Vince Gilligan understands America better than almost anyone. There’s a scene from Breaking Bad that proves it.

It’s near the end of the series, halfway through season 5. After taking out a rival group, two drug dealers commiserate in a dirty diner bathroom over the decline of American greatness.

“The other day I saw this kid wearing a bicycle helmet,” one of them says. “I wanted to smack the shit out of him, for his own sake.”

“Nanny state.”

The other one smirks, grabbing a paper towel to wipe some blood off his shoe. You can see the swastika on his neck. He goes by the name Jack, and you can sort of tell he’s killed an awful lot of people.

Later, Jack stops by a meth lab to see how his nephew is doing. His nephew asks him to put on a mask. He won’t. The nephew tries to explain. “It’s just that with the fumes and all...”

Jack stands proud.

“You let me worry about how to breathe,” he says.

There’s your MAGA crowd.

Right there.

They want to get rid of all the bike helmets.

If you really want to know what the MAGA crowd wants, I think I’ve finally figured it out. I’ve been listening and looking for clues, thinking about my own relatives and bits and pieces of culture.

It took a while.

The first thing you have to do is make a mental switch. With MAGAs, it’s not really about what they want to build.

It’s all about what they want to get rid of.

The first thing they want gone are all the safety laws. We think we’ve been clever comparing masks and vaccines to all the other rules they follow. I think we missed the mark on that one.

They hate seat belts, too.

They hate helmets and goggles. They hate warning labels and instructions. They hate ear muffs and safety caps.

They don’t want protection.

From anything.

They want a macho state.

There’s another scene that’s worth thinking about, this one from a book by Jared Sexton called The Man They Wanted Me to Be. It begins with a tree falling down in his yard during a storm. The next morning, a man shows up to give him advice on how to get rid of the tree.

“Got a chainsaw?” he asks.

“No,” Jared says.

The guy makes a judgmental grunt, then grabs his own chainsaw. He winds up getting it stuck in the tree. It’s not long before a group of dudes shows up and starts trying to yank the chainsaw out, like it’s Excalibur or Mjölnir or something. Jared watches, bemused.

He winds up hiring a pro.

This crowd clings to toxic masculinity.

Boys don’t cry. They bully. Men don’t talk about their feelings. They don’t show any emotions, except anger.

They can always show that.

They want to control women.

Nothing about their attitude toward women makes any sense.

That’s the point.

They want women to be hot, but they only want them to wear bikinis when they’re in a good mood. If a man decides to make some place a “family environment,” then they can tell them to put on something else. Women can have their breasts out at Hooters, but they can’t breastfeed their babies at Starbucks. When women aren’t using their bodies to attract the attention and approval of men, they should be out of sight.

They want strip clubs, but you have to hide them.

They want sex workers, but they don’t want to treat them like human beings or pay them what they’re worth.

They want porn, but they want it to be secret.

They want a harem of women, but they also want an innocent wife and a daughter they can take to purity balls.

They want women to have children, but they don’t want to raise them. They don’t want to pay for them.

Women should be robots.

They want guns, guns, guns.

America was great when Clint Eastwood was young and white men were in charge. They live for the moment when they can whip out their chainsaw and cut down a tree, or stick a gun in some guy’s face for no reason and ask him if he feels lucky. They fantasize about it.

That’s why they want guns. They want to spend all day LARPing in their very own spaghetti western.

They want to stroll through poor neighborhoods and ghettos, daring someone to mug them, or to try and vote.

Guns are what allow everything else to happen. When you’ve got a bunch of assault weapons, and you can carry them around everywhere, nobody dares to question you about anything.

You get to do whatever you want.

Nobody tells you no.

They want to be billionaires.

They’re going to make America great again by becoming rich. They all have a plan. They’ll invest in something, probably a pyramid scheme. Don’t call it that, though. At least, don’t do it publicly.

That makes it harder for them to attract new suckers.

If pyramid schemes don’t work, maybe they’ll sell drugs. They’re usually against drugs, unless you can make money off it. They’ll also rip off helpless old people, however they can.

(I’ve seen it happen.)

It doesn’t matter how wrong something is. If you can make millions of dollars by doing it, then that makes it all okay.

They’re not going to make America great again by investing any of their money in things like roads or schools.

That’s socialism.

They still believe in the American dream.

A while ago, I had a student who worked at Hooters. She described her worst day on the job. One morning the heater conked out. They tried waiting tables in their jackets and hoodies. The patrons complained. The manager caved. For the rest of their shift, these girls had to strip down to their tight little shirts, with a room temperature somewhere in the low 50s.

The MAGA dream is pretty simple.

It’s a cold day at Hooters.

They want strip malls and mega churches, and strip clubs hidden in the bushes. They want man caves. They want drugs on the sly, and jails full of people they don’t like. They want teachers with cancer cooking meth because they can’t afford insurance.

They want to enjoy nature, but they don’t want to clean it up. They want to throw their trash on the ground and walk away.

They want to ride off into the sunset, in a big dirty truck, with a horse or an eagle for a hood ornament.

They want one giant, lawless desert.

We’re getting there.