In 2016, a historically unprecedented incident took place. And yet, barely anyone even noticed. Even years later, we’ve failed to acknowledge it or to have begun the process of understanding it. Because we still can’t even see it.
And that’s because this incident involved a woman. And she was asking for it.
The woman was Hillary Clinton. What she was asking for was votes. And what she got was the single biggest outpouring of misogyny in human history.
We can now say that. Although no one ever does. But this was an unprecedented previously unimaginable event. Because 2016 was when the world’s first global instant mass communication technology – social media – crashed up against the most ancient of prejudices – misogyny.
And the result was an earthquake: Donald Trump.
In 2016, we weren’t prepared for it. We didn’t see it coming. We didn’t understand how these same social media platforms that have enabled us to share our thoughts instantly at a global scale also facilitate the worst kinds of human communication. How they are engineered to cater to our basest instincts and reward the clickiest, most hateful content.
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”. If that sounds vaguely familiar, you may recognise those exact words from the attacks that Brexiteers directed at me. In my case, it was an assault that went on for years and created the permission for the same man who seeded the narrative to sue me in court.
I was gagged, the necessities of the court case silenced me. Sticks and stones will break my bones etc. But this was never about me. I was just the access point, a way to shut the story down, a viable target. And this was an attack that achieved its goal. Overnight, all reporting on the subject stopped dead.
But there are things that only veterans of the childless cat lady wars can know. They used to call us witches because we knew shit. We still do. That’s what makes us so powerful. And dangerous. That’s what JD Vance understands: our cat lady energy. We’ve lived through culture wars before they even had that name, before they invented memes and when they just burned us at the stake.
So, here’s what I need you to do now: to shut up and sit down and listen. You are at risk. 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.
