The right is getting weirder about sex
The right is getting weirder about sex
Cults always police their followers' sex lives, but the right wants to impose their bizarre beliefs on everyone
Close watchers of the MAGA movement have been chronicling the alarming escalation of both violent intimidation and overt white supremacy in recent weeks. Donald Trump, of course, now begs his followers on a nearly daily basis to murder his perceived enemies. But the rhetoric is spiraling, with people like Fox News host Greg Gutfeld openly calling for civil war. Meanwhile, Christopher Rufo — a right hand man for Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla. — recently hosted a forum that pushed establishment Republicans to build a “bridge” to the so-called "dissident right," including some open white nationalists. He may get his wish, as one of the top contenders for Speaker of the House, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., described himself as "David Duke without the baggage."
The radicalism of the right is growing as the GOP careens swiftly towards nominating Trump as their presidential candidate, despite his 91 felony indictments in four jurisdictions. But, as anyone who has studied cults can tell you, they never limit their escalations to violence or hateful ideologies. There's almost always a weird sexual component, as cult leaders come up with ever stranger rules and regulations to control the sexual expression of their followers.
The MAGA movement is no different. The cult-like following of Trump always had an unsettling mix of incel-inflected misogyny, coupled with a homophobia that is somehow also homoerotic. But it's been rapidly getting worse in recent months. Even more frightening is how determined they are to inflict their sexual hang-ups on the rest of the country.
Gutfeld, who claims to be a "comedian," has long positioned himself on Fox News as an everyman character. He's meant to make audiences feel that normal people can be Republicans, and not just Bible-hugging weirdoes or camo-clad militia nuts. But, as his civil war rant makes clear, lately he's been channeling a more David Koresh-esque vibe, and invariably that comes with some sexual weirdness.
Last week, Gutfeld hosted a far-right figure named Hotep Jesus, who is known primarily for being an apologist for white supremacists and anti-semites. Hotep Jesus, whose real name is Bryan Sharpe, was on the show to promote a "dating" blog that is, in actuality, propaganda for domestic abuse. As Media Matters chronicled, Sharpe regards it as a form of adultery if women are "allowed" to work or vote. "Imagine guts, sweat, and tears shed only to watch your woman get dolled up only to prance around another man’s office while he gives her marching orders," Sharpe writes, claiming, "Women WANT to give up control of their life," and that they only vote, work, or otherwise make decisions because of "the pressure of modern society."
This wasn't a one-off, either. Gutfeld recently joined the chorus of right wing voices defending Russell Brand, after the British "comedian" was accused by multiple women of sexual violence and rape. Gutfeld applauded a teacher who got arrested for having sex with a 16-year-old student. And he claimed men only cry because of "substances in the water that reduce testosterone."
The jokey tone of some of this is there to insulate it from criticism, but Gutfeld isn't joking. The party of Donald "Grab 'Em By The Pussy" Trump shows no limits in normalizing extremely toxic masculinity and sexual violence. That much is evident in new court filings in the first big test case for the abortion "bounty hunter" law in Texas. The author of the law, former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell, has so far shown no shame that his client — who is suing his ex-wife's friends for helping her abort a pregnancy — displays a long history of abusive, controlling behavior. Mitchell shrugged off reports that his client, Marcus Silva, tried to prevent his wife from working and called her names like "slut" and "whore" in front of her coworkers.
So it's unlikely that Mitchell will mind a new filing providing evidence that Silva threatened to upload sexually explicit videos of his ex-wife, unless she returned home to clean and do laundry for him. Or that he used blackmail methods in an attempt to rape her, saying he would drop the lawsuit if she had sex with him. The document had a transcript of Silva, this latest "hero" of the anti-abortion movement, telling his ex, "You’re just gonna have your fcking life destroyed in every fcking way that you can imagine to where you want to blow your f*cking brains out."
It's not surprising that Mitchell would be fine with this treatment of women. As he argued to the Supreme Court in 2021, women have it coming by not "refraining from sexual intercourse." But now, of course, Mitchell is working for a man whose goal is to force his ex-wife to have sex with him.
One would think, after the political backlash to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, Republicans would not be so eager to advertise how the anti-choice movement is about controlling women and not "life." But, as David Kirkpatrick of the New Yorker writes, the head of Alliance Defending Freedom, the biggest conservative legal group in the country, was open about how the goal is to destroy access to contraception. "It may be that the day will come when people say the birth-control pill was a mistake," Alan Sears explained.
What's notable is this extremism isn't just relegated to the world of fundamentalist Christianity. The more secular and more proudly fascist right — which is increasingly cossetted and promoted by the tech billionaire world of Elon Musk and his buddies — has been aggressively promoting pseudo-scientific arguments in favor of extreme curtailing of sexual freedom.
The most prominent example is Costin Alamariu, a self-declared fascist who has become an "intellectual" darling on the right for putting a faux-intellectual gloss on some of the most evil impulses of the MAGA movement. He's been blogging for a long time under the name "Bronze Age Pervert," which makes him sound fun, but of course, he's anything but. His book, "Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy," has become an Amazon bestseller because he's promoted by the grossest people on the internet. He proposes strict control over human "breeding" on the facetious grounds that it's necessary for the betterment of humanity, which he mostly understands in extremely racist terms. In his newsletter, John Ganz quotes Alamariu's writing:
I make the case in this introduction that this same matter of selective breeding, whether sexual selection, or various societies' management of marriage and reproduction, constitutes the most important part of morality, legislation, or of the "lawgiver's art," and that a sharp awareness of this reality is what led, again, to the discovery of the standard of nature and the subsequent birth of philosophy.
As Graeme Wood at the Atlantic pointed out, on his blog, Alamariu dispenses with the faux-academic language for an earthier version of the same arguments. "He considers American cities a 'wasteland' run by Jews and Black people, though the words he uses to denote these groups are considerably less genteel than these," he writes. Christopher Rufo has publicly praised Alamariu.
The sexual weirdness of the MAGA movement is deeply intertwined with the racism and the violence. Alamariu's writings are just saying the quiet part out loud: Sexual control, especially of women, is largely fueled by notions about "breeding" future generations, especially to look a certain way that racists want them to. Normalizing violence against women is part of that scheme, since, as fascists long have understood, women often don't go along voluntarily.
Because this is so weird, it's tempting to ignore it as the chattering of a fringe group of men are still mad they didn't get laid in college. But that would be a mistake, and not just because some of those men have become wildly powerful:
As the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court shows, Republicans are never content to keep their massive sexual issues to themselves. They are determined to make everyone else suffer, not only by rolling back reproductive rights but by aggressively normalizing sexual and domestic violence. The throughline here is a belief that women aren't full human beings, but a sexual resource to be put under male control, by violence if necessary. It's a view they're getting increasingly less coy about publicly sharing.
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That's only because you listen to OP's nonsense. Meanwhile the trump supporters are in their own echo chambers and thing you're either a pedo or a pedo defender so you deserve to get punched too.
The right, especially Trump supporters are dangerous, not because of their "weird sexuality" or misogyny. But because they're trying to dismantle democracy. Free speech is an essential component of democracy and they'll go after it the second they get an ounce of power.
You talk about not wanting to allow hate speech, yet the speech you just read is making you want to punch people. That's what hate speech looks like.
Free speech is not unlimited, and never has been. When your speech infringes upon - or causes to be infringed - someone else's rights, your speech should be limited. Slander and libel are illegal. When your speech creates an unjustified panic, your speech should be limited. You can't shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater unless there is a fire. When your speech creates a legitimate threat to someone's life or limb, it should be limited. You can't call for the execution of your political enemies when your supporters have demonstrated that they are willing and able to commit violent crimes on your behalf ... unless you're Donald Trump, apparently.
Yup - and honestly, the people who blindly follow people like Trump or the GOP just “to own the libs” and those like Sanctus who say they’d “rather live in a society that punches people who say women are naturally subservient to men than one that does not,” are the same kind of person: the kind of people who want to control the speech of people who say things they don’t like.
Hate speech, from either side, should not be tolerated. The right tends to say a lot more batshit insane things that are downright vile, and I am deeply sadden that what they say is fucking okay and even cool with others, but that doesn’t give a free pass for people to go “well we should harm them or kill them or something”. Ideally, we would be holding people to a higher standard - especially those in public office - because saying stuff like “women are men’s property”, “maybe Hitler was right”, and “fuck black/hispanic/asian people” is actually hate speech, and that should be called out and have people held accountable for.
First of all, I'm not talking about what is. I'm talking about what should be.
But the way the law treats speech in the United States, I think is correct.
If you're trying to immorally cause direct harm with your speech (e.g. calling Fire in a crowded theater, or organizing an insurrection) then that should be illegal.
If you're only talking about the idea related to these, like how you think it should be legal to punch Nazis. Then that should be allowed by allow. But the people around you should call you out for being full of hate and spreading hate and that you're really not being the good person you think you are when you're doing this and you should stop.
Okay, let's go straight to the "Nazi-punching" situation then.
Nazis are dangerously wrong in their speech. Their speech does today present a legitimate threat of violence as a means to their ends, in a way that it hasn't in recent decades. Their speech does today legitimately threaten the foundations of our democracy. Therefore, the speech of Nazis is not protected.
We would ordinarily depend on the government to control and/or punish dangerous Nazi speech. However, between there being "Nazis" in government, who encourage that kind of speech, and the subtext of "What if the Nazis get worse?" - nobody in government is holding them accountable. That subtext tells you everything you should need to know about the dangerous nature of Nazis, and that their speech should be curbed.
As an example, any other defendant making the kinds of public statements that Trump is making would have been jailed pending trial, with nary a thought. Yet none of the judges presiding over his many criminal cases have lifted a finger to stop it. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who has previously sentenced Jan 6 participants to longer sentences that requested by the prosecution, and who chastised Trump to "not commit any crimes while he is released on bond pending trial," hasn't yet moved to put a stop to Trump's stochastic terrorism. She is afraid, for herself and her family, for potential random victims of violence, and for the nation.
When the government fails to defend the nation from its enemies, foreign and domestic, what do we do? Should we sit idly by and watch it all crumble? I say no.
Generically, it should remain illegal to punch people, and people-punchers should should be tried and sentenced appropriately. When that punching is done against a person who is creating a legitimate threat, is the punching justified? There's one way to find out. As such, I feel that "punching Nazis" falls into the area of civil disobedience. At the very least, vocally approving of "Nazi punching" is definitely civil disobedience.
Back to the previous example: If someone calling for the execution of their political enemies receives no punishment, then vocally approving of Nazi punching - which clearly does not rise to the same level of threat - must necessarily not receive punishment, either. The act of supporting the punching of Nazis serves to draw attention to the stochastic terrorism that currently exists, and acts as a demand that government do something about it.
Punch Nazis.
I dont see how I am listening. Trump is calling for outright violence, punch him. Tate brothers selling women hate books creating hordes of incels, punch them. RFJ Jr spitting anti-semetic world domination conspiracies? Punch him, too. Its not hard to identify these people, they wear it on their sleeves. Even the pedophiles, like Matt Gaetz. Saying people should get punched and suffer consequences for hate speech is not hate speech. Saying the Jews control the world and should all be killed is hate speech. Hate speech targets a demographic. People saying idiotic and hateful shit is not a demographic.
You don't think that the misogyny talked about in the post is dangerous? Asking for clarification here, but are you openly saying a political ideology promoting misogyny isn't dangerous?
Ideas are not dangerous; censorship is.
Have to be intolerant of intolerance or you lose freedom and free speech. We as a society have to decide that intolerant speech that tries to remove rights from certain demographics is in fact harmful and evil and intolerable.
We're not talking about academic debates here or hypothetical arguments. Folks are actively working to reduce the rights of others, and in some places they're winning. Advocating to reduce rights of others is not okay.
Normally I would agree censorship is not the answer. However without limits, we will see hate gain ground. Part of being a society is setting limits of acceptable behavior, we can't shit in the aisle at the grocery store, we can't propagate hate speech, both of these rules (should) exist to protect ourselves as a group. Pretty simple stuff.
Talking about reducing rights isn't what reduces them. Those in power dictate what our rights are, and the more power we give them the more they will take them away. People with money limit our rights; people with power limit our rights, but people with nothing but speech simply cannot. Don't give those in power the power to dictate what we're allowed to say simply because an extreme minority of people have opinions you don't like. One day you'll find yourself being the one that has an opinion they don't like, and by then you won't be able to defend yourself against it, because no one will be able to hear you.
How do you think those people got power and how do you think those rich people keep their money? It's not just the illuminati in the background. They use free speech to convince people that their problems are caused by someone different, not the guy on the microphone robbing them blind.
I don't think it's a controversial statement to say fuck Nazis, we literally fought an entire war to make that statement. They don't get to have a podium anymore, because their ideas are evil and harmful to others
As someone who has faced years of virulent antisemitism, some of which has led to violence when I didn't respond... ideas are fucking dangerous.
Ideas certainly can be dangerous. There are plenty of people in America today with the idea that I, as a Jew, am somehow evil and behind everything they label as bad in society.
Ideas like that lead to action to "fix the situation." This could be everything from relegating me to a second class citizen for the "crime of being Jewish" to pushing for a second Holocaust. Without the dangerous idea, the dangerous actions wouldn't occur.
I will agree that we need to be careful when we censor dangerous ideas. If we do it in a sloppy fashion, the right could gain power and use the same mechanism to ban ideas that they think are "dangerous." Things like LGBTQ people deserve to exist, POC deserve to be treated the same as white people, women deserve to be treated as equals to men. You know, really dangerous ideas to right wing straight white Christian men.
I remember when I was 12.