A new way to shout “witch”

Amanda Marcotte picks up on a new and, of course, revolting theme in Trump’s campaign: the evil of ambitious white women who neglect to have ten children and thus hand the world over to the teeming Hordes of Color.

Donald Trump has a new obsession: comparing Hillary Clinton to Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. During a Monday speech, Trump denounced the “massive immigration” to Germany under Merkel, for which he blames crime rising “to levels that no one thought would they would ever see.” He followed up this speech with press releases and a hashtag aimed at equating Clinton and Merkel.

The choice is an odd one on its surface because most Americans don’t have an opinion about Merkel, even when they know who she is. But as Alice Ollstein of Think Progress persuasively argued on Wednesday, the meme makes more sense when one considers that white supremacists definitely know who Merkel is, because they hate her:

To white nationalist communities that fervently support Trump, Merkel has been a popular villain. Sites like the Daily Stormer, the White Genocide Project, American Renaissance, and The White Resister have posted constantly about her since the Syrian refugee crisis began escalating earlier this year. They have accused her of making a “deliberate attempt to turn Germany from a majority White country into a minority White country.” They have called her a “crazy childless bitch,” an “anti-White traitor,” and “a patron saint of terrorists.” They have asked, in articles about Merkel, “Why would you allow a woman to run a country, unless you were doing it as a joke?”

So I guess Trump’s people, browsing through these wholesome materials, suggested the Merkel-Clinton theme by way of responsibly terrifying all the racist men out there. Seems legit.

If blatant white supremacy is not acceptable in mainstream conservative circles, opposition to feminism is completely standard on the right. By mainstreaming this “white genocide” hysteria in terms that focus less on immigration and more on attacking “Western” women for having too much ambition and too few children, these arguments have made their way into respectable conservative circles.

“A new genre of declinist literature, ranging from anxious to apocalyptic, has appeared to warn of the coming population implosion and the loss of Europe to more fertile, faithful Muslims,” Michelle Goldberg wrote in her 2010 book “The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.” She cites Mark Steyn’s “America Alone” and Pat Buchanan’s “The Death of the West” as books that raise the alarm about “Westerners” and their supposedly low birth rates. Both books focus heavily on blaming women for this purported decline.

Well they have to blame women, don’t they. Men can’t have the babies! Plus women are such selfish bitches anyway.

It’s impossible to know what Trump is thinking, but the campaign’s clear cooperation in putting out this message through press releases and tweets suggests this “Clinton=Merkel” narrative is very intentional. As ambitious women who haven’t had many children — Merkel has none and Clinton only has one — they make easy villains for those who fret about “white genocide” or “demographic winter.”

Trump is as usual playing with fire here. But the wider conservative movement shares the blame. For years now, mainstream conservatives, including Romney, have been elevating this theory that feminism is undermining the republic by discouraging breeding.

Women are also to blame for global warming, because we use too much electricity washing all those diapers.

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