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The fascism of stay-at-home moms
Source: Shutterstock, Sheila Fitzgerald. ID: 1441453388
As the Democrat party becomes ever more radically left-wing, I often wonder how they get half the population to vote for them. I mean, not everybody is a lesbian sociology professor at Amherst. How do anti-American radicals maintain the support of people who are neither stupid nor communists?
Another interesting feature of the modern Democrat party is how it presents its radical agenda. Thirty years ago, Democrats spoke mostly in euphemisms, avoiding clear explanations of their goals. Now that their goals are widely understood to be destructive and crazy, they have to be even more careful about discussions of specific policies. They avoid those discussions if possible, of course. For example, Kamala Harris really never clearly explained what she intended to do if she were to be elected president. She wanted to get elected, so she couldn’t, obviously.
But what if you work for the Democrat party? What if your job is to explain to American citizens what Democrat policies are, and why they are superior to the Republicans? What if it’s up to you to explain away the catastrophes which result from Democrat policies, and distract attention away from the successes of Republican parties? I refer, of course, to journalists. What if you are a journalist?
It’s easy for Kamala to refuse interviews. But if you write for The New York Times, you do have to say SOMETHING. And everything you say has to present Democrats in a positive light, and it has to make at least some sense.
Now THAT is a challenging job.
I read many different news sources, and I’m often impressed with the quality of the propaganda. I admire good writing whenever I find it. And I found a great example today: An article in Mother Jones about the “Trad Wife” phenomenon.
I don’t know much about the topic, but my understanding is that Trad Wives are an Instagram trend in which attractive women make videos of themselves doing housework or cooking, wearing pretty clothes, etc. They apparently are promoting a return to traditional gender roles. And this is apparently popular. Although, again, I’ve never seen any of these videos (I’m not on Instagram), and I don’t know much about it.
The Mother Jones article begins by explaining the phenomenon using snarky descriptions of behavior that is obviously below the standards of author Morgan Jerkins. I was learning about a new topic, but wondering why she was writing about it. But like the outstanding author she is, she not only explains her topic, but also explains why the reader should care about it:
But while it might be easy to write off the trad wives as a silly meme or a guilty pleasure, they should not be taken lightly. Given the misogynistic messaging and white-centric ideals some of these influencers peddle, they are indicative of larger forces at play—henchwomen in an ongoing effort to functionally erase modern women from the public sphere.
Golly. I thought these were just videos of attractive women baking or something.
Note how she does that. She doesn’t accuse any specific Instagram actress of doing anything racist. But she associates all of them with racism and misogyny. They are part of the evil master plan of “erasing women from the public sphere,” even if none of them are aware of their own nefarious plans.
Watch her do it again. Now she is going to go from vague eye-rolling at “images of wife- and mother-hood” to accusing all participating to taking part in white nationalism. Again, without specifically accusing anyone of anything. It really is well done:
But then the vibe shifted. In 2016 and 2017, when Seyward Darby was doing research for her 2020 book, Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism, she noticed an ominous subculture gaining prominence, one in which women were performing this highly curated image of wife- and motherhood. “It was aggressively anti-feminist, anti-diversity; some of it was proudly pro-white,” Darby says. Trump’s rise helped give these women a larger megaphone.
Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists, but, as Darby points out, “it is a slippery slope—and sometimes there’s no slope at all—between ‘I’m just a nice woman who wants to be a wife and mom’ and having a very white nationalist agenda. Whether they realize it or not, those are the waters they are swimming in.”
Check out the first sentence of that second paragraph: “Of course, many influencers bragging about being stay-at-home moms are not white supremacists.” Wow. Well, I’m glad she cleared that up. Very impartial of her, making an effort to see things from the other side, despite her understandable discomfort in giving the benefit of the doubt to forces of evil such as * shiver * stay-at-home moms. The horror…
I’d like you to read the whole thing – it really is remarkable. Although I hesitate to send clicks to The Democrat Party Marketing Department. If you also hesitate to wander into such places, I’ll offer you one more example:
Watching trad wife content can pull viewers into territory they didn’t expect. “What’s scary is that there is a subtext in all these videos,” Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tells me. For example, a trad wife might advocate for “natural living” or homeschooling, and then veer into anti–birth control rhetoric or religious indoctrination. “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of extremism.”
First, why does a Mother Jones columnist who is writing an article about Trad Wives on Instagram getting quotes from a tech columnist from The Washington Post? Second, why suggest that a trad wife might veer into bad things? Why doesn’t she give a few examples? Like I’m doing in this post. Wouldn’t actual quotes have more impact than vague possibilities? I wonder why she doesn’t give examples? I could guess why. But I don’t know. So I won’t speculate. Unlike the author of this piece. And her sources.
But forget that. Check out that last sentence: “When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of extremism.” Again, she does not specifically accuse anyone of anything. She just very strongly suggests that stay-at-home moms are “adjacent to fascist, far-right content.”
Stay-at-home moms. Adjacent to fascists. My goodness. So Democrats aren’t radicals. No, of course not. Democrats are reasonable people who value good old-fashioned common sense and are concerned about dangerous new fads.
Fads like stay-at-home moms. It’s these new-fangled stay-at-home moms who are the real extremists. OK.
The whole article really is well done. Note how she gives her audience an excuse to hate not just Trad Wives on Instagram, but stay-at-home moms in general. Without pointing to any misbehavior on anyone’s part.
She never mentions one example of white supremacy or misogyny. After all, her topic is attractive women making videos about baking cookies. People probably watch these videos because they don’t want to see anything evil. But thankfully, she doesn’t need to give examples of evil to convince her audience that stay-at-home moms are evil. Because she’s a good writer, and her audience wants to believe.
Or at least her audience is willing to suspend their disbelief in an effort to feel virtuous despite supporting horrifying things, like Democrat policies.
It doesn’t have to make sense. It just needs to appear sort of plausible. Pretty much.
Imagine if similar propaganda for Republicans was as ubiquitous as The Washington Post technology writer, to CNN, to The New York Times, to 60 Minutes, to The Today Show, to People Magazine, to nearly all advertising, to our entire educational system, to Hollywood, to social media, to Mother Jones Magazine, to nearly everything else everybody sees every day. Imagine all of them promoting Republicans to this degree.
Who needs propaganda? Just use all those outlets to compare the results of Republican policies to the results of Democrat policies. Presto. No Republican would ever lose an election again.
But Democrats can maintain their destructive policies because talented writers find ways to make them seem more palatable, and they find ways to make Republicans – even stay-at-home moms! – look like the real tyrants.
This stuff is powerful.
Really well done. I’m impressed.
But powerful. And dangerous.
Published in General
There is a famous quote from H.L. Mencken.
Apparently, there are people who have the haunting fear that some woman, somewhere, is baking a cake and enjoying herself.
Very simple; the Dems hand out “talking points”, and you just copypaste those.
Which is why you hear identical terminology and adjectives from so many media sources.
Rush Limbaugh used to play “super cuts” of these, and they were very compelling evidence of such a process.
I’ve said it this way a few times here: “It doesn’t have to be accurate, it doesn’t have to be correct, it doesn’t have to be true, it doesn’t even have to make sense.”
Great post. It is important to understand that “make sense” is really more “consistent with the narrative”. You see, Leftists don’t use common sense. They believe a narrative and everything they are told by their media and friends is consistent with the narrative. It all makes sense to them, even when the narrative has to change. Can you see the way they see? Probably not, because you are a dude and you do not have the biological need to reach consensus with other females. Now, can you see the way they see?
Nobody want’s a feral housewife. (I think this was your joke way back. I’ve been waiting to use it.)
I’m working in Amherst this week and last. I think I seen one dude that was a lesbian sociology professor.
——
I tried looking up Morgan Jerkins family life. I can’t find it. I figured she must know what a good wife is since she seems to be an expert on the subject. The article is written like a drive-by shooting. What a load of bull…
Women have been lied to by the feminists for years. Those libs who believe that they will only have fulfillment by killing their babies so they can work realize they have been lied to – but can’t admit it – so they go after women who do the opposite – raise a family as their prime vocation. I think someone coined a term childless cat ladies. Maybe the lie is sinking in and they lash out by writing ridiculous articles to vent their rage. As Trump would say; Sad.
Long ago I knew a young man who read Mother Jones enthusiastically, and waxed poetic about it. Out of curiosity I read an article in one he had left lying around. In it the author explained how growing up, IIRC her family didn’t have a TV which left her out of the conversations at school about the previous night’s programs. She went on to explain how her desire to fit in lead to honing the ability to appear to know all about episodes of popular programs she had never watched.
She explained this was the beginning of her training leading to her ability to write persuasively about subjects of which she had little knowledge. It seems to me there’s a lesson about leftists in there, but perhaps I’m wrong.
It’s the seriousness of the accusation, not the truth of it.
There used to be something people called “the mommy wars” when my kids were little. The two sides were the moms who had a job and those who did not. I straddled the line because I worked at home.
It was my conclusion that women who worked really hard as a part of their daily life did so both at the office and at home. People fill their days according to their own internal schedule and ambition. The moms who watched soap operas (I never knew any of those) all afternoon would have been sitting around unproductively in an office job too. :) :) I once walked into a bank in the early morning after I had dropped off the kids at school. I was rushing around trying to get my errands done that day and the tellers were sitting around chatting. :)
Moms entering the workforce was something I saw firsthand. When my daughter was born in the late seventies, only 20 percent of moms worked in outside jobs. By the time my son came along eight years later, it was 60 percent. That was a rapid and huge cultural change. We were in a recession though over those years with a tremendous loss of the lifetime corporate job for the dads that had made the stay-at-home mom a possibility in the postwar economic boom (what economists sometimes call “the nifty fifties), and many conservatives felt that families were resorting to having both parents work to cope with the economic changes. Living through it, I’m sure there’s some truth to it. Otherwise, there would have been much more clamoring about the poor economy and inflation. The government needed women to work outside the home in order to keep on the good side of the voters. :)
To this day, I believe that the moms entering the workforce in such a short period brought about the “managed-care” healthcare change. It seemed like overnight at one point, every doctor’s office suddenly had an employee filling out forms whose job was mirrored on the insurance company end. Very low paying jobs. But it was the availability of moms looking for outside jobs to pay for their kids’ basketball camps that enabled the managed-care healthcare racket. :) :)
I used to say this joke:
I once put this ad in the paper:
“Wife wanted. Nymphomania and OCCD a definite plus.”
A feral girlfriend would be okay, but I prefer a domestic housewife.
You’ve brought back a memory for me of a very famous, very humorous New Yorker article that appeared in 1971: Judy Brady Syfers’s “I Want a Wife” (reading this in the advent of gay marriage is bizarre today–its meaning was very clear and very funny when it was first published :) ):
Much of the article is of the whining category, and it is a clear indicator of how we got where are today.
My mother said around that time, “Just wait until society tries to pay for all the things we did for free!” Prescient words, Mom. :) :)
I find the phenomenon describe (media hinting strongly that some phenomenon, behavior, or thought media doesn’t like is bad because it is part of / adjacent to / leads to some acknowledged evil, but without ever providing examples or other evidence) common from the Left.
Remember a few years ago the panic-filled allegations that because young men were listening to Jordan Peterson’s admonitions to behave responsibly those young men were going to become organized racist killing groups.
Similarly, people listening to Ben Shapiro were somehow going to become Nazi totalitarians (never even attempting to explain how listening to a Jew leads to Naziism).
Going farther back to the 1990s, the media were in a tizzy over the Promise Keepers movement that encouraged men to be responsible and loving husbands and fathers, and in the media’s eyes this was somehow going to lead to legions of enslaved women. That one had to actively ignore that the biggest fans of the Promise Keepers movement tended to be the wives of the attendees.
The media has gotten quite skilled at implicit accusations that sound scary but have no actual evidence or facts.
The hardest part seems to be when they have a woman for an office boss. Maybe it works out OK sometimes, but the times when it doesn’t work have a way of drawing attention.
It seems pretty common that women say women bosses are worse than men bosses.
How is it that a feminist believing that she knows the right way for all women to live their lives is wrong, but it’s not wrong when a conservative believes he knows the right way for all women to live their lives? How about if everybody just minds their own business?
why do you think they want to start the indoctrination of the young while they are in elementary school
I don’t know that conservatives are so much about having just one approved way of living, as they are about – for example – pointing out the delusions of others who think THEY know the right way.
Be fair. The guy in the meme wasn’t saying she COULDN’T do that if she wanted to. He just pointed out how ridiculous and even contradictory her self-identified idea was.
He didn’t say that she MUST do so-and-so. He asked a question that exposed her stupidity.
That might be a great idea but the Left will never leave you alone to mind your own business.
That too.
One of the after-effects of school integration was black students being told by others that being studious was “acting white.” Better to wear shades, grow an afro, wear some pseudo-ethnic gear like a dashiki and strike a defiant pose. In fairness, the DOJ spent a lot of time worried about whether white parents would yank their kids is integration exceeded a certain threshold but just assumed the black kids were getting a better deal so nothing more needed to be considered. But they were taken out of a more supportive black community into an unwelcoming environment often with tougher standards. Rather than try, fail and confirm racist stereotypes, better to be defiant. Self-defeating but understandable. Done 5o years later in an all black public school–utterly brain-dead.
“Acting female” is a threat because it affirms a well-established, natural, ancient competitive standard. Attractive women with domestic skills and family-based priorities are more conspicuously desirable. Angry feminists with values, styles, interests, ideologies and behaviors not conducive to marriage and family much less immediate desirability would prefer the more desirable females not be so visible or not exist at all. Worse for the harridans, what if the trad wife is not stay-at-home forever but selling real estate, working online or otherwise seamlessly developing a career as the kids grow older but still making birthday cakes and pies, handling countless tasks and producing Thanksgiving feasts. ( I married such a woman and recommend it highly.)
How do you force women who successfully embody the perfect wife to transform into less desirable feminists, and not particularly successful feminists? The snarky, claws out, fangs bared resentment of the trad wife is a tacit admission that the left’s ideologically mandated rather (or literally) sterile female persona is not particularly satisfying for men or women.
They don’t.
Yes, they do.
A lot of my friends vote Democrat. And they are neither stupid nor communists.
Remember that a lot of voters were voting against one of the two candidates. Who they voted for doesn’t necessarily show who they wanted to win, but who they wanted to lose.
Also, remember that Americans are reading less and less. Less people read long form articles offered by Mother Jones or the Manhatten Institute.
One of my hopes was that Trump would bring out the worst of the left, and he did. I figured mainstream Americans, not just politically aware people like us, would see how nutty they were. The problem was that too many people thought Trump was a nut. And he politicized Covid when he took over the Mike Pence/Anthony Fauci press conferences, and worse he mishandled it.
Then January 6th happened. So to ordinary Americans who don’t care about politics except a few weeks before an election, both sides were nuts.
You’re only showing one side of the nuttiness.
Jerkins?
All Journalists Are Statists™
This is 100% my experience.
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No.
Let’s discuss!
A. Do people spend too much money?
B. Is there too much inflation?
C. Does trade and progress create deflation, which is stupidly countered by the central bank for government power, and the 1%?