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Feminists have been working for decades to get more women into politics. And it’s working ― a historic number of women are heading to Congress in January.
But this year, there’s a complicating factor: The biggest shift is in Republican women, with a record-breaking 17 new female GOP lawmakers set to be sworn in next year. Most of these women oppose feminist policies like abortion rights, paid family leave and equal pay. Some back QAnon conspiracies and racist policies.
For feminists, women winning office isn’t a victory on its own. Those women need to back policies that help other women, too.
“It is important to elect more women ― on face value, I agree with that. But I think the reason it’s important is because of women’s lived experiences,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder and executive director at Run For Something, a national nonprofit that recruits and supports young progressives of diverse backgrounds running for office. “If the women we’re electing are not going to govern with that lived experience ― where does the value add come from?”
Most of the women in Congress are Democrats, and that will continue to be true next year. Democrats elected 105 women to Congress, whereas Republicans elected at least 36. But that result was still big for the GOP, breaking the party’s record of 30 Republican women elected to Congress in 2006.
Republicans funneled money into women’s campaigns and primaries ― an obstacle for many GOP women, who historically have had trouble winning primaries. They face bigger challenges than their Democratic counterparts, including that they’re usually less conservative than their Republican male counterparts. And even when they’re not, they’re often perceived as more liberal than their male counterparts, according to research from political scientist Danielle M. Thomsen.
This year, many of the Republican women elected are extremely conservative. They include: Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, who owns a gun-themed open-carry restaurant and rose to prominence after defying COVID-19 shutdowns; Texas’ Beth Van Duyne, best known for supporting a conspiracy theory that Muslims were plotting to take over the U.S. and enforce sharia law; and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, an openly racist QAnon conspiracy theorist who has already vowed to “end every gun-free zone” in the country. All three GOP politicians are anti-abortion and support repealing the Affordable Care Act, which covers reproductive health services for millions of women.
Some women’s rights advocates worry that people will conflate gender equality with gender parity when looking at these female Republican politicians.
“Is it progress for women’s equity and women’s rights in general to elect people who are going to chip away at those rights? That’s not what I spend my days doing. I spend my days fighting for people who will fight for both of those things,” said Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at EMILY’s List, a national organization that supports pro-choice, Democratic female candidates.
Is it progress for women’s equity and women’s rights in general to elect people who are going to chip away at those rights?Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at EMILY's List
That’s not to say there’s no value in having women represented in both major parties. Early exit polls show that 42% of women voted for President Donald Trump. Women make up 51% of the U.S. population, yet only one-quarter of Congress.
“I truly believe that we cannot thrive as a country unless we have women represented on both sides of the aisle,” said Erin Loos Cutraro, founder and CEO of She Should Run, a nonpartisan nonprofit working to get more women into politics.
“Women are not monolithic. There isn’t one way to lead as a woman,” she added. “We don’t expect all men to vote the same way, yet there is this expectation that every woman is going to show up the same way on certain issues.”
Women on both sides of the aisle tend to work more collaboratively, are more open to working on bipartisan issues and tend to be more results-oriented than their male counterparts, according to research from the Center for American Women and Politics. “Having more women in Congress means that perhaps we might be more likely to break at least some of the partisan gridlock, which is crucial,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director at the Center for American Women and Politics.
Republican women are not immune to the sexism found within their party ― and that internalized sexism could impact their effectiveness as candidates, argued Erin Vilardi, founder of Vote Run Lead, a nonpartisan organization that helps train women of all parties to run for office.
“Subscribing to an anti-woman agenda does not make them any safer in their seats, despite that they’ve been ‘riding with the boys,’” she said. “A deeply rooted sexism exists, and these leaders should be wary about what this could mean for their legacy and opportunities.”
After all, all the women who ran successfully this year were able to do so thanks to the hard work of the feminists who came before them ― those who fought for women’s right to vote, women’s right to choose what to do with their bodies, women’s right to access birth control and family planning, and so much more.
Feminists hope these Republican female politicians will bear that in mind and do what they can to help other women succeed.
“It is because of feminism and the progress that the women’s movement has made that these women can run and they’re able to win,” Litman said. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re advancing the cause of feminism.”
https://www.aol.com/news/historic-number-gop-women-elected-130000943.html
Tucker Carlson: This Is Why America Is Great
Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date November 14, 2020
TUCKER CARLSON, FOX NEWS: There is a huge amount going on in America right now. So many things seem so completely screwed up that it all can be overwhelming. And over time, it's also misleading.
If you pay too much attention to what's happening, you can easily conclude that America is a rotten country. But that's wrong. America is still the best. There are two things about America make it great: the country and its people.
This is a truly beautiful place. That's the first thing. If you're absorbed by your phone all day, it's easy to forget that. But look around. America is a stunning country. Yes, Switzerland has the Alps and Zimbabwe has Victoria Falls. But multiply that by an entire continent and you've got what we have in America -- from the islands of Puget Sound to the islands in Casco Bay, from the Rockies to the Badlands, from the Upper Peninsula to the Appalachian Mountains.
Spend a day hiking through the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming. You may not see another person. How can a place so gorgeous be so empty? We've got a lot of those here. Wake up in Big Sur in California some morning. The smell of redwoods and salt air will change you. You'll feel things you inherited from your ancestors coming from places the modern world cannot touch.
We are blessed to live in a place like this, more blessed than we acknowledge. No matter what happens next, no matter who becomes the president now or in the future, nothing can diminish the dignity of an eastern white pine towering above the spruce in a New England forest. All of it is ours to enjoy, thank God.
And we've got a lot of people to enjoy it with, an awful lot. Americans are still the best people, misguided as we sometimes are. This isn't an especially religious country anymore, but surveys on churchgoing do not tell the whole story. Even now, most Americans know they're not really in charge of the universe. They know there's something bigger out there, bigger than all of us combined. And when you understand that, when you know in your bones how small you are and how short the ride is likely to be, you tend to treat people better.
This is a profoundly nice country, the nicest in the world. Americans are kind to children, to pets, to strangers. We give more money to charity than any other place. We tip our waiters more. There's no country on earth you'd rather be lost in, because someone will help you in America. We don't eat dogs, we rescue them. They sleep on the bed, we give them funny names, we cry when they die.
It's a sweet country. In some ways, it's getting better. The music's definitely improving. So is the food. Believe it or not, we still make things here and a lot of them are pretty good now. Americans love innovation, but they are distrustful of anyone's radical plans for the future. Most people here don't want an abrupt reshuffling of everything. They prefer incremental improvement. That's why we've had only one revolution. It's why we fought off the metric system all these years, and thank heaven we have.
It's why we still have Christmas and always will. Christmas in America is great. Even if you don't really understand what it's about, and many people don't, it's still the happiest time of the year and therefore it's the most American.
Tucker Carlson was born in San Francisco. When Carlson was in first grade, his father moved Tucker and his brother to La Jolla, California, and raised them there.
http://www.tuckercarlson.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlIg5lBujlk
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1325259770916462594
PRESIDENT-ELECT BIDEN: “230 million thousand Americans" have lost a loved one to COVID
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlIg5lBujlk
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1325259770916462594
Sleepy Campaign Strategy Mystery Solved. By Roger Kimball 4 min Even prior to election night, the Biden campaign knew that pollsters and media outlets were working hard to spin election coverage to fix the presidential race.
One of the great mysteries surrounding the presidential election of 2020 has now been solved. For months, people on both sides of the aisle noted the huge discrepancy between the campaign styles of Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Trump was a dynamo, sitting for interviews, holding press conferences, participating in an ever-increasing series of rallies across the country.
Joe Biden, by contrast, rarely left his basement and when he did it was to address 10 or 15 carefully screened supporters or pundits who were coached about what they could say. Even Biden’s supporters, the innocent ones, marked the difference and were concerned. How could their candidate win when he basically refused to campaign?
We now know the answer.
Biden didn’t really campaign because he – or at least his handlers – knew the fix was in. They knew that compliant polls would cook the numbers to show that Biden was 10, 15, or even 17 points ahead nationally and in all the battleground states even though he was more or less tied or even behind. The psychological, which means the political effect of that, was to insinuate an element of unreality into the whole campaign and to present the public, and the pundits who were there to spoonfeed them, with a false narrative about the performance and therefore the prospects of the two candidates.
The committee fielding Biden also knew that the media was almost totally on board with a Biden candidacy. This was clear during the campaign when an overwhelming majority of media coverage was both hostile to Trump and almost comically careful about Biden.
Consider the conspiracy of silence about Hunter Biden’s laptop or the revelations of Hunter’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski. With the exception of a few dissident outlets, there was an extraordinary conspiracy of silence about these and other stories critical of Biden’s behavior. (Special praise goes to the New York Post and to Tucker Carlson for bucking the trend and bringing these stories to the public.)
That most of the media was all-in for Biden was also clear during the election itself. Fox News notoriously acted as a cheerleader for Biden. They refused to call Florida for Trump for hours after it was clear that he had won it. They then ceded Arizona to Biden, though it was by no means clear that he had prevailed there and some voters were still in line at the polls. Fox eventually walked back its call (sort of), but only after the damage to Trump’s momentum had been clocked. Two days after the election, Fox refuses to call Alaska and other states for Trump even though it is crystal clear that he has won them.
Finally, the forces arrayed behind Biden knew that the whole bureaucracy of the state – the poll workers and postal workers in battleground states, for example – would be on board for Biden and would be carefully coached in deploying techniques to manufacture or suppress ballots, as necessary, and skew the vote.
We see all this playing out before our eyes – or, rather, we see the external manifestations of the massive effort to queer the election for Donald Trump.
Last time, in 2016, the establishment was not ready for Donald Trump. They were complacent because they just knew that Trump could not win, that Hillary Clinton was a sure thing. So they were both careless in covering their tracks and lazy about mounting a serious ground game against Trump should he win.
When he did win they screamed and stomped their tiny feet. They paraded around the Washington Mall in pink hats meant to resemble female genitalia in order to protest against Trump’s crudity. Less than 20 minutes after Trump was inaugurated The Washington Post informed its readers that the push for impeachment had begun.
But the fact remains, the establishment and its media megaphones were blindsided. They thought a Trump victory was impossible. This time, they knew that it was not only possible but probable, and they prepared accordingly.
Biden’s supporters, from Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol down to Chuck Todd, Chris Wallace, and the unsung destroyers of Trump ballots and fabricators of Biden ballots, all girded their loins and were prepared for a reprise of Trump in 2016. They were ready. But here’s what is surprising them: so was Donald Trump.
It is touch and go, but writing now, Anno Domini Guy Fawkes Day 2020, I think that the president will prevail. That is to say, the legitimate ballots will be counted, the illegitimate ones will be discarded, and Donald Trump will be president for four more years. Get ready, though. Victory will not come without a fight.
This article has been republished with permission from American Greatness.
Flickr-Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. Mr. Kimball lectures widely and has appeared on national radio and television programs as well as the BBC. He is represented by Writers' Representatives, who can provide details about booking him. Mr. Kimball's latest book is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press, 2012).
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/sleepy-campaign-strategy-mystery-solved/
