In a Wall Street Journal editorial “White Guilt and the Western Past -- Why is America so delicate with the enemy?, Shelby Steele suggests that America’s inability to fight war effectively was caused by “the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty”.

Shelby’s theory is wrong. The collapse of white moral authority is not the problem. The replacement of male authority with feminism is. To Steele’s credit -- he was gazing in the general right direction – but missed the real target. In America, there is one place where white supremacy and radical feminism existed: The Ku Klux Klan.

The crucial relationship Shelby missed is this: post-modern feminism (which has clearly admitted to being a supremacist movement) is the living granddaughter of the Women’s Ku Klux Klan (WKKK), where second-wave feminism (as we know it today) was gestated and borne.

It is important to recognize that the WKKK was not in the mainstream of the suffragette movement, but did strongly support it. Legitimate mainstream suffragettes, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, my grandmother Florence Richardson Usher, and great grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson (photo), did not participate in the smaller WKKK movement or its post-Klan feminist activities. In fact, my grandmother was on the board of the St. Louis Urban League, and often had Ralph Bunch and other black equal rights activists over to dinner, to the consternation of some neighbors. The suffragettes put up with WKKK feminists because of the common goal: passage of the 19th Amendment.

This distinction is important because post-WKKK feminists who today demand VAWA, abortion, “divorce for the hell of it”, free health care and endless welfare pretend to be the heirs of the suffragette movement when in fact they were not legitimate members of it.

Contemporary feminism is still bifurcated, but the divisions are now more deeply pronounced. Feminism is a paradox consisting of two wildly disparate camps, the conservative (post-suffragette equalitarianist) and liberal (post WKKK supremacist) wings. They both operate under the same name – “feminism”. This is quite confusing to the public and politicians. But it often inures to the benefit of radical feminists who carefully twist their words just enough to assume an appearance of equalitarianism in the political arena.

The relatively small (but growing) cohort of equalitarian feminists (such as Kate O’Bierne, Christina Hoff Sommers, Wendy McElroy, Kathleen Parker, and Erin Pizzey) are the legitimate followers of suffragettes. They still seek reasonable social equality between the sexes, and strongly oppose the egregious destruction of marriage and men’s social rights caused by second-wave feminists.

The prevailing second-wave feminist movement, steered by the National Organization for Women, predominantly applies ideological and statistical machinations to achieve women’s supremacy targets. It sees equalitarianists as “anti-feminist” enemies and is constantly at battle with them for control at the helm of feminism.

The transformation of WKKK paradigms into today’s preeminent form of feminism is an astonishing political feat requiring much more study and analysis than is contained in existing scholarly research. A brief inspection of the history of the “dark” wing of feminism demonstrates how this migration was accomplished in-principle.

Many popular second-wave feminist slogans originated in the WKKK. For example, the screed “the hand that rocks the cradle has the power to rule the world” was first published in a WKKK broadside in Evansville, Indiana in the 1880’s.

The KKK and WKKK expounded horrid sexual imagery about black men to stir up both violent and silent racial discrimination. Whites rose to the occasion in the name of “protecting the purity of white womanhood” from miscegenation.

Over time, women learned how to manipulate society from this powerful pedestal of unassailable purity. For example, the movie “Rosewood” is a loose documentary about how a town in Florida was burned to the ground by a woman who falsely claimed a black man raped her.

Much of the historical detail explaining the full story behind the WKKK is contained in the book “Women of the Klan”, by Kathleen L. Blee, which is required reading in campus women’s studies programs. I encourage all to study this book very carefully to fully understand the KKK and the WKKK.
After the 19th amendment was passed, WKKK feminists no longer needed the Klan for political power, and turned their sights towards the use of sexual imagery to control white men too. In the 1920’s a congressional investigation found that a woman by the name of Elizabeth Tyler was running the KKK. She assumed control by making allegations of sexual improprieties against the Grand Dragon.

In the early 1930’s, feminists left the Klan to pursue Marxist thinking consistent with their victim-driven ideology, which arrived with thousands of unwanted European scholars who immigrated to the United States Feminists studied Freud intensely, adopting everything Freud with one major modification: “penis envy” was left behind, but eventually became a “vagina envy” movement exemplified by the “Vagina Monologues” and the “V-day” celebration. The study of Kinsey in the 1950’s led feminists to women’s sexual liberation and the idea that women could freely use sex to get what they want from men, completely absent marriage.

By the early 1960’s, second-wave feminism was now ready to emerge. The movement now had sophisticated weapons consisting of sexual imagery, victimology, a fascist ability to shift word values at-will, a readiness to use physical sex to get men to do whatever they want (and to blackmail them with as well), and degreed individuals in creative fields of false science to legitimize their political agenda.

While WKKK feminists accomplished their goals by targeting black men with sexual imagery, second-wave feminists simply re-pointed their arsenal at all men when they attacked marriage on American soil in the early 1960’s.

Betty Friedan told contented wives that marriage was a trap. They should throw off their apron strings, become sexually liberated, get rid of that awful husband, and make something of themselves. This first wave of the feminist separatist movement brought on an immediate explosion of divorce and illegitimacy rates.

Young men of all political parties who did not understand this dynamic, but were operating on raging hormones, became instant feminist converts upon seeing cities full of easy women never before imaginable. Many men helped legitimize the feminist movement by staunchly placing “equal rights for women” on a pedestal to cover their guilt for participating in the sexual revolution.

An orgy of self-gratification and mass liberated sex ensued, spurred by the false security that the new birth control “pill” was actually being used. It wasn’t (particularly in the lower classes). The resulting illegitimacy boom caused mass poverty. Feminists immediately repackaged the problem to expand Johnson’s so-called “War on Poverty”, which provided billions to fund the feminist “War on Marriage” that today has left half of America’s children fatherless.

Shelby properly points out that a sea-change occurred during the Vietnam era. We must look closely at this confused time to understand what really took place. The collapse of white supremacy and race is of little consequence. The collapse of marriage, and particularly sex discrimination as exemplified by institutionalized disestablishment of men’s participation in marriage, is of paramount influence.
Vietnam coincided with the rise of the hippie generation. The core ideologies of the “do what you like” generation were substantively driven by early 1960’s second-wave feminism, and had become the rage on all college campuses by 1968.

By the time of the Vietnam era, liberated teens soaked in mind-expanding psychedelic drugs religiously believed in everything from feminism to transcendental meditation, “Revolution for the Hell of It”, love-ins, Saul Alinsky, Pete Seeger, and Jim Morrison.

Most conservatives (even ones who did not “inhale” or go to Woodstock) still religiously believe in chauvinist aspects of second-wave feminism despite all facts proving that it is the most devastating social movement in the history of America. This is the breakpoint where present-day conservatives and liberals diverge.

Liberal feminists believe that all violence is bad (unless it happens to be committed by a woman). Tralfamadore is a pain-free, hypersexual village of serial polyandry, where sustenance and protection comes from government, somebody else raises your children, and men get charged for it all even if they weren’t the father.

A United Nations taken over by feminists in the early 1990’s now does nothing but monitor genocide. Lawyers and ambassadors trade letters while countries murdering their own run U.N. committees, on the idea that collaborative talking and giving murderers a seat at the table can save the world.

Feminists of the 1960’s and 1970’s generations (liberal and conservative alike) are now in the cockpit of American politics. Marriage has been deprecated by federal programs entitling everything except marriage, and at the direct expense of marriage. Both political parties are equally responsible for it.

Boys brought up seeing no possibility of ever having a legitimate place in society settle for imaginary manhood by engaging the enemy in online war games. Men who do go in the military find themselves served with divorce papers, or default paternity judgments, or tremendously behind on child support orders that do not change even when a man serves his country.

On college campuses, any student who dares to hold a male perspective is a candidate for derision and discrimination, or a false rape charge.

The crucial war shaping the future of America occurs silently in Washington D.C. Feminists are deeply aware that war spending needs translate into reductions of federal funding on the war against marriage. This is why Jane Fonda, Barbara Streisand, and all known feminists staunchly oppose the war at all costs.

This week President Bush declared that the War on Terror is, in fact, World War III. He is basically correct. The war on terror is a “warm war” against a widely distributed, well-funded, technologically-adept enemy.

So is our own internal war, waged by feminists against marriage for the past forty years. Like the war on terror, the blood and wreckage of our internal war is not evident in any one place, but manifestly obvious every time we pick up a newspaper to see the latest murdered wives, husbands, and children, mass poverty in urban cores; and an effete political aristocracy willing to debate endlessly but unwilling to take up a war against feminism.

This political impasse will eventually explode. Many of the major federal problems that Congress has repeatedly taken up and put aside, such as health care and Medicaid, would abate substantially if Congress walked away from feminism and enacted simple, inexpensive, marriage-positive policies.

Charles Murray recently proposed a novel idea in his article “A Plan to Replace the Welfare State: reform it by giving $10,000 per year to every American adult, to preclude the prediction made by former OMB Director Joshua Bolton that social entitlement spending will grow from 9% to 28% of GDP by 2050. This is an effete answer and unsound economic policy.

Follow the money: directly entitling a problem is not the way to reform it. Much of our social security problems stem from divorce and illegitimacy. Married families have more money to save, and share expenses in retirement. Direct cash entitlements will discourage marriage and spur elective divorce. This, in turn, will reduce saving. Murray and Bolton are correct about one thing. As Bolton puts it; “No plausible amount of tax increases could possibly close the gap that will be created by the unsustainable growth in entitlement programs”.

Congress and President Bush have never had the courage to disentitle feminism. Instead, they just raised the federal debt ceiling to nine trillion dollars so we can just barely support a lackluster “warm war” with only minor cuts in social entitlement spending.

If we want a strong America, we have no choice but to restore a free marriage market. Heterosexual marriage is the only institution that naturally erases all physical, social, economic, and culturally-imposed differences that exist between the sexes. Marriage assures a robust economy, with many men ready to vigorously defend their homes and families, women willing to live on less to ensure the survival of a free democracy, and deficit spending is unlikely.

When America is sick and tired of feminism, it will demand the necessary changes in Washington D.C. I predict this will not take place until the U.S. Supreme Court has overruled Roe v. Wade, and the extant pro-life community finally takes the marriage issue up for lack of anything else to do.