Adrienne Wallace looks at the renewed assault on gender rights and how we can build a fight against it in the era of tech billionaires.
“We’ve great women and we want them breeding. Our women are only breeding 1.5 or 1.6 children. That’s shocking for an Irish woman.” This was the proudly proclaimed ‘independent’ councillor for Newbridge Tom McDonell after his successful election in 2024. Although the far right did not see a spike in support in the last general election in the South, Peadar Tóibín’s conservative, anti-choice Aontú party saw a moderate gain in the general election. At the same time in the US., Roe V. Wade, which was once seen as an immovable pillar of pro-choice legislation, has been hacked to pieces. With a second term for Trump now looming, gender rights will be a battle ground once again. In fact, a stark picture is emerging across the globe, from Poland to Brazil, women’s bodily autonomy is under attack and more and more restrictions are being placed on access to abortion. In Ireland, we would be naïve to presume a right-wing government led by Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will protect free, safe and legal abortion. This is especially so considering that since the momentous Repeal the 8th movement in 2018 many pregnant people still have to travel abroad for access to abortion as many barriers, including the unnecessary three-day waiting period, are still in place. As an era of political turmoil unravels before us it is worth reminding ourselves what past revolutionaries noted in similar situations. Before Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy, Antonio Gramsci wrote about a time of deep systemic contradictions. A (somewhat loose) translation of his words is, “The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” But it is also the time to organise and fight back.
As capitalism stumbles from crisis to crisis, the ruling class will intensify their oldest, and yet most reliable form of defence; divide and conquer. Sexism and misogyny are tools of the oppressors. As workers across the globe see their living standards fall, the ruling class will deploy tactics as old as day to intensify the division needed to stop the working classes uniting and challenging inequality. Consequently, a new wave of attack on gender rights is on the rise. Gender violence is at an all-time high. In Ireland, despite all the lip service, the Government have still not provided the recommended units for refuge spaces. At the same time, under the guise of “protecting women” the far right has demonised so called ‘unvetted’ male asylum seekers to build protests in opposition to their arrival in communities. This tagline is not only racist in nature but has also become a Trojan horse to embody the traditional ‘family’ values that the far-right wish to espouse. Embedded within it is the colonial mentality of the white male breadwinner who protects the white woman from the ‘savages’ of foreign men. In reality, women are most at risk in their own homes from partners or ex-partners known to them.
Freedom of speech and social media
The conservative and far-right movement has categorised anyone who espouses progressive ideas as ‘woke’, with US republican figures rallying against the “woke agenda” that they equate to an attack on traditional family values. The pressure against “wokeness” has led to restrictions on teaching Critical Race Theory in schools and further attacks on the LGBTQ+ community in the US Conservatives are targeting an increasingly alienated working class who are bearing the brunt of this system of exploitation. Many are on already low wages while the cost of living soars and housing becomes a rare commodity to be exploited by landlords and vulture funds. Trump is able to strike a chord with the disenfranchised by romanticising a perceived greatness that America once enjoyed, until PC Culture or wokeness “went too far”. Commentary on social media often focuses on people that are tired of being harangued and scolded for not using the right language or pronouns. Trump, and indeed many elements of the far-right, have been largely successful in persuading people to fight a culture war instead of a class war. It has been a useful distraction; while there has been a systemic shift of wealth from the masses to the new billionaire class, many have instead been enraged by drag queens in libraries. A key tenant of his campaign has been to convince people that the attack on their declining life style is as a result of minorities trying to unravel ‘the American way’. While Trump rushes to invoke imagery of a new ‘golden era’ for his latest term, for women and minorities it is becoming all too clear that this doesn’t include them.
In an era where traditional mass media’s power and influence has ebbed – how has the Trump administration, and indeed far-right figures across the globe, been so effective at convincing the working classes he is their ally (or messiah in some cases)? Social media has become an effective tool for communities looking to organise, helping to spread social movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. It has also helped educate the masses with free and easily accessible content on Karl Marx and other revolutionaries. So, it is no surprise that the elite have sought to use it for their own nefarious reasons. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter saw a surge in how racist, homophobic, neo-Nazi, antisemitic or conspiracy content from paid users went unmoderated on the site. Ironically Musk, the defender of “Free Speech” then attempted to sue the research group that published this data. Mark Zuckerberg has also recently gone to great lengths to align Meta’s policies with President Trump, while also donating millions to the Trump campaign. The removal of fact-checkers from Meta ultimately means more misogyny, not “less censorship”. Last year DCU researchers set up experimental social media accounts. All the accounts that were set as male received anti-feminist, extremist content within 23 minutes. When the account watched the content there was a rapid increase in the misogynistic media shown. Ultimately, when these billionaires remove regulation under the guise of “free speech” they are commercialising the hatred of women and minorities and spreading their propaganda. It becomes a useful tool to ensure we are so focused on hating each other we cannot recognize the actual problem: the capitalist elites and their new-found manipulation of digital media. While it was certainly true that traditional mass media had a certain bias written into its fabric; take Rupert Murdoch’s often biased and misleading coverage to support his business interests and political allies, the same can now be said for social media.
But what does this mean for politics in Ireland?
The age of social media has ushered in new ways to manipulate political discourse abroad and here. However, those pulling the strings behind the scenes are not under the same spotlight that the likes of Murdoch et. al. has been. Recent research was conducted by Sam Doak, from disinformation fact-checking organisation Logically Facts, who analysed the use of three slogans connected to far-right and anti-immigration views about Ireland in online posts shared on X, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit in the last month. The three slogans included in the research were: “Ireland is full”, “Ireland belongs to the Irish” and “Irish lives matter”. These posts increased in number following the knife attack that led to riots in Dublin. “Irish lives matter”, a phrase that only became popular after the riots of November 23rd, was shared 7,000 times in the US and UK compared to just under 4,000 in Ireland. The popularity of this last slogan is likely linked to the fact that it was shared by a US X account called ‘Catturd’, which instructed its 2.1 million followers to make it a “trend”. The account is run by right-wing online personality Phillip Buchanan, from Florida, whose posts are frequently amplified by Elon Musk. Social media has begun to have the same editorial and political bias as traditional media yet its modern format means that many are still under the impression it is not.
As we enter a new political era, one where Musk feels confident enough to do a Nazi salute at a Trump rally, we must avoid the pitfalls of this rage bait and instead begin the serious undertaking of organising in our workplaces and communities. The question herein lies in what political force has the best chance of demolishing the far-right and the close relationship they share with figures like Trump. In the South of Ireland, this is often expressed in a support for the so-called “centre left”. Labour and the Social Democrats took a record number of Dáil seats in the last election, albeit largely at the expense of another so-called centre-left party, the Greens. However, if we are to take a closer look at history, particularly Germany before the rise of Hitler, it was exactly the failure of the social democrats and the reformists to break from capitalism that paved the way for the rise of fascism. This generations task, is not just to break the glass ceiling and to have more “girl bosses”, but it is to smash the very pillars of institutional sexism and racism intertwined with this system of exploitation. In a post-Repeal Ireland that organized at a grassroots level and won the right to abortion we will not lightly hand over our bodily autonomy to Peadar Tóibín, Trump or any other reactionary figure.
