The Transformation of Tyrants

Antisemitism in the manosphere

Have you ever wondered if you’re descended from the all-powerful Genghis Khan?

Listed in the “famous people sidebar” on 23andMe, you can discover if your genes are laced with this (in)famous Mongolian leader’s spermatozoa. Simply spit in a vial and find out if that warrior nature you’ve always intuited is true. In fact, by some estimates, 16 million men alive today come from that mighty stock.

As 23andMe puts it,

Historians have long noted Khan’s prolific nature; he is rumored to have fathered more than 40 sons, with some of his descendants also fathering many sons of their own. So it’s a good bet that we’re seeing Genghis Khan’s legacy in the 8% of Mongolian males alive today who have identical Y-chromosome signatures.

What a way to Make Rape Great Again!

Don’t blame 23andMe. Khan was long ago reframed as a savior uniting disparate Mongol tribes. Never mind the 40 million people killed under his rule.

In fact, as one science website puts it, all that carnage was great for the environment! Turns out murdering 10 percent of the global population really reduces our carbon footprint.

Perhaps we can forgive these data crunchers for championing a man alive a millennium ago. That much time and distance transforms even the most murderous of tyrants into a modern symbol of masculine strength.

Besides, Khan was kicking it during the tail end of those pillaging, plundering, raping Vikings—and we love those guys today as well. 

Everywhere you look, the strongman is having a day. Really, thousands of years of days, but we really dig tyrants right now.

Genghis’s grandson Kublai got props in the Netflix series, “Marco Polo,” even if the series was dropped after two seasons and an apparent $200 million loss. Not so with vikings, however, the focus of too many series, movies, and books to count. 

So how long does it take to transform from vicious tyrant to sexy strongman? A thousand years is certainly enough down time for an internet makeover of dramatic proportions.

More disturbingly is “less than a century.”

Yet in our attentional-deficit age, Hitler is having a moment.

Men with mics

Sure, Hitler was always revered in part of the population. The part we used to ignore while they waged faux skirmishes in the woods and yelled to one another about how life isn’t fair.

They’re no longer in the woods. Now they have podcast mics, and they’re mostly aggrieved, ambitious men.

Myron Gaines hosts one of those podcasts that feature groups of young women surrounded by men yelling at them for all the problems they’ve caused which really only exist in the men’s ill-formed minds.

Gaines is a big fan of Andrew Tate. Speaking of selfish pricks, he recently hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes and boasted about running the biggest podcast willing to tackle the “Jewish question.” 

Besides using a cash register sound effect when discussing Jewish people and dressing up as a Hasid during Rumble livestreams, these actual words fell from Gaines’s mouth hole: 

Though [Hitler] did things that were morally incorrect, he definitely did a bunch of things correct for his country. That’s a fact.

Then there’s former Ye associate, white nationalist, and (another) Andrew Tate fanboy, Sneako, who has a history defending Hitler and ejaculates comments like this: 

The label owners, the real estate owners, like, all the people with the most amount of money behind the scene is a Jewish guy. Why are we out here slaving away for Jews who are profiting off of us killing each other?

Perhaps the most bonkers moment is when he references Nazis as “having drip” and notes that the swastika is “aesthetically pleasing.”

Because Jewish people today definitely appreciate how much swagger Nazis had when they walked.

Normalizing tyranny

A full accounting of modern antisemitism would take volumes and need to be updated daily. Besides the danger revisionist history and the barrage of gross stereotypes puts Jewish people in, we’ve seen people rewrite tyrants before. Only now, with the speed of social media and streaming platforms, it’s happening way too quickly.

Influencers with millions of followers dropping antisemitic rhetoric in between misogynistic takes on “what women really want” normalizes anti-Jewish sentiment. These conversations place gross misrepresentations within the context of everyday conversation, as true and almost-nonchalant as their ideas that all women need protectors and are, at heart, little more than “hoes and tricks.” 

Maybe this expectable in a culture that not only normalizes tyrants of times past, but of the present as well. A culture set to put Donald Trump on the presidential ticket and that champions Andrew Tate as a prophetic straight shooter is already accustomed to elevating the worst of us.

Their minions, with their fewer houses and cars, hope to achieve similar status as the tyrants they adore. Revising history, and the present, doesn’t require a second thought in their sheltered, myopic minds. 

In America: The Farewell Tour, journalist Chris Hedges writes,

The single-minded pursuit of happiness, with happiness equated with hedonism, wealth, and power, creates a population consumed by anxiety and self-loathing. Few achieve the imagined pinnacle of success, and those who do are often psychopaths. Building a society around these goals is masochistic. It shuts down any desire for self-knowledge because the truth of our lives is unpleasant. We fill the spiritual vacuum with endless activities, entertainment, and nonstop electronic hallucinations. We flee from silence and contemplation. We are determined to avoid facing what we have become.

Hedges concludes the book on a hopeful but realistic note. He knows how much organizing is needed to fight this uphill battle against the incessant quest for power and wealth, especially in a gamified system with paralyzing incentives.

While this system’s champions, the revisionist podcast bros, remain ignorant that they spend self-consuming hours of screen time to fill a void, the objects of their terror are all too aware of the cost of their ignorance.

They know what happens when tyrants are transformed into heroes.

Woe be unto those who have not yet had this realization.

For a full round-up of antisemitic misogynists with podcast mics, check out Media Matters.