Comment by Carole Cadwalladr you might find interesting, she begins the article about how misogyny was used about Hilary Clinton in her bid for presidency.
“But eight years on, we haven’t even begun to understand that lesson. We didn’t listen to Hillary. We haven’t yet realised that misogyny is one of the most dangerous weapons on Earth. The best friend of authoritarians and oligarchs. The handmaiden of tyrants.
Worst of all, we haven’t yet realised that misogyny represents the most urgent and pressing threat to global security.
Because it’s misogyny – networked misogyny across multiple global platforms that will earn their tech bro owners billions upon billions of dollars – that is going to decide the 2024 election.
And it’s misogyny that’s going to dictate the future of Nato, the outcome of the war in Ukraine, whether we have peace in Europe or more war. And because this is going to be a firehose that will be directed at a single woman – Kamala Harris – it will be misogyny multiplied: misogyny plus racism, the most toxic combination of all.
This week comments resurfaced that Trump’s newly appointed running mate had made about the woman who looks certain to be the next Democrat candidate. Comments from 2021, in which JD Vance dismissed Kamala Harris as a “childless cat lady”.
We are all at risk. Because this is what I know: bad things are coming. We are in a code red emergency.
Because misogyny isn’t bad people saying bad things that may hurt your feelings. (Though it might.) And misogyny isn’t about silencing women. (Though it does.)
Misogyny is now one of the deadliest weapons on Earth. Misogyny is a dirty bomb in the heart of our information system. Misogyny is electoral interference. Misogyny is a national security threat so lethal we can’t even see it.
Because misogyny is invisible. It’s never about all women, it’s always just about one particular, disagreeable woman who just happens to not be very likeable. Or competent. Who is loud or “shrill” or annoying or who got the job because she slept with a man. Or because she was a diversity hire. A woman who can’t even run her own house let alone a country. A woman who is “nasty”. A woman who isn’t and cannot be the strong leader a nation needs.
Enjoy the sunshine of the Kamala moment. Breathe in the clean fresh air of facts, of evidence, of information. Of hope. Before the toxic social media chimneys crank up the content. Because shortly, the particulates will arrive, will silently and stealthily and invisibly start clogging our bronchial pathways even as the billionaire bros who own the platforms rake in record profits. It’s not so much surveillance capitalism as disaster capitalism.
It took years for us to learn some of the basic facts of what happened in 2016 and it’s still just a partial view. But we now know: Russia attacked Clinton in exactly the same way that Trumpworld attacked Clinton, in exactly the same way that they are attacking Kamala.
We now know how the Kremlin actually paid in roubles for Facebook to pump those messages out across US social media. We now know that Cambridge Analytica, on behalf of the Trump campaign, created an anonymous Crooked Hillary campaign that it fed into the “bloodstream of the internet”.
But neither invented misogyny. They just used it. These were narratives the bros of the broverse were already spreading, which the invisible hand of the social media algorithms were pumping into people’s feeds. The same zombie narratives that have risen again for Kamala and are already being stoked not just by YouTube edgelords and JD Vance fanboys but Russia and China too.
Soon, we won’t even notice. It’ll just be part of the air that we breathe. A choking toxic misogynistic stew that will silently pour over the culture war trenches like mustard gas. Darkness is coming. This is the world social media created. And we’re much further out than we thought.”
Observer 28/07
