Who Lost America
by the subway philosopher™
MAGA Republicans and like-minded citizens are understandably celebrating their recent win in the presidential election. A common theme: ecstatic proclamations that the Deep State which has seized control of the American polity is at long last facing its götterdämmerung, the people finally having awakened from woke and assorted other delusions, ready to cast off their shackles and resume duty to the republic.
The reality is somewhat less rose-tinted. Trump received fewer votes in 2024 than in 2020 when he lost. The infamous graph of vote totals for the last three elections clearly demonstrates that Trump won for one reason only – someone turned off the machine that made Sloppy Joe Biden, a man who couldn’t rouse 50 people to attend one of his few campaign rallies, the most popular president in history. Who did that? A look at Trump’s cabinet picks and their geopolitical predilections clarifies one possible answer. Why did Trump accept the deal? Perhaps to have a chance at fighting a more pressing problem, the problem of domestic America, although America is far from alone.
In his latest book Who Lost America?, dissident academic Stephen Baskerville considers Biden’s 2020 ascension to the throne as a coup, an overthrow of the American ancien regime. I disagree slightly – a coup did indeed occur, but much earlier. The evidence and arguments Dr. Baskerville summons support both contentions.
The first task is to understand exactly who or what actually won. Baskerville calls it a new ideology, of the Left obviously, but one with a creative, even brilliant, addition to the standard divisions inherent in fascism and marxism, that addition being sex, a war primarily of women (and now the other 73 genders) against men (although not necessarily vice versa). There is nothing new about divide and conquer, but feminism is the first ideology that has used sex to achieve it. This new ideology got its start with the welfare state, which was soon co-opted by what Baskerville calls the feminist gendarmerie. Current-year and still-evolving feminists have effectively completed their ‘long march’ and entirely suborned the institutions of America and the Western world.
An important Baskerville insight is that feminism is political, not cultural, and always has been. The political has but one pursuit – power. Feminism disguises its lust for power. Words and phrases like ‘equality,’ ‘reproductive rights,’ ‘social justice’ and ‘empowerment’ are merely the veneer of do-goodery that always overlays the hunger for access to the levers of state violence. The radical feminists have gained that access. They’ve won. The personal has become political and the state has taken over their cause. The only question remaining is how deeply they will plunge us into the totalitarian abyss before the system collapses or the people fight back.
Who is to blame? Baskerville itemizes eight processes, policies and/or events that mark the path to perdition:
• the displacement of citizens by professional political operatives and activists (on both the Left and Right);
• the parallel displacement of churches, in essential roles, by law firms and pressure groups;
• intrusive government control over the private lives of millions of non-criminal people by the welfare machinery;
• the explicit abandonment of justice as the sole legitimate purpose of the judiciary, allowing legal proceedings and legal punishments against legally innocent people;
• the abolition of marriage as a legally enforceable contract;
• the continuing immiseration of the African-American community;
• commandeering the foreign policy machinery, military, and security services to serve the demands of domestic social engineering;
• policies designed to denigrate, discourage, and punish masculinity.
This list, which I don’t consider exhaustive, applies to every country in the American sphere of influence and shows precisely how the new ideology has successfully created a previously unimagined version of Hobbes’ war of all against all, one where no one and nothing is free from the destructive, intrusive and forcibly-corrective gaze of the state. Feminism has undermined and taken control of every principle of law and justice, every agency of government and big business, every academic institution from daycare to post-grad, every organization from the local HOA to the Oval Office, every individual from the gestating fetus to the adult male. The degree to which feminist ideology has infiltrated, corrupted and controls the machinery of Western civilization is staggering and far more comprehensive than most are aware of. Baskerville unravels the Byzantine mechanisms which underpin this state of affairs, and also lays a significant portion of blame where it belongs – on the small ‘c’ conservative right in particular.
Far from challenging the dogmatic and irrational paradigms of feminism, the right has done nothing against, and has more frequently aided and abetted, the new Leviathan, primarily for political and financial gain. The problem is now metastasizing and becoming ever more brazen and public. Every government agency is moving inexorably towards anarcho-tyranny, whereby state and state-controlled institutions ignore their own laws and legitimate mission, imposing their ideological agenda through what are effectively self-serving top-down decrees against which citizens have no reasonable means of redress. Tellingly, this process does not reverse itself or even slow down when Republicans or conservatives gain political power.
Despite Trump’s victory, feminist ideologues are still fully in charge of every aspect of daily life. They will not go away quietly or at all. And with the help of modern technology, they have no need to bring people to the gulag – they are busily bringing the gulag to the people. Trump will not and can not fix things, even if he does actually see the problem. Do not expect salvation from the Orange Julius or any other political figure.
Baskerville’s overall theme and arguments are more comprehensive and nuanced than the synopsis offered here. He also considers solutions, including a marriage/family/kids strike by young men, which to some extent is already occurring. Something he may not have seen coming is the recent uprising of 4B feminism – you can read more about that here. If men and women both refuse to have sex, marry, produce children, the monster will indeed be slain, but humanity will also slide into the dustbin of history alongside it, unmourned by the rats and cockroaches dining large on our legacy waste-heaps for the millenia to come. This is what feminism has brought us to.
I encourage people to buy and read this book (a full-length review is here). Cancel culture has made it all but impossible for scholars to even attempt an understanding of how the last 50 years have seen America and most of the Western world take a sharp turn towards the total state. Researchers such as Baskerville need support. Buy the book. Read it. Then give it to your sons and grandsons.
A final thought from Dr. Baskerville, who flatly rejects the technocratic and totalitarian single-mother welfare society that feminism has erected on the backs of men and children:
“… (M)otherhood is an inevitable biological necessity. It is fatherhood that must be constructed socially, and it is fatherhood in turn that constructs the social order.”
What is the purpose of marriage and family? It is not procreation, contrary to populist understanding. The over-arching imperative of marriage is to provide children with a father and the resultant stable, productive home. It is fatherhood that raises humanity above the ‘red in tooth and claw’ state of nature. It is fatherhood that paves the uncertain route to civilization. Citizens of the West have surrendered it with barely a whimper.
