Ladies, Republicans Don't Want Your Vote

 

     So take it as a challenge to do the right thing.

     Amanda Marcotte, in her Standing Room Only newsletter, to which I subscribe, decided to devote today's edition to the rampant misogyny that's bloomed like a corpse flower on the American landscape this past week. So that inspired me to do my own take on it with my unique spin.

     Apparently, some Republicans have been reading the tea leaves and noting that Trump's not doing so well with the gender that he's repeatedly demeaned, insulted and, in some cases, raped. 

     The misogyny got kicked up about 50 notches when the Harris campaign released an ad narrated by actress Julia Roberts. It was a savvy move on the part of the vice president to get out the female vote. It showed a woman being pressured by her MAGA husband to vote for Trump. When she gets to the booth, she picks Harris-Walz and she and the woman across from her give each other a knowing look. When the husband asks if she made "the right choice," she winks at the other woman and says yes. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know,” Ms. Roberts narrates.

     Well. The MAGA bros couldn't have that.

     Jesse Wattles from Fox "News": “If I found out Emma was going to the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair,” he said, conveniently omitting from the record that Jesse cheated on his first wife with his future second wife.

     Tiny-faced Charlie Kirk whined to Megyn Kelly, “I think it’s so gross. I think it’s so nauseating where this wife is wearing the American hat, she’s coming in with her sweet husband who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go you know and have a nice life and provide to the family, and then she lies to him saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m gonna vote for Trump,’ and then she votes for Kamala Harris as her little secret in the voting booth.”

     Kirk's statement is wrong on so many levels and in so many ways that it's difficult to completely unpack even that one paragraph. Firstly. it's nobody's business, not even a husband's, to know for whom his wife voted. And no husband or any man has the right to tell the woman in his life for whom to vote. And Kirk still seems to think that this is Eisenhower's America, in which the husband went to an office and bought home all the bacon to give his wife a good life.

     Sorry, Charlie. Wives work, too.

Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go. 👨🏼#JohnMcEntee #McEntee2028 pic.twitter.com/OJzXadROgo

— McEntee 2028 (@JohnMcEntee28) October 28, 2024

     Then there's antidiluvian douchebag John McEntee who actually is calling for a repeal of the 19th amendment that gave women the right to vote 104 years ago. (I guarantee you if polling data showed the female vote skewed in Trump's direction, they wouldn't be saying these things.)

     And then there were Trump's remarks the other day in Green Bay, Wisconsin in which he actually said while wearing a ridiculous orange vest, "I want to protect the women of our country ... I'm gonna do it whether the women like it or not."

     The moth-eaten patriarchal bullshit aside, this was coming from, again, an adjudicated rapist, someone who's been accused of sexually assaulting at least 27 women and bragged on a hot mic about being allowed to sexually assault women because he was a star. Then there's Trump's insistence that he'd do it "whether the women like it or not."

 

     Then he, appropriately, huffed his way into the wrong end of a garbage truck (although he almost didn't make it in) and drove around aimlessly for a few seconds. 

     This speaks perfectly to the perennial right wing attitude that it doesn't matter what women think whether it be their choice for president or having some alpha male "protecting" them "whether they like it or not." What Trump was referencing were the women who were allegedly raped and killed by undocumented migrants while he cynically read their names off a teleprompter. In reality, if Trump actually saw a woman getting sexually assaulted by a migrant and no one was looking, he'd probably help (but only after she was down).

     But the blowback over the Harris campaign ad is very telling and is pulling the Neanderthals out of their caves so they can drag their wives back in by the hair. Statements like Watters' and McEntee's proves conclusively what they and their forebears have thought all along- That their wives' votes should be an extension of their political wishes, that their enfranchisement is nothing more or less than a legal second vote for their candidate.

     In other words, yes, you have the right to vote as long as you vote the way I tell you to, which obviously is not real autonomy. This more than implies that your typical Republican male thinks their wives should not be allowed any real autonomy. And the very suspicion that they would deviate from their wishes and lie about how they voted is enough to make them run out of the trailer and pull on their wife beaters.

     And the fact that this ad was approved and put out by a woman is enough to make them chew their hind legs in rage, that she would encourage other women, their wives, to vote their conscience is akin to crossing the Rubicon, committing treason. Because to most Republican males, control over women is key, all the way down to who they vote for.

     This is why these so-called pundits are losing their shit, because, number one, they can't stand the idea of the next president not being an old, white Republican male and the alternative, a black/Indian female is, to them, akin to a fever dream, especially as they know they wouldn't be able to control her.

     If you think I'm being hyperbolic about Trump's attitude toward women, consider that just today, Trump told Tucker Carlson that he wishes Liz Cheney would get shot in the face by nine guns.

     This is why, in the waning days of the election, Trump is embracing the "bro vote", doing a three hour interview with Joe Rogan. He knows from his own internal polling data that he loses women every time he opens his foul maw. So he's hoping to get young white men to the polls because they're his key demographic. In essence, he's trying to cancel out the female vote with male votes, which, ironically, is what women are doing to cancel out their Republicans husbands' and fathers' votes.

     Essentially, Trump has given up on the largest voting demographic in the country. He doesn't want your votes, ladies. So give him what he expects and vote your conscience this November 5th.