Pity and Irrelevance: The True Fear Behind America's Reactionary Rage
Dan Stein, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions are stuck in a past that never existed, and they want us to live there too
They’re not screaming because they’re strong. They’re screaming because they’re afraid, afraid of change, of truth, of irrelevance.
In recent years, figures such as Dan Stein, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions have become louder, angrier, and more extreme. To hear them talk, one might think America is on the verge of collapse, that a sinister conspiracy of immigrants, feminists, “queers”, and critical race theorists is coming to “replace” them. But their noise isn’t a signal of strength. It’s the death rattle of a worldview that’s losing its grip.
For a brief moment, during the Obama years, the rise of multicultural politics, the visibility of trans people, and the protests for Black lives, these men saw a version of America they couldn't control. It terrified them, not because they were truly being oppressed, but because they feared what they projected: that one day, someone else might do to them what they had done to others.
But no reckoning came. No revenge. Just the quiet realization that the country was moving on without them, and they were no longer at the center of the story.
So they did what reactionaries always do when the tide turns: they screamed louder. They clung to old lies, doubled down on exclusion, and launched a new generation of grievance-fueled acolytes. Their goal is no longer persuasion. It’s survival. Their ideology is no longer about policy. It’s about ego preservation in the face of truth.
As Umberto Eco once warned in Ur-Fascism, one sign of emergent authoritarianism is that “disagreement is treason.” In this climate, empathy is weakness, truth is subversion, and history is the enemy.
But the real fear isn’t disagreement. It’s exposure. And more than anything else, they fear being seen, not as powerful men guiding a nation, but as sad figures raging against a future they can’t understand and a past they’ve never reckoned with.
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The Architects of a Failing Worldview
To grasp today’s politics, trace it back to the men who refused to let go of yesterday’s lies. Dan Stein, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions aren't relics; they are the braintrust behind policies now moving at terrifying speed during Trump’s second term.
These men laid the intellectual foundation for Trumpism and now Project 2025’s aggressive federal overhaul: dismantling equity, rewriting immigration, and erasing historical complexity.
Dan Stein: Quiet Godfather of Immigration Crackdowns
Dan Stein spent over 40 years leading FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, quietly crafting the intellectual and legal infrastructure for the anti-immigrant movement. While the public rarely hears his name, his fingerprints are everywhere. FAIR’s talking points, policy memos, and legal strategies became the backbone of Trump’s first-term immigration actions, and now form the ideological spine of Project 2025, the 900-page blueprint for permanent MAGA governance.
Stein’s ideology was shaped during the War on Drugs, when borders became militarized and migration was recast as a criminal threat. He has openly described immigrants as a "competitive breeding" problem and once lamented the decline of "Anglo-Saxon dominance" in the United States. His long-term mission has been to dismantle family-based immigration, gut asylum protections, and reduce nonwhite immigration to a trickle, not through open racism, but through bureaucratic suffocation.
Now, in Trump’s second term, Stein’s vision is being fully realized. Recent executive orders have expanded expedited deportation nationwide, suspended refugee admissions, and introduced criminal penalties for undocumented presence. All of it mirrors FAIR’s decades-old white papers, ideas that once sat in filing cabinets now enshrined in federal law.
Steve Bannon: Rage as a Strategy
Where Stein worked in shadows, Steve Bannon lit the match in full view. As Trump’s chief strategist and the former head of Breitbart News, Bannon fused white grievance politics with apocalyptic nationalism. He sold the idea that America was under siege from immigrants, Muslims, globalists, feminists, and that the only solution was war.
Bannon was instrumental in pushing the Muslim ban, in calling for the militarization of the southern border, and in fueling attacks on the “deep state” that now serve as justification for Project 2025’s dismantling of federal institutions. Today, he uses his podcast “War Room” to spread misinformation, recruit extremists, and frame the Biden years as treasonous. He is, in many ways, the ideological firebrand behind the purge now underway, not just of immigrants, but of civil servants, scientists, and educators deemed insufficiently loyal to the Trumpist cause.
Jeff Sessions: Law as a Weapon
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general, brought decades of Southern racial politics into the highest echelons of federal power. Long before Trump, Sessions had called the Voting Rights Act “intrusive” and opposed almost every major civil rights expansion of his lifetime. He once infamously joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was “okay until I found out they smoked pot.” That wasn’t just a clumsy line; it was a window into a worldview where racism and law enforcement were never truly in conflict, only in need of better public relations.
As AG, Sessions rolled back police reform, revived the war on drugs, and turned immigration enforcement into a mechanism of mass criminalization. He made it official policy to prosecute every undocumented border crossing as a federal crime, a decision that directly led to the family separation crisis. It wasn’t a side effect. It was the goal.
Now, in Trump’s second term, Sessions’s punitive legacy is being codified. New DOJ directives require criminal prosecution for undocumented migrants, expand detention capacity, and empower federal agents to override local protections. The cruelty is no longer an aberration. It’s the policy.
“People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.”
The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin
The Inheritors of Grievance
If Stein, Bannon, and Sessions are the architects, Stephen Miller is their disciple and their weapon. He didn’t invent their ideology, but he perfected its tone, stripped it of ambiguity, and embedded it deep inside federal policy. As a teenager radicalized in the post-9/11 era, Miller fixated on immigration, multiculturalism, and liberalism as existential threats. He spoke not of policy disagreements, but of civilizational warfare.
By the time he entered the Trump administration, he was ready to carry out the worst of what FAIR, Bannon, and Sessions had only hinted at: child separation, Muslim bans, attacks on asylum, and the erasure of humanitarian protections baked into U.S. law. If Stein laid the intellectual bricks, Miller set them in concrete.
See our reporting on Stephen Miller here:
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But Miller is not alone. A whole generation of men — white, often young, disaffected, and digitally radicalized — has grown up not with real oppression, but with the narrative of lost status. They’ve been told they are the victims of "wokeness," of diversity, of women’s empowerment, of Black success, of trans visibility. And instead of finding their way in a more just and pluralistic world, many have chosen to follow the path of resentment.
This is the emotional legacy that Stein, Bannon, and Sessions left behind: a worldview where equality feels like erasure and justice feels like persecution, where any gain by someone else must mean a loss for you. It’s a politics of status panic, dressed up as patriotism.
What they’ve inherited isn’t just ideology. It’s emotional fragility wrapped in historical denial. They are not fighting for the future; they are fighting to preserve a fantasy of the past in which they were always the hero, always the norm, always the winner.
But history is catching up. And so is truth.
Fear of Exposure, Not Replacement
Let’s be clear: the “Great Replacement” theory — that immigrants and people of color are systematically replacing white Americans — is not a demographic argument. It’s a psychological projection.
The fear isn’t that “they” will outnumber “us.” The fear is that “they” will treat “us” the way “we” treated “them,” that equity will feel like retribution, that inclusion will feel like loss, that the mirror will finally reflect who they really are, and who they’ve always been.
This isn’t about numbers. It’s about accountability.
What Dan Stein, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions have passed down, and what men like Stephen Miller now defend, is a worldview so fragile, so deeply invested in dominance, that even the idea of parity feels like an existential threat. It’s not just fear of being outvoted; it’s fear of being unmasked.
Because deep down, they know: if history is taught honestly, if the truth of America’s racial, gendered, and colonial legacy is widely understood, then the moral framework they’ve built their identity on collapses.
They’ve always relied on myths:
That America was always great
That whiteness was always rightful
That power was always earned
That violence was always justified
Strip those away, and what remains? A generation of men who were promised heroism and are now afraid of being remembered as bystanders, or worse, as villains.
They don’t fear replacement. They fear recognition. They fear a world where their children might look at them and say, “Why didn’t you do better?”
And beneath that fear lies something even harder to bear: pity.
Because what they dread most isn’t revenge. It’s the possibility that they’ll be remembered not with hate, but with sadness, as men who clung to power not because they were strong, but because they were too fragile to imagine a world without it.
They wanted to be feared, but now, they risk being seen and pitied, and that, to them, is worse than defeat.
Justice Feels Like Revenge When You’ve Never Faced It
For generations, many of the men now clinging to reactionary politics lived in a world where they were above consequence. Their families weren’t redlined. Their ancestors weren’t enslaved or displaced. Their religions weren’t targeted. Their schools taught a version of history where they were always the protagonists, and everyone else was a footnote.
When justice arrives — real, nonviolent, overdue justice — it doesn’t feel like progress to them. It feels like punishment.
“The opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”
Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson
Because when you’ve never been held accountable, even fairness feels like an attack. When the playing field starts to level, it feels like you’re being shoved down.
This is why the current backlash is so extreme, so personal, so irrational. It is why DEI initiatives, modest attempts at inclusion, are framed as discrimination. It is why Black Lives Matter is labeled terrorism, and trans visibility is cast as moral decay. It is why teaching history is portrayed as an existential threat to the republic.
None of these things are about actual harm. They’re about discomfort, the first tremors of being seen, of being asked to share space, to listen, to let go of control, to feel, for the first time, the mild unease that others have carried for centuries.
That’s why the rage is so raw. Not because justice is violent, but because it reveals how long they’ve been insulated from it.
“If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
But they didn’t, and now, instead of owning their choices, they’re accusing the mirror of being broken.
This isn’t about redemption or reconciliation. Not yet. You can’t reconcile with the truth if you won’t even acknowledge it.
And right now, the architects of grievance and their ideological descendants are choosing tantrum over transformation, retaliation over reflection.
But justice doesn’t require their permission. It only requires that we stop confusing their discomfort with oppression.
The World Moved On. They Stayed Behind.
For all their noise, for all the damage they’ve done, Dan Stein, Steve Bannon, and Jeff Sessions are not the future. They’re monuments to a fading worldview, one built on dominance, denial, and deeply fragile myths of superiority.
They built an empire of grievance, but what they feared most was never an invasion. It was a reckoning.
And that reckoning is here, not in the form of torches and pitchforks, but in something far more disruptive to their worldview: truth, equity, clarity, history, complexity, accountability.
They expected revenge. What they got was something worse: irrelevance.
“They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what they had done.”
As I Please, George Orwell
While they rage on podcasts, push policy blueprints, and desperately try to reinstall themselves into national memory, the world is already moving forward, led by people who aren’t asking for payback, but for progress, people who want to build something better, not tear something down. People who’ve spent centuries being erased and ignored, now finally stepping into full voice.
The most terrifying thing to a man who has always been feared is not resistance. It’s pity. And for the generation shaped by Stein, Bannon, and Sessions, that’s the legacy now taking hold.
Because history remembers. It doesn’t forget cruelty, or cowardice, or the refusal to grow.
If they wanted to be remembered better, they should have done better.
That’s not vengeance. That’s not even judgment. It’s just the truth. And in this moment, as the backlash grows more desperate and the policies more extreme, telling the truth is radical. It’s powerful. It’s healing.
The future doesn’t need their permission. It only needs our courage.
Let’s walk forward. They can stay behind.
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Bibliography:
Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.
Umberto Eco. “Ur-Fascism.” The Anarchist Library, June 22, 1995.
James Baldwin. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963.
George Orwell. The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1941.
Bryan Stevenson. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014.
Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). Extremist Files. Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Jeff Sessions’ Coming War on Legal Marijuana.” Politico Magazine, December 2016.
“Jeff Sessions to crack down on legalised marijuana, ending Obama‑era policy.” The Guardian. January 4, 2018.
It is an extinction burst! You went beyond the social science in your astute analysis. It makes sense. And they are so pathetic.
An extinction burst is a temporary increase in the frequency, intensity, or duration of a behavior when reinforcement for that behavior is withdrawn. It's a common phenomenon observed when using extinction procedures, where a behavior that was previously rewarded is no longer reinforced. Essentially, the individual initially tries harder to get the desired outcome before the behavior eventually decreases and disappears.
Like when the “play” button doesn’t play, I hit it again and again, finishing which a burst of quick, even aggressive, pushes.
No one is illegal on stolen land.