This revolution has been ripped apart by a rogues' gallery of abusers

President Donald Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 26, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Misogyny Is Not a Culture-War Sideshow. It Is a Program of Rule.

The Insult Is Cover for the Agenda

A Townhall essay sneering that women are too “nasty” to improve political leadership is easy to dismiss as adolescent provocation. That would be a mistake. The insult sits beside a more consequential project: religious activists arguing that women should not vote, Republican officials restricting reproductive autonomy, and federal appointees using public institutions to elevate those ideas.

The people wielding power here are not anonymous internet misogynists. They include officeholders, cabinet officials, legislators, judges, and political networks with access to the Pentagon and the White House. Their rhetoric matters because institutions are already translating it into policy.

Help fuel the work. Independent analysis doesn’t fund itself:☕ Buy us a coffee

Dependence Is the Point

Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, banks could require a husband or another man to co-sign a woman’s credit application. That was not an unfortunate misunderstanding about paperwork. It was an economic arrangement that made women’s independence conditional on male permission.

Modern demands for “household voting” follow the same design. Pastor Joel Webbon argues that a woman’s political voice should come through the man who supposedly represents her. Ministers affiliated with the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches have likewise promoted one vote per household, cast by its male head.

The premise is unmistakable: men are political individuals; women are dependents. Economic control, reproductive control, and disenfranchisement are not separate fixations. They are mutually reinforcing ways to limit a woman’s ability to leave, refuse, compete, or govern.

The State Is an Active Participant

The story’s strongest evidence is not what fringe preachers say. It is who grants them institutional standing.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth belongs to a church network whose pastors have opposed women’s suffrage. He invited Doug Wilson to preach at a Pentagon worship service, appeared with him, and had the event carried on the Defense Department’s internal television network. Hegseth has also pursued policies aimed at removing women from leadership roles while framing testosterone standards as military “lethality.”

That is government sponsorship, not merely private belief. Calling this a “trend in culture” obscures the chain of agency. Activists formulate the hierarchy; powerful officials normalize its advocates; public institutions supply the stage; policy gives the hierarchy material force.

The source weakens its own case when it lingers on the sexual histories and alleged misconduct of prominent men. Those details may demonstrate hypocrisy or contempt, but personal depravity is not the central mechanism. The political danger lies in authority: who controls appointments, military policy, health regulation, criminal prosecution, and the legal boundaries of bodily autonomy.

Cruelty Becomes Administration

Abortion bans expose what happens when misogynistic ideology acquires enforcement power. According to the reporting cited in the source, sepsis rates in Texas rose by more than 50 percent after the state banned abortion, while maternal deaths increased there as they declined in Democratic-led states. Texas authorities are pursuing a Houston midwife with criminal charges and a $1.6 million bond. Missouri Republicans are proposing a registry of pregnant women that could facilitate state monitoring.

These are decisions made by lawmakers and prosecutors, not atmospheric products of “polarization.” Women facing medical emergencies did not create the danger. Clinicians navigating criminal liability did not create it. Republican officials wrote the prohibitions, empowered enforcement, and accepted the foreseeable consequences.

The confusion is manufactured afterward. Preventable suffering is presented as an implementation problem, a medical ambiguity, or an unintended complication. But when government knowingly places prosecution between a patient and emergency care, cruelty is not a glitch in the policy. It is how the policy compels obedience.

Equality Delayed by Institutional Choice

The Equal Rights Amendment states that legal rights cannot be denied on account of sex. Thirty-eight states have ratified it, but its status remains contested because of the ratification deadline. The archivist has declined certification, relying on a Justice Department opinion, while the Supreme Court has not resolved the dispute.

Whatever one concludes about the amendment’s legal status, the political agency should not be blurred. Institutions are choosing inaction. Officials have interpretive power, Congress has legislative power, and courts control which disputes receive adjudication. Describing the ERA as simply “stalled” turns decisions made by identifiable authorities into weather.

That institutional caution is not evenly distributed. Government moves aggressively when prosecuting reproductive care and policing pregnancy, yet becomes exquisitely procedural when asked to secure equality. Power discovers uncertainty precisely where uncertainty protects the existing hierarchy.

Reaction Is a Governing Coalition

Gloria Steinem’s death provides the historical contrast, but nostalgia is not the lesson. The rights associated with the women’s movement were never self-executing or permanently secured. They altered who could hold property, obtain credit, leave a marriage, enter public life, and exercise political judgment without male supervision. Those changes redistributed power—and produced an organized reaction.

Today that reaction joins religious patriarchy, Republican state power, federal patronage, online misogyny, and selective institutional paralysis. Its factions do not need identical motives. They are aligned by the same result: women made less independent and men restored as legal, economic, or political gatekeepers.

The larger pattern is not a spontaneous backlash by lonely young men or a debate over whether women can be “nasty.” It is hierarchy laundering itself through sermons, jokes, health regulations, military doctrine, and procedural excuses. The misogyny attracts attention. The transfer of power is the actual project.

Thanks to Raw Story

Source: This revolution has been ripped apart by a rogues’ gallery of abusers

Systemic Error is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We warned them.We told them.We shouted from the rooftops.We plead.We begged.They didn’t listen.Now, we all will suffer.Y’all know what to do, right?VOTE BLUE! 💙Vote as if your life — nay, our country — depend on it.Because, this time, and every time, it does.