By Matthew N. Lyons
Treyf podcast #44, “Fascism and the Far-Right (Part 2)” features interviews with Diana Garvin and myself. Garvin’s interview discusses women’s oppression and resistance under the Italian Fascist regime. My interview discusses the book Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire, and focuses particularly on the role of misogyny within the U.S. far right today.
Treyf is a radical Jewish podcast based in Montreal. The link below includes the audio of Episode 44, a full transcript, and many related resources.
From my interview:
“GamerGate [in 2014] was this campaign to silence and stifle women in and around the computer gaming industry, whether they were programmers or reviewers or women trying to take an active role in the discussion…. They would target individual women and just bombard them with massive sustained campaigns of not just invective, but threats – rape threats, death threats, kinds of things that caused women to flee their homes out of fears for their physical safety…. And then a couple of years later, the alt-right took those same tactics and turned them against opponents of Donald Trump. And they used a lot of the same kinds of mechanisms of gathering people online to target specific individuals, bombarding them with rape threats and death threats, or if they were men, rape threats and death threats against their wives or daughters.”
“The Christian right … has been promoting patriarchal politics for decades, but it’s done it within the framework of this kind of mythos of the patriarchal family. You know, women need to be dutiful wives, dutiful daughters and so on. But what we’re seeing with the manosphere and then with the alt-right absorbing a lot of that misogyny in turn, is the kind of patriarchal politics where it’s not about the family, it’s not about building up patriarchal relationships in that sort of institutionalized way. It’s about predation. It’s about just using women and discarding them or or destroying them.”
“…we face different kinds of threats. On the one hand, there’s all of the institutionalized systems of social hierarchy and oppression that make up most of our world and that are intensely violent, dehumanizing and that need to be dismantled and overthrown. The far-right, it’s rooted in that reality, and it’s about intensifying it in all kinds of ways, but it’s also … an oppositional movement. It’s a movement that wants to dismantle the existing political system. It’s a movement that feeds on people’s sense of disempowerment as well as people’s sense of their privilege and their power being under attack from below. So the struggle against the far-right is something that needs to be waged in a different way than the struggle against institutionalized systems of power and oppression.”
