2024 Olympia, WA -- On August 1, 2024, Angela Carini, an XX woman, and Imane Khelif, an XY intersex "woman," entered the ring for round one of their boxing match at the Paris Olympics. Less than a minute later, Miss Carini said enough and refused to fight.

Rational people, and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, are reasonably asking why this is allowed to happen?

Riley Gaines and Lia Thomas
The debate over this erupted into the public sphere when Lia Thomas, a man who identified as a woman, plowed past Riley Gaines in the 500 Yard Freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Division I Women's Swimming & Diving Championships.

Famously, Gaines went on to campaign against XY males competing against XX females in women's sports. Like most, she doesn't get it. Both Feminist Progressives and Christian Conservatives share credit with intersectional scolds and trans activists for making this to happen. Not allowing it to happen. Making it happen.

Decades ago, Betty Friedan claimed that the vast majority of women in America were suffering from clinical depression, and she blamed men and The Patriarchy™ for it. As we now know, Friedan, a Marxist, lied. There was no epidemic of clinical depression, which she coyly called "the problem that has no name."

Nonetheless, Christian Conservatives wrung their hands and dolefully asked what they could do to lift this burden from their pampered housewives.

Masculinity Toxic
During the ensuing decades Feminists denounced men and masculinity as toxic, hailed women as superior in every way, and proudly proclaimed that "anything men can do, women can do better."

Colleges and universities hastened to facilitate female enrollment, often by limiting male enrollment. They created curricula that, while providing no valuable training or marketable skills, appealed to women. And they turned out thousands of women trained to be activists in the exciting field of "Human Resource Management."

In 1980 I attended a lecture provided by the placement office at the University of Washington where the woman who ran the office explained how women could force employers to change from within by majoring in HR, infiltrate, and then screen new hires to keep out conservative-leaning men and women.

This was not a secret. They were very open about it. And Christian conservatives went along with it.

During all that time, Liberals, Classical Liberals and some Christian Conservatives, like Phyllis Schlafly, pushed back. But most Christian Conservative men were eager to be seen as caring for women, and women were too willing to reap the benefits, and so if there was any reaction from them at all, it was to scoff and jeer at those of us who gave warning and pushed back against their hate-male campaign.

Meanwhile, the Feminist Progressives accused any man who spoke out of being sexist, a misogynist, and mobilized feminist organizations, family courts and employers to cancel them.

Turd Flinging Monkey
By 1999 or 2000, after two years of publishing a 'zine and four or five years publishing a website pushing back against this nonsense, I wrote that this is one fight men can't win; it will have to be fought by women.

Fast forward several years to men vlogging on YouTube and one, who goes by Turd Flinging Monkey, made a similar observation. The compelling conundrum was, what will it take for women to rise up en masse to oppose the insane agenda of the Fascist Oligarchs and their Progressive puppets?

TFM, as he's often called, made the observation that women won't push back until it's in their best interests to do so. So, he suggested, start by going on strike against the sexual marketplace. That is, create a virtual shortage of men.

Millions of men have done so. Some did so consciously by embracing the "Men Going Their Own Way" lifestyle. MGTOW, as it's known, refuses any relationship that might drag them into family court. We might enter relationships with women, but marriage is out of the question because divorce courts and family law are utterly biased against men.

But millions more men -- the vast majority, in fact -- simply feel the juice ain't worth the squeeze, and would rather play video games.

Some are what Progressives in general and Feminists in particular disparagingly call Incels, or Involuntary Celibates: guys who can't get a date. That's true for some, but not even close for most. Many MGTOW men are high income, socially engaged, politically active, and successful.

But Progressives and Feminists must denigrate us because to do otherwise is to admit that we're winning. The clinical depression Betty Friedan called "the problem with no name" that was virtually nonexistent in the 1960s has, today, become pervasive among women.

Cat Ladies
J.D. Vance recently came under fire from the Left for saying the country is now run by "a bunch of childless cat ladies." He's right. Feminists spurred women to put jobs ahead of family. As George Gilder wrote in his 1973 book, Sexual Suicide," and the updated 1986 version, Men and Marriage, most women who followed the feminist prescription would eventually end up single and alone.

In other words, they would end up being cat ladies.

With the benefit of hindsight, what we now know is that many of them followed career paths that put them into positions of power, from which they can inflict their misery upon others.

As women have taken over many reins of power, Western civilization has slowly collapsed into chaos and decay. And Christian Conservatives not only let it happen, but helped them to do it. Yes, you did. After she retired, Rep. Patricia Schroeder chortled on TV how all she had to do to get a Feminist law passed was to tell Conservative men that it would help women.

Men are evil, women are innocent? Pass a law! Twenty percent of American women will be raped or sexually assaulted? Believe all women, pass a law! Never mind that Mary Koss, whose Rape Campus Survey study made that claim, did not, herself, believe all or even most women. The majority of women who participated in her study told her they had not been raped or sexually assaulted. She did not believe them and put them down as rape and assault victims.

Feminists marched downtown with their "Take Back the Night" marches screeching, "What Do We Want? Safe Streets! When Do We Want Them? Nowwwwwwwwwww!!!!!" Christian Conservative men rushed to pass more onerous laws against men and toxic masculinity.

Progressives and their "mostly peaceful" riots aside, how safe are our streets today? Social Media platforms like Next Door provide ample anecdotal evidence of how unsafe the streets have become.

Burdened by the Past
So here's us, riding the raggedy edge while women in spandex play super heroes as they beat up half a dozen beefy guys to refrains of, "You go, Grrl!" In response to that and the many other lies and fantasies imposed on us as fact, TFM suggested that men should identify as "trans" and turn out for women's sports to expose the lie.

That was almost 10 years ago. Since then, women like Riley Gaines were forced to publicly reject the Feminist lies that anything men can do, women can do better. That women are just as strong if not stronger than men. That women are superior in every way.

The Simple Truth
The simple truth is that there are some things women are better at than men, and other things that men are better at than women. We're different, we're supposed to acknowledge that difference, and allow our weaknesses to be complemented by the others' strengths.

On March 18, 2024, after listening to Riley Gaines on Joe Rogan's podcast, I sent her the following message on X. Did she read it? Dunno. Probably not. Nor would she much like what I had to say. Here's a version of what I wrote that has been edited for clarity:

Open Letter to Riley Gaines
Welcome to the Fight: It's About Time
Hi Riley, just finished listening to your interview with Rogan and was dismayed but also gratified by the parallels between what women are experiencing today, and what men experienced two generations ago.

I'm gratified that women are finally joining the fight. I've waited more than thirty years for that to happen. I'm dismayed because women should not have to experience systemic misogyny, and men should not have to experience systemic misandry.

In 1988 I set out to write, What Every Man Should Know about Feminist Issues: the Male-Positive Perspective.

In 1990 my manager at Microsoft, who had worked at Simon and Schuster, said she heard I was writing a book and asked the title. She liked the first part, but when she heard the second part, she got angry.

Systemic Misandry on the Rise
By the 80s and 90s systemic misogyny was already waning thanks to Classical Liberals. Despite this, women in general and feminists in particular were often vicious toward men as Feminists encouraged them to fear men. In places like Seattle, they did with good reason.

The mob-connected contract killer, Gary Ridgway, aka the Green River Killer, who was killing the independent street walkers who threatened the prostitution rings centered around the massage parlors, helped Feminists to poison the well.

Marilyn French's infamous quote from The Women's Room, "All men are rapists, that's all they are," was, in the Seattle area, taken as a statement of fact.

When my manager heard the title of my book (which I ended up publishing on my backlash website), she began looking for a reason to have me fired.

Then, with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas in the news, she took away a pending lateral promotion and put me on permanent probation for complimenting a coworker. My coworker said I had not sexually harassed her, but our manager didn't believe her.

A sales supervisor learned of the situation and offered to transfer me to work for him, but then the DOJ investigators found an email I had sent to Joachim Kempin (sales manager) warning him that the per processor OEM contracts violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Basically, the contract required PC manufacturers to pay Microsoft for Windows and Applications like Word and Excel even if they loaded IBM OS2 Warp or some other operating system, and other brands of applications like Lotus and Word Perfect.

At that point, Bill gave her the green light to fire me. They went further to black list me, which made it almost impossible for me to get another job. Eventually, I literally begged a temp agency to give me any work, and I went to work in a warehouse.

The Backlash! is born
I finished that book, hooked up with other men who either had run afoul of the Feminist Progressives or were Conservatives in the tradition of Russell Kirk, and we began publishing a 'Zine, with me doing all the (volunteer) publishing work.

That made me a target and when I published an article by one of the group that called out all the lies about men that were being spread by the Fake News, the Seattle Times sent a reporter to interview me.

It would be charitable to call it a hit piece. They took everything in the article out of context to portray us and me as vicious little boys who said mean things about women.

I also did a few TV talk shows and almost 200 radio talk shows. During the first TV talk show (Night Talk with Jane Whitney), I met Kerry Ellison, whose case in the 9th Circuit forced the legal system to recognize that different things affect women and men as hostile environment sexual harassment.

Kerry was shocked when the first thing I said was that I absolutely agreed with her case. Her male coworker did harass her.

The Seattle Times article scared the other guys, who had been paying for our publication, and they scattered. With no money to cover the cost of publishing the 'zine, in May of 1995 I set up my website, registered my first domain name, and had the domain active by June 1995.

All during that time I worked regular jobs because while, obviously, no Progressive or "Liberal" (but not really) publications or media would hire me, all the Conservatives were too cowardly to really and consistently stand up to the Second Wave Feminists.

Men Can't Win
There are no Third and Fourth Wave Feminists. Almost all the nonsense we see today can be traced directly back to Second Wave authors and activists, and I read almost all of them.

It was Classical Liberalism that won women rights. Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young disagree with me on this. Cathy told me that "Feminism has utility." For a rigorous writer, as Russians so often are, on this she has fallen short.

There was no help and fleeting at best support from Conservatives. Then in 1998, Rep. Patricia Schroeder retired and went on talk shows. When I heard her laugh how all she had to do to get Conservative politicians to support Feminist legislation, was to tell them it would benefit women, I knew there was nothing men could do.

In 1995 there was only one other website whose owner, Robert Sheaffer, said anything at all about politics. He started his website a few weeks before I started mine, and only had a couple posts that, later, would be called blog posts.

So by 1998 I was routinely getting almost a million people reading my blog. It was in 1999 or 2000 that, after thinking about what Pat Schroeder said, I wrote that the Feminists' Hate Male campaign could not be defeated by men, but had to be defeated by women.

Skipping over a lot of history, years later with this thought percolating around the web, a very intelligent and insightful guy making YouTube videos under the pseudonym, Turd Flinging Monkey, opined that the only way to wake women up was to bring it home to them.

One way, he said, was for men to claim they were trans women, and to join women's sports. Which brings us to you, Lia Thomas wearing a woman's swimsuit that bulges in the wrong places, and other men posing as women.

And just so you know, all the way back when I started my backlash website (named, of course, after Susan Faludi's absurd book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women in America), on my "About" page I explicitly stated that my intention was and is to stop the cycle of sexism that you can find, if you look for it, going back generations.

You're probably familiar with the work of Strauss and Howe focusing on generational cycles. There are many cycles in human civilizations. They researched one. There are others, including cycles of bigotry.

In 1989, having read John Naisbitt's 1982 book, Megatrends, and Robert Prechter's Elliot Wave book, I went looking, found them, and in discussions on Usenet with what, today, seems to me like a very unrefined view of cycles, was still able to come close to accurately forecasting the major turning points.

The Backlash Against Women
The backlash against women that Faludi claimed began while the Feminist Progressives were still barely getting started, is now well underway. Unless enough of us finally dig our heels in and say enough, it won't peak until the 2060s.

Will enough of us dig in our heels? Well, like you told Joe Rogan, until you personally were affected by it, you were just focused on being you.

That reminds me of one of Ayn Rand's essays, Why Businessmen Need Philosophy. Most women in the west were not very interested in how the efforts of the Feminist Progressives limited men, especially since they benefited.

Conservatives saw the disintegration of the family (promoted by Shulamith Firestone in her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex) and the plague of single mother households thanks to Progressive Family Courts and laws that forced fathers out of the household, but they wouldn't engage.

Why Should Men Care?
Now the proverbial worm has turned, women are finally starting to wake up, and the problem going forward will be to answer the question, "Why should men oppose the things that limit women when men benefit?"

At age 71, having been forced by Washington State's Progressive governor's "get jabbed or get fired" vaccine mandate to retire from my job saving taxpayers money, I serve as a (volunteer) tribal councilman for my tribe.

Even in this position I'm attacked by Progressives in general, and Feminist Progressives in particular. Most recently because I suggested that we issue a statement in opposition to "gender affirming care" for children.

After more than 30 years of being in a pitched battle against the various flavors of Progressives (i.e., Woke Communist-lite) compliments of the Cultural Marxists of the Frankfurt School, and more than 40 years pushing back against the Neocons (who are also Progressives), my skin has gotten very thick.

Keep at it, and yours will be, too. Welcome to the war. The good news is, all the dumb cycles that have plagued us might be about to terminate as our true history and what has really been going on in the world for the past several thousand years comes to light.

Regards, Rod Van Mechelen

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Regards

Rod Van Mechelen

Rod Van Mechelen is a Rand Paul Republican (aka Classical Liberal) who lives in Olympia, WA. He serves on the Cowlitz Indian Tribal Council, was a Washington State delegate to the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, and founded The Backlash! @ backlash.com in 1995 to expose and oppose misandry and cultural Marxism. He lives in a monolithic dome home.