TheoFoes, TheoBros, and Mother Jones in TheoThroes

Introduction

So an article in Mother Jones about the “Theobros” and our relationship to JD Vance is now out and circulating, and moreover there is a video trailer for the article that has also been released. I am going to show you that trailer in a minute because I am just that kind of guy.

In the meantime, Mother Jones also made the news when their editor-in-chief had this woke spasm. Founded back in the seventies, when everything was weird, Mother Jones has certainly stayed mission true.

Not only did I show you the trailer, but I am also linking to the article. Here we go with that.

And if you don’t have time to wade through it all, here is the short form. There are a bunch of scary people out there who would love it if JD Vance were elected VP, and there are a bunch of scared people out there who are afraid that he just might be elected, and the idea occurred to them that it might help their cause out if they linked Vance to all of the scary people. And even if that doesn’t work, it gives them all something to do in the meantime.

Before getting into it, I do need to say something that will help to keep this whole discussion somewhat grounded in reality. Mother Jones tagged me as the boomer-patriarch of this whole enterprise, and opined darkly about the explanatory power that all of us provide in explaining the phenomenon of JD Vance. So it should be noted at the very front end, in the interests of humility, that I would be quite surprised to find out that Vance even knew who I was. Think of me as operating in the shadowy background. A shy, retiring figure.

Aw, Shucks

In an odd sort of way, the article was pretty complimentary of me. Perhaps we should just take the win then?

It is not every day that one receives a compliment like this from an extremism researcher, especially from one whose name sounds as serious as Tabachnick does. It is easy to forgive an awful lot when someone calls you “witty,” and even my most ardent foes can concede that she is at least half right. But still . . . there is a lot to talk about here. Discussion points remain.

Starting with the video trailer, let us therefore speak of chemtrails, women’s suffrage, and sandwiches. You know, the pressing issues of the day.

For My Part . . .

It gives me a great deal of delight to know that I made a joke at NatCon about chemtrails, making fun of the ChemTrailBros, and Mother Jones didn’t get it. It reminds me of that joke where the Dalai Lama walked into a pizza joint and asked them to “make him one with everything.” But that joke actually gets better. There is a video clip circulating where a television reporter was interviewing the Dalai Lama, in the course of which he told him that particular joke, and the Dalai Lama . . . didn’t get it. See for yourself.

Now some have alleged that Mother Jones actually did get the joke, and snipped the chemtrail clip the way they did on purpose. So then it would not be a matter of them not getting the joke, but more a matter of them being malevolent about it—as trying to represent me as ChemTrailBro. But I don’t think that was it. The reporter, Kiera Butler, was very professional and nice, and the article did contain certain qualifications from me that she had tracked down, and had made sure to include. So I don’t think it was hostility, but rather was closer to the Dalai Lama not knowing what pizza was.

So let us talk about women voting, shall we? Back in the bad old days, before the 19th Amendment, the men were considered to be the heads of their households and represented their families at the ballot box. So what happened when their wives were granted suffrage? Let us take a typical presidential election to illustrate it, using the first one in 1920 after women’s suffrage was accomplished—the election between Warren Harding v. James Cox. If both the husband and wife vote for Harding, say, then what you have done is simply multiply the number of total votes cast for him by two. And if the husband votes for Harding, say, and the wife votes for Cox, then what you have done is cancel out the voice of that particular household. Upon discovering how they were each going to vote, what would be the harm if the two of them just stayed home for a quiet dinner together in order to cancel out one another’s vote that way? Where was the great progress supposed to be located?

The net effect of women’s suffrage was not an advance in women’s rights, but rather part of a push to replace covenanted entities (like families) with raw individualism. An overweening state greatly prefers governing an atomistic populace—where each individual is like a BB thrown into an electoral sack. There is no structural rigidity to it, especially after laxity in the law concerning porn, pot, and poker has now greased all the BBs. Nothing coheres anymore. In the older system, the people were grouped in molecules (Burke’s little platoons), some of them quite complex, and molecular societies are much more capable of resisting the demands of statism.

So the suffrage movement was actually not taking up the cause of women, but rather was part of a long, sustained war on the family. The nadir of this kind of thinking says that a decision to abort a child is a decision between a woman and her doctor. The father of the child is stripped of any legal ability to protect the life of his own legitimate child. We need to retrace all of our steps in order to discover how a travesty like that could ever happen. And when we do, we discover a lot of it started at Seneca Falls.

And something else bears mentioning. In church elections here at Christ Church, the men don’t vote and the women don’t vote. Households vote, and the vote is cast on their behalf by the head of the household. And in those cases where women are the head of the household (Acts 16:14-15), they are the ones who cast the vote. I know. Oppressive tyranny that smokes to the sky and blackens the sun.

Next topic. I myself do know how to make a sandwich and, if it is myself that says it, they are in fact edible. But this issue goes back to the Buckley quote we started with. There are Christians out here in the world, men and women both, who want to live in accordance with the standards set out in the Bible. Those standards assign the domestic priorities to the women. In response, the secular world likes to say things like, “Live however you want . . . no, no, not that way.”

This is actually one of the things that was so encouraging about the Vance quotes in the video. There is a growing recognition that feminism multiplies rights for women, and all the women need to give up in exchange is their fundamental happiness. Feminism is a basic lie . . . you can’t have it all, and what you could have had—kids and adoring grandkids—have all been swallowed up in the maw of a horrific opportunity cost. And this is an opportunity cost that has been swathed for more than a generation in the most shameless of lies.

So Where Are All the Women?

At one point in the trailer, a predictable lament was raised—to wit, in this movement of ours, where are all the women? It is not like that kind of information was unavailable. So before I answer this question in a serious mien, allow me to have a little bit of fun with it first. Just a little bit of fun. Not too much.

Where are all the women, Wilson? Well, I was born in a middle class family . . .

Where are all the women, Wilson? I honestly don’t know, frankly. I am not a biologist.

Where are all the women, Wilson? Trapped in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs, weeping over their vanishing fertility . . . no, wait. That ‘s somebody else’s women.

Okay, knock off the horsing around. Where are all the women? This is actually a question that should be presented to Mother Jones, and presented to them somewhat brusquely. They are the ones who left out our women from their reporting, and it was not because there was nothing there to report. They either did that through sheer ignorance, or they did it for the sake of their narrative. We most emphatically do not leave the women out of our efforts, and no, I am not just talking about the sandwiches, which we continue to appreciate greatly. No criticism of the sandwiches, not at all. Quiet, girls.

Before getting into this most fun topic, let me make one important qualification. I do not point to the feminine accomplishments in our ranks because we are trying to compete with feminists on their terms. Not a bit of it. I bring all this up because our Proverbs 31 women run circles around the girl-bosses of popular mythology, and they do it while pushing a stroller.

So let me do a little kvelling on behalf of some of our women, and I will limit myself to family members. If I started writing about all the amazing women in our church community, it would rapidly turn into a book—well over twenty women in our congregation are published authors and writers. Many others are small business owners and managers—we know this because our local intoleristas make lists of businesses to avoid and boycott. I need to mention that because when this issue has come up before, the snarky response is that I let the women in my family do stuff, but all the other women have to settle for making biscuits.

That qualification out of the way, my wife is the author of nine books, a bestselling author, with one of those books being a widely-used textbook of English grammar. Why would Mother Jones refuse to recognize such an achievement? My oldest daughter is the editor of a 10-volume textbook series on British Literature, and the author of three books. Why would Mother Jones fail to recognize such an achievement? My youngest daughter is the author of four books, one of which has been Canon’s best selling title over the last decade or so. Why would Mother Jones fail to mention this? These same two daughters host a very successful podcast called What Have You, which draws a listening audience not to be sniffed at. What does Mother Jones have against feminine accomplishments? One of my granddaughters has already directed several documentaries. And another of my granddaughters, already writing professionally, made this observation: “I think its cute how they say Doug Wilson works hand in hand with his children to further his audience and the next sentence is that all our women are at home not allowed to voice their opinions . . .”

I really think that the next time Mother Jones reports on our movement they need to exercise a little bit more due diligence. Try to include the women next time, all right? This shouldn’t be hard. This is 2024, people.

Perhaps a sentence like this: “In light of his strong patriarchal stand, some are surprised to find that Doug Wilson’s wife and daughters, and other women in his circle, are amazingly accomplished. When they are not making sandwiches, they are out there making career feminists look lazy . . .”

A Melange of Characters

The video recognized that the array of characters on the right had their differences, which was nice, but said that there were a few things we all had in common. That is true enough, but I would like to mention one thing that we really do have in common that went unmentioned in this introduction to our inchoate movement. The fundamental thing we have in common is the conviction that the grand secular experiment of civil governance has been a moral and political disaster of the first order. If modern secularism were a school of culinary arts, we are all of us now staring at a heaping plate of warmed over dumpster scrapings. We all agree on that.

At the same time, we vary greatly among ourselves. We have our intramural disagreements. We have third generation reconstructionists. We have Catholic integralists. We have Feds circulating Nazi memes. We have NatCon conservatives. We have Thomistic Althusians. We have natural law guys and we have biblicists. We probably have some Bonapartists, you know, guys wearing bowties who work for think tanks in DC. We also have some tender-hearted pastors who for some reason are trying to sideline themselves by adopting a Revoice-style strategy for Nazis—you know, for Side B Nazis, not actual Nazis. Maybe a few of us are with the Mossad, you know. We even have Christian classical liberals who hate the label of Christian nationalism. But we pretty much all agree that our current system is the civic equivalent of a sucking chest wound. Even the FBI guys are starting to think that.

And so the reason that this perspective is gaining as much traction as it has been doing is that our current system really is the civic equivalent of that kind of dismal wound just mentioned. And anyone who is serious about heading off our radical proposals for stanching the bleeding is going to have to do better than alleging that wanting to stop the bleeding is a legacy of white supremacy.