Matt Walsh: “Feminism … Is the Most Destructive Movement in Human History”

“Great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment,” wrote infamous communism co-founder Karl Marx in 1868. Interestingly, too, it was a convention in 1848, the same exact year Marx’s Communist Manifesto was published, that’s often cited as marking “first-wave” American feminism’s birth. So the ideology has been around a long time — some would say, too long.

Enter commentator Matt Walsh. “Feminism,” he told interviewer Benny Johnson Tuesday, “is the most destructive movement in human history.”

“And I don’t say that as hyperbole,” he added.

Walsh then elaborated, stating on The Benny Show:

Well over 60 million human children have been killed in abortion. … There’s nothing else you can point to that’s had the death toll that feminism has had … the effect it’s had on the family, basically destroying the institution of the family; nothing comes close to feminism. And with feminism, it was like that from the very beginning.

The commentator then mentioned the Lindsay Clancy situation as one of the movement’s “terrible fruits.” As for Johnson, he concluded his X post of the clip (below) with, “Feminism is a death cult.”

This is hardly the first time Walsh has manhandled the ideology. Last July, for example, he stated in a podcast “that feminism has killed far more people than the atomic bomb.” But is it really the “most destructive movement in human history” — or at least something approximating that?

Culture of Death

Beginning where Walsh did, with abortion, note that prominent feminists have sacramentalized prenatal infanticide. Examples:

• “The right of woman to control her reproductive process [a euphemism for, in part, abortion] must be established as a basic and valuable human civil right not to be denied or abridged by the state.” — Betty Friedan, 1969
• “Abortion prohibition by the State … controls women and denies them full autonomy and full equality with men.” — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1993
• “If abortion rights are denied, then a constraint is imposed on women’s freedom….” — Judith Jarvis Thomson, 1995
• “If men could get pregnant, then abortion would be a sacrament.” — the late Gloria Steinem, quoting acquaintance Florynce Kennedy

In reality, if women (and men) wholly observed an actual sacrament — that of marriage — abortion wouldn’t even be an issue. It’s important to many primarily because free sex is a sacrament to them. They want prenatal infanticide available as an escape hatch from its consequences.

This is, too, likely why first-wave feminists, still raised in an age of chastity, sometimes opposed abortion. Later in her life, for example, suffragist Alice Paul (1885-1977) called abortion “the ultimate in the exploitation of women.”

Killing the Family

Pope John Paul II called the family the “basic cell of society,” and for good reason. If the family begins cracking, the government will step into the breach. The state may provide mothers funding, filling absent fathers’ role; or provide child care, filling that of absent mothers. If the family is healthy, however, government is unnecessary and often unwanted. So as “the family goes,” the pope also noted, “so goes the nation, and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

Now, feminist-encouraged abortion attacks the family by destroying who would be its youngest members, the little ones who give the husband-wife unit a tangible reason for being. But feminists have also attacked motherhood and the family explicitly. Examples:

• The aforementioned Friedan said in 1963 that housewives who accept domesticity are “in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps….”
• Shulamith Firestone wrote in 1970, “The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.”
• The same year, Kate Millett said that the “chief institution of patriarchy is the family.”
• French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir despised traditional motherhood so much that she suggested it be prohibited. “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children,” she stated in 1975. “Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

The Ensuing Wasteland

All this agitation has, over the course of decades, had its effect. There was a time when a “stay-at-home mom” was identified differently: a “mom.” But it has long since ceased being an unchallenged norm — and now the status is impugned. Just consider the words of Democratic political strategist Hilary Rosen in 2012. She said that Ann Romney, wife of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, had “actually never worked a day in her life.” Note here that Romney is a woman who devoted her life to raising five sons.

As Crisis magazine pointed out at the time, too, such sentiments are uncontroversial in Rosen’s milieu. In fact, they’re common in our society today.

And feminism’s destructiveness here should be obvious. Convince women that their primary (most important) role isn’t that of wife and mother, and you destroy the family. Destroy the family, and you destroy society.

A Unique Beauty

The irony is that motherhood is the highest of callings — a holy calling — vastly superior to workaday-world drudgery. Just consider philosopher G.K. Chesterton’s point on this concerning how, far from being provincial, good mothers must be beautifully multifaceted:

“How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone,” he said, “and narrow to be everything to someone?”

For sure. An employer might have numerous employees. Yet no matter how gifted one may be, the boss can replace him as he would a factory-machine cog. Oh, a woman might upon retirement have a going-away party, but she does in fact go away and pass away from thought. A good mother doesn’t go away and is thought of even after she passes away. Thus is there a film I Remember Mama and not I Remember Call-center Worker Debbie From Cubicle C.

A woman whom this eludes has imbibed a tragic lie. When raising a child you are molding a divine creature, a being born of a deific spark. Doing it correctly means creating the saints of the future. It is that higher calling.

More could be said about feminism’s destructiveness, too — such as how it paved the way for the “trans” agenda. (Yes, really.) And isn’t it the silliest of designations, anyway? If a man called himself a “masculinist,” wouldn’t you look at him as if he’d slipped a gear?

The good news is that, to paraphrase economist Herb Stein, “If something can’t go on, it won’t.” Feminism craters birthrates and crashes populations, and the future belongs to those who show up for it. Feminism will not show up. The question for our civilization, however, is: Will we?

Or will we keep indulging feminist fantasies?