MAGAs Demand Fascism Because No One Will Have Sex With Them (Seriously)

Eric Kaufmann of the National Review has penned perhaps the most ludicrous article of all time.

Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

by Justin Rosario

Once upon a time, Republicans and Democrats dated. Hell, they even married and had kids! But that was back before Fox News and Newt Gingrich told Republicans that Democrats were quite literally evil. It’s hard to hop in the sack with someone who believes that anyone with a different opinion is a God-hating, baby-killing traitor who wants to destroy America. Can you imagine the pillow talk?

But then Trump waddled into town and it wasn’t enough to just believe Democrats hated America. Now, in order to be a good Republican, you had to believe, and constantly say out loud, that anyone who did not worship at the altar of Trump was a pedophile who drained the blood of children.

The result of this is that Trump supporters have found themselves unable to have sex with, well, anyone who isn’t a Trump supporter. No one wants to date them and as far as Eric Kaufmann of the National Review is concerned, this is the worst infringement on civil rights since Jim Crow.

I am not kidding.

Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen. Nobody Knows But Donald...

To hear Kaufmann tell it, MAGAs are oppressed by “progressive authoritarianism” because out of 1,500 female Ivy League students, only 6% who were not already Trump supporters would date one. Clearly, this means America is headed towards tyranny:

This [the study] reveals the predilection among many young elite Americans for progressive authoritarianism, a belief system that justifies infringing rights to equal treatment or free speech in the name of the emotional “safety” of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexuality groups. In this left-modernist worldview, conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants. As Millennials take power, this generational earthquake is set to shake the foundations of the cultural elite to its core, leading to pervasive discrimination against, and censorship of, conservative views.

To be clear, this unfuckability is not a problem relegated to those evil Ivy League women. The majority of people do not want to canoodle Trump supporters. Only 23% of Ivy League men would date a Trump supporter but it’s not like the numbers vastly improve when you move into the non-elite college world. According to the study Kaufmann cites, 87% of college women who are not already Trump supporters would touch one with a 10-foot pole. Only 58% of non-Trump Republican women would hook up with a MAGA. Yes, you read that correctly. Almost half of Republican women who are not part of the Trump cult are steering clear of MAGAland.

A more self aware person might pause and look at why members of their own party find Trump supporters repulsive. But...no. Instead, we are to believe this is the vanguard of an assault on the freedom and liberty of conservatives. How? Because if progressives won’t date Trump supporters, then Trump supporters will be frozen out of positions of power:

The problem of “affective polarization” has been well documented, in which people react negatively to those of the opposing political tribe, and this animosity spills over from politics into everyday social relationships. But what if polarization has an asymmetric effect on power in society? What if the elite is becoming a politically endogamous tribe that dominates positions of power in society, reserving them for those with the correct political pedigree?

This is, quite literally, what the right has been trying to accomplish for decades. The ‘dominionist’ movement that has seen renewed growth since Trump’s rise to power is all about taking control of every aspect of society. Run by rabidly right-wing partisans, dominionism is exactly the kind of “asymmetric effect on power in society”  Kaufmann is whining about. The Washington Post reports:

They also began advancing a set of beliefs called dominionism, which holds that God commands Christians to assert authority over the “seven mountains” of life — family, religion, education, economy, arts, media and government — after which time Jesus Christ will return and God will reign for eternity.

None of which is new, exactly. Strains of this thinking formed the basis of the Christian right in the 1970s and have fueled the GOP for decades.

Curiously, though, while Kaufmann is freaking out over the possibility of conservatism being organically frozen out of power, he’s not at all concerned about a powerful and growing cult movement to deliberately freeze out not just the left but every voice on the right except for a chosen few. Weird. You’d think Kaufmann would be alarmed by this. I know I am.

This is the reason the right created an entire alternate universe of schools and media and churches. It’s hard to build a nationwide cult if they’re exposed to ideas outside of a propaganda bubble. But while this bubble has a stranglehold on our political world, it has failed miserably to grow deep roots in the wider culture and the roots it does have in education are withering. Hence, Kaufmann’s terror that MAGAs will be shunned.

He should be afraid. Assuming America survives our latest brush with fascism, everyone that proudly wore their red hat will be branded for life; forever relegated to the margins of society.

The Scarlet T Is Already Here

Kaufmann, as all right-wing “intellectuals” do, pulls a rhetorical sleight of hand when framing his case. He declares that the reason Trump supporters are undatable is “conservatives’ resistance to racial, gender, and sexual progressivism mark them as moral deviants.” But that’s not true at all. Conservatives have been resistant to racial, gender, and sexual progress longer than I’ve been alive and, for the most part, it didn’t stop them from getting laid much less see them exiled from polite society.

MAGAs are different. There’s a pretty specific reason no one wants to swipe right for a MAGA. Why no one wants to hire them. Why they rightly fear spending the rest of their lives as pariahs. They are monsters. Worse, they revel in being monsters. Their entire identity is based on cruelty and hate.

A lot of people would like to forget the trauma of the past four years but it’s hard to erase the memory of Trump’s rallies where his mob capered and jeered at children being torn from their mothers and tortured. Where they celebrated death and suffering because Trump told them to. Where white nationalism and fascism were held up as ideals to strive for.

No one can forget the terrorist attack of January 6 during which a frenzied mob of violent savages tried to install a fascist regime by overthrowing America. As I type this, MAGAs are, six months later, both defending the attack as “patriotic” and “heroic”. And of course, Republicans are, right now, openly setting the stage to overturn the next election while MAGAland continues to threaten violence and call us child-raping cannibals. 

But, you know, put all that aside and Trump supporters are really just like you and me so why not give them a chance, ladies?! It would be laughable if they weren’t serious about it. Sure, they openly embrace a political movement that ends with the mass murder of their enemies and the violent subjugation of women, but if you hold that against them, you’re an intolerant authoritarian and something has to be done to protect MAGAs from all this tyranny!

Protecting Fascists With...Fascism

The solution Kaufmann proposes to the MAGA dating problem goes right ahead and proves why nobody wants to have anything to do with them in the first place:

If public institutions such as universities, or de facto common carriers such as Google and Facebook, are acting illiberally by politically discriminating in how they apply community rules, government must step in to protect the liberty of the individuals within them. When such institutions are openly politicized and captured, democratically elected governments should be able to regulate their operations to ensure that they are not violating individuals’ rights to equal treatment or freedom of expression within the law that common carriers must obey. It’s worth adding that political discrimination, by forcing people to self-censor, restricts their freedom of expression.

Kaufmann is trying very hard to make an intellectual argument here but what he’s advocating is total control of society in order to benefit an ideology steeped in hate that has been rejected by the overwhelming majority of said society. That’s known as fascism. 

According to Kaufmann, twitter should not be allowed to get rid of an employee if they publicly brag about how much they hate Black people. Facebook cannot terminate Neo-Nazis. Google must be forced to employ Men’s Rights Activists. Because firing them is an assault on their civil rights. If you wear a MAGA hat and support insurrection, McDonald’s can’t fire you because something something “freedom”. But on the other hand, schools, universities, and private companies should not be allowed to discuss things that make Republicans uncomfortable. No supporting BLM. No Pride Month. And for the love of all that’s holy, nothing about slavery, women’s reproductive rights, or diversity! Free speech for me, not for thee.

In typical Orwellian fashion, Kaufmann argues that the government would dictate his warped vision of free speech in the name of...freedom.

Government should take the lead in establishing these principles. Though 

opponents will decry the principles as authoritarian, they are in fact liberal. Unlike the acts of authoritarian leaders such as Erdogan and Putin, who violate individual rights in an attempt to control the media or courts, these interventions seek to expand individual rights by applying existing laws protecting expressive and academic freedom against public institutions that prioritize progressive aims over individual rights and equal treatment. This method not only protects dissenters but removes chilling effects that lead them to self-censor.

Put aside the risible claim that this is liberal. Kaufmann is not arguing in good faith here. The problem isn’t that progressives suddenly became authoritarian tyrants. The problem is that Republicans became so extreme, so vile and hostile that their “political views” are simply barely disguised hate speech. Republicans routinely use the language of genocide and openly advocate for domestic terrorism. When polled, a full half of Republicans spit on the very idea of democracy.

When a country has healthy political parties, it can tolerate a fringe that indulges in hate. No one goes out of their way to shun Nazis but they are relegated to the shadows because their ideology is toxic to normal people. But Republicans allowed the fringe to become their mainstream. Now they’re surprised to discover that their ideology is still toxic to normal people, cutting them off from society at large? Did they honestly think embracing mass murder would be an aphrodisiac? “Hey there stud! Are you into wiping out the Jews and immigrants, too? That really turns me on!” said no actual person ever. Except maybe Laura Ingraham. 

If you’ve been paying the slightest bit of attention to the right, none of this should surprise you in the least. Outlets like the National Review exist to give a veneer of intellectuality to the worst impulses of the right. Nothing is ever their fault, progressives are always to blame, and why, oh why is the poor White conservative man always the victim? Projection and hypocrisy are all they have left. They are not the mob of authoritarian monsters bent on crushing free speech, you are and the only way to save America is to crush free speech and force a mob of authoritarian monsters on the rest of us! 

After all, War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength in MAGAland.

Glenn Greenwald Now Just Making Sh*t Up Instead Of Doing Journalism

Greenwald has now taken to smearing media organizations like NPR for entirely fictional crimes.

Image credit: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

by Ben Cohen

Last week, I published a lengthy essay on Matt Taibbi’s depressing demise as a credible journalist. Taibbi’s descent follows an almost identical path to Glenn Greenwald, the internet’s premier contrarian who used to do worthwhile journalism then decided it was more fun to troll liberals instead.

While Taibbi engages in highly suspect journalism, Greenwald has take his trolling to new levels and now just resorts to making things up.

In his never ending quest to convince his followers that liberals are the greatest threat to democracy in America, Greenwald has now taken to smearing media organizations like NPR for entirely fictional crimes.

This week, Greenwald claimed NPR was trying to censor the internet by destroying Ben Shapiro’s website, the Daily Wire. The article, titled “Outrage As A Business Model: How Ben Shapiro Is Using Facebook To Build An Empire” is a fact based report detailing the site’s use of outrage to turn “anger into an art form and recycled content into a business model.” Not so according to Glenn Greenwald:

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald

It's not an exaggeration to say that a top priority of both the Dem Party and the liberal sector of the corporate media (excuse the redundancy) is to gain greater power to censor the internet. Many motives, but a major one is to prevent competition and create a captive audience.

Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️‍🌈 @brad_polumbo

This NPR article is hilarious, if sinister. It basically boils down to establishment left-wing media outlets being salty that their content performs worse in the digital marketplace and thus wanting Big Tech to shut down @benshapiro for... beating them? https://t.co/2pVvArx9uJ

All you need to do is read the NPR piece to see how insane Greenwald’s claim is. To start with, NPR is publicly funded, so isn’t part of “the corporate media”. Furthermore, he provides no evidence whatsoever of any attempt by NPR to “censor the internet” and “prevent competition” - just a random tweet by a someone making a completely unfounded claim. Nowhere in the NPR article is there any suggestion that “Big Tech” shut down Ben Shapiro’s site. It simply shows — with ample evidence — that the Daily Wire peddles outrage for clicks, recycles and repackages reporting from other sites, engages in context free journalism with a heavy conservative bias, and has incredibly successfully gamed Facebook’s algorithm:

Daily Wire articles with headlines such as "BOOK REVIEW: Proof That Wokeness Is Projection By Nervous, Racist White Women Who Can't Talk To Minorities Without Elaborate Codes" regularly garner tens of thousands of shares for the site, and Shapiro is turning that Facebook reach into a rapidly expanding, cost-efficient media empire — one that experts worry may be furthering polarization in the United States.

None of this is remotely controversial, and yet Greenwald wants his followers to believe that fact based reporting on conservative disinformation is a grave threat to freedom of speech and an example of liberals trying to shut down conservatives.

Greenwald’s argument appears to be based on the Daily Wire’s hilariously idiotic response to NPR’s reporting. In a piece no serious news organization would ever greenlight, John Bickley claims Joe Biden is directing NPR to take out his enemies:

We’re reporting facts. We’re stating openly that we’re conservative. And this means, according to NPR, we are promoting misinformation.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration is openly pushing for Facebook to crack down on “misinformation.” “They’re killing people,” the president declares, and his Press Secretary confirms his White House is keeping a list of publications it disagrees with and which it believes Facebook should censor.

And as with Henry II asking, “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest,” Biden’s state-funded knights at NPR spring into action to assassinate his enemies.

At least they’re getting paid off for their efforts. Judd Legum at Popular Information, Kevin Roose and Kara Swisher at the New York Times, and the rest of the establishment media have made themselves puppets of the president for free.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this nonsense. Firstly, NPR is not “state funded”….

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