Michael Walsh Goes There: “To Save America, Repeal the 19th Amendment”

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Michael Walsh, editor of The Pipeline, has posted another in his series of “To Save America” editorials. This time, in “To Save America, Repeal the 19th Amendment” on 2023-01-23, he turns to the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1920, which gave women the right to vote in all elections in the U.S. He begins:

With Jacinda Ardern’s welcome exit from the ranks of world political leaders, leaving a shambles of constitutional freedom and human rights in her wake, now is perhaps an opportune time to reconsider the passage of the 19th amendment in American politics as part of our ongoing series of “To Save America” modest proposals advocating repeal of the most destructive tamperings with the original Constitution. We’ve already made the arguments for the repeal of the 16th, 17th, 18th (done!), and 26th amendments, so now it’s time for the women’s suffrage movement to take its turn in the barrel.

He then dives headfirst into the tree chipper, citing the Rape (or, if you like, Abduction) of the Sabine Women as evidence not of the moderating influence of the female perspective but rather:

This may sound warm and fuzzy, but one of the lessons the Romans derived from this episode was the fickleness and malleability of women. Far from being happy that their former countrymen had come to rescue them from domestic slavery to the Romans (as males would be), the Sabine women were appalled at the slaughter and sought a compromise—which ended with the effective disappearance of the Sabines from history and ensured the survival of the Eternal City.

What has all this history got to do with women’s suffrage or Jacinda Ardern? If you’ve read my book Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost, you will know that I believe the human animal doesn’t change very much, and no amount of wish-casting can alter reality. To take Ardern as an example, her reaction to a single case of the imaginary disease known as “Covid-19” was quintessentially female and maternal: she immediately shut down her entire country, then instituted a breathtaking regime of ruthless totalitarianism involving lockdowns and forcible "vaccinations." (She had previously displayed these same panicky instincts in the wake of the 2019 mosque shootings, when she almost instantly imposed a draconian anti-gun policy nationwide.) In other words, she acted according to stereotype, her policies not the product of calm thinking and reasoned judgment but of inflamed emotions absent any rational thought. After which she walked away from the chaos complaining of burnout.

Surveying the history of the battle for women’s suffrage and events after it was won, he argues:

The electorate has doubled but it has also become widely skewed, adding new value via the phenomenon known as the Single Woke Female—unmarried, exploited women of a certain age who fell for the siren song of “feminism” and the “sexual revolution” and are now approaching retirement from a pointless career who go home in the evening to their cats, bust out the ice cream and the white wine, and nurse their grudge against males for their barren, empty, childless lives. Foolishly seduced by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy into providing easy sexual access to their bodies in the name of “empowerment” and by the feminists who lied that they could “have it all,” they now in their anger and resentment vote the straight Democrat ticket, looking to the federal government to be a surrogate lover, husband, and father. It’s Obama’s “Life of Julia” writ large.

He concludes:

From Romulus to the fall of Constantinople, Rome lasted 2,000 years without ever offering women the vote. How long will America last as it makes one last attempt to prove that history is, in fact, bunk? Men are Romans, women are Sabines. The only iron law of history is that imbalances will be corrected, sometimes violently. Based on current voting patterns, if women didn’t vote, there would never be another Democrat president. Now, who wouldn’t make that trade? Come on, ladies, do your duty to God and country, and give it up for America. Otherwise, a Jacinda Ardern looms in your future, too.

What would repeal of women’s suffrage mean in governance (by those men who remained alive)? Ponder these hypothetical electoral maps for the 2020 presidential election.

2020_by_sex

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Ah! The Progressive Era! The evil that well-intentioned men do lives long after they have passed from the scene.

A more reasoned approach to the issue would be that there are undoubtedly women who should not vote – just as indisputably there are men who should not vote. The real issue is that too many people who have no skin in the game are allowed to vote themselves benefits. Universal suffrage democracy is a demonstrated failure. Just look around you.

Unfortunately, we will have to wait until after the financial collapse or the global thermonuclear war before our descendants will have the opportunity to choose a better course.

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Deep state is expiditing both – so when dust settles why not:

Require PASSING a civics test to qualify to vote.

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12/12/2000 SCOTUS verified what is written in plain English: there is NO fundamental Right for the citizen to vote for POTUS.

The General Assemblies have all the Power.

Kinda makes the ‘he v. she’ moot

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Voting for the President is so last century! Look at recent history. The people voted for President Trump, but the Deep State would not let him govern. Somebody voted for Biden*, and yet he is incapable of governing.

There is much to be said for indirect election of leaders. Who could argue with a system that gave the Brits Boris Johnson, that forgettable lady, and now a rich Indian? But someone still has to elect (chose) the representatives in the General Assemblies. Brings us back to the issue of who should be allowed to vote in an election.

I am in favor of “Makers” voting while “Takers” don’t vote, to make sure that the people voting have skin in the game. But it gets complicated. Active military and police are “Takers”, paid by the government (i.e., fellow citizens); but they definitely have real skin in the game. Similarly, a married woman with children under the age of 18 definitely has skin in the game, even if she is a non-earning homemaker. Democracy would be difficult, even if we were actually trying to do it right.

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Maybe suffrage should be limited to landowners and parents?
Y’know…I know so many blue collar men who dont vote. Oh they’ll be vocal about their discontents, but they just don’t seem to see themselves as part of the electorate.
And what about all those wimpy young guys who, for some reason, give a crap about abortion rights?
This guy sounds like Mrs. Humphrey Ward, a very popular novelist at the time the suffragists were being imprisoned and tortured in England: yes, of course women’s influence was important but it should be exercised quietly, genteelly, upon their own menfolk in their own homes.
But oh right: that was before men in general abandoned the paterfamilias rôle and responsibility.

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Somehow ‘General Assemblies abandoned their responsibility’ of exercising ‘quality assurance’ needs to be weaved into the conversation. (!:sunglasses:)

See Samo Burja’s writing on societal failure for an interesting perspective.

All that said—your statement is [accurately describes] the foundational problem.

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(Emphasis mine)

I haven’t heard about torture, but many of the suffragists in the slammer were there for good reason.

At the conclusion of the campaign in August 1914, the attacks had, in total, cost approximately £700,000 in damages (equivalent to £71,470,000 in 2021), although according to historian C. J. Bearman this figure does not include “the damage done to works of art or the more minor forms of militancy such as window-smashing and letter-burning”. Bearman also notes that this figure does not include the extra costs inflicted by violent suffragette action, “such as extra police time, additional caretakers and night watchmen hired to protect property, and revenue lost when tourist attractions and the State Apartments at Windsor Castle were closed for fear of suffragette attacks”. With these additional considerations, Bearman asserts, the campaign cost the British economy between £1 and £2 million in 1913 to 1914 alone (approximately £130–£240 million today). There was an average of 21 bombing and arson incidents per month in 1913, and 15 per month in 1914, with there being an arson or bombing attack in every month between February 1913 and August 1914. Bearman calculates that there was a total of at least 337 arson and bombing attacks between 1913 and 1914, but states that the true number could be well over 500. By the end of the campaign, more than 1,300 people had been arrested and imprisoned for suffragette violence across the United Kingdom.

Suffragette terrorists during the 1912–1914 period are credited with making the letter bomb a widely used form of terror attack.

One of, if not the first, groups to consistently use letter bombs on a wide scale were the British suffragettes in the years before the First World War. The group were the original inventors of a form of letter bomb designed to maim or kill politicians or opponents. In 1913, numerous letter bombs were sent to politicians such as the Chancellor David Lloyd George and Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, but they invariably all exploded in post offices, post boxes or in mailbags while in transit across the country. Suffragettes also once attempted to assassinate a judge they considered to be anti-women’s suffrage, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, with a “deadly” letter-bomb made partly out of bullets, but the bomb was intercepted by London postal workers before it could reach him.

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I used to think this would be impossible to disentangle, but there are precedents that might be useful. For example, the Hatch Act restricts the ability of federal employees to participate in political campaign activities. These restrictions could be extended to voting on the basis that it was a conflict of interest for someone whose income came from the federal government to select the people responsible for appropriating the funds that paid their salary. Police are mostly municipal, county, and state employees, and would be restricted from voting in the jurisdiction that employed them but free to vote in elections at other levels. As to the maker/taker distinction for homemakers, any taxpayer filing jointly or who is a dependent of a taxpayer paying net taxes would be considered a maker. Calculation of net contributions versus benefits could be structured along the lines of eligibility for the earned income tax credit.

All of this is complicated and messy, but the Internal Revenue Code (26 USC) is over a million words and the statutes and regulations to implement the code are another 4 million words. The voting rules would probably be a drop in the bucket even compared to the ten parts of the code you find with a search for “forfeiture and beer”.

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Oh yeah, they were effing TERRORISTS! But as to torture, look up the “cat and mouse” routine: the Brits imprisoned the women, who would refuse to eat, be force fed vua rope ‘n’ rubber catheters, then released on the point of death. As soon as she regained some strength, the woman would be arrested again, and on and on.
And then there’s the audacious crime of Emily Davison, who stepped out in front of the king’s racehorse in 1913, grabbed his bridle and brought him down (on top of herself).
All in a crazy attempt to obtain participation in some specie of democracy for approximately half of the population. Can you imagine…?

(Oh and BTW: I hate when people say “terrorists never win”. IMHO, they ALWAYS do. )

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I :heart: the story bout how of a few of ‘em stalked some govt minister to Scotland where he was playing golf, and pantsed him! His daughter beat ‘em off with a golf club.

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Well, one might say that trying to persuade folks you’re ready to assume the responsibility of self-governance by blowing up random people unrelated to the cause and destroying public property meets the definition of “crazy”.

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It worked, dinnit?
And it ain’t crazy. Was what Antifa did destroying their neighbors’ businesses in the summer of 2020 “crazy”? It was embraced by the Dem candidates (cue Kamala; “they aren’t going to stop and they SHOULDNT stop,”) and helped get Ol’Jo[k]e elected.
Good terror (oxymoron alert!) has to be indiscriminate and shocking, so the general population, the “shopkeepers” know they are not safe, no matter what they do or say. Witness that Lefty store owner in 2020 yelling at the looters, “But I’m on your side!” Traditionally the goal of anarchists like Bakunin was to force the government into repressive measures (as indeed it did in England with the suffragists) But cue American exceptionalism: in our case, it got the violence appeasers elected, and forced the opposition to believe it could ALSO assemble to show its strength. That’s what happened on J6….

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It’s hard to know. The suffragist bombings were largely the work of a single group, the Women’s Social and Political Union (WPSU), whose co-founder, Emmeline Pankhurst, said intended “to make England and every department of English life insecure and unsafe”. This prompted a reaction and opposition among other suffragist groups, which denounced the violence. The bombing campaign came to an end with the outbreak of World War I, with the WPSU abandoning the campaign and supporting the government in the war. The group disbanded in 1917.

After the end of the war, prominent politicians, including Prime Minister Davd Lloyd George, recognised the contribution of women to the war effort and the government recommended limited women’s suffrage (votes for women over 30, 19 for war veterans) in 1918. It was not until 1928 that women received full suffrage on the same terms as men.

It is hard to draw a connection between a campaign of violence in 1912–1914 to the grants of partial suffrage in 1918 and full suffrage a decade later, just as the assertion of a causal connection between the Weimar Republic hyperinflation of 1921–1923 and Hitler’s coming to power in 1932 is difficult to see.

Further, women’s suffrage was “in the air” after the end of World War I, with the following countries granting women the vote in 1918 alone:

  • Austria
  • Azerbaijan
  • Canada
  • Denmark
  • Germany
  • Hungary
  • Poland
  • Soviet Union
  • Trinidad and Tobago
  • United Kingdom

Only in the U.K. was there a terrorist campaign for women’s votes.

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Post hoc, propter hoc! England was then a culture-leader for the entire Western world. It may be “hard to know” whether the campaign of the suffragists in England prior to 1918 contributed to other countries’ extending suffrage to us, but in my humble (and I mean that sincerely) opinion, it did.

Along those same lines: look at Antifa’s wild success. Not ONLY did none of the actual perps suffer any legal consequences for vandalism, arson, assault, theft—actions that a few short years ago, pretty much everyone woulda considered criminal—but ALSO, those actions themselves have now been widely de-criminalized!

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Some of us are profoundly underwhelmed by the performance of “democracy”, and consider that it would work a whole lot better if a large proportion of the population was not permitted to vote.

Personally, I am not in favor of denying people the vote because they happen to be female, anymore than people should automatically have the vote because they happen to be male. However, it is past time for women to look seriously at the state of the world and ask themselves – Has giving (all) women the vote made the world a better place?

The answer to that is fairly clear. I am old enough to remember when the feminist argument was that the world would be much better if women were in more positions of power. Now that has largely been achieved, even to the extent of discrimination against males in government, education, military, and business. And yet in many ways the world is clearly worse now than it was decades ago, and the idiots pushing us all today to global war are predominantly female (such as Victoria Nuland, Anna Baerbaek, and that dancing queen in Finland).

Don’t take this personally, Hypatia, but women have been given a giant opportunity to take command – and they are screwing it up. We expected better.

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I don’t take it personally. Turns out, we’re no better’n the gents. (Although, no worse…)
Still, you can’t blame the late 19th-early 20th century suffragists, raised on a surfeit of high ideals of equality before the law and reverence for “democracy” , for wanting a piece of the action. Can ya?

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Kinda yes. Man and woman gotta know their limitations. The idea that everyone is equally right in what they think simply because they breath is asinine and yet that is what we are told. Make sure your voice is heard. How about make sure the people you know are wise and more intelligent than you get most of the say? If there was a bomb ticking down, would we want the decision of which wire to cut to be based on everyone getting a vote or would we maybe allow the most talented to pick? Part of doing what is best for you and your community is to understand your own limitations.

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Now, THIS is getting close to……oh never mind. I’ll just say, as my BMD likes to point out, Englands most memorable and successful epochs were under her Queens.
I won’t be goaded, but…do you gents really totes buy into Tennyson’s sentiment:

“Man with the head and woman with the heart,
Man to command and woman to obey:
All else, confusion.” .?

If you do, S’okay. I’ll be Dorothy Parker.

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Why yes, in the familial way . But the Man must love the woman more than themselves . And, Women should not be leaders of men . Only in the rarest of occasions.

The world has turned this all up side down. Hence , the world is upside down. No wonder that.

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