Inside the internet cesspool that made MAGA super weird

You ever wonder why MAGA is so weird?

As in, weird. 

Here is John McEntee, director of White House personnel during Donald Trump’s presidency, openly arguing that only men should have the right to vote. 

Or how about Elon Musk’s super PAC calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “C-Word”? 

Here is the deputy communications director for Mark Robinson, a reportedly self-proclaimed “Black Nazi” and the Republican nominee for governor of North Carolina, calling Robinson’s Democratic opponent “a beta male.” 

Also consider that far-right comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s set at Trump’s Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden was reviewed by campaign staff before loading it onto the teleprompter, The Bulwark confirmed. In the original draft of the speech, Hinchcliffe reportedly planned to call Harris a “cunt,” but the campaign got him to remove it. The outlet’s sources say Hinchcliffe’s offensive lines were ad-libbed, but those sources are “four top campaign sources,” so who knows if they’re trying to spin that after the rally’s massive fallout.

(Side note: Hinchcliffe’s defenders call his comedy “roast comedy.” But weirdly, no white people were roasted, no Christians or farmers or anyone that might be considered part of Trump’s core base. Just people of color and women. Strange how that worked out.)

But also worth noting is that in another part of Hinchcliffe’s offensive set, he said, “And these Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside, just like they did to our country.” 

The old, prudish Republican Party wouldn’t be making jokes about ejaculation in front of tens of thousands as a warmup to their presidential nominee. 

Earlier this month, there was a bizarre Fox News segment in which host Jesse Watters told Trump’s favorite fascist, Stephen Miller, that he was “some sort of a sexual matador.” Primed for the segment, Miller gave men the worst possible advice: “Show that you are not a beta. Be a proud and loud Trump supporter, and your dating life will be fantastic.”

The opposite is true, though. Trump-supporting men face a dating wasteland. Fifty-five percent of young women, including 76% of young women with a college education, said they’d be less likely to date someone who supported Trump, according to a large-scale poll by the Survey Center on American Life. (I am so writing an entire story on this survey in the future.)

And of course, the word “cuck” is uttered a thousand times a day by MAGA Republicans, referencing a sexual kink in which you watch your partner have sex with someone else, often a stranger. I don’t kink-shame people—what consenting adults do between themselves is between them—but to conservatives, “cuck” is meant as an emasculating term. To MAGA, everyone they don’t like is a cuck. It started with the idea that liberal men were weak, so unable to tame their wives from being taken by other men. But it expanded to attacks on Republicans for doing things MAGA didn’t like, and even tankie leftists like Glenn Greenwald have adopted it. 

So, uh, what the heck is going on here? 

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo notes that “among GOP operatives and staffers under 30 or so the majority, maybe the great majority had their political awakenings on sites like 4chan, 8chan, various far-right, incel and incel adjacent online communities. It crops up in various ways if you know where to look. It's why [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis had those weird frankly homoerotic campaign vids during the primaries.” 

Marshall adds that these young men are “awash in this world of casual racism, ironic provocation, not just misogyny but a weird emotionally-stunted kind of misogyny that to normal people isn't just often either offensive or weird but even kind of inexplicable.” 

There is a direct line from the Gamergate harassment campaign to MAGA. Once you know what to look for, you’ll find it pop up over and over again. 

Democrats did a good job with “weird” earlier this year because, well, Republicans were acting weird. Why they dropped it, who knows. Maybe it was oversaturated and no longer landing, but it needs to be part of our political lexicon as we do battle with these emerging young, male fascists. 

The goal here isn’t to bring these weirdos back from whatever cesspool they’ve fallen into, it’s to do our best to make sure other young men don’t also fall into that trap.  

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