Risk and Extortion XVII: The Devaluation of All Values

Right wing militia and the manosphere 3

The fascist takeover of Europe in the 1920s and the fascist takeover of the USA over the last decade could never have happened without right-wing militia. A clear example of this is the assault on the US Capitol on the 6^th of January 2021. After two months of failed attempts to cheat himself into a victory in the 2020 presidential elections, Trump decided to activated what he had already announced before the elections: unleash his henchmen and goons of the right-wing militia groups filled with frustrated little masturbators wanting to prove themselves to what they believed to be the Master-Baiter King. The Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three-Percenters did daddy proud and nearly succeeded in overthrowing the newly elected Legislature.

For people like me, who simply cannot understand why a pale-orange, obese, spineless, coward could have such an appeal to people, it remains inexplicable that he could be elected as president again in 2024. The “man” as not one single redeeming quality.  He is the exact opposite of what we have been taught as being core values: honour, courage, dignity, loyalty, fidelity and above all honesty. The man is a complete fraud. He cannot even play a game of golf without cheating. Instead, he exhumes all the worst traits of neurotic, malignant narcissism.

Of course, one can hear many “analysts” blaming the rise of MAGA among those who objectively speaking are never going to benefit from it, on a dissatisfaction with the “liberal elites” whose control over government (the “deep state”) and mainstream media is allegedly hegemonic. Obviously, such “explanations” bypass a few major facts: (1) the legislative branch is dominated by conservatives and paid for by billionaires; (2) the executive branch of government is not limited to the federal state and the majority of states have been under Republican control; (3) the judiciary branche is dominated by the federalist society and words for the billionaires. That is to say: what is described as the “elite” (government, media, universities, Hollywood) – i.e. the Professional Managerial Class – is not the main core of decision-making power in the USA.

Instead those so-called elites were quite happy supporting the billionaire class as long as they got something out of it. They are indeed the lubricants of kakistocracy. This is why “wokism” and its predecessor “political correctness” are so easily criticized. They are above all the façades of performative identity politics, which flatly refuses to engage in critical self- reflection about their own genesis and function. But this does not mean that the rejection of the PMC exclusively explains why kakistocratic movements such as MAGA have successfully invaded political cultures not only of so-called “Western Democracies” but all over the world.

And then it dawned on me that the toxic elements of kakistocracy – which are embodied by the orange cheater-in-chief – are normalized in the manosphere. Here, all values are turned upside down. Cheating becomes glorified because competing – especially when sticking to the rules of the game – is for losers. I suddenly understood why Donald Trump was so certain that he could not lose the 2020 elections. He was the president. He could decide to appoint a post master general who could legally sabotage the US mail. He could tell the Attorney Generals of “swing states” to “find him votes”. The Republican Party are the masters of cheating and rigging elections. I am sure the Democrats are jealous of that. They had to do all they could to stop Bernie Sanders from winning their primaries but were unable to keep that hidden. By contrast, Republican Primaries are probably the fairest elections in the USA, because whomever wins the Republican Nomination already has a massive advantage because of gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The oldest democracy in the world, which has effectively ceased to be a democracy quite some time ago, has always been corrupted by anxieties and neuroses: over the working class, over women, over race, over immigrants, basically over any issues that might involve a few rich white men losing their privileges. For a long time, this corruption through anxiety and neurosis could be wrapped in a rhetorical ethos of institutionalized procedures. This is why the PMC became such a powerful group. The PMC – also known as virtue hoarders – functioned to absorb frustrations over the institutionalization of corruption by sanitizing them as temporary, procedural imperfections that merely required more detailed legislation and administration.

There seems to be a widespread – perhaps even deliberate – blindness towards what Trump has done in the USA. Project 2025 was the secret election platform for the Republican Party in the 2024 general elections despite this being openly denied. People who have voted for Republicans and did not know project 2025 or believed that it was irrelevant, were cheated. If you do not recognize the con you are its target. The dismantling of the state was accelerated by Elon Must and his Doge. Checks and balances have been removed from institutions and they are no longer able to perform that which the PMC always taught us would be the safeguard against the collapse of democracy.

Democracy in the USA has collapsed. The election of Zohran Mamdani as the candidate for the Democratic Party for the election of Mayor of New York has already triggered an avalanche of racist, islamophobic and xenophobic comments and threats, including the threat of his deportation. The right win in the USA can only accept the results of elections if they win. That is Donald Trump’s logic which he first practiced as a mommy’s boy with bone spurs when dodging the draft. Fascists are overwhelmingly neurotic, anxious cowards. They eroticize hierarchy. The fascist libido is not about connection; it’s about the orgasm of obedience and conquest. As we have seen, its breeding ground is the cultivation of frustration without the ability to address the causes of this frustration as part of personalized competences of problem-solving. It is indeed a cultivated castration anxiety resulting in fatalism and a lack of self-critical curiosity as a means to find solutions. Incels are a perfect example of this. The inability to actualize competence in problem solving merely translates into a projection of blame onto women and above all feminism and of course, ethnicized and racialized men as better equipped physically and the ability to charm to attract female attention.