Opinion | Don’t Be Mistaken: The Right Wing’s Misogyny Is the Point
In the whirlwind decade since Donald Trump came to power, the American right wing has become increasingly vocal in its misogynistic, white supremacist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic rhetoric. The roots of this intense bigotry go deeper than a recent boom of online right-wing influencers, but rather act as a core organizing principle of the American Right. In particular, misogyny is integral to understanding the Right’s agenda. ICE agent Jonathan Ross punctuated his murder of Renée Good on January 7, 2026, by calling her a “fucking bitch” after he shot her in the head. This is not a mere outburst from an unqualified, criminal rogue agent, but rather a clear encapsulation of the Trump administration’s policy: feminize and dominate their opponents and enforce their own agenda.
This ideology of domination is inextricable from the intense misogyny that permeates the entire American Right. This hardcore misogyny appears in their anti-abortion, pro-fetal personhood, pronatalist ideology and policy, the beauty standards imposed on women, efforts to end no-fault divorce, impeding the right to vote, and the defence of sexual predators. These political and ideological choices seek to revert women’s opportunities to a fantastical pre-feminist version of society, with women completely subservient to men. In other words, the only “correct” world is a world where women are second-class citizens. By characterizing any opposition as feminine, the Right creates a reality where its manly, conservative policy is the only sensible worldview. That in turn validates their policy that dehumanizes women as necessary to “reset” society and defeat their opponents.
The particular rhetorical choices of prominent figures, including President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, the Tate Brothers, Elon Musk, and Nick Fuentes, only propagate this worldview with a healthy dose of grievance politics that see women’s liberation as the root of most bad things. Misogyny is as integral to the American Right as milk is to butter—and this has become more evident in the post-#MeToo backlash period in the past eight years. However, the extant misogyny has always been there, festering and growing in the conservative institutions that have shown their strength in recent years in Supreme Court decisions and the maelstrom of harmful executive orders.
The sexism in American society is neither new nor unique to the United States. Repeated failures to strip misogyny from American institutions have allowed a particularly American manifestation of misogyny to strengthen, heralded by Trump’s re-election and concurrent validation of the extremist Right that propelled his victory. It is integral to frame the Right as reactionary and regressive, tied to a false vision of an idealized, bygone America.
To consider the Right’s gender politics, it is helpful to begin with the second-wave feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the conservative reaction. The second-wave feminist movement was ideologically diverse but largely coalesced around securing women’s financial independence, diversifying opportunities for women beyond the home and family, codifying women’s rights in law, and expanding reproductive rights. To many liberal-minded people today, none of this seems radical. However, these incremental changes directly threatened the conservative conception of society, family, and politics. The conservative ideal society relies entirely on the unpaid labour of women in the home and on women being entirely bound legally, religiously, and personally to their husbands, unable to live autonomous lives from their family or put their minds to anything except the home.
While the Right’s reactionary vision is inherently threatened by feminism, the conservative movement (the on-the-ground manifestation of the broader political vision) picked its battles, focusing on abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which would have enshrined full gender equality into US law. In the ERA battle, leaders such as Phyllis Schlafly relied on fearmongering to rally opposition, telling women that they would lose the “privileges” that patriarchy granted them. Schlafly was successful in defeating the ERA, dealing a blow to the second-wave feminists. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Right more broadly retreated from women’s issues but kept the pressure on abortion, chipping away at the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which protected abortion—until overturned in 2022. They tacitly acknowledged advancements in terms of employment and differing family opportunities as a political necessity but remained dedicated to a system of male domination. The conservative movement was disciplined and aware of shifting political tides, choosing to emphasize and deemphasize certain priorities. They focused on abortion, not Title IX.
The third wave of feminism emerged in the 1990s, addressing some blind spots of the second wave, particularly intersectionality. The third wave made valuable contributions in terms of better understanding and attention to how race, class, and sexuality impact women differently as well as continuation of some second wave work—particularly mainstreaming discussion of stigmatized issues like abortion, and eating disorders; they further delegated attention to equal pay, domestic violence with the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, and workplace sexual harassment.
In the 2000s and 2010s, women were more prevalent and accepted in higher education and white-collar professions. However, there was backlash to the so-called “girlboss feminism” of the 2010s in two forms. First, some feminists found that it focused too much on individual success and legitimized capitalism more than it supported professional women. Secondly, right-wing extremists remained opposed to women’s equal participation in the workforce and have used the visibility of women’s advancements as a scapegoat for the problems men are facing today.
Since 2015, when Trump began his first campaign for the presidency, a new firehose of unabashed woman-hating has moved from the extreme far right to an accepted part of the mainstream Republican Party. The conservative movement never disavowed sexism or misogyny, so there remained well-worn paths for virulent misogynists to come to the fore in the past decade. Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist streamer known for his advocacy for a white Christian nation and praise of Adolf Hitler, unsurprisingly also subscribes to a viciously misogynistic politics, saying “your body, my choice,” after Trump’s reelection in 2024. He twists the pro-choice slogan into an assertion of ownership over women as a class; he implicitly legitimizes rape, abortion restrictions, and denial of educational or job opportunities for women.
Trump and Fuentes are not in perfect political lockstep, but Trump has dined with Fuentes and refused to criticize him, effectively validating the younger man’s position in the American Right. Trump himself has no shortage of sexist comments, sexual assault and rape accusations, and relationships with pedophiles that exhibit his view of women as sexual objects existing only for men’s pleasure. Additionally, Trump has made overtures to the online right-wing through his administration’s pressuring of the Romanian government to extradite self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who is accused of sexual assault, rape, and sex trafficking. Trump does not exude a strong ideology like Fuentes and Tate, but rather a more personal disregard for women as people.
JD Vance, Trump’s pro-natalist, pro-abortion ban, anti-no-fault divorce Vice President, has said that women without children are ruining the country and that their votes should be devalued. Vance’s true beliefs are unclear, as he constantly shifts his espoused beliefs to gain power. Whether or not Vance, in his heart of hearts, buys into the fervent misogyny he engages in is not the issue, but rather that he thinks that this rhetoric is popular enough to empower him. This demonstrates how present misogyny has been and continues to be in our society: it is an easy, natural fallback for men steeped in believing that women are objects to control.
The American Right’s extreme shift to radical woman-hating reflects how the conservative movement’s consistent anti-feminism undergirds its entire project. There can be no ideal conservative society without women upholding the system that keeps them down. However, the American Left and feminist movement have not had a solid response; there has been no broad positive vision of how life would be better in a world without patriarchy and misogyny for everyone. Overall, the Left has been far more disorganized than the Right, resulting in some useful ideological diversity but without the strength to sustain long-term progressive change.
It is far past time for the Left to reclaim feminism as a key organizing principle, just as the Right does with misogyny, and advance a new vision beyond the reactionary white nationalist patriarchy that only harms Americans. Arguments for the “Joe Rogan of the Left” are misguided. The Left does not need to imitate the Right’s sexism but instead build a new vision of an egalitarian society that works for everyone. Feminism does not advocate the promotion of women over men but the liberation of everyone from the oppressive nature of the patriarchy. It is up to us to build that new vision and refuse entirely the Right’s ideology that serves no one except those who could have owned property at the American Founding. The refusal to accept sexist rhetoric as palatable is a necessary starting place, but it is merely the beginning.
Edited by Liam Murphy
Featured Image: “AmericaFest 2025 – JD Vance 08” by Xuthoria is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
