Last week, I spoke to an Idaho woman named Carmen Broesder about a viral video from conservative influencer John McEntee claiming that abortion ban-induced horror stories like her own weren’t actually happening. When I told Broesder that McEntee, a former Trump administration staffer, also happened to be the founder of a conservative dating app called the Right Stuff, Broesder candidly said “women should be cautious” with the app. McEntee's anti-abortion comments raise “serious concerns about whether such a platform could genuinely be safe for women,” she said.
Broesder may have been on to something. In a Tuesday report in Wired, two young women recounted McEntee making them feel uncomfortable in inappropriate online conversations they shared with him online and through the Right Stuff. McEntee is also a writer of Project 2025, the far-right Heritage Foundation’s agenda for the next Republican president to bypass Congress and impose a national abortion ban, among a laundry list of other anti-LGBTQ, dystopian goals. One unnamed, 18-year-old woman told Wired she’s “semi-conservative” and connected with McEntee on his dating app. “It was very sexual from day one,” she alleged. “He kept making comments about my age and how hot it would be to sleep with someone who was my age.”
McEntee is 34-years-old. According to the teen, “He would say things like, ‘I come and visit you and we hook up’ or whatever, ‘You should bring one of your friends or you should take a couple of your friends,’ and was like, verifying that my friends were the same age as me as well." The young woman says their conversations tapered out after a couple weeks because “it was obvious I wasn’t going to fly out to California or something to see him.” “The more I thought about it, the more it makes me sad that he's sort of a role model, especially for young conservative men,” she said. “And I feel like this person isn't a great role model for those young conservative men.”
John McEntee (Project 2025 author, Former Trump Official) was caught hitting on college freshman using his OWN COMPANY'S INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT.
what a fucking creep pic.twitter.com/QS2VzlnA4m — Right Wing Cope (@RightWingCope) September 19, 2024
The other woman who spoke to Wired was also an 18-year-old college freshman when McEntee reached out to her via Instagram DM in October 2023. The woman, Grace Carter, said she has “no idea how [McEntee] found me” or why he asked her to promote the Right Stuff, because the “things I post, it's very leftist.”
Messages reviewed by Wired show McEntee repeatedly messaged Carter and even offered to fly her and a girlfriend to Los Angeles. Carter told the outlet that she continued to talk to McEntee for a bit as a means of “trolling”: “I remember I told my boyfriend about it and I was joking that he was going to be the other girl,” she said. “I was like, I could use a free trip, that’s initially why I kept the conversation going.” That said, based on her online communications with McEntee and his tone, she “would have been uncomfortable with him in person.”
Carter said she wanted to share her online interactions with him after seeing his viral video minimizing the violence of abortion bans earlier this month. “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath,” McEntee said in a TikTok from the Right Stuff’s account shortly after the September 10 presidential debate. The Right Stuff has 3.3 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million on Instagram. “That video he made about abortions really upset me. And I was just like, it needs to be called out,” she said.
Carter wasn’t the only person put off by McEntee’s smug lies about abortion bans on TikTok. Shortly after McEntee’s post, Broesder shared her own now-viral TikTok recounting her 19-day miscarriage in December 2022, during which she says Idaho hospitals declined to provide emergency abortion care because of the state’s total ban. “It’s disheartening and felt like a slap in the face” to hear someone with McEntee’s platform suggest her story and others like it are fake," Broesder told Jezebel last week. “I had done so much work to get my story out there and they always say ‘fake news,’ no matter the evidence I bring, including my book with photo evidence,” she said.
The comment section of her TikTok is rife with women sharing similar horrific stories of being denied emergency care due to abortion bans. Despite McEntee’s resume and massive online following, the only headlines about him I’ve really come across (and entirely against my will, at that) concern his failing online dating app, his stupid conspiracy theory that abortion ban horror stories are fake, and, now, that he is allegedly a creep intent on pursuing 18-year-old girls. And that sampling of headlines feels like an apt enough profile of today’s average young Republican man, to me!
