A cluster of alt-right men, conspiracy theorists – and even several high-ranking politicians – are condemning women agents with the U.S. Secret Service, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, for the act of a white, male shooter.
Trump’s Saturday campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, came to a screeching halt after a sniper shot at the former president, critically injuring two attendees and killing two others, including Corey Comperature, a firefighter who was protecting his family from stray bullets. The FBI has identified the shooter as Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old from Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, and a registered Republican who was killed by the U.S. Secret Service, NBC news reported.
As officials continue to investigate the attack, some conservatives are taking to social media to criticize women in the Secret Service, who they say failed to protect Trump, TIME reported. Right-wing political activist Matt Walsh said on X, formerly Twitter, that women shouldn’t be in the agency – and that “none of the very best at this job are women.” Scrutiny also came from Republican women like Meghan McCain, who described the situation as “embarrassing and dangerous.”
The criticism is “a transparent, laughable and absurd attempt” from Republicans to distract the public from the real issues at play, like gun control. That’s according to Lena Zuckerwise, an associate professor of political science at Simmons University in Boston. She says the criticism follows their playbook, “which is to blame women for most social problems.”
“This type of online criticism is very much aligned with conventional, Republican strategies and has no real relationship to the truth,” Zuckerwise adds.
Juliet Williams, a gender studies professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, called the Saturday shooting “a crisis for our country” – and in moments of crisis, before details are made available to the public, people will “just trot out their go-to explanations for the world” based on their belief systems, she says.
Other online critics, meanwhile, are shaming efforts that promote diversity, equity and inclusion for the incident, dismissing them as failures. “DEI got someone killed,” the controversial account Libs of TikTok posted on X. Specifically, critics take umbrage with Secret Service chief Kimberly Cheatle’s focus on hiring women – who, by the way, make up only 24% of staff, according to the Secret Service itself. It’s part of a broader push to halt DEI initiatives, with Florida Gov. Ron Desantis leading the charge by signing a bill back in May that banned public colleges and universities from spending money on such programs.
Whether such policies are framed as feminism or “DEI,” UCLA’s Williams says the backlash is based in the idea that “people of color and women have been given an unfair advantage that has propelled them to positions they have not earned, do not deserve and are not competent for.”
Zuckerwise noted that this could even be the start of a “proliferation” of employing hateful rhetoric, practices and policies that are disguised as progressive, citing the “Republican war on trans people [presented] as an attempt to protect women” as an example.
Adds Williams: “We shouldn’t let the fact that we still live in a world where it’s more okay to be sexist … cover the fact that these two forms of discriminatory attitudes are not mutually exclusive – in fact, they feed off each other.”
