MAGA: Asian Edition
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A good piece here on how Trumpian politics have proven quite appealing to the right in Japan and South Korea, two nations with very strong senses of both misogyny and racial purity and thus resentment at those who dare suggest that women could be equal or maybe that your subreplacement birth rates should lead to increased immigration.
Every Saturday, a group of demonstrators gathers in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, equipped with the U.S. Stars and Stripes and the Taegeukgi — the red and blue Korean flag. They chant xenophobic slogans, using offensive slurs directed against Chinese residents in South Korea. They carry panels reading “Korea to Koreans” and wear baseball hats emblazoned with the well-known Trumpian refrain, slightly adapted: “Make Korea Great Again.” Leading the march is the far-right organization Free University, composed mostly of men in their 20s.
The organization took shape following then-President Yoon Suk-yeol’s declaration of martial law in December 2024, an event that plunged South Korea into political turmoil. After being dismissed from the presidency through impeachment, Yoon is now standing trial for insurrection and several other charges. Immediately following these events, militants from Free University rallied to Yoon’s defense, demanding his “liberation” and decrying the alleged plot against him — a plot they claim led to the election of Democratic candidate Lee Jae-myung, the current president. This campaign included the adoption of the slogan “Stop the Steal” — a direct nod to the rallying cry used by Donald Trump’s supporters to contest the 2020 U.S. presidential election — because Free University insists that last June’s election results were a product of interference from Beijing. The name reflects the group’s origins among university students who see themselves as “liberated” from the grip of leftist ideology.
Just hours after the American political activist Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was killed at the Utah University campus, memorials and marches were already being staged. The connection between Kirk and the Korean far right was made evident when, just days before his killing, he embarked on an Asian tour that brought him first to South Korea and then to Tokyo. It is precisely in these two nations that a new political wave, directly inspired by MAGA, is emerging and employing the same playbook. Its supporters share identical code words and political agendas: They are fiercely anti-leftist, rail against the communist “menace” from China and North Korea, demand zero immigration, and maintain staunch opposition to any civil rights for the LGBTQ+ community.
For the demonstrators, the key evidence of the Korean government’s collusion with the Chinese Communist Party arrived when, at the end of September, the Lee administration permitted visa-free entry for Chinese tourist groups for up to 15 days until June 30 this year. This decision immediately inflamed the anti-China rallies, which claimed that the visa-free tourism policy would lead to an invasion of South Korea by Chinese nationals who would remain in the country illegally even after their visa-free entry expired. Conspiracy theories and alarmist claims that criminals and infectious diseases would enter the country circulated online and offline, and were promptly dismissed by officials and experts as false.
The situation escalated to such a degree that Lee intervened in early October, just ahead of a planned visit to Korea by Chinese President Xi Jinping. Lee ordered a crackdown on anti-Chinese and anti-foreigner rallies, stating that such demonstrations were harming South Korea’s international image.
It is obvious, however, that many of the attack lines of the Korean right have been lifted almost verbatim from the MAGA playbook. As Sim Jae-hong, a representative from Free University, told me during the Charlie Kirk memorial, the “nightmare to avert in Seoul is to become a city like London, full of immigrants and criminality.” This rhetoric, which frames European capitals as dystopian warnings of failed integration, is a hallmark of MAGA-style discourse.
By importing these narratives, the movement targets not only the Chinese community but also the Muslim community, which is no stranger to Islamophobic sentiments in South Korea. In the city of Daegu, in the southeast of the peninsula, the construction of a mosque was fiercely opposed by the local community in 2023. At the site where the place of worship was to be built, Al Jazeera reported at the time, three severed pig heads were left. Muslims are not allowed to eat pork under Islamic law, and people have used pork and severed pig heads as a symbol of anti-Muslim hate in other parts of the world, including in the United States.
It’s a grim world out there and wherever you live, Donald Trump’s life has made it worse.