Morgonn McMichael at the right wing Young Women’s Leadership Summitt 2024 (Photo: flickr/ Gage Skidmore)
A generation of young and unashamedly right wing women in the United States are emerging as the new flag bearers of the far right.
They tell their millions of followers that feminism is destabilising Western civilisation and is a thousand times more toxic than toxic masculinity. They think that giving women the vote undermines the family.
Three of these women were the focus of the documentary America’s New Female Right, aired on Monday last week. Journalist Layla White immersed herself in the women’s networking and political campaigning.
Morgonn McMichael is 24 and one of some 400 influencers employed by the right wing Turning Point, an organisation that spreads far right views among young people. McMichael gets millions of hits on her social media posts. She is a fan of the trad wives movement and of Pearl Davis, the “female Andrew Tate” who insists on the benefits of male domination and female submission.
Hannah Faulkner is 17 from Nashville. A rising star in the US far right, she organised a transphobic “Teens against Genital Mutilation Rally” in her hometown.
She thinks that LGBT+ people are members of some kind of Satanic cult and that “global elites” are trying to control the population by emasculating men.
Faulkner has been home schooled by parents who want to protect her from gay teachers and study the bible.
“Is this brain washing?”, White suggests to Hannah’s father. “Well, at least my kids’ brains are clean,” he replies.
Most terrifying of all is Christie Hutcherson who patrols the Mexico border to film and harass people trying to get through the border fence. She also targets the volunteers who give them water and food.
In Hutcherson’s world, anyone trying to get into the US is a terrorist and they speak a “terrorist dialect” called Arabic
The documentary promised to provide some insights into this shocking aspect of the far right. But it failed.
White didn’t interrogate or challenge the women. She didn’t point the contradiction in women speaking out in public about the need for women to stop speaking out in public.
Worse, White’s approach was based on befriending the women. At one point, White claims that she and Morgonn are just two young women navigating modern life, except that Morgonn chose to embrace “controversy”.
Morgonn has been repeatedly banned from TikTok for her transphobia. It’s not controversy—it’s extreme bigotry.
Hannah Faulkner is very young, but should a journalist exposing the far right really describe her as “sweet”?
“There are problems on the Mexico border”, White tells the camera, before suggesting that Hutcherson’s uniformed vigilantes don’t address these problems.
This is a gross understatement—Hutcherson is clearly aiming to incite violence against those she finds crossing the border. She tells White that not even children are innocent.
White’s approach is based on us knowing that she doesn’t share her subjects’ views. But journalists must do more than give people a platform and stand back. They must question, interrogate, challenge and contextualise.
The blurb for the programme claimed that White would find out what is driving women her own age to share extreme content on social media. White focuses on women’s personal motivations, but this obscures rather than reveals the bigger picture. I don’t care about their personal motives. I want to know why they are winning an audience and how to stop them.
The far right feeds on people’s vulnerabilities and insecurities.
When welfare is axed and neoliberalism blights people’s lives, the family looks like the only support network available. Staying at home to care for a family seems like the only choice when childcare is non-existent.
Unfortunately, the search for shocking content drove this documentary, just as it drives its subjects. That search came at the expense of really exposing and explaining the role of women in far right politics.
America’s New Female Right, BBC 3 iPlayer
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