By admin 
The two young men who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego, killing three people and terrorizing an entire community, were overflowing with hate. The manifesto they left behind teems with bigotry; there are sections for Muslims and Black people, South Americans and LGBTQ+ people (although they use different terms), the political left and the right.
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“They didn’t discriminate on who they hated,” Mark Remer, the FBI special agent in charge, told reporters last week. “It covered a wide aspect of races and religions.”
It’s true that the manifesto covers many different races and religions. But the men zeroed in on two groups with particular rage: Jews and women.
This may seem odd, given that the men attacked a mosque. And make no mistake, despite the men claiming in their manifesto that they didn’t hate Muslims, they were clear that they do hate Islam and they hate Muslim immigrants. And they were happy to slaughter them if it meant accelerating the white Christian war on everyone else. It’s notable, though, that the men characterized Muslims primarily as “bioweapons” of Jews (although the men used a slur in place of “Jews”). The central idea of the manifesto is one that will sound familiar to anyone who has even loosely read up on Great Replacement theory: White Westerners are being replaced with Black and brown outsiders in a nefarious plot to destroy Western civilization, and Jews are the all-powerful evildoers behind this plot.
But there’s one aspect of Great Replacement theory—and of general reactionary right-wing violence—that rarely gets the attention it deserves: These men believe women are at fault, too.
More than a decade ago, the word “incel” came into the popular lexicon via murderer Elliot Rodger, who killed six people and wounded 14 others in Isla Vista, California, all because he was homicidally angry at women he faulted for rejecting him. Since then, the relationship between misogyny and mass violence has been well documented, and it’s rare to find a mass shooter who didn’t have a history of domestic violence or woman-hating posts online. The San Diego shooters recognize several of them, referring to them as “saints.” But misogyny is also so pervasive—and extreme, overt misogyny now so mainstreamed on the right—that it’s increasingly going unremarked-upon or being downplayed, even when it’s central to mass murder.
This has certainly been the case with the San Diego mosque killings. The shooters hated a lot of different kinds of people, and if the manifesto is any indication, they were not exactly among the country’s top intellectual talent (on the Freemasons: “there is certainly something going on there”; on the Muslims: they are “demanding Shaira law”). But they also present a clear hierarchy of hate, one that assigns certain groups agency and responsibility while deeming others simply passively inadequate. Immigrants, Black people, Latinos, Muslims, transgender people, gay people—in the killers’ telling, these groups are all deficient or even repellent in their own unique ways, but they aren’t evil, scheming, or nefarious. The evil, scheming, nefarious ones are the Jews—the forces behind mass immigration, transgender identity, political instability, and the attacks on white culture and Western civilization.
But, inside this deranged rubric, the Jews have some help.
“After the Jew, the most evil creature in the world is the woman,” the manifesto says. “This is because after Jews, women tend to cause all the problems in the world.”
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It is hard not to see the irony in some of their complaints. “A woman if ever at all will barely think with logic rather making decisions based almost entirely off of feelings and emotions,” the manifesto reads. That’s quite a take from a man who, furious at Jews and women, decided the best course of action was to kill three men at a mosque. The litany of complaints continues, though, and reading between the lines, it’s clear the root of the men’s fury is rejection. But rather than engaging in any self-reflection over why women might pass on a pair of men who hated them and who would conduct a mass shooting, the men conclude it’s indicative of women being “all evil, self centered, entitled, egotistical whores.”
That mass shooters trying to start a race war tend to be megalomaniacal morons is not exactly breaking news. But the misogyny running through their ideology has barely been news at all.
Earlier this month, the journalist Helen Lewis published a cover story in the Atlantic with the subheading: “A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right.” From the conservative preachers whose arguments that women shouldn’t vote are shared by men at the highest levels of the Trump administration to a president who snaps “Quiet, piggy” at female reporters and to popular far-right figures who fantasize about “breeding gulags,” extreme misogyny is now so pervasive even on the mainstream right that it barely registers. Men who think women shouldn’t have jobs or the right to vote hold important positions at conservative think tanks; the idea that feminism destroyed the family and forced women into the workforce—and that it would be best if women stayed at home with many children—is omnipresent even in moderate conservative circles. Women are core to the popular right-wing concept of “suicidal empathy” because, as Lewis puts it, “Women pity the underdog, pander to self-proclaimed victims, and care about hurt feelings more than the truth—all of which are exploited by undocumented immigrants and violent criminals.”
Or, as the mosque shooters say, the feminine urge to put emotion over logic, which results in voting based on “some sob story” and eventually “the bringing in of millions of poor poor innocent little brown immigrants” who, the shooters say, will go on to rape them.
This specter of brown men attacking white women has been repeatedly invoked by Donald Trump and his allies to justify harsh immigration policies. Feminism and the “feminization” of American culture and its impacts—on men’s dating and marital prospects, on the American family, on immigration rates, on education, on male workforce participation—are now standard fodder across the conservative ideological spectrum. It’s not just misogyny that has been mainstreamed on the right. The idea that “heritage Americans,” or people whose families have long lineages in the U.S., are somehow more American than the rest of us is a view propagated by Vice President J.D. Vance; the MAGA movement has long been debating just how much antisemitism it should tolerate, and in which flavors. Many of the ideas in the shooters’ manifesto have shown up in various college Republicans’ group chats.
Twelve years ago, misogynist ideologies of men wreaking mass violence were highly newsworthy. Now, they seem to merit little more than a nod. This compacting of the bigoted extreme right into the mainstream should be a moment of reckoning. Instead, it seems what has happened is that we’ve all just gotten used to it.
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