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At the end of February, Andrew and Tristan Tate fled Romania, into the warm embrace of the Trump Administration. Despite having been held under a travel ban – facing rape, human trafficking and money laundering charges for over two years, this was lifted in a blink of an eye. When asked if this ban was lifted under pressure from Trump, Tate’s lawyer said, “Do the math. These guys are on the plane”.
It seems that Trump’s pardoning for far-right freaks reaches beyond the 1,500 nutters who stormed the capitol on January 6th – now his tiny orange hands can reach across national borders. For wealthy men like Trump and Andrew Tate, the laws don’t apply. You can be a human trafficker and still be an “entrepreneur”, a rapist and the President of the United States.
Trump and his billionaire mates are on a misogynistic rampage. From Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, campaigning for more “masculine energy” in corporate America to Trump’s administration trying to convince women to act as baby-making machines. In his first address as Vice President, JD Vance proclaimed on stage, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Last year, in a lawsuit attempting to ban a common abortion bill, Republican attorneys argued for the ban on the basis that the pill had “lowered birthrates for teen mothers”. You can’t make this up.
The far-right takes all the oppressive stereotypes of women that exist under ordinary capitalism and pushes it to the extreme. They believe it is women’s ultimate purpose and duty in life to be unpaid labourers in the home, raising a new generation of workers for the health of “the nation” and the economy. These ideas are normalised by the ongoing systematic oppression of women. Despite the vast majority of women being workers, they also perform an unequal amount of duties in the domestic sphere: doing the laundry, cooking, cleaning, and so on. Women in Australia do, on average, 50% more housework than their male counterparts. Not to mention the workplace, where they are drastically underpaid, earning on average $250 less than men per week.
To fight the far-right today, we have to start by rejecting the capitalist logic that underpins their politics. And a need for a radical struggle for women’s liberation is as important as ever. Sexist ideas are on the rise, alongside an emboldened far-right. Just take how a 2023 youGov poll found that a whopping 1 in 6 boys aged from 6-15 in Australia have a positive view of Andrew Tate. To fight sexism, we need to fight against the capitalist system, which profits both from women’s underpayment at work and unpaid work in the home. Not to mention, we need to fight against the system that finds far-right billionaires like Trump fit to rule. If we want a system where their ilk doesn’t exist – we need socialist politics.
Written by Asha Coles
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