The online right has that old spring to its step. The infighting brought on by Donald Trump’s chaotic second-term agenda has settled down and the anonymous accounts have been posting at a furious clip. What is the source of this newfound unity? The accusations brought by Jane Doe against seven men at Cornell have given the online right what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on.
The social-media celebrities and talking heads of the right have jumped at the chance to pick apart Doe’s allegations of a gang rape — labeling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault, including a lurid fraternity group chat, they’ve elected to argue that Doe is the actual aggressor, a once-willing participant in sexual debauchery now seeking vengeance against her hapless partners.
Her most hostile critics on the right have sought to portray Doe as a kind of out-of -control sexual fiend or “super slut,” as the conspiracist Alex Jones has labeled her. Not content to simply degrade her, Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist streamer and self-proclaimed virgin, has used the Cornell case as an opportunity to espouse his vision of male dominance by suggesting Doe that should not only be “put in jail” but that he would “absolutely beat” a woman who behaved like her.
Elsewhere, far-right online communities of young groypers, anonymous MAGA chuds and Christian nationalists have been relentlessly harassing Doe. Tactics have included doxxing her by posting her legal name and her address, as well as attempting to flood social media with intrusive images and videos supposedly ripped from her social media accounts. As a result of these obsessive efforts, Doe was subjected to a “swatting” incident that resulted in the police descending on her family’s house with their weapons drawn.
The message embedded in the right’s freakout is that feminism’s moral permissiveness is corrupting women, our institutions, traditional values and even the left as a whole. The conservative influencer Michael Knowles suggested that Doe is not a victim of violent masculinity, but rather of “hookup culture” run amok. Another conservative, Matt Walsh, declared that “feminists fundamentally reject the idea that women can ever be truly responsible for any wrongdoing of any kind.”
This hangdog argument, that women can get away with things and men can’t, is a staple of the manosphere. It’s here where men’s rights advocates like the podcaster known as Myron Gaines, one of the more prominent and vociferous voices in this sinister space, have declared that the Cornell case reflects a culture that demands “zero accountability” for women. And now, Mr. Gaines believes, it’s time to give the #MeToo moment a “real re-evaluation.”
The onslaught against Doe and her supporters is taken directly from the playbook that established them: Gamergate. In 2014, a mostly anonymous digital horde waged a full-scale assault on women working in the gaming industry in an effort to damage their reputations and drive them from their professions. They harassed and doxxed their victims and fabricated and disseminated conspiratorial rumors about them, all at a critical moment when the online world was first starting to function like the social media-dominated internet we know today.
Gamergate is a formative origin point for the alt-right, whose members and ideas have been absorbed into what is now called the new right. Once a subset of the broader conservative movement, the intellectuals and policy wonks of the new right, who almost all share atavistic visions of a masculine-obsessed politics, helped pave the way for Mr. Trump’s rise to power.
Today, their ideas are shaping both the G.O.P. and the actions of the federal government. What was once a style practiced by the fringes, out on the hard edge of the American masculine psyche, has now become an everyday tactic among the MAGA mainstream and the heart of government.
As a political tactic, resorting to a decade-old strategy of harassment should be evidence that the right’s bag of tricks is painfully meager. It’s also a bit baffling. In the face of a midterm election that could knock Mr. Trump’s presidency down into a posture of feeble lameness, the right’s online surrogates are instead burning crucial bandwidth on a grotesque persecution of a sympathetic woman — all while pushing a scolding grievance message about sexual values that is more likely to scare away new voters than bring them into the tent.
So who is this for? It’s clear the right has abandoned any effort at drawing more women, particularly young women Doe’s age, into its fold. It might be reasonable to conclude, then, that right-wing response to the Cornell case is some end-run play for the votes of young men, the angry disaffected kind. But this noncommittal voting bloc appears to have reconsidered its support for the president. A mid-September survey of 800 young men, aged 18-30, revealed a mass retreat from Mr. Trump and his agenda, with a double-digit preference for a generic Democratic ticket among young men who are likely to vote in the midterms.
Even for those young men who still lean toward Mr. Trump, a misogynistic digital blitz that blames women and feminism for male woes isn’t likely to inspire them to go to the polls. Which isn’t to say young men don’t feel aggrieved. It’s just that they’re more aggrieved about more material issues, like rising living costs. Affordability and inflation are issues that polling has consistently revealed to be the top anxieties weighing down young men. It just so happens that, for the party of Donald Trump, it’s the single issue it cannot address with a shred of credibility.
But to suggest that this reactionary effort to smear women stems from a lack of political imagination or tactical savvy misses another important point. The new right’s obsessions with masculine dominance, policing gender norms and traditional values are some of the rudimentary urges shaping its worldview. And of the vast discontents that seem to energize the right — nationalism, racial animus, antisemitism, contempt for elites, Islamophobia — few have the ability to bring together the right’s various factions like misogyny.
The writer Helen Lewis recently put a label on this political dynamic, calling it “masculinism.” More than attitude or a style or a culture war tactic, Ms. Lewis argues, it’s an energy far more intrinsic to the conservative worldview; she describes it as the one of “single most important forces uniting the American right.” Seen through this lens, the right’s campaign against Doe is something more rewarding and essential to how it does politics. It’s an opportunity to convey the purpose of the movement in the clearest possible terms.
It’s why one can sense a whiff of nostalgic euphoria in the right’s recent vulgarities against Jane Doe. Could it be that these reactionaries, in the face of an overwhelmingly complex and challenging political moment, are pining for the pleasant simplicities of the not-so-distant past? A nostalgia for their own reactionary uprising — back when a hysterical outcry against the so-called woke scolds or the liberal managerial state or the demonic left was a winning pitch to American voters?
Having won the presidency twice in less than a decade with its masculinist grievance politics, the right is now functioning much like an addict, flailing about for a quick fix and a familiar high, even if a brutal comedown is all but certain.
Nathan Pemberton writes about influence and the new right.
Source image by asmakar/Getty Images.
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