Republicans are about to inflict a rather strange vision of masculinity on America, one that is less the Triumph of the Will that they wanted, and more Idiocracy. The political messaging to their audience is simple: Democratic men are all gay transgender tofu-eating double-Communist weenies, and you don’t want to be that, do you?
It’s been heading in this direction for a long time, but it came into stark relief when White House aide Stephen Miller accused Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico of being transgender. “He’s clearly transitioning into a female,” Miller said. “When Talarico goes in for a blood test, when he gets a physical, blood doesn’t come out. Soy milk comes out.” This followed attacks on Talarico by his opponent, Ken Paxton, who called him “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “James Tala-freak-o.” Fox host Jesse Watters called him a “gay vegan.”
To set the record straight, Talarico isn’t transgender, he isn’t gay, and he’s not even a vegan. Also, unlike Paxton, he isn’t a scandal-plagued attorney general who narrowly avoided indictments for securities fraud and bribery. Paxton let a child predator off with one day in jail and no sex offender registration because he was an influential Republican. Paxton has been involved in multiple cheating scandals, but to Republican strategists, the fact that Talarico once ate a meatless breakfast wrap and doesn’t promise to eradicate transgender people makes him less of man.
Accusing Democratic politicians of being transgender or transgender allies has deep historical parallels with Nazi Germany. Nazis routinely accused political opponents of being Jews, having Jewish blood, or being “friends of the Jews.” Today, Republicans use transgender people in the same way. They present 0.5 percent of the population as simultaneously a dire threat that is destroying the country and pathetically weak and disgusting. They promise that only when “those” people and all their supporters are gone will the country truly be great again. Indeed, both Project 2025 and the Republican legislative agenda, Project 47, bear eerie similarities to the past.
Republicans offer a vision of manhood that is meant to look like a parade of Aryan Übermenschen but instead comes across as a depressingly absurd circus sideshow. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth does push-ups and pull-ups badly, while bench-pressing what appear to be fake plates. His performative masculinity in his speeches makes it clear why he was forced out of the National Guard before he could be promoted beyond the rank of major. Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promotes all-beef diets, raw milk, and shooting up on steroids, while looking and sounding like a Tom Waits outtake.
For a group that actively reviles gay people, the Republicans and their influencers are surprisingly averse to women. Fascist influencer Nick Fuentes has a lot to say about women, despite being a virgin, never having been in a relationship, and insisting that “having sex with women is gay.” Manosphere influencer Andrew Tate argued that any sex with women strictly for “feeling good” without the possibility of procreation is “super gay.” He has also suggested that “true alpha” men shouldn’t waste their time with women for physical release. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has promoted getting a suntan on your scrotum and perineum as a way to increase testosterone for “real men.”™
Even Alabama GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville recently got in on the “it’s gay to have a girlfriend” narrative. He declared on Fox News, “They’re now called the socialist, globalist Democrats, and it’s just unfortunate.… They’ve left their base of middle-class and union workers, and now, their new girlfriend is illegal aliens and women.”
This cavalcade of over-the-top performative hypermasculinity ends up looking a lot more like Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy than anything depicted by Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Idiocracy captures this current trend, with characters who are moronic describing the one average-intelligence, non-moronic human of “talking like a f-g.”
In the movie, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho (played by a jacked Terry Crews) is a pro wrestler who randomly sprays the air with machine-gun fire during his State of the Union speech while promising to fix everything. The character highlights how a society stripped of critical thinking elevates leaders who perform “strength” over those who possess actual competence. The performance of power has become the definition of power.
Idiocracy—which, remember, came out 20 years ago—depicts a trashed White House with a destroyed East Wing, inhabited by a cadre of unqualified idiots and in-laws working for a “five-time ultimate smackdown champion” and porn star president. In the real world, the East Wing is a smoldering wreck, Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden is reduced to an outdoor strip-mall food court, and an Ultimate Fighting Championship fighting ring is being built on the grounds to honor a president long associated with World Wrestling Entertainment and Jeffrey Epstein.
Idiocracy repeatedly highlighted how frighteningly dumb over-the-top masculinity was and what it would look like if it came to power. The answer was a society that thought it was a good idea to water your crops with a sports drink (Brawndo), leading to famine. According to the movie, this world where famine was a result of stupidity wasn’t supposed to exist until 500 years in the future. But today in real-life America … well, have you seen the price of groceries lately?
Performative masculinity relies on emotional reactivity. Whenever the future society in the movie faces a problem, their instinct is to shoot a gun into the air or scream, mimicking an angry toddler. Now, anytime something doesn’t go President Trump’s way, he threatens to have people imprisoned via angry rants on Truth Social, occasionally coating the walls of his home in ketchup in a fit of rage.
Poe’s law is an internet adage stating that without a clear indicator of the author’s intent (like a winking emoji or tone indicator), it is virtually impossible to distinguish a parody of extreme views from a sincere expression of those views. Today, I’m not sure how you could parody how the United States has descended into a form of performative weirdness that was considered too over the top just 20 years ago.
Perhaps the saddest part of this for me is remembering how masculinity used to be idealized in movies. I grew up with The Right Stuff and Chuck Yeager as the pinnacle of what an American man should be. He was portrayed as unpretentious, honest, confident, intelligent, competent, brave, calm, and dedicated to his wife. He stole the show in a movie that was theoretically about the Mercury Seven astronauts. Today, that form of masculinity seems positively anachronistic.
More’s the pity.
