MAGA America has created an entire generation of terrified white man-children who are intimidated by diversity, threatened by competition, and convinced that they’re oppressed.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
At the close of the Trump Administration’s garish, bloated, masturbatory performance art on the White House lawn, UFC fighter Josh Hokit proceeded to punctuate his match by offering a monstrous verbal assault on former First Lady Michelle Obama, targeting her gender.
His head wrapped in an American flag and flanked by Joe Rogan, the bottom-feeding patron saint for mediocre white men who’ve failed up in Trump’s America, Hokit expelled a sickening slur that encompasses the racism, misogyny, and queer-phobia the entire MAGA ecosystem runs on.
After pretending to vomit on himself (or purposefully doing it), during his weigh-in a day earlier, the 28-year-old proceeded to gleefully regurgitate the kind of reckless, moronic moral sewage that Trump has cultivated and curated over the last ten years, the kind he himself has regularly trafficked in. It was unprovoked, vicious, and embarrassing.
And it would be easy to dismiss Hokit as a professional buffoon, a jacked-up, brain-battered, ignorant caricature with no connection to reality, if not for the fact that he’s pretty much a typical MAGA man, without the skin-tight leotard, greased-up pecs, and proximity to a president. Guys like Hokit are everywhere.
Have a conversation with any random group of guys still supporting Trump, whether in your neighborhood, a local bar, or online, and you’ll find similar violent contempt for women, for immigrants, for trans people. Sit down with garden-variety America First dudebros, and you’ll likely have a front-row seat to the kind of fragility and aggression that explain precisely why a male loneliness epidemic should exist.
That the same performative males who never shut up about protecting children and women are so silent on the Epstein files and still so emotionally tethered to a sexual predator like Donald Trump reminds us how morally adrift they are, how rudderless they have become. Or worse, maybe it reminds us that this is exactly who they are because they willfully choose to be. Either way, it’s a national manhood emergency.
The urgent crisis of MAGA masculinity isn’t revealed by a performative clown like Josh Hokit; it’s revealed in the guys who are defending him in comment sections right now. It’s revealed in the dudes who laugh off his abject filth as a supposed “joke” that the oversensitive Left can’t take. It’s revealed in men who spend their days echoing his verbal diarrhea around their wives, girlfriends and children.
The toxic manosphere may be headlined by guys like Trump, Rogan, and Hokit, but it’s the massive undercard of tens of millions of perpetually enraged, emotionally unsteady, podcast-addled disciples that should alarm the rest of us. It isn’t just the poisoned minds of the guys at the top that are cause for alarm, but the trickle-down ignorance that has reached our families, friends, co-workers, classmates, church friends, and neighbors
Last week, I walked past a few conservative guys in our neighborhood having a typically louder-than-necessary front porch conversation. Normally, when I pass by, I crank up my earbuds to drown out the steady torrent of liquor-lubricated, nonsensical, right-wing talking points sure to be loudly propelled into the ether, but on that night, I heard the word “transgender.” I decided to listen in, knowing that it wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t.
There was little to differentiate their words from Hokit’s. They reflected the same uninformed phobia, the same irresponsible slurs, and the same dehumanizing hatred the fighter hurled at Michelle Obama from the White House lawn.
Black women will tell you that they are no strangers to slurs like the ones Hokit hurled at the former First Lady. Queer people will confirm that the UFC fighter is not an aberration. This attack isn’t an isolated exception; it’s the consistent party line.
And this same tired charade is playing out all over this country right now. MAGA America has created an entire generation of terrified white man-children who are so intimidated by diversity, so threatened by competition, and so convinced that they’re oppressed that they lash out with a violence that has no regard for its repercussions.
Conservative men’s lives are riddled with pleas for attention, signaling, overcompensation, and an insatiable need to be reassured. For all their baseless attacks on women they claim are men, they’re the ones with the identity crisis.
So, yes, we can see Hokit for what he is: a paid provocateur whose mindless, incendiary comments were intended to incite anger. Still, we can’t ignore the fact that his intended audience is larger and closer than any of us should be comfortable with.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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