The Women Leaving the New Right [View all]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/young-women-leaving-maga-new-right.html

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https://archive.li/g9xNx

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.

*snip*