If America’s Democrats are feeling cocky about their electoral prospects in November’s Presidential election they’d be well advised to take a look at America’s New Female Right (BBC Three). Layla Wright’s exemplary documentary exploring the rise of ultra-conservative influencers in their teens and twenties should be compulsory viewing, revealing how a substantial section of the electorate is feeling increasingly alienated.
Wisely keeping her own views on a backburner until near the end, 27-year-old Wright set out to discover how and why women her age and younger in the US are rejecting hard-fought feminist advances in favour of championing the idea that the sole purpose of women is to be wives and mothers. And garnering millions of followers on social media by espousing those views.
It’s an hour full of jaw-dropping soundbites. Morgan, 24, gave us “birth control was invented to destabilise Western civilisation”. Hannah, 15, followed “the LBGT movement is a religious cult”, with “this is Satan’s agenda, collapse the family to control society.” What became clear, and what Wright tried to get her head around, was that these were not outlier views but opinions that have gained credence in America’s heartlands thanks to the mushrooming of podcasts peddling all manner of misinformation to an audience lapping up views that, to an outsider’s eye, would seem extreme.
But Wright, polite almost to a fault until it all became too much, took us inside the bubble that much of the US, away from the progressive urban centres, exists in. This was an America where Christie, who believes God told her to patrol the Mexican border to keep “the illegals” out, thinks that she is fighting a war on the frontline.
It was joining one of these patrols where Wright’s hitherto impassive front broke down. Christie, gleefully reporting on camera that “we have just intercepted 110 people from the country of Africa”, lashed out angrily when Wright challenged her right to harass people who could well be genuine refugees. “People told me, the BBC – they’re lefty, they’re going to make you look like a crazy person. I’m done!’ For Wright too, that was job done.
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