Originally published on Carter Moon’s Substack – see more of his work & subscribe here!

Misogyny is the beating heart of MAGA, as has been particularly obvious given recent shocking news from ICE. Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good after he was confronted by Renee and her wife, the pair of them insulted him and clearly made him feel emasculated. He reached for his gun well before Renee could have alledgedly been a threat to him, and fired three shots into her car, calling her “a fucking bitch” as he did so. Here we very plainly have an armed agent of the federal government executing an American citizen — not because his life was threatened, but because he felt emasculated. The ICE agent who murdered Keith Porter on New Years Eve has a history of homophobia, racism, and child abuse. To make the misogyny of ICE even more explicit, an agent was recently charged with repeatedly raping a detainee in Louisiana. The agent was allegedly using forced sex in exchange for allowing the detainee to see her daughter, echoing the kinds of sexual violence that was common during the Holocaust.

Similarly, Matt Walsh recently contorted himself into knots justifying Trump’s flagrantly illegal kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro: “I’m as reflexively non-interventionist as anyone can possibly be, but … International law is fake and gay. The only international law is that big and powerful countries get to do what they want.” Performative, cartoonish homophobia and a desire to feel chauvinistically dominant over weak countries and people is really the only thing driving the fascist right. Any other grander ideals MAGA claims to possess fall by the wayside in moments when Trump or one of his goons does something plainly at odds with “America first.” Everything else can be stripped away, but so long as MAGA continues to feel virile and masculine, the hardcore will stay loyal.

It’s not a coincidence that Marjorie Taylor Greene finally got fed up and has seemingly broken ties with Trump and MAGA. Part of her decision to leave according to reporting came after she met with Epstein’s victims, who Trump refused to meet with in the Oval Office. The administration’s failure to do right by the victims was apparently part of the scales falling from her eyes when it came to Trump. She said of the Epstein victims: “These American women aren’t rich, powerful elites, these are your average Americans.” Considering that Trump is a convicted rapist, it’s odd that this is what it took for Greene, but it’s also interesting that this kind of open gender discrimination is what caused a fracture for one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers. (For now at least.) I do not think Greene should be celebrated or invited into the #Resistance tent, but it’s still an interesting data point that the systemic abuse of teenage girls and the subsequent cover-up was her breaking point. She said in her video announcing that she was leaving the party: “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

There’s also the trans rights case up at the Supreme Court this week, in which the conservative majority is almost certainly going to rule that transfeminine athletes don’t have the right to compete in girl’s sports. This is, of course, not really about sports, but rather the larger project of banishing trans people from public life and ultimately forcing them to die prematurely; in other words, the first stages of a genocide of a population that makes up 1% of the country. Trans people obviously do not pose any remote threat to the rest of us; they are not the reason none of us can afford our rent or healthcare, they are not responsible for climate change, and they aren’t making your eggs more expensive. But they are an effective minority population for fascists to target: Because trans people are such a small minority, there is a high likelihood most Americans have never knowingly met a trans person. In addition, the existence of trans people threatens the “natural” gender hierarchy we currently live under that fascists think is essential to maintain to restore society to its natural order.

As much as Marjorie Taylor Greene may have turned on MAGA over Epstein, Strictly policing the norms of gender is foundational to Greene’s politics. Greene believes in protecting certain women from certain kinds of abuse, but doesn’t believe in protecting women from dying due to lack of access to abortion healthcare. She still had a giant sign outside her office reading “there are two genders: male and female, trust the science.” On the surface this is just stupid culture war trolling, which is the only thing Greene has ever really done with her time in power, but it’s also extremely revealing.; it’s why she can simultaneously abandon her coalition for failing to defend cis women from Epstein while demonizing trans women. The “trust the science” trolling is also telling; scientific scholarship backs up that gender is naturally more fluid and much less rigidly binary than American culture tries to enforce, as evidenced by the existence of intersex people. MAGA has zero interest in empirical reality; the denial of the science around trans people is in line with their denial of climate change and vaccine science.

The internet has made it exceptionally easy for everyone to be exposed to a much broader array of human sexuality, and I think a lot of conservatives are extremely mad and ashamed to discover that they too enjoy busting to more than just “traditional” heterosexual porn. It turns out conservatives, just like everyone else, live in a spectrum of sexuality. It’s fairly obvious that constantly thinking about queerness as a sign of society’s decadence and decay makes it extremely appealing for conservatives to indulge in as a fetish. It’s why anti-LGBTQ Evangelical pastors and politicians have been getting caught having queer sex our entire lives; when you pin all of the world’s sins on the existence of queer sex, it becomes extremely arousing as a form of sin you partake in. This isn’t a new insight — it’s something queer people have been pointing out for decades, it’s just particularly obvious at this moment as fascism continues to ascend.

I always like glancing at the Pornhub year in review. Pornhub is a shitty service that dramatically suppresses the wages of sex workers and allows rape, trafficking, and revenge porn to proliferate on its platform. But its ubiquity in our culture does reveal a lot about what people are up to in the privacy of their own homes. Trans porn saw a 58% growth on the platform last year, suggesting that a lot of people, including conservatives, are fascinated by trans people’s bodies behind closed doors. There are obviously people who can watch trans porn and go “neat!” and come away from the experience less transphobic. But conversely, you can jerk off to and fetishize trans people and still hate them. I think there’s something particularly dark about people only engaging with trans people as a kink through their screens while never interacting with them as full human beings, still loathing them. It’s easy to infer that conservatives are discovering that they do, in fact, find trans people attractive and feel shame over that fact.

It’s pretty telling that every time large groups of conservatives gather in a city they make Grindr crash. There’s this constant drama roiling through MAGA, both in their influencers and their politicians, accusing each other of being gay. Nick Fuentes is constantly accused of it, Andrew Tate twists himself into a pretzel trying to act like any attraction to women is actually gay, Madison Cawthorne got himself ousted from Congress for saying that people within his party engage in debaucherous orgies. Gay comedian Caleb Hearon has a great bit talking about how Trump’s behavior reads as gay. I read all this behavior not so much as closeted, repressed self-loathing, but rather that their hatred of women is so intense that they find most women repulsive. They’d rather hook up with a specific type of conservative man because they’re the only ones “deserving” of them. They’re allowed to indulge in “degenerate” activities because they’re part of the hyper-masculine in-group and you’re not.

My friend Kit turned me on to finally watching Cabaret last year. Truly one of the all-timer musicals, and a haunting story to reflect on as we live through our own fall of the Weimar republic. One of the most striking things about it is how much the Nazis want to be a part of the cabaret. This show that represents moral decadence, that plays with gender and sexuality, is something they very much want to participate in. It’s partially about Nazis wanting to force themselves to be accepted everywhere, but it’s also clear they want to be able to enjoy the decadence just like everyone else, right before shipping all the performers off to the camps. Dominating queerness, fetishizing it as they punish it, becomes a driving libidinal force for fascists as they engage in their project of restoring society to its “natural” state.

That’s the thing, right? Everything is libidinal for these fascists. Everything is based on their shared psychosexual hang-ups and emotions. As much as Shapiro and Kirk have tried to present conservatism as rational and based in facts over the last decade, it’s plainly apparent now that their real motivating forces are bigotry and a desire to dominate people they deem as weak and undeserving. I find it increasingly unconvincing that people are still supporting Trump out of “economic anxiety” when the economy is objectively worse off now than it was in 2024. MAGA is primarily about getting performatively mad on X that women, queer people, and people of color have dared to ask to be treated fairly and to moderately readjust the social order to be more equal. Conservatism today is Jordan Peterson weeping and sputtering with rage much more than it’s John Wayne.

As I said, feminists and queer activists have been talking about this for a decade. I felt compelled to write this because it’s been especially galling in the last couple of weeks. I also think that the dirtbag left white guys I’m more or less a part of have had way too much of a tendency to diminish this stuff, or treat it as a “distraction” from talking about economic inequality or other issues we deem more “important.” In my opinion, you don’t really have a coherent critique of capitalism if you’re not considering how patriarchy plays a role in legitimizing capitalist reproduction. We’re never going to achieve the equitable and democratic world we want to live in without a rigorous defense of women and queer people’s bodily autonomy and freedom from gender-based violence. None of us are free until all of us are free, and my fellow white dudes could stand to remind ourselves of that more frequently and explicitly.