Why Team Trump Talking About ‘Lethalitymaxxing’ Should Alarm You
Trendy internet slang meets eugenics, the manosphere, and neo-Nazis.
SINCE I STARTED WORKING TO UNDERSTAND the radicalization of young men, I’ve gotten asked the same question everywhere I go: Are they a lost cause for Democrats? Too redpilled to reach? Too far gone to bring back?
My answer has always been no. The research bears this out. Most young men, despite swimming in a sea of extremist content, are not true believers—they are disaffected, economically squeezed, socially isolated, and looking for guidance. They are reachable. The pipeline that pulls them toward radicalism is not organic or inescapable; it is a system designed to enrage them, scare them, confuse them, and compete for their attention and affection.
Because progressives have ignored these young men for so long, the right has deeply influenced their view on institutions, culture, and their place in society. In Trump’s second term, what was once fringe culture has become convention. A three-sentence caption on a recent government social media post is one of the clearest signs yet of how far this process has gone.
“Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing. 🇺🇸” read a recruitment ad posted by the official X account of the Department of Defense’s chief technology officer on February 4.
Most people mocked it as a cringe attempt by the government to sound cool online. That reaction is understandable. It is also wrong.
That word—“lethalitymaxxing”—is not a marketing accident. It is a fluent, deliberate signal to a specific audience. To understand what it means, you need to understand where it comes from.
It started with fitness.
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign was peaking in 2024, my colleague Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and I wrote about his popularity with young male voters. His shirtless Gold’s Gym workout videos weren’t vanity—they were a calculated bid for an audience. RFK Jr. launched his campaign understanding something that most Democratic strategists did not: that the “red pill” fitness community—the sprawling intersection of wellness culture, men’s self-improvement content, and anti-establishment health messaging—was a documented gateway to political radicalization. Kennedy didn’t just want those voters’ attention. He wanted to position himself as the rightful heir to this new movement.
The fitness-to-radicalization pipeline works like this: A young man who feels defeated by external factors finds power and community in spaces within his control. One of those places is the gym, where self-discipline is celebrated.1 This is not inherently sinister. The desire to be strong, healthy, and competent is deeply human. But if you go deeper into some parts of fitness culture, the message shifts almost imperceptibly from your value is determined by your body to some bodies—and therefore some people—are simply worth more than others.
RFK Jr.’s ‘concern’ about vaccines was never purely about what was in the syringe. He was always alluding to a logic familiar to those within eugenics movements: that strong, healthy, naturally resilient bodies don’t need pharmaceutical intervention, and that those who do are, in some fundamental sense, weaker. It’s no coincidence that Kennedy is now secretary of health and human services, and that Make America Healthy Again is the mainstream-laundered expression of that same ideology, only operating from inside the federal government.
Now, the Department of Defense is getting in on the game. The term “maxxing” comes from the looksmaxxing subculture—a bleak corner of the internet rooted in incel forums and built around the obsessive desire to optimize physical appearance. Where red-pill fitness and MAHA offered self-improvement as aspiration, looksmaxxing suggests natural remedy is not sufficient. Here, the ideology is even more explicit: Human worth is a function not just of genetics but how you can build on it. Your jawline, your clavicle width, your bone structure—these aren’t just aesthetic qualities. They are destiny. To improve them is to improve your social rank, your sexual prospects, and ultimately your value as a human being.
The “looksmaxxing” world grades men on a scale that ranges from “subhuman” to “Chad.” They trade techniques ranging from aggressive fitness regimens to hormone injections to “bonesmashing,” i.e., hitting your own face with a hammer to reshape your cheekbones. The movement’s newest star, a 20-year-old known as Clavicular, has injected his teenage girlfriend with fat-dissolving acid on livestream to reshape her jaw. He says he typically earns between $80,000 and $100,000 a month from streaming.
The looksmaxxing world is, as the Atlantic recently described it, “narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.” Racism is rife in the looksmaxxing community, although some are fighting for looksmaxxing to be more inclusive. What all looksmaxxers seem to agree on, however, is that there’s a masculine ideal that is inseparable from the philosophy of male superiority that shaped the manosphere and birthed the incel movement.
This is the culture from which the Department of Defense borrowed its vocabulary.
IN ANOTHER, SEMI-RELATED PART of the internet, 27-year-old white nationalist Nick Fuentes streams daily to an audience that skews young and male, but is ever closer to the mainstream. He is a Holocaust denier who has given Nazi salutes on livestream. His own pithy summary of his political vision goes like this: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, blacks need to be imprisoned for the most part. . . . It’s that simple.”
Just last week, Fuentes called for women to be placed in “breeding gulags” where the government will “determine which ones are acceptable” for release. This is the flip side of the coin for eugenics totalitarianism, and it has a clear precedent in authoritarian and fascist regimes of the past. Nazi Germany implemented a program of forced sterilization for those it deemed “undesirable” while also creating forced breeding programs for those it deemed racially desirable. They believed that controlling who could reproduce, and under what circumstances, was a key part of their project of domination.
Fuentes is now the most important bridge between white nationalist ideology and looksmaxxing culture. He and Clavicular have appeared together publicly, co-streamed, and cultivated overlapping audiences. Fuentes has echoed looksmaxxing’s central obsession. He has also publicly attacked Vice President JD Vance as having “a fat face, no jawline, no chin,” and then pivoted immediately to saying that “his wife and kids are not white.”2
That pivot is a tell. In Fuentes’s worldview, the connection between aesthetics and race is not incidental. It is core to the ideology. Physical optimization is the cousin of racial optimization. What looksmaxxing culture provides that white nationalism previously lacked is a language that sounds more like self-improvement and less like bigotry. But underneath it is a fixed hierarchy of human worth—determined by genetics, ranked by phenotype, and enforced by exclusion. It’s a form of eugenics repackaged for young men who spend most of their time online.
Conservative writer Rod Dreher has cited administration insiders who told him they estimate that something like 30 to 40 percent of Republican staffers under 30 in Washington are followers of Nick Fuentes (who proudly call themselves “Groypers”). These are no longer people outside the government looking in. They are inside.
And now the government is speaking their language back to them, recruiting them to the cause.
“Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”
Read it with an ear for the subculture’s dialect, and the theme becomes clear. Calm, controlled, physically perfected—this is a looksmaxxer fantasy: Men being handed a uniform, a weapon, and a flag, and doing violence in service of something larger than themselves.
The people drawn in by this fantasy are not unreachable. But the window to reach them will not stay open forever. Every year that a movement with state power gets to define what strength looks like, what a real man is, what the body of a true American represents, is a year that definition further calcifies.
Democrats must reach these voters if they want to win the next election. But the deeper imperative, one that goes beyond politics, is to offer young men an alternative future to the one to which they’re actively being recruited.
Ilyse Hogue is a senior fellow at New America focused on gender and democracy. She is the cofounder of the SAM Project, which leads political and civic engagement with Gen Z men, and the CEO of American Futures, which works to create conditions for resilient democracy.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was also a key adopter of this approach, often posting her workout videos as a form of political outreach.
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