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Episode SummaryOne of the stranger things that’s happened in right wing media since Donald Trump emerged on the political scene is how obsessed with sex many far right figures have become. Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer, is one of many reactionary lifestyle influencers who preach a gospel of misogyny that they claim will lead followers to easy sex and money. Sex and birthrates are one of the most frequent topics you hear about on white nationalist and neo-Nazi podcasts.Some of this is surely due to the fact that the Republican party’s leader since 2016 has been a crass real estate investor more famous for his dating life than business success who also has faced numerous charges of sexual harassment.But that isn’t the only reason. If you look in the right places, you’ll realize that reactionary media has been filled with content about sex, dating, and marriage for many years. And it wasn’t exclusively a bunch of male pastors telling women what to do either. Far-right women have always and continue to be in the mix.In 1963, Helen Andelin published “Fascinating Womanhood,” a book telling women to submit to their husbands, but also to manipulate them. James Dobson, the far-right political activist, got his start offering relationship and parenting advice to fundamentalist Christians in 1977. And Phyllis Schlafly, who started her career campaigning against the Equal Rights Amendment was also a raging crusader against pornography, a cause that has recently been resurrected by reactionary leaders such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk.Far-right people obviously are still upset over the 1960s, but the language today is different. Joining me to take a look at all this is Seyward Darby, she’s the author of the book “Sisters In Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism.” She’s also the editor of The Atavist Magazine.We’re also happy to be joined by Katherine Abughazaleh, a researcher on far-right media figures like Tucker Carlson, who has also done some work examining the Republican dating website “The Right Stuff.” The transcript of the audio is below. You can watch this episode as well.TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Thanks for being here today, ladies.SEYWARD DARBY: Thanks for having me.KATHERINE ABUGHAZALEH: Thanks for having us.SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, so, let’s get started. We got a lot to talk about here, so let’s maybe just get started first with you, Seyward. Tell us a little bit about your book, briefly the people that are in there, and then and then we’ll go to you, Kat.DARBY: Sure. So “Sisters In Hate” is, as the subtitle suggests, about women who are or have been very active in the white nationalist space. And it focuses on three women who have radicalized into white nationalism over the last 15 to 20 years. And it’s, their lives, what led to that point. And then the roles that they played in various influencer groups as well as organized neo-Nazi groups in some cases.But the book also uses their stories as a jumping off point to look at the history of women’s roles in far right, organizing far right politics. And asks the question, why have we forgotten about them? Why do we ignore their contributions? And so I look all the way back to the immediate post Civil War period and bring it up to the present day with a diversion here, there into the international space namely Nazi Germany.SHEFFIELD: So Kat, you’ve looked at a lot of these right wing media figures that talk about sex and dating and whatnot. But your recent dive into the right wing dating website, The Right Stuff, tell us a little bit about that. What is that website and what did you find out when you went in there?ABUGHAZALEH: So The Right Stuff is this dating app that’s for conservatives and conservatives only. You can only get in through an invite, specifically through conservative influencers.And I was just curious to see what the people would be like on there. And so I talked to a conservative influencer on Instagram, pretended I was sick of liberal city boys on Tinder and went on the site.And it was pretty much exactly what you’d expect. A lot of guys holding fish or sitting in front of deer that they shot. There were a lot of prompts about January 6th and liberal conspiracies. It was a trip for sure.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All right. Well, so when you say a bunch of guys holding fish. I mean, are you saying that this, it was seeming to be kind of like a rural dominated demographic that was there? Is that what you mean by that? Or like what?ABUGHAZALEH: When I say guys holding fish in a profile picture, that’s something you’ll see a lot on dating sites like Hinge and Tinder, and it’s kind of a red flag.Either shows no personality or no personality.A lot of these were suburban guys that wanted to show that they were masculine and outdoorsy. There were a lot of guys showing how much they could squat at the gym. A lot of guys showing that they owned guns, was less about where men were and more about how they were men.They seemed like they were always trying to prove something, and didn’t really feel like it was about dating at all.SHEFFIELD: Like prove to themselves you think? Or to other men or to like what? I don’t know. Let’s talk about that.ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah, I mean on The Right Stuff, you can’t search for your gender, so you can’t say I’m a woman interested in women or I’m a man interested in men.So it’s not like other men would be seeing these. But there were a lot of pictures that I was just curious how they thought it would appeal to the typical woman, seeing a guy holding a lot of guns in all of his pictures doesn’t really project safety. It seems like a lot of peacocking for no reason, if the reason you’re trying to find is to get a date.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So Seyward, I would guess that some of the women that you have looked at in your research, they might find those pictures to be appealing, I’m guessing, right?DARBY: Yeah, very much so. I think that an important thing to remember about the far right space, and this has always been the case, is that it is a hyper traditionalist area.And so this idea of ‘men are men and women are women,’ and they’re very clearly defined identities for each gender, and that there are no other genders. I mean, that’s like a given, right? But the idea of you have a lot of guns, you like to fish, you like to hunt. I think that on the one hand, of course I’m married, I’m not on dating sites, but I agree, like if I saw a man holding a bunch of guns, that would not exactly appeal to me, to put it mildly.But I think to some women, it actually does project safety. It makes them think, oh, this is someone who will provide for me, who will defend me, and who will also fight for me, if necessary. And so I think that, and I have not spent time on the website, but I would be curious to know on the flip side, like what did the women look like?Because I’m guessing that they sort of fit into a cookie cutter idea of femininity in the same way that the men fit into a cookie cutter identity for masculinity.SHEFFIELD: Well, since none of us have seen it, I guess it’s tough to say for sure, but–DARBY: Right.ABUGHAZALEH: But I mean, that’s how I tried to make my profile look definitely. Growing up, in a conservative area as a conservative I was trying to fit every single one of those ideals I learned as a kid into my profile. It paid off.DARBY: Right.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and we’ll talk about it more, but so one thing that is kind of interesting about these about The Right Stuff is that it isn’t the first right wing dating website that has been in existence. It’s actually something that I’ve written about for the Young Turks that since the internet came along, there actually have been five or six of these right wing dating websites dedicated solely to the idea that ‘the libs won’t let me get a date. They won’t date me. They’re mean to me. They just don’t understand me.’And so for those ones, some of them actually did have public facing profiles, and it was interesting and if you go, you actually can go to the Internet Archive and look at some, it’s like a digital graveyard. It’s such a great site. There’s my plug for them. And of course they didn’t pay me because they don’t pay anybody for anything.But you can see the profiles, and one of the things that you note when you look for them is that they are overwhelmingly men that were on these websites and there weren’t very many women.And of the women who were there that I saw when I was going through these historical sites, a lot of them just seemed obviously fake accounts. Just not real women. Like they would copy and paste a model picture from a magazine and pretend it was them for catfishing and scam purposes. Who knows what it was for?And I think it’s kind of interesting when you think about it in that sense, because I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of single men who don’t understand the world has changed and that they need to change as well in order to succeed at it.That they’re also being sort of preyed on constantly by all kinds of grifters and scammers. In your research, Kat, you’ve, you talked, you’ve looked at how Fox News kind of forces that persecution narrative on a lot of their male viewers. Talk about some of the ways that you’ve seen that with some, or who are some of the people who do that the most there?ABUGHAZALEH: Tucker Carlson for sure tries to make men feel like they’re the victim. This last year at one point he said that if you don’t wear a dress that your trans neighbor is going to make you lick their feet, was how he described it. That masculine values are now illegal. That was something that he said, ‘illegal.’He talks a lot about how women are weakening our military, pregnant flight suits, that’s a rant that he’s gone on many times.It’s just a continuing cycle. He had Andrew Tate on earlier this year, or in 2022, I guess, to talk about how Andrew Tate’s rhetoric wasn’t actually that dangerous and he was being banned for dumb reasons.And it’s just kind of a repetitive cycle. Jesse Waters does the same thing. You also have people that might not say super explicit sexist stuff like many would think of, or really extreme things, but they always say, men are men and women are women. And that comes with its own implications. So it’s pervasive across the entire network.SHEFFIELD: One of the other things that’s kind of interesting is that when you look at the few women who are figures in these right wing media spaces, a lot of them do not live, particularly traditionalist lives themselves. And either one of you can jump in. I actually want to hear from both of you on this point.One person who comes to mind for me is Laura Ingraham, Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host. I don’t think she’s ever been married, or she was for a brief time. She never gave birth to children. She adopted children as a single mother, which was literally what Dan Quayle in the nineties said was this horrible, awful thing when Murphy Brown, the TV character did it. That’s Laura Ingraham’s life.And Anne Coulter, the far right columnist and blogger, she’s never been married. She’s never had kids. She pretty much seems to spend most of her time in bars smoking cigarettes with random people– obviously not a traditionalist, feminine woman, quote unquote.Is that something that you’ve seen, Seyward in some of the women that you’ve looked at? Maybe talk about some of them, specifically if you would please.DARBY: Sure. Yeah. I think absolutely, there are women, particularly ones who are more sort of public-facing, who don’t inhabit this hyper traditionalist role. At least, in pretty obvious ways, like the ones you’re describing.But I think too, it’s important to remember when you’re talking, and I did a lot of sociological reading and anthropological reading and whatnot, and studies into the far right indicate that there are so many more women we don’t see and don’t know about for the exact reason that being hyper traditionalist means not necessarily broadcasting yourself because you should be focused on home, family, husband, whatever it may be.And so just because, there aren’t as many of these female sort of pundits in the vein of, I don’t know, an Andrew Tate or a Jesse Waters, whoever it may be, I think that numbers are difficult to actually find and quantifying is not necessarily the way to do it, if that makes sense.It’s more about kind of thinking in terms of what are the different spaces in which these people who believe these things operate?But I think to kind of go back to the question you’re asking, some of the women who are more public-facing, and one of the women who I would put in this category is one of the women I profiled in my book, Lana Lokteff, who runs Red Ice with her husband, Henrick Palmgren.She’s actually addressed this directly in various interviews in her own programs where she said essentially we are at this pivotal moment–which, I mean, to be clear, white nationalists always feel like they’re at some pivotal moment if we don’t do something now, the world is going to collapse and white people are going to be extinct or whatever it may be. But her argument is essentially, ‘I don’t want to have to be doing this, but we are in such a state that we are essentially at a moment where, even some women need to kind of come onto the battlefield.’ In this case, it’s the battlefield of ideas, or whatever it may be, however you would describe their sort of world.But I mean, I think that’s a lie quite honestly. But at the same time, they are clearly, people like Lana, are trying to project this idea that I understand why you might have a problem with a woman like me doing something like this and that might be unattractive to you, that might not be traditional enough for you. But at the same time, I’m telling you that it’s necessary at this moment.This is something that I’ve heard her repeat in so many videos and interviews over the years. And I don’t think she’s the only female sort of pundit activist in the far right space who will give that spiel.And one of the texts that I use in the book to talk about Lana is the book, The Handmaid’s Tale, because in the book, Serena Joy, and this bears out a little bit in the show too, I don’t know if you guys have watched the show all the way through.But it talks about how Serena Joy, who’s the hyper conservative wife of the man who owns the handmaid essentially, and it talks about how in the before times, like before this revolution in which the hyper conservatives took over America, she was more in this sort of predominant public role, but then once they won, she was told to go back into the house and do her traditional wifely duties, right?And it’s an interesting– what would happen if the white nationalists of today actually achieved this society that they claim to want to achieve, what would it mean for women like Lana Lokteff, Lauren Southern, we can go on and on down, down the list of these influencers.Would they really be willing to give up that public facing influence, but also, I mean, they clearly take great pride in the work that they do, however regressive and awful it is. And would they be willing to give that up or are they just talking a big game right now?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Did you have anything you wanted to add on that regard, Kat?ABUGHAZALEH: Yeah, I mean, I just think that Phyllis Schlafly is like the OG for this, for really coining that. I mean, that’s who Serena Joy was based off of. And it’s this whole, oh, I regret that I have to do this, but I have to do this. She’s a martyr. She’s the person making a sacrifice for her children, for her family, or she paints it as a hobby. Even though Phyllis Schlafly was one of the most powerful tastemakers in Washington politically, she was behind so many right wing campaigns. She basically killed the Equal Rights Amendment, but she just painted it as a hobby, even though this was her full-…
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