How women are being weaponised by the 'freedom' movement

Friday, 1 July 2022

The anti-feminism of the far right has infiltrated Aotearoa New Zealand, researcher Donna Carson has found.

In a tour of the country earlier this month, Hannah Spierer addressed a crowd in Wānaka.

“If you are a working mother, and you’ve got children in a school, and you feel that there are some things you don’t like about schools, just consider that maybe quitting your job now is a sacrifice worth making,” she said.

“Too many women have been conditioned to sacrifice the raising of their own children.” She went on to explain - as she has during so many stops on the tour as one half of the right-wing propaganda network Counterspin – that ‘toxic femininity’ needs to be talked about, that feminism is a mind-control program, and that women have been led to believe they’re only worth something if they work outside the home.

“That’s not true. We can save our kids.”

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Hannah Blake was homeschooled in a religious environment. She reads a short piece of prose she wrote as a 12-year-old child.

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At home in the North Island, Hannah Blake felt her heart sink. She knew that language. Watching Spierer speak, she experienced a sensation she’d felt building since the Wellington ‘anti-mandate’ protest. Blake, a former homeschooled Palmerston North mum, had been following the main channels of the disinformation movement since becoming disquieted with the way some women were talking.

Hannah Blake, homeschooled in a religious home environment, wants to speak out about the anti-feminist, right wing ideas she sees being parroted among conspiracy theorists and anti-vaxxers here.

“Let the boys be boys,” personal trainer and ‘correspondent’ Caro McKee tells Spierer in an early clip, from Parliament. “Let them lead us… we have to sometimes back off and be that little submissive person and let our boys stand up.”

Spierer agrees. “We have to lead the charge in that conversation because if men do it they’ll just be called chauvinist, or they’ll just be called sexist.”

Homeschooled in New Zealand in a Christian fundamentalist household, Blake was taught that women existed to serve their man. And now, these ideas were being parroted in ‘alternative media’, social media and Telegram, where live streamers who once held court about the dangers of vaccination and the mainstream media were now railing against feminism, or applauding the reversal of Roe v Wade, leaving millions of women in the United States unable to access abortion.

“Hearing the same viewpoint about women belonging at home, about feminism being dangerous, about women needing to have children young, about women needing to shut up and let men talk, the concept that suddenly we are over toxic masculinity, all these talking points that I had heard from all my religious instruction growing up were suddenly being parroted, and I was like ‘Oh no, oh no’,” Blake says.

“Seeing the recent surge with the marriage of QAnon and Q-adjacent theories with this fundamentalist Christian worldview is frankly terrifying.”

The traditional wife

Nearly two dozen states have already moved to restrict or ban abortions in light of the decision. (Video first published June 27, 2022)

Far-right spaces, particularly online, have always been hostile towards women. Two of the most visible examples are in incel culture, where misogyny is a key driver of the ideology, and Gamergate, a campaign of sustained online abuse towards women journalists in gaming.

Massey University PhD researcher Donna Carson says misogyny is a key component of almost every extremist ideology, but in trying to expand their reach white supremacists have realised they need women to promote their worldview. “They know women can sell it, and if they can hook women in on that traditional family nous it’s not too hard to indoctrinate them into these other beliefs,” Carson, the author of thesis Breaking the Masculine Looking Glass: Women as Co-founders, Nurturers, and Executors of Extremism in New Zealand, says.

As the Covid pandemic continued, many of the spaces first touted as anti-vax, or anti-mandate – on platforms like Telegram in particular – have become a hodge-podge of convoluted ideas where elements of QAnon conspiracy and Covid-19 denial meet white supremacy, transphobia, and outright fascism.

The targeted harassment of New Plymouth drag queens at a storytime event in a library, for example, was floated on Telegram channel Unvaxxed NZ almost a week previously, with the idea lifted from a similar US event using the same abusive language. “They’re transposing the global stuff and using it because they know it works, and they’ve seen it work overseas,” Carson says.

“The pandemic just made this worse, it gave [the far right] a platform and it gave them an excuse to talk about the government being against them and society not being set up the right way. A lot of what they’re saying has a nuance of truth, people are feeling disenfranchised and they’re in a fringe group now which is perfect recruiting material.

“The research shows a lot of conservatives don’t realise they have jumped into a far right group - Kiwis won’t be any different.”

Coming from women, and cloaked in the idealisation of motherhood, reproduction and the satisfaction gained from traditional family values, racist, sexist and bigoted ideas can be sold as more palatable – and less threatening.

In the US and the UK, communities of ‘tradwives’ have sprung up to exhort the virtues of staying at home, birthing and looking after children, and supporting men’s every wish. The tradwife ideology says that feminism has failed, that women can’t ‘have it all’ and are exhausting themselves and betraying their biology to do so.

What really makes women happy is catering for their husband, handicrafts like knitting or crocheting, and enabling and encouraging her man’s innate masculinity, this doctrine says. It’s Serena Joy from The Handmaid’s Tale, writ large, all tied up in an apron with a bow.

Anything outside this – in particular anything that asks for equal rights – is branded ‘toxic femininity,’ and re-framed as harmful, to the fabric of society and intrinsic happiness. Gender roles are considered binary and immutable, with desirable femininity encapsulated in women as child bearers and homemakers.

In short; it’s sexism, as a gateway to fascism.

Feminism as the real enemy

An anti-feminist agenda has become more blatant in New Zealand in recent times , but the push to involve women began before that, Carson says.

In late 2020, neo-Nazi youth group Action Zealandia had their first ever woman guest, American right-winger Kiz Kardassian, who explained she was waiting for her ‘future husband’ by learning to knit and crochet. “If you actually asked women what they want, they’d want to stay at home and be married with kids,” she tells the men.

“True femininity and finding true happiness as a woman is just loving. So what, folding clothes is boring, but you’re loving your husband where you are folding his clothes and putting them away… you’re taking that stress off him and exerting the energy, so he isn’t. If you wake up and a woman presents you breakfast exactly as you like it, you’re like ‘Hell yeah, my day is amazing’.”

Former homeschooler Blake, who has now made it her mission to speak out publicly against what she’s seeing, says there are frightening parallels with the way she was raised. “A woman’s role in life is to basically help her husband, there is this idealisation of the Victorian era and the 1950s. Your whole identity is like… you are meant to mould yourself around another person.”

Blake questioned the dogma presented to her in many small ways. But the turning point came when her parents let her go to high school aged 16, and she read The Handmaid’s Tale. “The outcome of some of these ideas that sound good, like letting women have space at home to raise their families, is horrifying.”

At the Wānaka Counterspin meeting, a woman told of how she’d removed her kids from school to avoid them being brainwashed, encouraging others to do the same.

Ministry of Education figures show homeschooling saw a spike during the pandemic’s peak in October last year, though the past two months appear to have settled to almost pre-Covid levels and there’s no data to show this has any connection to anti-vaxxers. Still, Blake is worried.

“Things are escalating quickly, and these people are going to pull their children out and raise them with the ideas I was raised in – it's like they’ve been copy-pasted, but without the Jesus in them.

“The women are quitting their jobs for homeschooling, not men, so you’re isolating women, taking them out of the workforce, out of their friend groups, and it continues to radicalise people because all it comes with socially and online is staying within their bubbles.”

‘Emotionally manipulative and powerful’

Mandate and anti-vaccine protesters gather in their hundreds on the lawns of the Beehive Parliament grounds in Wellington.

And that’s a problem. UK-based researcher Julia Ebner spent months going undercover in far-right digital forums for her book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists. She found an active network of women celebrating and spreading these ideologies – including a video of young women who called themselves ‘Brentonettes’, after the Christchurch terrorist.

Ebner told Stuff appeals to embrace ‘traditional femininity’ and gender roles can be emotionally manipulative and extremely powerful.

She found the methods used by conspiracy theorists, white supremacists and anti-feminists all worked the same way – by hooking people into their enclosed ecosystems, warping their reality and encouraging anti-social behaviour in the wider world.

In the tradwife spaces she infiltrated, Ebner says she felt empathy for the women, who were often in crisis.

“They’d either been looking for a romantic or sexual relationship for a long time or were unhappy in their jobs because of double burdens. This was often related to persisting inequality, but their solution was going back to traditional gender roles.

“This community of traditionally minded women – but sometimes very radical misogynist women – offered them a solution and sense of belonging.”

Recruitment worked similarly to the way Isis targeted Muslim or minority populations with very specific grievances related to them. “Extremists are very good at exploiting frustrations and fears.”

Since Donald Trump’s US presidency, misogyny and derision of those who don't fulfil roles assigned to their gender has become more mainstream.

This can be seen in the widespread misogynistic abuse of female politicians, like Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and more recently in attacks on LGBTQIA+ people.

“That’s where it gets so dangerous, and we see today’s manifestation of that in organic, large-scale hate and harassment campaigns targeted at female politicians, but also female journalists and female activists.”

Weaponising women in New Zealand

What’s less threatening than woman with her children? She’s just trying to look after them, to nurture them as best she can, to protect them in a society that would jab chemicals into them, confuse them about their gender, and sexualise them.

But the weaponisation of women and children, by making them into “victims” or portraying them as harmless, is a well-known technique of the far-right, Carson says, and it works.

“They use family, the care of children and wellbeing to sell their ideas - ‘society isn’t looking after children and we’re on the right side, and they’re hiding things from you.’ A lot of women can get caught up in this and don’t even realise they are part of the far right at all. The women will kind of come to see that violence is “necessary,” a necessary tool to get the message across.”

Women through history – and in New Zealand – have been seen as less threatening when it comes to extremism, Carson says. This includes not just carrying out an act of terrorism, but encouraging, aiding, and providing alibis for.

Being a white woman offers an additional cloak of invisibility, with research showing extremist women from majority populations are more likely to be viewed as non-violent.

Clearly, being an anti-vaxxer does not make someone an extremist. But the same techniques have been seen here, most visibly with the Parliament occupation.

A network of ‘mumfluencers’ helped fuel the protest, which saw carloads arriving with kids in tow and a ‘freedom camp’ created with children’s activities and a creche. Children played in the mud, held signs, and stood next to a makeshift hearse with the PM’s name on it. As the police closed in, there were explicit calls on messaging platforms and in the crowd for women and children to stay, or to go to the front, so the crowd “wouldn’t get tasered ”.

Voices for Freedom, an anti-vaccination group run by three women who characterise themselves as concerned mums, have explicitly used children as the faces of its disinformation campaigns. This includes staging a protest at the Auckland Museum, where a “group of mainly homeschooled parents and children” tried to get into the museum. “Kids trying to talk through the door asking if we can come in. This is so sad for them!” they wrote, on a social media post.

Many of the figureheads to emerge during and since the occupation are women, including misinformation super-spreader Chantelle Baker, former broadcaster Liz Gunn, Tauranga electoral candidate Sue Grey, Voices for Freedom’s Claire Deeks, Alia Bland and Libby Johnson, and Spierer.

In their anti-establishment rhetoric, Government and the media are the enemy. But the most extreme version of this worldview, as the other half of Counterspin’s Kelvyn Alptold a captivated crowd in Wānaka, is that we are in a literal physical war where children are being killed, men should arm themselves and women stand beside them.

The attempted mainstreaming of anti-feminism won’t end here. It's the stated aim of many in conspiracy networks to infiltrate school boards of trustees and city councils in an attempt to gain political traction. McKee, the personal trainer from the Counterspin ‘live cross’ who thinks women should be submissive, has stated she is running for New Plymouth District Council

Grey got 4.7% of the vote in Tauranga, but in Bethlehem, the most conservative part of the electorate and the site of a recent row over the treatment of LGBTQIA+ students, she got more than 10% on the day of voting. More than the ACT candidate, and approaching Labour MP Jan Tinetti.

So here’s another question. What’s more frightening than a mother, with her children, asking you to unquestioningly follow her into her vision of the future?