CNN's Freakshow

The Caveman. You Love to See it.

The American Freakshow’s tent is so vast that we would have to run tours 24/7 to gawk at everyone. Fortunately, this week CNN arranged for a gathering of many in one place. The “Town Hall” was billed as the opening conversation (we use that quaint word out of habit) of the American 2024 presidential campaign season. For some reason - likely a “deal” with the Orangeman and his strategists - CNN decided to pack the audience not with regular American voters but with white male Granite State MAGA extremists.

When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked The Former Guy about a Manhattan jury’s verdict finding that he did assault E. Jean Carroll and should pay her $5 million, he called Carroll a “wack job” and said the trial was “a rigged deal.”  To which the audience applauded and laughed.

Hahaha! How funny is it to watch a rich man trash a woman who objected to being manhandled and assaulted? We have, sadly, grown used to these revolting spectacles, to the joy that our fellow Americans take in watching the humiliation of a weaker person or group.

Who are these people? How did we get here?

This brings me to an astonishing Neanderthal specimen I’d been meaning to get around to. Steven Crowder is on Youtube as “Louder with Crowder.” Bearded, buff, prone to displaying biceps and pecs in a clingy Jesus shirt that would work well on Fire Island - and he broadcasts from behind a handgun mounted on his desk.

I had never heard of him, but I was not one of his seven million subscribers, nor were my eyes (until today) among the the 2.2 billion sets of eyeballs that have watched one of his You Tube channels. Crowder got his start at Fox, and went on to travel the now familiar route to riches that produced Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson, celebrating racism and sexism.

He’s a “shock jock” - a profession requiring that applicants be male, white, pudgy or testosterone-poisoned, and adept at feeding the once-suppressed, now widely indulged appetite for humiliating and degrading women, minorities, the disabled. The special skill these men possess is to turn hate and misogyny into commercially viable laughs, employing the old “lighten up, don’t you get the joke” taunt whenever anyone objects. Their lineage includes Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, and of course, Trump himself. All of them are enabled, amplified, and abetted by advertisers and media magnates.

I only noticed Crowder because a few weeks ago, he got famous beyond his silo complaining about the ease with which the law allowed his (long-suffering) wife to end their marriage. “My then-wife decided that she didn’t want to be married anymore and in the state of Texas that is completely permitted. She simply wanted out and the law says that’s how it works.”

Hmm. No-fault divorce has been Texas law since Steven was a boy, so what’s up with that? It turns out not just he, but the entire Republican party, having accomplished forced birth, would like a return to the bad old days of ironclad marriages from which women cannot easily escape.

At its infamous 2016 Trump-nominating convention, Republicans apparently considered officially opposing no fault divorce. That didn’t make it on the platform (the candidate was after all, twice divorced himself) but the fantasy didn’t die. The 2022 Texas GOP platform urged the legislature “to rescind unilateral no-fault divorce laws, to support covenant marriage, and to pass legislation extending the period of time in which a divorce may occur to six months after the date of filing for divorce.” The state of Louisiana is considering the same language and  Nebraska Republicans are on record against easy divorce. 

Crowder’s marriage looks like a case study for why women should have easy paths out. Someone dropped audio, text and video on Yashar Ali recently, which he posted, including a scene of Crowder ripping into his eight-month pregnant now ex-wife about her failure to be “wifely.” The video, recorded on a security camera, shows the Crowders poolside. There’s a hot tub, a manicured lawn, nice furniture - please note the luxury that being a professional media fascist buys. Crowder complains that his wife isn’t respecting “boundaries” he set for her, demands that she take an Uber instead of the car to do errands, orders her to apply medicine to his dog that she fears will affect her pregnancy (she delivered twins a month later). Then things get ugly.

“You are not taking the car, because if you refuse to do wifely things then I will go pick up the groceries,” he tells his wife as she tries to leave.

She tries to calm him down. “I love you … but your abuse is sick,” she says.

He replies: “Watch it. Watch it. F–king watch it. Later, the audio picked him up hissing, “I will fuck you up.”

In a published text also shared with the media, his ex wrote: "Steven, I'm afraid of you [and your] rage. You are scary. You scare me.”

Scary. Good thing the state of Texas allowed her to leave, right?

It’s not been terribly long ago that women had to fight their way out of scary marriages. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no fault divorce law in 1969. Now, women initiate the majority (two-thirds) of heterosexual divorces in America. No fault divorce saves women’s lives. Rates of female suicide, domestic violence and men murdering their wives dropped dramatically according to researchers who have studied the states as the laws were passed.  Rolling Stone quoted one researcher who said the improved numbers were “not just because abused women (and men) could more easily divorce their abusers, but also because potential abusers knew that they were more likely to be left.”

As late as the 1970s, when Trump first got married, marital rape was still exempted from American laws, and abortion had been legal for only four years, meaning it was illegal throughout Trump’s college and early bachelor days. Trump was credibly accused of marital rape by Ivana, in a divorce deposition published by author Harry Hurt. Ivana testified that toward the end of their marriage Donald committed a “violent assault” on her, after pulling out fistfuls of hair, tearing off her clothes. She later rescinded the statement.

We will never know which version of Ivana’s story was true, but Trump is technically on record supporting rape. He even doubled down on his “grab em by the pussy” advice. When Carroll’s lawyers asked him about it last year in a pre-trial deposition, he replied:  “For a million years, this is the way it’s been. I want to be honest, this is the way it’s been. If you’re a famous person, if you’re a star, and I’m not referring to myself, I’m saying people that are famous, people that are stars, people that are rich, people that are powerful, they tend to do pretty well in a lot of different ways, ok? And you would like me to take that back? I can’t take it back because it happens to be true.”

Then he added: “Unfortunately. Or fortunately.”

There is a name for what he’s talking about, although it’s unlikely he knows it, much less could pronounce it. It’s feudal and French: Droit de seigneur. Also known as ius primae noctis, it was a supposed legal right in medieval Europe, allowing feudal lords to have sexual relations with subordinate women, in particular, on the wedding nights of the women.

The women of course, had no say in the matter. Fortunately, or unfortunately.

MAGA men are literally crying over this loss. Remember Boohoo Brett Kavanaugh?The sad fate of these men reminds me of one of my favorite poems, by Adrienne Rich, called Orion. In it, she writes of the great warrior in the sky:

my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride

Should we feel sorry for them, weighed down by archaic need for control and losing their minds? Steven Crowder monetized dickishness, but ex-colleagues told the New York Post that  he liked to unzip, pull out his junk, and literally lay it on friends. As a joke of course! “It was childish. But then I found out this was something he did,” one said. “At first, I took it as him trying to be friendly or one of the guys. Now I see it was a power play. If your manager at Red Lobster did this, it would be national news.”

The urge to feel sorry for freaks like Crowder, or in the case of the New Hampshire MAGAs with Trump, to side with the abuser, has a name: Himpathy. It was coined by Cornell philosophy professor Kate Manne, who defined it as “the inappropriate and disproportionate sympathy powerful men often enjoy in cases of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, homicide and other misogynistic behavior.”

Back to the white guys in the NH audience. Do they control and abuse their wives? Of course we cannot say that. Maybe they always bring flowers and cook dinner for the women applauding and laughing beside them. Maybe they do 50 percent of child care and housekeeping, and treat their partners as equals.

What we can say for sure is that MAGA Republicans want to allow men nearly unlimited bodily control over women. This monstrous system made life miserable for, if not outright killed our foremothers, subject to legal physical abuse, rape, forced birth and high risk of death in childbirth. In an interview after the Town Hall, E Jean Carroll, trashed and re-victimized by Trump since she dared tell her story four years ago, said she is considering filing another defamation suit: “I am upset on the behalf of young men in America. They cannot listen to this balderdash and this old-timey view of women, which is a cave man view.”

But they can and they do.

Links and sources

Yashar Ali’s substack Crowder’s “be more wifely” video.

GOP assault on no-fault divorce 

Trump pussy grab deposition statement

Encyclopedia Brittanica Droit de Seigneur Definition

Report on Crowder’s genital exposure as power play

Ron Mwangaguhunga’s Corsair substack.

E Jean Carroll’s post Town Hall interview.

More on Himpathy