‘Theobros’ Want to Strip Women of the Right to Vote—But Only After They Vote Republican in the Midterms

Being a MAGA influencer just isn’t what it used to be.

When the Trump administration returned to power nearly two years ago, the influencers swaggered into Washington, D.C. with unrelenting hubris. The inauguration gave us a window into just how decisive they’d been in the previous election. The late Charlie Kirk “got a better seat than every member of Congress,” according to The Daily Beast. Jake Paul and his brother Logan took selfies with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of many Big Tech Trump allies who donated to his inaugural fund to secure access to the administration. Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson mingled with government leaders and titans of industry.

If Democrats and Republicans agreed on one thing, it was that online influencers played a massive role in tipping the 2024 election to Trump. But on the eve of the 2026 midterms, these very same influencers are struggling.

With Trump’s approval ratings at a record low, the cult personality they’ve staked their name on is now more of a liability than an asset. The young men they were credited with recruiting into the winning 2024 coalition are now telling the mainstream press they’re disillusioned with the MAGA movement. Conservatives are already pointing fingers at each other in anticipation of losing control of Congress.

“The midterms are going to be a fucking bloodbath,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) who lost a campaign for governor and is not running for reelection, told Politico. The influencers are already seeing its effect.

While there was a surge in listeners following Kirk’s death, the Charlie Kirk Show, once a central hub for conservative movement message testing, is now a virtual nonentity after the founder’s assassination. Data from progressive media veteran Kyle Tharp shows right-leaning YouTubers are bleeding subscribers, and top partisan influencers have seen their audience growth plateau. Once a juggernaut publisher on Facebook, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire laid off 13% of its staff in the spring. Amidst the crisis on the right, a Wall Street Journal analysis from September found that MAGA podcasters are increasingly choosing to talk about anything else besides their beleaguered president. Trump, once a social media kingmaker, is now the clout-killer in chief. 

This all has created an opening for a new, untainted class of influencers to step into the spotlight. The “theobros,” as they’re called by critics, are a loosely connected network of extremely online Christian nationalist pastors who podcast and post constantly. Their central conceit is mapping out what a white Christian patriarchy could look like after Trump. Their aim is to establish a full fledged American theocracy based on blood and soil nationalism and a strict hierarchy of man over woman and husband over wife.

Joshua Haymes, who goes by “Reformation Red Pill” online, is a former pastor aligned with “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s Nashville church who has said Hitler was “misunderstood.” He has nearly 350,000 followers on Instagram. Joel Webbon is a Reformed Evangelical pastor and the author of “White Genocide: The Criminal Conspiracy of Immigration, Demographic Replacement” and founder of podcast network NXR Studios (short for New Christian Right).

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” the NXR website boasts. “We make content that conquers.” Dale Partridge, a pastor whose podcast is distributed through NXR, has called Islam and Hinduism “demonic” and has nearly 250,000 Instagram followers.

These men are not weighed down by Trump baggage like the Benny Johnsons and Ben Shapiros of the world. They make their own godhead, a fascist perversion of Jesus Christ, and do not depend on the popularity of those in charge of the secular government to derive their legitimacy.

Repealing the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote, is one of the more frequently repeated contentions of their biblical patriarchy movement — and it’s creating problems ahead of the dreaded midterms.

“In an ideal Christian society,” Haymes, or “Reformation Red Pill,” explained on his podcast, “it would be households that are voting. I think that’s the way that God designed the world.” That means that only the head of a household, a man, would have the right to vote.

“Women must be stripped of their right to vote,” Webbon wrote in response to a woman who posted what she later claimed was a joke saying she voted for James Talarico.

With the Benny Johnsons and Ben Shapiros of the world on their back foot, this fantasizing is increasingly at the center of the online right-wing fever swamps. The directionless ooze of conspiracism and bigotry online that Trump masterfully commanded for the last 10 years is increasingly beyond his grasp. Repealing the 19th Amendment is an early signal in the noise suggesting the priorities of a post-Trump right-wing, even if our democracy has one of the hardest to amend constitutions in the world.

The anti-suffrage arguments are no longer contained to these theological fascists. Pockets of Charlie Kirk’s legacy at Turning Point USA have come to harbor it as well. Haymes was a featured speaker on Turning Point’s fall campus tour. In June, TPUSA hosted the annual Women’s Leadership Summit, the organization’s flagship event for young women. This year’s conference speakers included anti-feminist influencer Savanna Faith Stone, an outspoken advocate for household voting. 

Alex Clark, Turning Point’s in-house MAHA influencer and the face of the organization’s outreach to young women, has said she “wouldn’t mind if it was just the male head of household that voted.” The argument is landing with some of TPUSA’s audience. Several young women interviewed by CBC at the Turning Point women’s conference said they’d give up their right to vote if it meant the end of liberal policies.

Advocating for repealing the 19th Amendment is a surefire way to build clout online as a right-wing influencer in 2026. There’s just one little problem: here on earth, Republicans still need women’s votes to win elections. 

“Stood next my wife and told her exactly how to vote,” Joel Webbon wrote on X alongside a sheepish selfie noticeably lacking the presence of a woman. “For the record, Zero ‘coercion’ required. It brings her joy to aid her husband in crushing wicked men like James Talarico.” 

The very same Turning Point women’s conference that featured an anti-voting activist was plastered with get-out-the-vote literature, including stickers saying “Moms Are the Red Wall” and a sign that read “DON’T BE RIDICULOUS, EVERYBODY VOTES” over a depiction of Meryl Streep’s character in the film “The Devil Wears Prada.”

Online, Alex Clark — a TPUSA podcaster — is running a full fledged get-out-the vote campaign to her audience of millennial women. In her October 9 newsletter “The Weekly Cure,” she wrote, “When you stay home, you don’t send a message. You just hand the decision to the people you trust least. You don’t have to love a party to use your vote.”

The Instagram page for her podcast Culture Apothecary has made multiple appeals to her audience of millennial women to participate in the midterms. 

“Its almost time for midterms and remember: it’s hard to complain about the outcome of an election you didn’t participate in,” they added in one caption. On her podcast, she plugs her website where listeners can check their voter registration status.

“Just to be frank — midterms are looking bad for us,” Clark posted to her Instagram story earlier this month. “I hope you love islam and socialism. If you don’t, you need to be making sure you are good to vote and taking 10 min to do that in Nov.” She added a link to her website that helps check registration.

Some in the conservative movement have noticed this fundamental problem. Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, has been outspoken in trying to shut it down.

“This is an argument that isn’t going anywhere,” she said in a video on Instagram. “All it does is make a lot of women who might think about voting for Republicans not want to vote for Republicans.”

Her comments section told a different story. The majority posting under her video advocated for repealing the 19th, including Dale Partridge, who wrote, “15 years ago nobody believed we could overturn Roe v. Wade, but we did.” Predicting an internal conflict that would result in “new nations or territories,” he added, “the conversation around women’s suffrage and how disastrous it has been should be a forefront issue” during a national reconstruction.

There are fundamental legal differences between overturning Roe and amending the Constitution that Partridge glosses over here. But the Overton window has no such protections. Pundits are free to pontificate about a world without universal suffrage. As the drumbeat grows louder and moves into more mainstream conservative circles, candidates will start getting asked about it, especially given some of these Christian nationalists’ direct connections to current administration officials, including Hegseth. This puts Republicans, who live and die by the online commentator class, in an impossible position: stay home ladies, but vote for us first.