MAGA has a new scapegoat for all its problems

U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he hosts a Rose Garden Club lunch at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 21, 2025. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Conservative/libertarian journalist Cathy Young has, at times, been highly critical of what she views as the excesses of third-wave feminism. Back in 2016, an op-ed Young wrote for the Washington Post was headlined "How Feminism Came To Be All About Hating Men."

Although the piece draw criticism from some progressives and praise from right-wing media, Young emphasized that she had no use for sexism whether it was male-bashing from the far left or misogyny from the far right. And in a lengthy article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on October 22, Young aggressively calls out a trend in the MAGA movement: blaming women for a wide range of problems.

"The latest intellectual buzz on the right is about a Compact Magazine essay that boils down to 'Women ruin everything,'" Young explains. "The piece by Helen Andrews, titled 'The Great Feminization' — a follow-up to a tweet thread and a speech at the National Conservatism conference last month — is, you could say, the modern-day equivalent of 16th Century Scottish preacher John Knox's celebrated polemic, 'The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women.' But where Knox inveighed against what he saw as unnatural rule by female monarchs, Andrews has a much broader target: the rise in female political and social power in Western societies."

Young continues, "There is no precedent, Andrews writes, for how Europe and North America have 'experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses.' This experiment, she says, has become a 'potential threat to civilization'…. It's not that women are bad, says Andrews, but their distinct qualities and values — 'empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition' — transform these institutions in ruinous ways…. Let's not mince words: This a grotesquely misogynistic screed."

But the "swashbuckling masculine spirit of business" depicted in Andrews' article, Young observes, is absent "in the sight of our manly tech tycoons groveling before Donald Trump."

According to Young, Andrews' arguments are echoing an "ultra-simplistic message" of the far right: that "everything they hate in modern American culture can be blamed on women."

"It is extremely unlikely that any strategies to reduce women's influence would get off the ground, even under the Trump Administration," Young argues. "But regardless of the results, there is little doubt that 'Great Feminization' discourse will help further normalize misogyny on the right and drive women farther left. Andrews' essay, whose principal thesis she admits is not original, contributes no new insights to our understanding of men and women. But it may well contribute to making our already fraught conversations about gender more extreme, more polarized, and more hostile."

Cathy Young's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

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