In the early 1990s, when MAGA — then known as the Religious Right — was in its infancy, MAGA began deploying a tactic intended to sneak far right Trojan Horse candidates into public office. Developed by early activists such as Ralph Reed of the then-ascendant Christian Coalition, these candidates would campaign on seemingly mundane issues while concealing their religious extremism from the general public. These candidates came to be known by critics as “stealth candidates.“

Stealth candidacies were the tactic of choice during the early takeovers of school boards in the 1990s. These candidates had the backing of the extremist churches of which they were members, so they could run for office on vague platitudes while their real constituencies — the congregations of these extremist churches — knew what these candidates’ real agenda would be.

A more recent example of a classic stealth candidate was Carl DeMaio, a highly motivated MAGA who, in 2014, reportedly kept his mouth shut on the Hobby Lobby “religious freedom” case and tried to portray himself as a moderate. And stealth — and not so stealth — school board candidates continue to flood the ballot.

The advent of hate media changed the framework, but not the concept

Today, MAGA extremists dwell in their own disinformation ecosystem. The concentrated hate speech within creates an environment intolerable for most normal people. Therefore, the modern hate media ecosystem functions much like a closed system even though hate propaganda outlets are innumerable and freely available.

The size and power of today’s hate media ecosystem gives it the sheer brute muscle to create lies at will out of whole cloth and push them into mainstream public discourse. In their effort to destroy a Democrat, they create a conspiracy or “scandal” out of thin air and can even make current manufactured “scandals” reverberate with past manufactured scandals. Notice how Burisma practically rhymes with Solyndra?

That’s no accident. Today’s hate media machine has enough power to create a fictional story line in a fictional setting — and then drop another made-up scandal years later into the same movie set. The story line and the setting for Burisma was already made familiar to MAGA by the earlier manufacture of the Solyndra lie; the manufactured Burisma non-scandal was dropped right into the same scene — with MAGA’s mental picture already in place and fully built.

Today’s hate media machine has the sheer power to create manufactured narratives and faux “crises” out of thin air.

The manufactured “crisis” for 2026 is “fraud”

Who doesn’t want to eliminate fraud? Fighting fraud sounds like a good normie’s campaign platform as anything. But what hate media do is manufacture visions of oceans of “fraud” wherever a Democrat-led state or city exists. Constant saturation of the MAGA mediaverse with these visions of “widespread fraud” in Democratic areas creates a pseudo-cause where no unusual problem exists. Whether it’s Medicaid fraud or the virtually non-existent voter fraud, the MAGA lies of 2026 drop neatly into this years fabricated dystopian story line.

But combating fraud has spectacular normie appeal, and the latest stealth candidate, Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, based his phony campaign message on the all-important quasi-mission of combating fraud. He also made great reuse of another manufactured right wing lie: that California’s wildfires of years past were Democrats’ fault because they didn’t send in crews to rake the leaves in our national forests. The lies about the Palisades wildfires fit perfectly into the existing mental movie set created by the MAGA lies about past destructive wildfires.

L. A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt drops his disguise

Spencer Pratt said that he was going to similarly “clean up L. A.” We knew the truth was coming.

But Pratt’s supporters knew his real agenda of hate from the day he began his campaign. That’s because Pratt, too, was such a stealth candidate.

Using language that no true moderate would ever use, Pratt referred to the front-runners as “commie animals.” MAGA knew what they would get in Pratt: “He leads an uprising of other frustrated Angelenos to throw tomatoes at Bass, Newsom and Kamala Harris. (For good measure, the ad throws out a crude mockery of transgender rights.)”

The lesson is: Pay no attention to what almost any present-day Republican pretends to be campaigning on. No matter which faux cause is feigned in an effort to attract the votes of normies, the real agenda of virtually every modern “R” is identical:

1. Book bans
2. Strip school and university curricula of all content that doesn’t conform to their religion
3. Give themselves the “parental rights” to control and abuse their children
4. Take away the rights of all other parents to protect and support their children
5. Grant people who follow their religion special, elevated rights and protections
6. Strip existing rights and protections from people who don’t follow their religion
7. Legalize bullying, but only when they are the ones doing the bullying
8. Elevate male supremacy
9. Roll back women’s rights
10. Repeal children’s rights
11. Render the Constitution completely inoperative, by packing the courts and redefining key legal terms
12. Strict, comprehensive, Taliban-like government regulation of everyone’s sex lives
13. Government run by religious fundamentalism much in the manner of Iran or Afghanistan.

That’s the entire MAGA agenda, from beginning to end. All the rest is bait and switch.