Fox News, desperate to defend Trump's tariffs, exploits MAGA's masculinity delusions
With the stock market plunging and the threat of hyper-inflation bearing down, the propagandists at Fox News are in quite a pickle. Their job is to paint every dumb decision made by Donald Trump as the work of a secret genius who is only pretending to be a half-literate idiot. But that's a tough sell, even to their delusional audiences, when Trump's tariffs are wiping out people's retirement accounts and threatening to raise the price of everything from groceries to cars. But Fox News knows there's one reliable way to get their audience to stop worrying about the real world and bury themselves even more deeply in fantasyland: make everything about MAGA's male insecurities.
Unable to deny the economic ruin Trump is inflicting on the nation, the Fox News spinsters have moved to reframing financial privation as a good thing, because it will supposedly restore Americans' lost masculinity. And, in the spirit of the "prosperity gospel" grifters that have cleaved themselves to Trump, Fox pundits are insisting that there will be a great reward for all this fiscal sacrifice: the restoration of male dominance over women. "Suffer now, but have faith in Trump, and he will bestow upon thee a tradwife" is the basic pitch.
"Could Trump's tariffs be the ultimate testosterone boost?" declared Greg Gutfeld on "The Five," immediately answering the question with a "yes." The propaganda team was boosted by a hamfisted chryon declaring that Trump's tariffs are "manly."
For those unclear on how paying way more for bananas and blue jeans will boost your testosterone, well, the tortured justification they offer isn't helpful. Jesse Watters tried to argue that tariffs will somehow magically result in millions of jobs doing physical labor, for which there is no evidence. (In reality, it will hurt existing manufacturing by raising prices on materials, and hurt agriculture by shutting down markets farmers depend on.) Watters went on to argue that these fictional jobs will restore manhood stolen from men who, like Watters, have desk jobs."When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this," said a still-male Watters as he sat behind the camera screen he stares at all day. This follows his lie from last week, when Watters promised tariffs would "turn the country into a place with thriving main streets and hometowns." This 1950s fantasy is the exact opposite of reality. The prosperity of the "Leave It To Beaver" era was kicked off because tariffs were dramatically lowered and taxes on the richest Americans reached historic highs — the opposite of Trump's economic plans.
Most right-wing propagandists aren't even trying to make argument-shaped pitches, but instead embracing the fascist method of portraying tariffs as a trial that will restore American manhood through pain. Sean Hannity scolded a caller who was angry about investment losses by telling him, "You don't have the stomach." MAGA influencer Benny Johnson mocked people worried about inflation by calling them "totally dependent and on our knees." He insisted losing money "builds quite a bit of character." Trump joined in by declaring Republican opponents of tariffs to be "Weak and Stupid people!"
This is fascist rhetoric, in no small part because it's all emotion, no reason or logic. But it's feeding off a recent trend, fed by predatory social media influencers, that conflates masculinity with punishing self-discipline, the kind that rejects all pleasure and comfort as a feminizing — and thereby evil — force. This was most recently illustrated in a viral video by fitness influencer Ashton Hall, who unpersuasively insisted he rises before 4 AM for literal hours of working out and torturing himself with ice baths, while denouncing any form of self-indulgence. Eschewing sex and going to bed early is the key, he declares, to preventing "a weak mind, bad decisions or lack of productivity."
The manosphere has always had two conflicting messages of masculinity. There's the hedonistic one that often tips into sociopathy, where "real" men are supposed to spend money lavishly, have a lot of heterosex — with or without the woman's consent — and flaunt their playboy lifestyle for online admirers. Then there's the "hustle culture" guys, who instead insist that puritanical self-deprivation is the key to masculinity: strict diets, elaborate workouts, overtime schedules that leave no time for a social life. Some of the most popular influencers, like Andrew Tate, toggle between the two ideas, using flashy signifiers and high emotions to distract their followers from the contradictions.
The "real men eschew comfort" mentality is quite convenient right now. Trump's actual reasons for imposing tariffs are a combination of off-the-charts stupidity and malice. But his fans cannot admit their hero-god is wreaking havoc on their pocketbooks for no good reason. Instead, this is being spun into a story not unlike Job's trials at the hands of God. But Trump-God isn't just testing their faith, but their manhood. And, to listen to Watters, if they hang in and prove their mettle, Trump will reward them with a 50s-era fantasy, complete with a submissive tradwife.
"It will make you a man" is not quite enough to sell even MAGA men on the idea that it's a good thing to make everyone collectively poorer. The real key to selling this nonsense is not just to make it about being men, but also hating women. To pull it all together, MAGA influencers online are conflating fun with being female, which they believe is self-evidently the worst thing a person can be. Trump fans revived another viral video from last summer, nicknamed "Gen Z boss and a mini," which features young women dancing and half-teasing, half-celebrating themselves with chants like "5'3" and an attitude" and "itty-bitty titties and a bob."
For MAGA, women being carefree is worse than genocide, so this video is being held out as evidence that Trump destroying the economy is necessary, if only to put these ladies in their place. One right-winger with 200,000 followers declared that these women are partying on "the ruins of bastions of masculinity that they just destroyed, sending millions into despair."
Another painted a woman who doesn't hate herself as a boss dominating oppressed men working in a factory.
https://twitter.com/Polytope13/status/1909636067554369640
Rogan O'Handley, a MAGA influencer with over 2 million X followers, offered a meltdown over this video that he eventually deleted, apparently out of embarrassment over how hard people were dunking on it. But the internet never forgets.
Another declared, "Tariffs or this? Tariffs."
This logic of "destroy us all to get those women" should be tough to defend. One does have to ask: Why stop at tariffs? If hurting these women justifies economic destruction, why stop there? Why not advocate for the nuclear annihilation of the entire planet? But none of this makes even a lick of sense. It's just "women bad, men oppressed, Daddy Trump will save us, blergh!!!!"
Ironically, it's all from men thinking they're tough guys, but of course, they melt down like snowflakes under a hair dryer at the mere sight of a woman smiling. Even more ironically, the narrative that pleasure is emasculating is being employed to defend Donald Trump, who has never endured a real hardship in his life, and who spent the day the stock market was crashing playing a golf game that was almost certainly fixed because he's way too fragile to admit he's not actually that good at the sport.
For MAGA, it's a sign of civilization-destroying decadence if a group of young women goofs off for two minutes. But the newfound cult of austerity-driven manhood is led by a spoiled brat who has never worked a hard day in his life and has a fleet of servants to make sure he never has to do ordinary tasks like grocery shop, cook, clean, or even walk more than 10 feet without a golf cart to carry him. But that's the beauty of fascism for its followers. It allows them to let go of all reason and live in nothing but a sea of incoherent but angry emotions, while what's left of their brains turns to rot.
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