A temple of white male grievance

Jill Filipovic discusses the significance of virtually the entire Republican conference — with the exception of a handful of women radical enough to believe the QAnon-adjacent stuff they say and a handful of libertarian men — doing everything the can (including refusing to seat duly elected representatives for weeks) to protect more information about Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein from coming to light:

And yet it has still been shocking and appalling to see how many conservatives, most of them men, wrapping Trump and by extension Epstein in a protective shield. “Trafficking underage girls for sex” should be the kind of principle that transcends politics, but here we are seeing that the rule on the right is more like “trafficking underage girls for sex is bad if Democrats do it” (and before anyone yells about the Clintons, I don’t see any collective effort on behalf of the Democratic Party to prevent the Epstein documents being released in order to protect Bill Clinton or any other Democrat, and if Clinton was involved then he deserves to be exposed and held accountable).

Powerful men protecting other powerful men is certainly a bipartisan exercise, and Epstein had friends on both sides of the aisle. But at this moment, only one side is doing everything it can to keep Epstein’s secrets hidden and to protect whoever else may have been involved in his crimes. I actually don’t think this would fly in today’s Democratic Party, which is heavily female and at least marginally feminist. Today’s Republican Party, though, is avowedly misogynist; it is a party that has built itself into a temple of white male grievance, and that promises not just to help white men get good jobs back, but to get impunity back — the freedom to behave as abhorrently as they wish, to treat women however they wish, to take the jobs that women and people of color rightfully earned simply because there is a presumption of white male deservedness. Some of the highest-ranking members of the Trump administration not only attend churches where the pastors say women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and must submit to male authority, but share videos making those same arguments. The young people staffing Republican politicians and organizing young conservative groups are a notoriously noxious bunch, with racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism simply part of the waters they’re all swimming in. Speaker Mike Johnson is a religious fundamentalist who worked to keep gay sex criminal, opposes no-fault divorce, and is himself in a “covenant marriage,” which Moira Donegan at the Guardian aptly describes as “a religious arrangement that formalizes men’s superiority and constricts women’s freedom to leave, designed for conservative straight couples who feel that no-fault divorce and gay marriage rights somehow degrade their own unions.” Men who see women as subservient, who believe that men have ultimate authority, and who intentionally set up systems of total male power and impunity — of course these are men who will cover for sexual predators. Of course some of these men are sexual predators.

You simply cannot create a culture or a party of wholesale male entitlement and not wind up with women and girls paying the price — being the ones who bodies, livelihoods, and lives those men feel entitled to. This is a MAGA-cult problem for sure, and the clearest test yet of whether there are any limits to what Trump can do and still maintain the support of his base. But it’s also a problem of the conservative He-Man Woman-Hater ideology this administration has embraced. Trump is a notorious moral reprobate, accused of sexually harassing and assaulting double-digit numbers of women, and using his current position to pardon violent criminals, do favors for “friends” he expects to repay him many times over, and enrich himself and his family. It is no surprise that his leadership has made a party that once boasted about their superior morality and “draining the swamp” into a pedophile protection racket.

Trump, Epstein wrote, was the only dog that hadn’t yet barked. Now he’s the leader of a whole cowed and silent pack.

As Jill says, it’s not that only Republicans were involved with Epstein — take Larry Summers and Bill Clinton, I beg you — but it’s only Republicans who want these people shielded now that it’s clear that nobody is more implicated than Trump. Well, one prominent Democrat was heavily involved in covering this up but we’ll to Joe Biden’s worst decision in a seperate post.