The Bitch Factor Inherent in the Mendacious Madness of Trump.

I initially heard about the white supremacist hierarchy of hate while serving my first sentence in federal prison.

I was sentenced to prison on five separate occasions. My shortest was 2 years, twice, followed by 2.5 years, thrice. On November 5, however, it felt like I was condemned to an additional 4-year term, not including county time (always the hardest time to do, by the way) to be served right up until my official transfer to the penitentiary on Inauguration Day. The noticeable difference between then and now is that the holding cell I currently occupy is awfully fucking crowded.

There’s been a lot of soul-searching going on as to just how Trump pulled it off. Given, however, my years of experience locked up with some of the Trumpiest men on the planet, I’m going to posit a twofold answer. The second I’ll get to presently, but the first is undoubtedly misogyny.

I initially heard about the white supremacist hierarchy of hate while serving my first sentence in federal prison. At the top of their list are Jews, followed quickly by Africans. The list then morphs into hatred of various POCs, religions, and LGBTQs, and ends with the Japanese. They of course hate the Japanese, as well, but hate them the least, mostly because of the Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan alliance during WWII.

Despite the secretive nature of white supremacists, the hierarchy is fairly familiar. Less so, however, is their hatred of women, under which, in a place bereft of females, their Hitler-inspired homophobia seemed to increase exponentially. One cannot be openly gay in prison, for instance. If you are, they will forcibly feminize you, I’m guessing because the anti-gay prigs who put you in panties in the first place can then justify having sex with you that is somehow understood to be not at all gay.

Sounds downright Trumpian in its twisting’s, does it not?

The victims of the feminization, whether voluntary trans or no, are referred to as punks and bitches. Indeed, so absolute is white supremacist revulsion of all things womanly that, if another inmate brands you effeminate by openly calling you a punk or a bitch, you have to fight him. You must counter the accusation that you are unequivocally a sissy la-la with bona fide fists of masculinity. If you refuse, they’ll send in the goon squad to beat you down and roll you up (so-called because those thin prison mattresses can be rolled like Yodels) off of whatever yard you happen to be occupying.

Rolling up is also known as PCing. PC is the acronym for Protective Custody, aka Punk City. It’s where they keep the rapists and child molesters and snitches and all those others whom the normal cadre of convicts despise enough to want to kill, batter, or, much more common, extort. And even though nine times out of ten admin will not put you in actual protective custody (where space is at a premium) but instead simply move you to another yard, the PC label, unlike Trump’s slime trail of malfeasance, sticks, and will eventually catch up to you, at which time you’ll need to PC up. Again.

PCing is also mostly voluntary and, in practice, quite simple. All you need do is walk up to a guard, tell him or her that your life is in danger, and you’ll be rolled up immediately. In prison and even jail you can remove yourself completely from your world and move to another, and for the most spurious of reasons. Have a beef with another inmate? PC up. Owe money for a gambling or drug debt that you don’t want to pay? PC up. Also known as a bitch move, PCing is the ultimate act of unmanliness. And yet, after spending over a decade in jails and prisons, I’ve seen hardened convicts – including not a few white supremacists – PC up for the feeblest of reasons; from avoiding a fight to saving face or even owing a few bucks.

In a similar vein, many Hispanic/Latino males voted for Trump on the mostly mythic notion that he’d save them a comparable few bucks. Cast their ballot for the man who called Mexicans drug dealers, criminals, and rapists; went to bat for the cat who ripped children from the arms of Latino mothers and incarcerated both separately; backed the blatant bigot who blocked hurricane aid from Puerto Rico during Maria, flinging them quicker picker uppers instead; and threw in their lot with a known grifter who said and did almost nothing when a member of his entourage referred to that same island as a floating pile of garbage.

The number one rule in prison for all ethnicities is that you have to be down for your race. No matter what. So, judging by the convict code (which are mantras to many hip hoppers, Latino hip hoppers not least), backing Trump is the ultimate bitch move. Case in point is a Puerto Rican man in Allentown, PA, who said he voted for Trump because eggs were 5 bucks a dozen compared to the .99 cents he claims he was paying four years ago, in effect selling out his people, his entire island, for four dollars, convict code or no.

Further, if the price of eggs is more important than Trump’s full-throated support of J-6ers (this not even mentioning every Trump voter’s tacit support of their pardons) or women dying from a miscarriage because they can’t get a life-saving abortion, then I would posit that those men are not voting rationally but rather emotionally, kind of like, well, women have been accused of doing.

On the opposite side of the price-of-eggs-and/or-hip-hop crowd are Latino evangelicals, one of the fastest growing factions in the country. Their I-voted-for-Trump reasoning revolves around their pro-life stance. Since, however, they are so willing to cast the first stone, I would love to lead them to Proverbios 12:22: “Los labios mentirosos son abominación a Jehová.” I wonder if lying lips are a different level of abomination on the sin meter than, say, abortion or even being gay. And how does frequency fit in? The Washington Post meticulously compiled an astonishing list of just how promiscuous the lying lips of Trump have been: “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency – averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.” Imagine a single woman getting 30,573 abortions or, better yet, a plural-pronoun-sporting individual wrapping their lips around a same-sex organ an equivalent number of times. Now imagine millions upon millions of evangelicals – not to mention five members of a certain Supreme fucking Court – justifying their vote for them.

Then there are young black males. Their loyalties also shifted significantly to Trump in this election despite his familial and frankly funereal reputation of discrimination against Africans. According to Tyler Austin Harper, “Donald Trump’s history of racism is breathtaking. His track record of prejudice is so prodigious that keeping all of the incidents straight is difficult: There’s the Central Park Five, the ‘Muslim ban,’ his response to Charlottesville. ‘Shithole’ countries and lamenting that Nigerian immigrants won’t ‘go back to their huts.’ The fabrications about Haitians eating pets.”

I would love for just one of these hairy-assed Trump supporters to tell me exactly what Harris said or did or even planned to do that placed her below this level of contempt; to describe for me why they voted for this flagrant bigot over a genuine woman of color. One explanation bandied about is that his allegedly unfair treatment at the hands of the justice system knits a kinship between he and African American males because Harris purportedly went after young black men as a prosecutor, a meme voiced by Charlamagne Tha God in his interview with her; “one of the biggest allegations against [Harris] is that [she] targeted and locked up thousands of Black men in San Francisco for weed.” Although patently false, the disinformation has struck a nerve, not surprising given the veneration of crime and rife misogyny so prevalent in hip hop. Now, consider the reality that Trump’s foul mouth and criminal proclivities combined with his open objectification of women apes hip hop almost perfectly at the same time certain rap lyrics conspicuously similar to “grab ‘em by the pussy” apes Trump right back, and you have a match made in misogyny heaven.

Moreover, these self-proclaimed thugs who lionize convict codes can justify a lot, not least of which is rooting for J-6ers assaulting over a hundred cops in a twisted rhyming of fuck tha police. It may also, by the way, explain the naked worship of Trump among non-college educated white males; why his bellicose vitriol seems to exponentially increase their sycophancy. As previously noted, rappers can very often say whatever they want in their songs without suffering the least infraction from even the most malevolently woke individuals. Not so white boys. So, simply put, Trump is rap for rednecks.

Of course, many men unaffiliated with hip hop also voted for Trump, with most, like the egg man mentioned above, claiming it was the economy, but they did so fully knowing that their vote would literally Trump (pun intended) the living shit out of women’s rights, a blatantly misogynistic move if there ever was one and which leads right back to why the hierarchy of hate has attracted such a diverse swarm of young men. Christopher Rhodes, in his piece, “Why ‘white’ supremacists are not always white,” puts it plainly enough:

The processes of radicalisation – from Fox News to online message boards – has ensnared a growing variety of people, mostly disaffected men, not only by touting their own superiority but, more potently, by pointing out to them who they should hate or disdain. These recruits – again, mostly men, usually young – unite over a shared hatred for marginal groups: immigrants, working and poor classes, Black people, LGBTQ individuals, Jews and, perhaps most importantly, women.

The commonality among all of these men, however, is raw emotion. They are populists, pure and simple, with little desire and apparently even less capacity to reason their way through the spurious nuances of political rhetoric. It’s why we find Latino/Hispanic and African American men bizarrely bedfellowing with white supremacists. Trump is perceived as manly, and manly is superior to womanly – especially relevant given that the slew of sexual assaulters Trump has nominated for his cabinet are the stuff of neo-Nazis’ (not to mention those equivalently creepy incels) wet dreams. Women in their eyes are punks and bitches; are indeed frail and emotional basket cases bereft of the God-given dosage of testosterone allotted to those made in His image. But more women voted for the candidate who is not a duplicitous, lying patriarch and halfway-out-of-the closet white supremacist, while this strange clique of men and most especially those connected to hip hop – think beyond crazy Kanye to more rational rappers like Killer Mike and Anuel AA – refused to, which leads to an unerring conclusion: As self-monikered alpha males who were nonetheless too chicken shit to vote (arguably twice) for a woman over an obvious sociopath whose obsession with makeup rivals even the most dedicated drag queen, they sure as fuck are shining examples of their own vilified specifications of femininity.

Not that there’s not legitimate anger and beefs. There are, illiberal identity politics and the border not least. And Democrats are horrible at messaging and almost always pick the wrong battles. But to actually believe that the complex problems we face can be strongarmed by fascism (because it has such a great track record in Latin America) and/or underwritten by billionaires (what I call the bling factor; many a hip hopper glorifies ill-gotten profits as much as they do guns and demeaning women, but I can’t wait until they get a taste of Ramaswamynomics) is beyond delusional. Income inequality is off the charts, mostly due to corporate greed and price manipulation fueled by our ever increasing oligopolies; aka markets dominated by a small coalition of corporations (and/or billionaires) which, intuitively, have a vested interest in gouging prices under a democratic president.

And to be clear, I just about give an incel’s pimply ass about gangster rap philosophy manifested in their lyrics and/or lifestyles; certainly no more than I do for Hollywood elites making revenge fantasy after revenge fantasy idolizing good guys with a gun. As a free expression purist, I simply view the misogyny and deification of crime, especially black-on-black crime, as only a step or two above the ravings of the Westboro Baptist Church, but I also laugh in the face of liberal elites when they insist that I stop referring to myself as an ex-con, as if they had one fucking iota of authority to do so.

But when it comes to exploiting the First Amendment, you have to hand it to the far rights’ ability to redirect their own spinelessness onto their opponents. In a white supremacist ploy, they have literally punked their base and are indeed doing so with Nazi strategies like “Accusation in a Mirror” (AiM), a scheme that has often been used to justify genocide. First exploited by Joseph Goebbels, who said “impute to enemies exactly what they and their own party are planning to do,” AiM is the holy grail of the hierarchy of hate. Susan Benesch, in her paper, “Vile Crime or Inalienable Right: Defining Incitement to Genocide,” puts it succinctly: “The propagandist understood that accusation in a mirror achieves an important psychological prerequisite for genocide: it provides a collective justification for mass atrocities, just as self-defense provides an ironclad excuse for the crime of homicide.” On the former, think of the great replacement conspiracy and its direct relation to the latter in cowardly little shits like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, both of whom literally got away with murder because of AiM and are in point of fact viewed as heroes to far too many cretinous MAGAites. Republicans are thus mirroring the white supremacist rhetoric that makes men feel like bitches, the genius of which plays into the very human (and naturally selected) propensity to never be satisfied no matter what. As such, they push the woefully overwrought and mostly false allure that life in America really can be great again (because it’s such a shithole now, of course,) with the right man in charge. Think of Elon Musk’s calls to ban the IRS because, you know, taxes have so crippled him financially.

Which leads us into the second reason why so many sought shelter in the mendacious madness of Trump: the grievance factor. No alpha male I ever looked up to was a such whiney little bitch, the quintessentially apropos moniker that Bill Maher has bestowed upon Trump. Indeed, so routine has the Trump whine become it is now trendy in the same manner that his unending lies have become what I’ve dubbed trendy truth – with the trendiest perhaps being that he won the 2020 election or, more recently, that Biden has destroyed Trump’s “best economy ever.” Those of us with the capacity to reason, however, know Trump’s strategy of lying echoes Stalin even as the former labels his rivals’ commies. In a “Moscow Times” piece, “Why Lying Has Become a National Pastime,” Marilyn Murray sums it up nicely: “Not telling the truth was reinforced by a Soviet system that lied consistently to their people. The government instilled great fear in its citizenry with nonstop propaganda about enemies who they perceived were everywhere – within and without the country.” This last in Trump terms, radical left lunatics and migrants, respectively. In this respect, he is preaching to the cowards.

Nor is Trump the first and certainly not the only lying cum whiney little bitch to take a leadership role in the Republican Party. Recall Newt Gingrich, the original whiner in chief, and the slew of insipid snake oilers who followed his lead, from Tom Delay to Dennis Hastert to the Tea Party and its sniveling spawns like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jim-Fucking-Jordan.

What pathetically facile victims they all make.

Lastly, not only are lies the building blocks of Trump’s wall of whimpering but also echo the endless whine of all those white supremacists I was forced to break bread with for so many years. But what irks me even more is that I’m now expected to swallow the lie by blaming Harris; to pretend that she was a flawed candidate and Trump the better, more deserving person, and to moreover heed the clarion calling on me to reach across the aisle and embrace my Aryan brothers and their newfound ilk, as if I was still locked up and had no choice but to shake their hate-filled hands just to fucking survive – the irony of which, by the way, was almost too galling. Self-preservation prevented me from informing them that, had their hero Hitler succeeded in his worldwide pogrom, they’d have been in line behind the gypsies. Cults, however, are rife with mawkish conformists posing as iconoclasts, as are, unfortunately, their voting blocs.