America’s social order has changed. There is a growing amount of economic and financial precarity, and previously marginalized groups are no longer confined to the margins of society. Future shock has left many members of American and global society feeling unmoored and increasingly confused and uncertain about their role in the present. Existential obsolescence breeds anger, resentment, irrationality and violence. Societies and individuals who are experiencing such a crisis of meaning are often attracted to fascists, authoritarians and other such leaders who promise salvation and empowerment.
Male rage is misdirected at the wrong individuals and groups as it is processed through conspiracism and anti-intellectualism and manipulated by malign actors who are masters at gaming the algorithm and attention economy; facts and reality generally do not supersede or override the power of perception and emotions; joy and hope and calling people names such as “weird” are not effective strategies for stopping such destructive forces.
The male rage that powers Donald Trump and his MAGA project and the larger neofascist movement is not race-neutral: It is fueled by aggrieved white male entitlement, racism, and white supremacy. The “natural order of things” in America that is to be restored by Trump and MAGA is one where white men are placed above and made superior to all other groups forever. In practice, this means rich white men. The poor, working-class, and middle-class white men who form the base of Trumpism and American neofascism will be discarded once they prove to be inconvenient to Dictator Trump and the movement. Likewise, the Black and brown people and the women who are attracted to Trump and the MAGA movement will just be used as fuel for the infernal machine once their usefulness ends — and it will end very quickly and very soon if Dictator Trump takes power in 2025.
Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author, and scholar-activist who has long been a major figure in the growing global movement of men working to promote gender equity and prevent gender-based violence. He is a frequent contributor to Ms. Magazine, where he writes about masculinities, politics, and violence. His new film is entitled “The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power, and the American Presidency." He is also a co-founder of the Young Men Research Initiative. Katz is the author of two books, including the classic bestseller "The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help." His next book, entitled "Every Man: Why Violence Against Women Is a Men's Issue", is scheduled to be published by Penguin Random House UK in February 2025. His TEDx talk on that topic has been translated into 27 languages and has over 5.5 million views. He has lectured and trained in all fifty U.S. states, eight Canadian provinces and every continent except Antarctica.
In this conversation, Katz explains the relationship between the Age of Trump and the so-called manosphere and the “men’s rights movement.” He also highlights how Trump’s crude humor and juvenile humor and obsessions (in this example with golfer Arnold Palmer's penis size) reflect insecure masculinity and a larger culture of distraction and superficiality. At the end of this conversation, Katz shares his predictions about the outcome of the 2024 election and how, if Trump wins and becomes the country’s first dictator, angry (white) men will be mostly to blame.
This is the second part of a two-part conversation.
How is the Age of Trump related to the rise of the "men's rights" movement and the “manosphere” and male victimology entertainment propaganda machine?
Many millions of white men, including young white men, are really kind of lost at sea. They’re uncertain about what it means to be a man and some of them are looking for guidance in some of the most dangerous places and leaders. Some are being radicalized online, where the algorithms take them from an interest in men’s issues all the way to chat rooms for organizations that espouse white nationalism and advocate for armed resistance to federal tyranny. It’s a little shocking how much the language and ideas of the misogynous manosphere have made their way into “mainstream” social media.
On the other side, many liberals and progressives are more interested in mobilizing communities of color, women, the LGBTQ community, and other marginalized communities than they are in addressing the needs and interests of cis white men. I think that's a huge mistake politically because what happens when liberals and progressives don’t speak directly to the needs and aspirations of those men is that Donald Trump gets elected President of the United States — and has a good chance of winning again. And ending American democracy as we know it.
Liberals and progressives need to tell a better story to young men, specifically young white men, which lets them know there’s a role for them to play in progressive social change. There is a way for them to be self-respecting people who are respected by others. We want them to be part of positive change in the United States and the world. How are we going to live with each other? How are we going to build a healthier society with men, women, people of all genders, white, Black and brown people, all of us together? Men have a role to play in that. If Democrats, liberals, and progressives can figure out how to do that, they can turn back the tide against Trump and his movement in the years and decades to come. Protecting, defending, and renewing American democracy is going to be a long struggle.
Trump recently joked about Hall of Fame professional golfer Arnold Palmer's penis and how endowed he supposedly was. In his joking, Trump was also sharing his admiration for Palmer's penis. How does this type of crude behavior fit into Trump's performance of masculinity and why do his followers love him so much?
Trump has immeasurably degraded our political culture at the highest level. Who knows if we’ll ever come back from that? Neil Postman was right when he wrote in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" — in 1985! — that democracy is doomed when entertainment values take over political discourse. That said, I’m interested in the ways in which so many men continue to take Trump seriously as an “alpha male” when he says such obviously juvenile things like that. A penis-size reference about a sports and cultural icon like Arnold Palmer? This isn’t serious adult man talk — certainly not in public.
Then again, it’s not lost on anybody that Trump is obsessed with matters of size, so if we want to psychoanalyze him, it’s pretty easy to see there is deep anxiety bubbling underneath the joking exterior. If he’s voted back into office, historians, political scientists and social theorists of every stripe will be analyzing the masculinity politics of Trumpism for the next hundred years. Why do so many millions of men identify with him, especially but not exclusively white men? And for every man who somehow identifies with him, I’m sure there are many more who will vote for him because of his position on immigration or tax cuts. They’re willing to overlook his glaring deficiencies of character and temperament — which of course is s statement about their values and their commitment to democratic principles.
Donald Trump recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast. Rogan has many millions of listeners across the "manosphere" and more broadly. Rogan's influence is underestimated by those in the mainstream news media and commentariat. I would include mainstream liberals and progressives as well. What do you think of Trump's move here?
Trump has been appearing on podcasts with a string of “manfluencers” as part of a broader strategy to convince impressionable young men that “real men vote Republican.” It’s an embarrassingly cartoonish tactic, but I’m afraid it can work with some male voters. In response, the Democrats and aligned groups have been running ads that show “traditional” looking men saying they support Harris. The idea is to create a permission structure for men to support Harris and not feel emasculated by doing so. It’s come down to this: They need to give permission to white men to vote for a Democrat and against fascism.
When I heard that Trump was going on Joe Rogan, I worried that Rogan would play it safe and down the middle, and not confront Trump about all his lies, his obvious corruption, his fawning praise for authoritarian dictators, and the fact that dozens and hundreds of people who worked closely with him in the first administration are trying to frantically warn the public against re-electing him. And that’s what happened. Rogan didn’t bring up any of that. He engaged Trump in a conversation that made him sound normal and relatable. Rogan never pushed back when Trump called generals who served under him stupid and incompetent because they don’t support him now. He didn’t raise any objections when Trump repeatedly called Kamala Harris — who might become the first woman president — “low IQ” and worse.
Many of Rogan’s questions and comments fed the Trumpian narrative that he’s been unfairly persecuted by his enemies, the big disrupter who the “establishment” and the “deep state” fear and are trying to take down. Rogan played right into that cheap storyline, the one that has helped convince millions of working-class white men to vote for a fake populist whose biggest legislative achievement was tax cuts for the wealthy.
I know that Rogan is not a political interviewer and can’t be judged by conventional journalistic standards. But he had the Republican candidate for president in an incredibly tight race for a three-hour conversation less than two weeks before the election. Rogan’s audience is over 80 percent male, and it skews young. It’s worth restating that the Trump campaign’s overarching strategy is to run the table with white male voters, especially high school-educated white men. This was a totally political interview — whether Joe Rogan acknowledges it or not. It’s gotten something like 27 million views and counting!
Rogan asked Trump mostly softball questions. He mainly gave him a forum to use his interpersonal charm and charisma. Much of the conversation was devoted to subjects where Trump shines, like the two men trading stories about UFC and boxing. The Trump campaign’s cynical but ultimately sound calculation is that many low-information, low-engagement voters don’t know or care too much about policy. They know that when Trump appears on podcasts that are popular with young men it feeds the narrative that he can relate to them and that he cares about them. He is, after all, a highly skilled con man. One of the best ever.
Rogan’s devoted fans regularly repeat the podcaster’s stock line that he’s a guy who doesn’t take strong positions on many political issues…he’s “just asking questions.” But his audience is overwhelmingly white men who vote and lean libertarian and conservative. His political interviews platform way more people from the center-right and far-right than anything on the liberal or progressive side. Imagine if Rogan decided to pivot and began to provide his vast audience of men exposure to more progressive and feminist guests — including men who support feminism and don’t reflexively lash out against it. I think many of them would be blown away because they’ve been fed a distorted caricature of feminism and racial justice as based on man-hating and white guilt. Few of them realize, for example, that profeminist men have been researching, writing, and talking about issues of men’s emotional, physical, sexual and mental health since the 1970s!
I do hope Kamala Harris goes on Rogan, but time is running out. The Trump campaign and the conservative infotainment complex have thoroughly discredited her as a lightweight and “DEI hire,” and not the very smart and serious person she is. All those slurs by Trump and his surrogates have had their intended effect. The propaganda has been very effective. She needs to go into the lion’s den — similar to going on Fox News — and prove that she’s strong and unintimidated. And by doing so she’ll signal that she respects his audience — a respect they crave, even if they have to keep up the public act and pretend not to care.
Last Sunday, Donald Trump held his much-anticipated rally at Madison Square Garden. It was a fascist spectacle — and included a speaker who said the "enemies" of the Trump movement need to be “slaughtered.” Trump continued to expand his enemies list to basically include anyone who opposes him as he talked about "the enemy within." The personal is the political. What type of masculinity was being performed and channeled at Madison Square Garden on Sunday?
In 2008 the New York Times described Sarah Palin’s rallies as “spectacles of anger and insult,” which came to mind as I reflected on that ugly evening at MSG. The entire vibe of the event was a mix of right-wing triumphalism — hopefully premature! — and relentless chest-beating, male-centric aggression, and rhetorical violence. For the second time in less than a week, Tucker Carlson said the quiet part out loud when he praised Trump for “liberating us in the deepest and truest sense… Donald Trump has made it possible for the rest of us to tell the truth about the world around us.” Most of the post-rally commentary rightly interpreted this to mean that he was referring to how Trump gave white people permission to express racist sentiments without shame. That was on full display. But so was a deep well of masculinist anger. From the moment Trump emerged as a political figure he has been a vehicle for both white racial resentment and a defiant cry of white male victimhood. I know many women and people of color have little to no patience for the idea that so many white American men see themselves as the true victims of race and gender-based discrimination. When Carlson talks about “telling the truth” about the world, one thing he means is how white working-class men have been disrespected by the feminized elites. This is mighty rich coming from a member of the wealthy white conservative elite like him, but here we are.
A big part of the appeal of Trump’s rallies is that he’s a talented and insightful insult comic. When he mocks and ridicules people who many right-leaning men believe have disrespected them, it puffs them up a little bit. But what’s even more insidious is that when Trump and other right-wing speakers invoke the “threat” posed by dark-skinned immigrants, he’s tapping into many white men’s sense of themselves as protectors. Of course, this is a very old narrative that goes back to the early days of colonial America, when white male European settlers were the protectors of white womanhood against the dangerous Native American “savages.” But it gives these men a feeling of self-worth and a sense that they still matter.
On a symbolic-emotional level, what are the Democrats giving them? I also think it’s important to note that misogyny has been so normalized in the Trump years that when it surfaces at events like this, commentators often downplay or simply overlook it. Trump constantly refers to Harris as “lazy, stupid, low-IQ.” All by itself, speaking this way about the first woman of color to be a major party’s nominee should make him unfit to be president. One speaker implied Harris was a prostitute who had a “pimp handler.” I read that Tony Hinchcliffe, the comedian and podcaster who’s getting lots of blowback for his racist jokes against Puerto Ricans and others, was set to use the c-word in his routine until party officials took it out. And let’s not forget about Carlson’s issues with women. That rant last week about “daddy’s coming home and he’s pissed” at his disobedient daughter was very creepy, but it also provides a revealing glimpse into some of the deeper psycho-sexual resentments and frustrations of right-wing masculinity in an era of steady feminist progress that Trump, MAGA, and their white evangelical allies are furiously trying to roll back and undo.
Who do you think will win the 2024 election?
Like many people, I read the polls, follow the news closely, and worry a lot about the election. Trump is so deeply unfit for office that it shouldn’t even be close. But it is. One way to think about the outcome is that if he wins, it will be because he was able to get more votes from men than Harris was able to get from women. And that truly will be a dark day for this country and the world. But after mourning, we’ll need to redouble our efforts to fight back against Trump’s plans for retribution against his many enemies, the mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, and other anti-democratic moves outlined in Project 2025 and elsewhere.
I’m also worried that his election will give further license to some of the most regressive, misogynous men to openly express and enact hostility to women. It’s a totally different picture if Kamala Harris wins. I know that she and others have downplayed this, largely for strategic reasons, but I’m convinced that the election of the first woman and first woman of color, to be president of the United States will be a huge step forward for this country — and the world. It won’t change everything, but it will permanently disrupt the deeply rooted idea that men are the natural leaders of both the family and the nation. And not only women, girls, and non-binary people will benefit too! I think the best thing that could happen to American men and boys on November 5 is the election of Harris-Walz. We need to say a resounding and definitive no! to Donald Trump and all the damage he has caused with the anger, hostility and violence he has unleashed since he emerged as a national political figure over a decade ago with his racist birther crusade against Barack Obama.
I am worried about violence in the streets for days, weeks and even months after Harris wins because violence is one of right-wing populism’s animating energies. Many people in that movement — especially men — believe that violence is justified if they don’t get what they feel entitled to. But we can’t let the fear of violence get in the way of what we need to do.
