By Wayne Allensworth
A perceptive Canadian, commenting on a Rod Dreher blog post, believes that the protests generated by the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for Canadian truckers are closely connected to a masculine rejection of a feminized political and social order:
“The protesters are definitely the non-elite, a combination of working class and others up to the middle middle class, such as farmers, owner operators, and so on. This is definitely about class — non-elite versus elite. …
There is a masculinity archetype at play here. … Canada is very ‘safetyist’ and this is in part a reaction to that. That Trudeau embodies a kind of feminine energy has been one aspect of his ineffectiveness here. I think this is partly a non-elite masculine response to a society-wide denigration of the masculine… a refusal to go along with that denigration and its various manifestations.”
Precisely. The un-feminized working and rural classes are rejecting what your observer has called a “Nurse Ratched” style of feminized authoritarianism that undermines masculine leadership and masculine risk-taking values. Indeed, one of the chief goals of a Nurse Ratched regime is to destroy the “patriarchy” by subverting traditional sex roles and legitimate authority (the father as the “head” of the family, the mother as its maternal “heart”).
Gun control is also part of the “woke” agenda. A people that cannot defend itself will not be an effective threat to globalization. There is a psychological aspect to disarming Middle America as well. Just as the propaganda of white guilt has been used to morally disarm our people, gun control has an unspoken psychological aim of emasculation and male demoralization. I suspect that is why Americans who have put up with the destruction of historical monuments have bristled at talk of gun confiscation.
Feminized “therapeutic totalitarianism” seeks to “cure” our inner lives as well as to alter our behavior. As noted in this space earlier, the woke style is “feminized and passive-aggressive. The approach is that of a scolding schoolmarm, the ‘Karen’ who is ever ready to denounce someone’s not ‘masking up’ in public. Woke scolds enjoy lecturing us on ‘systemic racism’ and ‘white privilege.’ It’s all for our own good, after all.”
Thus, it is no accident, as Comrade Stalin used to say, that hosts of young, educated white women are professing the tenets of the woke pseudo-religion.
The feminized style of the assault on civilization has often confused and neutralized conservative-minded men who find it repellant. The vanguard of the revolution is substantially made up of highly emotional, screeching women–and men don’t know how to deal with that.
Richard Hanania, writing on Substack, has noted that Women’s Tears Win in the Marketplace of Ideas. “To a large extent, conservatives wish they were facing a more masculine form of authoritarianism,” Hanania writes. “Men know what to do when other men try to oppress them. They resist and fight back. But who wants to participate in a struggle where women’s tears are what you need to overcome?”
Hanania makes another perceptive observation in linking masculine exasperation to an aggressive foreign policy, something we should all be thinking over in view of the Russia-Ukraine crisis Washington has drawn us into, a crisis in which Americans have no stake. He writes:
“This can also explain the weird melodramatic way in which conservatives understand foreign policy. Why were conservatives, who have basically been pessimists about the state of their society and where it has been going since the 1960s, such enthusiastic supporters of foreign adventures in places like Vietnam and Iraq that meant absolutely nothing to the future of the United States? Why are so many who think they’ve lost their country still desperate for an existential struggle against China?”
As Hanania observes, imagining a struggle in which the battle lines seem clearer and more understandable is a coping mechanism for conservative men, many of whom prefer a “hard totalitarian” male enemy, even a false one, to a battle with a feminized, passive-aggressive “soft totalitarian” system. That tendency has made it far easier for the globalist Blob to wave the flag and watch the military contingent of the American Remnant rush into battle.
Understand your enemy. Understand the mind games that enemy plays to neutralize resistance from our people.
Finally, the Canadian truckers and their supporters should remind us that there is a grassroots resistance out there that no one has tried to organize. We have long been distracted by our adherence to a moribund civic religion and its spectacle of political “horse races,” that, especially at the national level, has failed us.
If that energy could be channeled into an organized, coordinated American Resistance that would unite disparate protest elements — parents fighting CRT and “trans” nonsense in their schools, nurses and policemen resisting vaccine mandates, county sheriffs resisting gun control measures, “red” counties seeking to redraw state lines to join with like-minded patriots, Christians joining together in “intentional communities” — such a resistance movement would be a force to be reckoned with.
Wayne Allensworth is a Corresponding Editor of Chronicles magazine. He is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel Field of Blood.
