Fifty-three percent of white women in the U.S. voted for Donald Trump in 2016, whether out of the selfish, misguided, racist logic that by aligning themselves with their race over their gender they might be afforded a certain protected status or out of good old-fashioned single-issue pro-life tunnel vision, like this crazy lady opening a CNN interview by telling reporter Poppy Harlow, “congratulations on your unborn child,” before proceeding to defend Roy Moore.
That statistic should be cited, and often, if only to point out that intersectionalism is a thing, and if you support the oppression of another group, your claims to feminist empowerment will fall apart rather quickly. Exhibit A: British “alt-right” YouTube personality Tara McCarthy, who recently got very upset about the sexist harassment she’s been getting from her male counterparts. (Who would have thought a bunch of bitter racists would also be misogynist assholes?) McCarthy recently changed her Twitter account to private, a telltale sign of troll trouble to which I’d be more sympathetic if she didn’t do things like call interracial relationships “borderline bestiality”and fill her podcasts and YouTube videos with anti-Semitic dog whistles on a regular basis.
Apparently, McCarthy’s been under fire from her “alt-right” brethren, who are angry that McCarthy has yet to produce a pure white baby, as is her genetic imperative and sole purpose on this planet. In a series of tweets collected by Salon before McCarthy’s account went private, she complains that “women in the Alt Right are constantly harassed by low status anonymous trolls trying to put us in our place … The ultimate goal seems to be to bully us off the internet.”
Meanwhile, McCarthy’s podcast, Virtue Of The West, states that its mission is “reconnect with the traditional values that once made Western Civilization great, including but not limited to the glorification of the nuclear family, motherhood, masculinity, femininity, etiquette, traditional gender roles and love of one’s own culture, race and country.” (Emphasis ours.) So, basically, McCarthy’s upset because she’s not being made the exception to the values she claims to share with the trolls she courted to make herself famous. Sorry, Tara, but you know what traditional Western values have to say about women speaking up on sensitive issues like politics. (Hint: They’re witches.)
Canadian “alt-righter” Lauren Southern attempts the same intellectual contortionist act in a recent video called “Why I’m Not Married,” which she opens by decrying the decline of traditional Western values, then explains why the patriarchal part of same doesn’t apply to her, because she’s only 22 and no one understands nuance anymore. “People who ignore that there are exceptions to the rule are just as crazy as people who ignore that there’s a rule in the first place,” she says.
Meanwhile, six days later Southern released a video called “Asking Feminists: Women’s Rights Or Islam?,” an affair only slightly less embarrassing than the time Alex Jones got chased around downtown Seattle. In the video, Southern asks protestors at a march in London, “which would you rather have, women’s rights or Islam?” Faced with responses like, “both,” “that’s not an either/or question,” and “why are you here asking stupid questions?,” Southern insists the two are fundamentally incompatible, regardless of history or the first-hand experiences of a Muslim woman at the march who’s patient enough to speak with her. She also likes to joke about drowning refugees. You see? Nuance.