The right has its own unwritten rules of political correctness. There are forbidden words, and while they might not be met with censorship, they do elicit eye rolls. One proscribed term is “misogyny.” It also happens to be the most accurate description of the right’s mood and trajectory these days.
The right’s response to this trend has been to downplay it, or even deny that it is happening at all. But ignoring it will not make it go away. Political discourse often operates like a ratchet: the intensity around a given topic is constantly turned up, but the mechanism is not designed to dial back.
The Lindsay Clancy case has become the latest fodder for a movement looking to break the clock of sexual equality
It might have been easier to wave away accusations of misogyny a few years ago. Now, I can just point to a viral post on X by Christian Heiens, who worked for former Republican Virginia delegate Nick Freitas, declaring that the time has come to end women’s suffrage. “The experiment has been run, and the results have been a catastrophe,” Heiens said.
“The sensible and prudent thing is to admit that our 20th century ancestors were wrong, and our ancestors over the preceding 5,000 years were right all along.”
The backdrop for that call to give women the Bronze Age treatment is the Lindsay Clancy case, which has become the latest fodder for a movement looking to break the clock of sexual equality.
In 2023, Clancy killed her three young children and then attempted suicide by slashing her neck and wrists before jumping from a second-story window. She survived, paralyzed from the waist down. That she killed her children is undisputed. Clancy’s defense is that her actions were the result of a lost battle with mental health issues, including bipolar disorder and postpartum psychosis. Unlike postpartum depression, which is different and more common, postpartum psychosis is considered a psychiatric emergency. It can involve hallucinations, mood swings, and delusions. All things Clancy reported experiencing before tragedy struck.
A judge declared a mistrial on September 4 following seven days of deadlocked jury deliberations. By then, though, it had already become a magnet for what Rolling Stone described as the “true-crime-obsessed network of internet commentary.” Some of Clancy’s female supporters went so far as to claim that her then husband was the real culprit – a conspiracy theory vigorously rejected by Kevin Reddington, Clancy’s own defense attorney. “My response to those people is, at some point, maybe you get a chance to listen to that 911 tape, and then you look me in the eye and tell me that you think Patrick Clancy did this,” Reddington told Fox News. “What this guy has been through is horrific.”
The right went even further than true-crime-obsessed misandrists and used the case to paint a picture of women as a whole in the most sordid colors conceivable. Clancy became “proof” that all women everywhere are evil, simply looking for any excuse to destroy their families, then lie about it to evade accountability.
Over at the Daily Wire, Matt Walsh used the case to claim that postpartum depression is mostly fake. Women are just being “selfish,” he said. The stuff about hormones causing havoc after birth? Overblown. The real problem is the rotten core of modern women.
Walsh’s wife, Alissa Walsh, seems to disagree. In a 2024 post, she comforted a struggling friend: “Postpartum is not easy at all.”
“We blame hormones but… should we?” Joshua Lisec, an author who frequently collaborates with high-profile MAGA celebrities, wrote on X. In another post, he claimed that “upwards of 70-80% of marriages are one-sided abuse and violence of every kind, women against their husbands,” and that this is a conservative estimate.
Others used the Clancy case to make even more shocking assertions. “If women can be excused for killing their kids due to Postpartum depression then men should be excused from raping women if they have High Testosterone,” wrote self-described “paleocon” and “Christian” Andrew Wilson. “Modern women have become incompetent, immoral, and driven heavily by hatred of accountability,” he added in another post, citing the Clancy as evidence.
You might be wondering if people like Wilson and Walsh understand the difference between postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. But the truth is that it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t care that men account for 91 percent of all perpetrators of familicide for the same reason that they didn’t care about another recent tragedy involving a father who strangled his five-year-old son and was found not guilty by reason of insanity – the same defense Clancy is making. The reasoning seems to be that if it does not contribute to the cause of vilifying women, then it may as well not be real.
Some conservative women have begun to take note of where this is all going. Kimberly Begg is a lawyer and the president of the Clare Booth Luce Center for Conservative Women. She’s also the mother of five children and a devout Catholic. Speaking to the New York Times, Begg expressed concerns over “conservatives pushing for a return to rigid gender norms, with women firmly planted at home.” Begg rejects that framework. She believes women can have both a family and a career, which is pretty typical anyway.
What Begg is saying is not controversial, or at least it shouldn’t be. Working moms had a labor force participation rate of 71.7 percent in 2021, according to USAFacts. Indeed, women accounted for virtually all US job growth in August. That’s not surprising, given that they tend to gravitate more than men toward some of the only reliably growing sectors, such as public education and healthcare.
On the same day the story about her ran, Brian Sauvé, a pastor and founder of a Christian publishing house, encouraged his flock on X to put women like Beggs in her place. “Laugh at the girl boss,” he wrote. “Make her feel low-status. Call her cringe.”
One of Begg’s sons told her that his male classmates have ‘openly questioned whether women should be able to vote’
Sauvé is part of a constellation of right-wing religious figures who want women taken down a peg in society. Among the most notable of these figures is Doug Wilson, a pastor who believes women should not be able to vote. Wilson has powerful allies, like Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who belongs to a congregation in the evangelical fundamentalist network of churches co-founded by Wilson.
One of Begg’s sons told her that his male high school classmates have “openly questioned whether women should be able to vote.” Several of her young female interns shared similar stories. One recalled hearing a classmate quote webcam pimp-turned-MAGA celebrity Andrew Tate saying, “So I guess women just want to be raped.” Another shared that, upon expressing interest in law school, a male colleague told her, “I don’t know if women should be lawyers.”
Though Begg is aware of the problem on the right, she seems to view it as a nascent thing that hasn’t quite arrived in full. But it is already here.
In August, a reader of my Substack told me about how the misogynistic views absorbed by her husband, through his contact with online spaces, contributed to the collapse of their marriage. This woman, I’ll call her Jane, described herself as a lifelong conservative, raised in a religious household by two smart, caring parents. Her husband was initially a fairly conventional, fiscally-minded, and business-oriented conservative. Gradually, then suddenly, that changed as he immersed himself in right-wing spaces online. Eventually, he began to challenge and provoke Jane, spurred on by whatever he had been consuming.
“He would pick a fight with me, say something that was so clearly not his independent idea,” she said. “Sure enough, I would find out later that he had read ‘red pill’ right-wing rage-bait that stated husband versus wife was necessarily a zero-sum game.
“He said I had tricked him into marrying me for children,” Jane said. “I did marry him for children – isn’t that the whole point?” Jane noted that he had been struggling with himself as an individual, and that it seemed to make him vulnerable to pernicious ideas.
Their marriage crumbled. She emerged late in the Trump era, divorced, without children, and starting over. To make things worse, she said her parents fell under the same influence as her husband after stewing in the same psychic milieu for too long.
“From their interactions with me lately, and what they share with me on Twitter, it’s clear that some part of their brains have steeped in the general anti-woman discourse in right-wing online spaces,” she said.
It’s unclear how or even if this genie goes back in the bottle. Ideologically, much of the movement has been infected by concepts from “incel” subculture. Now, even married men on the right talk about women in a way that had once only been associated with the terminally online and involuntarily celibate. Part of the reason for this pervasiveness is that the rationale behind misogyny can be used to bolster some of the right’s political interests that have, on the face of it, nothing to do with gender.
Even married men on the right talk about women in a way that had once only been associated with incels
Women are cast as the carriers of empathy, which is pathologized by the right and presented as a kind of social contagion. There is some evidence that women indeed register more emotional responsivity than men, meaning that they’re better able to recognize the thoughts and feelings of others and take perspectives outside their own. Women have also historically played key roles in a range of social justice efforts, from suffrage to the civil rights movement – all things a not-insignificant part of the right wants to roll back. This bears out even across the daily news cycle.
A Gallup survey in June on approval for the US strikes in Iran found that women were far less supportive than men. Just 28 percent of women said they approved. They are also less likely to support the war than men in general. Similarly, polling from YouGov and the Economist earlier this year found that more Americans support than oppose abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with more women overall than men being in favor. Even on AI safety, women are more likely to express skepticism about the benefits and concern about the risks. From the perspective of the hard right, it makes sense to try to diminish the influence of women in the movement.
Even if someone wanted to halt this trend, it’s hard to imagine how it could happen. The right-wing attention economy places a premium on outrage. There’s just no reason for it to dial any of this down. You might be wondering whether that is wise from an electoral standpoint. Politics, after all, is about adding, not subtracting supporters – though, not according to Matt Walsh.
When warned by conservative women that the rhetoric he was mainstreaming would alienate members of the Republican coalition, Walsh simply balked in a three-post thread. “Tired of this nonsense. Don’t care. Go cry somewhere,” he said, adding that anyone who would walk away from the movement due to the misogyny of its leading voices would be a “a retarded, morally debased egomaniac.”
His responses swiftly garnered tens of thousands of likes and half a million impressions. The ratchet turns again. That’s what it’s designed to do.
Comments