Making Racism and Misogyny Great Again: The Emptiness and Misplaced Meaning of Angry Young White Men

History shows us that every demagogical dictator requires an equal and opposite enemy, the Evil Other whose mere existence threatens the demagogue’s people. The leader then calls for the good people to annihilate the Evil Other, and all traces of their alleged influence. In short, we are witnessing the rise of American fascism. What is fascism? In my view, it refers to a system of government premised on a mythical superiority of race or culture, and at the same time, the oppression and elimination of a mythical inferior enemy. It promises gratification (and maybe prosperity) through hate and violence. Empirical evidence overwhelmingly contradicts the popular belief and media accounts that Trumpism, the MAGA movement, and broader American white supremacy consist of “left-behind” working class people. That belief is factually false, (Manning and Stefanovic 2025, 2024; Reyna et al 2022). Neither are they pursuing a rational response to adverse social change, a belief Arlie Hochschild popularized in academia in two (2024, 2016) highly misleading books. There is no evidence that economic decline or rational assessment drive fascist white men. In economically depressed areas of the Midwest, for example, lower income and impoverished people are most likely not to vote at all, such that middle and higher income people voted for Trump and other Republicans, not the working class (DiMaggio 2022: 201-204). Neither are they rural. Racism, not location, predicts support for Trump and punitive measures against immigrants (Dawkins et al 2024).

They are in fact something very different, a collection of angry and overwhelmingly white men who long for violence against members of the alleged inferior enemy, or really, any perceived outgroup who dares to improve any part of their socio-economic status, or even merely to exist. Why are they angry? Their feelings of aggrieved entitlement define their sense of self (Reiter 2025; Schrock et al 2022). Social change activates longstanding racism and misogyny that overrides economic and other rational interests, such as upward mobility and other livelihood issues. Approximately 66% of US whites somewhat or strongly support the “Great Replacement” fear, that non-whites are fundamentally transforming American culture into something inferior. DiMaggio et al (2024) conclude that racial invasion fears have become mainstream. Giroux and DiMaggio (2024) further argue against the economic left-behind argument that both left and right politicians embrace, to show that MAGA and fascist support in general draws from a politics of hate—what I summarize as white masculine heteronormative ethnonationalism, or American fascism for short.

Aggrieved whites seem to be perpetually aggrieved across time. One especially popular narrative today is that the Democrats have lost the working class, because they have become overly concerned with minority rights, and no longer speak to the economic interests of wage earners. In fact, the working class never consistently supported the Democrats. Since the 1940s, the working class has voted for the most culturally conservative candidates, regardless of party (Stonecash 2025). Angry white men today are not insane, but rather, willfully ignorant. They are not logically considering their economic interests within a perceived unfavorable sociocultural climate, as Hochschild imagines. Their desire for angry personal emotional gratification does not require rational thought or enlightenment, only racial and/or gender hatred.

In terms of perceived status privilege, young and older white men hardly differ, and this is important, because the sense of white male privilege is foundational in US culture and transgenerational. Angry white men of today have inherited a sense of decline that goes back to the end of the Civil War. Across various issues that involve perceptions of race and gender, roughly half of white voters consistently believe that Black people get special treatment, don’t try hard enough, and that white people, not people of color, face the most discrimination (ANES Guide 2025). The entire Trump political campaign in 2024 and his current ongoing administration openly expresses anti-Black racism and misogyny (Rhym and Garbes 2025), and repeated expression bumps his approval upwards among his devoted followers (Gallagher 2025; Silver and McKown-Dawson 2025). This strategy holds support from true believers, about 42% of the US electorate, but also caps his ceiling. To win in 2024, Trump needed a new constituency, and he found it in angry young men—the current generation of aggrieved white males.

Fascism, GenZ Style

Political leaders like Donald Trump, online influencers like Laura Loomer, and savvy agitators like Charlie Kirk voice aggrieved emotions and promise to restore former racial and gender privileges. Importantly, Charlie Kirk conducted his mass rallies on college campuses, his audience overwhelmingly white college men, not working class. What are upward bound white college males angry about? The fact that success typically requires work, and young white males shouldn’t need to work hard to stay ahead of perceived cultural subordinates, women, people of color, and gender nonconformists (Parker and Lavine 2025). As one of the most successful fascist agitators, Charlie Kirk (murdered in 2025 at age 31) embodied this hatred and lust for vengeance, but packaged it as compassion, using a quiet conversational style to openly advocate racism, misogyny, and LGBTQ-phobia. He routinely denigrated successful Black people as unqualified, claimed that Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, as both Black and a woman, lacked the brain power to serve, ridiculed Martin Luther King as a huge mistake, lied about crime statistics, and attacked anyone who disagreed with him as un-American and un-Christian (Frank and Walker 2025). Through his Turning Point USA organization and rallies on college campuses, Kirk organized aggrieved young and overwhelmingly white men and turned them into a political movement.

Although their anger goes back generations before Donald Trump first ran for president, he most successfully gave voice to their fear and hatred and opened the door for Kirk and others to a national audience. Trump’s support stands on a cult of personality, anti-science and anti-intellectualism, and conspiracy fantasies (DiMaggio 2022: 211-214). Sarah MacMillen and I (2023) also make this argument, that fascism places “fellowship before facts” (p. 165) and offers belonging in an ersatz religious community that stands outside of and in opposition to the mainstream. It appeals especially to young men, who feel alone as young adults yet who still depend on parents or face economic precarity who also expect white male supremacy. Conspiracies in fascism function as a source of so-called alternate facts independent of science, and derived instead from allegedly immutable and eternal truths about race, gender, and whatever other hierarchy makes people feel elite and powerful. Fascists embrace their own unique worldview, and their own invented facts to legitimate it. This creates a powerful sense of community, based on a transcendent sense of righteousness. This sense of transcendence is crucial, because it inspires much greater commitment to the cult of personality (the leader), and overrides rational policy or factual discovery. For example, Charlie Kirk called young women to give up on their careers and become mothers and homemakers, but never offered any policy ideas to make unpaid domestic labor viable. In short, fascism asks people: who are you going to believe? Geeky know-it-all intellectuals, or god’s chosen leader? Which one makes you feel important and powerful? Which one offers you enemies, real or imagined, to stomp on in righteous self-gratifying fury?

Evil Others

The more outrageous the Evil Other appears, the more credible it seems. American fascists believe that illegal immigrants of color and trans-people threaten the US from within, an enemy in our midst that his infiltrated the real America and will kill white people and men who dare to uphold aggressive masculinity—the real men. Supposedly, immigrants are raping and killing freely, and trans-groomers are sexually assaulting innocent youth and turning them into transgender miscreants who will in turn rape and forcibly transition more youth to the trans-agenda. What is the alleged trans-agenda? To emasculate men, and mutilate everyone’s genitalia so there are no more men or women, only mutilated monsters that want to eat human flesh to live forever. After all, their leader, Hillary Clinton is a 600 year old witch, a longevity she supposedly achieved by terrorizing babies, extracting adrenochrome from their brainstem, and then eating their raw flesh. Despite a complete lack of evidence about an alleged trans-agenda and cannibalism, white supremacists and other supporters believe these things and many more conspiracy fantasies (Lundskow and MacMillen 2023). In their view, only Donald Trump, certain online influencers such as Laura Loomer, and anti-science cranks like RFK Jr speak the truth. Everything else is a deep state lie.

Why does the alleged deep state and so-called woke left create such vast conspiracies? Because they are evil—the eternal enemy of whiteness and real masculinity. In this view, good people cannot explain evil, only call it out and destroy it. Among the most ardent white supremacists, only a civil war can return America to its former purity and greatness (Wintemute 2024), just as Pape and Ruby (2021) found among the January 6 insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the US government. They wanted violence, because they believed it was the only way to restore a true America. Although the details of the deep state and wokeness conspiracies differ from one white supremacist supporter to another, the call for violence remains consistent.

As the model agitator, Trump speaks such a wide range of nonsense and lies that each individual can hear what they want, and ignore the rest. However, the anti-trans and anti-immigrant sentiments remain consistent, because the core supporters—white males—feel like these people directly challenge their white and masculine privilege. The anti-trans beliefs attract entitled young males in general, and the anti-immigrant beliefs attract white males in particular. The most strongly fascist young white men thus see themselves as double victims, and incels occupy the pinnacle of racism and misogyny (Pettersson et al 2025). The claim that trans-people want to sexually mutilate everyone is so overtly ridiculous that it doesn’t deserve a factual correction. Young men may feel disempowered, but trans-people have nothing to do with it. On the surface, the anti-immigrant belief seems at least possible. Are legal and illegal immigrants of color in fact bringing crime and violence?

The answer is no. Texas is the only state that requires law enforcement to determine the citizenship of every person arrested. Data analysis from Texas shows that immigrants commit all types of crimes at a rate 45% lower than native-born American citizens (Light, He, and Roby 2020; Nowrasteh 2024). Ye the belief persists. Immigrants of color, especially Mexican and other Hispanic people, have supposedly caused a massive spike in violent crime, such that US cities have become war ravaged wastelands. In fact, urban violent crime has been falling steadily since the peaks of the late 1980s and early 1990s. They spiked somewhat during the Covid period in 2020 and early 2021, but have since fallen to the lowest level in all majors cities since about 1964. American cities are more prosperous and safer than ever before in their history. Yet, people who don’t live in urban areas still believe that cites are warzones with roving rape and murder gangs, a post-apocalyptic nightmare conjured from something like the Matrix movies and the Fallout video games. The source of dissatisfaction cannot be from actual immigrant crime (or a sinister trans agenda) that doesn’t exist.

Conspiracy fantasists don’t care whether post-apocalypse cities are real or not. What matters is that the great leader in the form of President Trump (or other favorite influencer) has declared them as such. Visions of the apocalypse excite their imaginations, and gratify their craving for violence as a replacement for happiness in life. In other words, followers see Trump and fascism as incarnation of the divine, a unique American divinity and Christian redeemer, who will stomp out a fictitious Evil Other. The strongest followers believe in evil entities as supernatural facts (Nie 2024), which in their minds Trump and others correctly identify in real-life—multiculturalism, feminism, LGBTQIA, and immigrants. The enemy is not so much the people, but what they embody—inclusion, compassion, and mutual respect—all of which fascists experience as weakness, and therefore, as an attack. Their hatred of self-transcendent emotions, especially compassion and gratitude, allows them to direct their hatred at anyone they don’t like. Trans people have no direct relationship to immigrants of color, but both embody marginalized people attempting to improve their position in life—both materially and in terms of status and political influence. Who will it be tomorrow? Jews are the longstanding Other, but Muslims also play their role today. Donald Trump personally fears strong women, and strong men readily intimidate him. He attacks men who rely on competence and experience, and bows to dictators and kings. The effect for fascist believers is that everyone is becoming an enemy, except for white heteronormative males who submit to Trump as the ultimate leader and his endless stream of delusions and lies.

In the fascist view then, real Americans must rise to the moment and stomp out those who can never be white, male, or normative. At the same time, top public figures in politics and business increasingly compete to demonstrate the most obsequious submission as they praise Trump for his alleged eternal brilliance and glory. Trumpism even rejects education and science, the basic parameters of logic and reason, which makes rational thought and objective consideration of qualifications and accomplishment impossible. In this kind of sociopolitical environment, the more that marginalized people improve their lives—and society—through work and education, as they organize in the cultural sphere and in the socially salient institutions of the economy and government, the more fascists hate them. For aggrieved whites and males, people of the Other are not joining the system or building a more egalitarian America; they are invading and destroying God’s order.

American Fascism

In reality, fascists today do not follow heartfelt religious principles, or likely any principles at all. Their interests center only on themselves, their own gratification, and they have minimal genuine thoughts or feelings for anyone else. When The Authoritarian Personality appeared in 1950, Theodor Adorno and colleagues found strong statistical and qualitative relationships between authoritarianism and conservative politics. Authoritarians (a desire to dominate anyone perceives as inferior, and submit to anyone perceived as superior) gravitated to the established conservative politics because it represented conventional attitudes and lifestyles—the normality of familiar and mainstream (white male) American life. Conservative (generally Republican) politics represented white patriarchal heteronormative males and racist attitudes as normal and natural. Hegemonic at the time, authoritarians identified with it precisely because white heteronormative ethnonationalism was hegemonic. Enforced through institutions, including education and government, it dominated the public sphere that subordinated women and ethnic minorities as trespassers to tolerate to the extent they served white male interests as support staff and laborers. In mid-Twentieth Century America and into the 21^st, authoritarians were typically conventional, submissive, and aggressive.

By the 1990s, Bob Altemeyer had advanced research on authoritarianism, and identified “Wild Card Authoritarianism.” People with these traits have no consistent political views or loyalties. They do not respect the law or legal authorities. Altemeyer (1998) found that wild cards are highly prejudiced and quite hostile in general. Because they have no commitments beyond their own satisfaction, they appear on both the left and right extremes in the data (p. 71-72). These are the American fascists today. Importantly, they seek a strong leader who promises violence against so-called transgressors who the fascist regards as inferior and unworthy of life. They long for a leader who will give them free reign to join the violent persecution, and they don’t much care who they stomp, so long as they get to freely stomp someone. With only superficial commitment to rightist or leftist ideology, they latch on to any belief system that justifies violence without personal accountability, or to no beliefs at all.

Formerly centered on anti-Blackness and other racism, they have added transgender people to the list more recently. Fascists hate DEI because it promotes equality. Expanding on previous research, David Smith (2024) notes that “…Wild Card attitudes have become increasingly central in circles that once called themselves conservative (p. 820). As Smith then elaborates, Trump leads a movement of self-perceived great-little people, those who want to flaunt their ignorance, bigotry, and selfishness just like Trump himself. Their average social position makes them “little” in this sense, while their gender and race (masculine and white) render them “great.” Instead of being a disqualification, they perceive Trump’s self-aggrandizement as authenticity, because for a wild card authoritarian, there is no such thing as integrity and virtue. They once congregated around conservative politics, but only because they spoke to aggression against Chicanos in the 1950s, civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and hippies in the 1960s, feminist activists in the 1970s, and all of them together from the 1980s to the present. Therefore, I suggest that wild card authoritarianism, as a type of social character, underlies Trumpism specifically, and the Republican party’s shift to fascism in general.

For a wild card authoritarian, there is only self-interest and a lust for violence. Anyone who professes anything else is dishonest. For a fascist, the world is nothing but a brutal struggle for dominance, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a fool or a liar. Compassion is bait for suckers, and it will only hurt you. Therefore, the wild card only trusts those who openly and shamelessly pursue their own selfishness, especially those who acquire a lot of money and fame in the process, by any means that succeed. Cheating on taxes, stiffing contractors, lying to investigators, as well as sexual aggression, crude insults, mass immigrant arrests, whatever it takes to aggrandize oneself and hurt the inferior Others.

Consequently, authoritarianism today has evolved into a peer reference identity separated from political parties or other organized groups. The most recent research today shows that only one attribute from previous studies remains, aggressiveness, and this appeals most strongly to men who feel declining masculine or racial privilege (Justice 2025; Smith 2024; Reiter 2025). The promise of violence directed against racial and gender outgroups most strongly explains Trump’s appeal (Dusso and Demirel-Pegg 2025). Fascist men especially fear change that might challenge their relatively rigid, hierarchical, essentialist identities which have traditionally granted them a certain degree of power, privilege, and advantage over racial, ethnic, gender, or other marginalized groups. Gender privilege explains why some Hispanic men voted for Trump (Geiger and Reny 2024), but only those with a strong religious identity as well as patriarchal attitudes (Martinez and Marti 2024). Likewise, non-college white women (but not college-educated or women of color) see their racial privilege declining and they similarly supported Trump’s promise to punish non-whites (Versteegen 2025). Therefore, Trump’s support primarily exists based on character, because his support stands on personal allegiance, not primarily for any particular policy position (Goldsmith and Moen 2025). The wild ride of rhetoric and emotions provides the thrill of belonging, not the substantive content. Emotional gratification, not reality, motivates their commitment.

Anti-Reality

Why do they hate science in particular? Both the natural and social sciences are a reality they can’t control, so they try to suppress it. Science is not a matter of belief, but of logic and evidence. Consequently, Trump appoints anti-science quacks to run important government agencies that rely on science. Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is the prime example. He reject the basic tenants of modern medical science, such as the germ theory of disease, and actively seeks to replace it with nonsense drawn form conspiracies and even medieval beliefs about bodily humors and miasma (bad air and smells) as the cause of poor health and disease (Mole 2025). Like all of Trump’s cabinet, RFK Jr has no valid reputation or career to protect, and thus obsequiously submits to Trump personally. Otherwise, RFK Jr would have no justification to remain in power, and Trump keeps him in power to destroy America’s medical scientific credibility and the underlying research that once kept the United States at the front of medical advances and technology. The Trump administration slashed spending for scientific research across the board, because sciences address truths that exist independently of belief, independently of rhetoric and nonsense.

Fascist hatred of empirical reality permeates economic policy as well. Trump replaced existing trade agreements with irrational tariffs that are significantly shifting trade away from the US and towards the European Union and China. As of October 2025, Trump has reached an actual trade agreement with only two countries—Vietnam ($155 billion) and Cambodia ($13.5 billion) —which together constitute .03% of total (5.5 trillion) US trade. Having broken treaties with all other major and minor trading partners, all of Trump’s other so-called trade “deals” are only framework agreements (Palmer and Hawkins 2025), which simply means that each party agrees to continue negotiations within the framework parameters. Fascists disregard complex politics, economics, medicine, and other facts of reality because for the fascist, there is only one simple truth. They embrace a remarkably dogmatic, consistent and simplistic view, as first measured in the Berkeley Studies (Adorno et al. 1950) to today (Radkiewicz 2021; Torres-Vega et al 2021), and including empirical type differentiation (Lilly et al 2025), and methodological updates for particular new theoretical refinement, such as neoliberal authoritarianism (Nicieza-Cueto et al 2025). Fascism succeeds to the extent it makes a complex world seem very simple, with one simple solution to everything—violence. The only real motivation people ever have, as fascist agitators, online influencers, and political leaders claim, is ruthless self-interest. Trump in essence tells his followers to do as he does: take what you want, and never ask for permission or forgiveness.

If not Reality, then What?

In my view, American fascism today is nothing new, but appears new to people who simply don’t care about American historical reality. Descended from myths about the antebellum South and the Golden 1950s, it appeals mostly to white supremacists, but dominant masculinity tentatively appeals to some young men of color. White racism for white men, and dominant masculinity for non-white men. In the few months leading up to his murder, Charlie Kirk claimed that many more young women were also gravitating to his sphere of influence, although no evidence supports this. His constituency remained overwhelmingly young white males.

What did he call people to support? Based on pronouncements at public appearances (Riccardi and Swenson 2025; Smith 2024) and his several books (Kirk 2022; Kirk and Hamachek 2021) and most forcefully in The Pagan Threat(2025), Kirk and his various allies advocate for a pure dominionism. As a form of theocracy, RJ (Rousas John) Rushdoony and Gary North began the American Reconstruction in the 1960s as an anti-science movement, because cold-war communism relied on science over faith in God, so America must necessarily reject science as evil. By the 1970s, they also rejected racial and gender equality as Satanism—attempts to overthrow God’s divine white male hierarchy. The Dominionist narrative, also called Christian Nationalism, resonates with many American popular beliefs (Nalani and Yoshikawa 2023), especially that the Confederacy, as the idealistic Land of Dixie, was an Eden in which everyone supposedly lived in happiness and harmony (Bonekemper 2022). In this myth, slavery didn’t really exist, but rather, grateful Black servitude, and men were masculine and women gratefully subservient and feminine. Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization and American fascism rehash that view. While Trump clearly has no particular convictions about faith or anything beyond his own personal self-aggrandizement, Kirk fully embraced dominionism, although not by name.

Rushdoony and North argued that God ordained the United States as a Christian bastion against the world. They saw the United States as an aggressive conqueror that must subdue the world. As subjugation continues, American Christianity must eradicate all other versions of Christianity, and all other religions. This uniquely American Christianity must consist only of three institutions—family, state, and the church, which encompasses the first two. A council of patriarchs would rule the state, and a man holds dominion over his family. In Christianity and the State (1986), Rushdoony absolutely opposes democracy. The religious state exists only to serve biblical dominion. In A Biblical Psychology of Man, he condemns individual freedom as a petulant “revolt against maturity.” In this view, God created man as an object, and so real life men (women are irrelevant) have no autonomy separately from God’s will. This essential fact for Rushdoony means that

at no point in his life or imagination can man step outside of God’s ordained order into a realm of humanistic or man-made freedom…dominion is written into the nature of man, who was created to exercise dominion over the earth, and this fact of dominion conditions man’s life, his obedience as well as his disobedience (Rushdoony [1977] 1987: 18, 20).

Disobedience against God’s dominion violates man’s essential nature to dominate the earth and in turn submit to God, and so this disobedience constitutes the basis of mental illness and all social problems. Disobedience against God’s dominion is both sacrilege and mental illness. Just as God’s dominion subsumes the government and the family, so it subsumes social science as well, and negates natural science entirely. According to Rushdoony ([1967] 2001), the reason why disciplines such as genetics, chemistry, and physics seem so complex is because they are in fact nothing more than an ancient pagan mystery cult embellished with modern techno-mythology and self-important gibberish.

In North’s (2022) final telling before his death, everything before Christianity was all prophetic prologue, and meaningful history only begins when Christianity appears, and this marks the beginning of divine earthly dominion (p. 263). Imbued with Christian moral clarity and divine power, Christian civilization advanced to the New World to establish God’s fully-formed dominion in preparation for the end times. However, the Union states abandoned Christian civilization when they became more secular and abolished slavery, allegedly a benign and nurturing institution that civilized an inferior and non-Christian race. Slavery constituted a cornerstone of God’s natural and social order, as scripture clearly legitimates slavery in Deuteronomy. In collusion with Satanic forces, the Union destroyed the final bastion of Christian government on earth, the Southern Confederacy (North 2022: 296-298). Thus, God’s dominion collapsed, and the United States fell from grace. The challenge moving forward would be to reconstruct divine dominion, restore America as a theocracy, and restore slavery. Although North coats his narrative with the language and style of empirical scientific precision and scholarly-style references, he decisively rejects science, as did Rushdoony. North’s only professed concern is restoring God’s kingdom. As the patriarchal council dictates, so every man must obey, and women must obey their men. Women have no right to live separately from male dominion.

Charlie Kirk, Laura Loomer, Lucas Miles, and others on the fascist right have not added anything new to Dominionism, except possibly Charlie Kirk’s conversational style. At campus rallies, he typically invited young people to discuss their disagreements with him, and then receive Kirk’s laid-back wisdom about proper values and lifestyles. No less racist or misogynist than more conventional fascists like Stephen Miller or Pete Hegseth, Kirk equates compassion with domination. The world is tough and life is hard, yes, and the way to peace and happiness is to destroy all who oppose the real Americans. Women must go back to domestic labor, and men must defeat science, equality, and gentle emotions in favor of masculine toughness and control.

As Larsen and Jensen (2025) found, right-wing youth cultural spheres promote a sense of nostalgia for this world that has been lost, but to which white men are entitled, connected to emotions of anger and resentment. What nostalgic legacy have enemies allegedly destroyed? Although Kirk and others do not call for a return to slavery today, they do call for racial and gender hierarchies, and white male heterosexual dominance. Notions of racial superiority and ethnonationalism equally predict right-wing views alongside masculinist domination (Huft et al 2025). Although far-right attitudes among European youth closely resemble American youth, one factor distinguishes them—American commitment to Christian rather than secular nationalism (Pickel and Pickel 2024). Overall, contemporary research shows that worldwide, masculinist gender domination and corresponding misogyny pervades nearly all fascist movements throughout the United Sates, Europe, and the Middle East (Roose and Cook 2025).

Likely Outcomes

Consistently then, American fascism centers on white, Christian, and patriarchal nationalism. At the same time, believers feel free to choose which parts they acclaim. However, the white supremacist establishment on the right does not accept Hispanic or other men of color  freely, but more as useful drones who otherwise have no place in a white supremacist future. The latest research shows that Trump’s primary support comes from people who share his prejudices and hatreds (Smith and Hanley 2025), and want him to stomp out transgressions (successful women, gender non-conformists, people of color, and immigrants) by any means necessary. Trump promises what they want, but he does not lead a movement. Rather, he delivers what the followers demand. Whether this restores their sense of superiority is ultimately irrelevant, because the satisfaction is in the stomping, not the aftermath. They hope that the violence against immigrants and LGBTQ people never ends.

For aging Boomers like RFK Jr (71) and Trump (79), as well as for younger fascists like J.D. Vance (41) and Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika Kirk (37), the mythological 1950s and before seems equally compelling precisely because it is myth, not reality. Anyone can jump on the fantasy bandwagon because it matches nobody’s actual lived experience, but rather, speaks to emotional longing for violence to exalt selfish gratification and punish the Others who don’t fit the white masculine heteronormative archetype.

The Moral Majority of the 1970s, the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, The Neocon and Tea Party movements of the 2000s, and Trump’s MAGA movement since 2016 have all blended elite economic interests with alleged moral concerns polished with a Christian veneer. They finally achieved a “moral” success to punish women when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, such that far-right state legislatures have effectively banned abortion in 23 states. The Trump administration now uses Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forces to terrorize neighborhoods, apprehend immigrants and US citizens alike, and expel them from the country with no legal proceedings. It took several decades, but the “wild card” fascists are now getting the racist and misogynist gratification they crave. All along however, major corporations and billionaires have been getting what they want—richer and more powerful, corporate profits soar, while college and everything else gets more expensive and the middle class becomes the precariat class. Eventually, the angry young men of today will realize that the Christianity and nationalism the various movements profess was an illusion, and their alleged compatriots and leaders were little more than opportunists who never cared about anyone or anything except their own self-aggrandizement. They hope for fulfillment, but will find only more aggrievement.

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