On Wednesday, the HuffPost published an important article titled “At Least 9 Far-Right Insurrectionists Have A History Of Violence Against Women.”
Using police records and court filings, HuffPost researchers discovered that a significant number of the January 6th Capitol attackers had long histories of violence and other forms of abuse against women — “ranging,” the article notes, “from domestic abuse accusations to prison time for sexual battery and criminal confinement.”
The article is carefully researched and full of horrifying details; it’s an important contribution to our understanding of the Capitol attack, and well worth a read.
But it is also one of the least surprising articles I’ve read in some time. We know that the far right is suffused with misogyny; not every misogynist is a right-wing extremist, but most right-wing extremists are misogynists. These are men who, by and large, believe that white men should rule the world; when their masculinity is challenged they sometimes lash out with violence, often directed at those women who are closest to them.
We also know — as the HuffPost article itself points out — that many men who commit public acts of violence have histories of violence against women.
Experts have linked extremism to violent misogyny in recent years, especially in the wake of mass shootings in which the perpetrators had a history of violence against women. These violent behaviors exist on a spectrum … but violence against women often begets more violence, sometimes deadly. Three people died as a direct result of the violence at the Capitol, and more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured during the riot.
Domestic violence is often, as one expert quoted in the HuffPost piece notes, “a troubling indicator of someone who could become more violent.”
The most surprising thing about the HuffPost article is that there weren’t more Capitol attackers with documented histories of violence against women. But I’m sure more evidence is out there and that this number will grow.
It’s not hard to imagine that way more than nine men in this video compilation have committed violence agianst women.
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TBH I’d guess most if not all of the capitol insurrectionists are misogynists. It’s a common thread for almost all extremist men.
I’d be astonished if as many as 1 in 10 men who went didn’t have a history of misogynistic violence. Many of them also have extensive histories of general violence as well, not to mention DUIs, fraud, and weapons violations. Indeed, it seems that every last person who went to the Capitol is clsuch a complete insufferable asshole that everyone in their lives, from blood relatives to strangers on a bus, is jumping at the chance to turn them in.
I seem to remember reading that the #1 indicator of whether someone (some man) was going to become a mass shooter was a history of violence against women. Violence against women is not taken nearly as seriously as it should be. If we were more proactive about perpetrators of violence against women, a lot of other types of violence would go way down.
Violence against women within a household is predictive of violence against people outside of one’s household specifically because we don’t take violence against women seriously.
The violent begin by inflicting violence where they’re least likely to be held accountable: in their own home, attacking women who live with them.
As they commit more and more acts of violence without being held accountable, they lose their fear of accountability and act out their violence in more public ways.
Taking violence against women seriously is the only way to impose the early accountability that prevents someone from escalating their violence further – both within the home and outside it.
The principal reason that there aren’t any laws in the US prohibiting guns to people with a history of domestic violence is that it would require disarming above half the police in the country. Which is also a good plan, but police cartels fight tooth and nail against any such measures.
TL;DR:ACAB, Abolish the police.
So what pre-incident indicators would the female Capitol attackers have exhibited?
I can’t wait for the cries of “There were women there too!” and “Half the dead
insurrectionistspatriots were women!”Note: that statement is a lie. I would be happy to wait for it forever.
@Full Metal Ox
Child abuse? Support/defense of abusive men? I’m just guessing.
@Rabid Rabbit
Last I checked, they’re still squabbling over whether Ashli Babbitt was a secret antifa agent or a martyr. I’m guessing they’ll go with whichever is more convenient at any given time.
It’s frustrating that everyone seems to discover that extremists and mass shooters are lifelong misogynists every time there’s some sort of incident. It seems like we always get these pieces, and then it’s memory holed. I wish everyone would learn from this and just take misogyny seriously.
@Full Metal Ox
Carrying water for the patriarchy, enthusiastically. Marjorie Taylor Greene springs to mind.
The right wing generally (and even the ‘reasonable ones) facilitates domestic violence in the USA and across the globe, ironically often through their obsession with self-sufficient morality and apparent family values.
Psychologists consider a rigid belief in gender roles as a key personality factor in abuser profiles, and by failing to fund domestic violence shelters or invest in key social programs, more violent men are created and domestic violence continues.
@Dalillama this calls for stealing guns from cop houses then and making it very difficult for them to retrieve it, i.e. hiding them or destroying them.
The women rioters are the type who call police on innocent black people
@Lollypop:
The phrase “family values” actually seems to represent a bundle of “values” that boils down, in large part, to “women and children are, or at least should be, the property of their closest male relative, his to dispose of as he sees fit”, so there is nothing at all surprising about finding a correlation between so-called “family values” and domestic violence. (There’s a bit more to it than that, chiefly homophobia, transphobia, generalized misogyny, prudishness, and the regarding of promiscuous women as essentially having become socialized as “property”, so a public resource to be abused by anyone in the vicinity, but most of that in turn seems to exist to reinforce the patriarchal family dynamic by closing off perceived and actual escape routes and access to information that the circumstances of women, in particular, could be better.)
@Surplus
The other side is, conservatives don’t believe in any value other than gaining power and harming those who aren’t them. So family values also serves as a catch-all term for every double standard they can use to attack their opponent, such as how they attack Democrats for supporting abortion access, then pay their mistresses to get abortions.
@Surplus – Along those lines, Utah lawmakers just struck down a bill to include teaching about consent, coercion, and sexual assault mitigation in sex ed classes.
That only makes sense if you think nobody should be consenting to sex outside marriage, and that once you’re married consent is irrelevant (at least, for the wife).
Unsurprisingly, Utah’s rate of rape and sexual violence is well above the national average.
It strikes me that the illustration at the top of this column is Larry, who was the first guy carrying restraints who was arrested. Because he was arrested early, his comments were carried at length and it surprised me at the time how practiced he was at gaslighting—making his case for his actions sound reasonable and level-headed — except that he’s pictured on the floor of the Senate chamber, wearing a helmet and body armor, and carrying restraints, while being part of a crowd looking for Mike Pence. It does not surprise me one bit that could excuse himself for seven years of verbal abuse of a woman he expected more from.
This phrasing occasionally comes up in US political discussions (and only in the US, as far as I can tell), and I sometimes wonder what exactly is meant here.
I get that abortion can be a big expense, and is not often covered by insurance. I gather the man in these scenarios would be likely relatively wealthy compared to the mistress, even if she’s not poor either, so paying the whole expense would be expected courtesy on his part. Not to mention the likely “sugar daddy” dynamics at play in these relationships.
But the phrasing makes it look like she’s extorting money on her choice to abort or not. Is this something that commonly occurs between wealthy conservative men and their secret mistresses? (Probably not in cases that involve a formal “hush up” agreement to begin with, I suppose.)
Or is it just a convention of language, in reference to the abovementioned courtesy/sugar daddy dynamics? Like, you discover that Senator Pro-Life has had a secret girlfriend who had an abortion at the time, and you also discover that he made some substantial money transfers to her around same time, and then you rhetorically combine the two to make his involvement in the abortion look more active, to emphasize the hypocrisy?
@Surplus
Totally agree. And as far as I can see, the supposed payoff for a woman submitting to the binds of Family Values is being perceived as a good woman in her community and getting “looked after” by her loving man – in exchange for which she has to sacrifice all autonomy and ambition. But if it turns out he’s not so loving? Well, then she’s not sexy enough, or doesn’t cater to his needs well. If he’s outright abusive, then she’s a nag and needs to learn to manage him better. And if his behaviour is so egregious it can’t be ignored, it’s still her fault because she should’ve known what he was like before she married him. It’s an absolute con in which women never win.
@Lumipuna
As far as I am aware, the “paying mistresses to get abortions” is done to cover up the fact that the politician was having an affair. The emphasis is usually placed by media on the abortion aspect to show the hypocrisy of officials who would ordinarily be opposed to abortions and affairs.
@Lollypop:
Totally agree. And as far as I can see, the supposed payoff for a woman submitting to the binds of Family Values is being perceived as a good woman in her community and getting “looked after” by her loving man – in exchange for which she has to sacrifice all autonomy and ambition. But if it turns out he’s not so loving? Well, then she’s not sexy enough, or doesn’t cater to his needs well. If he’s outright abusive, then she’s a nag and needs to learn to manage him better. And if his behaviour is so egregious it can’t be ignored, it’s still her fault because she should’ve known what he was like before she married him. It’s an absolute con in which women never win.
And that’s just women who meet all the Good Respectable Chaste Cishet Christian Wife criteria; other women get to be chew toys for what men are carefully taught are their slavering bestial impulses (that it’s somehow women’s responsibility, rather than their own, to govern.)
This is almost certainly unrelated, but why am I not surprised Trump was acquitted again? If justice is to be done with him, there’s no way it can happen in the halls of a Congress too busy bickering over irrelevant minutiae and covering each other’s asses in the name of party loyalty and preservation of a status quo whose entire existence was a mistake.
If Trump is to be held accountable for anything, the people will need to take matters directly into their own hands and see that the government has no intention of doing what is right no matter who’s in charge.
@Anonymous the Democracts are a bunch of “both sides” cowards who need a better taste of radicalism or be eradicated like the Republican party. I hope the power vacuum won’t be filled by a bunch of assholes because of how America was invented – to placate to rich white Christian men first. Unfortunately this would hurt so many of their rich corporate donors who rely on the Democrats propping them up to do their dirty business or even exist, even if it hurts what Democrats (supposedly) stand for (racial justice, queer liberation, fighting misogyny and ableism etc.).
@Lollypop
This reminds me of the Finnish saying “oma sika, oma vika”, which translates to something like “your pig, your fault”, which I’ve seen used as a put-down either when an individual woman as any complaint concerning her husband, or when someone tries to suggest that marriages in general may have some systemic issues in Finland. The reasoning seems to be that since no one forced you to marry, and women are the ones doing the choosing in these matters, whatever happens after a woman says “I do” is her own fault.
When I learned of this, I sure was glad to know no (Finnish) men ever pretend to be nice to fool a woman into marrying them, and that (Finnish) women apparently have some super power where they can make their husbands do whatever they want and any and all problems are a result of women not exercising this super power correctly.
So violence is like bigotry in that different kind of being violent go together well.
Also, I suspect it’s an history of being violent with weaker people. Not that I know of a lot of violent people who unleash it against people who can retaliate.