Why Did We Think We Could Beat The Manosphere?
The first influencer election, paid for by billions of right-wing dollars
Right after the election, like many people, I couldn’t bear to take in much news.
I didn’t watch the speeches, or read any analysis, or scroll through anyone’s accounts.
I took my kid to school, pushed through my days at work, and fell asleep every night before 10. Like so many of my neighbors, I stumbled around in exhaustion and overwhelm and shock, though not surprise.
Now that a few days have passed, I’ve started to read again. Like a patient titrating some new medication, I can only handle small doses, a controlled amount of analysis, explanations, hot takes and dire predictions about what’s to come.
There are the analysts who argue Harris lost the election by abandoning Gaza, or because she — and the whole Democratic Party — ignored Latino voters, or because she should have been more like Bernie.
They may all be right.
But today, I am also confident that there is nothing that Harris could have done to shift the voters who were being fed a diet of hate served up by the manosphere, driven by a group of highly-coordinated and exceptionally well-funded right-wing activists.
Trump’s biggest supporters openly thanked the manosphere at his victory party.
“I want to thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan,” said one of Trump’s biggest backers, Dana White, who is the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO.
Harris and Trump both reached out beyond traditional news outlets to reach voters this year. But Trump’s reach into the fringes of the internet went deeper — and was far more toxic.
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This has been called the first “influencer” election, and it comes at a time when big, legacy media has been thoroughly fractured.
Rather than a handful of reliable sources, the media is more like shattered shards of glass, slivers of information scattered across different platforms, social media sites, and news feeds.
And when attention is scattered across scores of shards, it’s easier for conspiracy theories to spread, to let violent speech go unchecked, and to let facts slip out the back door.
Of course, we’ve known for a while that trust in credible journalism is falling every day. Recently researchers found that “across the world, much of the public does not trust most news most of the time.”
I’ll be honest, it’s a devastating reality for me to embrace. I’ve been a journalist for 20 years and in my full time job, I work for a school that teaches people to be journalists for a living.
It solidifies a suspicion that we are all just screaming into the wind. As a woman, this kind of screaming is familiar: It’s the same kind we do when we’re screaming, “Stop hurting me,” and “Don’t touch me.”
And it’s a violent kind of gaslighting, being told that if only we’d offered our message just a little more carefully, provided a little more evidence, or spoken in just the right tone of voice, we would have been heard.
The impacts were real for this election. People who read newspapers or follow network news overwhelmingly planned to vote for Democrats, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote. “Newspaper readers clocked in at 70% Democratic support, and network news viewers were 55% Democratic.”
Republicans, on the other hand, are more likely to get their news from friends and family, compared with Democrats and Independent voters.
“The more ignorant of basic facts you are, the more you're likely to vote Republican,” Marcotte wrote.
And that’s a pretty ripe place for the manosphere to step in and thrive.
The right-wing influencers that Trump courted are united across all these other platforms – from YouTube to TikTok to Twitch – in a way that credible journalists, as well as progressives and liberals, are not.
And as The Guardian reports, the manosphere has been the breeding ground for radicalization.
“For years, media outlets have documented how more and more young men have been radicalized after consuming content from right-leaning entertainers and commentators, especially on platforms like YouTube and Twitch.
Now, as more of those men have reached voting age, this phenomenon appears to be benefiting Trump and the far right.”
This hasn’t happened by accident.
Right-wing propagandists have created an entire ecosystem of alternative platforms that help influencers earn money and build audiences, writes Taylor Lorenz in UserMag.
They’re funded by wealthy donors, PACs, and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies.
These billionaires “strategically invest in right-wing media channels and up and coming content creators,” she writes.
For instance, Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire has been heavily funded by wealthy Republican donors, including the Wilks brothers, Texas-based billionaires known for their oil and fracking fortune. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, receives millions from conservative mega donors including the Koch network. Right wing content creators Benny Johnson, Tim Pool and Dave Rubin were recently getting paid $400,00 a month, at least $100,000 per YouTube video, after accepting funding from a right wing Russian influence operation.
And, because the numbers on these platforms can be easily manipulated – cranking up the “likes” and “shares” on a post by paying for them to be amplified – policies and opinions are made to seem more popular than they actually are, and “like the right wing creators on them command a much larger audience than they actually do.”
“The conservative content creator ecosystem is extremely collaborative,” Lorenz writes. “Right-wing content creators frequently appear on each other's shows and lift up smaller YouTube channels, podcasters, and up-and-coming creators.”
They tap into a shared belief in “hegemonic masculinity” — believing that men should be in positions of power, be “mentally, physically, and emotionally tough,” and reject anything considered feminine or gay, The Guardian explained.
A 2021 study found this belief in hegemonic masculinity was a more important predictor of support for Trump than your gender, race or what political party you typically supported. That’s true for men and for women.
And with many of these well-funded influencers promoting this masculinity, they give their followers full permission to be misogynists.
Liberals and progressives have no way to match their kind of financial backing, because most of the policies they advocate for involve taxing the wealthiest and narrowing the income gap.
As Taylor Lorenz writes, “There appears to be zero appetite from the Democratic party establishment to embrace left-leaning populist messaging and policies.”
This is the point where I long to make a big pivot, point to a strong solution, and offer evidence that it will work.
Sadly, I don’t have that, yet.
What I can point to is the long history of powerful feminist journalist and activists that have always vowed to fight in the face of the patriarchy.
That includes the independent feminist journalists we treasure here.
As Lane wrote the day after the election.
We started this Substack three years ago with the hope of connecting with like-minded people who cared about issues that impact women and children, and to tell the stories that our newsroom editors didn’t always support. We wanted to tell the kinds of stories that we wanted to see.
And now there are thousands of us here every month. And that means a lot to me. It can feel like we are alone right now, and that no one cares, but we are here. And we do care.
Yesterday, my 8-year-old asked to watch Trump’s victory speech. “It’s good to know what the enemy is saying,” they said, quoting Hermione Granger.
Now we know. The question is, what will we do next?
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“It solidifies a suspicion that we are all just screaming into the wind. As a woman, this kind of screaming is familiar: It’s the same kind we do when we’re screaming, “Stop hurting me,” and “Don’t touch me.”
And it’s a violent kind of gaslighting, being told that if only we’d offered our message just a little more carefully, provided a little more evidence, or spoken in just the right tone of voice, we would have been heard.”
Yes! This! Thank you so much for putting this together for me. Every other headline blaming the left for this makes me feel crazy when the right knowingly chose this
Garbage. We did not. Put the blame where it belongs!
This is the backlash against women's progress. We know we have not yet achieved a level playing field, but many men feel like they are the victims of our gains. So here we are. They will have to go full Gilead to remove our progress: end our right to vote; end our right to decent paying jobs; end our right to own property and obtain credit; end our right to education. The problem of ending our financial rights is that is a downside for the capitalists. Billionaires may want to 'keep us in our place' but they also want more customers and more money. We'll have to say how that plays out.
I'm more worried about women who are joining the manosphere. We need to understand them and see what they distrust or disbelieve in our message. I fear that many women think if they did patriarchy perfectly, then they are safe. We know that is not true.