This week the nation bore witness to an especially shameful episode for Republicans, even by the right's rock-bottom standards. Right-wing media came together to respond to the story of a 10-year-old rape victim by denying her existence and calling those who provided medical care liars. What was surprising about the whole thing was not that conservative media was reckless, hateful, and mendacious. That's a permanent state of play for Republican propagandists. No, it was that the face of these attacks on a child rape victim and her doctor was not the usual doe-eyed Bible-huggers pretending they want to force fourth graders to give birth for Jesus and "the babies." It was the noxious frat daddy Jesse Watters, the former Bill O'Reilly underlying who is now forever vying for Tucker Carlson's throne as the Fox News host most like a rich boy villain in an 80s movie.
Sadly, there was a choir of jackasses making false, unevidenced accusations against the doctor who terminated the child's pregnancy, but it was Watters and his smirking visage that was really the star of this clown show.
First, the Fox News hosted Ohio's Republican attorney general falsely implying there was no case on file — even though one was reported in June. Once that falsehood was exposed, it was Watters who falsely accused the doctor of not reporting the rape (she did, even though it had already been reported by the victim's family.) Watters also hosted the Republican attorney general of Indiana, gloating about the legal harassment campaign he intends to launch against the doctor. The move is clearly retaliation against her for — and this can't be stated strongly enough — helping a child rape victim avoid forced childbirth.
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Republican propagandists used to drape the anti-choice movement in fake piety, to put a moralistic veneer over what is actually a desire to punish women — and child rape victims — with forced childbirth. Clutching Bibles while making maudlin speeches about "babies" was helpful to lull the press into presenting anti-choicers as well-meaning Christians instead of the sadistic misogynists they are. But that strategy has given way to letting shameless creeps like Watters become the face of anti-choice ideology.
Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people in both mainstream and liberal media who are pretty sexist themselves and don't want to admit that women or LGBTQ people are important enough to hate.
And as with many things, we can blame Donald Trump.
Despite his half-hearted and unpersuasive attempts to feign Christian faith, Trump has mainly been received, with his pussy-grabbing ways, as an icon of secular misogyny. That doesn't mean that the more fundamentalist-flavored misogyny has gone anywhere. This week, in fact, Republicans on Capitol Hill coughed up a stock judgemental church lady, who was previously spotted claiming that fetuses are used to power D.C.'s street lights, as their point person for lying about this 10-year-old rape victim. Trump's entrance onto the political scene empowered every catcalling dirtbag out there who wants to hate women without having to go to church first.
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As I note in this Friday's Standing Room Only newsletter, despite the heavy focus on the Proud Boys during the January 6 hearings, almost no attention has been paid by either the House committee or the press to the group's misogynist origins. It's an unfortunate oversight because to truly understand the rising threat of fascism, it's important to understand the role that misogyny and toxic masculinity play in it. That's especially true when it comes to understanding radicalization, as these far-right groups recruit by targeting men who go online to complain about how modern women aren't submissive enough to men.
The Proud Boys continue to be a secular version of the fundamentalist groups that reject women's equality and LGBTQ rights.
Back when most of the media was still treating the Proud Boys as a harmless drinking club, I was reviewing hours of footage, cataloged by researcher Juliet Jeske, of "The Gavin McInnes Show," which is where the Proud Boys got their start. On this online program, the shock jock-style right-wing host pundit frequently waxed poetic about "Western civilization." It was pretty unsubtle as euphemisms go, but much of what drew in his male audience was the overt sexism.
RELATED: Fetus-powered street lamps? Republicans ramp up outrageous anti-abortion lies ahead of Roe's demise
McInnes was unapologetic in romanticizing "traditional" marriage, in which women are submissive and financially dependent on men. He and his followers wallowed in outdated stereotypes accusing feminists of being sad, barren "cat ladies," which really says more about their pathetic fantasies than women's lived realities. Critically, though, McInnes didn't present these as religious arguments. Instead, he appealed directly to the deep insecurities in his audience, telling them that they needed no excuse other than bolstering their own egos to demand women be kept in second-class status.
In fact, the Proud Boys continue to be a secular version of the fundamentalist groups that reject women's equality and LGBTQ rights. As Salon's Kathryn Joyce has reported, Proud Boys chapters across the country have been targeting gay clubs and drag shows for harassment. They've also been joining anti-abortion protests, adding another layer of violent menace to the already notoriously violent movement.
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The secularization of misogyny and homophobia as ideologies is an underreported phenomenon, especially in light of how dangerous it is. As the explosive growth of the Proud Boys since the Capitol insurrection suggests, there are a lot of white men who are bitter about gender equality and racial diversity but aren't exactly keen on having to get up for church on Sunday mornings to justify themselves. Defeating Trumpism means grappling directly with the rise of misogyny and homophobia, especially the secular flavors of it, and rebutting those views forcefully.
Unfortunately, there are still a lot of people in both mainstream and liberal media who are pretty sexist themselves and don't want to admit that women or LGBTQ people are important enough to hate. That makes it hard to have an honest public conversation about how much Trumpism is fueled not just by racism, but by this attachment to rigid gender roles that benefit straight cis men to the detriment of everyone else.
The overturn of Roe v. Wade, however, is forcing a reckoning a lot of people would rather avoid.
As the smirking Watters shows, the people who are willing to go to the mat for forced childbirth aren't just the Bible-thumpers. It's a larger coalition of everyone who experienced nervous sweats during the #MeToo era and sees this as an opportunity to put women in their place. (Or, as in the case of the 10-year-old rape victim, to re-traumatize little girls.) It doesn't matter to the misogynist Trump coalition, however, because the goal is restoring straight male supremacy, no matter how many lives they have to destroy to get there.
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