Anger, Rage, Hatred... Is It Ever OK To Stir Those Emotions Up?

Outside the door, she took four more, What a drag it is getting old

Blue America isn’t raking in much money for our candidates this cycle. I know why. We tend to ask for contributions based on policies, not based on emotions like anger, hatred and rage. And the most successful online fundraising is all about those emotions, starting with Trump’s 35 million in the last quarter. Yesterday, Josh Krasushaar reported that it pays to channel anger against one's opposition more than it does to draw support to one's own campaign message. He pointed to not just Trump but also to Colin Allred, whose bogeyman is Ted Cruz, to Adam Schiff, who uses “MAGA Republicans” the same way Trump uses “Deep State,” and to Adam Frisch who’s running a negative campaign against Colorado psychopath Lauren Boebert (and has brought in the largest quarterly fundraising total for any non-incumbent House candidate). “Negative polarization— the intense dislike of the political opposition— is driving politics,” wrote Kraushaar, “to the point in which we forget what our favored candidates even stand for.” That’s something I always try to stay away from when I write the Blue America e-mails. It’s not always easy… there’s a lot of anger out there. He forgot to mention Meatball Ron. But don't worry... keep reading.

Yesterday, Washington Post reporter Tamia Fowlkes wrote about how pissed off people, especially young people, are about the rulings of the grotesquely corrupt Supreme Court and how that may be a motivation for increased voter turnout. “For many voters under 35 years of age,” she wrote, “especially those on the left, the Supreme Court has become a political issue in the same way that climate change, gun violence and immigration have over the course of the last two decades, some political scientists and organizers have said. Conversations with more than a dozen young voters from around the country who recently visited Washington for the nation’s 247′s birthday celebration suggest a sense of frustration, even resignation for some, but also a renewed understanding that their votes directly impact which justices sit on the federal bench.”

Democrats and liberals have viewed the high court as an institution that has historically protected the rights of marginalized groups. But Republican politicians and activists on the right have successfully remade the court to reflect conservative values: former president Donald Trump, backed by a Republican Senate, appointed three justices to the court, creating a 6-3 conservative majority.

Over the past five years, trust in the United States Supreme Court to “do the right thing” all or most of the time has decreased by 10 percentage points among 18- to 29-year-olds, according to a 2023 national poll released by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School.

The court’s rulings this term, along with last year’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade that guaranteed the right to abortion, could prompt more young people to be active in next year’s presidential and congressional elections, some observers predict.

“They are [angry] because government continues to give them the short end of the stick, they’re going to turn out and vote. And in this case, it could not be more clear that there’s two sides and the contrast could not be more stark,” said Antonio Arellano, a spokesman for NextGen America.

…Young voters, who overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates in last year’s midterms, were credited with helping to stop an anticipated Republican tsunami in Congress. Democrats were able to hold onto the Senate and the GOP won the House with only a slim majority. A Washington Post analysis of census turnout data indicates that 26 percent of voters under 30 turned out in 2022, which was down from 2018, but still notably higher than any midterm election between 2002 and 2014.

And in the spring, college-aged voters in Wisconsin headed to the polls in droves to elect Janet Protasiewicz, flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s majority from conservative to liberal, in a bid to protect abortion rights in the state. Additionally, the state’s young voter turnout led the nation in November’s midterm elections, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Still, turnout among young voters continues to lag behind older voters. Rick Hasen, UCLA Professor of Law and Political Science and Director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, said organizers should seek to expand the number of young people on the voter rolls.

“The kind of political action that should be targeted at young people, the very first thing to think about even more than getting people to show up at the polls is getting them to register in the first place," Hasen said.

In addition to its rulings against affirmative action and student loan forgiveness, the court’s ruling that a Colorado graphic artist could refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples, citing her religious objections.

…According to a 2023 survey by Marist Poll, 50% of 18 to 29-year-old voters disapprove of the job Joe Biden is doing as president. The poll also found that 61 percent of young people don’t want former president Donald Trump to return to the Oval Office.

Voters under 30, who backed Biden by a wide margin according to exit polls conducted by Edison Researcxg and AP VoteCast, were hopeful that the Democrat would make good on his promise to protect abortion access, cancel student loan debt and defend the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. But a series of Supreme Court decisions have made those goals seemingly unachievable. Many now see voting for Biden as a matter of survival.

“I felt like after Roe v. Wade, it just went downhill from there. And I feel like that was the starting point of like, really seeing how bad things could get,” said 21-year-old Faye Ipaye, a student at Bowie State University. “I feel like young people don’t have a lot of trust in them... We’re gonna like have to just pick the lesser of the two evils. I’m just like about doing my due diligence.”

Organizations like NextGen America, a liberal advocacy group and political action committee, are trying to make sure that disillusionment doesn’t turn into disengagement. Its mission is to increase national voter turnout on college campuses and among voters ages 18-29 years old. Through social media outreach, organizers educate about voting resources and Supreme Court rulings and their impact through trusted messengers and peers who can communicate the stakes of the decisions.

Although young voters have consistently leaned Democratic, the party shouldn’t take that support for granted, organizers warn.

Clarissa Unger, CEO of Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, a nonpartisan voter education network working to increase turnout among college students, said Gen-Z voters don’t bind themselves to parties but instead respond to candidates who demonstrate an understanding of their lived experience. "Both parties have an opportunity to make a direct appeal to young people and to bring them into the fold and I think it’s to either party’s detriment to not do so,” Unger added.

A study by the Tufts’ Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) estimated 8.3 million youth became eligible voters in 2022, with 46 percent representing communities of color. If mobilized, this diverse group of newly eligible voters brings with them a unique set of policy priorities shaped by identity and informed by significant national struggles like confronting the covid-19 pandemic and the social justice movement that grew around the police killing of George Floyd, said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Newhouse Director of CIRCLE.

According to data from The Education Data Initiative over 15 million millennials have student loan debt, owing more to the government than any other generation. On average, the group carries a balance of $33,173 per borrower with many waiting, with fingers crossed, for the passage of Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness agenda.

I bet the gay-bashing, anti-Pride DeSantis video went over worse than poorly among young voters, who generally feel strongly against social bigotry. Ian Ward dissected it for people not as obsessed with gay people as the sickos on team DeSants are. “Clips of DeSantis fade in and out,” he wrote, “intercut with a series of seemingly random images: DeSantis with red lightning bolts emerging from his eye sockets; a black-and-white photo of a chiseled bodybuilder; pictures of Hollywood anti-heroes. Headlines denouncing DeSantis’s ‘draconian’ policies on LGBTQ issues flash across the screen, layered atop of clips of liberal talking heads criticizing DeSantis’ record. (On Friday afternoon, the clip disappeared from Twitter, replaced with the message, ‘This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner’ before being deleted. For now, you can still view it here.) To the average voter, this rapid-fire mishmash of images might seem like a political fever dream. But the video fits squarely within an emergent strain of an online conservative subset that focuses on LGBTQ issues and masculinity. This discourse, which emerged from an obscure corner of the internet sometimes called the ‘manosphere,’ relies on a heavily self-referential set of memes to convey its message, a message that is almost always drenched in irony. It can be hard to discern which images are supposed to be taken seriously and which are just designed to provoke outrage and troll the viewer. Yet beneath the irony lies a coherent— if deeply intolerant— argument: The embrace of LGBTQ people is part of a broader plot in society to destroy traditional masculinity.”

NOTE: When I was growing up, these pictures from the DeSantis video are waht a gay magazine looked like.

For the most part, this irony-laden variety of homophobia remains a relatively fringe position on the online right. But its prominence in DeSantis’ latest campaign video suggests that it could be seeping into the conservative mainstream, and that might pay dividends among a group of Republican voters. “After all, [DeSantis’s backers] are seeking out the Trump voter,” said Daniel Adleman, an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Toronto who was written about the overlap between pop-culture and far-right ideologies. “They are trying to demonstrate that DeSantis doesn’t just talk the talk, but he walks the walk— that Trump is all full of lip service, but that DeSantis is the one who makes good on quasi-Trumpian promises.”

To help piece it all together, here’s your definitive guide to the memes and images from DeSantis’ recent video. This might be the first time you’re encountering them, but it likely won’t be the last if you pay close attention on Twitter, Threads, or whatever social new social media platform launches next week.

GigaChad

This meme, depicting a chiseled bodybuilder with a massive chin and a manicured beard, is a staple of discourse in the manosphere. Often referred to as “GigaChad,” the name borrows from the popular internal slang word “chad,” which is used refer to a stereotypical alpha male. The origin of the meme is shrouded in mystery— it’s rumored to have been taken from a series of photoshopped images of bodybuilders taken by a Russian photographer— but it first made its way online in 2017, when a version of the image was posted to the popular message board 4chan. The post introducing the meme defined GigaChad as, “The perfect human specimen destined to lead us against the reptilians”— a nod to a fringe conspiracy theory that posits that the world is run by humanoid reptiles.

Since its introduction, though, the meme has come to symbolize an ideal male form that, according to certain strains of thinking on the right, is being wiped out by the alleged feminization of American culture and media. Consider it the manosphere’s statue of David.

Patrick Bateman

You may recognize him from the 2000 film American Psycho— based on the 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis— but Christian Bale’s character has taken on a whole new life in the manosphere. In the movie, Bateman is a chauvinistic and status-obsessed Wall Street banker who— spoiler alert— may (or may not) lead a secret life as a serial killer and cannibal. (The movie leaves open the possibility that Bateman’s murderous activities are part of an elaborate, delusional fantasy.) Ironically, Bateman idolizes Donald Trump, a symbol of New York’s well-heeled nouveau riche during the 1980s.

Online, Bateman and other erstwhile Wall Street icons such as The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort (who also makes a brief appearance in the DeSantis video) have come to symbolize the set of hypermasculine virtues the manosphere is propagating. “If you’re a superficial reader of Patrick Bateman, he represents an avatar of the Reagan era, self-asserting, shameless, impudent man who’s able to make the best possible use of neoliberalism as it existed in the 1980s and, by extension, as it exists now,” Adleman said. “I could see that might appealing to the alt-right, 4chan crowd in this post-Trumpian era.”

Yes Chad

Giga is not the only Chad popular among this crowd. In mid-2019, an image of a cartoon figure with blonde hair, blue eyes and a thick blonde beard started making its way around Twitter and other online message boards. The illustration was captioned was a single word: “Yes.” Since then, the image has become the template for a universe of memes known as “Yes Chad,” featuring illustration of men — yes, always men— who project an air of masculine authority and steely male confidence. (Sometimes, the meme is paired with an illustration of a blonde woman in a blue dress, symbolizing the so-called “trad wife.”) The meme also carries some not-so-subtle racist undertones, as it depicts the ideal man as an Aryan archetype.

In the video, meanwhile, a cartoon of DeSantis in the style of the “Yes Chad” flashes in between a clip of the governor giving a speech and a scene of him walking with his coterie. What, exactly, DeSantis is saying “Yes” to is left up to the viewer to decode.

Thomas Shelby

The fictional protagonist of the British television drama Peaky Blinders, Tommy Shelby— portrayed by Cillian Murphy— is the leader of a crime gang who evades the law and rival gangs in post-World War I England to expand his criminal empire. But online, Murphy’s character has become associated with the trope of the “sigma male,” a type of man who— in contrast to the stereotypical “alpha male,” who sits atop a social hierarchy— has transcended societal norms to play by his own set of rules. A quick Google search turns up pages of YouTube videos with titles like “12 Reasons why THOMAS SHELBY Is The Ultimate SIGMA MALE.” (In a statement released Wednesday, the team behind Peaky Blinders disowned any association with the DeSantis ad.)

Presumably, the comparison between Shelby and DeSantis is intended to highlight the latter’s willingness to play dirty and buck conservative convention— like, for instance, fighting with Disney or sending planes of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and California.

Bodybuilders

“I’m going to leave aside the strangeness of trying to prove your manhood by putting up a video that splices images of you in between oiled-up, shirtless bodybuilders,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said last weekend when asked about DeSantis’ video — apparently referring to several shots of slick-looking male bodybuilders flexing their bulging muscles. But in certain corners of the online right where the popularity of bodybuilding is on the rise, it’s not strange at all. For one possible explanation of this trend, look no further than Tucker Carlson’s much-discussed documentary The End of Men, which advanced the argument that the destruction of men’s bodies through poor nutrition and poor exercise habits is part of a broader globalist plot to take over the world. Understood in this context, rebuilding a man’s physique isn’t just good for his health— it’s also a critical first step toward overthrowing the power of the corrupt global elite.

DeSantis has not revealed whether weightlifting is a major part of his recent weight-loss efforts, but on the campaign trail he has certainly has leaned into the anti-elite rhetoric that’s tied up with the bodybuilding fad.

Achilles

Is that Brad Pitt staring out from behind that bronze helmet? Yes, yes, it is. As film buffs and mythology nerds will know, Pitt portrayed the ancient Greek hero Achilles in the 2004 movie Troy, based on Homer’s epic poem the Iliad. As in the Iliad, Pitt’s Achilles emerges as the hero of the film, bursting onto the battlefield toward the end of the conflict to revenge the death of his comrade Patroclus at the hands of the Trojan hero Hector.

As many commentators online have pointed out, there a poignant irony to the fact that a video targeting LGBTQ people included an image of Achilles, given that many scholars have interpreted Achilles’ friendship with Patroclus as a type of homosexual relationship. But the valorization of Achilles fits neatly within a broader far-right obsession with ancient Rome and Greece, which some conservatives hold up as the cradle of “Western civilization.” Ever heard of “Bronze Age Mindset”? We bet the creators of this video have.

Over the weekend, the respected Iowa blog Bleeding Heartland, exposed an insidious plot by the Meatball Ron campaign to once again tie Trump to an imaginary pro-LGBTQ agenda. Above is the front of a mailer that went out to likely Republican voters, portraying Trump as a “Transgender Trailblazer.”

And this is the other side of the mailer which quotes Trump saying “We are fighting for the gay community, and we are fighting and fighting hard. With the help of many of the people here tonight in recent years, our movement has taken incredible strides, the strides you’ve made here is incredible.” DeSantis is counting on innate and carefully cultivated right-wing bigotry and homophobia to turn MAGAts against Trump. Will it work? As DeSantis is well aware, the average Republican voter has an IQ way too low to support critical thinking so... anything goes. DeSantis is running the most overtly homophobic campaign since Hitler gave the orders for the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934.