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This is embarrassing to admit, but I think I fell in with the right wing as an aesthetic choice initially,” says Anna. For several years a celebrated pundit of the New Right — a movement of young conservatives at war with the old GOP Establishment — Anna has requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation. A religious Catholic, she had grown up the token liberal in her conservative town, owing, in part, to a durable contrarian streak. (Her father, she says, was a typical “Fox News guy.”) But during college in the mid-2010s, she was exposed to the overweening, haughty moralism of Peak Woke.
“I’m somebody, dispositionally, who likes to have a good time,” she tells me. She found the humorlessness of the contemporary left more alienating than the conservatism of her youth.
She wasn’t attracted to the right by the romanticized aesthetic of “traditional America” — big beautiful houses and bread-making and families with half a dozen children. Rather, she says, “I was in love with the frisson of transgression.” The online right had begun to engage more explicitly with forbidden subjects: nativism, race science, and gender essentialism drawn from evolutionary psychology. “There was an element of gnosticism to it,” she says, “the sense that you know secret things that other people don’t know.”
After college, in the waning years of Trump’s first term, Anna wrote for popular right-wing outlets, worked for conservative institutions, and attended movement conferences. She fell in socially with the young firebrands of the New Right; she remembers it as partially happenstance. “You kind of meet people and proceed on and then suddenly you find yourself being a part of this thing,” she tells me. A portion of her early writing was about feminism and gender: “I was doing the typical right-wing female thing where all these men will kind of pat you on your head for saying the edgy thing — about women, as a woman — and they need you to be their mouthpiece.”
Her work tapped a rich vein of 2020s discourse: the notion that women are mentally disturbed. “They’re more crazy and upset and unwell than they’ve ever been before,” she recalls. “And it’s because they’re not having babies, and it’s because they’re working too hard.” In Anna’s essays, women were unhappy because they were tyrannized by choice and alienated from their God-given purpose. It was easy to see things this way for a time; she herself was lost and a little depressed. But gradually, over a few years, it became tiresome. Women, it seemed, were always to blame for the world’s problems.
Anna believed — and still believes — that “homemaking is a dignified and beautiful thing to do”; she has a “fundamentally high view of ‘women’s work,’ or care work.” But increasingly, the men around her were demanding that women stay home and, from an entirely different perspective, seeing care work, and women, as beneath them.
Anna’s discomfort with the right’s sexism grew throughout the early 2020s, especially after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and began rewarding the most outrageous and offensive posters. “Over time, the language of New Right misogyny got way more tuned in to red-pill-type stuff,” she says. Among young MAGA men, there ceased to be a huge difference between self-understood trads — Christians who tend to (patronizingly) venerate women’s special contributions to family and religious life — and rageful incels, who see women as conspirators in a plot to deprive them of sex and status. Both groups, Anna says, came to see women as “these objects you can use at will. So if you want a marriage, if you want a lifelong ‘bang maid,’ then you can pursue that. And if you want to just have endless hookups, you can pursue that by using these dating tactics within the red-pill sphere.” Men in the movement who rejected these ideas were nonetheless hesitant to criticize others. “The principle was ‘No enemies to the right,’” Anna says. “So normal conservative men — the good husbands and self-understood nice guys — refused to police the vanguard.”
Anna’s career and income depended heavily on conservative patronage, and by then, she and her husband had several children to support. For a while, she experienced the ramped-up misogyny as primarily an online phenomenon. But sometime during the Biden administration, young men began repeating repulsive manosphere talking points in her presence — that women are irrational and manipulative, good for little but sex and childbearing. They assumed, she says, “because of how I presented myself” — as anti-feminist, as “based” and unbothered — “that I was not like the other girls.” They demonstrated their fealty to MAGA by enthusing about repealing no-fault divorce, gender-discrimination laws, and even the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote. Often enough, women in the movement would agree. “That was your ticket, your entry point,” Anna says. “It’s a ‘Leave your dignity at the door’ type thing.”
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/young-women-leaving-maga-new-right.html
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The Women Leaving the New Right Defectors say the movement has dropped the pretense of protecting women and is now openly “cruel and fickle.”