Sept. 6, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:59
3402 Phyllis Schlafly: The Lost Interview
Conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly passed away on September 5th, 2016 at the age of 92. I had the privilege of speaking to Phyllis several times, but a discussion we had in June 2013 while I was undergoing cancer treatment had been "lost in the shuffle" until now. RIP Phyllis Schlafly.Phyllis Schlafly was a constitutional lawyer, founder and president of Eagle Forum and an author of many books, including A Choice Not An Echo and Who Killed The American Family. For more information, please go to: http://www.phyllisschlafly.com and http://www.eagleforum.orgThe Conservative Case for Trumphttp://www.amazon.com/dp/1621576280/?tag=freedradio-20A Choice Not an Echo: 50th Anniversary Editionhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/162157315X/?tag=freedradio-20Who Killed the American Family?http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938067525/?tag=freedradio-20The Flipside of Feminismhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/1935071270/?tag=freedradio-20No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedomhttp://www.amazon.com/dp/1621570126/?tag=freedradio-20Feminist Fantasieshttp://www.amazon.com/dp/1890626465/?tag=freedradio-20Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
I am sad to bring to you the news of the death of conservative genius Phyllis Schlafly at the age of 92.
She actually died just a few minutes drive from where she was born.
What a powerhouse this woman was.
She raced her undergraduate.
She finished her master's degree in a matter of months.
She was invited into a PhD program by a university that didn't even allow women into the PhD program at the time because they all saw her brilliance.
She self-published a book out of her own garage called The Choice Not an Echo, which sold over 3 million copies.
A bestseller these days is about 5,000 copies.
She sold over three million copies prior to being able to post it on Twitter.
And she founded the Eagle Forum with over 100,000 members.
She was a prolific author and she wrote columns and she was a radio host.
She testified before Congress countless times.
She wrote on military matters.
And in her 50s while raising six children, by the way, she was Illinois Mother of the Year.
She was testifying and people were saying, wow, you're not even a lawyer.
She's like, OK, fine.
So in her 50s, she went back to law school and became a lawyer again while raising six children.
She was passionately devoted to children's education.
Her children all seemed to have turned out wonderfully.
She actually wrote a book on phonics and said that her greatest dream was for children, all to be able to read by the time they went to school.
She was a truly astonishing force of nature and has been at the center of I was privileged and honored to have three conversations with Phyllis Schlafly over the years.
Two of them have been released.
The third one, well, as you'll see from the video, I was undergoing treatment for a lymphoma at the time, and in the chaos and exhaustion of treatment, must have got lost in the shuffle.
But I'm very pleased to bring it to you now.
And of course, to Phyllis Schlafly, thank you so much for the conversations.
Thank you so much for the inspiration.
And rest in peace.
Hello, everybody.
It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I have Phyllis Schlafly on the phone.
She is an American constitutional lawyer, activist, author, founder of the Eagle Forum, and somebody who I find enormously energetic, concentrated, brave, controversial in things that I'm not sure why they're controversial, but anyway.
So thank you so much, Phyllis, for taking the time today.
Thank you.
Very happy to join you.
Okay, so, of course, one of the big topics that has been somewhat controversial for you is your critique of modern feminism.
But before we get into that, you've pointed out that feminism is a word that is notoriously slippery to define, and so people will make it mean whatever they want to mean, usually as an ad hominem against anyone who's questioning its tenets.
So I was wondering if you could give a brief overview of the issues you have with the sort of post-60s Well, there's no way to agree on it, because the word has been co-opted by the radical feminist movement, and they have a very specific definition for what they're after.
When they started out, they called themselves the Women's Liberation Movement.
And you have to ask, what did they want to be liberated from?
It's pretty clear they wanted to be liberated from home, husband, family, and children.
So they are anti-marriage.
As Gloria Steinem said, a woman becomes a half-person when she gets married.
A semi-person, she said.
And they are against the expectation, society's expectation, that mothers should look after their own babies.
They consider that that is part of the oppression by the patriarchy.
And they're all the time talking about how unfair and mean the patriarchy is to women.
All of which is nonsense because American women are the most fortunate class of people who ever lived on the face of the earth.
One of the things that struck me when I was in college and studying some women's issues was that In the 1930s, 1940s, even into the 1950s, you could openly talk about in America A Marxist or socialist or left-wing agenda and call it by what it was.
But then after the Stalinist purchase and concentration camps were revealed, it became more difficult to talk about, openly talk about a socialist or Marxist agenda.
And it seems to me that these movements then split into radical feminism and environmentalism as a way of continuing that same large government socialist agenda, but without actually having to call it what it was.
What do you think of that rough thesis?
Well, I think that's right.
And of course, a lot of the leftists like to argue by epithet instead of by facts.
And they would just prefer to call people names and to deal with what we're really talking about.
But after the collapse of the Berlin Wall came down and Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, These left-wingers, as you said, did move in, I think, largely into the environmentalist movement, but also into the feminist movement.
Now, the feminists were always connected with the communist view, because feminism is against marriage.
You know, the one conservative professor at Harvard, whose name is Mansfield, wrote a very fine book called Manliness, And he identified the feminist movement as anti-men, anti-marriage, anti-masculine, anti-motherhood, and anti-morality.
And that's all very true.
And so the American people who don't really understand the definition very well nevertheless do not want to be called feminists.
All polls show that the big majority of American people do not want to be called feminists.
Right.
And it also seems to me that we have a fundamental choice in society that we're only seeing the after effects of now, which is you either have strong families or you have an ever-increasing government, an ever-escalating levels of government power.
and that anything which fundamentally attacks or weakens the marriage bond and particularly the bond between parents and children is going to sort of inevitably lead to a bigger government.
And it seems, I don't know if it's a conscious plan or not, but it seems kind of clever that if you undermine the family, you get the big government agenda without ever having to explicitly state that that's your goal.
Well, it's very smart of you to recognize that because you and I have been talking about that, but the American people don't seem to understand it.
We had, a few decades ago, A society which was based on the nuclear family.
That is the father, husband, provider, and the mother, who was the homemaker, who raised the children.
And that is what the many forces, particularly the feminists, have been trying to eliminate.
But when you had the nuclear family, people didn't need government to butt in their life.
They didn't need all these busybodies telling us what to do.
They didn't need to provide free lunches and breakfasts to the kids because their parents fixed them a sandwich to take to school with them.
If you want limited government, then the way to do it is to have strong nuclear families where the father has his role of...
Of supporting his family and keeping them together.
And once that disappeared, and of course, the courts played their role in kind of detaching children from marriage.
And then you had this growing illegitimacy in this country.
It's now running at 41% in the United States.
And when the woman is having babies and doesn't have a husband, Right.
And of course, by encouraging women to go into the workforce, it's interesting because when you have children, if you decide to go and work, it's not like your children's needs suddenly vanish into thin air.
What happens is somebody else, some other institution, some group, assuming you don't have an extended family, and as more women went to work, communities as a whole dissolved.
I mean, the role of women in stay-at-home moms in keeping communities together and doing charitable work and volunteer work is huge.
And it seems that somebody else has to pick up the slack.
And generally then what happens is the more responsible people in society end up having to pick up the slack for the less responsible people in society.
Whatever you subsidize grows, whatever you tax decreases, which I think is one of the reasons why we see such escalations in, I don't know, people say non-traditional families, but it seems to me just dysfunctional families.
Yes, of course, you're absolutely right.
And you have correctly identified the relationship between the decline in marriage and the nuclear family and big government.
Because somebody's got to look after the children, and if the father isn't providing the support, then big brother government is going to do it.
And that is what Obama has encouraged.
He was more and more people dependent on government, and he has all kinds of plans to help single women.
They're not helping the married women who are raising their own children.
But I will point out that getting the women out of the home and into the workforce It was the major goal of the feminists from the very start of Betty Friedan's book in 1963.
And they told women that the care of the little children was simply not a worthy occupation for an educated woman.
And the only way you could have your own identity and be a real person was to go out and get a job in the workforce.
So, that's what they've been promoting all these years, and it had nothing to do with economic need.
It had to do with the vision that the feminists had for the role of women in society.
And then, of course, with the free trade policies that has shipped millions of American jobs overseas, it's very difficult or impossible for the blue-collar men to support a full-time home working anymore.
So free trade has been giving to the feminists one of their, and their major goal, getting the women, getting the wives and mothers out of the home and into the workforce.
Right, right.
The other interesting thing too, I think, is the degree to which it seems hard to imagine how, as you point out, one of the most privileged groups in history, the American women, how is it possible that they were able to be informed in a believable way that they were some of the most subjugated people around.
I mean, how did that not smash up against the empiricism of their lives and just look ridiculous?
Well, that's a good question, but I would say the feminists, like the communists, were very clever at infiltration and the Gromsky effort to take over the culture Which is the way he thought to destroy capitalism and a free society.
And so they took over the media and they took over academia.
And I always urge young people not to take any women's studies courses.
And some of them will tell me, well, it was required.
And the women's studies department is completely biased.
They're anti-man and anti-masculine, anti-marriage and anti-motherhood and that's just very unfortunate and it's a constant ding-ding-ding of propaganda that's coming at the young people.
Right, right.
Now, I've read some statistics that say that the growth in the welfare state is largely driven by a single motherhood and of course, as you probably remember, I guess a decade or two ago, Dan Quayle actually talked about some problems with single motherhood and it effectively ended any kind of impact he was going to have on the American political scene.
The single motherhoods have become like a sainted group like public school teachers.
You can't criticize, you can't question and so on.
But it seems that the facts are just stacking up so enormously about the negative effects in general on children of being raised in single parent or single mom households.
Do you think that we still have enough respect for empiricism for us to reevaluate the role of dual parents versus single parents in the productive raising of children?
Well, that's what I'm hoping.
I'm working on a new book called Who Killed the American Family?
And it's hard to find and to set forth a solution.
There are a number of publications that have done articles called Dan Quayle was right, and of course he was right, but the fact that the media destroyed him over that argument that he made simply shows the power of the feminists in the media.
And the men are afraid to fight him.
I'm trying to encourage men to get the courage to Stand up to these feminists and treat them like the men they say they want to be.
It's extremely unfortunate the way the feminists have dominated the media.
Let me mention another thing.
What they're doing is so contrary to human nature.
I think mother nature is still winning, but in the minds of people, But they're crying around about this so-called gender gap in wages, where women get only 77 cents of what men are getting the dollar for.
And it's so ridiculous because we don't believe in equal pay.
We believe in equal pay for equal work.
And the men are doing more work than working long hours, and they just ignore that.
But they're now discovering...
That there are a lot of women who really like the gender gap because women believe in hypergamy.
That means they want to marry men who are making more money than they are.
So that will give them the opportunity to opt out of the workforce if they have a baby or if they just simply get tired of all the stress and the long hours of working in the workforce.
What the feminists are doing is completely contrary to human nature, but they're trying to erase everything masculine and promote the interchangeability of the sexes.
This announcement this week that they're going to put women in military combat and some of the toughest fighting is just so wrong and so bad, and I have no respect for the men or the military or the politicians who have made those decisions.
Because a real man doesn't send a woman out to do his fighting for it.
Well, the other thing I wanted to mention as well, you've had a very interesting argument about one of the reasons why women who want to work, because to me, if a woman wants to go and have a job and doesn't want to be a wife and doesn't want to have kids, you know, live and let live.
Everybody can make their own choices.
Who's to say what's best for some other individual in particular?
But they wanted all the women to go into the workforce and you've made I think a very interesting argument that I wanted to introduce to my listeners about one of the reasons why ambitious women wanted all the other women to stop supporting their husbands and go into the workforce.
I wonder if you could repeat that argument here.
Well, are you talking about the women's complaint that the men they're in competition with in the workforce I may have a wife at home and that gives the men an advantage that the women don't have.
And they're trying to wipe that out.
That's one of the reasons why they hate the full-time homemaker.
They think that she gives an advantage to the man in the workforce that the women don't have.
Right.
Well, I can certainly say that I'm able to do this interview because my wife is here with my daughter.
So even in little things like that, it can make the world of difference.
And one of the things that I remember, again, when I was in college studying some of this stuff, you know, I approached it with...
I really wanted to approach it with an open-minded...
Well, what were you doing taking some course in women's studies?
Well, I wasn't taking a course in women's studies, but unfortunately, I have a master's in history, and you can't avoid women's issues in history.
I mean, that stuff, it's not like you have to take a dedicated women's course.
It's just everywhere you turn, and you have to sort of process it.
And I remember one of the things...
I think we're good to go.
They always chose left-wing policies at the expense of women.
That seemed almost universal.
Some of the female heroes that I had when I was younger, Margaret Thatcher, Ann Coulter came along a little bit later, Ayn Rand, yourself of course.
When you talk to feminists about women who've had incredible success but who come generally from the right, You seem to get this torrent of negativity.
And so it doesn't matter that you and Ayn Rand and Margaret Thatcher and Ann Coulter, it doesn't matter that they're women, what matters is that they're on the right.
In other words, the left-wing paradigm is trumping what the gender politics are supposed to be, which means it shouldn't be called feminism, it should be called leftism.
I mean, that seems, because that's where their highest value is.
Yes, and the original ones had Marcus' training, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Others had Marxist training.
That's where they're coming from.
But you make a very good point, and part of it is one of the worst things about feminism is the attitude that they impose on the young women.
And a major part of that attitude is that in this oppressive patriarchy, women cannot succeed.
They do not believe in successful women.
You never hear them talking about Margaret Thatcher or Sarah Palin or Condoleezza Rice or any of the really successful women in our society because they don't believe that women can be successful.
We are oppressed and ground down into the ground by this patriarchy.
And so never do they exalt a successful woman because they just can't believe it.
The other thing that seems surprising to me about the feminist and the environmental to some degree, their approach to have a problem, pass a law, have a problem, make a government agency, have a problem, expand the power of the state.
The vast majority of state edicts are, in the end, of course, enforced by an almost exclusively male police force.
If there's some tax increase and you don't pay it, then the cops will come and arrest you.
If the woman wants alimony and the man doesn't pay, then she has to go to the largely male enforcers, the cops, the courts, and so on, to get this.
How is that not appealing to the patriarchy to get resources for women?
It seems...
I mean, it seems like it makes Cinderella look like some feminist hero because they're basically saying, well, maybe I married the wrong guy, he ran off, I need money, so I'm going to go and get a bunch of lawyers who are mostly men and a bunch of cops who are mostly men to go and get the money for me and bring it to me.
So it seems that if you say, well, there's this patriarchy and that's really bad, but then you want all these laws, aren't you just setting up an actually much more brutal patriarchy in its place?
Well, you're asking the feminists to be consistent.
And they're only consistent in hating men, not what they demand that they do.
And I've pointed out that they're crying around when they're married, that the men are not doing half of the dishes and the laundry and the diaper care, but once they divorce him and kick him out, they claim only a woman is capable of handling the child, and all the father is good for is sending a check.
And it's a complete reversal of what they believe about the duties that make a household run and care for a baby.
Now where do you think we are in our culture as a whole?
It seems to me that particularly from the conservative right there are coming some very pro-family arguments backed up by some distressing but compelling statistics about the effects of family breakup on children's development and moral and mental happiness.
Where do you think we are in this – I hate to say it's a battle, but it kind of feels like a battle, this race, this battle for big government or strong families.
Where do you think we are?
Are we at some kind of tipping point?
Are we going to turn this thing around?
Well, it certainly is a battle, and we certainly have gone a long way down the wrong road.
And you can see that with the high illegitimacy, the breakup in marriage, the people living on Alone, the people who are dependent on government today.
I grew up during the Great Depression, and we didn't have all these getting handouts, and we grew up to be the greatest generation.
So I think we're a long way down the wrong road.
I wish I had the solution.
I am trying to, you know, we ought to cut off the welfare.
We, for example, ought to cut off the college loans.
I work my way through college.
I work in a 48-hour week.
I do not think the taxpayers are obligated to provide college education to kids, and so many of them can't even get jobs.
And it leads them to live a party life when they go to college instead of working for it.
And you find now that the college loans are a big deterrent to marriage because a boy will check out the credit worthiness before he lets some romantic A relationship developed because he doesn't want to take on the burden of a college loan.
So there are all kinds of forces that are working against marriage, and I wish you'd give me some good solutions to this.
I'm trying to figure out some, but one of them is you just ought to cut off all of these incentives to illegitimacy.
And I think since the American people say they believe in marriage, We shouldn't be putting more money out there to incentivize illegitimacy, which is what the Obama administration uses the taxpayers' money to do.
Yeah, of course, the challenge is that 41% illegitimacy, as you've quoted, this is a huge and highly motivated voting bloc for politicians to appeal to who they cross at their peril.
And so that becomes a challenge in a democracy, which has largely become less about the rule of law and more about the handing out of ill-gotten gain in some medieval format.
So it is a challenge.
I think it has to be a moral appeal.
I mean, one of the things that we as a culture have always said in the West is we love our children, our children are everything, the children are the future and so on.
And I think just trying to connect people to the values they espouse and say, okay, if that's true, if children are everything, if the children are the future and so on, then gosh, at least for the first five years, you know, stay home and spend time with them.
I mean, children are designed to be with their parents.
Isn't it weird that we have to say that in the 21st century, such an obvious biological fact like children are designed to spend time with their parents?
It's weird.
It's like defending property rights.
I mean, after the communism of the 20th century, still having to defend property rights feels weird.
So if we just remind people that if we live by the values we talk about, things will go a lot better.
But if we are hypocritical with our values, things are just going to keep getting worse.
Well, it's a very good point, and it's amazing that some of these propositions that you and I have been discussing are even controversial today.
The men have got to learn to stand up to these feminist women and the bad propaganda and the bad advice they are giving.
Well, and I think that your advice to treat women as equals to men as the feminist one has always been my policy.
I mean, to say, well, if I would have chatted this way with a man, I'll chat this way with a woman.
If I would confront a man on his errors as I see them, I will also confront a woman on – I mean, that to me is the kind of egalitarianism that gives the most respect for women.
But the idea we have to build these fences around women's sensitivities and treat them differently just seems – So retrograde, so medieval.
It's just not the way I think that you deal with another human being, whether male or female, with respect.
It's just to give them your opinion, your arguments, bring facts to bear, and treat them with the respect of an intellectual equal.
But I found that quite often when I do that, some responses are not generally very positive.
I was watching some wildlife program on PBS one night, And they were showing some real bears in Alaska in their natural habitat.
And, you know, the male bear is about 30% bigger than the female bear.
He's a big monster.
And they showed this female bear who paced off a little area for her fishing so she could feed her cubs.
And then you saw this big male bear wanted to encroach on her territory.
And it was so funny to watch because the male and female bear faced off against each other just like boxers in a ring.
And they glared at each other and they kind of moved a little bit back and forth.
And after a bit, this monster male bear just hung his head and walked away.
It is not natural for men to fight women and the feminists have taken advantage of that.
Well, I really, really do appreciate your time.
I know you're a busy and highly productive lady.
You mentioned you're working on a book, Who Killed the American Family?
When is that due?
Well, I hope later this year.
I need some solutions.
If you could give me some solutions, I'd like to have them.
I will drop a few thoughts and send them along to you, and you can use them however you see fit.
But it is a huge challenge.
I mean, in the democratic paradigm, whenever you get a big entrenched voting base, it's almost impossible to dislodge that.
And also because, you know, I view the welfare state like a cast on someone's arm.
It makes everyone kind of weaker.
The things that we as a culture have done, overthrowing slavery, ending Nazism, fighting communism, these were monstrous tasks.
I think of the work that you had going through college, firing machine guns 48 hours a week on a night shift and then getting up to go to college and then getting your law degree when people said, oh, you need a law degree to talk about law.
This is all very impressive, energetic, powerful stuff.
But it seems that the more we end up with the government doing things for us, sending us money, setting up programs for us, we become like an arm in a cost.
We just atrophy and wither away.
And one of the reasons it's so hard to take away these programs is because… Everything that used to be there before those programs, the friendly societies, the charity work, the welfare, the local charitable welfare that mostly women did when they were at home, that's all atrophied and gone away.
And so we feel like we're just opening up a net with no other safety net below it.
So I sort of encourage people to attempt to replicate government social programs in their own neighborhoods.
Because this stuff's going to end.
Mathematically, the numbers just can't continue.
I mean, the government's going to hit a wall and be unable to spend money the way it has been.
And it's my hope that they're going to have some local charitable safety nets to help people in this transition.
But we will be all surprised at what incredible strength of character and fiber we can discover when the cast falls away.
We shouldn't be scared of that, but we should almost welcome it.
