The MAGA Hat Is Still an Object of Hate
Those blood-red Make America Great Again hats have a tendency to crop up during the country’s dimmest moments. Think of where you’ve seen them over the past two years. They’ve been at the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, in the Instagram avatar of the Parkland shooter, and, of course, inside unhinged Trump rallies.
The hats are once again in the conversation after this weekend’s confrontation at the anti-abortion March for Life in D.C. In the aftermath, House Democrat John Yarmuth joked that the hats were “poisoning young minds” and should be banned until “we can figure out what is going on.” The actress Alyssa Milano called the MAGA hat the “new white hood,” referencing the robes worn by the KKK.
So yesterday, Fox News trotted out its worst to defend the MAGA hat. In a segment with Jesse Watters, Jedediah Bila, and host Greg Gutfeld, the panel equated judging teens for wearing MAGA hats with saying women who wear short skirts deserve to be sexually assaulted. “The nerve to say that to a kid, too,” Bila says. “Imagine if you were saying that to a woman. That’s that line, ‘Oh, if you were wearing a skirt like that, you deserve it,’ it’s crazy.”
Video: Alyssa Milano Says MAGA Hat Is the 'New White Hood'
The difference—evident to everyone who doesn’t cash checks from Fox News—is that, unlike skirts, the MAGA hats do signal something. In this regard, they're a whole lot less like skirts than, say, other baseball caps: They announce the wearer is on a certain team. Wearing a MAGA hat aligns you with the policies of the very person who made that hat famous, and who has sold them by the boxful. That is: the president who started his campaign painting Mexicans as rapists, criminals, and drug dealers, who lustily bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” who has stoked hate crimes, and who seemingly desires more than anything else to build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border. Who thinks America needs to be made great again, like it used to be.
The hat alone is a symbol of hate, all of Trump’s retrograde policies and dog-whistle statements conveniently wrapped into a bit of red fabric. A strong contender for the most infuriating bit of the conversation this week—an extremely high bar to clear!—is right-leaning outfits like Fox News pretending that the hat is still some impotent, quotidian symbol. It's not.
That is, strategically, missing from this week’s right-wing talking points. So is this idea: that clothes mean something. The social power of clothing—the idea that what you wear says something about you and the world you inhabit—is the reason those on the right are so offended that Milano would call MAGA hats the “new white hood.” It’s the reason the KKK instituted a dress code calling for members to dress prim and proper—and why so many of the people in attendance at the Charlottesville rally were dressed like innocuous dads. And it’s why, after the school shooting in Santa Fe last spring, a conservative commentator suggested banning trench coats, as if they were to blame. These items accrue meaning because of what people like Nick Sandmann do while wearing them—and by what people have done for years now while wearing the red cap.
