Neanderthals with Smartphones: How MAGA Is Being Played by Russia

How America's anti-intellectual cult became the perfect delivery system for Russian sabotage.

Let’s call it what it is. The MAGA movement, at its rotten core, has become a parade of people who stopped evolving somewhere around fire and wheel. It’s Neanderthal thinking with 21st-century tools - a tribal, grunting worldview amplified by algorithms, Fox News, and rage-bait memes. The fact that someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene sits in elected office is not just a sign of democratic decay, it’s hard proof that political regression is real. If you gave a Paleolithic hunter a smartphone, taught them to chant "deep state," and told them drag queens were the enemy, you’d have most of today’s MAGA base - proudly angry, proudly uninformed, and allergic to nuance.

But here's the darker layer: those knuckle-draggers aren’t even in charge. They're pawns. MAGA was the perfect host body for a viral campaign of foreign influence and domestic sabotage - and it worked. The American empire, for all its faults, used to stand for some form of democratic order. That order is now collapsing from within, not due to external force but because a handful of useful idiots handed the keys to the Kremlin’s preferred chaos agents - and then thanked them for it.

Enter Trump - the great orange Trojan horse. A man so obsessed with himself and so unburdened by integrity that he became the perfect weapon. His connections to Russia are so obvious that they barely need rehashing. The man couldn’t even criticise Putin when it mattered. At a Helsinki press conference, he publicly sided with Putin over his own intelligence services. But the MAGA base didn’t flinch. They heard his grunts, his rants, his easy scapegoats - immigrants, minorities, elites - and they cheered. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t think. They howled.

And following close behind? The next generation of bad-faith actors: Tulsi Gabbard, grifting off her military record and faux-independence while parroting Kremlin talking points on cue. Elon Musk, the tech bro turned chaos agent, using his platforms to amplify conspiracies and destabilise institutions under the guise of "free speech." The man who once launched rockets is now helping launch narratives that serve Russia’s geopolitical interests, from platforming anti-Ukraine propaganda to algorithmically boosting far-right content.

And then there’s JD Vance - the opportunist turned apologist. Once a voice of reason in a sea of rage, he transformed from Rust Belt chronicler to full-blown mouthpiece for authoritarianism. Vance isn’t just MAGA’s intellectual fig leaf - he’s a willing handmaiden to America’s enemies. A man who openly questions the value of supporting Ukraine, undermines U.S. alliances, and signals loyalty not to democracy but to power, wherever it originates. If there’s a traitor in a blazer playing both sides for long-term gain, it’s him.

These aren’t patriots. They’re assets - ideological or otherwise - helping dismantle America from the inside. And they’re doing it by riding the wave of MAGA’s proudly anti-intellectual cult. These figures speak in half-truths and memes, counting on the short attention span and deep resentment of a base trained to distrust anyone with expertise.

MAGA voters were told they were the real Americans. They were told they were under siege by wokeness, by migrants, by liberal cities, by climate scientists, by journalists, by experts of all kinds. So they lashed out - not upward, at the billionaires robbing them blind, but sideways and downward, at the targets they were given. Meanwhile, Russia smiled. The Kremlin didn’t need to plant saboteurs - it just needed to amplify the right voices and let American dysfunction do the rest.

The genius of this sabotage is that it’s self-inflicted. The very people screaming about "patriotism" are the ones opening the gates. The people who claim to love the Constitution are standing behind a man who literally tried to overturn it. And the ones shouting about "deep state" are being quietly nudged along by a foreign state. All while thinking they're the resistance.

The American empire may be falling. But it’s not being toppled. It’s being hollowed out by its own citizens - or what’s left of them - who’ve traded their brains for slogans, their votes for vibes, and their national pride for cult loyalty. MAGA didn’t just break conservatism. It broke America’s immune system, making it ripe for infiltration. The infection spreads not through tanks or troops but through YouTube, Facebook, and late-night cable.

This isn’t just a political crisis. It’s a civilisational one. The U.S. is being outflanked by allies and adversaries alike - economically, technologically, diplomatically - while its internal politics revolve around imaginary enemies and social media tantrums. And unless America wakes up, stops mistaking grunting for discourse, and starts holding these saboteurs accountable - both foreign and domestic - the next chapter won’t be a renaissance.

It’ll be a post-literate autocracy run by bots, billionaires, and bare-knuckle morons. All cheered on by a mob that thinks critical thinking is communism and Putin is somehow better than Portland.

The fall won't come from an enemy at the gates. It’ll come from the cheer inside the arena when the gates are thrown open by the crowd.