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.

  • BeMoreCareful@lemdro.id
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think one of the things I struggle with is: how much should I be concerned about this?

    Like, it’s wildly concerning, but aren’t these just the same people that always thought this way saying the quiet part out loud?

    I kind of personally feel that it’s the death throws of the more gentrified version of this brand of politics. The women are more family focused, men are goal oriented demographics reflect reality while ignoring systemic issues brand. It’s kindly thought of as old fashioned, but increasingly described as ignorant or unsophisticated.

    It feels more like the violent lashing out of a cornered animal that knows it is about to be lunch.

    The money behind it is worrying, but it feels like these people are kicking and screaming because they’re being dragged forward.

    Idk

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      1 year ago

      There’s danger in the fact that they’re comfortable saying it out loud. It means they don’t fear the consequences of saying this, and thus they’re much closer to not fearing the consequences of doing it

    • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      they’re lashing out, hoping the liberals amongst us go to their defense. They want a fascist dictatorship, it’s spelled out in the 2025 plan. You should be concerned. But we aren’t done fighting yet. Join protests, punch fascists, vote, and volunteer at election sites to fight the wave of fascism heading towards our country.

    • LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 year ago

      I would agree if they hadn’t controlled the country for 4 years and hadn’t made huge strides like overturning roe v wade. The fact that you see them as fringe kind of works in their favor.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      The regressive right has been pushing back against progress, playing the long game, since the civil rights era. Fifty years or more.

      It seems to me their power has only grown since then. They’ve stacked courts, gerrymandered the shit out of many places, and managed to get Bush and Trump elected.

      If regressive politics is in its death throes, how did Republicans gain control of the Senate? How is it that so many anti LGBTQ laws have been passed in* so many states? How is it so many boards of education have been taken over by the right?

      If the right is almost done how did they have the power to overturn Roe v Wade? How did we end up with the Shelby County v Holder decision?

      Conservative* regressivism and the bigotry that undergirds it is a fact of human nature. Don’t be naive and think we will be done with it so easily.

      And pay attention to who is exercising power to enact their visions. That should disabuse you of any false hope that the fight against regressivism is over.

    • cmbabul@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      1 year ago

      So you ain’t wrong that they are lashing out because they see the march of social progress on the wall and see that as a threat. But they are very much still dangerous maybe more than ever. They know that if they don’t take extreme measures to drag us backward they will die out and “lose”, which is why what they hope to achieve is a dictatorship where they can force the country to fit their desired reality. I am very much afraid and I live in a very solidly blue state

    • spaceghoti@lemmy.oneOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      The problem is that no one is saying they can’t continue to be family-focused or goal oriented, old-fashioned, or ignorant and unsophisticated. They can choose those things for themselves and no one is going to try to stop them. The problem is that they insist that everyone else conform to their values and are trying to drag the rest of us back to the Dark Ages with them. And they’ve made a good start with the rights they’ve already rolled back.

      So yeah, I’d say there’s good justification to be concerned. If they were only dangerous to themselves I wouldn’t be too worried, but they’re a danger to everyone.

    • Meowoem@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I do agree tbh, people find a weird bit of right wing craziness poking through the wall and panic but the reality is you can find popular republican’s with crazy hateful ideas all through time and in every direction.