Women are fleeing the MAGA right’s rampant misogyny: conservative

U.S. President Donald Trump with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 11, 2026. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

In the past, conservative/libertarian journalist Cathy Young voiced strong criticism of what she viewed as the excesses of third-wave feminism. An op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post in 2016 had the headline "How Feminism Came To Be All About Hating Men."

But Young, very much a Never Trumper, is equally proactive when it comes to calling out misogyny from the MAGA movement.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on March 19, she observes a pattern: pro-Donald Trump women promoting misogyny in order to prove their loyalty to President Trump and MAGA.

"Is it really a revelation that women who move in far-right circles must prove their 'based' bona fides by going along with performative woman-bashing — or even by voicing 'Repeal the Nineteenth' slogans as an I'm-not-like-other-girls badge?," Young laments. "These interactions were depicted in a post from nearly a year ago by the controversial pundit and reformed far rightist Richard Hanania titled 'The Based Ritual.'"

Overt misogyny, Young warns, is only growing more plentiful in the MAGA movement —and the MAGA women who are "going along" with it are trying to express their allegiance to MAGA.

"Nick Fuentes, who declared in a notorious recent video clip that 'women exist for sex' and for breeding — and who routinely attacks women as innately selfish, greedy, mindless, and basically subhuman — is not quite a respectable member of the right today but no longer a pariah, either," Young observes. "Aimee Terese, who thinks that Fuentes-style overt woman-hating is 'infantile' and 'socially inept,' pitches benign misogyny as the alternative…. Conservatives have rightly pointed out that progressive rhetoric about 'toxic masculinity' and white male privilege alienated some men from the Democratic Party. But apparently, if you're a woman who objects to far more vile language about women and bristles at calls for taking away your voting rights, you're just proving that women are a thin-skinned and humorless lot."

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