When Trump and Vance Dog-Whistle the Misogynist Manosphere, What Do They Invoke?

They Honor January 6th Conspirators--Because That's Where They Came From ...

The Capitol Buildling, January 6, 2020. Note the upside=down blue flag center right. That’s the one Samuel Alito and his wife flew at both their residences. Photo: Michael Nigro.

When most people looked at the dismaying scene above, they saw no real patterns—just a motley crew of disgruntled conservative voters in a rage because their guy lost the election. More seasoned observers saw something else, and they were afraid: the distinct insignia of four groups allied to white supremacism and the most virulent of all the groups in the rapidly developing misogynist “Manosphere.”

In the diagram of January 6 Insurrectionists below, three of the five major nexuses were run by groups that started as anti-feminist groups—the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers—and the other two, QAnon and the White Supremacist/White National Coalition, as racist groups.

More than 800 people from these groups are in jail, and Trump has promised them pardons. So dog-whistling these groups now means when he loses, these people can be counted upon to do just what they did before.

But the Manosphere is growing on its own, and when Vance, particularly, dog-whistles these guys, he’s not only promising get-out-of-jail-free cards for their members (whom Trump visited in the slammer), he’s promising them what they wanted to begin with: a removal of women from the public sphere and a denial of working rights, financial freedoms (like having their own bank accounts, credit cards, home ownership, land ownership, and inheritance rights)—and now voting rights. The Trad Wife movement being hawked by Harrison Butker is the mild version of this, though odious enough. The more odious version espoused by Andrew Tate (who converted to Talibanism a year ago) and certain Incel and MRA groups advocates polygamy and the right to rape without legal redress if, for example, a woman is in your house or apartment or on land you own.

It’s a huge group. Andrew Tate alone has 9.6 million followers, and they’ve shoveled more than $760,000,000 into his accounts as he sells “pick-up artist” secrets — read: manipulate her into bed—and how to get her to make porn videos for you for free so you can make a fortune off her low self-esteem and culturally ingrained panic that she must please a man, no matter what a bottom-dweller undesirable he really is.

On the off chance that Trump actually wins, these groups will be unleashed on the American public—and they will go after women, already forced to bear children against their will and denied a way out even when a pregnancy or labor threatens their lives—with knives forged of the steel of blame and hatred by men with digital addictions and a revenge mindset that says women owe them sex on demand, childbearing on demand and free domestic labor for life—and who owe it to them to get out of independent living and allow them to retake the complete control of all money in the society, the means by which they enforced a slave-labor culture before.