I’ll never forget the moment, in one of the 2015 Republican primary debates, when Donald Trump looked into the camera and declared that destroying political correctness was his No 1 campaign issue. His fans went berserk, both in the crowd and, especially, online. Oh my God, I thought, even then. He’s courting the troll vote.
Sure enough, over the subsequent year, I watched as wildly disparate groups of men from the slimiest corners of the internet – anti-feminists, antisemites, anti-choicers, white nationalists, gun fetishists, Islamophobes, rightwing talk-radio toadies, garden-variety good old boys – coalesced into one sprawling, frothing hydra behind Donald Trump. When mainstream news outlets started churning out thinkpieces about the mysterious “alt-right”, the wicked green engine of Trump’s base, I wanted to scream.
Feminists and other social justice activists already know what the “alt-right” is – it’s a roll call of the angry men who’ve been stalking, harassing, abusing and trying to silence us for years. The only thing they have in common is a fixation on the spectre of “political correctness”, a vaguely pejorative catch-all for post-Martin Luther King social activism, and in Trump they found their champion: the alpha male who was finally going to give these bitches what they deserve. (I can’t adequately convey how sickening it has been to watch groups of men who have posted my home address online, dug up photos of my husband and children, and threatened to rape and murder me lie and steamroll their candidate to the presidency.) For 18 excruciating months, we were expected to entertain the fantasy that a person could vote for Trump without voting for racism, for xenophobia, for rape culture – when that campaign’s very slogan vowed to drag us backward to a time when the US was “great”, a time before people of colour and women and LGBTQ Americans had inked, in blood, our few hard-won protections into law. It’s gaslighting on a galactic scale.