On Monday, a Minnesota GOP state senator named Justin Eichorn introduced legislation that would have defined “Trump derangement syndrome” as a clinical condition for purposes of allocating resources to people with mental illness. (Haha, get it, libs!)

The same day, Eichorn was arrested and charged with soliciting sex from a person he believed was a teenage prostitute.

By Thursday, he had resigned.

If you’ve already anticipated that I mean to slot Eichorn in among a large and growing population of Trump-loyal elites who are also sexual degenerates, you’re in luck! Eichorn’s downfall may actually be attributable to the fact that a state senator doesn’t have enough clout to thrive in the MAGA cult. Many MAGA elites climb the ranks because they’re sexual degenerates. If Eichorn had a popular right-wing podcast, Trump might have already dispatched a private plane to fly him to the safety of Mar-a-Lago, or nominated him to a federal judgeship.

Putting together an exhaustive list would require lifetimes, or tax the capacity of ChatGPT¹. But just in recent memory:

• The Trump administration used state power to secure the release of right-wing grifter Andrew Tate, who stood accused by Romanian officials of sex-trafficking and rape, along with his brother Tristan.

• Matt Gaetz trafficked women including an underage girl he had sex with.

• Pete Hegseth (now secretary of defense) raped a Republican activist in California.

• Elon Musk is at least rumored to have many more than the 14 children he acknowledges. But not because he’s some kind of Lothario. He spreads his seed compulsively and narcissistically, offering his semen to various acquaintances in the hope that they might impregnate themselves. He’s made a hobby of jerking off into a cup to pepper the world with his spawn because he is a megalomaniacal freak—but his pool of consensual sex partners is limited almost exclusively to women who are attracted to his fame, power, or wealth.

• Donald Trump is a rapist in the commonly understood sense of the term, a “sexual abuser” in the legal sense, and an unrepentant friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

These guys are degenerate enough to make a virgin-core weirdo and Trump hanger-on like Ben Shapiro seem normal, and that guy declared WAP female sexual arousal a medical condition. He was so roundly mocked for it, he uprooted his family and moved to the drier pastures of Tennessee.

Professional Democrats generally will not touch this stuff, at least not post-2024. They will touch very little that isn’t directly related to health-care or tax policy. But they should. Because for all their wrongheaded ideas about what is politically advantageous or not, Democrats are also rightly worried about the direction young men are headed as they form the political opinions they’re likely to hold for life. They increasingly support Donald Trump and his movement. They see these men as role models. They are angry, yes, but they are also lonely, and undersexed, and I would wager (sneaking suspicion) that these things are related.

Share

All the cool people are doing it

FUCK BOY TRYLAND

Within a particular kind of right-wing information silo, it’s easy to see why incels or incel-adjacent young men would idolize famous perverts. They want what those guys appear to have: dates; facility with women. When it doesn’t work out, they reach out to each other on social media (privately and publicly) for sympathy and to exorcise their rage.

It’s hard to know what’s what online—what’s real versus what’s engagement bait, or trolling, or foreign influence—but it isn’t an imaginary phenomenon, and it isn’t isolated to men with personality disorders. It’s reflected in survey data tracking teen socializing, loneliness, and sexual activity. It’s reflected in the reporting of writers like Elle Reeve, an exceptional journalist who embedded with a bunch of young, male rightists, many of whom ended up confiding in her. It’s at least occasionally reflected in acts of terrible violence.

And so it’s tempting, in the progressive world, to put their woes on them, just as we’re often tempted by schadenfreude whenever a Trump voter finds out the hard way. But in that latter circumstance, there’s almost always a do-gooder or influencer nearby to point out, rightly, that defeating fascism will require making allies with marginal, disaffected Trump voters. Snake-bit or no, most of them won’t be swayed by appeals from Democrats, but some will, so it’s important to present a spirit of openness to them. Hop in the water’s warm.

In a similar spirit, meet Harry Sisson, one of the few young, male, progressive influencers of any note in his generation. He’s also, apparently, a bit of a cad.

This can be—how to put it gently—a liability in the realm of modern progressive culture. There’s a whole jargon for ostracizing skirt chasers, even if their indiscretions are personal, and the worst of their sins is hurting feelings. Conservative’s know this, and it’s why they’re eager to exploit the mores of progressive culture to drive Sisson out of relevance. To cancel him or, perhaps more accurately, to convince other young progressives to cancel him, or make him shun himself. They recognize, in a way many progressives do not, that they’re in a 24-7 battle for future power, and making left-of-center communities seem hostile to young men is in their long-term interest.

Instead of playing into their hands—and assuming Sisson’s only “guilty” of leading people on—I want to appeal directly to young men on the other side of this divide to learn from Sisson’s example. Not a perfect example, by any means, but certainly better than their current role models. Without committing any acts of sexual violence, or being a weird, moralizing freak, Harry is cleaning up with the ladies, in a way that, just a generation ago, was basically normal and generally healthy. Not to say nobody’s feelings got hurt in the aughts, or that everyone behaved with perfect integrity. But by shedding a sense of entitlement to women’s attention, and being aware of and open-minded about their valid concerns, young men could do all kinds of young-men things—party, drink to excess, work out, shoot guns, defer monogamy, subscribe to Maxim, whatever—and not make themselves repulsive to the opposite sex.

If you’re a young American man who took the red pill, here’s your blue pill: A tantalizing and/or fulfilling social and sex life is still available to you. But you make it much, much harder for yourselves by idolizing fanatics and criminals who view sex as a commodity that you must buy or steal. You’re transforming yourself into the men of South Korea, and it’s all entirely thanks to hobbies and role models that have robbed you of an essential part of your humanity. They’ve robbed you of your precious time, too. They’ve convinced you that pluralism and empathy and basically all liberals are anti-masculine, as if those aren’t important values and allies to the overwhelming majority of women your age.

No wonder young Harry is killing it with a smile, while you’re a white-hot ball of rage. Detox from Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, and go talk like a normal person to some ladies.

DON’T INCEL YOURSELF SHORT

You might even do better than young Harry by actually talking. The indiscretions Republican influencers have cited to drag Sisson down were reportedly virtual. Direct message exchanges with women he didn’t know personally.

Right-leaning young men face a bigger challenge, because their tribal commitments are sexually repugnant to most women of the same age. But all young men, left and right, would run into less trouble if they got offline and socialized in person—ideally without filtering people by algorithm first. (In my youth, we called this “going to the bar.”)

More actual sex, less casually hurt feelings. Just as it’s easier to be an asshole behind a veil of anonymity on social media than in real life, it’s also easier to be a heel and a liar to a virtual admirer than to a proper date.

Easier, but also: less fun.

I think a lot about what the political alignment of 2025 would look like if Democrats hadn’t nominated a 77 year old man for the presidency in 2020, and had rallied instead behind someone younger and more vigorous. Beto O’Rourke or Cory Booker, say.

Normally we look to younger generations for enlightened thinking, but it was Joe Biden, alone among prominent political leaders, who was attuned to the concern that pandemic restrictions were depriving young people of healthy sexual experiences. He did this in an especially cringy way, befitting a very old man, by asking his surgeon general “how young people could ‘make love’ under the circumstances.” But he had your interests at heart.

Politicians a generation or two younger than him might have been able to surface this problem publicly and address it in a less grandpa-ish way. And if that had happened, maybe you wouldn’t feel so alienated from a generally well-meaning American center-left.

MAGA elites by contrast were only interested in harnessing your frustrations with COVID restrictions, not because they cared about your social or sexual development, but because they wanted to foster your anger and direct it at their enemies. Trump is a hedonist, and they are in thrall to him, but outside that degenerate inner circle, you’re in the party of Mike Johnson and abortion bans and slut-shaming.

Good luck plying that into dates. Your very loyalty to them and their culture has left many of you locked in a state of semi-permanent COVID-era isolation. But it’s all self-imposed. Hop on in, the waters warm…and there’s girls here.

Leave a comment