Fascism Is What You Do, Not What’s In Your Heart

On Marty Embry’s MAGA hat experiment.

Image: Gage Skidmore, CC

Marty Embry—an American chef, a former professional basketball player, a Black man, and a Democrat—donned a MAGA hat and walked around in it for a week as a “quiet social experiment.” In the short essay he wrote about the experience (which has gone viral on Facebook and other social media) he says that the reaction to the hat “on both sides shook me to my core.”

But the reactions to the hate, by MAGA and not MAGA, are not surprising. For that reason, and others, Embry’s shock, and his glib moralizing, feel bizarrely divorced from our current reality and from the mechanics of fascism and hate.

Embry doesn’t really tell us anything new about MAGA or about MAGA’s targets, victims and opponents. He does demonstrate, though, the ways in which centrist both sidesing of fascism is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of what fascism is and of how it functions. Hate is not, primarily, an ineffable internal state that requires deep understanding. It’s what people wear on their heads more than what they feel in their hearts.

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Wear a bad hat, win bad prizes

Embry is clear throughout his essay that MAGA is a fascist, racist movement built on lies and led by a violent abuser. “The MAGA hat is not a neutral piece of clothing,” he says, with welcome clarity. “It carries the weight of family separations, of ‘very fine people on both sides,’ of voter suppression, of January 6th, of Project 2025.”

And yet, even as he notes that “very fine people on both sides” is a fascist dogwhistle, he rather helplessly defaults to the rhetoric of both sides being fine people.

Embry starts off by noting that MAGA voters and Trump fans were eager to welcome him when he wore the hat. He is very disturbed when one man calls him “brother.” Another tells him “’Blacks who get it’ are the most important people in the movement.” Though the man intended it as a “compliment,” Embry says, “I sat with it like a stone in my chest.”

Embry finds the welcome from the fascists painful. But he also is powerfully affected by the disdain from those in his own community. Black people who do not know him, and Black people who do, treat him like a tragedy and a traitor. “Black fathers that I have mentored kids alongside, men I respect deeply, were visibly cold. One pulled me aside and said quietly and directly: ‘What are you doing, man? You know what that hat means to our kids.’”

Embry acknowledges that this father was right about what the hat means; it represents a movement that wants to rob Black children of the right to vote, of the right to pursue the careers, of the right to exist safely in public. “[The Black father] wasn’t wrong. Not even a little,” Embry says. “But he didn’t ask me why either. And that assumption, even when it comes from love, from history, from real pain, is still an assumption.”

This is an especially odd passage because Embry has just told us that the man did in fact directly ask him why. The man walked up to him, and according to Embry, he said, “What are you doing, man?” He wasn’t rejecting Embry out of hand; he was calling him in, not calling him out. But somehow, this becomes for Embry an iconic example of the intolerant left—an incident on which to pin a right/left equivalence narrative. The problem in America, he concludes, is not fascism, but “The willingness on BOTH sides to stop seeing a person the moment they saw a symbol.”

People are allowed to believe you when you tell them who you are

The fact that Embry’s story about the Black father so completely contradicts itself suggests that Embry went into his “social experiment” with some major preconceptions. Chief among those preconceptions, I think, was a powerful belief in his own innocence and his own distance from his own actions.

Embry assumes, in all his interactions, that his real self is not the self that puts on the MAGA hat. He is a Democrat, a good person, and not a fascist. He wears the hat as an experiment; he is not wearing it, he insists, for the same reason that everyone else is.

That’s part of why he has such sympathy for the people he meets who vote Republican but disavow Trump. He mentions an army veteran who hates Trump as an example of moral complexity: “He voted for Trump twice. Would likely do it again. But he had zero illusions about who the man was.” He also mentions a woman who says she can’t vote for someone who would raise taxes or take her guns, so she supports Trump—though she hates that she does so.

Embry concludes:

This is the piece the left often refuses to see. There is a significant portion of the Republican coalition that is not MAGA, does not worship Trump, cringes at his cruelties, but calculates that their policy interests are better served by staying inside a broken house than building a new one. You can disagree with that calculation. I do. But dismissing those people as fascists means you never understand them and you never get a chance to reach them.

To be a fascist, Embry believes, you have to “worship Trump”; you have to support everything he does, even, presumably, unto the White House ballroom. Only those who are utterly devoted in their hearts to his every burp and nap are truly in the club. It’s not enough to wear a hat, to donate to him, to vote for him, to work for him. Actions, ultimately, don’t matter, as long as you have a reservation in your heart.

That’s why Embry reports that the father asked him what he was doing and then insists that the man did not ask him what he was doing. His colleague was demanding that he account for his actions, but Embry believes he shouldn’t be judged on his actions, but on the purity of his heart—which he believes people should intuit, or at least assume.

But nothing works like that. Fascism isn’t a secret code written on your soul. It is a brutal pragmatic political program of hate, subjugation, and extermination. People sign onto that program not through some internal communication with the orange god, but by taking specific actions to align themselves with the program. This was the case in Hitler’s Germany too; there were many “yes, but” Nazis who (like Webern) disliked the extermination of Jews, but liked the idea of Germany conquering Europe. We refer to those people now as “Nazis”, because their reservations were irrelevant to their support of Hitler’s horrific imperial and genocidal projects.

When you wear a swastika, or a MAGA hat, you are publicly aligning yourself with a hate movement. You are telling Black people, and women, and Jewish people, and trans people, and Muslim people, and Arabs, and immigrants, that you believe in and want to work with the regime that is attempting to subjugate and/or exterminate them. And when you say that you are so aligned, people are allowed to believe you.

Indeed, people would be foolish not to believe you. If you say you’re a fascist, I’m not going to (for instance) tell you about the status or whereabouts of friends who are immigrants, friends who are pregnant, friends who are trans. Fascists are an active threat at the best of times, even when they don’t have the support of a massive state apparatus. Letting self-declared fascists into your community and your family puts you and those around you in danger. And putting on a MAGA hat is in fact declaring yourself a fascist, as surely as putting on a swastika armband.

You are what you do

It’s very Protestant, and therefore very American, to believe that your actions and your moral state are largely divorced from one another. Judge us, Americans say, on our own sense of ourselves as good people, not on the bombs we drop, the atrocities we commit, or the apartheid we institute. Those are, after all, only transient works; why must you insist on attributing malice when, for all you know, I exterminated your people with great internal regret?

Embry of course was a somewhat special case; he wore a MAGA hat not because he supports Trump, but to better understand support for Trump And yet, he makes himself less special by insisting on generalizing his experience. People, he insists, shouldn’t judge people by what they do, but should assume good faith. But how is that different than saying that people shouldn’t judge Elon Musk for making a Nazi salute? Isn’t this ultimately just a way to blame people who express distaste for Nazis rather than blaming the Nazis themselves?

I don’t doubt Embry’s good intentions. But the point here is that intentions don’t count for much. He put on a MAGA hat, delighted fascists, horrified those who oppose fascism, and then wrote a piece shaming fascist opponents and apologizing for a bunch of fascists. I don’t think that makes him history’s greatest villain, but it does suggest that what you do makes you who you are, regardless of what you mean to do or what you think you’re doing. Embry decided to wear a fascist tool, and became—not entirely, but still—a tool of fascism. Especially in times like these, very often, for better or worse, we are who we pretend to be.