On @DKThomp, Trumpism and the Misunderstood Crisis of White America

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Derek Thompson (@DKThomp on Twitter) is not a stupid knee-jerk liberal, despite “Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America,” an article at The Atlantic that at first glance might seem like yet another knee-jerk liberal smear of the presumptive Republican nominee.

“Gleeful-sounding headlines announcing the end of white America may play a role in Trump’s rise, too,” was Professor Reynolds’ reaction, which is almost certainly true. The headline on Thompson’s story, and his tendentious treatment of political history, may create the impression that Thompson is just another of those “Democrats with bylines” whose partisan contributions to increasing ignorance we have come to expect.

A quick scan through his past work reveals that Thompson has read Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, a 2012 book that is a sober, factual analysis of the social and economic forces that make it impossible to view “whiteness” as a monolith. Increasingly, over the past half-century, white Americans have been sorting themselves into two groups — a small, affluent, college-educated elite, and everybody else. To speak categorically of “white privilege,” as young progressives habitually do, conjures up an image of white people sitting around their mansions sipping chardonnay. Not only does this image of “privilege” fail to capture the reality of life for the majority of white Americans, who are just working people with bills to pay, but it also fails to reflect the reality of what life is like for affluent, college-educated elite.

Guess what? The elite work, too, and they’ve also got bills to pay.

Among the bills that the elite must pay is tuition for their ungrateful offspring, who think themselves entitled to have Daddy send them to expensive private schools like Hampshire College (annual tuition $48,065) where they can learn to whine about living in a “white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal society.”

When we behold idiots like Jennie Chenkin and her social-justice comrade Cora Segal (aka “TrigglyPuff”), what we are seeing is the decadence that besets the children of privilege who have not been taught to appreciate the hard work that produced the wealth they frivolously squander. Their exhibitions of infantile narcissism — protest tantrums and self-pitying postures of victimhood — reveal the defects of their personal character, the moral depravity of minds warped by a corrupt education system.

Modern Americans have an unfortunate tendency to consider “education” a virtue unto itself, and to accept as proof of this virtue the attainment of academic credentials, especially from prestigious “elite” schools. All that was necessary for progressives to control America, therefore, was to take over elite educational institutions and promote their own political opinions as truth, thereby convincing the college-educated segment of American society that progressivism is not only what all Smart People™ believe, but is also synonymous with moral virtue.

William F. Buckley Jr. spotted this problem long ago, and his 1951 classic God and Man at Yale remains highly relevant in the 21st century. Buckley saw that Yale, originally founded as a Christian school, had quietly abandoned Christianity and adopted a new religion, liberalism. The consequences of this were evident, as Buckley demonstrated at some length, in the way that Yale’s department of economics was dominated by Keynesians who were hostile to free-market enterprise and enthusiastically in favor of central planning and confiscatory taxation. The American intellectual elite, in turning against God, had opened the door to what Buckley’s colleague Eric Vogelin later diagnosed as a revival of gnosticism:

All gnostic movements are involved in the project of abolishing the constitution of being, with its origin in divine, transcendent being, and replacing it with a world-immanent order of being, the perfection of which lies in the realm of human action.

Pursuing a utopian heaven-on-earth fantasy of “social justice” invariably leads to catastrophe, and conservatives have been striving to stave off this disaster for so long that many have forgotten what the struggle is about.

‘The Fools That Bring Disaster’

If the people who lead a movement have forgotten their own principles, if they lack the courage to state their principles or are unwilling to do the work of helping others understand why these principles matter, then the movement is certain to fail. The sense of failure that has gripped the conservative movement as a result of Donald Trump’s success would be a teachable moment, if the leaders who have failed were willing to admit their own failure. From Karl Rove to Mitt Romney, from Rich Lowry to Jeb Bush, all across the vast spectrum of Republican politicians, consultants and pundits, what do we see? Evasions of personal responsibility, lashing out at Trump as a scapegoat for their own incompetence. When David Horowitz gave Bill Kristol a well-deserved spanking, the only thing the “Never Trump” crowd seemed to notice was the headline phrase “Renegade Jew,” and the merits of Horowitz’s argument were ignored by all the virtue-signalling spoilsports who lost the game but don’t want to admit they deserved to lose.

Careerism in the punditocracy means that political wizards like Karl Rove are more concerned with preserving their own prestigious reputations — their prestige being their stock in trade — than in telling the truth or winning elections. And too many conservative pundits who profess to loathe Karl Rove are nonetheless guilty of playing the same game. While consultants keep getting paid to provide bad advice, while the politicians continue listening to such advice, and while the pundits are all busy trying to get booked for their next cable TV appearance, the selfish concerns of such so-called “leaders” do nothing to strengthen the conservative movement. The soldiers of the army become demoralized when their generals repeatedly lead them to defeat. During the winter of 1862-63, when command of the Union’s Army of the Potomac had devolved onto the incompetent Gen. Ambrose Burnside, a soldier in the 79th New York Infantry wrote a letter home in which he complained: “Mother, do not wonder that my loyalty is growing weak. . . . I am sick and tired of the disaster and the fools that bring disaster upon us.”

For the past 25 years, going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Republican Party has gone from one disaster to another, and the fools in charge of the GOP can’t seem to comprehend the fundamental nature of their problem. Talk of reviving “Reaganism” is common among pundits and politicians who seem willing to ignore the historic context from which the modern conservative movement emerged. Reagan biographer Craig Shirley has chronicled the history of the movement and its greatest leader, and yet we must wonder how many conservative pundits have read Shirley’s books, because they seem not to have learned any useful lessons from this history. In politics, it is important to have both the right message and the right messenger. Ronald Reagan’s personal experience, particularly in his fight against Community Party efforts to take over Hollywood in the 1940s, provided him with a profound insight into the nature of America’s enemy in the Cold War. By the time he gave his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” Reagan had spent nearly 20 years studying the issues confronting America. He was familiar with the ideas of men like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, he was well-informed about current events, and he was an experienced public speaker. Reagan had traveled the country as spokesman for General Electric, and in his travels had met and listened to the voices of many ordinary Americans, developing a strong sense of their problems and concerns. From the disaster of Goldwater’s defeat in 1964, it took another 16 years (and his near-miss attempt to get the 1976 nomination against Gerald Ford) for Reagan to be elected president. By that time, America had been through the ordeal of defeat in Vietnam and the economic stagnation of the 1970s, and was ready to listen to a common-sense message that had been rejected as dangerous “extremism” when Barry Goldwater had been the messenger.

Attempts by Republicans in the past 25 years to recapture the magic of Reaganism have failed in large part because Ronald Reagan possessed such a rare combination of personal qualities as to be nearly unique. Yet the Republican Party’s decline also reflects a failure of GOP leaders to understand the issues facing America in the post-Cold War era. Steve Sailer’s terse summary of Republican policy during the presidency of George W. Bush — “Invade the World. Invite the World. In Hock to the World.” — hits the nail directly on the head. By 2008, the GOP leadership was officially committed to a neo-Wilsonian crusade to impose “democracy” on Mesopotamia at the point of a bayonet, the pro-amnesty policy of “comprehensive immigration reform,” and a continued drift away from sound fiscal and monetary policy. If this is what the Republican Party stands for, certainly Republicans deserve to lose.

Trumpism is a repudiation of Bushism.

Whatever else you may say about Donald Trump, it seems unlikely he’ll be seeking advice from Karl Rove, Nicolle Wallace or Lindsey Graham.

And thank God for that.

The Problem With ‘Hate Whitey’ Politics

After eight years of Obamaism, threatened with a return to Clintonism, how many Americans might be willing to give Trumpism a try? Well, the number was large enough to destroy every rival who stood between Trump and the GOP nomination, and Democrats are afraid enough of Trumpism that they’re unloading their opposition-research dossiers in May. Sidney Blumenthal and the other Democrat strategists believe they can elect Hillary by demonizing her opponent, and perhaps Trump will be the perfect test for this strategy. Yet whoever the Republicans had nominated would have faced a similar attack and, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, Trump might prove to be the one guy on the planet against whom the Clinton slime machine doesn’t work. But I digress . . .

Derek Thompson’s article “Donald Trump and the Twilight of White America” is one of those demographics-of-decline pieces that assume, as the basis of analysis, that current trends may be extrapolated into the future, so that the continued rapid growth of the U.S. Hispanic population, for example, can be taken for granted. Yet just as the white population bifurcates into separate socio-economic groups (the elite vs. everybody else), so also do Hispanics. My daughter’s husband is Hispanic, but he is an ambitious young attorney in private practice, the scion of a very prosperous family, and it is a racist stereotype to imagine that “Hispanic” is a synonym for “poor” or “ignorant” or “Democrat.”

The hard-working taxpayer is always at least a potential Republican voter, no matter his or her ethnic background. While Democrats and their allies in the media have been successful in fomenting racial hatred for partisan purposes — “Hate Whitey! Vote Democrat!” — this political charade cannot succeed forever. The policies of the Democrat Party are ultimately bad for everybody, and if you want to see where these policies lead, take a look at the bankrupt catastrophe of Detroit. Or take a look at Chicago, where there have already been 234 homicides this year. Beyond this startling death toll, more than 1,100 people have been wounded by gunfire so far this year in Chicago, where about a dozen people get shot on an average day. Most of the victims (74%) are black, and another 22% are Hispanic, so that the politics of “Hate Whitey” correlates with very bad outcomes for the people who elect Democrats. Are there people in Chicago who hate whitey so much they don’t mind their kids getting gunned down by the Latin Kings or the Gangster Disciples?

“A lot of the gangs that you see . . . when you look at Baltimore, when you look at Chicago and Ferguson and a lot of areas, you know a lot of these gang members are illegal immigrants. They’re going to be gone.”
— Donald Trump, August 2015

Most white people probably don’t realize it, but many black communities are feeling squeezed by immigration, too. The gang warfare in the streets of Chicago is often between black gangs defending their “turf” against Latino gangs and, as Trump said, illegal immigration contributes to this problem. A lot of the dope being sold by these gangs is imported from Mexico, and you can’t address the problem of gang violence without addressing the drug problem and the immigration problem, too. Beyond that, there is the job shortage problem, the crappy school problem and also the problem of fatherless children, and the Democrat Party is certainly not going to do anything to fix any of these problems.

Put the dope dealers in prison, deport the criminal gangsters, get serious about enforcement of the existing immigration laws — these are not “extremist” ideas, they’re just common sense, and white people are not the only hard-working taxpayers who would support these policies.

Yet here we have Derek Thompson playing racial psychotherapist:

Trump’s core constituency is clear: Republican whites, particularly men, and especially those who didn’t go to college, who feel their American whiteness like a second skin. Many of these first beneficiaries of the franchise now feel disenfranchised. The original middle class feels cut out of the American Dream. The majority is collapsing in on itself. . . .
It is not enough to say that Trump is a purely racial phenomenon. Nor is it complete to argue that he is the perfectly predictable result of economic upheaval. Rather, in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline. Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger — Donald Trump.

Never mind, for the moment, the idea that “racial resentment” explains Trump’s success. Instead ask, what does this have to do with policy?

Thompson takes for granted what liberals (and too many Republicans) expect everybody to take for granted, namely that a determination to enforce existing immigration law is racist, and therefore illegitimate. Yet the chief architect of our existing immigration system was Ted Kennedy. From the time of The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 until the day he died in 2009, no immigration bill could make it through the Senate without Kennedy’s approval. For most of the past half-century, in fact, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, and even after the Republican takeover of 1994, which gave the GOP congressional control, the Democrats in the Senate could always use the filibuster to force Republicans to compromise. In 2006-2007, Republicans like John McCain twice failed in their attempts to pass a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, and what did they do about immigration? Nothing. Zero. Nada.

A profound dishonesty about immigration as policy has made immigration as politics impossible to discuss rationally. The liberal media’s “reporting” on immigration is simply partisan propaganda. The media depict Republicans as hateful bigots, so as to maximize Latino votes for Democrats, and this requires a narrative about immigration which ignores the differences between legal and illegal immigrants, portraying all immigrants as impoverished victims of white racism.

Donald Trump is a blunt instrument, a political sledgehammer with which angry voters seek to smash the Democrat-Media Complex that has tried to conceal the failures of the Bullshit Factory in Washington, D.C.

Derek Thompson is an alumnus of prestigious Northwestern University (annual tuition $49,047) and his sneering disdain for “conservative white American middle-class men” is an attitude widely shared by Democrats, who consider “white male” an acceptable synonym for evil. However evil they may be, however, it is a mistake for Derek Thompson to think he is a better judge of their political interests than they are. This is what elite education does to people. Every 22-year-old who graduates from a school like Northwestern thereby obtains, along with his diploma, an incurable certainty of his own moral and intellectual superiority.

The narcissistic arrogance of the elite makes it impossible for them to empathize with their inferiors (i.e., everybody whose Daddy couldn’t afford to pay $49,047 a year to send them to school), and it is this absence of empathy that makes the intellectual elite so dangerous. Even though Derek Thompson is not a stupid knee-jerk liberal, his analysis of the Trump phenomenon still manages to convey the idea that the opposite of “racist” is Democrat. Every consideration of policy evaporates into an invisible mist, because anyone who didn’t vote for Obama (and who won’t vote for Hillary) is presumed by Derek Thompson to be motivated by racial hatred. It would never occur to Derek Thompson to ask why black people in Detroit and Chicago keep voting for Democrats who are manifestly not solving the problems of the black community. The prejudices that inspire Democrat voters never arouse journalistic curiosity. So long as the politics of “Hate Whitey” elects Democrats, no mainstream journalist will ever question the rationality of such sentiments. And what this means in terms of policy, of course, is that whatever policies Democrats support are good, and all criticism of Democrat policies is wrong — racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.

Regardless of who wins in November, we will continue to be plagued by the decadence of the intellectual elite. It is a tremendous irony that the populist sledgehammer is a billionaire with an Ivy League education (Penn, ’68), but Trump is not an intellectual, and he seems to have more empathy for ordinary Americans that does Hillary Clinton. Can he win? I don’t know. I’m just a conservative white American middle-class man and, as such, I need Smart People™ to do my thinking for me.





 


Late Night With Rule 5 Monday

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— compiled by Wombat-socho

In the normal order of things, the FMJRA precedes Rule 5 Sunday, but this weekend was anything but normal. Since I’m short of inspiration (and silver bikinis, frankly, look tacky), here’s a pic of Eva Werschky, Miss Reno Rodeo 2016. As usual, the management is not responsible for any misfortunes caused your inability to exercise discretion when clicking on the following links, many of which are to pics generally considered NSFW.

Eva Werschky, Miss Reno Rodeo 2016.

Political Clown Parade kicks off this week with Flowing Curves of Beauty, followed by 90 Miles from Tyranny with Morning Mistress, Hot Pick – CAMELTOE!, and Girls With Guns; Goodstuff offers an especially confused megablog featuring Lili Simmons, The Last Tradition submits Kirsten Dunst and Rosie Huntington-Whitely, Animal Magnetism chips in with Rule 5 Commencement Speech Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, and First Street Journal pays tribute to American women in uniform.

Speaking of rodeos, EBL’s herd this week includes The Mosby Show, Jacaranda trees, a House of Lords member picking up another woman’s husband, V-J Day, Flight Molester, Fundamental Transformation, and Chinese Revolutionary Girls.

A View from the Beach has From Serbia – Bojana Krsmanovi?, Did Helen of Troy Trigger World War 0?, Floron du Jour, Slick as a Greased Pig!, Why Does Obama Hate Eagles?, The Wednesday Morning Workout, Good-for-Nothing Japanese Girl Convicted Over Pussy Kayak, I Learned a New Word Today, US Goes Bonkers Over Bathrooms, Mothers Day at Clinton.com and Say, How Do You Pronounce Krsmanovic?

The DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes this week included Melissa O’Neil, Nicole Beharie, Nicole Tubiola, Patrice Fisher, Arden Cho, Antonima Murphy, and Paulina Singer.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Emily Ratajkowski, his vintage babe is Noel Neill, and Sex in Advertising is covered by Erica’s Micro Mesh. At Dustbury, it’s Linda Evangelista and Anahi.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery and their patience this week! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday (which will, I swear, actually be on Sunday this week) is midnight on Saturday, May 21.

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Fear And Loathing In Reno: What I Saw At The Nevada State GOP Convention

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— by Wombat-socho


It all started at the chaotic Clark County Republican convention back in April, which I attended as an alternate from my precinct and wound up leaving early so I didn’t miss too much of a Saturday in the tax mines. Shortly before my departure, volunteers for the Cruz campaign encouraged me to self-nominate for the state convention, so I filled out the paperwork and didn’t think anything of it…until three weeks later when I got an e-mail while in Minnesota visiting friends and family. Clark County is entitled to something like two thousand delegates to the state convention, since it’s the largest county in Nevada by both acreage and population, and much like every other year, they have problems assembling a full slate of delegates. That’s how I wound up being selected. So after asking folks to hit the tip jar, I looked into accommodations and quickly rejected the Atlantis since the rate for Saturday night was $179. Since I was planning on driving up, I had some flexibility, and used Priceline to get a room three blocks from the convention center at the Days Inn. The rest of the month was spent trying to save as much cash as possible for what promised to be anything but a cheap weekend in the second city of the Silver State.

As luck would have it, I had an appointment with the VA Friday morning of the convention, and didn’t get more than a couple hours sleep Thursday night, so the drive up to Reno via US 95 was more than a little harrowing. 95 starts as a would-be Interstate in Las Vegas, but around Indian Springs turns into a two-lane blacktop with a 70 mph speed limit except when passing through half-abandoned towns like Tonopah, Beatty, Luning, and Hawthorne which reminded me entirely too much of the bitter James McMurtry song “We Can’t Make It Here“. Between those towns, it’s all dozens of miles of scrubland and desert surrounded by mountains, exactly the sort of country described by Hunter S. Thompson in the opening to Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. Eventually I got to the Days Inn, managed to stand up and walk in to get my room, and discovered on unpacking that I’d grabbed the wrong AC adapter for my laptop. The nearby Office Max was closed, and in my excessively fatigued state I completely forgot that I’d passed a Walmart on the way to the hotel. I gave up, hit the local Del Taco for a couple of burritos, and crashed hard.

The next morning, I rose and promptly motored over to the Walmart, where I picked up some Atkins bars and a recharger for the laptop before getting breakfast at McDonald’s and heading up to the Atlantis, where I parked and hedged my bets (the lot had plenty of signs warning people that parking for the convention center was prohibited) by applying for a players’ card and spending a few minutes on a video poker machine absorbing coffee while losing a dollar and change. I then made my way over to the convention center via the sky bridge, arriving a little after the announced start time of 9 AM to find that the convention still hadn’t been called to order. It’s worth noting that the state party did a lot better job of organizing than the Clark County committee; I was quickly checked in, given my delegate badge, and issued a hand-held electronic voting machine which got quite a workout over the course of the day. One other thing was obvious: the supporters of Donald Trump were present in huge numbers, many of them wearing “101% Trump” T-shirts or other such apparel along with buttons and other devices proclaiming their fealty to the prospective nominee. No representatives of the other campaigns were present, or visible if they were, although there were several tables for groups like the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action. For that matter, there weren’t that many candidates for Federal or State office visibly present, except for Congressman Joe Heck, running to replace Harry Reid in the Senate. Heck was unfortunately not present due to Army Reserve obligations, though his challengers, Sharron Angle and Lee Hamilton were and did little to impress.

The prevailing mood was one of anger, not just at the Washington establishment but with Governor Sandoval (who was absent) and a bloc of nominally Republican state legislators who had joined with the minority Democrats to push through a gross receipts tax, and a motion to amend one of the resolutions to call for a condemnation of the RINOs responsible came very close to passing. I’m getting ahead of myself, though. If you want a blow-by-blow review of what happened, search the hashtag #FearAndLoathingInReno on Twitter; I’m just going to hit the high points here so you won’t be here all day. The high points of the morning were convention chairman Bob Morin and Joe Heck (via video) calling for party unity against Hillary, which calls were very well received; not so well received was a speaker from the AARP calling for reform of Social Security, who was loudly heckled from the floor. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who remembered how the AARP had ganged up with the Democrats to sabotage Bush the Younger’s feeble attempt to semi-privatize Social Security by letting part of new contributions be put in IRAs. Arizona GOP chair Robert Graham also appeared and gave a rousing unity speech, calling for the party to unite behind Trump and stop Hillary. The rest of the day was spent on electing delegates to the national convention, electors, and committeeman/committeewoman to the RNC. An interesting aspect to the latter is that the Nevada GOP bylaws prohibit the committeeman and committeewoman from being from the same county, so since all the committeewoman nominees were from Clark County, four aspiring committeemen from Clark County were removed from the ballot. Generally speaking, the Trump folks had it their own way here, securing most of the at-large delegate seats and a good chunk of the congressional district delegates as well. The exception seemed to be my own NV-1, where an informal slate led by Amy TarkentonTarkanian largely prevailed over the official Trump slate. This pretty much wrapped up the business for Saturday, and around 6:35 the convention adjourned for cocktails. I skipped the cocktails and went back to the Atlantis, where I spent some more time (and 44 cents) on video poker before heading back to the hotel via the Carl’s Jr. across the street, where I picked up the half-pound bacon guacamole thickburger and a salad, because I’d earned it.

While I was live-tweeting the goings-on at our convention, I was also amusing nearby delegates by relaying news of the shambolic chaos at the Nevada Democratic state convention, which was going on at the same time down at the Paris Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. As most of you know by now, the Democrats got thrown out of the Paris at 10 PM Saturday night after a day full of protests by Sandernistas, who (correctly) felt they’d been robbed by the pro-Hillary convention chair, who forced through a rules change before most of the delegates had even checked in, a change that resulted in most delegates being awarded to Hillary Clinton despite the Sanders faction having played the game by the rules and actually obtained most of the state’s delegates.

Unfortunately, when I got back to the hotel I discovered that the recharger I’d bought at Walmart that morning was a larger version of the Anker recharger I had for my phone, and not useful for running the laptop at all, which is why you’re reading this now and not on Saturday night. Gave up, finished reading Jean Larteguy’s The Centurions, and went to bed.

In the morning, not having slept well, I was slow and logy and didn’t manage to get out, get breakfast, and get to the convention until ten A.M., an hour after the announced start time. It didn’t matter because the convention wasn’t called to order until around 10:15. The rest of the day was spent wrangling over resolutions and the platform, with the most interesting parts being the aforementioned attempt to officially condemn the RINOs who had voted for the commerce tax, interminable arguments over the precise wording of a resolution regarding control over land administered by the BLM, and an attempt to replace the platform committee’s product with a much shorter (and therefore conforming to the rules) one-page platform that struck me as being pretty close to the ideal Libertarian Republican platform. The latter failed, unfortunately, and most of the delegates present went with the committee’s product and its preamble, which contained language calling for equal treatment without regard to sexual orientation that annoyed many folks. At that point, the convention moved on to endorsements – it is apparently the practice in Nevada for the state convention to do pre-primary endorsements instead of having local party orgs do this – and since I had no idea who most of these people were nor whether they were even running in my district, I decided to head on home, since it was 2:30 PM and I’d be lucky to be home by 11:30. Which is pretty much the way it went; the drive home in the late afternoon and evening was much more pleasant than the drive up from Las Vegas, and when I got home, I immediately found the missing AC adapter on the bookshelf in my bedroom.

(Thanks to @ThePoliticalHat for providing useful background throughout the convention via Twitter.)


Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72

In The Mailbox, 05.16.16

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


As those of you who follow me on Twitter are aware, the original plan to blog from Reno failed since I brought the wrong AC adapter for my laptop and couldn’t find a replacement. A recap post will be up later today along with Rule 5 Monday. The FMJRA for last week will be posted tomorrow. Thanks for your patience.


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Nikola Tesla
Da Tech Guy: Ted Cruz Writes About The Mullahs And Their Missiles
The Political Hat: Meanwhile, At The Nevada Democratic Convention…
Michelle Malkin: What It Took For Nutball Azealia Banks to Get Kicked Off Twitter
Twitchy: Sorry, Josh Earnest, Nobody’s Seriously Buying This Obamacare Spin
Shark Tank: Sheriif Candidate Daryl Daniels Responds To Obama’s Latest Transgender Order


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Power: Daryl Hall Tells SJWs To “Shut The F*ck Up”
American Thinker: Darkness Flourishes At Vanderbilt University
BLACKFIVE: Book Review – The Wages Of Sin by Nancy Allen
Don Surber: NYT, Not Trump, Mistreated Rowanne Brewer Lane
Jammie Wearing Fools: Man Arrested After Two Shot During “Stop The Violence” Event
Joe For America: Obama Orders All Public Schools To Let Boys Use Girls’ Bathrooms
JustOneMinute: Saving Ben Sasse
Pamela Geller: Smirking Muslim Nanny Who Beheaded Four-Year-Old While Shrieking Allahu Akbar Won’t Face Murder Charges
Protein Wisdom: Of Cabbages And Kings – My Response To A Trumper
Shot In The Dark: Open Letter To Senator Latz, Rep. Schoen, Et Al
STUMP: Public Finance And Pension Quick Takes – Puerto Rico, Chicago, And Detroit
The Jawa Report: It’s For Real Bro!
The Lonely Conservative: Zuckerberg To Meet With Glenn Beck, Other Conservatives
The Quinton Report: Catholic Bishops Criticize Transgender Letter
This Ain’t Hell: Alicia Watkins, Air Force Vet In The Trump Campaign
Weasel Zippers: Planned Parenthood To Spend $30 Million To Defeat “Asshole”, “Racist” Trump
Megan McArdle: Debate – What Kind Of Inequality Matters?
Mark Steyn: A Se’ennight Of Steyn, May 9-15


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Australian Gay-Marriage Crusader Was Fugitive Wanted on Kiddie Porn Charge

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The fugitive Matthew Hynd with his lover Ali Choudhry in 2013.

Matthew Hynd, who made headlines in Australia as a supporter of gay marriage, was a fugitive from justice, wanted in the United States on child pornography charges. Hynd was sentenced to more than six years in federal prison earlier this month, after having been deported last year from Australia, where he had started a business and, along with his Pakistani boyfriend, campaigned for gay rights.

“In 2010, while Hynd was living and working in Albany, FBI Agents executed a search warrant on his home, after Hynd distributed child pornography images over the Internet,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release. “Agents found hundreds of images of child pornography on Hynd’s computers. Hynd then fled the United States and returned to his native Australia.”

Hynd had been a professor at New York’s SUNY Albany Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, but became addicted to both methamphetamine and child pornography, his lawyer told Judge Mae D’Agostino at a May 3 sentencing hearing. U.S. prosecutors described Hind as “manipulative and attempting to falsely blame a friend for the child pornography,” according to the Australian News website:

Three days after the search warrant was executed [in 2010], Hynd bought an airline ticket to fly from New York to Casablanca, Morocco, and the next day he boarded the flight.
He left his job in Albany without providing notice to his employer and prosecutors said flight records showed Hynd “travelled around the world before landing in Australia, where he is a citizen”.
Hynd was indicted in the US in 2012, extradited from Australia in August 2015, and entered guilty pleas to distribution and possession of child pornography charges. . . .
Judge D’Agostino ordered Hynd also serve a lifetime term of supervised release after he leaves jail and to pay $US1000 in restitution to one of his child pornography victims.

However, as activist Luke McKee reported on his @VGB_OPSEC Twitter account, Hynd had become something of an LGBT celebrity while a fugitive in Australia. In March 2012, he and his lover Ali Choudhry were featured in a profile story in the Brisbane Courier-Mail after they were granted a civil union license in Queensland, which was voided in a controversial act by the province’s conservative government.

 

The couple later made news because Choudhry, who had come to Australia on a student visa in 2009, was facing deportation to his native Pakistan. In a 2013 profile at the Australian LGBT site Same Same, Choudry described how he met Hynd:

As with all great modern romances we met online, in February 2010. I was studying in Australia and Matt was working with the New York State Department of Health. Over the next few months we spoke on the phone, texted and Skyped — which is harder than it sounds because of the 14-hour time difference.
In August of 2010, Matt came on a holiday back to Australia where we were able to finally meet in person. We knew right then and there that it was meant to be. After a lot of thought, Matt quit his job and moved to Australia in December 2010. On February 13, 2014 we will celebrate our four-year anniversary.

Choudhry’s claim that Hynd came to Australia “on a holiday” when, in fact, the professor was fleeing federal charges in the U.S., raises the question of whether Choudhry knew of Hynd’s interest in child pornography, and possibly shared it, since their online “romance” occurred during the months immediately preceding the search warrant that prompted Hynd’s flight. Yet the fact that Hynd had been indicted in the U.S. was not known to the Australian LGBT activists who supported an online fundraising appeal Choudhry and Hynd made in 2013:

That appeal (“Support Love – A Gay Love Story”) raised more than $6,000 — easily doubling their original goal — and in 2014, Choudhry was granted an extension on his visa. Meanwhile, Hynd had started a business, Slurp Tea, that got publicity in Brisbane media:

The report of Matthew Hynd’s sentencing in the Courier-Mail this month made no reference to his high-profile past as “Chief Tea Guru” and a prominent gay-rights activist widely covered in Australian media.

Nor is this the first time Australia’s media has promoted pedophiles in the name of gay rights. In 2010, the Australian Broadcasting Company featured a story headlined “Two Dads Are Better Than One” about Peter Truong and Mark Newton, who said their son was conceived in 2005 with the assistance of a Russian surrogate mother. Three years later, however, Truong and Newton were convicted of sexually exploiting the boy:

Police believe the pair had adopted the boy “for the sole purpose of exploitation.” The abuse began just days after his birth and over six years the couple travelled the world, offering him up for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse and uploading the footage to an international syndicate known as the Boy Lovers Network.

Another prominent gay activist, former University of Southern California Professor Walter Lee Williams, was sentenced to five years in prison in 2014 for “flying to the Philippines and sexually assaulting underage boys he had met online.” Williams had been a fugitive in Mexico but was apprehended in 2013 after being named to the FBI’s Most Wanted List:

Recognition for Williams’ educational work included the USC General Education Outstanding Teacher Award in 2006. But his academic work was a cover for his criminal activity, according to prosecutors.
Williams taught anthropology, gender studies and history at USC for about two decades until he quit in 2011. Under the guise of academic research on sexuality in the Southeast Asia/Pacific region, he repeatedly traveled to the area, prosecutors said.
Federal prosecutors alleged that the author and Fulbright Award winner used those trips to sexually assault underage boys. Investigators believe he has at least 10 victims across Southeast Asia, aged 9 to 17.
Williams engaged in Webcam sex sessions with two boys, aged 13 and 14, in the Philippines in 2010, prosecutors alleged. The next year, he traveled to the country and sexually assaulted both boys and a 15-year-old boy, according to the plea agreement.
While there, he also had sexual contact with three other 16-year-old boys, records show. When he returned to Los Angeles International Airport on Feb. 11, 2011, he was stopped and child pornography was found on him.
The professor fled Los Angeles a week after being interviewed by the FBI. An attorney for USC last year provided the FBI with materials the professor donated to the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives that contained “lascivious visual depictions of minors,” according to the plea agreement.

Professor Williams was co-editor of a 1997 book, Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia, and also co-edited the 2003 book Gay and Lesbian Rights in the United States: A Documentary History.

 

Prosecutors in Scotland Say Lesbian Couple Murdered Two-Year-Old Boy

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Rachel Trelfa, left, and her lesbian partner Nyomi Fee.

In a trial making headlines all over Britain, a lesbian couple are charged with murdering a 2-year-old boy that one of the women had from a previous relationship with a man, and then trying to blame the toddler’s death on another boy the couple allegedly had abused. The so-called “Liam Fee” case involves the March 2014 death of Rachel Trelfa’s son. The boy’s father had been living with Trelfa more than five years when their son was born. A few months later, however, Trelfa moved in with Nyomi Fee, with whom she later registered for a civil union:

Liam was born in the north of England in August 2011 but Trelfa left him for Fee, who lived locally, that December.
Mr Johnson said the split was completely unexpected and left him feeling “devastated”.
He said he subsequently made a failed attempt to get back together with Trelfa.
“She’d fallen out with Nyomi and wanted to get back together with me,” he said.
“I had my reservations about it but it was what I wanted at the time.
“I wanted my family back together.
“She started saying she was getting treated quite badly by Nyomi and wanted to get back to me, things like having her bank cards taken away from her and not being allowed out of the house.
“Things like that she told us everything we’d always thought, that she (Nyomi) was a controlling person who had manipulated her into going away.”
Within 48 hours of the reconciliation Trelfa again left him for Fee, taking Liam with her.

The kind of controlling, manipulative behavior described is typical of domestic abusers. Fee and Trelfa “are also charged with a catalogue of assault, cruelty and neglect charges involving three boys in their care, including the dead toddler.” British law prohibits naming the two other boys or describing their relationship to the women. The latest news:

[Cell phones] belonging to the women accused of murdering Liam Fee did internet searches for subjects such as: “Can you die from a broken bone”, a court heard [Thursday].
Liam’s mum Rachel Fee, 31, and her civil partner Nyomi Fee, 28, had their phones taken by police when the tot died in their flat in Thornton, Fife.
They were used to search the internet for “broken hip in baby” and “how long can a broken leg take to heal?” in the days before Liam died.
The court previously heard Liam had a broken leg and arm at the time of death. The Fees are accused of failing to get him medical help.
Their phones looked up “morphine for children” and browsed Amazon for child medication and leg supports.
A text from Nyomi Fee’s phone read: “Kids should be drowned at birth to save problems. LOL.”
The day before Liam died, Rachel Fee’s phone searched: “Can wives b in prison together?”
The pair are accused of murdering Liam on March 22, 2014, then falsely blaming a young boy for killing him.

Isn’t “equality” awesome?

 

Police: Lesbian Teacher Had Sex in Cemetery, Spent the Night With Teen Girl

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Public education news from rural Minnesota:

A fourth-grade teacher and junior varsity athletics coach at Aitkin Public Schools is accused of having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old female student.
Kristy Lynn Hoge, 24, was charged [May 6] with four counts of felony criminal sexual conduct in Crow Wing County District Court. . . .
Hoge worked as a fourth-grade teacher at Rippleside Elementary School and a coach with the high school’s junior varsity girls’ basketball and softball programs.
According to the criminal complaint filed against Hoge, her alleged relationship with the student became sexual in March.
In a taped statement made to an investigator on May 3, the student detailed the evolution of her relationship with Hoge, which she said began in December 2015 as a friendship. The student said Hoge was easy to talk to about issues in her life.

(When a teenage girl has “issues in her life” and the person it’s easiest for her to talk to is the lesbian basketball coach? Trouble.)

In the middle of March, the student said she and Hoge started having feelings for one another and began kissing.

(Like I said, trouble.)

Over the course of the next couple weeks, the alleged relationship evolved into first touching over the clothes, and then touching under the clothes. The student said she and Hoge met five or six times at a cemetery south of Aitkin and at a residence in Aitkin.

(“Hey, coach, wanna go parking and make out — uh, I mean, talk about my life issues — in the cemetery? Because education and stuff?”)

The student’s mother told the investigator she became aware of the alleged relationship between her daughter and Hoge on May 2, when another coach approached her with concerns. At the beginning of March, the student’s mother said her daughter asked if Hoge could spend the night while she and the student’s father were on vacation. The mother said she explained at that time it would not be appropriate for Hoge to spend the night. The student later said Hoge spent three nights at the residence and slept in her bed.

(“Your honor, this is merely an unsubstantiated allegation. My client, Ms. Hoge, denies this, and unless there is video evidence . . .”)

After receiving statements from the student and her family, the investigator contacted Hoge and asked her to come to the Aitkin County Sheriff’s Office. A little more than a half-hour later, a medical call alerted the sheriff’s office to Hoge’s alleged suicide attempt. . . .

(A victim of homophobia, obviously.)

Charges against Hoge include two counts of felony third-degree criminal sexual conduct, when the accused is in a position of authority and more than four years older than the 16- to 18-year-old victim. These charges each carry a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison, a $30,000 fine or both. Hoge also faces two counts of felony fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct, which each carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, a $20,000 fine or both. . . .

(It would be terrible to send a lesbian to a prison full of women.)

Hoge was a high school athlete at Aitkin High School and went on to play college softball for the University of Minnesota-Morris. She was hired as a fourth-grade teacher in Aitkin for the 2015-16 school year.

This explains everything, of course. Are there any heterosexual women playing varsity softball in college? It’s like majoring in Gender Studies — one occasionally hears rumors of heterosexuality, but such reports are difficult to prove. Please excuse my sarcastic tone about this very serious criminal allegation, but what do we expect? Every public school in America now teaches children that approving of homosexuality is mandatory. The federal government requires schools to support transgenderism. Students are being taught that it is impermissible to express disapproval or moral opposition to sexual perversion — words like “perversion” and “abnormal” are now considered hate speech — and if “education” includes pro-homosexuality seminars in kindergarten, does anyone believe this will have no effect on student behavior?

This is just another isolated incident . . .

Laura Garrigus

Police in Fayetteville, N.C., say Laura Garrigus, 30, had sex with a 17-year-old girl who was her student at Cumberland International Early College on the campus of Fayetteville State University. Garrigus was charged in February with four counts of taking indecent liberties with a student and two counts of sexual offense with a student.

Kimberly Naquin

Kimberly Naquin, 26, was arrested Jan. 15 after it was learned that the high school geography teacher had sexually molested a teenage student, according to police in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana. Naquin had sex with the girl on at least 10 occasions over the course of nearly a year beginning in September 2014 when the girl was 16, police said.

Johnna Feazell

In December, former Missouri teacher Johnna Feazell, 48, was sentenced to seven years in prison for sexually molesting a 16-year-old girl she had known since the student was in seventh grade. Feazell, who had coached sports at a Webster County junior high school, was also convicted of tampering with evidence.

Tiffany Howard

In December, police in Austin, Texas, arrested former Bowie High School teacher Tiffany Howard, 41, on charges that she sexually molested a girl during a three-year period that began when the victim was 13. Howard had coached the girl in seventh grade.

Patricia Hermann

Gymnastics coach Patricia Hermann, 48, was charged in October with sexually abusing two girls, ages 10 and 13. Police say Hermann molested the two girls while their Special Olympics team from Illinois was staying in a hotel in Cobb County, Georgia, for a competition.

  • In June 2015, former high school teacher and swim coach Leah Eames, 33, was sentenced to 30 months probation in Illinois after she pleaded guilty to having sex with a 16-year-old girl she coached.
  • In May 2015, a Michigan judge sentenced Erin Katharine MacDonald to a year in jail after the former Grant High School science teacher pleaded guilty to having sex with a teenage student.
  • In April 2015, Texas officials arrested Heather Lynn Packwood, 25, on charges that she sexually molested a girl who was a student at New Braunfels Christian Academy.
  • Geraldine Alcorn, 28, was arrested in March 2015 in Pittsburgh after police say she became obsessed with an 11-year-old student at Beechwood Elementary School, where Alcorn was a pre-kindergarten teacher.
  • Meghan Colleen Daugherty, 36, was charged in February 2015 with criminal sexual conduct with a minor in South Carolina. The arrest warrant said the Hillcrest Middle School physical education teacher committed sexual battery on a 14-year-old girl.
  • Shakyla Wilson, 22, was charged with one count of aggravated criminal sexual abuse after police in Naperville, Illinois, say she had sexual contact in February 2015 with a 14-year-old girl from Hill Middle School, where Wilson was volunteering as a girls basketball coach.
  • High school dance teacher Michelle Smith White, 37, of Durham, N.C., was charged in October 2014 with having sex with a 16-year-old female student. Police said White had the student’s name and initials tattooed on her body.
  • Dance teacher Sabrina Epps, 19, was arrested in October 2014 after police say she admitted having lesbian sex with a 14-year-old girl who was a student at the Tennessee studio where Epps taught.
  • Gaile Supp, 25, pleaded guilty in September 2014 to sexual battery, a third-degree felony. A former teacher at Clearfield High School in Utah, Supp had originally been charged with object rape, a first-degree felony, in April 2013 for allegedly committing a sexual act on an unwilling 17-year-old female student at her West Haven home.
  • California teacher Rebecca Eileen Diebolt, 35, was arrested in June 2014 after a woman told police that she and Diebolt had a four-year sexual relationship that began in 2004, when the victim was 15 and Diebolt was her language arts teacher and swim/water polo coach.
  • Dance teacher Nichol Marie Phelps, 30, was sentenced to prison in June 2014 after she pleaded guilty to having lesbian sex with a 15-year-old student at the Florida academy where Phelps taught.
  • Andrea Michelle Cardosa, 40, was charged with 16 felony counts in February 2014 after two former female students accused her of sexually molesting them. One accuser said Cardosa started having sex with her when she was only 12.
  • Tonya Drueppel was arrested in January 2014 on charges that she had sex with a middle-school girl beginning in October 2012, when the victim was 13.
  • Amanda Michelle Feenstra, 32, pleaded guilty in October 2013 to having sex with a 17-year-old girl who was a student at the Texas high school where Feenstra was a dance teacher.
  • Kelly O’Rourke, 42, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in October 2013 for having sex with a 16-year-old girl.
  • Linda Wallace was sentenced to prison in September 2013 after pleading guilty to having had a four-year sexual affair with a female student that began when the girl was 13.
  • Nicole Wooten was arrested in February 2013 on charges that she had sex with a girl in 2005 and 2006, when the victim was a 12-year-old eighth-grader.

But it’s not like there’s a trend here or anything . . .




 

 

 

Feminists Against Heterosexuality (@CarolineHeldman Edition)

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Stop objectifying her with your male gaze, misogynists!

Years ago, Professor Donald Douglas of American Power began a sort of blog feud with Occidental College Professor Caroline Heldman, and at the time I had no idea who she was. Back in the day (circa 2008-2012), I treated academic feminism as a joke, the way all conservatives did. Those were the years when I was up to my eyeballs in campaign politics, the Tea Party, etc., and it wasn’t until 2014 that I began seriously researching feminism. Among the weird concepts I encountered was object relations theory, a concept explored at length in a 2011 book Fixing Gender: Lesbian Mothers and the Oedipus Complex by Natasha Distiller. This brain-straining attempt to adapt Freudian psychoanalysis to feminist purposes has an ideological ancestry, as it were, traceable to Nancy Chodorow’s 1978 book The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychology and the Sociology of Gender. Not to delve into this too deeply, but because feminists believe everything is “socially constructed,” their attack on men, marriage and motherhood required them to develop a theoretical refutation both of (a) the idea that sexual behavior is a matter of biology, and (b) Freudian theory about the developmental origins of sexual behavior. Since the 1970s, basically, feminists have been blaming patriarchy for whatever they don’t like about men and sex (which is to say, everything about men and sex), and this is where Professor Heldman’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual propaganda becomes relevant.

 

How old was I the first time I rolled my eyes at the phrase “sex object”? No older than 19, I’m sure. “Everybody Loves a Pretty Girl” (Rule 5) is a fact of human nature, and all complaints about it are futile. Lecture all you want and write yet another book criticizing “objectification” as “sexist,” and still the fact will remain: Beauty exists, and men will always prefer beautiful women to ugly women. Nevertheless, despite the already vast library of feminist nonsense on this subject — Femininity and Domination by Sandra Lee Bartky (1990), The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1990), Beauty and Misogyny by Sheila Jeffreys (2005) — the same basic arguments continue to be endlessly recycled. To recite the main points of this dreary theme, there is no such thing as “beauty,” nor any reason (other than “sexism” and “misogyny”) why anyone would notice the difference between Kate Upton and Jaclyn Friedman.

Jaclyn Friedman, feminist (left); Kate Upton, supermodel (right).

According to feminists, it is wrong for men to admire Ms. Upton’s beauty, and also wrong to think maybe Ms. Friedman should lose a few pounds. Feminists insist there is no objective basis for preferring one to the other — no biological fact of human nature is involved — and anyone who disagrees is a victim of patriarchal brainwashing:

Overtly, the fashion-beauty complex seeks to glorify the female body and to provide opportunities for narcissistic indulgence. More important than this is its covert aim, which is to depreciate woman’s body and deal a blow to her narcissism. We are presented everywhere with images of perfect female beauty . . . These images remind us constantly that we fail to measure up. . . . The female body is revealed as a task, an object in need of transformation. . . . Every aspect of my bodily being requires either alteration or else heroic measures merely to conserve it.

So wrote Professor Sandra Lee Bartky in 1990, and this claim — women are victims of a sinister “fashion-beauty complex” — is one that feminists never get tired of repeating, as if repeating it could make it true.

Yet even if it were true, and if by some magical power (an edict from the White House or the United Nations) all the advertisements for fashion and beauty were abolished, (a) men would still prefer good-looking women, (b) women would still want to enhance their beauty, and (c) feminists would still be bitching about it. So here is a 13-minute video of Professor Heldman lecturing about “self-objectification”:

She made this argument in a 2008 Ms. magazine article:

A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and girl’s perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been recognized by social scientists as self-objectification — viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the male gaze. . . .
What would disappear from our lives if we stopped seeing ourselves as objects? Painful high heels? Body hatred? Constant dieting? Liposuction? It’s hard to know. Perhaps the most striking outcome of self-objectification is the difficulty women have in imagining identities and sexualities truly our own. In solidarity, we can start on this path, however confusing and difficult it may be.

Oh, “social scientists” say this? Well, that settles it! You can prove damn near anything with “social science,” but never mind whether this is true. Correlation is not causation,  and the question Professor Heldman wants us to ignore is, “Why would a women want to be a ‘sex object’?” Also, we must ignore another question: “Why is ‘the male gaze’ thus specified?”

Like all such feminist arguments, Professor Heldman’s rhetoric is superficially a criticism of media “depictions of women,” a Trojan Horse within which she conceals an attack on male sexuality. This kind of “consciousness-raising” aims to incite women to resent men’s normal behavior, and to view male sexuality as inherently harmful to women.

Ladies, if you don’t like Cosmo and Vogue, don’t buy them. If a TV advertisement offends you, change the channel. Everybody is free to ignore any media “depictions of women” they don’t like, and I’ve been criticizing media since before Caroline Heldman was old enough to drive. But while Professor Heldman pretends she is merely criticizing media, what she is actually criticizing is heterosexuality, both in terms of mens’s desires (their admiration of beauty) and women’s response to male desire. Women should never seek to be beautiful in order to attract male admiration, Professor Heldman insinuates, and any male who admires a woman’s beauty is wrong for doing so. Every woman is equally deserving of admiration, feminists would have us believe, and anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist. However women themselves may judge each other, any scale of value applied to women is “sexist” if it in any way reflects male preferences. Whatever men want is always wrong, because men are bad — this is the unstated premise of Professor Heldman’s “objectification” discourse, as of feminist ideology generally:

This anti-beauty message has been a core component of feminist rhetoric since 1968, when the Women’s Liberation movement emerged from the New Left and staged its first public protest against the Miss America pageant. Beauty pageants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women,” the protesters declared, proclaiming that “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.”
Notice the words “forced,” “enslaved” and “conditioned,” used to imply that these “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards” are imposed on women against their will. Are women “forced” to play these “roles”? Do women “compete for male approval” because they have been “conditioned” to do so?

A careful student of rhetoric perceives how feminists employ tendentious language to depict men as evil oppressors and women as their victims. Similarly, we see how Professor Heldman employs the appeal to authority fallacy (argumentum ad verecundiam) by invoking “social scientists” as having proven the harmful effects of “self-objectification.” Whether or not this “research” proves what Professor Heldman says it proves, at what point does the ordinary human concern with appearance and grooming become that awful thing, “self-objectification”? Could we all improve our lives by ceasing to care what we look like? Should my teenage sons stop working out in the gym? Shave their heads instead of paying $20 for a nice hairstyle? Sit on the sofa and stuff themselves with Cheetos? Wear ratty old clothes instead of Abercrombie and Fitch?

Well, I could continue this argument further, but the shrewd reader perceives the basic point: Professor Heldman’s arguments are popular (that YouTube video has gotten nearly 1.3 million views) because she is telling unhappy women what they want to hear. “You are not to blame for your unhappiness,” feminists always tell women. “Blame the media! Blame society! Blame capitalism! Blame patriarchy! Blame men!”

Rationalizations (scapegoating and sour grapes) are attempts to evade responsibility for our own failures, to justify our resentments, or to explain away our disappointments. This is all feminism really is, a gigantic Excuse Factory, mass-producing self-justifying rationalizations for unhappy women. As Peter Lloyd says, “feminism teaches women they’re perennial victims and deserve whatever they desire.”

No paranoid conspiracy theory can compete with feminism when it comes to attributing unlimited evil to the all-powerful Them. Everywhere she turns, a feminist imagines herself confronted with the oppressive power of the patriarchy, and it’s amazing that any of the young women Professor Heldman teaches at Occidental College (annual tuition $49,278) can withstand all the social injustice they suffer, living under the constant hostile surveillance of the male gaze. Professor Heldman is promoting an attitude of sexual paranoia — “Fear and Loathing of the Penis” — which has become the core value of feminism in the 21st century. Feminists are against marriage, against motherhood, against capitalism, against Christianity, against men and thus, ultimately, against heterosexuality.

Could feminist theory ever succeed in changing men’s behavior? Is it possible that somewhere in the world, a lunatic pervert is now masturbating to depraved fantasies about . . . Jaclyn Friedman?

In a world gone mad, anything is possible, you sick freaks.

However, I see Ms. Friedman has only 10,700 followers on Twitter, while Kate Upton has 2.2 million, so I guess we know which of these two women is the greater victim of “objectification,” right?