While bigotry and white supremacy are core tenets of the radical right, underlying it all is a deeply ingrained misogyny that has manifested in violence. (…) The contemporary iteration of the radical right, often referred to as the Alt-Right, has developed as a core feature a deep-seated misogyny, a hatred of women that ranges from the view that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or partake in the making of policy to the most extreme proposals of the online “manosphere” of “men’s rights” activists, including the “corrective rape” of women and girls. Take Richard Spencer. For at least the first part of Donald Trump’s first term, Spencer was the face of the Alt-Right. He claimed to have developed the phrase, was endlessly quoted as the top spokesman of the movement in media accounts, and led the radical right’s embrace of Trump. At the same time, despite his unapologetically Nazi views, Spencer portrayed himself as a genteel radical, opposed to violence and in favor only of “peaceful ethnic cleansing.” But that Pollyannish Spencer self-portrait took a beating when the divorce court pleadings of his wife, Nina Kouprianova, became public. Far from the Aryan family man he had portrayed himself as, the pleadings — many of them backed by audiotapes and online screenshots — suggest instead a man who physically and mentally abused the mother of his two children over a period of many years. At one point, Kouprianova alleges, Spencer dragged her down a staircase by her hair and arms. He woke her up screaming that she should kill herself. In 2012, he “had me down on the ground smashing my face into the floor,” she wrote. In 2014, when she was pregnant, Spencer pushed her down and bruised her neck and jaw, she said. In 2017, he tried to “punch me in the face.” He sent her messages like, “Fuck you. Please kill yourself” and “You are a disgusting cunt.” His mantra, Kouprianova alleged in interviews, was one he repeated to her on several occasions: “The only language women understand is violence.” (…) Misogyny is endemic across the radical right. Stephen Bannon, the one-time Trump campaign manager who described his Breitbart News as “the platform for the alt-right,” ran headlines like “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy” and “Would You Rather Your Child Have Feminism or Cancer?” Bannon’s attitude allegedly was not limited to sexist headlines. In 1996, his then-wife wife told police called to her home that Bannon had violently grabbed her by the neck during a fight, leaving her bruised. According to a police report on the incident, she also told officers that the pair had earlier attended marriage counseling after “three or four arguments that became physical.” Bannon was charged with misdemeanor witness intimidation, domestic violence, and battery, but the case was dismissed after his then-wife failed to appear in court. The radical right today plainly includes the so-called manosphere, a world of mostly online groups where misogynistic men complain that women routinely make false accusations of rape, lead men on in a whole variety of deceitful ways, and refuse to have sex with those who are not “alpha males.” This movement has produced a whole series of massacres of women, as exemplified most recently by the 2018 murder of 10 people in Toronto by a radicalized woman-hater.
via rantt: The Radical Right’s Violent Hatred of Women
