I am beginning a new five-part series on “Dividing & Conquering.” Here I start with the question of women.
The Need to Divide & Conquer
The Swamp Mafia faces one persistent challenge: namely, their demographic disadvantage. If we can visualize the Swamp, we must picture a rotting bog full of slithering pests, stinking of rot and pestilence. What a horrible place! The vast majority of people whom the Swamp affects suffer because of its festering. Yet there is a Swamp Mafia that likes the rot and muck since they stay in charge as long as nobody cleans the place up.
Demographics create a difficult situation for the very people who masterminded and perpetuated the Swamp. Despite their ghoulish dominance over systems of power, their victims outnumber them by an enormous margin.
Consider the Republican Party, run by a tiny elite of power utterly at odds with a massive swath of conservatives whose interests they subvert at every turn.
Consider the Democratic Party, run by a tiny elite of power that can claim unity with the thoughts and dreams of their constituency, but only because they have poisoned their constituents’ mental faculties, brainwashed them against their own interests, and turned them into self-destructive vermin.
One party must evade the wrath of its own members who know the party machine lies to them and opposes them. The other party must forestall the great awakening of its own members, who largely labor in ignorance of how corrupt their leaders have become and how much their leaders have corrupted their very souls.
Much of the Swamp’s activities, therefore, consist of evasion and forestalling. The Republican Swamp Mafia must talk around in circles and engage in sundry dissimulations, pretending at once to be victimized by and courageously opposing “da liberal establishment” while they cut backdoor deals and thrive on the favors the liberal establishment affords them in exchange for being the liberals’ loyal and purposefully ineffective opposition.
The Democratic Swamp Mafia must inject constant adrenaline into the bloodstreams of their numerous useful idiots, sounding alarms of crisis after crisis at volumes so high that nobody logical can put together two rational sentences and be heard. Racism! Sexism! Homophobia! The worst year for ___________ ever. So you have campus protests on campuses where the liberal administrators incite hyperventilating students against a random conservative guest speaker like Ben Shapiro, thereby forestalling the moment when the students might realize that the liberal administrators are the ones miseducating them, gouging them with tuition, and dooming them to a life of onerous debt.
Hollywood actresses get millions of vain women to put on vagina-shaped hats and march in Amazonian mobs, screaming about a plague of sexism because of a few words uttered by Donald Trump in a private conversation in 2005. Meanwhile, the thing that would make the vast majority of these women happy–finding a strong man to marry them, provide them a comfortable life, give them regular bedroom affections, tell them they are beautiful, and turn them into respected mothers receiving Valentines and Mother’s Day cards–vanishes increasingly on the horizon because the party that claims to represent women has demolished the masculine values that alone make such a scenario for them possible.
Everywhere we turn, we find signs that women find workplaces unhappy. They do not like bosses. They itch to sue over “unwelcome” remarks. They make up stories about sexual harassment for attention and easy settlement money. They work most diligently to force their employers to change standards and job descriptions so they do not have to work as hard as men have been expected to work. One cannot deny that many of these women, had they not been mind-bent by feminists, would have been many times happier if they had married a man at the age of twenty-one, spent their years nesting and tending to their domestic happiness, raising children, rising in leadership in women’s groups and mothers’ associations, and skipping out on the tens of thousands of dreary hours in cubicles speed-dating disappointing male weaklings they met on Tinder.
Pro-choice Angela, pro-life Angela
Imagine a woman named Angela. Angela graduated from high school in 1990. In her last semester of high school she had reckless sex with a guy named Bill who worked at the supermarket. She got an abortion so her career would not suffer. She left her small Ohio town to get a degree in business administration in the New York area.
She went on to finish a law degree somewhere on Long Island by 1998, slaved for seven years in a Manhattan law firm, and watched her beauty vanish, her maidenly disposition sour, and her student debt hover above her head like a sword of Damocles.
Lonely and drunk, unmarried and unloved, she fell victim to her own need for love, and hooked up with another lawyer who worked with her on cases until two in the morning. They had unsatisfying sex and he usually made her go back to her own third-floor walkup in Brooklyn Heights because he didn’t feel comfortable having her spend the night at his place. Both she and he were up to make partner at the same time, but he bad-mouthed her to the partners and she was asked to leave the firm, as is standard procedure for assistant attorneys who do not get promoted.
It is now 2005, and Angela is jobless, heartbroken, lonely, fat, ugly, and sinking in debt. She takes a job with an ambulance-chaser’s small firm somewhere in New Jersey and has a dozen flings with men she meets at Bennigan’s in Bergen County while she tries to pay off her student debt. One night a man takes advantage of her but she did not catch his name. The police cannot track him down and she has PTSD.
With the aftereffects of her sexual trauma, Angela starts to perform badly at work and begins to drink more heavily. Doctors prescribe Xanax to her, which makes her drowsy. She crashes her car a few times. Finally the ambulance-chaser firm loses a few too many cases. Madison, a blonde and perky twenty-six-year-old fresh out of Princeton Law School, gets hired and takes an immediate dislike to Angela, undercutting her on a number of cases until Angela is let go.
So now it’s 2013 and Angela, age 41, moves back to Ohio to take care of her aging mother. She spends her nights gobbling ice cream with chocolate sprinkles on top, playing the slot machine of online dating, and driving her mother to Bingo games. She earns a little extra money on the side by taking small cases, such as a man who sues a department store because the refrigerator he bought came with faulty instructions and it fell on his foot. She self-publishes a book on avoiding tax liabilities, joins Weight Watchers every few years, and eventually gets tired of her mother.
It’s 2018. Angela marches with a pink pussy hat on her head and hopes to shake hands with Madonna at one of the women’s marches, because this will be the highlight of her feminist life. She rallies behind Planned Parenthood because she convinces herself that back in 1990, her nightmare of a life would have been worse, had she had that baby.
Now let’s rewind, if you will. Go back to 1990, and instead imagine that Angela revealed her pregnancy to Bill, the hard-working guy who bagged groceries at the local supermarket and was in love with her.
Bill really wanted to marry Angela so he went to community college and learned about accounting. He got a job at a large accounting firm and worked sixty-hour weeks so Angela could stay at home in their Ohio town, grow a garden of roses and petunias, have three kids, and start a book club with ladies she knew from church. Once the youngest was in pre-school, Angela went part-time to an Ohio State to study English and got a certificate to teach ESL. This allowed her to take some teaching positions and earn extra money down the line, once the kids were in high school. She took Spanish classes in her spare time, learned sewing, and took a keen interest in world cuisine. For her 25th anniversary, Bill took her to Switzerland where she entered into a cooking contest and won the gold prize for her exquisite chocolate mousse.
Every day, for almost three decades, Angela got up and made a boxed lunch for Bill, brought the kids to school, took step aerobic classes or went jogging in the morning, caught up on the news, picked up her kids, stayed busy, and cooked a nice dinner for Bill, who usually came home after twelve-hour days exhausted and tired.
In 2018, at the age of forty-six, Angela likes her life. Her years were well spent. She was obedient and supportive to a man who deserved her submission and love, because he was devoted, caring, and willing to make sacrifices for her happiness. At forty-six, Angela has savings rather than debts, three lovely grown kids rather than a revolving door of Tinder dates, a jazzercise body rather than obesity, and friends rather than catty co-workers.
What was the difference between miserable Angela and happy Angela? Feminism. The Democrats. The left. Even more than that, though, the Swamp and its rotten priorities, its distorted calculations of what a happy life looks like. They took many women’s lives like Angela’s and immersed them in muck, where people chase after phony promises of advancement and determine fulfillment by what professions, institutions, and metropolitan media companies define as success.
The threat both Angelas pose to the Swamp
Think of the second-scenario Angela, the one who had the baby in 1990 and married the baby’s father. She is probably Republican today. I imagine her going to the March for Life in Washington, DC, feeling all the more convicted of the pro-life cause because she talks to the girl to whom she gave birth on December 17, 1990. That baby is now 27 and calls Angela several times a week. Angela sleeps beside Bill, her husband, and looks at the framed photographs of all three of the kids. She knows that if she had decided to get that abortion, none of these people would exist, she would be impoverished (though maybe Angela does not know how sad the alternative scenario would be), and God would have been displeased. She knows that Bill would not have been happier with one of the other girls in town, who would not have cared for him as much as she did.
But does this Republican Angela at the March for Life have much reason to feel happy about her Republican representatives? No, not really. Between 1990 and 2018, how many millions of babies were aborted, how many lives destroyed, how many other awful liberal policies proliferated, while these Republicans sat complacently in their incumbent seats? This pro-life Angela made the right choice because of Angela–and arguably because of the Holy Spirit–not because of the incompetents who were running the Republican Party then or now.
Whichever Angela we use as a benchmark, we can see that she poses an existential danger to the Swamp. Whether she chose a liberal or conservative path in life, she will come to the point of realizing that elites have let her down.
And what if Angela is not alone in either scenario? We know she is not alone. If she marches with a pussy hat on her head she stands with millions. If she marches with a pro-life sign and a cross she stands with millions. Either way she marches against the Swamp.
And yet the Swamp continues to bubble and grow more scum while its muck stinks more and more.
How?
The Swamp perpetuates its power by isolating Angela from others. It is crucial for Angela to find herself in a cost-and-benefit analysis that favors the Swamp, no matter which path she chooses. If she is the pro-choice Angela, she must feel that the cost to her of questioning the dominant feminist narrative would be greater than the benefit to her of doing so. The Swamp creates this bind through the deployment of social isolation (divide and conquer).
If Angela posts on Facebook one day, “I wish I’d never had that abortion. I wish I’d never gone to law school. I think if men are happy putting up with the horrors of full working days, I would have been happy letting a man do all that while I stayed safe and made him sandwiches and obeyed his wishes in a house with the kids,” a swarm of other women will attack her. Pro-life women will attack her for admitting she got an abortion. Successful career women who avoided her pitfalls will claim that she was merely a bad lawyer. They may shame her about her sexual assault by saying it is tragic that she would support a patriarchy, which in their mind is like justifying rape culture and therefore justifying her own experience with sexual assault.
The Democrats will also make sure that trans activists, lesbians, black women, and any number of other constituencies will pick apart anything pro-choice Angela says about her doubts that the party line is truly wise. “How dare you complain when women with penises, women who don’t have sex with men, and poor women have so much more to feel hurt about than you and your somewhat boring life? How pathetic!” They will make her fear grave consequences for voicing any such doubts. If she sticks her neck out, she will be ostracized and lose the minimal social support she needs to endure her lonely, unsatisfying life.
Now let us think of pro-life Angela. The Swamp deals with her somewhat differently. Her Republican leaders will exalt her choices, hold her up on a pedestal, sing praises to her sacrifices, and then cut deals with Planned Parenthood and LGBT groups to ensure that everything Angela supports will never come to pass. This form of divide-and-conquer is incredibly insidious because Angela will come across to her political allies as paranoid, ungrateful, or annoying if she posts on Facebook, “why is abortion still legal if the pro-life party controls the whole federal government?” Whom is she attacking? People will say, “these are the very people who have been leaders, fighters, and spokespeople for the pro-life cause for decades! They have fought for this far longer than you have! Have you ever been targeted by a Planned Parenthood smear? Have you ever been on the Tucker Carlson show?”
Pro-life Angela must choose whether or not to point out the obvious. The Swamp that controls her will also place various other conservative wedges that will increase the cost to her of speaking out against the status quo. The Swamp has noticed the growing power of the pro-life cause, but one thing keeps protecting them: they have driven a wedge between the pro-life people and the anti-LGBT people. Pro-life is now respectable in polite society, while opposing homosexuality is not. But the people who are most ardently and dutifully pro-life, as opposed to dabbling in pro-life rhetoric while accommodating the abortion status quo, are those with orthodox religious views. These latter people know that their faith exalts the design of God for humanity, against which homosexuality commits tremendous sacrilege and violence.
The Swamp acts shrewdly. In order to stop pro-life Angela from joining forces with millions who might notice the deceitful status quo, the Swamp starts putting forward a mixed message: on the one hand, giving a lot of attention to pro-life superstars, while on the other hand, putting forward openly gay conservative superstars (this happened recently as Guy Benson did a video with Dennis Prager extolling the rich possibilities in being a practicing homosexual and “conservative” at the same time.) What happens next? Well, then the same Christian groups that have fervently stood up to abortion must come out and speak against these compromisers like Dennis Prager and the host of others who abet gay conservatives or stay silent on the topic to placate people close to them. These Christian groups come across as mean, homophobic, closed-minded, bad for conservatism, not winsome enough, etc., and homosexual activists working to undermine Christian values, like Guy Benson, get to present themselves as wounded victims who just want to be included in the conservative movement.
Pro-life Angela, who may not even care that much about whether Guy Benson’s glorification of male-male sodomy is a good thing or not, finds herself in a melee that she did not choose to jump into. If she decides to voice frustration with the slow movement of the pro-life “industry,” she risks being grouped with the outcasts who oppose LGBT and who will be increasingly caricatured within the conservative movement as embarrassing fanatics. She will figure out, soon enough, that if gay conservatives like Guy Benson view her as in league with anti-LGBT pro-life groups, they will assume she is also anti-LGBT, and they will not protect her from the attacks from the left or from the Republican establishment. The withdrawal of support on the right, combined with the guaranteed attacks from people on the left, makes the cost of saying anything too much.
So pro-choice Angela stays quiet about the lies of feminism and pro-life Angela leaves in place the charade of pro-life conservatism. The Swamp lies undrained. Nothing changes.
Both men and women lose
The clarity and directness of Genesis amazes Bible readers. God designed male and female for each other, not for themselves or to exist without the other. Those who obey God’s design choose a way of life suited to make them happy. Women will have to submit to men because they live in societies where men’s physical advantage makes them impassable obstacles to a world run exclusively by females. A woman who submits to a husband who provides for her, gives her a home, makes love to her, and conceives children with her will always find greater happiness than a woman who submits to the heartless shell of whatever male magnate or boss will pay her a miserable wage to do a thankless job and then fire her when she makes the slightest mistake.
Men who submit to God and accept the gift of women in their lives, follow the design made for their happiness. God created females to be men’s helpmates. Men who step up to the leadership role this demands of them, commit themselves, to providing for wives, and endure the pain of hard work to build a family’s livelihood, work toward a goal that constitutes real happiness. A man who accepts that his destiny is hard work and who accepts that a woman’s love and obedience will guarantee her access to the fruit of his labor, will always be happier than a man who wants to work only to spend money on himself or, even worse, a man who expects the weaker, fairer sex to do the long hours of work to pay for the comforts of her own home.
The Swamp needs most men and most women to feel unhappy but confused about their own unhappiness. The Swamp needs this because it needs people to be divided against each other and also divided within their own thoughts. The Swamp holds out a false promise–do this, vote for these, send your money here, and you will be happy–and then finds countless ways to prevent people from realizing that the promises were false. That is one way the Swamp stays in power. Which is sad, because men and women would be far happier living the way God designed their bodies to live.
