The Illusion of Consent: A Rape at Cornell and the MAGA Right

Last week at The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert wrote a gripping analysis of the Cornell gang rape case, in which she laid out the decades of administrative and policy neglect around campus rape that helped lead to this moment. And she indicted a metastasizing online culture where men replicate frat-boy bonding rituals and abuses for a global, digital audience. At The Guardian, Moira Donegan argued,

Many men rape; many men giggle encouragingly, or shrug indifferently, when their friends rape. Many men rape, and few seem to think that it’s a very big deal. If anything, cases like the alleged incident at Chi Phi—and many others—show that rape can be a bonding activity for men, a way they celebrate their own shared status as men.

Donegan and Gilbert are two of the most insightful and probing commentators we have on modern misogyny and rape culture. And I think they are exactly right in their presentation of rape as a male bonding ritual, both in the act and the culture that glorifies and perpetuates it. Rape culture affects us all. It is the air we breathe in many ways, and it’s something far too many young men internalize without even recognizing that is what they are doing. 

But for my part, I want to ask what we can say about the particular ways American politics is being structured around rape as a core pillar of Trumpism. For that, I want to return to the groundwork I laid out in a 2025 essay here at Liberal Currents, in which I argued that rape forms a cornerstone of authoritarianism, and use that groundwork to examine reactions to the case in MAGA media. 

Those reactions have been predictably heinous. But it is worth pushing through the sickening bile offered by figures like Matt Walsh and Richard Hanania to look at the political implications of their words. Walsh has been particularly aggressive in his comments:

The Cornell case shows again that the deepest desire of many people in modern culture, especially feminists, is to be released of the burden of their own agency. They want to believe that they are not responsible for anything they do. A perverse unhuman desire, but widely felt.

But Walsh isn’t satisfied with victim blaming. He goes so far as to assert that, given the consumption of drugs and alcohol, the fraternity boys couldn’t possibly be held responsible themselves:

I’m not kidding when I say that the Cornell frat guys should file a counter suit accusing the woman of raping them. According to her own testimony, some of the men were drunker than she was. By her logic, and the logic of her supporters, they were even less capable of consent. She was the rapist in that case. There’s no way out of our current madness except by holding feminists to their own standards.

When I read Walsh’s comments I see a level of male supremacism that leaves my jaw on the floor. It also reminds me of a quote from President Andrew Johnson delivered to Frederick Douglass when pressed about protecting freed slaves:

If I know myself, and the feelings of my own heart, they have been for the colored man. I have owned slaves and bought slaves, but I never sold one. I might say, however, that practically, so far as my connection with slaves has gone, I have been their slave instead of their being mine.

I don’t want to take us too far afield, but the connection here is a fundamentally supremacist one. The response of Walsh and others I’ll detail below is that only male interests are of concern when a rape occurs—their reputations, their power, their dignity. When a man is accused of rape, he is first and foremost a victim. He’s a victim of feminism. He’s a victim of a kind of inversion of the natural order of power. 

Consider what Walsh’s Daily Wire colleague and boss Ben Shapiro has said. Shapiro laid the problem squarely on feminism, insisting the case offers no evidence of rape but that “The terrible thing that happened here is people consented to acts that are inherently degrading. The woman in this particular case degraded herself. The men treated her in unbelievably degrading ways.”

Shapiro cites a litany of issues that anyone familiar with the criminology of rape knows to be entirely typical, including the victim communicating with her assailants and an evolving view of events. I’m sure Shapiro would insist he would believe some other woman under other circumstances, but I doubt he would. The argument here is about the stripping away of anything like a woman’s capacity to say no by refusing to even imagine the possibility. It’s the same one being put forward by Hanania, who has asserted the case is an instance of regret and self-loathing by a young woman who had “casual sex” and couldn’t live with the fallout. “Maybe she was assaulted, maybe not,” Hanania posted, “either way it was a terrible decision to make. Women need to be told the truth.” 

The truth here is that male supremacism leaves zero room for female sexuality that isn’t in service to male whims and fantasies. It’s one where women’s agency is illusory, only appearing when the choices they make serve male ends and assumptions. Feminists taint this by imposing shame on those involved and by reframing male sexuality as predatory and violent. Any evidence, however infinitesimal, that the victim might have consented, might have wanted it, is seized upon with glee. Here’s what Rod Dreher wrote:

Behold, Schrödinger's Slut

(N.B. "Jane Doe," the Cornell sorority girl now accusing her frat boy sex partners of rape, referred to herself, in conversation with a sorority sister, as a "slut")

You might ask why it’s worth dredging up all these bilious comments. But these are coming from major media figures on the American right. Moreover, Hanania has, as I noted in a recent column, ingratiated himself with mainstream media outlets and even writes regularly at the Boston Globe. As fraternity members at one of America’s major elite universities, the young men in question are well-positioned to become leaders in their chosen fields and even elected officials. The networked effects of both Ivy degrees and fraternity membership can be considerable. 

Consider the Young Republicans group chat messages that leaked last year, featuring dehumanizing jokes about rape and homosexuality. In those messages, exposed by Politico, they glorified mass rape as a tool of conquest:

"The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman."

"Sex is gay”

"Sex? It was rape.”

"Epic”

This was a chat for Young Republicans, the future of their party. And it reflects dynamics we see across American society, and especially online and on the right, of young men being drawn to a culture of male supremacy and rape enthusiasm. As I wrote then, “In the context of sex, [male supremacy] comes down to a wholesale rejection of sex as a consensual act for the enjoyment of both parties.”

As I noted here at Liberal Currents last year, rape is integral to authoritarian politics. Mussolini was a rapist. Francisco Franco imposed a hardline Catholic dictatorship in Spain in which women were expected to serve the nation by serving their husbands. Lavrentiy Beria, head of the Soviet NKVD during World War Two, leveraged his position to engage in serial rape on a prolific scale. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat observed in her book, Strongmen, “The strongman would be nothing without bodies to control.” And authoritarianism offers up these bodies to its most dedicated foot soldiers, a point on which Beria serves as a good reminder. 

Yes, in this case, we are talking about the control of women’s bodies. But that doesn’t mean the male form doesn’t enter into it. In fact, it’s the male body that retains its specialness. This fixation moves, sometimes rapidly, from obsession to revulsion. We see that in the language of incels like Nick Fuentes, who has proclaimed that “dating women is gay, having sex with women is gay. And having sex with men is gay.” And we see that preoccupation in Walsh as well. When one commenter asked if the Cornell fraternity brothers should be considered “whores,” Walsh replied, “Yes, and gay. But they aren’t rapists. That’s the point here.”

Women’s agency only appears in all this as an illusion for absolving the men of rape. It’s a pantomime about consent that doesn’t really care about consent at all, except, of course, male consent. Male bodies, male power, male dignity, and male futures are all that matter here. They are the only objects of empathy and compassion and therefore the only humanized and, for political purposes, the only politically empowered parties. Women’s consent is held at the door, at best an observer to the actions of powerful men. 

Featured Image is ¡Que se la llevaron! by Francisco Goya