AOC Correct Again: Trump And JD Vance Are Running An Incel Campaign
The entire conservative movement is heavily inspired by extreme manosphere nonsense.
On Monday, Vivek Ramaswamy, who is apparently still hard at work trying to make himself happen, pouted on social media about the recent* characterization of Trump and JD Vance as just being “weird.”
“This whole ‘they’re weird’ argument from the Democrats is dumb & juvenile,” he wrote. “This is a presidential election, not a high school prom queen contest. It’s also a tad ironic coming from the party that preaches ‘diversity & inclusion.’ Win on policy if you can, but cut the crap please.”
Yes, the famously policy-driven approaches of the Trump campaign, like calling women fat and ugly, and all the rest of it we don’t have the energy to catalog.
This would be reasonable if we were talking “weird” like just being unique and different. That’s the kind of weird we love and are happy to embrace! But we’re talking about “weird” as in “it’s super weird to get upset about childless women in the year 2024.”
“Being obsessed with repressing women is goofy,” responded Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a quote tweet. “Trying to watch what LGBTQ+ people do all the time is abnormal. Punishing people who don’t have biological offspring is creepy. It’s an incel platform, dude. It’s SUPER weird. And people need to know.”
She’s right, and they do.
It’s been a while since I’ve seriously covered the manosphere, but it really is truly, truly startling the way a lot of the lingo and ideas from there, particularly from the incel boards, has migrated into the mainstream. Zoomers on Tiktok now talk about “looksmaxxing” — a term that came about on incel sites like PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism (commonly referred to as PSL) to describe efforts at looking better physically. Many have also become obsessed with the “canthal tilt” (whether eyes are turned up, down, or are neutral) as something that incels have long insisted distinguishes attractive people from unattractive people (it absolutely does not!) and other bits and pieces of PSL “looks theory.” There was even a trend of people using a filter to test themselves for a positive canthal tilt, with those who had a negative canthal tilt responding with the incel-ese maxim “It’s over.” (Incels are famously fond of declaring “It’s over if …” and then citing some ridiculous reason they think women won’t fuck them, outside of the fact that they hate women.)
But the biggest impact overall has been in the Republican Party, which has become increasingly obsessed with “childless women,” with pressuring people to get married at younger ages, with virginity, with the distribution of women, with tradwives, with ending no-fault divorce, and other things that incels and other factions of the manosphere have been dreaming about for ages. Not to mention their extra creepy obsession with Kamala Harris’s sex life. You know who gets real angry at women for having sex? Incels. You know who sits around seething and fantasizing about all of the sex that bad women must have had/be having with men who aren’t them? Incels. And, well, Republicans.
JUST TODAY!
In fact, earlier this month, over on one of the main incel messageboards, there was a discussion on “How would you solve inceldom if you became a dictator?” and some of the answers were eerily similar to what we see in Project 2025 and hear from the mouths of vice presidential nominee JD Vance and conservative pundits all over.
Here’s one especially comprehensive answer, from user VideoGameCoper (not linking for obvious reasons):
I know my first steps would be to ban government support for single mothers, which would disincentivize them from getting pregnant from a chad who will just leave her. I would also ban alimony to women in divorce and make it so the divorce laws do not favor women. Next steps are to ban onlyfans and diversity hiring that favors women. After that, I would start destroying social media that boosts women's egos. Paternity tests would become mandatory. This will all make women depend on men more and be more incentivized to get with a looksmatched man who will be loyal instead of getting pumped and dumped by chad.
At least they’re more honest about why they want to do these things (though the Right has been experimenting with saying the quiet part out loud for some time now).
Now, sure, a lot of these ideas have been popular with conservatives for a long time, but they’ve only recently gotten so bold as to start talking about banning pornography and no-fault divorce, or being comfortable ragging on “childless cat ladies” in public. This is likely due, at least in part, to the normalization of these ideas in “extremely online” conservative circles — which already have a lot of crossover with the manosphere in general.
I’m not saying they’re purposely cribbing from the incel boards (not that this would be too surprising), just that Republicans are somehow coming out with many of the same ideas. And when you have the same ideas held by a group of people notorious for repulsing other human beings and going on killing sprees, you can’t be too surprised when people get the ick.
*All of that being said, can we please not overdo it on the “weird” thing and make it cringe? Wonkette, which has long been on the forefront of calling these people creepy weirdos, is depending on you!
Single mother here, weighing in. I was fortunate enough to not require government assistance, despite not receiving a thin dime from my “chad,” and I can’t quite parse wtf this choad is suggesting. I would assume he wouldn’t accept “damaged goods,” so is this just another way to drive desperate women into the arms of a worthy man? News flash, pal, there is no universe in which you are worthy of me.
Steve Bannon: In cell.