Wednesday, April 03, 2024

I'VE SEEN A FUTURE THAT LOOKS LIKE THE HANDMAID'S TALE, BUT BRO-IER AND MORE ANTI-SEMITIC

At a time when Democrats are hoping that referenda intended to secure abortion rights in Florida and Arizona might help them win votes in other races, why are prominent right-wing influencers openly attacking birth control, which is very popular?


Kirk and Raichik don't seem to worry that their message could alienate normie swing voters, much less Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters who might recognize them as GOP activists, and be even more motivated to vote against the GOP as a result. I'm afraid they're right -- I know a lot of engaged Democrats, people who phone-bank and do door-to-door canvassing for Democratic candidates, and my sense is that they have no idea who Charlie Kirk is. I'm not sure they can identify Chaya Raichik, either. Republican voters who live on a steady diet of Fox News identify everyone they don't like as part of the Vast Democrat Conspiracy, but Kirk and Raichik can probably safely assume that they're invisible to most Democratic voters ... though if they're lucky, they might reach people without a fixed ideology and win some of them over.

The unaffiliated people they're targeting clearly include the young, especially resentful young men. We imagine that the future people like Kirk and Raichik want looks a lot like The Handmaid's Tale, with the moral code enforced by people who are grim and solemn, but the propaganda from these birth control haters is often much bro-ier. So in addition to this from Kirk...


...we also get this, which is the language of the manosphere tailored to support the right-wing agenda:


Kirk says:
We basically told a great generation of young women, "Don't get married, don't have kids, go get a corporate job," and it's created mass political hysteria. And then in their early thirties they get really upset because they say, you know, "The boys don't want to date me anymore," because they're not at their prime. People get mad at me when I say that. Well, it's just true. If you're in your early thirties, I'm sorry, it's, like, you're not as attractive in the dating pool as you were in the early twenties. But again, you have your corporate job and cats, so I thought you... [audience laughter]
I found another bro-ey moral scold in a different piece I was reading today -- Audrey Clare Farley's New Republic report on right-wing influencers who use the phrase "Christ is king" as an anti-Semitic dog whistle. The better-known names Farley mentions are Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist who once met with Donald Trump, and Candace Owens, who recently left the Daily Wire on bad terms. I saw another name in Farley's piece that was new to me: Sovereign Brah.
The Blaze and Turning Point USA pundit Lauren Chen hosted a live audio show on X to discuss the [Daily Wire] dustup....

A guest popularly known as “Sovereign Brah” lamented Jews’ “extraordinary concentration of power in America” and described Judaism as satanic.... Later, calling it “biblical fact” that “Jews had Christ killed,” Sovereign Brah said, “Free speech is completely under assault by Jewish people.”
Sovereign Brah, also known as Chase, is a would-be right-wing influencer (156,500 followers on Twitter) who uses manosphere language to decry birth control and sexually active young women.


(Chads, in the mythology of the manosphere, are the attractive men who are chosen as sex partners by young women, who won't have anything to do with less attractive men. As the manosphere tells it, young women have sex with one Chad after another -- until they age out in the way Charlie Kirk describes, at which time, if they can't find some sap to marry them, they become barren, lonely, embittered crones. It's really quite a worldview.)

Sovereign Brah regularly appears on Whatever, which "bills itself as a dating podcast," according to Magdalene Taylor at Vice, who adds:
... the Whatever podcast demonstrates [that] all you really need for a hit show is a carefully curated selection of 30-second clips where you frame women as hopelessly dumb creatures and blast them off without context on Twitter.
Sovereign Brah's role on the show is, apparently, to tell women in tight T-shirts that they're irresponsible sluts -- but with a cool-dude vibe:



And here's the same message we get from Charlie Kirk: that it's a fate worse than death for women to become "wine aunts living with their cats on anti-depressants" (and Hillary Clinton voters):



That this guy is also an antisemite is just the chef's kiss.

The Republican Party won't die when Donald Trump dies. This is where it's going.
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