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.

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  1. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

     

    `

    Al Sparks (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):
    I just saw Mark Andreessen, the Netscape guy, say on Joe Rogan’s podcast that AI is going to take all of the jobs.

    He didn’t say that. He said that it would take a lot of jobs, and that it would also create new jobs.

    What he’s not saying is that the people displaced by new technology won’t likely get those new jobs.

    If you are in constant deflation, the unskilled and the stupid don’t have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck so much. 

    Inflation *** sort of *** worked when people were forking out multiple FICA slaves. Not anymore because computers and trade i.e. deflation are taking everything over. 

    • #61
  2. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Al Sparks (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):
    I just saw Mark Andreessen, the Netscape guy, say on Joe Rogan’s podcast that AI is going to take all of the jobs.

    He didn’t say that. He said that it would take a lot of jobs, and that it would also create new jobs.

    What he’s not saying is that the people displaced by new technology won’t likely get those new jobs.

    A continuation of the problem that’s been ongoing for decades already. Increasing demand for higher-quality/higher-intelligence workers, while the average intelligence of PEOPLE doesn’t seem to increase.

    Which means at some point, you might have all the needed work being done by a fraction of the total population, and there’s basically nothing that the rest are NEEDED for. Even if they were CAPABLE, which many won’t be. Yet they’re expected to still have A Job of some kind?

    What if we switched to constant deflation as God intended?

    • #62
  3. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    kedavis (View Comment):
    Which means at some point, you might have all the needed work being done by a fraction of the total population, and there’s basically nothing that the rest are NEEDED for.  Even if they were CAPABLE, which many won’t be.  Yet they’re expected to still have A Job of some kind?

    If we switched to constant deflation, the labor system would be far more flexible.

    You are expected to have a job! People will hate you if you don’t have a job!

    • #63
  4. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    The Ludwig von Mises Institute Is Right About Everything™

    foRCInG uS tO uSE goVErNmENt moNEy mAKes ouR lIvEs betTEr  

    • #64
  5. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    Which means at some point, you might have all the needed work being done by a fraction of the total population, and there’s basically nothing that the rest are NEEDED for. Even if they were CAPABLE, which many won’t be. Yet they’re expected to still have A Job of some kind?

    If we switched to constant deflation, the labor system would be far more flexible.

    You are expected to have a job! People will hate you if you don’t have a job!

    Expectations would also be… well, expected… to change in that future, in accordance with reality.  But even if there’s a deflationary system, people with NO INCOME still have NO INCOME.  Deflation doesn’t help THEM at all.

    • #65
  6. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    kedavis (View Comment):
    But even if there’s a deflationary system, people with NO INCOME still have NO INCOME.

    Nobody has proved that a deflationary system increases unemployment. 

    • #66
  7. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    But even if there’s a deflationary system, people with NO INCOME still have NO INCOME.

    Nobody has proved that a deflationary system increases unemployment.

    Not the point.  Improving/advancing technology, automation, AI, etc, do that.  What’s left are the results and consequences.

    • #67
  8. Chris O Coolidge
    Chris O
    @ChrisO

    RufusRJones (View Comment):
    We could handle a straight half a percent or a percent of deflation.

    Well, it’s chicken and egg, right? What’s my motivation to spend a year developing a product to get it to market when its value to me continually diminishes? 

    • #68
  9. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Chris O (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):
    We could handle a straight half a percent or a percent of deflation.

    Well, it’s chicken and egg, right? What’s my motivation to spend a year developing a product to get it to market when its value to me continually diminishes?

    Another problem that deflationists seem to ignore.

    • #69
  10. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    I just thought of something else.

    What allows people to live? Profits, wages, and purchasing power.

    What is the Federal Reserve about? The ***w e a l t h * e f f e c t ***. Pumping up assets to get people to spend. 

    If you keep pumping up assets, the wages and income increasingly vanish.

    • #70
  11. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Chris O (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):
    We could handle a straight half a percent or a percent of deflation.

    Well, it’s chicken and egg, right? What’s my motivation to spend a year developing a product to get it to market when its value to me continually diminishes?

    Nobody is entrepreneurial about anything without a fat profit in it. I’m not talking about commodities or anything that has been commodified.

    You can’t find one Austrian economist that endorses inflation. We have gone the other way for 100 years and it has totally quit working if it ever did. 

    • #71
  12. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

     

    Inflation isn’t good anymore if it ever was. It’s artificial and they don’t know what they are doing. 

    • #72
  13. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    kedavis (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    But even if there’s a deflationary system, people with NO INCOME still have NO INCOME.

    Nobody has proved that a deflationary system increases unemployment.

    Not the point. Improving/advancing technology, automation, AI, etc, do that. What’s left are the results and consequences.

    They need to stop forcing inflation against it. 

    What do you think happens when they force inflation? They lower interest rates among other things. This makes it easier to replace people with automation. 

    What do you think happens when they force deflation. They jack up interest rates which makes it harder to replace people with automation.

    • #73
  14. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    What was this post about, again?

    • #74
  15. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    But even if there’s a deflationary system, people with NO INCOME still have NO INCOME.

    Nobody has proved that a deflationary system increases unemployment.

    Compared to an inflationary environment,  in a deflationary environment Consumerism will decrease by some marginal percentage because people will be incentivized to not spend their money now, with the expectation that they’ll be able to use the same amount to buy more in the future.

    Businesses and retailers will avoid carrying inventory because they won’t be able to sell it for as much as they paid for it.

    That decreased demand will decrease employment.

    • #75
  16. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Miffed White Male (View Comment):

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):
    But even if there’s a deflationary system, people with NO INCOME still have NO INCOME.

    Nobody has proved that a deflationary system increases unemployment.

    Compared to an inflationary environment, in a deflationary environment Consumerism will decrease by some marginal percentage because people will be incentivized to not spend their money now, with the expectation that they’ll be able to use the same amount to buy more in the future.

    Businesses and retailers will avoid carrying inventory because they won’t be able to sell it for as much as they paid for it.

    That decreased demand will decrease employment.

    Those last 2 might be a little more complicated.  Will they be selling it for the same currency number, but that amount of currency will be “worth more” than when they bought the inventory?  Or would they be selling it for a lower currency number that is “worth the same” as the higher currency number they paid for it?

    • #76
  17. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Miffed White Male (View Comment):
    Businesses and retailers will avoid carrying inventory because they won’t be able to sell it for as much as they paid for it.

    They won’t have as much debt to cover. The profit margin won’t change. 

    You can’t find one Austrian economist that favors anything but deflation. They keep forcing deflation, and we have all of these social problems from it. 

    • #77
  18. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    kedavis (View Comment):
    but that amount of currency will be “worth more” than when they bought the inventory? 

    Well.

     

    • #78
  19. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

     

    Inflation is about two things: it’s much easier to be militaristic and it’s the only way these guys know how to keep a fractional reserve banking system together. Then this in part forces demand for the reserve currency of the dollar.

    Then you have all of these social problems they can’t manage. 

    Why would you be a conservative or a libertarian if you need the government to equalize the inflation for you?

     

    • #79
  20. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    The Ludwig von Mises Institute Is Right About Everything™

    • #80
  21. Joker Member
    Joker
    @Joker

    Yeah, this thread strayed pretty far from the original post.

    “How do anti-American radicals maintain the support of people who are neither stupid nor communists?” -Dr Bastiat

    One point that Dems can’t shut up about has to do with the preference for Democrat candidates by college educated voters. It came up in practically all pre election poll discussions. If you don’t follow politics the way we do, it sounds good to agree with the smart folks. “Hey, I have a degree, so I must be one of them and vote accordingly.” Who wants to be on the dumb team? So without being an idiot or a socialist, you vote like a Nobel candidate.

    About the feminist tendency to mock the trad moms: There’s a set of circumstances that can apply to women who were told they needed a college degree (and I pass no judgement here.) Like most college grads, a degree’s main value is to qualify a person for some career. Once out of school, women are naturally going to commit to that career and may have to in order to pay off student debt. The die is more or less cast, and it absorbs at least a big chunk of a woman’s childbearing years. Now you’re motivated to mock the path you didn’t take. 

     

    • #81
  22. Joker Member
    Joker
    @Joker

    As far as inflation is concerned, the discussion needs to include the impacts of technology that creates new efficiencies (that lower costs) in producing existing products and the creation of products that didn’t exist. One person with a laptop can do more, faster than a dozen people with calculators could in the early 80s. I watched it happen.

    Those who had to find work elsewhere did, as they will when AI shreds jobs. The tendency is that people, jobs, professions become more specialized to maintain and improve value to an employer.

    What’s the 90s version of the ubiquitous cell phone, and what has it added to the economy? Underlying the entertainment value is the advance in communications that make it possible to avoid mistakes and execute projects, more than just a cute new tool. In some ways, its an example of deflation in terms of the capability per dollar for a brick phone compared to a current generation cell phone. How much would 1950 Henry Ford pay for the opportunity to reverse engineer the cheapest US automobile and the technology it contains?

    These factors play a role in inflation as people are willing to pay more for improved products. And new products move from playthings for the wealthy to everybody has one over time. Vanderbilt a hundred years ago or regular person today?

    And the value matter brought up in the house discussion. One consistent measure of the down payment is how long the average worker has to work to save up the money it takes to buy a house. (doesn’t apply to everyone under all circumstances, but it’s a BFD.) If the increase in cost of the property accelerates faster than general increase in wages, it’s going to adversely affect first time homebuyers. If ordinary workers could save up $30K in six months, nobody would be complaining about a stubborn housing market for the GenZ kids.

    • #82
  23. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    Joker (View Comment):

    About the feminist tendency to mock the trad moms: There’s a set of circumstances that can apply to women who were told they needed a college degree (and I pass no judgement here.) Like most college grads, a degree’s main value is to qualify a person for some career. Once out of school, women are naturally going to commit to that career and may have to in order to pay off student debt. The die is more or less cast, and it absorbs at least a big chunk of a woman’s childbearing years. Now you’re motivated to mock the path you didn’t take. 

     

    This is excellent analysis. 

    I forget where I saw this, but supposedly the best situation for this country and everybody is if the woman forks out a couple of FICA slaves, and then worries about her career.

    I swear the root of all of our problems is too much central planning.

     

    • #83
  24. Joker Member
    Joker
    @Joker

    I think there’s plenty of wisdom in the contention that government spending causes inflation. It certainly plays a huge role, but its also what the government is spending on. What we increasingly see is that we aren’t swapping long lived assets for long lived debt. We’re not getting new roads, bridges, airports and water treatment facilities. What measurable benefit has there been for the $1T spending on Green New Deal initiatives (Inflation Reduction Act)? Might as well have set it on fire. Paying capable people not to work and putting them on a par with productive citizens is reverse of a healthy incentive.

    • #84
  25. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    “Public goods” only. It has a definition. Look it up. 

    I think there is some utility to putting a gun to everybody’s head and forcing them into Medicare and Social Security (they are annuities and you only have to fund them at the 50% level when everybody starts dying), but we did this all wrong and I have no idea how to fix it now

    • #85
  26. Joker Member
    Joker
    @Joker

    That public good concept is important right up to the point where magical benefits are shoehorned into the cost/benefit analysis. Yeah that calculated savings of asthma reduction is worth a couple of trillion a year.

    One overlooked benefit of health insurance companies is that they’re like medical traffic cops. You want to cover liver transplants, that’s gonna cost ya in premiums. If you’re not paying for that coverage, the insurance company won’t pay.

    I know someone whose job it was to deny unapproved treatments, like aroma and gem therapy. Evidently, there are no studies showing that there’s any efficacy, but patients seem to want everything and anything covered. And I wouldn’t want to be paying higher premiums for such nonsense. Government programs tend to expand for votes, not dollars. Eventually care suffers as providers avoid or limit government programs.

    I think it was the first Ann Coulter book I read, where she asked why people expected health coverage for free, but think it’s ok to pay a couple of thousand for a cell phone. They understand very well why a Benz costs more than a Kia, but can’t grasp why they need to pay more for better coverage or more doctors.

    • #86
  27. Dr. Bastiat Member
    Dr. Bastiat
    @drbastiat

    Joker (View Comment):
    why people expected health coverage for free, but think it’s ok to pay a couple of thousand for a cell phone. They understand very well why a Benz costs more than a Kia, but can’t grasp why they need to pay more for better coverage or more doctors.

    So, so, so true…

    • #87
  28. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Joker (View Comment):

    That public good concept is important right up to the point where magical benefits are shoehorned into the cost/benefit analysis. Yeah that calculated savings of asthma reduction is worth a couple of trillion a year.

    One overlooked benefit of health insurance companies is that they’re like medical traffic cops. You want to cover liver transplants, that’s gonna cost ya in premiums. If you’re not paying for that coverage, the insurance company won’t pay.

    I know someone whose job it was to deny unapproved treatments, like aroma and gem therapy. Evidently, there are no studies showing that there’s any efficacy, but patients seem to want everything and anything covered. And I wouldn’t want to be paying higher premiums for such nonsense. Government programs tend to expand for votes, not dollars. Eventually care suffers as providers avoid or limit government programs.

    I think it was the first Ann Coulter book I read, where she asked why people expected health coverage for free, but think it’s ok to pay a couple of thousand for a cell phone. They understand very well why a Benz costs more than a Kia, but can’t grasp why they need to pay more for better coverage or more doctors.

    It might not be as big of a problem if people could decide on their own whether or not to pay for coverage of aroma and gem therapy.  But when the government mandates it, perhaps because of the aroma and gem therapy lobbies, things change.

    • #88
  29. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat: How do anti-American radicals maintain the support of people who are neither stupid nor communists?

    They don’t.

    Yes, they do.

    A lot of my friends vote Democrat. And they are neither stupid nor communists.

    I bet they are. By the strong evidence that they vote D, I predict they are either stupid-adjacent helpless or bandits, in which cases they are effectively communists for conversational purposes, or truly stupid.

    • #89
  30. Chris O Coolidge
    Chris O
    @ChrisO

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat (View Comment):

    Barfly (View Comment):

    Dr. Bastiat: How do anti-American radicals maintain the support of people who are neither stupid nor communists?

    They don’t.

    Yes, they do.

    A lot of my friends vote Democrat. And they are neither stupid nor communists.

    I bet they are. By the strong evidence that they vote D, I predict they are either stupid-adjacent helpless or bandits, in which cases they are effectively communists for conversational purposes, or truly stupid.

    Possibly, but there are also some personal associations that defeat common sense. Easier to go along.

    • #90
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