And then you get the wilder fringes. Doug Wilson — we have mentioned him a couple of times — has an aspiration in 200 years that he wants household voting.
Archival clip
Sam Harris: In the fullness of time, a single woman would still be able to vote, but once she married, then her husband would vote for her? Is that ——
Wilson: Yeah. Well, her husband wouldn’t vote instead of her. Her husband would cast the vote that she and her husband and household that he was representing the whole household.
Harris: But presumably he would have the power to simply decide what the household should be voting. I mean, isn’t he in the leadership position there?
Wilson: Yes, he would have — if they disagreed, he would break the tie, and he might break the tie by going with her desires, or he might break the tie his way.
More pressingly, he also thinks women shouldn’t serve in combat roles in the military.
Archival clip of Wilson: Women are created by God to be life givers, nurturers. That’s how they’re created. That’s their function. That’s their form. That’s their creational identity. God gave them to be life for us. And you shall not take a woman who is given for the nurturing of life and turn her into a death agent.
And now, if I had to put my hand on my heart, I think that is also what Hegseth believes.
Archival clip of Pete Hegseth: Because I’m straight-up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.
And he has an aesthetic demand for his Army. He wants an Army of people without beards. He’s very clear about this.
And I think Trump has that, too, right? There was that famous reporting about Trump not wanting disabled veterans in his parade. He’s got a vision of what he thinks an army should look like.
All of that stuff is already happening. You’ve got the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, who has basically put out an ambulance-chasing lawyer’s ad saying:
Archival clip from commercial: Are you a white male who’s experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws. Contact the E.E.O.C. as soon as possible.
There is also a hunger for using the instruments of the pro-D.E.I. bureaucracy in the other direction and saying: Well, we think now it’s white men’s turn to get treated to some of this, to be treated as a protected group and get some special latitude in some of these hiring decisions.
Scott Yenor wants to, for example, reinstitute male-only military colleges.
He thinks that having women in military training colleges, again, affects these very manly, vigorous, slightly bullying standards and they make everything a bit of an H.R. bureaucratic nightmare.
There’s also, obviously, the Dobbs decision a couple of years back, which is worth thinking about here.
