Guns N‘ Rosé

not to be confused with Guns N' Roses, the name of a Rock Band, is the title of a book by Juliane Schäuble and Annett Meiritz. The authors are USA correspondents of two German newspapers, the Tagesspiegel and the Handelsblatt, respectively.

The two ladies wrote the book in German about Konservative Frauen erobern die USA (Conservative women conquer the US).

On page 13, the authors explain the title of their book: In 2020, when a (small) wave of Republican women was elected into Congress, the glossy magazine Marie Claire declared 2020 the year of the "conservative pink wave. "Pink = Rosé? 

Michele Fiore is posing on her 2nd Amendment calendar for 2016.
Presently, she is the Nevada Republican Party national committeewoman
responsible for fund-raising in the State.
She isn't mentioned in the book but is simply here as an eye-catcher.

In fact, today, more women are engaged in the GOP than ever before.

Red Baron follows American politics rather closely but has difficulties appreciating all those ambitious conservative ladies mentioned in the book with their attitudes and remarks. How will this book be successful in the German market? 

On February 1, Red Baron introduced the book at a Stammtisch of the Freiburg-Madison-Gesellschaft. While the information below was mainly new to my listeners, my American friends may find the revelations boring.

The Three F

Conservative women defend the traditional American values of faith, family, and freedom. These three American "f" remind me of the three German "K" Kinder, Küche, and Kirche propagated in the Second Reich before 1914.

 

When you equal church with faith and children with family, the home activity kitchen is replaced by freedom. In the States, the third freedom is the traditional value, although I assume that the founding fathers (!) were intolerant in matters of the third "f."

Faith, or rather adherence to one of the many churches in the States, is one traditional value conservative women defend with teeth and claws. 

Overall, they are determined to save the country from what they call the "radical left" by taking up power, and many of the conservative women deliberately are radical to be taken seriously by the target audience. 

They are united by a fundamental distrust of what they see as an "encroaching" government; they reject abortion ("pro-choice"), "cancel culture," and "wokeness;" they also, as they emphasize, stand behind the police and the forces of order. And they do not want a welfare state, which for them is synonymous with socialism or even communism. In this way, they live the antithesis of progressive feminism, represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the left-wing icon of the Democrats, or Vice President Kamala Harris.

Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House and supporter of Trump's claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, said, "Women are more energetic than men. They're probably smarter, too. That kind of woman who has come a long way has worked harder than the average man. The view is gaining ground that women can be more persuasive advocates for conservative causes than men."

Red Baron didn't know that after decades of debate, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which both chambers of Congress approved in 1972 and which guarantees racial and gender equality in the US, has still not been ratified by all States. 

Opponents are mainly conservative women who feed the fairy tale of the young career woman who selfishly chases her individual dreams, scares off all suitors, and ends up depressed, bitter and, divorced, lonely without having had children. Why do conservative women see the traditional division of roles between men and women not as oppression but as freedom?

Here are some of those active conservative women:

©Huffpost

Ronna McDaniel (49), Republican national chairwoman (RNC) since 2016 and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is supposed to put the GOP back on the winning track after the recent defeats. Formerly a strong supporter of Trump, her motto is not to anger the ex-president but also not to actively support him.

©Stern

GOP hopeful Nikki Haley (51), former first female governor of South Carolina and United States ex-ambassador to the United Nations, is also following an irritating zigzag, building herself up as a possible candidate for the 2024 presidential election. She said, "The time for being nice is over; that doesn't mean we must be disrespectful. I wear heels - and it's not a fashion statement. I use them to kick. But I always kick with a smile."

Schooling

Schools are always a famous arena for arguments about children's education. For example, one maxim of conservative women is, "Our children see so much garbage on social media. Reading in school should give them beautiful ideas for life. Schools have that in their own hands and must live up to that responsibility." So, it comes to cleaning up school libraries.

 
Already in the early 2000s, there was a backlash against the Harry Potter series because strict Christians sensed a glorification of Satanism and witchcraft. Civil rights activists, in turn, took action against racist stereotypes in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men or Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

©KABB

Stacy Langton (34), the spokeswoman for School Board Mums, revolts with the Mommy Warriors against curricula, mask mandates, and vaccinations. They take action against what they claim as "anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-white" textbooks. In transgender school workshops, children are "taught to question whether they were born a girl or a boy."

 

Supreme Court

©Der Tagesspiegel

The fight for the right way America should steer has reached the Supreme Court. While the late and oldest justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, championed non-discrimination in employment and education, equal pay, and legal and safe access to abortion, her youngest successor, Amy Coney Barrett (51), a Catholic mother of seven, embodies the opposite model. Her supporters celebrate her as a preserver of traditional values.

Concerned Women for America (CWFA) supported Coney Barrett in her bid for office. They chartered a tour bus ("Women for Amy") to promote the judge. CWFA was formed in 1979 in response to the leftist women's movement. 

The association's goals have hardly changed; it seeks to "protect and promote biblical values among all citizens" and to reverse "the decline of moral values." The 5,000,000-member organization is closely networked with Republicans; grassroots mobilization is its strength. CWFA has hundreds of prayer chapters across the country. It sends a delegation to Congress every month to keep the social conservative palette on the agenda: Abortion, pornography, contraception, stem cell research, etc.

While the worldwide trend is "pro-choice" abortion, the Supreme Court has since overturned Roe v. Wade and granted the states the carve-out of the right to abortion with the result that many states are answering "productive freedom" with "pro-life."

Abortion

©Abby Johnson

Abby Johnson (42), a radical anti-abortion activist, wants sex education in schools to be about more than contraception. She tells young audiences, "You must consciously choose your sex partners; you may be fathering a life with them. At school, I saw many disgusting pictures of genital warts and sex positions reenacted with stuffed animals. But no one told me about children with disabilities; no one taught me how to raise a family responsibly."

      

Influencer

©The big game hunting blog

At age 19, Kendall Jones (47) was on the German daily Bild, grinning at the camera in photos with lions, elephants, and antelope shot beside her.

28 years later, Jones is an influencer and sits on a stage at Turning Point USA (TPUSA), the most prominent conservative college organization. Year after year, more female than male students enroll at the approximately 4,000 universities in the United States; in the 2020/21 academic year, nearly 60 percent of all freshmen were women. 

So TPUSA regularly holds a conference exclusively for female members, the Young Women's Leadership Summit. These students demonstrate female empowerment. "Kendall is just herself; she pees in the woods.

In her allocation, Kendall says, "It's more important than ever to be authentic and show the left that we're not going away." She advises the attendants, "Don't be too sexy; you don't have to squeeze every body part into the camera. Pursue a purpose, a goal. Find a subject you're good at and own it. You don't have to know all the details, but you do have to be convincing." This is pretty hollow and superficial. But can you really blame the female influencer? Aren't they following the very concept that men use to rise to the top: "Fake it till you make it"?

Deep Country vs. Big City

The Corona measures have led to a gigantic wave of radicalization in conservative rural areas of America - and a strengthening of the Republican Party.

 
People in rural America feel that their way of life is under attack. Be it because they are forced to be vaccinated, forbidden to attend church services, or have their guns taken away from them and the joy of eating meat spoiled.

They don't want to be patronized; they want to decide for themselves because they believe they know the risks better than politicians and activists who live far away and have long been alienated from rural life. The plan to enforce the same rules for all states drives many of them to the barricades.

©Twitter

Kristi Noem (51), Governor of South Dakota, promises to defend Americans' "God-given rights." In her book Not My First Rodeo, Lessons from the Heartland, she stages her "conservative feminism" from the countryside as the antithesis of liberal big-city feminism, "These days it seems like it's all about gendering. I'm baffled about who's still a girl and who's a boy. God was never unsure about that."

©Kim Reynolds

Kim Reynolds (63) also emphasizes the conservative idea of freedom. When the Iowa governor announced in early March 2022 that she would run for a second term, she declared, "As long as I'm governor, Iowa will be a state where you can live your life in freedom and not wake up every morning worrying about what the government will do next to you, to your business, to your children." She was reelected.

African Americans

©Winsome Sears

I couldn't believe there was a group called "African Americans for Presidential Reelection." One passionate Trump supporter is former US Marine Winsome Sears (58), lieutenant governor of Virginia. For her, the most critical issues for black women are not "Black Lives Matter" or the legacy of slavery but the economy, education, upward mobility, inflation, and the surge in crime in American cities during the pandemic. Sears belongs to the fastest-growing group of gun owners: black women.

 

©C-SPAN

Candace Owens (33), an American conservative author, talk show host, political commentator, producer, and activist, sees the Republicans as the Freedom Party and takes a hard line on Democrats, "Republicans freed the slaves in the Civil War. Republicans were the first to elect black Americans to Congress. No matter how you slice it, Democrats can in no way claim to be the party of inclusion. Since the 1960s, we have been the Democratic Party's most loyal constituency. But it has since become clear to many blacks that our relationship with Democrats is best described by the words' abuse by neglect.'"

         

Latinos

©Pinterest

Anna Paulina Luna (33) has Mexican roots, was poor as a child, her mother a single parent, and her father a drug addict. As a young woman, she joined the Air Force. Her campaign page reads, "She serves her country, not herself."

The negative appeal of "socialism" drove a large number of Latino voters to Republicans. Diane Hirsch, a 72-year-old former nurse carrying a "Latinos for Trump" sign, says, "I don't want socialist communists running our country. We Latinos are often very conservative and care about family values and personal responsibility."

The fact that social benefits are paid for by the government doesn't fit the "American spirit," and Republicans condemn Obamacare as the maximum government intervention.

On Capitol Hill

Political scientist Catherine Wineinger wrote, "Women in both parties, like their male counterparts, are more ideologically extreme than in decades past. Now, there are only about two dozen Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill who count themselves in the centrist camp; in the 1970s, there were well over a hundred."

Infernal duo Lauren and Marjorie (©WJCL)

There is this right-wing radical-women duo on Capitol Hill. Marjorie Taylor Greene (48) and Lauren Boebert (36) are here heckling President Biden during his State of the Union message.

©NYT

Newly elected Lauren Boebert, the congresswoman from Colorado and communications director for the Republican right-wing "Freedom Caucus," caused a stir before entering Congress by announcing she planned to carry a loaded revolver in her purse. 

Then, she voted for Jim Jordan as House speaker until the 14th ballot. Only a call from Trump changed her mind, so Kevin McCarthy eventually became House majority leader on the 15th ballot.

©Marjorie Taylor Green

Lauren's crony Marjorie Taylor Greene, a conspiracy fantasist, is celebrated at the grassroots level for her extremism, with donations flowing lavishly to the right Republican from Georgia.

©Marjorie Taylor Green

The list of Marjorie's scandals is long: she paid tens of thousands of dollars in fines rather than wear a mask in Congress and supports the far-right movement QAnon.

           

Trump's Party

The Republican National Committee (RNC) winter meeting in Salt Lake City in early February 2022 will go down in history as the meeting at which the GOP finally surrendered to Trump.

Liz Cheney chairs the House Select Committee.
on the January 6 Attack (©Süddeutsche Zeitung)

What was striking at the Salt Lake City meeting was that women spoke more harshly than men, even unforgivingly, about Liz Cheney (56). Is this because women are particularly fond of criticizing other women, as is often said?

In July 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Cheney to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Two months later, she was made vice chair of the committee. That made her a traitor in the eyes of many Republicans - and a lone hero to Trump critics trying to save the party's brand core.

Punishment was swift to come. On August 16, 2022, Cheney lost renomination in Wyoming's Republican primary to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman in a landslide, garnering just 28.9% of the vote. 

Recently, Cheney has said that she intends to be "the leader, one of the leaders, in a fight to help to restore our party" and that she may be interested in a presidential run., but the Trump people refer to people like Cheney as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only).

Ultimately, I asked ChatGTP, "Do conservative women conquer the US?"      

Here is what the software artificially and intelligently had to say: Conservative women certainly play an increasingly important role in the United States. While there is still a long way to go before true gender parity is achieved, conservative women are increasingly gaining influence in politics, business, and other areas. They are also making their voices heard in the media, and their presence in the public sphere is growing. However, it is too early to say that conservative women have conquered the US.

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