Homelander Goes to Washington

Donald Trump is the most successful fascist of the attention economy era, I mulled while watching the Pete Hegseth confirmation hearing. Hegseth has been credibly accused of rape, showing up drunk to work, and shouting “Kill all Muslims” in a bar. He’s bankrupted several of his own organizations. Why would anyone nominate this guy? The best explanation is that, according to a disillusioned GOP oppo researcher in 2016, “Trump thinks he [Hegseth] looks and sounds good on TV.” And he’s MAGA-loyal. Trump has set him up as a square-jawed, salt-and-pepper Captain America, an image enhanced by his cartoonish flag boasting — on socks at the hearings, as a jacket lining at a rally. But he resembles no one more than Homelander, the narcissistic and violent leader of corrupt superheroes on TV’s The Boys, who rapes, murders, and lies with sloppy abandon while playing the glossy-haired, back-slapping hero to millions of adoring citizens. Hegseth probably wishes he could shoot lasers out of his eyes, but instead, it’s patriotic smarm dripping out of his mouth.

Hegseth is not the first nominee for high office in the MAGA orbit to be credibly accused of sexual assault — Brett Kavanaugh was, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was, and so was Trump. No one is even pretending that sexual assault allegations are disqualifying. The effect is that what has long been a more private tool of American male power — sexual assaults carried out in the home, behind closed doors at work, in prisons — is now a public tool of male power, prominently displayed and thinly denied by nominees for public office. In fact, Hegseth was ahead of the curve on this: When he was a mere Princeton undergraduate, the conservative journal he published ran a piece arguing that a woman who’d passed out couldn’t be raped because she couldn’t experience “duress.” Twenty years later, rape lends a little frisson to the media arcs of the swaggering, staggering machos in our era of raw retaliatory power. 

Feminism does linger around these debates, but not as a force that can stop the appointments. Rather, during the hearings, Hegseth and his fellow party members repeatedly referred to “wokeness” in the military, suggesting that gender equity and anti-racism in the military are weakening national defense. Liberal senators castigate the nominee for his sexist comments and demand sex equality in the army.

I don’t think that the MAGA team cares much whether Hegseth raped anyone or whether we at home are convinced that he didn’t. This torrid spectacle is designed to overwhelm us by way of the many social media and cable channels to which we’re addicted, largely owned by people who back Trump. I lost hours of my life watching Hegseth lie through his big, camera-ready teeth. I’ve lost hours, wide-eyed, absorbing tradwives making cereal from scratch on TikTok with a glassy-eyed tenacity that makes girlbossery look benign. While there were not Beyoncé-level superstars at the inauguration, it was awash in manosphere podcasters and TikTok influencers. As we go to press, Trump and Elon Musk have turned dismantling the government into a very successful form of content. 

As Michelle Santiago Cortés has noted in our pages, participants in the attention economy manosphere try to replace vulnerability with aggression, their dearth of friends with far-off followers, and end up terribly lonely and aggrieved in the process. The more we digest content like this — or any content at all on platforms belonging to Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others — the more lonely and alienated we feel, and the more politics is reduced to mere discourse on platforms designed to sell us to advertisers. It’s an onslaught on our minds and spirits, and it’s as addictive as opiates. I used to accede that perhaps we needed a “left Joe Rogan,” but in many ways, the medium is the message — if the left depends on bridging differences to form one solidaristic mass, we all know that social media, which encourages attention-seeking over careful discussion, isn’t the place to do it.

At Lux we’ve become very interested in developing our ideas away from this onslaught. One more positive reason for the relative quiet on the left since Trump’s election is that we have long since started doing the things we think we should do to face rising fascism — here and abroad. Part of that is working through this magazine to refine our thinking about the political moment, analyze the conditions, and face hard facts. But we also use the magazine to connect us to many sympathetic spheres. Right after the election, we held two in-person events. One brought a filmmaker, who had adapted Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein’s Lux article about the self-proclaimed redneck mutual aid auto repair shop. Our home at the Francis Kite Club filled up with mutual aid organizers, journalists, and artists, glad to be together post-election to talk about very local organizing. Our second event was a packed bookstore panel to discuss the election itself. The atmosphere in the room was focused — everybody wanted to be together in this moment and think together, even if they had to stand. 

We plan to do more work like this in the coming period and are developing plans for a tour (please tell me if you have an organization, university department, or smart donor who can bring Lux folks out to talk: [email protected]). In this issue, you’ll find a lot of unexpected communities, wartime solidarities, and big, in-depth essays like our cover story. We’re so proud of the community we’re building with you.