Lawfare Daily: Misogyny and Violent Extremism with Cynthia Miller-Idriss

[Intro]

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: You know, there are these connections that creates a kind of culture and a community online that is, even if the targets don't end up being women, can also foment and foster violence. And that is pretty well documented in the field.

It's really oriented around punishing women for not giving these men what they think they are entitled to.

Daniel Byman: It is the Lawfare Podcast. I'm Daniel Byman, the foreign policy editor of Lawfare with Cynthia Miller-Idriss, a professor at American University and the author of “Man Up: The New Misogyny & the Rise of Violent Extremism.”

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: It's not just men—not just some men who do this, but also women, and women have played a big role in policing boys and also in policing girls with gendered norms and expectations.

And then in—sometimes promoting and sustaining misogynist systems and white supremacist ones, including in violent ways.

Daniel Byman: Today we're talking about her book and how understanding and exploring different forms of misogyny is vital for understanding violence today.

[Main Episode]

I wanna kind of start with what I feel was perhaps most interesting as a reader on this book is that I found it was both familiar and novel.

Like most of what I was reading about was like, yeah, I read about that, or, yeah, I kind of knew about that. But you're taking what I always thought of as very separate events and separate problems and helping me see them through a lens that mixes misogyny and mass shootings and violence. Can you tell me a little bit, first of all, about why you decided to write this book?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, great question. And I love that you had that experience, 'cause it's sort of one of my goals of the way that I wrote the book was I was hoping that people would recognize what I was talking about, but maybe had not yet reflected on it, and that was that sort of experience of ‘Aha, you're right!’ Like this felt so familiar and it should feel familiar to people because I'm not—

In many ways, I'm just, I'm putting together things that many other people have said for many years in the domestic and intimate partner violence space. A lot of Black feminists have pointed out the intersections of white supremacy and misogyny or sexism, for example, and had that experience themselves so much.

And so it's not that I, things I'm saying are new, but they haven't really been heard on the side of the field that I spend most of my time on in national security and prevention. So, I wrote the book in part because I, it started to become glaringly obvious to me.

And this is my fourth sole-authored book. It's my seventh book overall. I've been in the field for 25 years. I've spent my whole career interviewing boys and men in and around violent scenes. And I had never done—I had never really acknowledged this or seen it even. And so, you know, when I talk about the field having blind spots, I'm part of those blind spots.

Like I fully acknowledge that, even as a woman, not seeing these connections between gendered violence, misogyny, domestic and intimate partner violence, and the histories of perpetrators relationships with women especially, and the LGBTQ community, have just been ignored or not seen or not paid attention to enough.

And I think it was really around the time of Gretchen Whitmer's kidnapping plot—and the book was originally called “Just Grab the Bitch.” That's how it went in—it went all the way almost to publication, but the marketing department really dinged it, and I think they were probably right. And—

Daniel Byman: Maybe, and I'm going to interrupt for a sec. This is with reference to the attempted kidnapping of Governor Whitmer in, I forgot which year, I'm sorry.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: 2020.

Daniel Byman: Yeah.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: It was during the pandemic. So it was the fall of 2020. And, you know, I remember it so well because I was in isol—you know, we had decamped to a rental house outside the city and was fielding these sort of interview requests from journalists walking around on the front lawn, outside in isolation from everybody else.

And they would always ask like, is there anything that I haven't asked at the end of that interview? And I'd say like, well, we could maybe talk about the misogyny, you know, that was so present in the way they, the militia members were using language, you know, describing what they would do to her, describing, you know, her as a tyrant bitch.

And it just, it really didn't register with most of the bookers and the, you know, with one exception for Fareed Zakaria, in the end, asked me about it on camera and we had a discussion at that time about the misogyny, and I thought that was really brave and he was, you know, sort of out on the cutting edge of having that conversation.

But still, then you kept seeing things like the Biden administration's new classification system after January 6th came out for domestic extremism that had a bunch of different categories, and in one column of that was something called all other extremisms, and it was everything related to gender, sexuality, or religion, like it just didn't fit in the rest of their classification.

And even though we were seeing really big increases in anti-LGBTQ violence, in misogyny and incel violence—incels, which are involuntary celibates—and so it just, I thought if this is gonna sit in all ‘other,’ and we can't even center it the same way that we could center race or even animal rights extremism or environmental extremism as an issue, we're just not gonna get the kind of resources to attend to it or have hearings to talk about it or anything like that.

So I sort of wrote the book to put it all together to help understand it myself, these different tactics and strategies of misogyny and how they play out in mobilization of violence and thinking about, maybe there's more upstream ways that we could prevent some of this on an interpersonal level before it escalates to mass violence.

Daniel Byman: One sentence you had in the book that I really like is, it's hard to see a problem for which there is no category,

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Right.

Daniel Byman: And you're giving us a category. I'll say it, it complexifies all this because, if I read your work correctly, it's not a category that excludes other categories.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: That's right. It's a connector category, really.

It's like a, you know, it's a through line. It's a red thread that cuts across a lot of other types of extremisms across ideologies, even. And we actually acknowledge this pretty well when it comes to Islamist extremism, as I talk about in the book.

There's a lot of public attention global campaigns on the exploitation of women and the treatment of women by Islamist terrorists. Whether you're talking about the Nigerian school girls or the Yazidi women, or the use by Al-Shabaab of forced marriage as a tactic of territorial control, right? Like these are oper—the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas—these are seen as operational financial recruitment tactics, right? Women given to recruits, promises of all the virgins in heaven, right?

Like these, all of this stuff is so well acknowledged. There's a dozen reports just at the UN Counter-Terrorism and International Criminal Court alone talking about it, but we don't talk about it when it comes to domestic extremism or domestic terrorism. I even, and I'll say, there's a German edition of the book coming out, so I'm opening, there's a preface, that I'll open with this anecdote.

I won't name where it was, but I was in a high-level briefing and globally—in the fall—on the book, and there was German delegation there. And at the end, the high, the high-level, the highest person in the room from the German delegation said, ‘Well, we don't have this problem.’ And then said, you know, ‘and besides what are we supposed to do? Dismantle all of patriarchy?’

Like there is a real, even when you're kind of confronted with it, there can be a bit of a dismissal of like, this is just too entrenched. It's too much of a problem. And there's a lot of personal choice involved in patriarchy 'cause women participated in it as well, there's a lot of—right.

And so there's lots of different ways that this starts to come up against people's value systems, too. But when you're talking about violence, misogynist violence, domestic, intimate partner violence being, you know, in the 60% of the histories of perpetrators, of mass violence or some data point like that, that I talk about in the opening of the book, it's so incontrovertible that I wanted people to have to read it and say at the end of that first chapter, like, there's no doubt that these things exist.

The data is so clear. Now we can start to talk about what do we do about it, which is a much stickier question.

Daniel Byman: I wanna go into the different categories you identified in your book, but before I do that, one thing you note is that you know, in general the media doesn't acknowledge this. You talk about your experience with the plot against Governor Whitmer as one example. Do you have a sense of why? Because you would think actually this would be, you know, compelling for the media, right?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah.

Daniel Byman: Presumably half their readers or listeners are, you know, are women who might have a personal interest in this.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah. It's super interesting question. I mean, I thought about it a lot.

I think there's, one, I think it's just, it's so common. I mean, it's the same way I think, you know, the Uvalde, Texas shooter who attacked an elementary school was later found out to have been making persistent kidnapping and rape threats against teenage girls online. And when a journalist asked them why they had not reported it, one of the girls said, ‘report it? You know, why would you report it? It's just how online is,’ right.

I think that there is that kind of ethos for a lot of women in particular who see misogyny as the cost of doing business in the workplace or in, you know, you just, everybody has a handful of those stories in their pocket, and I use some of those stories to illustrate in the book, including in the opening, just the stuff that you just, and I have been really lucky that I haven't had to deal with so much that other women have had to deal with. But the things that women have told me in our field after this book came out are so much worse than the little anecdotes that I pepper throughout the book. And so, I think, to some extent women also dismiss it as just, even what the defense attorneys in the Michigan case said, big talk or blowing off steam.

I think that we also see it as a characteristic that illustrates how these are bad people, but not as an immobilizing factor. So I talked to Amy Spitalnick about this, who was ran the organization that sued the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. And she described the fact that, at the trials, it came out that every single one of those defendants, and there were dozens of them, had a criminal history of domestic and intimate partner violence, including things like kidnapping their wives or sexual assault. I mean, just terrible things. And, but still, that didn't come out. That didn't come out in the reporting of the trial. It never came out.

It's just, and I found this in looking at affidavits too, it's sort of descriptors to tell you how bad these people are before you go on to talk about their actual crimes.

And I think that's just—It's a real blind spot for the public, for the media and for the field in general.

Daniel Byman: I hope your book will be part of the change on this. At least now they'll have a go-to person who has thought about this seriously. So you note in the book you in, you know, individual chapters are about each of these, about there are kind of five different approaches that are advancing different forms of male dominance through violence. And I wanna kind of discuss I hope each of these if we have time.

And the first one you talk about is containment and—Can you kind of describe what containment is and how this shows up?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah. I wanted a chapter that would show how gateways work and how, where you could have kind of opening, opening entry points, if you will, to a way of thinking that allows for this kind of violence and power to be intersected both against women and LGBTQ folks in gendered ways, but also that can open up other beliefs, hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, racist, white supremacists, anti-immigrant, et cetera, that might come out of that same set of kind of hierarchies of superiority and inferiority.

And because gender is one of the first social differences we ever come to see as human beings, right in the family, and in our relationships, in school, this containment is the chapter where I start to talk about these ordinary and everyday ways that women in particular, and also LGBTQ folks, are kind of talked about in ways that try to put them in their place.

And I use a lot of anecdotes in the opening because I started with an analysis of my own hate mail, where I had realized that there was this really interesting pattern in the hate mail that I got after “Hate in the Homeland,” my last book. When the mail, you know, there was also sexualized stuff that happened, but when you get rid of that content, like the nasty content or the threats, a lot of what men, in particular, would write to me about, used the language that involved movement. They wanted me to go somewhere, right? ‘Get back under the rock,’ ‘go back in the shit hole,’ ‘jump off a bridge,’ you know, ‘go rub your hands together elsewhere,’ right. There'd be all kinds of like, other references or ‘stop being front and center,’ you know?

And a lot of it was about not wanting that, not wanting me to be front and center, not wanting, and they want, and I realized like, ‘send them back’ and ‘lock her up’ or ‘get back in the kitchen’ or ‘get back in the closet,’ these are all metaphors of containment and a lot of slurs that are used gendered slurs, which I also analyze in that chapter, are also metaphors of containment or trying to make women into animals, right, to dehumanize, to make them smaller, to make them less powerful.

“Bitch,” even, is a great example of that. It's like, or a “castrating bitch,” right? You're an “emasculating bitch.” You're so unnaturally aggressive that you can only be compared to a dog, right? It's, so I use that, all these ideas about containment to think about how a culture—and also the policing, I should say the gender policing of boys in this way too, with homophobic slurs—'You throw like a girl’ or ‘you're sissy’ or ‘you're a fag,’ right? All of that kind of language that says you're not doing your gender right either, right? You're doing your gender badly. You're not sufficiently masculine enough. You're not sufficiently manly enough. That also fits within the category of what I call misogyny, which is the law enforcement arm of the patriarchy.

It's not just hatred of women. It is a policing of expected norms and behaviors and those who step out of line are contained with slurs, with words, with actions, with chance at a, you know, at a rally to ‘send them back’ or ‘lock her up.’

And that kind of creates a mindset that can lead to a sense that boys or men should be more dominant, and that might make them more vulnerable to some of the pathways I talk about later in that chapter, that are ordinary ways, a self-help search or in-game chats in gaming, that have deeply misogynist and racist ideas peppered throughout, or means—short-form videos that tell jokes about, you know, gender ways of control and containment or arguing for more dominance and violence oriented way of controlling women, including, like Andrew Tate for example, I talk about in that chapter.

Daniel Byman: Let's go to kind of the much more obvious side of this, which is, I think, when I cracked open your book, I thought it was gonna be primarily about this, which is, you know, what you call punishment and you discuss, for example, the incel movement.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yes.

Daniel Byman: Talk us through that a bit, please.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah. I put that chapter deliberately in the center of the book because I think it's the center of what the field already thinks about gender and misogyny, and it's the one area that is pretty well documented. There's a ton of, especially doctoral students and younger scholars who are really interested in violent incels.

I should say, you know, incels themselves, which is an abbreviation that stands for involuntary celibate, was originally a community created by a woman that was just to support other people who were somehow in a position of involuntarily being able to form intimate relationships or had no success dating, basically, and—but it quickly became co-opted by more violent fringe of men, who we sometimes then refer to them as misogynist incels or violent incels who espouse a complete hatred of women for denying them the sexual attention, but also the kind of affection and love that they feel they are entitled to.

So, you know, this is a kind of familiar—within some countries, it's actually part of the domestic extremism spectrum, seen as a true intersection in Canada and the U.K. and in Australia, you know, really treated as—here, not so much. It's addressed within the field, but it's not doesn't get the same kind of attention that something like neo-Nazism has gotten or even environmental extremism has gotten—although that's changing.

But, you know, we've seen attacks at a Santa Barbara sorority, at a Tallahassee yoga studio, van attack in Toronto. But also, you know, a lot of attacks that don't get identified as incel attacks had some connection—so the Parkland school shooter praised the incel shooter from the Santa Barbara sorority before he began his attack, right? We have a number of those. A lot of other school shootings and university shootings had incel references. In Germany as well, one recent terrorist attack that targeted Jews and a Turkish restaurant, he was listening to a song that's known as the incel anthem, right? While he was trying to livestream that attack.

So, you know, there are these connections. It creates a kind of culture and a community online that is, even if the targets don't end up being women, can also foment and foster violence. And that is pretty well documented in the field. It's really oriented around punishing women for not giving these men what they think they are entitled to.

Daniel Byman: The next category you talk about is exploitation.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah.

Daniel Byman: And that to me was something I actually hadn't thought about in any serious way. And again, please talk us through.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: I hadn't really thought about it either. And I have to say, this was the hardest chapter to write. It's still the hardest chapter to even think about. I thought it was just brutal.

When, once I started looking into it, it talks about both the disproportionate evidence that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are harboring child sexual abuse material on their computers, but also the 764 networks, the exploitation of, so not only in far right circles here, this is just a broader form of—

Daniel Byman: I think many of our listeners know what 764 networks is, but if you don't mind just two sentences on—

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, I mean, 764 is a code name. I mean, it's a word that is, comes originally from somebody's area code for their phone number. And it's morphed into lots of different, we still think of them as 764 networks, even though it's not just 764.

They're sadistic exploitation networks that basically blackmail kids typically into harming other kids, both sexually, but also physical abuse, harming themselves with self-harm, and harming animals and enacting other horrific things on video. And then they blackmail them for lots of different reasons. And sometimes it's just exploitation in terms of cash or money. And other times it's grooming them toward neo-Nazi attacks or other mass nihilistic attacks.

And it's part of what's known as nihilistic violent extremism, a new classification from the FBI. It's rapidly growing, estimates of 10s of thousands of victims, there are 500 open investigations in the U.S. alone. And you know, and so the number of victims and part of what's so horrific about it is that victims and the perpetrators are children in many cases, but at the hands directed by adults. And so that, you know, that's a horrific thing to talk about.

The FBI have issued several warnings about it and so have our Canadian colleagues and others. We in the lab are working on resources for parents and schools who are dealing and grappling with the mental health effects and then the real effects of the harms that are being done.

And so, and then I also talk about the sexual exploitation historically. For example, under the Nazis who ran brothels, but also, there's pretty good evidence—you know, a journalist turned over some reporting that he was unable to figure out how to report on while protecting the women.

But I was able to look at his notes in the affidavits of an investigation of a neo-Nazi group that did get broken up here in the U.S. and in the affidavits, you know, they were keeping women for sale at a, that's the description in the affidavit, at a property where they would, you know, both prostitute them, but also—forced prostitution, but also the sale of assaults on the dark web as video. And then they were using that money to finance their neo-Nazi operations.

So that's what I mean by thinking about some of this exploitation in the ways that we think about it easily when it comes to terrorists who are somewhere else, you know, in other parts of the world, but we haven't really looked at it in the U.S. And part of that is because we have, typically, when neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups are broken up in the U.S., they're arrested on one of sets of three charges, usually together, drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, and racketeering charges. It's the fastest way to put them away, or child sexual abuse material. And you get the same amount of sentencing as you would if you include the sex trafficking charges.

But the DEA themselves have said, basically, where there is drug trafficking, there is sex trafficking. It's like a 97% overlap. They're almost always together.

And so, you end up with these situations, like in Los Angeles, a couple of years ago, 63 neo-Nazis were arrested, a big ring, broken up, Aryan Brotherhood groups. They're arrested on drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, racketeering charges. That trifecta is always there and there's a little line in the AP reporting about it, and all it says is, “The hostage negotiation team was also on hand to assist.”

And so I'm thinking like, well, who do you think the hostages were? Right? We know that where there's drug trafficking, there's sex trafficking. We know that these things go hand in hand. We know that they're financing operations off of this, and but we don't do it.

And so one of the things I've been talking to attorney generals about is the possibility of adding an enhancement charge to help local law enforcement, you know, to incentivize them to at least get the data. You know, at least we would know how often these crimes are there, because if they're not getting any extra years on sentencing, why would you do it? Right?

You have victims who are vulnerable, who may at one time have consented to their situation. There may be drugs involved and you know, they could be harmed with any kind of testifying that has to be done. And so they just look away.

And I think that invisibility contributes to the fact that we don't see the problem in the field, even though once you start to look at it, it's there.

Daniel Byman: For those interested, I'd also highlight some, a lot of the significant law firm reporting on this exploitation, which is something that we've covered for some time. It's kind of, once you go down that road it's impossible to see the world in the same way. It's shattering.

Let's go now to your fourth category, which is erasure.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah.

Daniel Byman: Help us out with that.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah. So, erasure here, I'm primarily talking about the LGBTQ community, but, and looking at both, kind of, mainstream legislative efforts to erase bodies, like gender affirming care, but also the attacks on trans athletes and trans rights and bathrooms, all of that kind of stuff, the quick mobilization that happened there—

But also around knowledge. So erasing bodies and erasing of knowledge through the curriculum bans and the protests, the attacks that have been happening on librarians. So I trace those two types of erasure of knowledge and of bodies. But then I also try to connect it, showing how it connects as a mobilizer of violence.

So where we've had neo-Nazi groups or Proud Boy groups engaged in protests that are, you know, I mean, one of the most absurd ones I think I opened the chapter with is the neo-Nazi protest outside of Disney, right. And you just like, it just wasn't on my Bingo card that year. Like what? You know, like a neo-Nazi anti-pedophile protest outside of Disney.

You know, the, how those, how this kind of opportunistic, I would say use by extremist groups of this quick mainstream conservative mobilization around anti-LGBTQ sentiment and attacks on kind of gender studies in universities and in schools, how that kind of mobilized—and where there've been some real violence, not just sort of attacks on homes that, and businesses that have waved pride flags, but the shooting of a woman who was an ally in California, for example, and some other cases like that.

So really trying to show how that erasure can play a role in a gendered way, in a way that is part of a tactic of how misogyny links different forms of extremism and the potential for mobilization to mass violence.

Daniel Byman: So, your last category is enabling and I'll say after being thoroughly depressed as I was reading along, this depressed me in a completely different way. So, again, please talk us through this.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah. This is actually the first chapter I wrote for the book. Because I started, you know, thinking about you have to look at the role of women and white women in particular in creating and contributing to some of the conditions that support this, either deliberately or inadvertently.

And so, I start with this what I really liked as a story arc for that chapter, looking at the killing of Vicki Weaver, you know, 30 years ago, and Ashli Babbitt, both were white women who were shot through a door by federal law enforcement agents.

But Vicki Weaver was in a white supremacist family at the siege at Ruby Ridge and was holding a baby and was shot accidentally through a door. She was sort of wearing a flowy sundress, and she used to pick berries and sell them at a local farmer's market, like she was, you know, a martyr, an absolute martyr for the movement immediately with signs that said, you know, your family could be next. This is what the government can do to you. So, this anti-government and white supremacist intersection.

Ashli Babbitt was shot at the U.S. Capitol as she was trying to break down a door. So, 30 years later you can kind of see this arc of, and she's a veteran, she's not a mother, right? Vicki Weaver is very much martyred in the movement through her role as a mother. This mother was shot holding her baby. Ashli Babbitt, a veteran who is breaking down, trying to break down a door in the Capitol because she was mobilized by conspiracy theory around QAnon.

So, you know, it kind of tells the story of this mobilization of women from—through the roles as mothers initially, and then eventually you kind of get to a place where they don't even have to be mothers to get mobilized. They're not only being mobilized as mothers who are defending their families or their children, but they're just violent actors in and of themselves.

So one, we've seen more violent engagement from women in these movements, and January 6th was a good example of that, but there've been other cases. And then also social media, as I talk about in the, in that chapter, really opened up a whole new realm for women who had taken a backstage in domestic and white supremacist and anti-government movements, in part because of the misogyny that they faced there, like in the real person meetings. We would regularly hear about that.

In fact, some women I know who we've worked with as formers left those scenes because of the misogyny they experienced, the harassment, sexual harassment from other men. So the misogyny was a problem for them in the movement, but social media allows them to suddenly be super engaged as leaders in a safer way, right?

So ironically becoming leaders who have called on white women to have, you know, the six baby challenge, right? So, to have as many white babies, the white baby challenge, to have six white babies to help counter, you know, demographic change or to get involved as QAmoms, you know, this whole movement to support QAnon as, again, through your role as a mother and defend and rescue children who are supposedly being trafficked.

So that was the point of that chapter, was to show, first of all, it's not just men not just some men who do this, but also women. And women have played a big role in policing boys, and also in policing girls, with gendered norms and expectations.

And then in sometimes promoting and sustaining misogynist systems and white supremacist ones, including in violent ways.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask you in here—to be clear I'm kind of drawing on my own current research, so it's, there's a strong bias in this—about what I felt was perhaps either a missing category or a past category that no longer exists, and I'm gonna call this protective.

So when you look at white supremacist groups in the past, right? You have—the image they tried to portray was, we are effectively knights, right? And there are these, often virginal, white women that we are protecting and they are helpless. And if we are not there, then, you know, usually Black, but you know, savages, in general, are going to attack and rape them.

And you as a man need to act. And one group, VDARE, used to take an oath over a white baby girl, right. It was very kind of literal.

And you know this much better than I, but the rhetoric seems to have shifted from women on a pedestal who are kind of helpless and must be protected to, you know, bitches and hoes.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah.

Daniel Byman: Right. And is it, is that protection still a thing? Or—

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: It's still a thing,

Daniel Byman: Or is it really kind of not part of the movement in the same way?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, I think it's still very much a thing. And I talk a little bit about it in the chapter on exploitation. I think toward the end, around the ideological.

I like the idea of having had a chapter on protection, though that'd be really interesting. And is like, it's another example of how you can just—You take these different slices through a story arc and there's whole categories I'm sure that I missed. I also felt this way in “Hate in the Homeland,” where I could have written the whole thing about, you know, totally different chapters. These were, each one is sort of illustrative.

And yes, I think, you know, there's always been this kind of Madonna, like the Madonna-whore contrast, right? So, women are either virginal on a pedestal to be protected, particularly white women in this case, or they are devious, manipulative, you know, transactional, and not to be trusted, and that those two tropes have always been there. It's this sort of catch-22 for many women in these movements and as depicted by these movements, and I think we still see very much both things alive today.

You have the ‘bitches and baby makers’ terminology that gets thrown about on social media. The, ‘your body, my choice,’ chanting, the, you know, this kind of reclaiming of ownership over women's bodies, including through the election and the idea that reproductive rights are at risk and the celebration of that, the glee of that, the—including, you know, the killing of Renee Nicole Good and the words of the ICE agent afterward saying, “fucking bitch,” right? This idea and what happened afterward in the days that came with reports of other agents telling women, ‘didn't you learn your lesson?’

You know, I think that same kind who are protesting the same kind of message of punishment of anger and of, you know, putting women in their place. But we also see—and I'm writing about this right now for an op-ed that's due in three hours, so I'll finish it—on the misogyny in what's happening in Minnesota and with ICE agents. But the, you know, we also see this protection narrative coming out very strongly in the justification, for example, of state-sponsored violence in Minnesota with, you know, false crime statistics that depict white women as more at risk from immigrants than they are from men who are citizens, which is just not true.

I mean, there are of course cases where undocumented immigrants or immigrants have harmed women, but women are more at risk from their own, you know, communities of men who are citizens who are born here, including from their own partners, than they are, statistically, from an undocumented immigrant, so who have lower crime rates. So it's, you know that.

But that protection narrative, and you sort of see that coming out of the Trump administration referring to suburban women at risk or repeatedly calling out the names of particular individual, handful of cherry-picked cases of women—young white women who have tragically died at the hands of a sexual assault or rape or murder from an undocumented immigrant, but not actually expressing concern about those things happening to women when it's not an undocumented immigrant.

So I think that protec—and then calling on, you know, the imagery of protecting, defending your homeland, that language coming out for the administration, I think in advertisements right now is very much evoking that same kind of sense of threat, of invasion, of incursion, and gender is a part of that.

And so I think you still see both narratives. You're just seeing on the fringe a little more of the anger, narrative, the—and I think from the mainstream now a little more of the protectionist narrative.

Daniel Byman: Thank you. I wanna shift gears a little bit and go through a couple, I'll say, you know, possible, I'll say counterarguments or questions—

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah.

Daniel Byman: That people might have as they read your work. And you, and to be clear, you address these in the book. I think it might be good for listeners to hear them directly. One is the question of the visibility of rhetoric versus are we actually seeing things getting worse? 

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, right.

Daniel Byman: So, you know, just to make a comparison with race, you know, if you track, you know, X or other sites, you'll find a huge amount of racist content.

But a lot of indicators on racial relations in the United States are actually quite positive. If you look at something like acceptance of your marriage, you know, it's gone from almost none to almost universal, right. And there are a lot of very positive things.

So how much can we trust the visibility of rhetoric to be a measure for how strong the hatred is?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah. I think that we're seeing, I mean, there's some things that are like pretty clear in the data, like online misogyny documented in, in online spaces, surges starting in 2011, which is pretty not unexpected, given the way social media platforms took prominence, you know, became much more popular starting around 2009, 2010.

So it is, you know, it's amplifying. It's not that this is new, but there are new channels and forms to express it, and that makes it so much more normalized, so much more legitimized, and so much more common that again, this sort of what women often describe as the cost of being online. Is this, you're gonna get rape threats. You're gonna get sexist attacks, misogynist attacks, hate mail that comes at you in ways that would've been harder a generation ago if people had to actually like send you a letter in the mail, right? You just don't get as much. It’s easier to do it and so you get more of it, right?

So it doesn't mean that it's new or novel, there's just more of it. And that can make it feel like there's more. And then, but in online context, that also contributes to the disinhibition effect, which is the effect that people feel more empowered to say awful things. And when more people are saying awful things, it can kind of, you know, spiral in that way. So I think there's that kind of stuff. The online stuff is pretty well documented, and we see it. And there's definitely more of it.

I think what we're seeing in the cultural shift with the rhetoric is a very clear resurgence or re—you know, kind of reclaiming of male power in official spaces. So you see things like Mark Zuckerberg calling for masculine energy in the corporate sector as what we really need. Or Pete Hegseth saying, you know, we're gonna have male standards in the military.

So this kind of establishment of a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority in a call for that. You see the data pretty clearly showing, now, trends among Gen Z men agreeing more highly than older men with things like ‘feminism has gone too far,’ or ‘our society has become more too feminine and needs more masculine emphasis,’ right?

Those data points, I just saw some of it from the more and common surveys last week are really clear and depressing. And, you know, 26% of younger Trump voters saying they agree with this statement, “Men should lead and women should follow,” but only 10% of older male Trump voters agreeing with that statement.

So it's not just that it's increasing, but it's increasing in a really specific, demographic way among a younger generation of men, and Gen Z men in particular, who are embracing a more traditional conservative and anti-feminist kind of stance based on, I think, the content of online worlds compared to older generations of men.

So it's not moving in the direction that people typically expect change to happen. It's a retrenchment and so that's a kind pretty well documented shift that I think is also spurred, I will say on the other side of it, a huge interest in and a huge growth in men's wellness communities that are focusing on men's health and wellbeing as a concern around reducing both gender-based violence misogyny, but also other outcomes like loneliness and isolation and the deaths of despair and all the other outcomes that are very bad for men right now that I talk about in the book that create vulnerabilities.

So, you know, that's one thing I'll say is when I talk about my complaints about the field not doing a good job of all this, we do have much more interests from like Jacinda Ardern’s Christchurch Call Foundation, who's doing a massive project that we're a part of on gender-based violence and violent extremism. You have Australia, the U.K., Canada, all doing major initiatives now on gender-based violence and violent extremism, or violent incels, or really drawing out these connections.

So it's not that no one is doing it, it's that the U.S. isn't doing it and Germany isn't doing it, which is part of why, I think, given that I spent the first 15 years of my career working in Germany, probably contributed to my blind spots as well.

Daniel Byman: Let me ask you another kind of question that came up, which is how much of this is really about ‘the violence is caused by, you know, these kind of extreme interpretations of gender roles’ versus it's simply a broader mental health crisis. And that people who have more extreme mental health issues will almost look for hateful ideologies as a way of kind of expressing themselves.

And we see this, you mentioned, you know, people online, you know, we of course, see, you know, lots of online activity actually is often associated with a lot of negative mental health outcomes. So how do we think about that intersection, especially with your professor hat on, with regard to causality?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: I mean, what I, the way I've thought about it is that, you know, we do have a well-documented crisis among men, however you wanna define that, right? Loneliness, isolation, I mean, loneliness data is also high among women, but it's more problematic for men in terms of the outcomes of scapegoating that you know, that it can lead to the vulnerabilities to online influencers.

So, you know, it's not that they're more lonely in the data, but their loneliness creates more vulnerabilities for them into bad trajectories, but also higher suicide rates now and among a younger generation of men and, again, what we call the deaths of despair, which are drug overdoses, alcohol, fuel, deaths suicides. Those men have three quarters of those at this point. So, you know, they're not doing great.

And so, I think it's fair to talk about a crisis of men and boys, but there's no reason why a crisis of men and boys should have become a crisis of misogyny. But that's what happened, I think because of when you look at, you know, what you look at with online worlds and how so many influencers have converted very real, or some perceived grievances, into narratives of blame and of scapegoating and the scapegoat, feminists and women, and depict women and feminists as, you know, transactional and devious and out to get you and taking your opportunities. And it's gone too far.

And so I think that's the way I would describe it. Not quite as a causal line, the way a quantitative scholar would maybe do it, but it, with my professor hat, I would say like there's a model here with some squares and some boxes with arrows that show that there's some relationships here that still need to be disentangled, and that's part of what I hope the book will do, is inspire a bunch of research that can start to look at these relationships.

I think when you have such a blind spot, a lot of the data's just not there because we're not looking enough at the problem.

Daniel Byman: Let's go to your concluding parts of the book, which is the ‘what is to be done’ section. You have a lot of ideas, and I'll also highlight for those listening, there are also a lot of resources listed.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah.

Daniel Byman: Which is I think, very helpful. But pick a few. What are, kind of, you know, a few things you think people should know that might be done to reduce this problem?  

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: So I think I, you know, one of the things I often talk to parents about is just understanding that the online worlds that their kids inhabit are highly gendered and a lot of the solutions that we're hearing and being offered right now are just about banning or creating, you know, bell to bell bans or social media bans, like Australia's just done and the U.K. is debating now.

Like, just walling off the content is not enough. When you have, I talk a little bit about violent porn in the, you know, in the book, and I'm, I have a separate piece coming out on that. The impacts on choking, you know, the U.K. banning choking as a, as one option, because stroke rates are so high now among young women under 40, like how the consumption of violent content online can contribute to behavioral changes that are not in anybody's interest or might not reflect healthy relationships moving forward.

And so just understanding the content of what kids in particular are exposed to, how early they are, and that banning alone doesn't create a solution. You know, I'm not opposed to bans entirely, but I just don't like the idea that's all we need to do is like build bigger fences the same way that we have, you know, build bigger fences to create ourselves, you know, to try to create more safety from terror attacks. Teach synagogues to lock the doors before services is important, and also like, I don't really want that to be our best measure of how successful we are at preventing terrorist attacks.

So I think understanding the content and how we can talk to kids about gender and talk to kids about the gendered content they see, and start to understand how they might be receiving information that can create these openings to influencers that are really trying to profit off of them, but maybe don't have their lifelong healthy relationships and futures in their own interest, right. They're not, that's not where they're coming at it from.

So that's one thing I think that everybody should know. I think there are resources—we have a guide that I put in the back of the book that was produced in conjunction with the Southern Poverty Law Center that helps parents and teachers understand some of the things that kids might be encountering or saying ‘feminism is a cancer,’ right? Or slang words that tell boys their simps or they're too, like they're too sympathetic to girls or they're too soft, you know, that kind of language can indicate exposure to toxic or harmful environments that might warrant a conversation.

And these are, you know, I've had a conversation with a lot of parents when I talk about the book, inevitably, whether it's the FBI, or like counter-terrorism officials in Australia as I was in this fall, or to a university audience. I guarantee almost every time the first hand up is a personal question, and it's often from a parent who will say, like, I know I have professional questions too, but let me tell you what this thing that my 12-year-old said to me last night, right? What do I do?

And so, you know, a 12-year-old comes to a mom and says, ‘mom, what does the phrase submissive and breedable mean,’ right? Which is like—I mean, doesn't even have a phone yet and heard it from a friend. It's in a meme. It's like, you know, and so those kind, you know, just that level of not knowing how to grapple with the kinds of things that your kids are hearing and someone told, tells your 12-year-old, they're supposed to be ‘submissive and breedable,’ you know.

Or a 17-year-old who suddenly—a parent said, I realize now he's in the gym all the time. And you know, so if he's following fitness influencers online, that might create vulnerabilities to, exposure to people who are trying to, you know, lead them down different pathways. So I think just understanding how online worlds work and what are some strategies to talk to your kids with curiosity rather than judgment, is sort of the two major pieces of advice that I have on the interpersonal side, on the thing that any person can do.

Daniel Byman: Thank you. I want to end our discussion really where your book ends, which is one of the few times I laughed.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Good. I'm glad you laughed, because people never know if they should laugh at that story and they should.

Daniel Byman: Okay, good. I thought you meant—it was there to laugh. So the, I'll use the phrase and turn it over to you. It is, ‘Oh, sorry ma'am.’

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yes.

Daniel Byman: So can you describe the story and then why you think it's useful for this project?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: It's such a good story. So I was telling my editor this story and she said, you have to put it in the book like we have to because she told her friends and they laughed so hard. And it is the story that produces the most laughter among my friends.

But it's funny 'cause I tell that story sometimes in public, in talks and it's clear people aren't sure, are we supposed to laugh or not? And so yes, you are supposed to laugh 'cause I thought it was hilarious. And also sobering, right?

So it's, so I was jogging in my neighborhood a couple of years ago and I got catcalled from behind. And when I turned around to look at the guy over my shoulder. And he saw how old I am, right? He saw my face. He took a step back and put his two hands up and said, ‘oh, sorry, ma'am.’ Right? Like, and so it was just such a funny experience—

And every woman I know who's my age, you know, in my early fifties, like has had an experience like this now of realizing you're crossing over suddenly and out of an age you maybe had forgotten you were in to begin with. This age of objectification, this whole era where you're so used to having catcall experiences or comments or slight safety concerns walking around and then you're suddenly more invisible.

And so, what was interesting to me about it was one that I'm like, oh, I'm crossing over into this era of more invisibility where. I warrant some kind of respect from this catcaller now, right? Like he's he wasn't apologizing though for catcalling. He was apologizing for catcalling a woman who was presumably old enough to be his mother.

And I think that's where the rub is, right? It's like it didn't, it's not that catcalling itself was something offensive anymore to him, or he doesn't see it as wrong in any way, this casual, everyday form of objectification that, you know, every parent, I know, of daughters has had to like help them understand if they, especially if they live in a place where they walk home from school. That starts happening at 11 or 12.

And so you have to have these conversations about, well, what do you do? What's the right way to react? How do you not make this guy matter? Because then they'll say like, why aren't you smiling, right? There's all this, it's just such a ubiquitous part of life for a lot of women and I think crossing over and out of that, but realizing younger women are still facing it just as much made me feel like, okay, this, maybe this is actually why I was able to write the book at this moment in time, because there's more cognitive dissonance for me because I'm not really gonna experience it as much as, you know, a younger generation of women are.

And yet, that means like this is a time to kind of use my voice. And I know that sounds like a lot of hubris, but it's a chance to kind of try to draw attention to something that I now have a little bit more power to talk about and a little bit more resilience because I'm not dealing with it as much.

So that's kind of where that anecdote fits in. And it was a call to women like me to not just slip into invisibility. But then I also, you know, had to add, 'cause I sent it to a reviewer, several people to review it. And I sent it to a friend who said, why does your epilogue only have things that women can do, right? And things that women—can do?

I was like, oh my God, here I go again. Like I just missed it myself. So I then had to add a whole section in which I asked a lot of men for advice too, friends, and my husband, and others: What do you think men should actually be doing about this on an everyday level? And so that paragraph or two in the epilogue is also kind of like a call to men to speak up, to stand up and to not, and to pay attention as well.

Daniel Byman: Cynthia Miller-Idriss, thank you very much. We're pleased to have you on the show.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Thanks for having me, Dan.

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