A surprising number of authoritarian leaders and psychopaths (serial killers in the extreme case) were poets. Did you know that? Josef Stalin was a poet. (You probably already knew Adolf Hitler was a landscape painter.) Stalin’s poetry was well-regarded in Georgian literary circles. The overlap in such cases typically reflects ideological performance and self-mythologizing egoism rather than genuine artistic humility. Not difficult psychoanalytical work. This is not to say that all or even most poets are psychopaths, just that poet and monster are not mutually exclusive categories.
What about mothers? Isabel Perón, the Argentine political figure noted by identitarians for being the first woman in the world to serve as president, while not a mother, manufactured a motherly image, which her regime weaponized to manipulate the masses. Her regime repeatedly used emergency powers, suspended civil liberties, censored the media, and pursued political repression against opponents. Her regime tolerated and enabled street-level violence.
Renée Nicole Good was a poet and a mother of three. Certainly, you know this by now. The ubiquitous picture of her was taken during one of her pregnancies, standing against a beautiful backdrop of beach and sky. She won an award for a poem she wrote. Almost every corporate state media story leads with the woman’s bona fides—as if they matter.
Progressives work from emotion, not reason. To be sure, the emotional manipulation is selective; they use it to humanize their side, while dehumanizing their opponents, dulling the emotional response to victims on the other side. But it’s emotional manipulation nonetheless.
This is how Democrats control their ranks: the rational manipulation of irrational signals, signs, and symbols. It’s why Democrats substitute sophistry for logical argumentation. It’s why they teach the art of fallacy-making in colleges and universities rather than the finer points of logic and critical thinking. It’s why feelings and movement ideology are invited to corrupt science and medicine.
The reality is that poets and mothers are quite capable of doing bad things, even killing people—children, husbands, and, yes, law enforcement. Those with such wonderful qualities (presuming the poet mother was good at these) are quite capable of possessing authoritarian personalities and psychopathic tendencies.
We’re often lectured about the problem of the state as father. Granted. But the state as mother is not equivalent? Aren’t they both parens patriae? Might the latter be even worse? What is the ubiquity of an image of a woman with a swollen belly meant to make us pine for? Surely it’s not natalism. How is the womb’s security any better than the authoritarian desire seeking father-rule? Is this the “warmth of collectivism” Mamdani is promising New Yorkers? He did tell his followers that “rugged individualism” is “frigid” and needs to be replaced. Replaced with what? Mutterrecht?
It couldn’t be that. Assertive women on the right are stripped of motherly attributions, their outward appearance mocked. DHS Secretary Kristi Noam has three children, too. She’s “ICE Barbie.” Don Trump Jr.’s now ex-fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is (not really) a “dominatrix” (which is fine as long as you’re a drag queen reading books to children at a public school library). And why wouldn’t they be mocked? Progressives think cosplaying porn stars and prostitutes makes a man a woman. Their ideal mother is the antithesis of Columbia, the republican icon devoted to rearing virtuous citizens prepared to defend constitutional democracy.
That’s the profound propagandistic utility of selectively elevating art and motherhood to symbols of political efficacy. More immediately, poetry and motherhood are elegant (i.e., crude) distractions from the relevant question: What radicalized Renée Good? What turned her into an attempted cop killer?
That’s a rhetorical question, of course, which is why progressives are selective in their pretentious wonderment over poetry and motherhood: the question answers itself. The depth of ideological distortion compels me to answer the question anyway.
freedom and reason 