Part Two: The Nine Year War on Women Who Dare to Speak

This is the second of a three part analysis examining how Donald Trump’s “quiet piggy” comment reveals the systematic dismantling of democratic norms. Part One explored how the flood the zone strategy and attention economy conspire to make outrages disappear. Part Two examines the nine year war on women who dare to speak. Part Three will map the global authoritarian playbook for destroying press freedom.

In Part One, we examined how the “quiet piggy” incident almost disappeared entirely, buried under an industrial scale production of amnesia. We watched journalists stand silent while their colleague was called livestock. We saw the system work as designed.

But to understand why this moment matters, we need to zoom out. Because calling a female reporter a pig isn’t an isolated outburst. It’s the latest instalment in a nine year campaign to normalise contempt for women who dare to ask awkward questions. 

This campaign has measurable effects. Rising violence. Shrinking rights. Women driven from public life. And it’s not happening in isolation. It’s part of a global pattern where authoritarian movements always target women first, testing how much cruelty a society will tolerate before expanding to other populations. Women who speak are the canaries in the coalmine of fascism. And right now, the canaries are copping it.

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The Timeline: From ‘Pussy’ to ‘Piggy’

Let’s be clear about the progression. The pattern is clear when you step back far enough to see it whole.

Trump announced his first presidential campaign in June 2015 with a speech calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals. But it was October 2016 that marked the real watershed: the Access Hollywood tape.

“Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

That was the beta test. The question wasn’t whether he’d said it, the tape was clear enough. The question was whether America would care.

The answer, delivered in November 2016, was a collective shrug and an electoral college victory.

That’s when the war on women went from guerrilla tactics to full mechanised assault.

The through line from “grab ‘em by the pussy” to “quiet piggy” isn’t a character flaw. It’s a deliberate, sustained campaign to normalise contempt for women, to make casual misogyny just another quirk of the national conversation.

And it’s worked beyond Trump’s wildest authoritarian fantasies.

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The Downstream Effects Are Measurable

This isn’t abstract cultural commentary. The effects of normalising contempt for women are documented, measurable, and accelerating.

Since 2016, researchers have found:

• Violence: Spikes in domestic violence in counties that voted heavily for Trump. Increased reports of harassment and assault on college campuses following Trump rallies.
• Political Participation: Measurable decreases in women running for office in regions where Trump style misogyny is most normalised. Women candidates facing unprecedented levels of gendered harassment and threats.
• Youth Radicalisation: Teenage boys expressing increasingly hostile attitudes toward girls’ autonomy. The mainstreaming of incel ideology among young men who’ve come of age entirely during the Trump era.
• Media and Journalism: Female journalists specifically targeted for rape and death threats. Physical assaults at Trump rallies and events.

This isn’t happening because Trump occasionally says something crude. It’s happening because he’s made cruelty toward women a central feature of his political brand, and millions of people have adopted that brand as their identity.

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Female Journalists as Specific, Systematic Targets

But women journalists face a particular kind of targeting that goes beyond general misogyny. They’re attacked not just for being women, but for being women who dare to ask questions.

The pattern is unmistakable:

• Delegitimisation: Female reporters are dismissed as biased, emotional, unprofessional. Their questions are framed as partisan attacks rather than legitimate journalism.
• Sexualisation: Unlike male journalists who are merely called fake news, female journalists face explicitly sexual harassment. Rape threats. Fantasies about violence. Their bodies weaponised as tools of intimidation.
• Isolation: Female journalists who ask tough questions are cut off from access, singled out for crowd harassment. The message: step out of line and you’re on your own.

The combination is devastating. It’s not enough to be a good journalist. You have to be willing to endure systematic harassment, threats to your family’s safety, and the knowledge that your own colleagues might not defend you.

How many important questions don’t get asked because female journalists have calculated the cost and decided it’s too high?

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s the goal of the entire system.

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The Pattern: Women Who Ask Are the Problem

Now let’s examine the specific context that made “quiet piggy” land so hard: the week in which Trump made clear that women asking questions about powerful men’s crimes would be treated as the problem, not the crimes themselves.

Catherine Lucey asked about the Epstein files. She got called a pig.

Mary Bruce from ABC asked Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman about ordering Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. She got scolded for rudeness.

The combination reveals the structure perfectly.

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The Epstein Files

Jeffrey Epstein ran a child sex trafficking operation that serviced wealthy, powerful men for decades. Trump fought to keep those files secret. When a reporter asked why, the response was hostility. The deflection is textbook: make the question the problem, not the answer.

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The Khashoggi Murder

Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, dismembered with a bone saw, on the crown prince’s orders. But when Mary Bruce asked about it, Trump’s response wasn’t outrage at the murder. It was annoyance at the reporter for bringing it up.

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said. “Whether you like him, or didn’t like him, things happen.”

Things happen.

A journalist gets murdered, and the President of the United States dismisses it with the fatalism of someone explaining a flat tyre.

Notice who’s rude in Trump’s telling. Not the crown prince who ordered a hit. Not the killers who wielded the saw.

The rude one is Mary Bruce, for mentioning unpleasantness.

Let’s be explicit about what these two incidents together reveal:

A female reporter asks about a child sex trafficker whose files implicate powerful men: “Quiet, piggy.”

A female reporter asks about a murdered journalist: “Don’t embarrass our guest.”

The crimes, raping children, murdering dissidents, barely register as problematic in Trump’s response. What registers as offensive is the impudence of women presuming they have the right to ask about them.

This is patriarchy in its purest form: women who speak are the problem, not the men who commit atrocities.

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The Global Pattern: Women as Canaries in the Coal mine

This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Scan the global authoritarian landscape and you’ll see the same pattern repeated with depressing consistency.

• Brazil’s Bolsonaro: Openly celebrated rape culture, joked about sexual assault. He won. The downstream effects included spiking violence against women.
• The Philippines’ Duterte: Made rape jokes about missionaries, threatened to shoot female rebels. He won. Press freedom collapsed.
• India’s Modi: Presides over epidemic levels of sexual violence while Hindu nationalist movements push women out of public life.
• Hungary’s Orbán: Dismantled reproductive rights, pushed “traditional family values” as cover for authoritarian consolidation.
• Afghanistan’s Taliban: Within months of retaking power, erased women from public existence. The logical endpoint of treating women as less than human.
• Tony Abbott stood in front of a banner calling Julia Gillard a witch and a bitch.

The pattern is universal: authoritarians always target women first. Always test the boundaries of acceptable cruelty against women before expanding to other populations.

Women, and specifically women who speak, women who question, women who refuse to be quiet, are the canaries in the coalmine of fascism.

When a society tolerates calling female reporters livestock, it’s not a gaffe. It’s a dress rehearsal for broader violence.

So far, not enough people have flinched.

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The Cracks in the Edifice: Why He’s Scared Now

There’s a reason Trump’s lashing out with particular viciousness right now, and it’s not strength. It’s fear.

His air of invincibility is cracking:

• Democrats dominating off year elections in districts he won
• Forced to reverse course on Epstein files under public pressure
• Economic turbulence as tariffs and chaos spook markets
• His approval rating softening in key swing states
• Wounded authoritarians are more dangerous than confident ones. When bullies sense they’re losing, they don’t retreat gracefully. They escalate. They lash out harder, faster, more recklessly.

The “quiet piggy” outburst might be evidence of a man on the back foot, overreacting to a question he should have deflected with his usual blizzard of lies.

But don’t mistake fear for weakness. Cornered animals bite. Failing authoritarians would rather burn everything down than admit defeat.

And female journalists, already the most vulnerable, already the most systematically targeted, become the easiest targets when the lashing out intensifies.

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Part Two Conclusion: The War Continues

So we’ve traced the nine year escalation from “grab ‘em by the pussy” to “quiet piggy.” We’ve documented the measurable downstream effects, rising violence, shrinking rights, women driven from public life.

We’ve watched this pattern repeat globally, from Brazil to the Philippines to Hungary to Afghanistan, with women always the first targets of authoritarian consolidation.

And we’ve recognised what this means: women who speak are canaries in the coalmine of fascism. When they’re silenced, everyone else is next.

The “quiet piggy” moment isn’t an isolated incident. It’s the latest chapter in a systematic campaign to make women, and particularly women who ask uncomfortable questions, afraid to speak.

And it’s working.

In Part Three, we’ll examine the authoritarian playbook for destroying press freedom: the four phase strategy that moves from delegitimisation through intimidation to isolation and violence. We’ll see how this playbook has succeeded globally and how it’s being deployed in America right now. And we’ll explore whether we have the courage to resist before silence becomes survival.

For now, understand this: the war on women who dare to speak is a war on democracy itself. When female journalists learn to be quiet, everyone learns to be quiet.

The only question is whether we’ll let that lesson stick.

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