A quick post-election thought I want to shout into the ether: Republicans are losing because they hate women.

Is it the only reason? No, of course not, nothing's monocausal. But insomuch as a coherent platform is legible among the modern GOP, it's a desire to hard reset to 1950 or so, and not 1950 as a general concept but specifically the Deep South version of 1950, single-party lily-white control of government powered by extrajudicial fascist terror, where hard-working white men come home to their adoring, kitchen-obsessed, elaborately coiffed, sexually submissive white wives. They're losing in no small part because those prospective wives don't want what they're selling and can't be beaten into going along with it.

The far right has ascended to heights gubernatorial candidate David Duke could've only dreamed of, and throughout this ignominious period of history they've united around specific hatreds. They hate Latinos for stealing their blue collar jobs and raping their women, Black people for stealing their white collar jobs and raping their women, Asians for stealing their Harvard spots and raping their women, Muslims for stealing their religious adherents and raping their women, Jews for stealing their pop culture and raping their women, and queer people—especially trans people—for corrupting the general concept of "woman" as a thing over which man rules. But of course you really cannot build a hate movement in the modern United States with exclusively white men; even 100% girlfriend-and-wife participation in such a movement leaves you lacking in numbers. For the last ten years, then, MAGA and the hate movements that feed it have tried to settle on a couple scapegoats they can focus on for the long haul.

"Mexicans" (all Latinos), per Trump's golden escalator speech; Muslims, per Trump's travel ban; Asians, per Trump's anti-DEI efforts; Jews, per Trump's executive-branch social media. You get the idea. In Trump 1.0 some of these bigotries were de-emphasized or even hidden, most notably antisemitism, which has always been a favorite of the far right but which Trump vigorously denied for most of his first term. The way far right bigotry works is complicated. The Proud Boys were run by a Latino man; Trump personally and viciously hates Black people but bear-hugged various Black MAGA candidates and fans over the years. In Trump 1.0 it wasn't uncommon to see people expressing amazement about this kind of thing. Isn't it crazy that Stephen Miller, a Jewish man from California, is a Nazi? Nick Fuentes, the Mexican Nazi! The list goes on. MAGA-world isn't exactly light on white Christian nationalists, but they're also not a country club from those halcyon days of yore. They can't be; they wouldn't have the votes if they were.

Which brings us to Trump 2.0. Trump, unleashed. Trump, uninhibited because his brain is fucking melting, a deeply hateful and demented man who decided to hand the keys to Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and a pack of weird little Nazis who run all his social media. Did they keep up the successful rotating scapegoat strategy? No, of course not. Instead they decided to go all-out and unleash every single one of these hatreds all at once. Obviously, it didn't work. Eventually the left hand notices that the right hand's calling it a slur, and then the right hand notices that the left hand's also calling it a different slur. But in addition to all the coalitional infighting over H1Bs and Israel, and in addition to taking one of the fattest Ls in history by alienating Latinos en masse, they overplayed their hand with women. All women, everywhere, as a group.

MAGA women put up with a lot, but I suspect even they are really feeling it right now. Women like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace have broken with Trump, gone insane, or both, over his unflagging, deeply ideologically committed love of rape and support of rapists. The Epstein files and Trump's own allegations and convictions are the most obvious example of this, but he also surrounds himself with abusers of women. His cabinet's full of them (top of my head: Pete Hegseth, Linda McMahon, RFK, Howard Lutnick). He won't ever back down from having endorsed abusers, even when, as with Max Miller, the accusations are luridly vile. JD Vance and his skeezebag fellow travelers promote soft misogyny, leaning heavily on complementarianism and homophobia to justify their portion of the group project, but JD was also part of inviting the Tates to flee to the US. Women straight up aren't allowed to work for Trump without strapping on stilettos and mutilating their faces with shit-tier Florida filler. The list goes on and on and fucking on. Being a woman, any kind of woman, in Trump's America, is a long and grinding exercise in dehumanization.

As his own coalition breaks down internally over salient questions like "is it okay to beat your wife and break your toddler's collarbone", the coalition opposing him includes a fuckload of women. The right has noticed this, and they've tried to shift their rhetoric accordingly. People tend to attribute this sort of shit to the absolutely Handmaidian levels of misogyny on the right, but I think the underlying motivation is a little different. Some of them, like noted 19th Amendment and no-fault divorce enemy Matt Walsh, will say it openly: their women, you see, have too much empathy.

From Time:

At one point, Vance said it was a “lie” to describe Good as “some innocent woman,” arguing that she had gone to the scene to interfere with federal agents. He went further, alleging without evidence that she was part of a “broader left-wing network” intent on obstructing, assaulting and doxxing ICE officers.

Later, after acknowledging that he had watched the video, Vance softened his certainty slightly, saying he did not know what was in the woman’s heart or mind. “Was she panicking, or was she actually trying to ram him?” he said. “That’s a reasonable conversation.” Even so, he called her death “a tragedy of her own making” and “a tragedy of the far left,” saying she must have been “brainwashed” or “radicalized” to put herself in that situation.

From The Independent:

Following the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a new derogatory acronym, 'A.W.F.U.L.' (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal), has been coined and spread by right-wing commentators.

The term is used to label Good and other white women whose political views are rejected by these commentators, with some describing it as 'precisely accurate' and others calling for such women to be 'avoided at all costs'.

The phrase, which appeared on Wiktionary this month, has also generated backlash, with some X users deeming it 'borderline dehumanizing' and 'fucking disgusting'.

Figures like Elon Musk have amplified posts criticizing 'liberal women', linking them to issues like divorce and family separation, while a conservative influencer advised to 'BEWARE of ALL white liberal women'.

Cat ladies, blue-haired liberals, "Karens", these are dog whistles for white women lacking the—to these people, good and natural—firm hand of a husband. And it's not just because of sexual jealousy or Christian nationalism; it's because activism supporting every single group the right wants to use as a scapegoat has included a mathematically meaningful number of women, white women very much included. The right hates all women of color reflexively, but for years now they've been targeting white women in an attempt to enact a sort of collective domestic discipline. We are just straight up not supposed to be resisting the torture, murder, and kidnapping of our neighbors, or the Muslim bans, or the attempts to reinstitute Jim Crow. We aren't supposed to be standing behind Scott Colom as he (righteously) insults the white woman he's in the process of defeating.

I don't mean any of this in a triumphal way. White women aren't the heroes of this election or any other. But I think it's important to note that as the far right tries and fails to maintain its multiracial coalition of insane Nazi-Klan freaks, it has repeatedly anchored itself with vicious misogyny^[1]. As with anti-Black racism, this anchor is deceptive. The right is happy to use women as tokens just as it's happy to use Black people; Trump's cabinet right now includes a white woman in charge of education, a white woman in charge of small business administration, and a Black man in charge of public housing. The coalition doesn't want us ethnically cleansed the way it does Latinos or Arab Muslims. But it wants us submissive, and its standard-bearers are increasingly bold in dehumanizing women who refuse to comply. Do the voter trend math, and you see the GOP's lane narrowing, even in very white areas.

Say it with me: WHOOPS!