What Russia’s Army in Ukraine and MAGA’s Joni Ernst Tell Us: Both Are Death Cults
- john raymond
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
The illusion of difference between the MAGA movement in America and Putin’s army in Ukraine is seductive. One wears fatigues, the other wears flags. One charges into trenches, the other tweets and filibusters. But look closely. Look at the logic that drives them. Look at what they demand from their people. Look at what they accept as collateral. You will see it: they are both manifestations of the same rot. They are both death cults.
Let’s begin with the obvious: Russia’s strategy in Ukraine is not strategy in any conventional sense. It is a willingness to sacrifice endless lives for inches. Human wave attacks, where conscripts are hurled into meat grinders, are not innovative tactics. They are ritualized slaughter. A thousand dead? Ten thousand? It does not matter to the Kremlin. What matters is that the dead serve the myth — that the Motherland is eternal, that Russia cannot lose, that martyrdom is patriotic. Death becomes not just accepted but normalized. It becomes part of the ritual.
Now let’s bring that home. Joni Ernst — senator, Republican, MAGA acolyte — was recently asked about healthcare. She could have demurred. She could have spoken in the language of policy. Instead, she basically said this: “Everybody dies.” And as if that weren’t enough, she doubled down with a political video taken in a graveyard. Not by accident. That was the point.
You’re meant to see death not as a policy failure, but as a fact of life that excuses policy failure. It’s a perfect parallel to the Russian justification for the dead in Ukraine. The message is: Why complain? Everyone dies.
And that’s what death cults do. They sacralize death to obscure the cruelty of the systems that cause it. They hide the lack of care, the lack of planning, the lack of responsibility, behind a fog of inevitability. “It’s not our fault,” they say, as the bodies stack up. “This is just how the world works.”
But it’s not.
In functioning democracies, policy is meant to prevent unnecessary death. It is meant to provide healthcare, security, dignity. But in both the MAGA movement and Putin’s regime, death is no longer a bug. It is a feature. It is the ultimate proof of loyalty. In Russia, you die to serve the state. In MAGA America, you die to serve the myth of rugged individualism — and the evil men it protects.
In both cases, the leadership is protected. Putin is nowhere near the front. Trump has a helicopter and a doctor’s note. Joni Ernst has the best healthcare the government can provide. The people who die are always someone else’s kids, someone else’s parents, someone else’s neighbors. But for the movement, their deaths are proof of faith. And questioning that death? That’s sacrilege.
A death cult doesn’t need robes or rituals. It just needs a belief system where human suffering is sanctified, where questioning cruelty is seen as weakness, and where preventable death is repackaged as patriotic necessity. That’s what MAGA is. That’s what Russia’s war machine is.
And that’s why Joni Ernst in a graveyard and a Russian general ordering another wave into a minefield are not as far apart as you’d think.
They both believe your death proves their strength. They both believe you owe them your life. They both believe that caring is weakness. They both believe that dying for their cause is preferable to living free without it.
You don’t need to call it a religion. Just call it what it is: a cult that makes death sacred, so it never has to make life better.
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