Feminists, Leftists "You're Next"

“To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”— Thomas Jefferson

In the mass of war stories this week, two items popped out. The first quotes a senior US military officer who blames a recent failure to kill Taliban leader Mullah Omar on "a slow degeneration of the system due to political correctness." The second item, largely overlooked in the press, was the murder last week in Seattle of Tom Wales, 49, a federal prosecutor and a leading gun control activist. The first item is an excellent example of the subversion of the military due to feminist influence. The second is an extremist response to this kind of subversion, but it is a despicable criminal response that itself subverts freedom. The Right needs to uphold the rule of law. A better target would be the stranglehold that feminism holds on the education system and on parts of the federal bureaucracy. We need to use the electoral system to purge feminists from government. If feminists want to corrupt society, let them do it on their own dime.

"Political correctness" means adherence to feminist doctrine. The term is alien to America because it originates in the Communist Party. I have demonstrated in previous columns that feminism is a successful "rebranding" of Communism. In this form, it has subverted our minds and our social fabric. Second-wave feminism originated in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and almost all its leading activists were/are Marxists. Essentially it is dedicated to achieving power by advocating and imposing gender, racial and economic "equality" (i.e. outcomes) on individuals who are neither equal nor the same. It goes under various names such as "anti racism", "equity", "diversity" and "multiculturalism" but the aim is to transfer wealth and power from people who have earned them to feminists and their allies. In gender terms, it is lesbian because, while despising men, the standard of sameness is male. Here, feminism has undermined heterosexual identity and the nuclear family and torpedoed the birth rate, posing a dire threat to western civilization.

I had read that Donald Rumsfeld was "seething" over the failure to nail the Taliban leader Mullah Omar when he was in our crosshairs. Seymour Hersh has the story of this breakdown in the current New Yorker entitled Annals of National Security. Apparently a $40 million unmanned CIA drone called "The Predator" equipped with cameras and missiles had located the Mullah fleeing Kabul in a convoy. The Predator tracked the Mullah to a building where he and a hundred or so soldiers took cover. The CIA had to get permission from Central Command in Florida to terminate. The response from General Tommy R. Franks was that his legal officer "doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire." The Mullah escaped unscathed. Let Seymour Hersh continue:

Days afterward, top Administration officials were still seething about the incident. "If it was a f--kup, I could live with it," one senior official said. "But it's not a f--kup it's an outrage. This isn't like you're six years old and your mother calls you to come in for lunch and you say, 'Time out.' If anyone thinks otherwise, go look at the World Trade Center or the Pentagon." A senior military officer viewed the failure to strike immediately as a symptom of "a cultural issue""a slow degradation of the system due to political correctness: 'We want you to kill the guy, but not the guy next to him.' No collateral damage." Others saw the cultural problem as one of bureaucratic, rather than political, correctness. Either way, the failure to attack has left Defense Secretary Rumsfeld "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors," the officer said. "But in the end I don't know if it'll mean any changes."

To understand why the U.S. military seems to need mommy's permission to get its hands dirty, I recommend Stephanie Gutmann's book The Kinder Gentler Military (2000). For most of the 1990's the military has devoted more energy to appeasing feminists than to preparing for battle. The result has been that soldiers, from generals on down, are afraid of women, specifically of sexual harassment accusations. Sexual harassment is a Red Guard-like denunciatory tactic used by feminists to dis- empower men — the victim is most often the accused. Costly investigations of thousands of charges show that, despite what feminists think, most women are very sexual creatures enthralled by powerful men. Nonetheless a Marine will cross a street "to ensure [a woman] isn't offended because he invaded her space," as one female Marine sergeant said. "The atmosphere in today corps is one of fem fear." (226) Men who are afraid of their mommies cannot act decisively, and that's what happened in the Mullah Omar incident.

This war will expose the damage feminism has inflicted on the US military. According to Guttmann, morale is low. Men resent that women soldiers, pregnant or breast-feeding, have turned army bases into day cares. They resent that standards are lowered because 85% of army women fail to meet the minimum physical requirements, are three times more injury prone and when the going gets tough, "get pregnant." Men fight to protect women. As Amelia Earhart said, "men would rather vacate the arena of combat altogether than share it with women." And they have been doing that in droves.

As in the Cold War, this war will force the United States to define what it represents and to purge subversive elements. It will force liberals to decide where they stand. The rot is deep and the process will be painful. Gun control, which prevents good people from defending themselves, is a hallmark of the feminist "mommy" state. Communist dictatorships in Russia and China would not have survived if the citizenry had been armed. So, in the current context, there are strong feelings when the state tries to disarm people. Last week, a leading gun control advocate, Tom Wales, 49, was shot and killed while working in his basement home office in Seattle. The assailant shot him through the window. In terms of our cultural civil war, this murder is comparable to the assassination of Hamas and Israeli political leaders. Wales made many enemies in his 19 years as an U.S. attorney prosecuting business crimes and fraud. But probably his role as president of "Washington Ceasefire" motivated the attack. In 1997, Wales campaigned for a statewide initiative to require all gun owners to register and complete a safety course. Gun-rights advocates and the NRA bitterly fought the measure that was rejected at the polls. Undeterred, Wales stepped up his activism.

Wales was an idealist. Activists on both left and right share a certainty that their vision is true and some are willing to resort to violence. Until I had a taste of feminist fascism, I too was a leftist. If only we could get rid of the "Right," the world would be a beautiful place, I thought. Now I am on the Right myself. However misguided our opponent is, often his intentions are good.

Left-lib feminists believe in using the government to "improve the world." Unfortunately, their prescription is deeply flawed. And behind this "idealism" is self interest, a "doing well by doing good" as one social worker said to me. They represent a large class of unproductive people, paper pushers who depend on government programs for their livelihood. The vast majority are cowards who will do anything for job security. When they see the wind is changing, they will trim their sails accordingly. Feminism has become a job requirement, like membership in the Communist Party was in Russia.

Conservatives should aim at breaking the feminist stranglehold on the public education system, which they use to indoctrinate the young. We need to break their control of government bureaucracy. We need a genuine "diversity" program that will make our public institutions truly representative of the nation's values. The way to proceed is to organize politically. The greatness of America is the rule of law. It works. America remained steady and calm, while the Presidential election hung in limbo for weeks.

Let us defend freedom by upholding it. Let's fight the cultural civil war at the ballot box.