Labeled and Blamed
I'm a liberal white woman, apparently responsible for the destruction of America.
I certainly had an interesting reaction to the quote that follows.
"Feminism is national suicide. When American women choose career over children and Muslim and Hindu women do not, heritage Americans will be replaced by pagan immigrants in 1–3 generations. Liberal women, you've been played. You sharpened the axe that is cutting down America."
The underlying premise is that "whitehood" is the ultimate goal. Actually, white supremacy as defined by numbers. So the quantity of whitehood is some sort of criterion for success. That's the "great replacement" concept.
It's clearly misogyny, not sure why it's directed particularly at white women; so even white women are "the other". If skin color is the criterion for success, which it appears to be, then it's not even skin color. It's male, white skin color.
But that's not enough blame. The amount of melanin in the human race is insufficient cause for... the collapse of society, I guess.
Not sure what I think of the "liberal women" part. More division and blame. The author seems to have some kind of idea that woman-as-baby-carrier is involved in the failure of his personal vision. White women are simultaneously prized as bearers of his future and resented as autonomous agents who might not comply. It's things like this that have begun to give me an understanding of patriarchy.
That "liberal women" don't have babies and some ideal trad mom is, to me, the most artificial concept. I'm speechless about that.
I was a foster parent for 30 years, nurturing abused, abandoned, and neglected children and trying to help them heal a little bit. Families struggling with trauma, poverty, addiction, and instability. The bottom line is that for whatever reason they were unable to provide a safe, secure childhood for their children. I live in the southwest, and even so, by far the largest percentage of foster children were white. Regardless of their skin color, the moms loved their kids and their problems were economic or came from their own inability to meet the family's needs.
The "pagan" label is a rhetorical trick. Muslim and Hindu traditions are among the most practiced and theologically developed in the world — far more religiously observant by most measures than the average American. The word isn't meant to be accurate. It's meant to mark the out-group as spiritually illegitimate.
My emotional response was to the level of pain in the author. I was taken aback by the blaming framing, but I was kind of appalled at the sense of the personal pain this person has to be in. I don't want to minimize that it felt skanky to be labeled as a liberal white woman and blamed for the collapse of society. But overall I just feel so bad for this man's pain. I don't think I can really comprehend it. I think that men do want to be the container, the protector, the provider. I know that in reality, every human carries a certain amount of pain. It varies by person, but basically the human condition is painful from one point of view.
His pain didn't come from nowhere. Something is actually collapsing — just not what he thinks.
I agree that society is collapsing. Society is collapsing as a result of wealth extraction. Resources are being removed from the general human being, and collected in a microscopic percentage of the population. Without resources, the human condition deteriorates and is collapsing. I think it's some sort of human trait to assign blame (ergo, religions, political beliefs, gender). Another human trait is us versus them thinking. Women become the "gatekeepers" of the group's future. The image of the idealized stay-at-home mother is based on a society with a strong middle class, where families could afford to have a single breadwinner. That happened in the '50s, as a result of social and political dynamics. It was a specific product of post-war policy: union wages, GI Bill access, housing subsidies, and a tax structure that supported a strong, broad middle class. And that led to America's position as a global world leader, economically and politically.
Society is collapsing as a result of wealth extraction.
It seems odd that numerical dominance is the basis of national success. Another part of the change in society is just population. 8 billion people — more resources are needed, or the resources have to be spread thinner. But if the resources that do exist are being concentrated in a microscopic percentage, that just exacerbates the problem. This is wealth extraction anxiety displaced onto demographic scapegoats. The point of this text is to redirect that frustration away from its systemic causes and toward personalized targets. Two-income households became necessary partly or mostly because one income stopped being enough. This was an economic shift, not a cultural one driven by women's choices.
This is wealth extraction anxiety displaced onto demographic scapegoats.
As I understand it, this has been building for fifty years. Both parties made their peace with it — Reagan opened the door, Clinton walked through it, and neither looked back. The economy was deliberately restructured to move wealth upward, and it worked. The top 1% took home somewhere between 8 and 10% of national income in the 1970s. By the 2010s that share had more than doubled. The average household in that top tier now holds wealth equivalent to about 200 years of median American income — up from roughly 60 years in 1980. For people at the bottom, net worth often hovers near zero or goes negative. The money has been and is being sucked out, and it hurts.
I feel for this guy's pain.
Read more:
The Collapse of the Middle Class Is a National Security Issue
Oh, the implicit threat. To un-liberal women. Hmmm. This propaganda works on so many levels!