Male Supremacy Is the Backbone of Authoritarian Movements
An excerpt from Katherine Stewart's Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
The Trump administration is moving fast and breaking things. If you, like me, are struggling to keep up with the daily dramas and assaults and walk-backs, and if you’re hungry for a bigger-picture view on what this all means and how it happened — and what might be coming — then you should read Katherine Stewart’s new book, Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. I’ve long followed Katherine’s work on the intersection of politics, power, and religion, and I cannot think of a better person to have tackled this topic. And you don’t have to believe me; just check out the incredible review she received from the New York Times.
Katherine has kindly shared an excerpt from Money, Lies and God here. I hope you enjoy(?) it, or at least find it wholly fascinating, appalling, and necessary. Buy her book wherever you buy your books (and if your local doesn’t stock it, ask ‘em to order it for you!).
xx Jill
Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy
by Katherine Stewart
President Trump’s contempt for women is no secret. This is a man who has faced civil penalties for sexual assault and allegations of harassment from over two dozen women. Many of his nominees for high offices in the administration face serious sexual misconduct allegations, too. Several more have histories of misogynist and racist commentary (such as Darren Beattie, who has a top job at the State Department, and who declared, on X, “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work”). The cat-lady-hating Vice President has long argued that feminism was a huge mistake; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth praised a pastor who said that it was wrong to give women the right to vote; and Trump’s billionaire co-president, Elon Musk, along with his DOGE bros, is targeting funding for a range of women’s health initiatives. All-in-all, the second Trump presidency is shaping up to be the most misogynist administration in recent history.
The contempt for women in the new administration is more than just a reflection of the kind of people that seem to gather around Trump. It’s also more than just a symptom of the backlash against the advance of women’s rights that courses through parts of American society. Throughout history and around the world, male supremacy has supplied the backbone of authoritarian movements. Fascist parties always glorify the virtues of manliness (by which they typically mean some form of brutality) and despise the supposed weakness of womanliness (how they interpret empathy, moderation, and compromise). They always appeal to the resentments of the disempowered, and they promise to dominate the objects of resentment, which for a great many people happen to be sexual in nature.
Quite a few names in Trump’s administration are associated with the New Right, a reactionary intellectual movement that is neither new nor conservative in any conventional sense. Centered on the Claremont Institute, a southern California think-tank, and more recently the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025, the New Right blames feminism for many of America’s problem, openly calls for male dominance of government and society, and aims to replace American democracy with a form of monarchical rule.
Of Claremont’s nineteen board members, all appear to be male. Even this fact, however, understates the masculinist ethos of the place. The men of Claremont aren’t just men; they are manly men by their own estimation, or at least men preoccupied with their own masculinity. To get into the mind of Claremont, it helps to browse the American Mind, which is aimed somewhere beneath the brow of the (putatively) high-minded Claremont Review of Books.
Recently, the American Mind featured an interesting piece from a frequent contributor who calls himself “Raw Egg Nationalist” (REN). REN is the author of a cookbook. He advocates “slonking,” that is, a diet he describes as part of “a physical and political ethic built around the massive consumption of raw egg.” The eggs are said to help with bodybuilding and other manly pursuits (remember Rocky Balboa arising before dawn and chugging down raw eggs?). But the benefits don’t end there! It turns out that raw eggs can also counteract “the globalists’ plan for world government.” In Tucker Carlson’s 2022 film The End of Men, REN cameos with other figures in the “manosphere” to link the consumption of animal products with a back-to-the-land nationalism. This is somehow meant to strengthen the traditional moral values of Western males, which may explain why Tucker often shows up in a plaid shirt.
The problem with the world today, according to REN, starts with “the agricultural revolution and its consequences” and ends with a “crisis of masculinity.” “We have it drilled into us, this instinctive revulsion for inequality in any form. And actually, I think we need to ask instead whether inequality has its uses,” REN muses. Once you get past REN’s abstract world-historical patter about globalism and the agricultural revolution, it becomes clear that the real issue for him is women. “Maybe men and women shouldn’t work together in the same spaces,” he says.
A related problem would appear to be ugly people, by which REN seems to mean the kinds of people who show up at racial justice events. In an interview with Jack Murphy, the recipient of a Lincoln Fellowship at Claremont who reportedly once wrote “feminists need rape,” REN has this to say about the BLM protesters of 2020: “All of these people look the same. I mean, they are hideously ugly, malformed people.” The publisher of REN’s antiglobalist cookbook, as it happens, is Antelope Hill, otherwise known for its Nazi and white nationalist titles, such as Michael, a novel written by none other than the young Joseph Goebbels (“Antelope Hill Publishing is proud to present a new English edition”).
REN is far from the only writer with woman problems to score a platform at the Claremont Institute. In 2021, a Boise State University political philosophy professor named Scott Yenor delivered a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, in which he characterized women with professional aspirations as “medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome.” Yenor’s views could hardly have been news to Claremont. Six months previously, the institute had invited him to deliver a keynote titled “Does Feminism Undermine the Nation?” Yenor seized the opportunity to inveigh against women’s pursuit of economic security and a satisfactory sex life. He maligned the “pernicious trajectory of feminism” and argued that it is “fatal to family life and fatal to the country.”
Claremont hired Yenor to be the think tank’s inaugural senior director of state coalitions for their new center in Tallahassee, Florida. From his speeches and writings, it would seem his actual plan looks more like an affirmative action program for reactionary males. “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade,” he said. According to Yenor, state officials should conduct civil rights investigations of academic programs (“especially colleges of nursing and education”) that attract larger numbers of women than men. Ron DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis, tweeted her support for Yenor’s appointment, saying “Thrilled to welcome @scottyenor from the Claremont Institute to his new home in Tallahassee.”
As Bill Kristol observes, the fanaticism here is even worse under the surface. “They are not just against the legalization of same-sex marriage. They are so extreme they are for permitting gender discrimination in salaries, changing divorce law to what it was seventy years ago, for criminalizing homosexuality. They don’t want to say that because of political reasons, but certainly you don’t get the sense that they feel any compulsion to restrain their extremist rhetoric.”
Setting aside the rabidly misogynistic agenda, the most curious thing about Yenor’s work is just how unserious it is. If you want to make the case that women’s struggle to realize inherent natural rights and secure equality under the law is connected to various social ills in some way, you could look for evidence to test that remarkable hypothesis. You might, for example, compare countries with different levels of gender equality with economic outcomes, life expectancy, and health measures. You would surely want to explain the inconvenient fact that some of the places that are least hospitable to women’s rights happen to be those with the worst social and economic outcomes for all people. You might consider that around the world, the countries that seem to best satisfy Yenor’s urgent desire to keep the genders in their lanes are also among the most repressive, unsafe, nepotistic, and corrupt. You would, at the very least, want to consider alternative explanations for the collapse of marriage rates among working-class Americans and the decline in male health indicators, such as the erosion of working- and middle-class wages and job security, the decline in manufacturing, and the rise of a winner-take-all economy. You might also consider that among those in the higher income brackets—the upper middle classes, within which ideals of women’s equality are widespread and robust—divorce rates are low, and men (as well as women) are living longer and healthier lives.
But Yenor doesn’t have to do analysis because Claremont already gave him the answer. The culprit, ever and always, is liberalism, progressivism, wokeism, and—it is all the same thing to them— feminism. So if white working-class men are suffering, that can only be because the “woke Left” has mounted a merciless assault on—here’s a word Yenor uses a lot—“manliness.”
The salvation of men, however, is not just a matter for the lower-brow readers of the American Mind. The serious people of the Claremont Review of Books can pitch it into their work, too. Michael Anton, who has taken up a job as director of policy planning in the new Trump administration, reviewed a book titled Bronze Age Mindset, whose author goes by the name Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) and has since been identified as Costin Alamariu, who received his PhD in political philosophy from Yale.
BAP writes as if he were some modern-day Zarathustra descended from a mountaintop cybercollective. “I was roused from my slumber by my frog friends, and I declare to you, with great boldness, that I am here to save you from a great ugliness,” he intones. (“Pepe the Frog” is a meme widely associated with the far-right blogosphere.)
BAP abhors women. He refers to them as “roasties” (a crude reference to female genitalia), “whores,” and “property.” “Your friends are more important, far more important, than the girlfriends or wives you’ll have,” he writes in a self-helpy aside to his presumptively male readers. “And actually, your girl will admire you for this—not that you should do it for that reason,” he hastens to add. The “liberation of women,” he whines, amounts to an “infection” from which the West “can’t recover without the most terrible convulsions and the most thorough purgative measures.”
BAP isn’t into gay people either. He thinks they represent “the most profound of social and political problem” of the modern world. Then again, as he recounts in his book, he managed to ejaculate without touching himself while gazing upon an ancient statue of a Greek boy; so perhaps he is part of the “problem”? For what it’s worth, Alamariu sprinkles his Twitter feed with images of muscled beefcake. Oh, and that Twitter feed is also a collection point for racial hate.
BAP thinks the Bronze Age was just great. This would be the same Bronze Age in which human sacrifice was widely practiced, and a great many humans were enslaved to other humans. But none of that bothers BAP, because he identifies with Achilles and the master race—those superior beings who ride herd over their inferiors without apology, without false ideas about human equality, without woke politics. “The free man is a warrior,” says mini-Nietzsche; “the only right government is military government.” In fact, he encourages his followers to join the military, where he seems to think they will be able to organize coups against womanly democracy (or as he, along with Yenor and much of the manosphere call it, “the gynocracy”).
Manliness. In this context, where exactly did that word enter the conversation? In the New Right world, manliness is a bit of a dog whistle, and Senator Josh Hawley has blown it hard with his recent book Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs (Regnery, 2023). True to Claremont formula, Hawley traces the crisis to our departure from ancient sources. When we were schooled in the classics, we had “moral uprightness”: “Machiavelli called it virtù” (from the Latin vir, meaning “man”); and the Bible has “a mission for men.” You might think that the man who raised his fist on January 6 and then scurried away from the manly men attacking the Capitol would see some complexity in the issue, but Hawley does not. The problem, as ever, is the “priests of wokery,” as he said at the 2023 Road to Majority conference, who have apparently succeeded in infiltrating the C-suites and learned to dispense their toxic doctrines through the corporate hierarchy.
Hawley, Yenor, and REN, however, are just taking a page from an earlier chapter in Claremont history. The story of manliness at Claremont might be said to begin with Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., the author of the 2006 book Manliness. A fixture of the Harvard University faculty of government for decades, Mansfield counts as nobility among Claremont’s extended family. His father, Harvey Sr., helped Claremont founder Henry Jaffa land a career-making teaching job; Harry introduced Harvey Jr. to Claremont patron saint Leo Strauss; Harvey Jr. was Claremont Review editor Charles Kesler’s teacher.
Manliness offers a lightly informed romp through some work in biology and the social sciences on gender and sex, from which we supposedly learn that gender stereotypes are all true. “War is hell but men like it,” and women will never make good soldiers because “they fear spiders.” The patriarchy is just a biological fact of life. “Lacking as women are, comparatively, in aggression and assertiveness, it is no surprise that men have ruled over all societies at almost all times,” Mansfield concludes. And that’s that.
The book then rushes to Mansfield’s home ground, the seminar room, where the ideals of the great philosophers are held up against present-day reality— which inevitably falls short of Aristotelian (or Machiavellian, it really doesn’t matter) virtue. We get tips on manliness from Plato’s dialogues and Homer’s story about ancient Greek warrior Achilles and his captive Briseis, whom Achilles enslaves and rapes until King Agamemnon takes her for himself.
Mansfield is at least twice as subtle as REN; he knows enough to divide manliness into two basic types. The bad type is “nihilistic.” In a neat exercise of philosophical jujitsu, he argues that the real problem with feminism today is that it tries too hard to be “manly”—but (gotcha!) in the bad, nihilistic way. This is especially true for Mansfield’s bête noire, Simone de Beauvoir. As Diana Schaub elaborates in a retrospective on Mansfield’s book in the Claremont Review, “Manly nihilism was embraced by the woman warrior, Simone de Beauvoir, who refashioned it into radical feminism’s womanly nihilism.” If it sounds like Mansfield is blaming harlot Eve and her uppity sisters for ruining manliness for everyone, that’s because he is, at least according to Schaub’s deferential take: “Mansfield insists on women’s weakness. Returning manliness to these civilized bounds, however, will be difficult, because getting manliness to walk the line, Johnny Cash–style, depends greatly on how that weaker sex behaves.” Lady behave!
Mansfield is far too sophisticated to openly argue for stripping American women of the rights they have fought for over the past two centuries. The “public” sphere, he insists, should remain gender- neutral. But in the “private sphere” (don’t bother looking for any definition of how the spheres are distinguished), those highly accurate stereotypes should reign triumphant. Only by acknowledging that women hate spiders and men alone can be properly manly can we retain the “moral moorings” of manliness, as Schaub explains. Meanwhile, outside the seminar room, the demand that men alone should perform manliness has been pretty much standard practice for non-gender-neutral societies from South Sudan to Kazakhstan to Taliban Afghanistan.
In short, Manliness is not the lowbrow male supremacy that bubbles up from the manosphere into the pages of the American Mind. It is the kindly, high-brow version of it. The raw egg fellow and Florida’s new thought leader on antiwoke education don’t represent a break with Claremont’s misogynist past. The novelty is just that REN and Yenor are saying the quiet part out loud.
***
To be clear, the misogyny of the New Right isn’t just for angry young men. Authoritarian movements around the world have always used male supremacist ideology to appeal to some number of women, too. In America, we have Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other prominent female advocates for the subordination of women. Some of this is opportunism, of course—why not join the boys’ club that rules the world? But some of it runs deeper than that. The roots of misogyny lie not in the timeless differences between the sexes but in some very time-bound conditions that affect all people in some societies.
History and sociology show that societies with massive economic or political inequalities also tend to have extreme gender inequalities. When large group of relatively disadvantaged men become anxious about their prospects of securing respect and dignity in society, they can be “bought off” with promises of male supremacy. No matter how low a man may be on the social totem pole, he can still “big himself up” by putting women down.
Women’s interests in societies with such inequalities is no mystery. Whether successfully paired with a big-enough man, or failed by a series of men, they may perceive gender equality as a threat to the only order that keeps things in place. They may feel that the best chance women have to claw back dignity and economic security in a deeply and irredeemably unequal society is to be subordinate to men, who will then be compelled to “protect” them and financially support them and their children. This was basically the position of Phyllis Schlafly forty years ago, and it still resonates with many conservatives today.
Who will pay the price for the male supremacism of the new Trump administration? It’s a safe bet that the brunt will fall on lower-income and socially disadvantaged women, along with its many other targets. The dehumanizing rhetoric that Trump and his acolytes issue serves as an enabling or permission device for those prone to target others for abuse.