Why Dictators Have Secret Sexual Perversions
Dictator Sexuality: How Tom Buchanan Took Over The World
Before blowing his brains out beneath a bunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler married his long-time love interest Eva Braun.
The wedding was a farce—a grim little ceremony in a concrete tomb while the Red Army railed the city above. It’s hard to imagine the marriage was consummated. But the truth is we don’t know.
In fact, there’s a lot we don’t know about Hitler’s sex life. It’s a remarkable accomplishment. He’s perhaps the most documented human being of the 20th century and we can say almost nothing definitive about his sexuality.
Which loudly begs the question: what was he hiding?
A variety of accusations have been hurled at him through time. Did he like getting pooped on? Was he merely impotent as Ernst Hanfstaengl argued? Was the answer too disturbing for the world to know definitively?
The truth is forever lost to time. But the fact that his sexuality was so masterfully concealed tells you that there was something worth hiding. The man who bent an entire nation to his will could not face his own dick.
From dictator to dictator, a similar pattern emerges: social power protecting sexual perversion.
Dictator sexuality is what’s happening whenever a man uses his social power to do creepy, violent shit to those below him, normally women. Sometimes, girls. People who can’t say no, who can’t defend themselves, who cannot seek justice when things go wrong. And they always, always go wrong.
I don’t know when it became acceptable human behavior, but it’s been around since the Jazz Age with literature’s worst East Egger.
The Buchannian Dictatorship
Tom is the quintessential American dictator—not the kind with a cult of personality and personal police force, but the kind who uses his social position to unleash his repressed sexual animal on the unfortunates beneath him.
Fitzgerald wrote him in The Great Gatsby a hundred years ago, and he’s been running the country ever since.
He peaked in college as a football star. Now he’s rich, bored, and obsessed with the non-white masses swallowing the white race. He reads racist pseudoscience and tells you about it at dinner. “Yeah, according to this book, apparently I’m a member of a superior race.” A silly idea that has been ridiculously repeated by every single racial group that’s ever existed.
“We’re very, very special boys. Maybe the most special of all” Tom says before prancing to the kitchen to phone his side chick.
Tom cares deeply about the white race. Surprisingly, he has precious little interest in his own daughter. There’s not a single scene in the entire novel where Tom shows any interest in her. Wasn’t even there when she was born. Poor kid. He’s too busy reading about his very special boy DNA, cheating on his wife and… physically assaulting his mistress?!
Let’s talk about that other woman. Myrtle Wilson. Fitzgerald doesn’t even describe her as pretty. “Faintly stout.” Contains “No facet or gleam of beauty.” She has “vitality”—a polite way of saying she’s available.
Myrtle conveniently lives along Tom’s commute to the city, so he can pick her up without a detour. The whole thing is less like love and more like a logistics operation.
See, Tom is a cool, well-adjusted Übermensch like that.
But here’s the thing that Fitzgerald understood about Tom and men like him: his own wife Daisy doesn’t really want him. She’s with him for the money, the status, and the security. And there’s a moment in the novel where this is on full display.
Can we talk about the shirt scene? Why is no one talking about the shirt scene?!
Gatsby has been showing Daisy around his mansion. He pulls out his shirts, piles of them, beautiful shirts from England. And Daisy starts to cry. “They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
On the surface, it’s a ridiculous line. But what’s actually happening is that Daisy is seeing the life she could have had. A life with a man who actually desired her. A man who threw these extravagant parties just for the chance that she might wander in.
Gatsby loves Daisy. Tom owns her.
Tom could never make a woman cry over his shirts. Tom makes women cry with his fists.
And in that moment, Daisy realizes what she traded away. She’s shackled to a bitter bully who makes everyone around him miserable. A narcissist who can only feel good about himself when he’s putting someone else down. And she cries because she knows she’ll never have an orgasm in her entire life.
Tom builds boxes with boundaries for the women in his life. It might be suffocatingly claustrophobic, but it makes him feel safe, like he’s in control. And by all accounts, he is in control. When Myrtle violates the boundaries of the arrangement—by saying Daisy’s name—Tom physically assaults her in public. Breaks her nose with an open hand. Nothing happens. No one intervenes.
Tom is a man with power. Myrtle is a woman with no power. So Tom can brutalize her in front of people and no one thinks about intervening.
This is what I call a Buchannian dictatorship: men with power can do creepy or violent shit to women without power, and nobody will stop them.
But you don’t need to be a wealthy failson to be this kind of dictator.
Any old schlub with a microscopic modicum of power will suffice.
Keith Ervin, The Small Town Tom Buchanan
Not every Buchannian is rich or peaked as a college football star. Some of them are small-time school board members in Kingsport, Tennessee. But they’re just as dangerous, because the system protects them too.
Keith Ervin. A school board member in Washington County TN. In April, during a livestreamed meeting, he turned to a high school girl sitting next to him, touched her arm, and said: “God, you’re hot. Do you know that? Damn. Where do you go to school at?”
He knew she was a child. He literally asked her where she went to school. Other board members laughed. The meeting went on.
Only after massive public backlash on social media did anything happen. Keith Ervin was censured—the school wrote a strongly-worded letter. Keith Ervin didn’t even own up to it and officially denies “meaning anything by it.” Denial is always the last stage of these things.
Keith Ervin kept his job.
The message from the Washington County School Board is clear: please shut the fuck up about Keith. He can do whatever he wants to children and we will protect him from anyone who tries holding him accountable.
I shudder to imagine the long line of women and girls Keith Ervin–that chubby, balding, insipid swine–has fawned over like a drooling dog hungry for its next meal. If he can’t even contain himself at the sight of a child–during a public livestream no less–what happens behind closed doors? What happens when there are no witnesses?
Keith Ervin is a man with power. That underage girl he harassed is a child without power. He can sexually harass her in public and no one thinks about intervening.
It is not an accident. It is not a coincidence.
Ohhhh, that’s why Daisy wept when she found out her baby was a girl.
Keith Ervin hit on a child in public on a recorded livestream and got away with it. But don’t let that make you think the volunteer state is soft on crime.
Meet Larry Bushart. A former law enforcement officer. He posted a meme on Facebook following the Charlie Kirk drama:
The police came to his home. Arrested him for “threatening mass violence at a school.” His bail was set at a jaw-dropping $2 million. For reference, the median bail for murder is $100k. Bushart was jailed for 37 days. Lost his job. Missed his granddaughter’s birth.
All for a meme.
Tennesseans call this freedom.
The charges were eventually dropped but the damage was done.
So let’s say the quiet part out loud: In Tennessee, in Trump country, an elected official can sexually harass a little girl in public, on a livestream, and face no consequences. Meanwhile, a retired cop can post a meme about a podcaster and get imprisoned for over a month.
Tennessee is a Buchannian dictatorship: every woman (and girl) is Myrtle Wilson so that every man can be Tom Buchanan. And anyone who challenges the status quo could face jailtime.
If Keith Ervin had been born rich, if he had been handed a football scholarship and a trust fund, he would be Tom Buchanan. The only difference is the altitude of the grabbing. Keith can’t afford to buy a beauty pageant or visit Epstein’s island so he has to settle for little girls who go to school board meetings.
It’s the most fun he can have without facing consequences. But if he were richer, more powerful–he could be having more fun, a lot more fun.
The Logical Extreme
The Epstein Files. Good God, the fucking Epstein Files.
This is Tom and Keith taken to their most vicious and most coordinated.
Tom had a mistress conveniently located far from home, someone from a lower social class with no recourse. Epstein just scaled that exact operation. Dozens of Myrtle Wilsons, many of them children.
The power differential is the same. The impunity is the same. The only thing that changes is the body count.
A straight line runs from Myrtle Wilson’s apartment in the valley of ashes to the tarmac of Epstein’s island. At every altitude, it is the same transaction: power converted into access to bodies that can’t say no.
At the bottom, a school protects a creep drooling at a child. At the top, a financier trafficking girls to billionaires and politicians.
They don’t even hide it. They do it out in public. Everyone knows. Nothing happens.
When Lex Fridman asked Trump about the hesitation around releasing the Epstein files in 2025, Trump’s response was the verbal equivalent of shitting his pants in public: “I’m not involved. I never went to his island.”
Nobody asked if he went to the island. Nobody accused him of going to the island. The question was about the hesitation on releasing the files. And he responded with a straight-up denial of a crime no one had mentioned.
Ohhhh. That’s why the hesitation.
The denial that nobody asked for is the confession. It’s the mask slipping for just a second. It’s the same energy as Keith Ervin claiming he “didn’t mean anything by it.” Denial is always the last stage of these things. Always.
And it works, because the system is designed to make it work.
The Bargain
Here is the part that should keep you up at night: every conservative is living with this bargain.
Maybe they’re not the predator. Maybe they’re just the one who laughed at the school board meeting. Maybe they’re the one who looked away. Maybe they’re the one who hears about it later and says, “Well, that’s just how he is” or “isn’t that just awful?”
But they know.
On some level, they know what their movement protects. And they have decided it’s acceptable.
Albert Camus once wrote, “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
Well, guess what? Watching men like Tom physically assault women like Myrtle is siding with the executioner. Not saying anything when a grown man flirts with a child is siding with the executioners. Voting for a party that conspires to keep the Epstein files hidden forever is siding with the executioners.
For the love of God — stop siding with the executioners!
There are no innocent bystanders. If you vote for a party that jails the meme-maker and protects the predator, you don’t get to pretend you didn’t know. You don’t get to claim you’re just in it for the economy. You don’t get to say, “Well, I’m not one of those Republicans.”
You are the reason men like Tom can abuse women like Myrtle in broad daylight and face no consequences. You are the reason Keith Ervin still has a job. You are the reason the Epstein files remain illegally sealed.
Every time a conservative tells you they’re the party of family values, of protecting children, of moral clarity, remember the all that they are complacent with.
They keep grabbing down because no one is punching up.
It is not an accident. It is not a coincidence.
It is the whole fucking point.
