Douglas Wilson, the Moscow, Idaho-based patriarch and recent Pentagon guest, assured his followers this week that repealing the Nineteenth Amendment remains on his vision board, despite being temporarily deprioritized behind much larger theocratic fish.
The announcement arrives as a profound disappointment to those of us who have followed Wilson’s overarching project—a sprawling, multi-platform performance piece encompassing a publishing house, a liberal-arts college, and an aesthetically barren streaming service—which has long suffered from a certain narrative bloat. In his recent pivot toward the total erasure of women from the civic sphere, one detects a familiar structural precariousness; we are reminded simultaneously—though I suppose I must spell this out for those unfamiliar with the syllabus—of the unfinished, agonizingly dense architectural folios of Vincenzo Scamozzi, the interminable agricultural interludes that disrupt the emotional momentum of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and, perhaps most acutely, the desperate mid-season pacing issues that plagued Xzibit’s early-aughts MTV vehicle Pimp My Ride. Wilson, it seems, has similarly overpromised on the chassis of his utopia while entirely neglecting the transmission.
When pressed on the glaring omission of female disenfranchisement from his immediate syllabus, Wilson famously deflected, noting that his movement has bigger fish to fry; this is a pedestrian aquatic metaphor that, frankly, betrays the limits of his rhetorical imagination. To casually suggest reverting to a system where we vote by household—a mechanism he claims to have successfully beta-tested within the microscopic terrarium of his own Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches—is to present an ideological framework so derivative it borders on pastiche. It is one thing to construct a patriarchal theocracy; it is quite another to execute it with such a glaring lack of avant-garde panache.
That this tedious little franchise now counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth among its devotees—culminating in a February Pentagon prayer service that played like a dreary, low-budget community-theater staging of the Council of Trent—only underscores the banality of Wilson's current era. We, the audience, are expected to wait patiently for the promised revocation of basic constitutional liberties, as though the systematic dismantling of the twentieth century were merely a stretch goal on an overcrowded Kickstarter campaign.
We are currently locked into a grueling production schedule for the new media slate, and frankly, stripping the franchise from half the population is a logistical nightmare that completely ruins the narrative arc of our winter catalogue.
Ultimately, Wilson’s failure to immediately enact his Nineteenth Amendment repeal reveals a creator who is profoundly overwhelmed by the scope of his own worldbuilding. One can only hope that, once he has finished frying his proverbial fish, he will return to the task of subjugating the electorate with a renewed sense of editorial discipline; until then, we are left with a profoundly uneven body of work that demands submission but rarely earns our applause.