As a retired white woman who was born in this country, I don’t experience all of the discrimination that Donald Trump and his Project 2025ers are leveling at my gender. Nevertheless, I’m horrified.
I’d like to turn the tables on this regime and its supporters by asking them to define a woman, a question they often pose to put progressives on the spot.
My guess is that male and female regressives alike think women are or should be treated as subhuman commodities that are useful ornaments, sex toys, incubators, unpaid house servants and/or boosters of fragile male egos.
Of course, regressive women probably see themselves as exceptions who prove the rule, and the men around them may even agree.
Only the most rabid extremists are expressing such toxic opinions, though. Others label their agenda “a return to traditional values” or make outlandish claims that women really don’t want to think for themselves, let alone decide their own destinies.
There are also the pro-natalists, who wring their hands over declining marriage and birth rates and try every which way to get young women to tie the knot and have lots of children ASAP.
In her “Barefoot and Pregnant” video, singer-songwriter and women’s rights advocate Gwen Levey depicts this christofascist fever dream in all its backwardness.
At a recent Red Wine & Blue panel discussion with National Women’s Law Center officials, I learned who’s behind this movement to make half of the population dependent on and submissive to the other half.
It’s no surprise that one group consists of “traditional conservatives who oppose abortion, idealize the nuclear family (i.e., straight married couples with children), and embrace traditional gender roles.”
It’s harder to understand why “tech elites who believe more ‘high-IQ’ people should be having children” have jumped on this bandwagon, given how the artificial intelligence that they’re pushing threatens to eliminate the need for much of the human kind.
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Actually, marginalizing and restricting women is a major strategy for what Harvard Kennedy School professor Erica Chenoweth and lecturer Zoe Marks call patriarchal authoritarianism.
Patriarchy is closely related to authoritarianism, they wrote for Ms. “By strengthening men’s control over the women and girls in their lives, authoritarian leaders strike a patriarchal bargain, doling out private authority in exchange for public loyalty to the strongman. Incidentally, many women buy into the bargain, too.”
Carrots and closed doors
The Heritage Foundation, which brought us the Project 2025 handbook, began 2026 with a new manifesto, “Saving America by Saving the Family.”
Written by four men and two women, it declares that we’re in a “family crisis” due in part to feminism and expanded educational and career opportunities for women. The authors did take pains to say men and women should have equal rights and dignity – just before noting their “natural, complementary differences.” (Does that sound like a dog-whistle or what?)
Both the Heritage Foundation and the federal government are trying to persuade women with propaganda and economic incentives, while also finding ways to reduce their options.
The National Women’s Law Center has issued a slew of reports on efforts to set woman back by making education and child care less affordable and abortion and even contraception less accessible.
In the midst of a war Trump started with no clear purpose and apparently no strategy, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the regime’s poster boy for toxic masculinity, is fixated on bringing more testosterone into the U.S. military, firing high-ranking women and blocking others from promotions.
Hegseth’s Christian nationalist minister, Doug Wilson, wants to build a theocracy where each household gets one vote, cast by its head, who is typically male, although women in that role could cast a ballot. Others, however, suggest that male relatives should represent unmarried women.
Wilson admits that the United States of Christ that he envisions is centuries away, but Trump won’t stop pressuring the Senate to pass the SAVE America (for Trump and His Cronies) Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register and therefore make voting harder for women like me who’ve taken their husbands’ names.
And then there’s the AI time bomb, according to what Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp told CNBC earlier this year.
This technology, he said, will disrupt every aspect of society, reducing the economic and political power of “highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat” while increasing that of “vocationally trained, working-class, often male voters.”
His prediction caused Guardian columnist Arwa Mahdawi to wonder whether Karp, “one of the key architects of our glorious AI-driven economy,” was delivering a warning or a sales pitch.
If this is a future he’s selling, it’s safe to say that the Trump/Project 2025 regime would buy it. Which means that while we still can, all women should vote for anyone who’ll fight it.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
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