Normally when some influencer posts a video that I find annoying and I feel the need to respond to it, I save it for my Daily Cancellation segment. Today, however, I am going to break that rule. I am going to begin with a video from an allegedly conservative influencer named Emily Wilson.

What makes this video relevant, aside from the fact that it just simply annoys me, is that it echoes a message we’ve been hearing with increasing frequency from women on the Right with, in some cases, very large platforms. Emily’s platform isn’t very large, but it is sizable enough. She has half a million followers on Instagram. I’m sure she’s a nice person. I don’t know her and have no issue with her personally. But she represents a growing, or at least increasingly evident, problem on the Right. The problem, in a word, is feminism.

Feminism is not compatible with any meaningful definition of conservatism. Whatever conservatism is trying to conserve — like marriage, the family, western civilization itself — feminism militates against. And yet many feminists have become mouthpieces in the movement, and are accepted as such, as long as they wear a MAGA hat and say that they don’t like illegal immigration or whatever.

So with that in mind, let’s listen to just the latest submission to the ever expanding conservative feminist genre:

 

Well, I am cringing. But not because of the trad wives. I’m cringing at this lame, half-baked attack on stay-at-home moms. And I’m cringing even more at the fact that women with these kinds of views are still embraced as “conservative.”

Try to imagine the opposite of this. Imagine a Left-wing influencer who advocates for every Left-wing policy under the sun but then comes out one day and says, “You know what? I think a woman’s proper place is in the home, raising her children.” It’s impossible to conceive of any Left-wing woman ever saying such a thing. And if she did, she would be immediately excised from the movement. That’s because leftists understand that supporting so-called traditional gender roles is fundamentally antithetical to their worldview. You literally cannot be a leftist and hold that view.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

The same is logically true in the reverse. Attacking gender roles is fundamentally leftist. Which means you cannot be conservative if you hold fundamentally leftist views. You have every right to express those views. But you should not be embraced as a conservative, much less listened to as a spokeswoman for the movement. 

Now let’s go through some of the specifics here. Emily says that a woman should have a job and her own income so that she isn’t “trapped” by a man. She envisions the relationship between husband and wife as inherently competitive. Marriage is a zero sum game where both husband and wife are competing for control. Again, this is a fundamentally leftist conception. It is a recipe for divorce. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with a wife earning money. As I’ve conceded many times, a family may feel that they need two incomes in order to survive. Or they may want a second income. Or the wife might have a job that doesn’t require leaving the house and going to an office every day. But if she’s earning money as an escape hatch because she doesn’t want to be “trapped,” that is a very bad sign.

If you want to understand why it’s a bad sign just imagine how it would sound if a man adopted this philosophy. A woman on X commented yesterday that a wife needs a “backup in case their man can’t fulfill his providing roles.”

Well what if a man decided to have a back up in case his woman didn’t fulfill her wifely duties? Most people would find that objectionable, for good reason. The whole point of marriage is that you are devoting yourself entirely to your spouse. Two become one flesh. It is not possible to make that level of commitment while at the same time actively building yourself a nest egg just in case you want to leave. Saying the vows and pledging yourself to your betrothed means not having an exit plan. It means you burn the boats like Cortés and turn towards that wilderness and journey into it together, come what may.

She also says that men want to be mentally stimulated. The implication is that stay-at-home moms are too stupid to provide that sort of stimulation because all they think about is their “sourdough bread.”

This is absurdly dismissive and insulting to millions of good, godly, intelligent women who, while staying home with the children, are also capable of having intelligent conversations with their husbands. It also assumes that a woman who sits in a cubicle all day will somehow have more interesting things to say to her husband at the end of the day. Having a job as a woman does not make you smart or interesting. I hate to break it to the working women of the world, but your husband is almost certainly not intellectually stimulated by your job or your stories about your job. If he was able to choose between listening to a story about your office drama or listening to a story about what you did with the kids that day, he would prefer to hear about the latter. This is the sort of thing you would know about men if you listened to them when they try to tell you what they want, instead of declaring what you think they should want.

But the biggest problem — and the objection you hear most often from these feminist types — is the claim that somehow the stay-at-home mom arrangement is implausible, or even impossible. Emily declares that your chances of finding a man who can provide for you while you stay home and raise the children are, “Slim to none. Actually none,” she says. There’s no chance that it works out for you. There’s no chance that it works out for you or anyone you know. And yet it has worked out for countless people. It’s worked out for my wife. It’s worked out for many families that I know personally. It’s worked out for billions of human beings across the globe and through history since the dawn of civilization. Emily has written off the most normal and historically common practice as not just difficult but, according to her, literally impossible. And not just impossible, but also absurd and grotesque.

There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around. During my conversation with Tucker Carlson this week, we talked about the absurdity of gay adoption and gay parenthood.

Here’s a clip of that exchange that Tucker’s team posted:

 

Plenty of people on the Right, or Right-adjacent, took great exception to this. Glenn Greenwald is one of them. He tweeted in response:

One has to be morally deranged — or totally ignorant of the grim realities of kids lingering without parents in orphanages, shelters and foster care, only to be expelled at 18 with no support — to believe that that dark hell is better for kids than being adopted by gay couples.

Morally deranged, he says. The view that two men should not be allowed to adopt children was held by nearly everyone in this country, and everyone across the world, until very recently. Barack Obama was against gay adoption when he first ran for president. So was every other elected Democrat. Any elected Democrat over the age of 50 was probably, at one point, opposed to both gay marriage and gay adoption. In fact, gay adoption was so obviously wrong to so many people for so long that it wasn’t even discussed. It wasn’t debated. It was just intuitively understood that children need a mother and a father. We won’t let two men adopt children for the same reason that we wouldn’t let a polyamorous polycule adopt a child. Children need a mother and a father. We are not going to deliberately put a child into a disordered environment where he is not only deprived of a mother or a father, but the role of mother or father has been replaced in an unnatural and confusing way.

This was always understood. Now, in the blink of an eye, what was always understood is “morally deranged.” The thing that everyone believed forever until approximately last Tuesday is not just wrong but shocking and upsetting and baffling. This is the game that’s played. And I, for one, am entirely sick of it.

Not everything that is old or traditional is automatically good, of course. Slavery is old and traditional — and still practiced in non-western countries. It’s also very bad. But there are basic truths about how human society is fundamentally structured. Truths that have withstood the test of time. Truths that have, while civilization held fast to them, it flourished and advanced in remarkable and seemingly miraculous ways. Truths that, minutes after our society abandoned, immediately led to decline and chaos and confusion. One of those truths is that a child needs a mother and a father. Only a man and a woman can have a baby, or should. Another one of those truths is that men and women are different, and so have different roles in the home and in society. This was an idea so basic that there wasn’t even a term for it. We only started labeling it “gender roles” at the moment that we decided to abandon it. And I would say that the results of that decision have not been good. Divorce, broken homes, declining birth rates, 60 million dead babies. And those are just the early returns.

That’s why we cannot be embarrassed to hold to a system that is ancient and timeless, and proven, tested, and vindicated by the testimony of our ancestors and by thousands of years of human experience beyond that. As conservatives, if that is not worth conserving, then nothing is.

​[#item_full_content]  

​[[{“value”:”

Normally when some influencer posts a video that I find annoying and I feel the need to respond to it, I save it for my Daily Cancellation segment. Today, however, I am going to break that rule. I am going to begin with a video from an allegedly conservative influencer named Emily Wilson.

What makes this video relevant, aside from the fact that it just simply annoys me, is that it echoes a message we’ve been hearing with increasing frequency from women on the Right with, in some cases, very large platforms. Emily’s platform isn’t very large, but it is sizable enough. She has half a million followers on Instagram. I’m sure she’s a nice person. I don’t know her and have no issue with her personally. But she represents a growing, or at least increasingly evident, problem on the Right. The problem, in a word, is feminism.

Feminism is not compatible with any meaningful definition of conservatism. Whatever conservatism is trying to conserve — like marriage, the family, western civilization itself — feminism militates against. And yet many feminists have become mouthpieces in the movement, and are accepted as such, as long as they wear a MAGA hat and say that they don’t like illegal immigration or whatever.

So with that in mind, let’s listen to just the latest submission to the ever expanding conservative feminist genre:

 

Well, I am cringing. But not because of the trad wives. I’m cringing at this lame, half-baked attack on stay-at-home moms. And I’m cringing even more at the fact that women with these kinds of views are still embraced as “conservative.”

Try to imagine the opposite of this. Imagine a Left-wing influencer who advocates for every Left-wing policy under the sun but then comes out one day and says, “You know what? I think a woman’s proper place is in the home, raising her children.” It’s impossible to conceive of any Left-wing woman ever saying such a thing. And if she did, she would be immediately excised from the movement. That’s because leftists understand that supporting so-called traditional gender roles is fundamentally antithetical to their worldview. You literally cannot be a leftist and hold that view.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

The same is logically true in the reverse. Attacking gender roles is fundamentally leftist. Which means you cannot be conservative if you hold fundamentally leftist views. You have every right to express those views. But you should not be embraced as a conservative, much less listened to as a spokeswoman for the movement. 

Now let’s go through some of the specifics here. Emily says that a woman should have a job and her own income so that she isn’t “trapped” by a man. She envisions the relationship between husband and wife as inherently competitive. Marriage is a zero sum game where both husband and wife are competing for control. Again, this is a fundamentally leftist conception. It is a recipe for divorce. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with a wife earning money. As I’ve conceded many times, a family may feel that they need two incomes in order to survive. Or they may want a second income. Or the wife might have a job that doesn’t require leaving the house and going to an office every day. But if she’s earning money as an escape hatch because she doesn’t want to be “trapped,” that is a very bad sign.

If you want to understand why it’s a bad sign just imagine how it would sound if a man adopted this philosophy. A woman on X commented yesterday that a wife needs a “backup in case their man can’t fulfill his providing roles.”

Well what if a man decided to have a back up in case his woman didn’t fulfill her wifely duties? Most people would find that objectionable, for good reason. The whole point of marriage is that you are devoting yourself entirely to your spouse. Two become one flesh. It is not possible to make that level of commitment while at the same time actively building yourself a nest egg just in case you want to leave. Saying the vows and pledging yourself to your betrothed means not having an exit plan. It means you burn the boats like Cortés and turn towards that wilderness and journey into it together, come what may.

She also says that men want to be mentally stimulated. The implication is that stay-at-home moms are too stupid to provide that sort of stimulation because all they think about is their “sourdough bread.”

This is absurdly dismissive and insulting to millions of good, godly, intelligent women who, while staying home with the children, are also capable of having intelligent conversations with their husbands. It also assumes that a woman who sits in a cubicle all day will somehow have more interesting things to say to her husband at the end of the day. Having a job as a woman does not make you smart or interesting. I hate to break it to the working women of the world, but your husband is almost certainly not intellectually stimulated by your job or your stories about your job. If he was able to choose between listening to a story about your office drama or listening to a story about what you did with the kids that day, he would prefer to hear about the latter. This is the sort of thing you would know about men if you listened to them when they try to tell you what they want, instead of declaring what you think they should want.

But the biggest problem — and the objection you hear most often from these feminist types — is the claim that somehow the stay-at-home mom arrangement is implausible, or even impossible. Emily declares that your chances of finding a man who can provide for you while you stay home and raise the children are, “Slim to none. Actually none,” she says. There’s no chance that it works out for you. There’s no chance that it works out for you or anyone you know. And yet it has worked out for countless people. It’s worked out for my wife. It’s worked out for many families that I know personally. It’s worked out for billions of human beings across the globe and through history since the dawn of civilization. Emily has written off the most normal and historically common practice as not just difficult but, according to her, literally impossible. And not just impossible, but also absurd and grotesque.

There’s a lot of this kind of thing going around. During my conversation with Tucker Carlson this week, we talked about the absurdity of gay adoption and gay parenthood.

Here’s a clip of that exchange that Tucker’s team posted:

 

Plenty of people on the Right, or Right-adjacent, took great exception to this. Glenn Greenwald is one of them. He tweeted in response:

One has to be morally deranged — or totally ignorant of the grim realities of kids lingering without parents in orphanages, shelters and foster care, only to be expelled at 18 with no support — to believe that that dark hell is better for kids than being adopted by gay couples.

Morally deranged, he says. The view that two men should not be allowed to adopt children was held by nearly everyone in this country, and everyone across the world, until very recently. Barack Obama was against gay adoption when he first ran for president. So was every other elected Democrat. Any elected Democrat over the age of 50 was probably, at one point, opposed to both gay marriage and gay adoption. In fact, gay adoption was so obviously wrong to so many people for so long that it wasn’t even discussed. It wasn’t debated. It was just intuitively understood that children need a mother and a father. We won’t let two men adopt children for the same reason that we wouldn’t let a polyamorous polycule adopt a child. Children need a mother and a father. We are not going to deliberately put a child into a disordered environment where he is not only deprived of a mother or a father, but the role of mother or father has been replaced in an unnatural and confusing way.

This was always understood. Now, in the blink of an eye, what was always understood is “morally deranged.” The thing that everyone believed forever until approximately last Tuesday is not just wrong but shocking and upsetting and baffling. This is the game that’s played. And I, for one, am entirely sick of it.

Not everything that is old or traditional is automatically good, of course. Slavery is old and traditional — and still practiced in non-western countries. It’s also very bad. But there are basic truths about how human society is fundamentally structured. Truths that have withstood the test of time. Truths that have, while civilization held fast to them, it flourished and advanced in remarkable and seemingly miraculous ways. Truths that, minutes after our society abandoned, immediately led to decline and chaos and confusion. One of those truths is that a child needs a mother and a father. Only a man and a woman can have a baby, or should. Another one of those truths is that men and women are different, and so have different roles in the home and in society. This was an idea so basic that there wasn’t even a term for it. We only started labeling it “gender roles” at the moment that we decided to abandon it. And I would say that the results of that decision have not been good. Divorce, broken homes, declining birth rates, 60 million dead babies. And those are just the early returns.

That’s why we cannot be embarrassed to hold to a system that is ancient and timeless, and proven, tested, and vindicated by the testimony of our ancestors and by thousands of years of human experience beyond that. As conservatives, if that is not worth conserving, then nothing is.

“}]] 

 

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