Today's Cage Match Is About Enrolling the Manosphere for Future Allegiance--and Violence

It's not about Trump's birthday or America's. The Manosphere pulled off January 6th and got Trump elected to a second term. Trump wants to keep them enrolled.

Image: WhiteHouse.gov

And there he is, sitting at the Resolute Desk—UPON WHICH SITS A UFC EMBLEM—with the men who represent male aggression in its most animalistic form. And I say that while having immense respect for fighting as an art that was requisite for the male of the species for the last roughly two million years. You could see the natural nobility of risking pain, disability and death in legendary fighters like Mohammad Ali, Jimmy Braddock, Joe Louis, George Foreman—and even Mike Tyson, who embraced boxing as a way out of a life whose poverty and oppression would have destroyed him.

The males of most animal species, though definitely not all, have had to fight for the privilege of passing on their genes—until, that is, intelligence in a male proved more efficacious to the future of the species than the throwback behavior of gladiatorial self-aggrandizement. Because this aggrandizement and elevation of male strength as superior to intelligence, knowledge, and (certainly) anything feminine has a dark side that was embraced, for example, by Rome’s infamous egomaniac, the Emperor Commodus … see:

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Another infamous example, touted by Donald Trump, Jr. and accused of rape and human trafficking in Romania and the UK, are the Tate Bros., principally misogynist Andrew Tate—who has largely brought cage fighting (with its sadomasochistic overtones and undertones) into general public consciousness. See Robert Reich’s article this morning on how the Tech Bros—Musk and Zuckerberg—leaned into this culture in challenging each other to a cage fight because both worship power. Frankly, both of them would die in the cage with a real fighter, but I digress.

A little history helps in Andrew’s case:

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And finally, cage matches are MANOSPHERE DOG-WHISTLES, and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance particularly learned a big lesson in the run-up to the last election.

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And here’s where the cage match, the Manosphere, misogyny, and the January 6th insurrectionist assault on the Capitol merge.

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Four of the five major nexuses of groups that became the core marching army of January 6th started as overtly anti-feminist groups—the Proud Boys chief among them—or directly espouse woman-controlling and -disenfranchising beliefs and goals.

When J. D. Vance dog-whistled the Manosphere to get out and vote for Trump in the run-up to the last election, these guys turned out in droves. And, of course, Trump knew they would because they’d “hopped to” before. He had told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” And then, when he called them to action on January 6th—and yes, there is proof of this—they came. They were tried for it. They went to jail for it. And then Trump pardoned them.

Trump pardoned them for attacking the Capitol of the United States of America to disrupt the certification of Joseph Biden as the duly—and fairly—elected President of the United States.

What’s Really Going On Here?

There are principally two things going on here:

• Trump’s attempt to pay off—and pay forward—the Manosphere and the January 6th conspirators with a $1,776 billion-dollar cash award has failed. Dozens of judges railed against it when it first passed; it was then reversed. Now courts are moving to make sure Trump can never do this again, while he keeps saying he thinks it’s such a good idea! Well, no, it’s not. And what is haunting about this is that whatever this is—pay off, pay forward, or both—it has staggering possible implications, among them:

  • Is Trump getting blackmailed by the January 6 insurrectionists? Yeah, he pardoned them, but are they basically demanding hush money so that they never reveal how much he had to do with this assault, how deeply involved his was in its planning, and how clearly he intended to overthrow the government of the United States and hang vice-president Pence. Is this Trump’s response to extortion? … Do note, however, that whether it’s extortion or not, Trump had every intention of making taxpayers pay off this protection racket for him!

  • Is this a pay forward in which Trump is, without saying the quiet part out loud, promising these woman-hating men that if they help him overthrow the government at the end of this term they’ll be able to control women for everything from sex-on-demand to free maid service forever? If, by the time 2028 rolls around, he hasn’t already declared himself Jesus for Life and “the Divine Don Eternal” and gutted U.S. democracy down to a racist, misogynist, white nationalist dark shadow by other means, is Trump now building his own private army to create another insurrection? Maybe he just thinks he’ll get around the two-term limit, in which case these guys would simply need to be there for him the way they’ve been there for him before, which might get him elected again.

The Cult of the Male Body

It is axiomatic in all studies of fascism that it is, at its deepest core, both misogynist and male self-aggrandizing. The two most obvious examples of this are German Nazism and Spanish Fascism. In the Spanish example, the CULT OF THE MALE BODY burst out of Spanish culture in the earliest days of its coup-d’etat against the duly-elected Second Republic of Spain.

It is very, very important that people start to recognize what’s appearing right in front of their eyes: the Cult of the Male Body:

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And finally, there is a very specific place where all of this goes—and it is why understanding what the cage on the White House lawn means is so important. Because the Spanish Civil War was every bit as brutal as the Nazi regime’s internal purges. That’s why historians are now calling it The Spanish Holocaust. Please read Paul Preston’s brilliant book. And please meet Marina Ginesta.

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Hopefully this cage—like Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center—will come down immediately. Hopefully the “ballroom” will be razed to the ground. Hopefully the Arch d’Trump will never have a stone laid.

But make no mistake, Trump always has a reason for everything he does, and he has a reason for this cage match. And it has everything to do with securing more power—permanent power if he can manage it. And this time it has to do with selling female freedom to the worst of men to get it. That is why the lesson of what happened to the Spanish “New Woman”—the crushing of whom set back women’s rights by 50 years just as the Iranian Revolution has stripped Iranian women of rights for the last 45—is the price we will all pay for Trump’s ultimate power play:

Dictator for Life.

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