Saw a story out of Pakistan and it is similar to many stories I’ve read over the past years – teenage Christian girl (13 in this case) is kidnapped by a Muslim man, sexually assaulted, forced to convert to Islam and then “marry” the man. In a rather sad, last echo of British rule there was a court case about it: going through the motions, as it were. The court ruled for the Muslim. These cases are usually decided by a few things:
- How intimidated the court is (the man brought something like 150 male friends to let the court know how it would go if it ruled incorrectly).
- Statements allegedly from the victim claiming she’s happy with it (this is coerced and the girl can’t actually testify in a Muslim court).
- Because this is what you can do if you’re a Muslim male when dealing with non-Muslims in a Muslim-majority country.
But don’t get too hung up on the Muslim aspect of it. What happened here is the common run of humanity. The strong take what they can, the weak endure what they must. This is what the world is like – except in places where Christianity is the majority worldview. This is what Christianity suppresses when it waxes strong.
You can look up the Amritsar Massacre and you’ll find that it is a very big thing in India. It happened in 1919 in the Punjab, then under British rule. The dislocations caused by World War One had lead to unrest all over India – riots, attacks on Europeans, destruction of property. In Amritsar, an elderly British schoolteacher was manhandled by a mob and the local military commander decided to teach the locals a lesson. With eyes clear, he ordered his troops to open fire on a large crowd of Indians – nobody to this day knows how many were killed. Lowest estimate is 200, highest is 1,000. Times two or three injured. Remember: the British commander wanted a large number of Indians to die. He felt is was the only way to control an increasingly unruly situation and bring peace to the Punjab. Of course, when word got out of what happened, the whole world was shocked and outraged – including the British Establishment…and including Winston Churchill who was an ardent opponent of anything like independence for India. Post-Independence, the massacre has become part of the integral story of India’s rise to independence – they’ve got a huge memorial to the slain and it is ingrained into Indian national consciousness. The justification, as it were, for throwing off the British yoke. And, of course, Dyer – the British commander – is roundly condemned as an insensate brute…a racist imperialist oppressor.
But, here’s the thing, Reginald Dyer was born in the Punjab. He was fluent in many Indian languages. He commanded Indian troops in battle – very successfully on multiple occasions. In short, the man knew India – and Indians. Perhaps not as well as a native, but as well as any outsider can know another people. It was with his deep knowledge of Indians that he gave the orders to fire – and the firing was done by Gurkha and Pathan troops under his command. It is when you actually look at this that you realize that maybe the kindergarten history we’ve been spoon fed about the end of the European Empires is leaving off some crucial details. He wasn’t some monster – he was a highly educated man who lived and worked with the people of India his whole life.
So, why did he open fire?
Because the sort of people he was governing included the very sort of people who here a century later kidnap Christian teenagers, assault them and force them to marry their captors. Whatever brutalities the British Raj visited upon India, it is nothing like the brutalities that Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis visit upon themselves. Dyer wasn’t trying to kill good people…he was trying to make sure that the sort who kidnap little girls – or manhandle elderly British women who devote their lives to educating poor Indians – didn’t get the upper hand. We can dispute whether the action was right or wrong – but we cannot, we dare not, just go for a cartoonish view of the event. There was a reason – and we must know the reason before we render judgement. And we here in 2026 have the luxury of hindsight. We’ve seen what happens when the barbarians are able to take control.
Good to keep in mind that while the British Establishment condemned Dyer, the British people handed him the modern equivalent of about 1.5 million dollars via voluntary subscription. Almost as if even way back then, there was a divide between People and Rulers…and it was the Rulers who were undercutting the People no matter what the People wanted.
Why bring all this up? Because there’s been a lot of talk about decency of late. Most recently sparked by Trump accidentally including in a video post a couple second clip showing the Obama’s looking like apes. From what we can tell, that last bit was entirely inadvertent. Trump – or Team Trump – was posting a video indicating the fraud in the 2020 election and whomever posted it simply slipped up and picked up a couple seconds of the next video in the stream. Poor editing! But we were immediately told by the Left that it was indecent and a host of so-called “Conservative” voices rose to condemn Trump.
Meanwhile, a 13 year old girl in Pakistan was just legally handed over to her abuser.
Armed bandits “kidnapped” 150 Catholic students in Nigeria – I put that in quotes because they weren’t kidnapped…it was a slave raid. Those poor kids are being sold.
An illegal immigrant truck driver killed 4 people in Indiana.
Up in Canada a woman was killed by the national health service against her will – sorry, lady; but two out of the three MAID ghouls agreed it was time for you to go!
Decency, huh?
Meanwhile, these Democrats who say Trump is indecent are in favor of federally funded abortion on demand to the moment of birth. They cheered with Trump was shot. Cheered when Kirk was killed. They are fighting tooth and nail to keep illegal alien criminals in the USA – and are inciting violence in our street to protect Democrat voting and financial fraud.
Spare me the whines about decency. Our world is very indecent right now – and the only way we can get back to decency is to get back to whacking the barbarians. And not fairly. The barbarians must feel more pain than they ever caused us. It is the only way barbarians learn. We have very much lost something – the will to live, as it were. We fuss so much about any perceived error on our part that we have no time to spare for the massive crimes against humanity our opponents commit on a daily basis…with the promise that if they ever get back on top, they’ll jail us for merely disagreeing. There is nothing quite so true as the old phrase that you sleep peacefully in your bed at night because rough men stand watch, ready to do violence on your behalf. Like the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, we are sheltered, but have ceased to remember it…we think we’re safe because being safe is the norm. It isn’t. And the areas of “safe” in the world are rapidly shrinking. If we don’t let the rough men get back to work – and soon – we’ll be overrun with savagery.
Blogs For Victory 
History repeats itself and what we witnessed from 2020-2024, which was just an acceleration of what was going on before Trumps first term, was the ushering in of modern day slavery. These “illegal immigrants” are simply the new crop of slaves for Democrats and they have told us that. How many Democrats over the years have said we need illegal immigration to pick our crops, clean our homes, etc. Democrats have no interest in educating these people or helping them improve their lives … they need votes and maids and landscapers, period. This is why they are fighting so hard to keep them. Democrats are incapable of governing an educated, independent populace … they just have no policies for such a thing.
Revisiting our conversation yesterday, here is another article
https://hotair.com/john-stossel/2026/02/07/girls-vs-boys-n3811643
And surprisingly, I am seeing articles like this more and more … it’s not just an observation. It’s a problem. Women are so much more special than men, that I am shocked any of them want to be like us. Of course women can do what men do … other than the tasks that requires more physical strength, men do nothing special other than labor, provide and protect. Women on the other hand, nurture, comfort, make a home, empathize, heal, and are simply the center of a mans and children’s universes. When that’s gone, chaos ensues. Any woman can replace a man on the assembly line but no man can replicate the God given attributes of a woman … and men and children need that.
Just a note here: When I realized I wanted to learn to operate a backhoe, it had nothing at all to do with wanting to be “like a man”. It just looked like fun. And it was. It was amazingly gratifying to be able to look at a pile of dirt and think “I don’t want that there”….and then be able to move it somewhere else.
A few years ago I took one of those silly magazine tests, and it said I have a lot of very “masculine” traits. And just what ARE “masculine traits” you might/should ask? Well, it turns out that putting a high value on competence is the biggest marker of “masculinity” and when I read that I though “OK…I can live with that.”
Seeking accomplishment, achievement, competence, skills in new areas, are all traits considered “masculine”. Well, I have all of them, and I can guarantee with absolute certainty that not a single one of them is even remotely related to a desire to be “like a man”. Bluntly, after more than half a century of experiences of different types with many men I wish more of them had even some of these traits. (And BTW I clean up pretty good, too. I always liked being able to shower and put on something a little frou-frou and some smell-good stuff and engage my Femme Fatale alter ego.)
I am just wired to want to learn things. Some people are wired to seek out excitement through danger, like sky diving or alligator wrestling. Some are wired to pursue enlightenment through study of philosophy and religion. And so on. I’m also hands-on. When raccoons were raiding my garage through the cat flap and eating all the cat food I got out my table saw and built a big wooden cabinet out of half-inch plywood to hang on the wall, with a shelf halfway down to hold the automatic feeders and a system for the food to be dropped through pipes to outlets at the bottom so the coons could not reach the feeders from the bottom. There was not a single moment in this process where I thought “Look at me! I’m acting like a man!” No, it was just fun to analyze a problem, figure out a solution, and make it work. (And there was the gratification of watching, through a security camera, the frustration as the coons tried to reach up through the feeder pipes to get to the food.)
So no, I think very few women are motivated by any desire to be “like men”, as gratifying as some men might find that belief. They just want to be “like people”—people with different personalities and goals and interests and motivations.
Possibly related to my observation about being unmoored from a solid sense of identity?
liberal women report lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction compared to conservative and moderate women. According to the 2024 American Family Survey, only 12% of liberal women aged 18–40 said they were “completely satisfied” with their lives, compared to 37% of conservative women.
Similar disparities were found in mental health and feelings of loneliness, with liberal women being the least happy and loneliest group in the survey.
A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that 56% of white liberal women aged 18–29 had been diagnosed with a mental health condition by a medical professional, more than double the rate among conservative women (27%) in the same age group.
Alright, here’s another article detailing the decline of the covenantal relationship between men and women …
The rise of what I call “punitive femininity” is downstream of the toxic political culture online — a culture that is transforming the sex long viewed as more restrained and less prone to violence … The most unexpected result: Women were significantly more likely than men to endorse such violence.
https://hotair.com/headlines/2026/02/07/american-women-have-a-terrifying-new-flirtation-n3811621
That last sentence IMHO, is because men have self emasculated and abdicated their role, as Amazona mentioned yesterday, I agree with that. But this is a clear indication that women are UNHAPPY, because our God structured lives are in chaos. Men and women are unhappy because we not giving to each other what God intended … we have become narcissistic vessels who think we know best and we can do anything … WE CAN’T.
While the primary role of women has been to reproduce and nurture, the fact is that this has never been a simple, clearly defined or restricted role. Historically, women have always been expected to help defend the home, plow the fields, slaughter the livestock, etc. while also reproducing and nurturing. Only in the past couple of centuries has society imposed rigid restrictions on “what women can/should do”.
So it is unreasonable to impose those limitations on women today. When historically women have been responsible for management and decision-making and accomplishment it is unreasonable to say, in this time and place, those skills should be limited to reproduction, nurturing and housekeeping.
In an earlier post I talked about the farm community where I grew up and the satisfaction the women I knew got from the richness of their lives, which in those days did not include driving into town to work in offices. However, at one point we did move “into town” and my mother, a registered nurse, started working in the local hospital. It had little impact on our family. Our dad got us off to school in the morning, we rode our bikes to our grandparents’ house after school where we stayed for a couple of hours being nurtured by the people who brought up our mother and had some skills and experience in that, and then went home with our parents. My mother was not being narcissistic—she was using her God-given talents for healing, for comforting the sick and helping them recover, and the satisfaction she got from that was not nefarious in any way.
I think the message we need to understand is that all work has value. In spite of Dan Brown’s shameful libeling of Opus Dei, the true concept of Opus Dei, or “work of God”, is that all work is worthwhile and of value. If we can get away from rigidly defining what “is” and “is not” appropriate for either gender, and just accept that all work done well should be respected, we can honor both the hard work of the full-time homemaker and the woman who also has a job outside the home. When the woman who chooses to focus on her home and family gets the same respect and status as the woman who is a senior partner in a law firm as the woman who manages a restaurant, the rest will fall into place and more women will make that homemaker choice.
The violent screeching harridans advocating for overthrow if not the entire government then whatever law they are currently finding offensive are not there making fools of themselves because of some narcissistic concept of unlimited ability. I think it is because they have no inherent concept of who or what they are.
Too many, both men and women, have become unmoored from core identity points so are drifting, seeking something outside themselves to give their lives meaning.
I think the true core identity point has always been gender. A man could start with “I am a man” and that was an absolute. From that point he could add data points: “I am a man who loves other men” or “I am a man who defends his nation” or whatever, but even when some of those data points were not traditionally linked to the original “I am a man” point, it was inviolable. It simply was.
The same was true of “I am a woman”. A woman could accept or reject societal or cultural definitions so she could do “men’s work” or not, as one example, but nothing changed the fact that she was a woman. Any shift in any direction was a choice, a decision, with a starting point of original identity.
Then people were told “No one knows what the hell you are. There is no way to define a foundational identity for you. So just go out there and make s**t up.”
Boudicca, who chose to be a warrior queen, made the decision that as a woman she would also be a fighter. Ditto for Joan of Arc, and the women who parachuted into France to fight with the Resistance. They knew who and what they were, so any departure from a generally accepted characteristic of that identity was a decision, a choice, and they had agency in the process.
Then society, or at least part of society accepted by some people, pulled the pin out. When a kite string breaks the kite no longer flies but flails around. It needs to be moored. And now we have a lot of people who have no inherent sense of who or what they are, because they have chosen to put that important aspect of humanity in the power of a political entity. So we don’t see women who think “I know that as a woman society expects me to be civil and polite but here I choose to act like a savage because it suits my immediate agenda”, what we have is females who don’t even have that starting point so merely act out raw unfiltered animalistic emotion with no self awareness—because there is no real self. And humanity depends on a sense of self.
In ancient Athens, women couldn’t shop at the store.
In ancient Rome, women were never legally outside the authority of father, brother, husband or son.
On and on like that – which tells you that someone had to think it up and impose it because it wasn’t always like that. Some social development happened which changed the relations between the sexes.
My view?
I think that women invented agriculture.
In the times of hunter-gatherer is it logical that men did most of the hunting. Not that the girls couldn’t, but the very high infant mortality rate of early humans – plus our long development time – meant that most young women were pregnant and/or caring for small children all the time. This would divide the tribal labor – men go out and hunt the mammoth, women gathered. Given this, women would be most likely to perceive the whole seed-to-plant thing. But once you’ve got this figured out, you have to stay put…caring for the plants. You need a permanent shelter. Storage places. Tools. An infrastructure which was large…and very vulnerable to attack. My guess – and we can only ever guess on this – is that women developed the concept of owned land…and the sacred duty of men to defend it against outsiders. The trade-off here was that men were granted primary political authority.
I also bet that women invented the concept of slavery. Men simply aren’t that practical minded. It likely started internally – within the tribe. That is, the women built the farm and got men to defend it…but there were lots of men who were layabouts. Don’t have to hunt any longer – the food is right there! Especially as animals got domesticated. I can just see a group of women working their fields and seeing a pack of men laying by a stream and figuring they’d find those bums something to do. External slavery would come when the agriculturalists defeated someone else…it would be women who figured that taking the defeated women and children in as servants was more sensible than killing them all.
I guess where I’m going here is that women likely built civilization. Including taming of the barbarian man into the civilized husband and father.
Voting?
Oh; that was easy – that was a man thing. Probably originated in voting on who would lead the hunt. Later the war. Finally the polis. Women weren’t allowed to vote simply because if it was time to vote on whether or not to call out the all-male phalanx to defend the polis, why ask the women for their view on the matter? Women concerned themselves with the affairs of the home – which for 90% of humanity for 90% of history has been the farm. It was only with the urbanization of humanity and the increased government interference in the home that women started to vote…because now they had a reason to.
From Malones Sunday Strip:
Just the facts…
liberal women report lower levels of happiness and life satisfaction compared to conservative and moderate women. According to the 2024 American Family Survey, only 12% of liberal women aged 18–40 said they were “completely satisfied” with their lives, compared to 37% of conservative women.
Similar disparities were found in mental health and feelings of loneliness, with liberal women being the least happy and loneliest group in the survey.
A 2020 Pew Research Center study found that 56% of white liberal women aged 18–29 had been diagnosed with a mental health condition by a medical professional, more than double the rate among conservative women (27%) in the same age group.
Sorry, I didn’t realize Amazona had posted this right before I did.
Let me try and clarify one more time lol, because I am not trying to imply anything about women working outside the home or being submissive or anything like that. It has always been common and essential for women and men to partner on the work obllgations. Fortinately when I grew up, my Mom did stay at home and raised the 6 of us, which was quite a job. And she made it look seamless, even though it was organized chaos. And Dad was her employee lol. Whenever he called or got home, Mom would give him his marching orders on what needed to be done and they made it work fabulously. NEVER discount the role of a Mom who stays home and raises children …. That is the MOST important job EVER created.
But what I am saying is that spiritually and covenantally, we have lost our purpose. We are over stimulated, over digitized, over materialized, and over secularized. I’ve been reading about this quite a bit lately and I think this is why we are witnessing a return to Faith. We all need an anchor and stillness in life for the soul to be nourished. We all need to unplug from the 24/7 chaos and be still, be present, and be grateful and recharge. There is a divine rythym to our universe, our solar system, and our lives, and that rythym requires rest, stillness, and worship. We are not machines, we are spiritual beings that need replenishment and there is ONLY one source. God Bless.
And I am in agreement with all of that, commenting only on the use of the term “feminization” to describe something not only negative but not truly feminine.
I am not the one to coin that term but what I think it refers to is the softening of our culture. We are too forgiving, too accepting, and too lenient when confronted with evil, and this is more of a feminine trait. Women are much more likely to forgive, accept, and comfort than men are and that can lead to danger. Men are less forgiving and more inclined to confront … and both traits are essential for life, but the balance between the two is out of whack. We need to be more judgmental and less accepting right now. IMO
“Women are much more likely to forgive, accept, and comfort than men”
You are talking about traditional roles and concepts. Look at the female creatures in Minneapolis and tell me they are “more likely to forgive, accept, and comfort”. That is what I mean. It’s not that men are becoming more like women, it’s that men are becoming less like men —and there IS a difference. Men are becoming less, period, and so are women, as the gender differences are denied and then neutered, creating animals with no core identity in a society that tries to deny that there is any such thing as a core identity. The Left is trying to create a hybrid asexual human which has no inherent qualities but can be molded to fit any current preference, and to do this they have been stripping away the very things that have always made men men and women women.
While Schlichter sees this from a male perspective, we need to look at it from the female side, as women are being stripped even of the identity of being the humans who can reproduce. Now any male who wants to indulge in a fantasy can claim to be able to bear children and nurse them, and get the same respect from society as a real woman is entitled to receive, making a mockery of her gender and role in life.
And this topic is being written about and discussed more and more … here’s another article this morning
This isn’t to say that women and femininity are bad. They aren’t. They are a part of humanity. But so are men and masculinity; the problem is the dedicated campaign to stamp out the male part. The sexes combine to create a functional society of human beings, the yin and yang, if you will. You need both, in proper proportion. Disrupt that balance and you get, well, this current mess.
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2026/02/09/men-are-going-to-strike-back-n2670837
The movement is also to stamp out the female part. From removing the basic identifier of “woman” by claiming it cannot be defined to destroying the concept of women protecting and nurturing their young (as opposed to butchering them in the womb) to representing the best of civilization to pretending that men can also give birth, the identity of “female” is every bit as under attack as that of “male”. It is not the feminization of America, it is the neutering of America.
You could even refer to the “masculinization” of women in the form of males cruelly stereotyping and mocking women in drag shows, reducing them to big hair, huge boobs, layers of makeup and tittering stupidity.
Good point. Overall, it’s the intentional blurring of individuality. Communism in other words.
Collectivism to the max and rejection of individualism.
Yep – or in my formulation, Feminism (the political thing) is the assertion of:
1. Only things men do are important.
2. The woman is a slave if she serves her family, but free when she serves her employer.
Nothing in there about the crucial feminine aspect: women can make babies. Sure, men need to participate, but it is the woman who does the absolutely most important thing, ever: have a baby. There’s no point to anything unless someone decides to do that.
Genuine feminism basically says a woman can do anything a man can do that does not involve a biological advantage, and vice versa. That is, a woman can drive a truck but probably not handle a charged fire hose or lift heavy pipes, and a man can be a wonderful nurturing parent, nurse or teacher but not give birth or nurse a baby.
Political feminism is pure junk, with nothing whatsoever to recommend it or defend it other than the intent to divide and create dissension and chaos.
Allow me to throw out another controversial subject lol … people who don’t pay taxes, or fail a basic competency test, should not be allowed to vote. People who game the system, and there are a lot of them, will always vote for the candidate who promises the most and as Rush always said … it’s hard to beat Santa Claus.
I think everyone should have a vested interest in the country. Even if you only make $25,000/yr, you should have to pay in something, even if it’s only $25. We can’t be a country of givers and takers … we all need to contribute and voting patterns will change because of that …
“Basic competency test”: A foreign-born friend once asked me why there is a need for translators in polling places. As she pointed out, when her parents got naturalized they had to pass English competency tests, and anyone born here should already speak English, so who are those translators for? (She also said “come to my country and demand that your paperwork be in English and see how far you get with that. Are you people CRAZY?”)
Speaking of naturalization tests, ideally everyone allowed to vote should have to get at least a 50% score on that test first.
Agreed. Otherwise the people who actually pay attention and contribute to this country, will have no voice in the voting booth.
There is a lot being written about election integrity and the Left’s efforts to block it. I have been, for years, harping on the insanity of claiming that vote tallies are “certified” by states even when those tallies are proven to be false. That violates not only the purpose of certification but the very definition of the word.
So how about this? Come up with a metric for determining the degree of fraudulent voting it should take to make it impossible to certify a state’s vote tally. Because we can now prove, indisputably, that some votes are fraudulent (as we did in Arizona in 2020, within a few days of the election, before the fraudulent tally was “certified” by the election official who then took office based on that “certification”) we have a way to disqualify at least some fraudulent votes. The problem is, we can’t prove who got them. (Emphasis on “prove”.)
So let’s say that in a state where the margin of victory is 200,000 votes we can also prove that more than 200,000 votes were fraudulent. That is, from people who were ineligible to vote, voted twice, were not citizens, no longer lived in the state, had fraudulent voter registrations, did not sign ballot envelopes, mailed ballots after the deadline, etc. At that point the state can simply not certify its vote count, losing its representation in the Electoral College.
Yes, this would disenfranchise every voter in that state. But it would also put the responsibility for election integrity where it belongs—on the voters. Elect officials who refuse to clean up the voter registration rolls? Great, your choice—but lose your vote for the presidency. Tolerate illegal voting? ditto. That leaves four years to fix these problems, which means four years to hold official feet to fires, four years to get rid of bogus registrations, four years to clean up voting machine problems, four years to institute solid ways to check signatures on mailed ballots, etc. If, as citizens of that state, you can’t do that, then you also can’t let your state participate in the national election.
This would address that silly whine of “not enough to affect the outcome”. So if the margin of victory is 200,000 and within a few days it is proved that 120,000 mailed ballots either had no signatures, had blatantly false signatures, and/or arrived past the deadline, that number of ballots is entered as invalid votes. Add proof of how many votes were from people living out of state, and people voting twice, and non-citizens, and all of a sudden that state’s participation in the process is on the line.
It is really a simple fix. It puts the onus on the state officials. And let’s say the margin of victory is small—maybe 4000 votes—-and there is proof of 5,000 bogus votes, then force the state to split its electoral college votes between the two candidates. Not an ideal solution, but one that makes cheating less productive.
Let’s say that there is proof that 250,000 California votes are bogus, for various reasons as listed above, and the margin of victory in that state was 125,000 votes. This would mean that California could not certify its official (incorrect) vote count, and would lose its 54 Electoral College votes, meaning that the presidency would be decided by the majority of 484 votes, not 538.
Theoretically this would result in a major upheaval of California politics, as citizens would demand stringent oversight of voter registration rolls, adherence to election rules, etc. to preserve their voting rights in the next national election. I dare to suggest that this would be a good thing.
Accountability and consequences need to be placed somewhere, and this would be a good place.
Leftists are always so vague, except of course for their pinpoint focus on the Villain Of The Day. The money to pay for all that “free” stuff is just out there, somewhere, somehow, and so on. Creating a single act (“certification”) and furnishing it with a definition, examples and specifics sets up a comprehensible entity, and the consequence series leads to the only solutions.
The only argument against this can be reduced to “We think we should claim something is accurate when we have proof it is not” which is a hard argument to make even at high volume screamed over loudspeakers. The only alternative to making certification dependent on accuracy would be to abandon the term and change the process to “rubber-stamping whatever is handed to us even when we know it’s wrong”. Again, hard to defend.
This would leave the arguments against this consisting of quibbling about the penalties for false certification. And at some point even in California someone is going to say “Wait a minute—if the purpose of an election is to know who got how many votes and we are not willing to do what it takes to be able to know that, why are we pretending to have an election at all?” and at that point another voice is going to say “What about designing a process that actually lets us KNOW how many people actually, legally, voted for anyone?” and once that becomes the goal, more than just getting people into office, the battle is nearly won because the battle line has been shifted from “how do we get our people into power?” to “what do we have to do to retain our voting rights?”