions of the people: not abstract anti-imperialism, but anti-imperialism that starts at eviction court, at the border, in the jail cell, on the bus to work.

We don’t win by convincing everyone. We win by building a pole of attraction strong enough to pull the disillusioned away from the fascist orbit. We win by creating a new “common sense” that names the settler project as the real source of misery—and dares to destroy it. That’s why we call this Weaponized Information. Because ideology is a weapon. And if we don’t wield it, the enemy will.

The Choice Is Clear—Empire or Emancipation

Settler socialism promises revival. It sells you factories, flags, and full employment. It speaks of dignity and discipline, of greatness restored. But peel back the red and white paint, and what you find is a blueprint for colonial permanence. Their future is a closed-loop: imperialism without NATO, capitalism with tariffs, white power in overalls instead of uniforms. It is not a vision of liberation—it is a desperate attempt to freeze history, to rebuild the empire in the shell of its own decay.

Real socialism doesn’t come wrapped in patriotism. It doesn’t pledge allegiance to a flag soaked in blood. It doesn’t want to “bring America back”—it wants to bury it. Not to punish, but to free. To finally release the people inside this prison-house of nations from the lie that they must choose between neoliberal rot and red-brown revival. The choice was never between Democrats and MAGA. The real choice is between empire and emancipation. Between a system built on stolen land and stolen labor—and a world built on solidarity, sovereignty, and socialist transformation.

But to build that world, we must do more than confront empire—we must also heal from it. That means reorganizing society along lines that settler capitalism has tried to erase: lines of ecological balance, reciprocal stewardship, and communal life. We’re not fighting for smokestacks and steel mills—we’re fighting for clean water, free land, sustainable food, and housing that doesn’t poison us. The blueprint is not in Fordist nostalgia—it’s in the knowledge Indigenous nations have carried through genocide. Knowledge of how to live with the land, not off of it. How to organize power horizontally. How to honor difference without domination.

True socialism in the U.S. must be anti-colonial and ecosocialist. It must abolish the settler state—not just to redistribute the spoils, but to re-root life in a different ethic. One that treats water as sacred, land as shared, labor as cooperative, and all beings as bound together. That’s not utopianism. That’s survival. That’s strategy. That’s the real transition—not from capitalism to some red version of the same death spiral, but from imperialist extraction to planetary regeneration.

Our line is not a niche opinion. It is the line of the colonized world. It is the line of Sankara, Cabral, Guevara, Claudia Jones, the Panthers, AIM, the Zapatistas, the South African poor, the Palestinian resistance, the Haitian peasantry, the Venezuelan communes, the Vietnamese victory, and the long rebellion of the Global South. It is the line that connects every enclosure, every chain, every checkpoint, every border wall, and every riot that has ever burned against them. This is not theory. It’s memory. And it’s coming back with a vengeance.

So let the grifters grift. Let the chauvinists cosplay revolution. Let the settler left keep circling its drain. We have work to do. We have comrades to reach. We have ecosystems to protect. We have information to weaponize. Because we are not here to rehabilitate empire. We are here to end it. Not with slogans. With struggle. Not with nostalgia. With strategy. Not in someone else’s name—but in our own, and in the name of all those who’ve fought, bled, and died trying to breathe under the boot of this global settler regime.

This is the line. Choose your side.