Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea in 1998, immediately after the blue dress forced Bill to confess.

Yes, that caption is click bait exaggeration, but actually only by a little. Feminists have not said explicitly that Hillary is too mentally and emotionally weak to be president. They have, however, said it implicitly by saying that, to the extent she didn’t completely destroy Trump during the first debate, it was because she was struggling under the severe handicap of dealing with his sexist conversational style.

In other words, they’ve pretty much admitted that the woman seeking to lead a country and to do battle on Americans’ behalf at home and abroad can’t handle dealing with men. They’re just too overwhelming for her.

If you doubt my take, get a load of the whiny feminist headlines that have taken over my Facebook feed, thanks to my living in a Blue enclave:

Stephen Colbert calls out debate double standard:

Stephen Colbert blasted the different expectations for the presidential candidates in their first debate in a live “The Late Show” Monday night.

“Hillary (Clinton) had to be confident without smug…commanding without shrill,” Colbert said.

I don’t see anything “shrill” about Hillary. She hectors, rather than shrieks. Remember this:

Not shrill, just angry and entitled.

Donald Trump’s interruptions of Hillary Clinton are familiar to women

Call it “mansplaining,” “bropropriating,” or “Kanye at the VMAs,” women are familiar with being interrupted by men when they speak.

So when Donald Trump repeatedly interrupted Hillary Clinton at Monday night’s debate — 51 times, according to Vox — it hit home for much of the audience.

Women have been interrupted by men in professional settings for decades. Whether it’s Kanye West cutting off Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards or an executive halted midsentence by her peer in a corporate meeting, studies have found that men are more likely to block women from talking entirely, to correct them, and to prevent them from using expletives.

While feminists and their pajama-boy men are rushing to Hillary’s defense, conservatives are robustly castigating Donald for not being tougher in his dealings with Lester Holt, who interrupted him constantly and framed all the questions to support Hillary’s Leftist agenda. Sure, Holt was mean to Donald, but if you can’t stand up to the moderator, are you really going to be able to stand up to Putin? Or Kim Jong Un? Or all those nasty Republican men in Congress? Or the Iranian Mullahs? We expect Donald to do so, but we’re being told that Hillary cannot.

In fact, a lot of women have managed to rule in a man’s world without have the rules remade for them: Boudica, Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Golda Meir, Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher (who relished, not ran from or whined about, the fight), Indira Gandhi, Angela Merkel (Hillary’s favorite), Corazon Aquino, etc. All were strong women who managed to deal with mansplaining in macho cultures.

And then, of course, there’s the whole Trump is “sexist” charge, which is just the 2016 version of 2008’s and 2012’s claim that “everyone who doesn’t support Obama is racist.”  With this charge floating in the air, there’s a lot of smug laughter on the Left and head shaking on the right about the fact that Trump refuses to let go of the whole Alicia “Miss Piggy” Machado thing.

What many have already forgotten is that Hillary brought the matter up, out of the blue, as a way to avoid Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, pay for play, Bimbo eruptions, etc. People will also forget the details of Trump’s fighting back. What they will remember is that Machado willingly put her body on display to win a prize, then let that same body run to fat, then did porn, and then was involved in murder. It’s not about sexism, it’s about the facts.

And another thing: Republicans are wrong to tell Trump not to attack Hillary about Bill’s women. Bass ackwards wrong.

If Hillary’s now going to play the sexism card against him, Donald should beat her around the head with it. There’s nothing pro-woman about Hillary’s brutal, endless, and successful efforts to destroy the women that Bill raped, assaulted, or lied about having slept with. Hillary is the ultimate unfeminist, one who put her male husband’s career over women’s health, safety, and honor. As Hillary herself said of women who have survived precisely the kind of sexual assault Bill visited upon them, “Don’t let anyone silence your voice. You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed and we’re with you.”

Feminists are doing their damndest to prop Hillary up. This is going to backfire, as they’ve been locked too long in their pretty pink caves and have lost perspective. Otherwise, they wouldn’t shout from the rooftops that Hillary is too weak to function in what is, after all, a world that is predominantly populated by male leaders.

Moreover, they’re setting her up for a huge fall regarding her whole claim that Donald is sexist. At least he has the excuse that he’s a man. Hillary, however, is a traitor to her sex.

If you like non-stop political facts and opinion, check out WOW! Magazine, the online collaborative magazine from the Watcher’s Council members and their friends.

The post SHOCKER: Feminists admit Hillary incompetent to be president appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Photo by tedeytan

A Progressive friend is relentlessly pushing “Trump is awful” stories on me. I, a conservative, invariably counter by pointing out that Hillary’s list of sins and failures is infinitely worse.

I realized yesterday that my arguments are irrelevant. My friend will never vote for someone who is not 100% pro-abortion, pro-socialized medicine, or pro-open borders.  Given a choice between a rotting dead body that is pro-Abortion and a genuine angel from Heaven that is pro-Choice, he’d vote for the rotting body every time.

Even as we endlessly talk down the other side’s candidates (because few people are really comfortable talking their own candidate up in this bizarre election year), what really matters is the ideological divide underlying this election. The following list might help you decide on which side of that divide you live. Once you decide, do remember that you will never get people to accept your candidate, no matter how flawed their own candidate, until you get them to accept your ideology.

National security

• Conservatives believe that America and her allies are safest when America projects military strength that acts as a deterrent to predatory actors around the world.
• Progressives believe that America is itself a predatory actor and that it and, indeed, the rest of the world are safest when it is passive and weak.

Guns

• Conservatives believe that guns’ defensive benefits far outweigh their ability to kill.
• Progressives believe that guns have no utility other than killing and that only police should be allowed to carry them.

Police

• Conservatives acknowledge that, among America’s approximately 1.5 million state and federal police, there are individual bad actors, including racists, but strongly believe that the vast majority are decent men and women who routinely put their lives at risk to keep the American public safe.
• Progressives believe that America’s police are inherently racist and corrupt and that they must be kept on the shortest leash possible, especially when dealing with the inner city black community (but that they and private bodyguards to celebrities should still be the only people allowed to have guns).

Race

• Conservatives try to heed Martin Luther King’s dictum to look past the color of people’s skin in order to judge them by the content of their character.
• Progressives believe that race is of paramount importance in that it determines both how people act and how others act towards them.

Crime

• Conservatives acknowledge that some people are born sociopaths or psychopaths, but they also believe that people are rational actors and that a society that refuses to hold criminals accountable for their actions and refuses to impose strong deterrents (e.g., armed, law-abiding citizens) against crime, incentivizes crime.
• Progressives believe that all criminal acts that blacks commit are because of racism, while all criminal acts that white Americans commit are because white Americans, especially poor white Americans, are weak, inbred, and stupid (and usually racist).

Welfare

• Conservatives believe that a moral society must take care of those unable to care for themselves, but that it’s also immoral to create a system that gives incentives to able-bodied people to shape their lives so as to conform to welfare requirements, allowing them to avoid work (and I know of many such people).
• Progressives believe that, while middle-class Progressives routinely conform their lives to the education-marriage-job-children metric that prevents poverty, it’s racist and classist to expect that of minorities and poor (and stupid) whites.

Immigration

• Conservatives believe that America’s strength comes from a constant infusion of immigrants but they also believe that, as a sovereign nation, America gets to decide (for better or worse) which immigrants it wants at a given time and how many.
• Progressives believe that borders are racist and that they allow America to hog resources; therefore, they support an open border that allows the unchecked, unvetted, free flow into America of people from the entire world, all of whom are entitled to full benefits upon their arrival.

Abortion

• Conservatives believe that life begins somewhere on the continuum between conception and viability.
• Progressives believe that life begins at some indeterminate time after birth.

Euthanasia

• Conservatives believe that your family loves you and will willingly take on debt to save your life.
• Progressives believe that the state loves you and will willingly allocate funds to save your life.

Socialized medicine

• Conservatives believe that a free market and an educated public are the best way to drive down medical and insurance costs, something regularly proven in the real world.
• Progressives believe that the government is the best way to drive down medical costs and increase access to care, something that has never been proven in the real world (including in Europe, which is seeing its health care system collapse now that American Cold War dollars are almost gone).

Judeo-Christian ideology

• Conservatives believe that the Judeo-Christian ideology that has governed America for more than two centuries, while sometimes imperfectly practiced (e.g.,slavery), is still the best ideology for creating a safe and prosperous world, one peopled by decent, generous and moral citizens.
• Progressives believe that the Judeo-Christian ideology is racist, misogynist, and homophobic, and that the world will be best served if it could be wiped out.

Radical Islam

• Conservatives believe that, while the majority of Muslims are not terrorists, the Koran contains within it an incitement to cruelly-effected world domination, and that Western nations must fight against that mindset both on the battlefield and in the world of the mind.
• Progressives believe that Islam is a “Religion of Peace” and that anyone who engages in the type of violent activity called for under the Koran is not actually Muslim.

Israel

• Conservatives believe that Israel is as decent a country as one will find, one that has managed to maintain its commitment to individual liberties for all citizens, regardless of race, religion, country of national origin, sex, or sexual orientation, despite being under extraordinary genocidal pressures from the Muslims surrounding it, all of whom get moral and material support from Europe (and, sadly, from the Obama administration too).
• Progressives think that Israel is a colonial oppressor that deserves to be destroyed, whether quickly through all-out warfare or slowly through the demographic pressure of a two-state solution augmented by the “right of return” (a unique refugee benefit limited solely to Palestinians).

Big Government

• Conservatives believe that big government is dangerous, because those who work within it, once they obtain power, are capable of doing anything to maintain that power.
• Progressives believe that, no matter the question, big government is the answer, and are certain that their navel-gazing makes them sufficiently righteous to avoid the sins of an all-powerful government seen in places such as the Soviet Union, Cuba, Nazi Germany, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, ISIS territory, etc.

The Constitution

• Conservatives believe that the Constitution is the most brilliant political document ever created, with timeless rules that ensure that the government is always subordinate to individual liberty.
• Progressives believe that the Constitution is the outdated product of racist, misogynistic, homophobic white men and should be removed from its centrality in American life.

The Supreme Court

• Conservatives believe that all Supreme Court decisions most draw their principles from the Constitution as written.
• Progressives believe that all Supreme Court decisions must draw their principles from whatever they can find that justifies a Progressive outcome.

Free Speech

• Conservatives believe that actions count more than words and that free speech, even ugly speech, is the cornerstone of a free society.
• Progressives believe that conservative words hurt, that Progressives are entitled to take violent action to censor conservative words, and that free speech has the potential to be mean and should therefore be limited only to Progressives.

Religious Liberty

• Conservatives believe that people should be allowed to look to their religious values to govern their conduct, provided that their conduct does not stray beyond the agreed-upon parameters of modern Judeo-Christian morality (no virgin sacrifices, no ritual murder, no slavery, etc.).
• Progressives believe that, because the Judeo-Christian doctrine is inherently flawed, people should not be able to act on their religious beliefs on pain of financial penalties and imprisonment.

Same-Sex Marriage

• Conservatives believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and are worried that, with the Supreme Court having looked far beyond the Constitution (and into tawdry gay romance novels) to assert that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, the state will interfere with their religious liberty and insist that civil marriages aren’t enough — all churches and synagogues (but not mosques, of course) will have to perform same-sex marriages.
• Progressives believe that marriage is a dated concept, but nevertheless want it to apply to any and all combinations of humans (same sex, multiple sexes) as well as to human-adroid match-ups and human-animal match-ups, and they want the state to destroy anyone who refuses to be a party to these new-style marriages.

Climate Change

• Conservatives believe that the climate is changing because it has always changed, mostly in response to changes in the sun, and like to point out that actual facts support this hypothesis.
• Progressive believe that the climate is changing because of the West’s abusive, carbon-generating activities, and insist that the science bears this out, even though the past twenty years have proven that the most extreme predictions were wrong, the less extremely predictions were mostly wrong, and that any scientific statements about climate change that appear to be correct manage to appear that way only because of data manipulation.

Environmentalism

• Conservatives believe that mankind is the earth’s steward (whether because God said so or because humans what to preserve the earth for their progeny), which requires us to do what we can to limit man’s negative interaction with nature but that, when there is conflict between man and nature, humans should have the edge.
• Progressives believe that mankind is a parasite on earth and that, not only should we limit man’s negative interaction with nature, we should ensure that, in any conflict (whether with spotted owls, Delta smelts, little lizards, etc.) man must always yield.

Sex

• Conservatives believe that there are two sexes — male and female — which are determined at the genetic level and that mistakes in this coding are rare.
• Progressives, despite their claim to be the science-based community, believe that gender is a construct, that XX and XY chromosomes are meaningless, and that people are whatever sex they say they are at whatever hour or minute they feel that way.

Feminism

• Conservatives, like the French of old, celebrate la difference, although they strongly believe that all people should receive equal treatment under the law, equal pay for equal work, and equal access to education, jobs, housing, etc.
• Progressives believe that men are dangerous and inferior and the corollary that women are wonderful and superior — except when it comes to Hillary Clinton, who is simultaneously incredibly superior and so fragile that she cannot handle it when Trump talks to her, interrupts her, or stands near her.

College education

• Conservatives believe that people who graduate from modern American colleges are indoctrinated.
• Progressives believe that people who graduate from modern American colleges are educated.

Trump is the candidate who openly stands for the conservative ideology; Hillary is the candidate who openly stands for the Progressive ideology. If you cannot get someone to buy into your particular ideology, you will not be able to get them to buy into your candidate — and that’s irrespective of the actual candidates’ sins and virtues.

(I’ll be out and about today, but if you add more couplets to the comments, I’ll try to update this post.)

UPDATES: My brilliant readers have chimed in. Thanks to Danny Lemieux for the first two suggestions, Jedi Jones for the third , and Servo 1969 for the fourth:

Poverty

• Conservatives believe that poverty is the result of denial of human opportunity, whether by economic regulations, laws combined with human spiritual failings (such as bad behavior, sloth, greed, etc.) for which people must take responsibility as individuals
• Progressives believe that poverty is the result of material dislocations due to societal failings (i.e. “isms”) and that individuals cannot be held responsible for their own poverty.

Crime

• Conservatives believe that criminal behavior is due to personal failings.
• Progressives believe that criminal behavior is due to material /economic deprivation.

Sexuality

• Conservatives often hold themselves to a stricter moral code with respect to sexuality but also believe that what people do behind closed doors is their business. As long as people don’t force the rest of us to hear about their alternative sexual lifestyles through schools, the media and the legal system, conservatives don’t care what you do in your private life.
• Liberals believe that society is too “heteronormative.” They believe that any alternative sexual lifestyle that anyone can think of should be celebrated, applauded, broadcast on public airwaves, given special workplace protections and taught to schoolchildren. Even though they don’t believe that people were born as male or female, they do believe that gay people were “born that way.” Despite this belief, there is no shortage of anecdotal evidence that people with a particular sexual preference are trying to recruit, convert and seduce others into their lifestyle.

The role of government

• Conservatives believe there is no situation so bad it can’t be made worse by adding more government.
• Progressives believe there is no situation so good it can’t be improved by adding more government.

The post Progressive v. Conservative ideologies, not the candidates, are the real drivers in this election *UPDATED* appeared first on Bookworm Room.

When I was young, feminism was about singing “I am strong, I am invincible, I am woman!” We women weren’t weaker than men, physically or emotionally. We were at least as strong, if not stronger. We were women and we were roaring!

Maggie Thatcher was one of those women, even though she never made common cause with post-60s feminism. You know, if any man ever had the temerity to grope Maggie Thatcher, she would have ripped his testicles off . . . and that was before she was five years old. It would have gotten scarier later.

The current generation of feminists, though, are defined by their weakness, not the strength. In the wake of the “groping Trump” media fiesta (a private boast followed by scads of accusations from women who can be proven to be lying or to be Hillary operatives), women have been swarming social media with tales of their being groped too. One of my Leftist Facebook friends stated that she didn’t know any woman who had not been groped.

I said, “I haven’t.”

I was then told by her, and her friends, that I’m in the minority. That the vast number of women have been groped.

I said that there’d be less groping if women responded to a grope by groping the guy back, in the same region, much more painfully (a la Maggie Thatcher).

I was told that I was diminishing women’s pain. That women suffer. That women cannot recover from the experience. That I’d made the women in the conversation who had been groped feel bad about themselves. No one said it, but the word “microaggression” was clearly in the air. Heck, maybe even “macroaggression.” Mind you now, we were not talking about criminal rape or molestation; we were taking about the disgusting (usually drunk) opportunist taking a quick grab.

I came away from that exchange convinced that we’ve gone from women who are roaring to women who are whining. These gals, frankly, sickened me with their assertion that women cannot handle what the world sends their way.

So, what’s this have to do with Hillary? Well, after the first debate, Hillary was a victim because Trump interrupted her. I interpreted this to mean that Hillary was too weak to hold her own.  Certainly Trump fought back vigorously when Lester Holt kept cutting him off. Paul Ryan showed his weakness when Biden bullied him. Mike Pence, on the other hand, showed Kaine up for a bully and handle it well. No victim there.

After the second debate, when Trump wandered the stage, we were told that Hillary was a victim because he “stalked her.” Hillary later agreed that, yes, she felt victimized.

Thanks to today’s feminists, the message is that women are total victims:  They have no emotional resilience, they’re easily cowed into silence, and a man’s mere presence can intimidate them. Hillary has cheerfully agreed with her followers’ assessment of the situation when it comes to Hillary and men.

My conclusion from all this is that Hillary’s most impassioned followers have made a strong case that Hillary should not be president and, indeed, that no woman should be president. We women are too emotionally and physically fragile to function outside of “safe spaces.” Sure, Hillary’s good in a high school gym with a few dozen screaming fans, but put her on the world stage against Putin (a very dominant man), the Mullahs (men who hate women), or any other male world leader and she won’t be able to handle it. Handling Trump is trauma enough.

Face it: the days of Maggie Thatcher and Golda Meir were a golden age for strong women. We’ve now fallen back to an era of fragile Victorian women who can’t be far from their fainting couches. I don’t want one of those neurotic whiners leading my country.

(And by the way, if you ever meet me, don’t try to grope me. I’m not kidding about groping you back, the hard and painful way.)

The post Hillary’s followers trumpet her unfitness for office appeared first on Bookworm Room.

This is it: the countdown to learning whether Obama will have been successful in fundamentally changing America or whether we can still resurrect something from the wreckage. This is an umbrella post with a variety of articles that touch upon the election, America’s culture wars, politics generally, the Middle East, and other interesting things. The only thing I don’t have here, because Assange keeps promising but not delivering, is a single smoking-gun document that hands Hillary her “go directly to jail” card. Instead, each Wikileak tranche, while confirming Hillary’s and the Democrat’s core corruption and self-interest, fails to be the jail card.

The #NeverTrumpers still have time to reconsider. Some of the people I admire most are #NeverTrumpers. I don’t understand them on the issue and they don’t understand me, but it’s ultimately a good thing that we’re not Democrat herd animals but, instead, have independent minds. Still. . . . Roger Simon makes what seems to me to be a very compelling argument that, no matter how flawed Trump is (and he is very flawed), Hillary will be infinitely worse. We’ll be plagued by a corrupt media, the culture wars on steroids, a level of corruption unimagined in American politics, the constitutional risks of a president under FBI investigation, and the horrors of Hillary’s manifest incompetence.

Trump offers a return to “normalcy.” Peter Thiel, whose gayness the Gay “Baby, I was born this way” Mafia now denies because he supports Trump, made an important point, which is that Trump represents a return to the norm. What the Left offers is no longer even remotely normal. We’ve spent the last eight years in Looking Glass Land, and people are turning to Trump to back away from Progressive insanity.

Hillary’s terrible incompetence. One of the things that’s come through loud and clear with the Wikileaks is that Hillary and Company are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. They’re terrible at what they do, and they get away with it only because they have a media infrastructure that vouches for them (“She has a vagina so, leave Hillary alone!!“). And of course, because that are the bridge connecting money (no matter how dirty or anti-American) to American power and assets.

This is almost certainly untrue, un-sourced rumor, but I couldn’t pass it up. Please keep my caveat in mind: There is no reason to believe that this post, which has the NYPD saying that the Weiner dox are much worse than anyone imagined, is true. However, I can’t resist linking to it to the extent it claims to represent unnamed sources in the NYPD and alleges this kind of stuff:

But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top-secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to:

* Money laundering
* Child exploitation
* Sex crimes with minors (children)
* Perjury
* Pay to play through Clinton Foundation
* Obstruction of justice
* Other felony crimes

NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices.

Well, there was no way I could pass it up. Let me just say once again: Regarding that link’s validity, you have been warned.

The FBI agents may have done something good. I argued a long time ago that, when push came to shove, career FBI agents would not stand up and shout out Hillary’s guilt. The chains of salaries, and pensions, and mortgages, and college fees would be too much. (Please note that I did not excuse myself here. I’m sorry to say that I don’t believe that I’d show exceptional moral courage either when staring at the end of the middle class life I love.)

It turns out I was partially right. As David Goldman sees it, while none of the FBI agents went public, the rising number of resignations as well as the anger and hostility within the FBI is what drove Comey to do the decent thing, which was to walk back his now erroneous statement that the FBI was not currently investigating Hillary. And for having done that, says Goldman, those agents, who did put themselves at risk, deserve our thanks. I agree.

Progressivism is anti-science. Academics are beginning to catch on to the fact the Progressive belief systems do not operate in the real world. This article explains how Third Wave feminism (which has nothing to do with equal pay for equal work or equality of opportunity) is antithetical to science. And Mike Rowe has a wonderful little essay saying that, considering all that we manifestly do not know about our universe, those who call skeptics “deniers” are the true anti-science people.

Calling Black Lives Matter on their core anti-black racism. When the campus censors at Calif. State Univ. — Bakersfield objected to Mike Adams using the slogan “All Lives Matter” for a speech he was to give, Dr. Adams wrote an open letter to the campus BLM reps, suggesting that they, too, might want to look at whether their name honestly represented their activities and suggesting some alternative names:

2. Shacked Lives Matter. Illegitimacy rates have skyrocketed in recent decades. And this matters more than anything. It matters if a man gets a woman pregnant and decides to shack up with her for a little while and move on – as opposed to marrying her and actually raising the child. If the child is male, the consequences of the father’s absence are particularly severe. Put simply, there is a clear and inverse relationship between time spent interacting with dad and time spent interacting with the police. Presently, there is only one racial group in America for which fatherlessness is the rule rather than the exception. To be specific, the black community is now experiencing a whopping 72% illegitimacy rate. This simply must be dealt with now and without relying on the government. In fact, government cannot be part of the solution because it is the root of the problem.

Binge drinker named Woman of the Year. You may recall that I was livid about the Left’s take on Brock Turner. As you may recall, he was convicted of rape because he and a girl both got incoherently, black-out drunk and somehow or other they ended up having sex behind a dumpster. The girl admits that she has no idea what happened — that is, she doesn’t know whether she said yes or not. The only thing certain is that when people caught up with this disgusting duo, she was no longer conscious — and no one knows when she lost consciousness, nor is it reasonable to believe that had she first consented and then past out, the disgracefully drunk Turner would have noticed.

So it was that Turner became the most hated man in America, while this pathetic piece of alcohol sodden humanity, who denies being responsible for the situation in which she found herself, is now touted to America’s teens and young women as one of Glamour’s “Women of the Year.” This “honor” seems to have come about because she’s now made a career of blaming everyone (Turner, Stanford, fraternities, the judge) but herself for a situation in which she bears the largest part of the blame for her travails.

The real antisemitism isn’t around Trump. A Jewish(ish) (i.e., nominally Jewish) Hillary supporter keeps telling me that Trump is antisemitic. And I keep telling him that the fact that some nasty fringe of people has attached itself to him is small potatoes compared to the grotesque and growing antisemitism at the heart of the Democrat party — something Hillary, no friend to Israel herself, has never addressed or disavowed. The latest example of what’s going on with the Left is “soft” Holocaust denial, which involves saying “We’ll agree that the Holocaust happened, but it wasn’t that bad, and the Jews had it coming, and they’re even worse in Israel.” And Hillary says nothing….

Really, there’s no daylight between Hillary and Obama on Israel. Many Israel supporters are very worried that, once he’s in the last two months of his Presidency, Obama will move to destroy Israel through the UN. Charles Krauthammer wrote a representative column. Progressive friends of mine say it’s unfair to indict Obama for something he hasn’t yet done, but the point of openly worrying is to try get Leftist Jews energized enough to stop him from doing anything. Meanwhile, Daniel Greenfield looks at the kind of village in Israel that Obama wants to destroy — an act that Hillary would certainly support.

This is a very touchy subject for me today because one of the Little Bookworms, despite my strong opposition, joined J Street and went to a weekend seminar. After assuring me that the seminar was pointless, boring, and poorly managed, Little Bookworm nonetheless said, “Don’t worry, Mom. There are some things on campus, like BDS, that are really antisemitic. And some things, like Hillel, that are too pro-Jewish. But J Street is right in the middle, because it just wants to end Israel’s illegal occupation of the territories. And no, I don’t want hear from you about it.”

While I’m on the subject of Obama, he’s a liar. I’ve been writing since 2008 about the fact that Obama is a liar, although a more subtle, intelligent one than Hillary. The public started catching on when his Obamacare lies were exposed. Now, with the Wikileaks, he’s been revealed in yet another blatant lie, this one about his alleged ignorance of Hillary’s private server.

The anti-Israel, pro-Muslim indoctrination is everywhere. How can I get too angry at my Little Bookworm when so many facets of American society buy into or actively promote the Left’s Big Lies. Even the Metropolitan Museum in New York has gotten in on the act, with a gauzy, loving, completely dishonest exhibit about the first Muslim occupation of Jerusalem before the Ottomans came along.

No, Obamacare can’t be fixed. Megan McArdle speaks the truth: there is no quick fix for Obamacare. It’s broken down to the bone.

If this magnificent man were an American, he’d vote for Trump. As Brexit showed, the British are sick to death of politicians like ours — the kind who put a matter to the vote and then, when they don’t like the outcome, ignore it:

Davy Crockett’s introduction to limited constitutional government. Back in 1867, before Harper’s Magazine was just another Left-wing outlet, it published an article about the lesson Davy Crockett learned when he once voted to use public money for someone’s private benefit. The someone for whose benefit the money was to be used was a good person, but a voter explained to Crockett that, once a government starts treating money as if it’s the government’s own, to be doled out as the government sees fit, the government has ceased to become representative and is on its way to tyranny.

Actual science backs historical events. When Britain first staked a claim in North America, it chose the Irish to be its slaves — both as true, owned slaves, and as endlessly indentured servants. The problem was that the Irish died like flies. The reason the British turned to Black Africans, saddling the future United States with the stain of black slavery, is that the Black Africans were more resistant to many of the diseases that made the Irish inefficient.

What’s fascinating is that the Irish susceptibility to disease may come about because Northerners, unlike Africans, mated with Neanderthals, which created different immune systems — with the African immune system possibly better suited to combating infections, which were a major killer, especially for field workers:

Barreiro and his team studied blood samples taken from 175 Americans – roughly half of which had African ancestry, with the other half being of European descent.

From these samples, the team extracted macrophages – immune cells that work to kill pathogens – and infected them with two kinds of bacteria: Listeria and Salmonella.

When comparing the samples 24 hours later, the researchers found that the macrophages from the African group had reduced the bacterial growth three times faster than the European group, thanks to a stronger inflammatory response.

In terms of combating these specific bacteria, that’s a definite advantage, but the researchers point out that it also comes with certain disadvantages.

“The immune system of African Americans responds differently, but we cannot conclude that it is better,” says Barreiro, “since a stronger immune response also has negative effects, including greater susceptibility to autoimmune inflammatory diseases such as Crohn’s disease.”

History might have been very different if African slaves had weaker immune systems so that they were a poor investment, rather than a good one.

Incidentally, I’m reading Bruce Levine’s The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South, which relies heavily upon contemporaneous documents to show (a) how unutterably cruel white slaveholders were to their slaves and (b) the terrible lies the slaveholders told themselves and others to justify what they did. Very depressing, but important to know. It’s a reminder that slavery is horrible — including slavery as practiced today in most of the Muslim Middle East.

Democratic socialism is still socialism. When Bernie was still a contender, rather than a quisling, I argued hard that his putting the word “democratic” in front of “socialist” didn’t mean that he wasn’t a hardcore socialist who sought government control over every aspect of American lives. Steve Crowder makes the same point, only much better than I ever could:

Two points, one smart and one stupid.. The smart point comes (naturally) from a conservative who is kind enough to read my blog and correspond with me. The other day, I received the following note from Kathy, and I couldn’t agree more:

Just a short note on something that has bugged me since I first heard it and today I heard it again and am finally fed up, the phrase “working people.”

Politicians constantly talk about how they want to tax the “rich” to provide relief for “working people.” The implication is that the “rich” don’t work. Therefore it’s “fair” to tax them. What a load of cr@p! How do politicians think the “rich” got rich? Most of them worked hard to acquire their money. To imply the “rich” don’t work is insulting and ignorant. “Rich” people work and many work harder and longer than the politicians” “working people.”

Yes! Exactly right.

And the stupid point (naturally) came from one of my Progressive Facebook friends. Only a Progressive could be this clueless. After putting up a Facebook post decrying the fact that Hillary is on the ropes only because of sexism, the friend wrote this in a comment:

This is not just about sex – it is anything and everything to distract from the issues. I’m sorry, but those taxes?

I suspect that the phrase “but those taxes” is not some weird shorthand for the IRS’s illegal (and ongoing) attack against conservative groups, which goes to a serious issue about the size of government, government accountability, and government corruption. Instead, to her, an “issue” is that Trump won’t reveal is taxes, while it’s not an “issue” that Hillary used her four years as Secretary of State to enrich herself at America’s expense and then, to hide this criminal conduct, set up an illegal email system that exposed America’s security secrets to anyone who wanted to take a hack at her system.

Photo by ** RCB **

The post Bookworm Beat 11/2/16 — the “Please Save America” edition and open thread appeared first on Bookworm Room.

I’m still peeved that Glamour Magazine named Brock Turner’s “rape victim” a Woman Of The Year, which set feminism back at least a hundred years by infantilizing women and insisting that the power in all situations rests solely with men. Thus, Glamour has reinforced the modern “feminist” notion that “Being a woman means never having to take responsibility for your stupidity.”

I put a post up on Facebook page expressing, in milder language, my surprise that a woman who got blind drunk, leaving her vulnerable to the possibility of rape, is a heroine. Two of my Progressive friends earnestly assured me that it was the gal’s “brave” letter that earned her that honor.

With their praise for the victim statement before me, I took the time to re-read that statement — and didn’t change my mind. Indeed, I wrote a long response to put on Facebook. Before I hit the “Enter” key, though, I realized that (a) I would not change anyone’s mind and (b) I would become a pariah in my community were I to go public with my views. I’m not cut out for pariah-hood, at least not at this stage in my life. I therefore opted not to publish my comment on Facebook and, instead, to publish it here and see what you, my valuable readers (and stalwart reality checkers) have to say.

Please be honest with me after you read my take on the matter. Am I an embittered old lady who’s forgotten what it is to be a young and foolish woman? Am I a pettifogging lawyer who puts strict legal construction above the nuances of human behavior? Or am I someone who hates to see a gal who did something stupid whine about a verdict she didn’t like and, in the process, destroy the life of a young man who, as best as I can tell on the actual evidence available, behaved neither better nor worse than she did?

Mostly, I don’t think there was anything “brave” about her anonymous letter. Lord knows, there’s nothing “brave” about my writing my ideas anonymously. Instead, as I’ve known about myself for years, there’s nothing brave about anonymity if the only thing you’re hiding from is social stigma.

Anyway, here’s my take:

I agree: we’ve all done stupid things. But one of the after-effects of our doing stupid things is either thanking God we narrowly missed horrible consequences or, if we’re not that lucky, suffering the horrible consequences and, one hopes, learning a lesson. The wise learn from their travails. The weak blame everyone else for what happened to them.

I’ve read the victim’s letter several times, as well as contemporaneous news coverage and, putting her “horrible things happened to me” rhetoric aside, a few facts stand out.

(1) They were both blind drunk. Indeed, considering a woman’s lower tolerance for alcohol, she should be grateful she didn’t die from acute alcohol intoxication or from choking on her own vomit.

(2) She has no memory anything before finding herself in the hospital being prodded and swabbed. That means she does not know whether she consented — and keep in mind that lack of consent is an essential element of a rape charge.

(3) She has no idea when she passed out, which means that it could have been long before or seconds before they were discovered behind the dumpster.

(4) Because he was also blind drunk, it’s reasonable to believe he had reached the stage at which he couldn’t distinguish a human from a rubber doll — and was just as incapable as she was of behaving in a rational manner.

(5) Those who stumbled across them, seeing her unconscious and him retreating, could reasonably recreate a rape scenario. From a legal perspective, though, that doesn’t change the fact that, because she blacked out, there is no no independent evidence of consent, absence of consent, or withdrawal of consent.

(6) It’s apparent from reading her letter that, since she has no memory whatsoever of events during or immediately after the party, the real physical assault and psychic trauma to her happened in the hospital and afterwards, with the medical team repeatedly poking and prodding every orifice and everyone around her telling her about the undignified state in which they found her and assuring her that she was a victim. In that regard, the victim was incensed that, during the trial phase of things, people dared question her about what she remembered or, in the absence of any meaningful evidence, to see if her history provided clues.  (This is different from denying rape because of the victim’s “reputation,” which is what Hillary did.)

Bottom line: On the facts available, it was impossible for the prosecutor to prove that she denied him consent in the first instance or, if she had initially granted consent only to withdraw it later explicitly or by passing out, that he was sober enough to be aware of that withdrawal of consent. Viewed in that light, a six months sentence was probably excessive — although it was a decent enough punishment for a young man who was stupid enough to drink himself into oblivion and making himself vulnerable to a rape charge in this day and age.

Just for the stupidity of getting that drunk in a day and age when men are fair game on college campuses, I would probably have given him a longer sentence. The bottom line for me is that they both behaved stupidly, which is the prerogative of the young; they both deserved to suffer, which is the natural consequences of stupidity; and they both did suffer — he by being tried and convicted, and she by defining herself as a victim.

A brave and honest letter from a young woman who wanted to help other young women would have said, “Girls, never, ever, ever drink too much in a public because bad things happen.” She then would have been a useful morality tale about what not to do in social settings. As an aside, the one and only time I drank to excess (which was also the one and only time I drank), I still had the wisdom to stop while I knew what was going on. I giggled for three hours, which was vaguely amusing (at least to me), and then was desperately ill for 24 hours, which is why I never drank again. For me, being drunk wasn’t worth being hungover. Lesson learned.

Instead, her self-pitying letter essentially said, “Yeah, I shouldn’t have drunk myself into oblivion at a party full of strange men, but none of what happened is my fault. I’m a victim of everything here and it’s the guy, who happened to be drunk too, who is the only responsible party. And it made matters worse that he had the temerity even to try to defend himself against the charges against him.” Talk about a double standard. “Men are creatures in total control and responsible for everything. I, a mere woman, cannot be expected to take reasonable steps to keep myself safe.”* Color me unimpressed. Of course, given the state of modern feminism, the message that the woman is never at fault is-probably the exact message that Glamour wants to send.

(I should say that my view would be different if the gal remembered what had happened and gave credible testimony about her efforts to disengage from Turner; or if Turner had been reasonably sober or even less drunk; or if there was video or audio footage proving that Turner, even a drunken Turner, had boasted that he intended to or had already sexually assaulted an unconscious woman. But those aren’t the facts here.)

__________________________

*Please note my use of the word “reasonable.” This is not to fall back into the old Hillary habit of saying the woman is always responsible because she must have done something to ask for it. Instead, this is to acknowledge that rational creatures avoid certain situations and that, if they fail to do so, the law can find them culpable for their own injuries. If you’re drunk, don’t climb a ladder or drive a car. If you’re alone and unarmed, don’t walk into a shootout. If you’re a young woman at a frat party filled with strange men, limit yourself to one alcoholic beverage.

The post Stanford “rape victim” should not be a Glamour “Woman Of The Year” appeared first on Bookworm Room.

I want to share with you one of the funniest feminist posts I’ve ever read, although the humor this anguished feminist infuses in her post is entirely accidental. The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as the Oscar Wilde’s quotation about The Old Curiosity Shop: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”

Unlike Dickens, the post to which I refer is not literature but — Oh. My. God. — it did make me laugh. Self-described “comedy writer” Eirene Donohoe confesses through a veil of tears that she is still unable to recover from Hillary’s loss. If she’s a comedy writer, this post is the tears of a clown.

The post opens with Donohoe describing her valiant efforts to live her life as if nothing has changed since that fatal day in November. Then, overcome by emotion, Donohoe finally admits that she can no longer pretend that life is still normal or, indeed, that her life or the lives of any women in America still matter:

I’m a comedy writer, but suddenly I was thinking up stories about post-apocalyptic worlds where women revolt and take over the planet. I started thinking about writing a song. Something that captured everything I was feeling. A love song, a fight song. Something to show the world that I was still with Her.

I am her. The words flashed through my head. And suddenly, there on the 101 freeway, I was down the hole again. Tears streaming, sobs choking, heart breaking. The realization hitting me. I am Her.

Yes, this young comedy writer in Los Angeles, with her three-year-old child, is identical to a 69-year-old woman who has built an entire career based upon her willingness to stand by her husband, a man repeatedly and credibly accused of raping and otherwise sexually assaulting women. Moreover, Donohoe’s woes aside, if one looks back over Hillary’s career, one can see that, up until her tenure as Secretary of State, she accomplished nothing other than being her husband’s wife — and, moreover, a wife who strongly felt he and the rest of the Democrat party owed her for her unswerving fealty to covering up his (and her) financial and sexual peccadilloes.

Somehow Donohoe managed to miss the bit about Hillary’s tenure as Secretary of State, who the biggest praise her supporters could offer in her support was that she flew more miles than any other Secretary of State before her. Hillary’s fan club downplayed the other stuff: Her “reset” with Russia witnessed Russia invading its neighbors and increasing its crackdown on free speech and political opposition within its own borders. The Libyan invasion that was her particular baby not only resulted in four Americans dying while the Obama administration sat on its hands for hours, having quickly concluded that the political risks of a possibly failed rescue attempt simply weren’t worth the effort.*

It was Hillary who partnered with Obama to create power vacuums in Iraq and Iran, paving the way for a resurgent Iran and for the sadistically inclined ISIS. Iran and ISIS, incidentally, are not known for supporting women’s rights. When I think of those two groups, I think of sexual slavery, executions, denial of all rights, and other things that ought to offend all good feminists.

And do I even need to elaborate on her using the State Department as a pay-for-play toy that personally enriched her through her private charity, The Clinton Foundation? I mean, this is a woman who cheerfully sold 20% of America’s uranium reserves to Russia, a country she now characterizes as the main perpetrator behind her failed run for the White House.

Hillary’s real feminist victory was just being Secretary of State. The stuff she actually did was ignored. And regarding her “being” Secretary of State, one has to wonder if the younger ones amongst her weeping acolytes realize that Madeleine Albright was the first female Secretary of State and that Condi Rice was the second. I’m willing to bet that many of these same young women haven’t figured out that, in the world leadership contest, women such as Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, and Margaret Thatcher long ago broke the glass ceiling — and they did so, not by pointing to the female bits in their panties, but by being the best.

With all this in mind, it’s a laughable tragedy that today’s young feminists look to Hillary as an icon of the movement. What she has really done is to betray the feminist movement in those parts of the world in which it counts most.

But to Donohoe, Hillary’s failure to capture enough of the vagina vote to win is a repudiation of everything that represents today’s feminists:

This wasn’t just about the disappointment that my candidate lost. Or the fear of what Trump will do to this country. It felt like my very soul hurt and I realized that it was because of what this election said to me as a woman. It said no.

No, woman, stay in your place. No, woman, you are not good enough. No, woman, no matter what you do, you will not win, you will not be the boss of me.

It crushed a part of my female core to realize that yes, the world at large really does hate women that much. And while there are other reasons to dislike Hilary Clinton and disagree with her policies, misogyny and sexism are the gas that fuels the fire they burned her with.

We are supposed to stay quiet and not ask for much. Stay in our place and say please and thank you and don’t challenge anyone. We must be perfect, ten times more perfect than the man beside us. And then we must wait for them to give us permission to follow their orders.

By the way, if you are clutching your sides with laughter over Donohoe’s personal/political tragedy, you may wonder how she came to believe that in America, a country in which she has the full range of civil rights, enormous personal autonomy, and laudable physical safety, she is a silenced victim. Donohoe finally admits what turned her into a paranoid, narcissistic, delusional, emotional wreck: ” I went to an Ivy League school and even gave the commencement address, just like Hillary.” Those kids who manage to survive Leftist public high schools intact are utterly destroyed when they reach expensive Ivy Leagues that eschew teaching using knowledge and expanding students’ mental horizons in favor of teaching politically correct identity politics with a laser-like focus on victimhood and the importance of emotionalism over facts and rational thinking.

As if the above wasn’t funny enough (in a Little Nell’s death kind of way), Donohoe likens her own “fighting” spirit to . . . Hillary’s:

I dream big dreams. I make hard choices. I don’t give up. Just like Hillary.

Donohoe must be referring to election night, when Hillary saw her anticipated coronation snatched from her, and then walked out in front of her disappointed fans and give them a lesson about losing with dignity and respecting the American transfer of power. Oh, wait. That never happened.

What really happened is that this fighter who never gives up collapsed in a weeping, drunken fit, abandoning any dignity or decency, and instead sent John Podesta out to face her equally emotionally overwrought supporters in their terrible despair. Then, after finally sobering up to give a decent, if boilerplate, concession speech, Hillary hid behind Jill Stein’s hippie skirts to force a recount that cannot change the election’s outcome, but that can do unimaginable damage to America’s unusually successful system of transferring power and allowing for stable majority rule. Yeah, I really do believe that Donohoe is just like that “fighter” who “never gives up.”

Medium, the online forum at which Donohoe writes, has a cool little feature that highlights the paragraph that resonates most with readers. Donohoe’s readers resonated most to this paragraph:

I am Her. Every woman is, whether they know it or not. Every woman has been held back by, pushed down by, grabbed in the pussy by sexism that cannot, will not, allow a woman to rise higher than a man. The misogyny that pulses through this world, the blood that keeps the dick of American patriarchy hard, it penetrates us from the day we are born. Smile pretty. Be good. Be quiet.

I think I need to rewrite that paragraph:

I am Her. I am a corrupt, raddled, 69-year-old woman who hooked her wagon to a rapist star, who used the State Department to enrich herself and her husband, and whose only fixed principle over the years has been her own accumulation of power and wealth. I am a woman who has been lauded perpetually in the media just because I am a woman. Even my staunchest defenders, when pressed, are hard-put to point to anything I’ve actually done to benefit anyone but myself, my husband, and the vapid child I’m grooming to take my place on the political stage. I have ensured that, when my husband grabbed pussy and raped women, he suffered no consequences, but that the women he assaulted would be maligned and threatened for unceasingly for decades. When I smile, it sends chills down people’s spines. I’m good only for myself. And when I talk, people wish that my harsh, accusatory, hectoring, angry, self-serving, entitled voice would just stop.

Dear Ms. Donohoe, please grow up. Stop measuring yourself by Hillary and your own vagina, and start measuring yourself by yourself. You are an individual who is much greater than the sum of your female parts. You’re smart, you’re allegedly funny, you’re hard-working, you love your child, you support your husband — all of these are attributes that exist irrespective of your sex. Stop thinking of yourself as a victim. See yourself as an independent warrior who fights for individual liberty rather than for corrupt autocrats.

_______________

*Incidentally, it’s that politically motivated passivity that distinguishes the Benghazi matter from all other attacks on America’s ambassadorial and consulate employees. I mention this because, if you have Progressive Facebook friends, the following is typical of the type of poster repeatedly appearing on your feed:

The distinction that the poster is incapable of recognizing is that all of the listed deaths came about from bombings or shootings that were entirely accomplished in seconds or minutes. In the case of Benghazi, not only did Ambassador Christopher Stevens begged for month for better security in the most dangerous part of the world (handsome Marines in Paris; local contractors in Benghazi), a battle raged for hours and hours before the Americans were finally murdered and the compound — with all its secrets — was in the hands of al Qaeda affiliates. It was during those hours in which the Obama administration, including Obama and Hillary, did nothing that constitutes the betrayal that galls so many Americans.

UPDATE:  I suddenly realized that Little Nell is from Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop, not Uncle Tom’s Cabin, so I fixed that reference.

Image of Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the Tate Gallery’s online archive.

The post The unintentionally funny anguish of the distraught feminist Hillary voter *UPDATED* appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Hillary’s pink-hatted “nasty women” have had their moment. My leftist friends on Facebook are ecstatic.

Many said of their participation in local marches that they’re “with Hillary.” One used the march to shill for her obsessive claim that Big Oil and Big Tobacco own the federal government. It was they, not Putin, who elected Trump. Another, looking at the undoubted crowds that showed up, opined that this was proof that the vote was hacked. When it comes to basic logic, she doesn’t seem to understand that the same people who show up at these marches are also the same people who actually voted. Yet another spoke approvingly of a march in Oakland. To her, the size of the march and the nature of the signs (see below) meant that Trump will be unable to govern.

All, of course, as their pink-hatted heads attested, were offended that Trump is an old-fashioned guy who is open (and, indeed, vulgar) about his sexual passion for women. I mean, it’s bad enough that he’s unapologetically cis-gendered. It’s worse that he actually talks about sex in a “guy” way.

I should note here that I am in complete accord with the Canadian vlogger who, having watched the entire Billy Bush videotape, concluded that Trump did not boast about mauling women but, instead, made an admittedly vulgar, but otherwise non-specific, and probably completely accurate, wisecrack about what rich men can theoretically can away with. Aside from getting baited into somewhat vulgar badinage in a guys’ locker room kind of way, his behavior was impeccable.

As much as anything, the marchers seemed bound together by cognitive dissonance. For example, everyone on my Facebook feed was proud of the marchers’ slogan: “Love, not hate, makes America great.” Indeed, one friend heartily approved of marcher Wanda Brown’s comment about “all the love I saw out there.”

That happy rhyme, however, was belied by the loudest rhetoric and the hate-filled signs. Madonna drew cheers when she said loving things as “F**k you” and “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House” (Hey, Secret Service! Did you hear that? Sounds like a threat to me.)

Ashley Judd also wowed the crowd when she read a poem that called Trump Hitler, claimed he had wet dreams about Ivanka, accused him of supporting the KKK, and sang a paean to women’s “pussies.” I don’t know about you, but when I hear that, I’m not feeling the love.

Many of the signs too were a whole lot closer to Judd’s and Madonna’s neurotic, hate-filled rhetoric as opposed to that that chipper, friendly slogan:

The entire march was an “intersectional” melange with feminists loudly advocating for Muslims, apparently unaware that the latter’s idea of feminism involves burqas and driving restrictions, and LGBT activists also siding with those same Muslims (including refugees), apparently unaware that homosexuality is a capital crime under Islam.

Typically for the Left, the real common denominator was abortion. As I figured out years ago, abortion is the Holy Grail for the Left. It is the one thing that ties white middle-class women to disparate groups such as Muslims (who hate those same women), black supremacists (who hate those same women), homosexuals (who hate breeders), and so on. Nancy Pelosi, the alleged Catholic, said it best when she insisted that abortion, especially late-term abortion (i.e., aborting a viable baby) is “sacred ground.”

At the end of it all, I’m actually at a loss to understand why those women are marching. It’s one thing if a movement arises, as the Tea Party did, in direct response to post-election legislation and executive action. In that case, the ballot box is unavailable in the immediate and relevant time frame, making street protests the only option. However, this march struck me as massive temper tantrum from the side that lost the election. Col. Kemp nailed it:

If America gave women the vote they could have elected who they wanted in November & not have to do all this marching now. pic.twitter.com/c3HiFMUgN1

— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) January 21, 2017

Color me . . . not pink, but unimpressed. Of course, I don’t matter. What matters is whether Trump and the Republicans in Congress care about these marchers and their tantrum. My guess is that Trump won’t care in the least. Moreover, I suspect that the Republicans in Congress, who finally have fearless leadership, might be able to close shut out the protesters and do the right thing. After all, that’s what Obama and his Congress did in 2009 when the Tea Party presented them with a legitimate grievance for which there was no ballot.

UPDATE: A perfect poster came my way:

The post Thoughts on those pink-hatted marching women *UPDATED* appeared first on Bookworm Room.

You’ll notice that the title of this post — Life in Trump’s America — echoes previous round-ups I did called Life in Obama’s America. Those old posts were dystopian; in this, the new Age of Trump, things are a lot more cheerful when viewed through the prism of patriotism, rationality, and fealty to the Constitution. Yeah, the Left is going batsh*t crazy, but that’s proof that Trump, in his first seven days in office, has been doing just about everything right. Don’t believe me? Just check out these links:

Opening with a little deserved snark about the idiocy underlying the much vaunted Women’s march. Col. Richard Kemp, if you’ve forgotten is the retired British military officer who loudly explained over all the mewling antisemitism from Europe and the UN, that he’d never seen a military put itself at such great risk to protect enemy civilians as Israel’s military. He’s now weighed in rather brilliantly on the stupidity behind that women’s “empowerment” march:

If America gave women the vote they could have elected who they wanted in November & not have to do all this marching now. pic.twitter.com/c3HiFMUgN1

— Rɪᴄʜᴀʀᴅ Kᴇᴍᴘ (@COLRICHARDKEMP) January 21, 2017

What?! You haven’t met Big Joe yet? You must. Big Joe found himself accidentally in the midst of one of the women’s marches and he had a lot to say on the subject, all of it delightful:

Vagina-less females suffering discrimination. This is old news by at least five days, but I’ll throw it in anyway for those who might have missed it. Pro-Life women weren’t the only ones left out of the Women’s March last Saturday. Women without vaginas also suffered discrimination, what will all those pink knit caps and the ladies dressed up as lady parts. Oh, in case you’re wondering what a woman without a vagina is . . . well, in the old days, we would call that person a man. Nowadays, it’s someone who, rejecting biological reality, has picked “women” as his chosen identity.

There is something truly delightful about watching the Left eat its own.

Three reminders that those women marching are whiners, not victims. One of the sickening things about the Women’s marches was to see a sea of educated, affluent, healthy, well-fed, coddled white women scream about their suffering. Here are three reminders that they don’t know what suffering is. All three of these reminders make for tough viewing or reading, so if you don’t want to have that with your breakfast, you may want to scroll past them a little quickly:

[Warning: Graphically tragic image ahead.]

It’s all about abortion. When you get right down to it, the core issue uniting those screeching, whining women and beta men was abortion. Everything else was imaginary fears and the acting out of sore losers. But abortion — that’s where it’s really at.

In keeping with the marches’ theme, the latest attack on the growing pro-Life movement in America came in the form of a ridiculously unscientific article in The Atlantic attacking modern sonograms, which show babies in remarkable detail in the uterus. Per The Atlantic, these insights into the womb create the false notion that those fetuses are actually alive. Michelle Malkin knocks this fatuous argument out of the park. As for me, the whole thing makes me think of three things.

First, I too lived for years with the cognitive dissonance that fetuses were not really lives. Moreover, I’m precisely the kind of woman that The Atlantic article fears because what changed my mind was in fact a sonogram. When I saw my 14-week-old fetus’s spine, which was like a strong of pearls, and beating heart, I had to abandon the notion that the thing in me that was making me so desperately ill (Gawd, was pregnancy hard on me) was not a parasite but was, in fact, a baby. My “a ha!” moment of acknowledging reality increased when my children were born and the fetus turned into a baby, the baby became a toddler, the toddler a child, the child a teen (which is, yes, maybe a vaguely sub-human phase although I mostly enjoyed the teen years), and the teens have become rather interesting young adults.

Of course, being a Lefty means you can embrace all sorts of ridiculous notions. Examples are the absolute faith in climate change, never mind that the computer models on which the Lefties so desperately rely have all been proven false. Lefties also leave science and reality far behind when they accept unquestioningly that a person’s sex (or race) is a choice, not a biological reality. This leads to interesting things such as “vagina-less females” (i.e., men) complaining about discriminating against their womanliness, or lefties contending that Rachel Dolezal (genetically white) is black, while Allen West (genetically black) is a deracinated white person.

Conservativism came to me as an enormous relief, because it allowed me to accept the world as it is, science and all, rather than having to lie to myself daily about utterly fake “scientific” principles that are necessary to ward off the hard truths about the world in which we live. One of those hard truths, as I discovered, is that, even if having a baby is a miserable experience, that fetus is still a life. Moreover, when it comes to life and the law, both statutory and moral law do not allow us to go around murdering people just because they make us sick or suck up our time or destroy our plans for our own future or are generally inconvenient. And that’s the real inconvenient truth.

Second, this is a great poster:

Third, whenever I think of the fact that fetuses are alive — and the horror that Progressives will undoubtedly feel when they finally acknowledge that truth — I irresistibly think of this moment:

Allen West and Mike Huckabee both have great rants about the Women’s march.

Here’s Allen West’s.

And here’s Mike Huckabee’s. (I’ve never been able to warm up to Huckabee, but I definitely like this one, although I continue to think that conservatives are wrong to echo the screaming, vulgar women who claim that Trump admitted to assaulting women. What Trump said, accurately, is that when you’re a star, women will let you grab them by their genitals. Lord knows, Bill Clinton has proved that often enough. Aside from the principled women he actually raped, assaulted, or harassed, women over the decades have been delighted to let him grab them anywhere he wants.)

For those who fear government, look not at Trump but at what Obama did. Bretigne Shaffer has been bemused by the Left’s screaming, hysterical, neurotic, paranoid collapse since Trump got elected, something that accelerated immediately before his inauguration (and hasn’t slowed down since). Shaffer takes a look at the facts on the ground, however, and concludes that it was the Obama administration that chipped away at the Constitutional protections that the Left suddenly holds so dear:

1. We no longer have a Fourth Amendment, nor the right of habeas corpus (you remember: it was kind of the foundation of our justice system). Yes, the demise of these fundamental protections has been a long time coming, but President Obama delivered the death blow when he gave himself (and all future presidents) the right to imprison indefinitely or even assassinate any human being on the planet with no due process whatsoever.

Number One should be enough. Any normal person should look at the first item on this list and say “OK, I guess that’s a little bit worse than making fun of a disabled reporter.” (And I say this as the mother of an intellectually disabled daughter.) But, because I know it won’t be enough, I’ll continue…

2. Obama has bombed more countries than George W. Bush did, and his drone strikes have killed more than six times as many people as those under Bush, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (killing unintended victims 90% of the time.)

3. He has given himself (and all future presidents) the power to wage war without Congressional approval.

4. He has greatly expanded the mass surveillance of American citizens.

Read the rest here. It’s as good a summary as you’ll ever get of Obama’s use of executive powers to disregard the Constitution.

Oh, and to those Lefties who say Trump’s executive orders are just as bad — they’re not or at least most aren’t. While Obama made it up as he went along, in total disregard of both the Constitution and federal statutes, the bulk of Trump’s orders to date simply reinstate the pre-Obama status quo, when we still had law and a constitution that actually garnered some respect.

No, you’re not a hypocrite to want to see Trump mete out retribution. Even if you think Trump is crossing too many lines and utilizing more power than he should, you’re probably not the hypocrite the Left tries to make you think you are.

The Left has always used conservative standards as a cudgel against conservatives and their principles. If our political leaders deviate even slightly from the straight and narrow, both they and everything they stand for get attacked and discredited.

Lefties don’t have that problem, of course, because hypocrisy is built into their system. As Wolf Howling likes to say, “If Lefties didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all.”

Writing at Ace of Spades, Warden notes that this has been the year in which conservatives have been liberated from their usual standards. Thanks to Obama’s abandonment of any fealty to the Constitution and his one-man rule, things have changed:

There’s a frustrating game that the left plays with conservatives. It’s an Alinksy tactic called, “Make them live up to their values.” Now, living up to one’s values isn’t a bad thing, but setting high standards ultimately means that you’ll sometimes fall short.

The left loves to exploit these shortcomings–every Christian who falls short of perfection is a hypocrite; the social values candidate you voted for just got arrested for drunk driving. Haha, everything you believe and advocate is now discredited.

They got away with it for years, waving away the lies, hypocrisy, indiscretions, and criminal behavior from their own politicians while beating the right mercilessly with the missteps of their own. It’s effective because the right always maintains a baseline of integrity not displayed by the left, as evidenced by comparing what happens to Republican politicians when they’re caught in criminal behavior with what happens to Democrats. Republican voters and politicians reluctantly dump the malefactor while Democrats defend their guy and launch an offensive against those who demand accountability.

And then came along Trump, a guy just ripe for demonization by the left. I think it’s fair to say that even his early supporters worried that the Democrats would successfully make him toxic to the general voting public with his boorish behavior, vulgarity, multiple bankruptcies and very public divorces.

But something strange happened. Not only did Donald Trump not care about attacks on his character, neither did anyone else. We saw this new paradigm assert itself over and over during the primary throughout repeated media predictions that this time he’s gone to far and he’s cooked.

This same indifference that helped Trump carry the election has continued into the early days of his administration. With it comes a refreshingly freeing state of mind. Personally, I don’t feel in any way responsible for Trump, nor do I feel compelled to defend him against attack.

Why? Because I voted for retribution.

Again, you won’t regret clicking over and reading the whole thing.

Yeah, it was a damned big crowd. The media started it when it compared pictures of the mall from the height of Obama’s inaugural ceremonies with a picture taken at least an hour before Trump’s ceremony began. Oh, and of course there were all the protesters blocking entrances to the mall, preventing many people from getting there at all.

The Left has been laughing itself sick over Trump picking a fight about the crowd. Worse, the fearful Right, as always, has joined in saying “See, he’s making us look bad.”

Both the Left and the cowardly ones are wrong.

First, let’s be clear that the media picked the battle by lying and lying hard — and worse, since NPR started it, by using the taxpayer dollar to create and spread the lie. Trump’s crowd may not have been as big as Obama’s (Obama was, after all, the first black president, which is something in itself; his inauguration took place in a city with a huge black population; and no one was prevented from getting to the mall), but it was still a damn big crowd. The Trump administration’s rule is that it will never let the media get away with even a smidgen of a lie and that’s as it should be.

Second, by forcing the crowd size issue, Trump is forcing the media to cover the crowd at the annual March for Life — or to admit the real truth, which is concede that it doesn’t care about crowd size at all; it only cares about pushing a Progressive agenda.

Third, with all the sound and fury about this, Leftists are missing the substantive stuff. Which leads me to my next item. . . .

Trump wants the media and Leftists (but I repeat myself) to miss the substantive stuff. Glenn Reynolds figured out the game that Trump is playing:

The press’s “insider” status — which it cherishes — is going to fade, with Trump’s press people even talking about moving them out of the White House entirely, and ignoring their existing pecking order in press conferences. (This is producing waves of status anxiety, as are many other Trump-induced institutional changes). And, having abandoned, quite openly, any pretense of objectivity and neutrality in the election, the press is going to be treated as an enemy by the Trump administration until further notice.

 In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).

Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.

And — yes — this is another article you should read in its entirety.

Whatever you’re for, I’m against it. I admit that I do a lot of “whatever you’re for, I’m against it.” Aside from the endless factual errors with so-called climate change, I knew it was bad immediately because Al Gore was shilling for and getting rich off of it. If he was for it, I was against it. If the Left wanted Hillary, I wanted nothing to do with her. (And nothing will change my mind about that one.)

The Left has its own version of this mindset. Because Trump refused to insult Putin — the same man to whom Obama made the “reset” and “flexibility” promises, and the same man to whom Obama handed the entire Middle East — suddenly Russia became the devil. (If only Progressives had felt that way during the Cold Way.)

And because Trump is pointing out that China is a troublemaker, both in terms of trade and in terms of South Sea aggression, the Left has decided that China — a statist nation that still routinely imprisons dissidents and that only recently backed off of its murderous one-child policy — is the great hope for a free, liberal world. China, being a very smart nation, is playing to the Progressive crowd. Don’t let yourself get hornswoggled.

(Having said all that, I spent a fascinating day in Beijing a few weeks ago. Beijing, like Vietnam, shows no signs anymore of being a communist economy. Capitalism is bursting out all over. Having said that, the omnipresent military and police all over Beijing, while not precisely threatening — which the military and police were when I was in Prague in ’87 — were a constant reminder that this is not a free nation and that mass killer Mao is still revered. Treated right, perhaps China will join the community of free nations. Given its head, though, and allowed to grow its worst, militaristic instincts . . . well, that’s a bad thing.)

Obama administration abandons principled whistle blower. My Facebook feed is filled with Leftist posts mourning the departure of St. Obama from the White House. Except he wasn’t a saint. Just ask Stefani Butler, whom administration flunkies tried to destroy when she blew the whistle in the Census Bureau. Nor was this meaningless jiggery-pokery:

Data falsification is no small matter. This past presidential election turned on how people felt about the economy versus what we were being told was happening by Census data-gatherers. And policies are made in Congress, at the Federal Reserve and in corporate boardrooms based on what leaders are being led to believe.

[snip]

The importance of the Census Bureau shouldn’t surprise anyone. When Obama took office in 2009, one of his first moves was to try and get the bureau to report to him and not Congress. He failed.

But at the time, with the big 2020 census coming up that would determine how much representation states would have in the House and how much tax money they get from Washington, the logic of that power play was clear.

Let’s look at the one case that set Butler off — the cheating done by Buckmon, who is now deceased.

Buckmon would complete more than 100 cases in 10 days — more than three times his peers.

It turns out that Buckmon wasn’t actually surveying people. He was making up data and collecting overtime to account for the time it would have taken to get those interviews.

And this one man alone was cheating on such a large scale that it could affect the national jobless numbers since the bureau’s Current Population Survey is scientifically weighted and each response counts as 5,000 households.

So Buckmon’s 100 cases equaled 500,000 households — and he wasn’t the only one caught faking data, Butler said.

No, punching Richard Spencer is not a good thing. The Left is incredibly excited about the fact that, during the Women’s march, one of its own jackbooted thugs brutally punched Richard Spencer. Spencer, as you no doubt recall, is a true, hardcore, Nazi. There is nothing good about that young man. He has set his feet on an evil pathway and seems determined to follow it to its conclusion.

Having said that, punching him just proves (at least in his mind) his myriad points about the degradation of American society.

Most importantly, though, this fight doesn’t have the smell of freedom versus tyranny. Instead, it’s reminiscent of the fight to the death that the communists and fascists waged in the late 1920s and early 1930s in Germany, before Hitler definitively beat the communists and starting shipping them to Dachau. This is a war in which both sides need to lose if liberty is to survive.

Ann Coulter explains just how bad Obamacare is. Two or three Christmases ago, a drunk little Progressive man-boy tried to physically intimidate me into believing that only people who were stupid would rebel against paying more for insurance that offered them fewer doctor and hospital options while forcing them to pay for things they didn’t need. I was still very active in martial arts back in the day, and the only reason I didn’t take him out was because it wouldn’t have been a fair fight — and I might have gotten my hands dirty.

I thought of that moron when I read Ann Coulter’s description of her endless travails with Obamacare. While the Left is wailing that the 19 million who weren’t insured will lose the Medicaid they got under Obamacare, hard-working Americans are breathing a sigh of relief that the free market will once again work to their benefit — and, frankly, the benefit of everyone else once the government releases its death grip on the marketplace.

Education may see a rebirth too.. I’ve detailed the horror of my Little Bookworm’s Obscenely Expensive Liberal Arts College here and here. Berkeley, which I attended in the late 1970s/early 1980s, looks in retrospect like a calm, reasonable, centrist, and definitely mature kind of place in comparison. Tomorrow I’m attending a PRI event about Leftism on American campuses, which should be interesting.

David Gelernter reminds us of something heartening, which is that these overpriced institutions are on their way out. New media will kill them. Yay! To which I’ll add only that the process may be a whole lot faster if the Trump administration stops the endless flow of dollars to these institutes of indoctrination.

School choice is good for students. Good teachers don’t need to hide behind those awful public sector teachers unions. They, like my Dad decades ago, understand that unions are antithetical to good teaching. A marketplace in education is what makes a real difference:

The post Bookworm Beat 1/26/17 – Life in Trump’s America round-up appeared first on Bookworm Room.

What you’re seeing here is a walking, talking symbol of the end of the Democrat Party.

If my internet reading had a chyron, of the type you see on cable news, under every article I read you would see the words “Democrat Implosion,” along with headlines about walking vaginas, feminists advocating sharia, Senators weeping over terrorists, and other insanity from Progressives who are no longer on the verge of a nervous breakdown because they have crossed the verge and taken a dive into the abyss of insanity. Most of the links in this round-up illustrate my point.

The cognitive dissonance about Trump’s alleged Hitlerism. Throughout the election cycle, Scott Adams pointed out the two different realities in which people were functioning: The first, the winning one, saw Donald Trump as a charismatic showman who has the skills to return America to being a constitutionally guided country — a state of things that is the complete opposite of the soft administrative and judicial tyranny under which we’ve been laboring for too long. The second, the losing side, saw Trump as Hitler. I’ve even got a nice satirical cartoon to make that point:

What worries Adams is that, if people refuse to abandon a reality that they’ve constructed when the real world intrudes in stark opposition to their mental paradigm, they can go a bit nuts:

I’m talking about ordinary people doing ordinary things to turn Trump into an actual Hitler. For example, if protesters start getting violent, you could expect forceful reactions eventually. And that makes Trump look more like Hitler. I can think of dozens of ways the protesters could cause the thing they are trying to prevent. In other words, they can wish it into reality even though it is the very thing they are protesting.

In the 3rd dimension of persuasion, the protesters need to be proven right, and they will do whatever it takes to make that happen. So you might see the protesters inadvertently create the police state they fear.

If you are looking for the tells that this dangerous situation is developing, notice how excited/happy the Trump critics seem to be – while angry at the same time – that Trump’s immigration ban fits their belief system. If you see people who are simply afraid of Trump, they are probably harmless. But the people who are excited about any Hitler-analogy-behavior by Trump might be leading the country to a police state without knowing it.

If you’re looking for concrete examples of what Adams rightly characterizes as lunacy from the anti-Trump crowd, look no further than this hysterical denunciation of Gorsuch, which has nothing to do with Gorsuch himself and everything to do with blocking Trump:

It’s time for the sweet resistance we’re seeing in the streets to start showing up in the U.S. Senate.

Democrats in the chamber have the votes to hold up exactly one major appointment from President Trump without any Republican help. And they should fight Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court with every vote they’ve got — even if it means ending the ability to filibuster any high court nominations in the future.

They have no other choice.

This is an appointment by the biggest popular vote loser of the modern era to fill a stolen seat. Pretending this is just Senate business as usual would pat the GOP on the head for pulling off the heist of the century, and it would give Trump a thumbs up for his first-week “shock and awe” campaign of executive orders designed to roll back immigration, the Affordable Care Act and voting rights.

And yes, it all has to do with that “popular vote” rubric, as if it mattered. Progressives are deaf to the fact that, if the Constitution called for a popular vote, Trump would have campaigned differently and probably won that campaign too, simply by getting more people out to vote across America. Lefties, on the other hand, had already maxed out their Blue voter turnout in their Blue urban enclaves. Just remember, this is what the election map looked like:

And if you want a nice comparison of ordinary Americans and the vileness that the Left displayed on that “women’s march” (which accounted for a minute percentage of American women, with that percentage concentrated in Hillary’s archipelago) get a load of these photos, comparing the women’s march to the March for Life (which the media predictably ignored).

Fortunately, conservatives are also benefitting from Nietzsche’s insight that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger:

Progressives aren’t interested in what we have to say, or in having a “reasonable dialog” with us. It’s nothing but “shut up or we’ll shut you up!”. This is what their shouty, dialed-up-to-11 rhetoric is designed to do. And this generally works, or at least, that’s how it has worked in the past. But what has happened over time is a process very much like how we produced antibiotic-resistant superbugs. Like a dose of penicillin, the shouty rhetoric takes out “nice” conservatives or conservatives who decide they have better things to do than to get shouted at by shouty progressives. But some conservatives manage to survive, so the dosage is upped: the shouts get even louder and the attacks get more vicious and are extended beyond the political arena into personal lives. This creates a very hostile environment. But even it drives out or silences many conservatives, it also creates a new strain of tough conservatives who don’t mind fighting, who like to fight, and can throw 2 punches for every one they take. I’m thinking of Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, and Milo Yiannapoulos. To this we can add the guy who wrote this book, Doug Giles, and Townhall.com columnist Kurt Schlichter. There are probably others I’ve missed. And of course, what is now the most imperviously resistant conservative ever, Donald Trump, who is so impervious that nobody really knew for sure until a couple of months ago that he even was conservative. Oh sure, there were indications, but there were indications the other way, too, so it was kind of a guessing game as to how he would actually govern until he started naming individuals to fill the various open cabinet positions.

Read the rest here.

And here’s another good post — Robert Stacy McCain’s about the psychosis that is Third Wave feminism. I can’t get my real-world friends — nice women and good mothers — to understand that what we’re seeing isn’t their Mother’s feminism any more.

The media is the enemy. Does anyone at this point doubt that the media is no longer reporting news but that it has instead hunkered down to attacking President Trump on every front, by fair means (which it doesn’t have) and foul (including lying, spinning, folding, twisting, and mutilating)? Kelly Riddell has a 10-point list of Trump’s entirely valid reasons for hating the media. And just today, John Hinderaker pointed to a disgracefully biased piece of writing from the AP.

Melanie Phillips, watching from England, has her usual astute observations on the subject, beginning with the deconstruction of one of the media’s first, damning lies:

On Thursday, the Washington Post published a story about the first interview with the new President on ABC TV. This story said the interview “revealed a man who is obsessed with his own popularity and eager to provide evidence of his likability, even if that information doesn’t match reality”.

The Washington Post story dwelt upon quotes from Trump boasting about the size of his standing ovations at the CIA; claimed that he was “preoccupied with two variables that are gumming up his claim of being widely beloved: losing the popular vote to Clinton and hosting an inauguration crowd that was smaller than in previous years”; quoted him boasting he could have won more of the popular vote had it not been for voter fraud; and said he kept claiming the crowd at the inauguration was “massive”, and that unlike his interviewer David Muir he was anxious to drag the conversation back to the size of that crowd. The clips from the interview video that accompanied this story were cut accordingly to match this account.

If you read only that, you’d be pretty alarmed that someone with a serious psychological disorder was now the leader of the free world. But the full transcript of this ABC interview, also published in the Washington Post, paints a very different picture indeed.

Most of it was about substantive issues, such as the Mexico wall, illegal immigrants, ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, voter fraud. Only a small part of the interview concerned Trump’s popularity. It was Muir who brought up the subject, referring to the crowd size at the inauguration and asking Trump when his popularity would “matter just a little less”.

It was only in response to these questions by Muir that Trump insisted that the crowds were so large and that the media had distorted the numbers to demean him. He repeatedly told Muir that he was only talking about this because Muir had brought it up. The Washington Post story removed those protestations.

From the context of the interview, it was clear that Trump was only going on at length about crowd numbers and the CIA ovation and so on to make the point that the media had tried to demean him by distorting the reality. None of that was in the Post story. Instead it created the impression that President Trump was pathologically obsessed by his own vanity.

I can attest to the power and reach of that lie because, the day after the interview, the lie showed up on the feed of every single Progressive Facebook friend I had, along with hysterical ruminations about Trump’s sanity or lack thereof.

Bravo to Trump for attacking the media: “I don’t watch CNN. . . . I don’t like watching fake news.” If Trump were the tyrant the Progressives claim he is, he would imprison everyone at CNN or order their executions. As it is, he just calls ’em as he sees em.

The Democrat retreat from reality. Matthew Continetti wrote about the Democrat retreat from reality only four days ago, and his article is already out of date because President Trump’s later actions furthered the Progressives’ slide into madness. Nevertheless, the principles are still good and, as is the case with everything Continetti writes, it’s fun to read:

I like to imagine Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer nodding sagely as Joe Manchin, the only Democratic senator with a modicum of common sense, asks a group of Trump voters to explain why calling people drug-addled unemployable racist misogynistic fascists is not, in fact, the best way to earn their votes. It’s moments like these when Barbara Boxer’s absence from the Democratic caucus would be most felt, I think. Faced with Trump supporters, the former California senator likely would respond with a hysterical and barely coherent monologue involving climate change, immigration, abortion rights, and gun control, all the while oblivious to the fact that these were the very issues that brought Trump to office. At least Boxer has pizzazz. These days the role of the clueless liberal proclaiming her moral supremacy over the déclassé is left to the nondescript, soporific, Dolores Umbridge-like Patty Murray. Here is yet another example of national decline.

What’s great is that there’s law to help drive Progressives further around the bend. It’s not just that President Trump is doing exactly what he promised on the campaign trail (and how’s that for a dream come dream?), it’s also that it turns out that he has the power to do everything he promised, including ridding America of Obama’s economically stifling, personally tyrannical regulations:

It turns out that the first line of the CRA [Congressional Review Act] requires any federal agency promulgating a rule to submit a “report” on it to the House and Senate. The 60-day clock starts either when the rule is published or when Congress receives the report—whichever comes later.

[snip]

There are rules for which there are no reports. And if the Trump administration were now to submit those reports—for rules implemented long ago—Congress would be free to vote the regulations down.

There’s more. It turns out the CRA has an expansive definition of what counts as a “rule”—and it isn’t limited to those published in the Federal Register. The CRA also applies to “guidance” that agencies issue. Think the Obama administration’s controversial guidance on transgender bathrooms in schools or on Title IX and campus sexual assault. It is highly unlikely agencies submitted reports to lawmakers on these actions.

[snip]

Once Congress overrides a rule, agencies cannot reissue it in “substantially the same form” unless specifically authorized by future legislation.

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I am so loving President Trump.

Conservatives will prevail because we have Iowahawk. And now for a comedy interlude:

Seems a little harsh, maybe he should just fire themhttps://t.co/cSXBSJvMud

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 28, 2017

When you do a street blocking protest in Portland & bystanders cheer as cops beat you, it’s time to rethink strategyhttps://t.co/KnITsLUR1M

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 26, 2017

Trump brings more another quality person to his team. I was introduced to Victoria Coates during the Republican primary, when she was Ted Cruz’s foreign policy adviser (after having worked with Donald Rumsfeld). She is incredibly smart, an excellent communicator and, as someone with a solid grasp of history, she fully understands the existential threat Islamic fundamentalism poses to the free world. That’s why it’s very exciting that she’s accepted a position as senior director for strategic assessments to the National Security Council. Yay!

It’s different when it’s not Texas talking succession. You may recall that, by the end of the Obama administration (not the beginning, but the end of a second term), certain Texans started talking succession . . . and Progressives ridiculed them. Apparently it’s not such a funny idea when you’re a Progressive in Week Two of the Trump administration. Michael Goodwin looks at the extreme reactions Progressives are having to every breath Trump takes and saying that they are creating a dangerous schism in America that could cause a painful split. You’ve heard it all before, but Goodwin does it well.

In Progressive-land, every thing is political. I was pleased when my daughter’s first music idol was Taylor Swift. I didn’t particularly like Taylor’s country music (I like her pop music better), and I still don’t like the way she seems to date men to get fodder for her break-up songs, but I greatly appreciate that Taylor Swift comports herself like a lady: Good behavior and an incredible classy approach to her appearance. Being a smart young woman, Swift treats her fans well and stays out of politics.

Except that in Progressive-land, where everything is political, the mere fact that Swift won’t roll in the Lefty mud is a reason to attack her. This attitude is just one more thing that should turn ordinary, decent Americans away from the Democrat party.

By the way, the Seinfeld show saw this coming:

People who have seen radical Islam up close . . . blame Obama. This showed up on a friend’s Facebook feed and I agree:

If you read the above post, you might also want to read this article and watch the video from an Iraqi Muslim who has realized that his own world is not serving him or his people well.

Let me say here that I really do think that I am more humane than those multicultural Progressives because, unlike them, I want to save generations of people from the clutches of a religion that has lost its way. The Progressives, on the other hand, think themselves morally superior for wanting to continue a world in which women are (at best) marginalized, gays are slaughtered, and warlike conquest is the highest goal. While people, who are infinitely adaptable, may be used to that life and even enjoy parts of it, we know that this is not an optimal environment for developing higher human attributes.

Islam needs a reformation. The reality about Islam is that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, sucking up the oxygen from decent people. Many ignoramuses will always follow the loudest voice, but others are genuinely scared of the radicals who have no compunction about killing off their co-religionists. In addition, thanks to our PC-ness, we don’t offer viable options who realize that their faith has taken a wrong turn, but have nowhere else to go.

With this in mind, to the extent the Progressives are always going on about refugee immigration being “for the children,” I have a proposal: I suggest that we take in up to 50,000 refugee children a year, from war- and economically-ravaged regions, aged birth to five years old, and place them with adoptive families (kind of like the Vietnamese orphans who came in the 1970s).

Here’s the catch, though: The homes in which these children are placed, if they are Muslim, would have to be vetted by representatives from organizations founded by Ayaan Hirsi Ali or Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. Both of these brave, brilliant souls envision a Reformation Islam that cultivates the best in Muslims, not the worst.

For more about the difference between the sweet little children and the potentially very dangerous adults in their world, I recommend this article.

Meanwhile, Daniel Greenfield explains why, in the world as it is, rather than the world as Progressives imagine it could be, unrestricted Islamic immigration into America is a serious concern.

And of course the Left is lying. Immediately upon the immigration stay going into effect, my Facebook feed was inundated by sob stories about people stuck in airports for hours. I should clarify. The people in the sob stories, of course, are immigrants or green card holders trying to get into the US, not American citizens trapped by screaming protesters. At least one of those sob stories (of course) was a lie.

I keep telling my Progressive friends in a general, non-partisan way, they we’re all being lied to and that we need to be more careful news consumers. They just don’t listen….

Speaking of pain at the airport. At Seraphic Secret, a reminder that it was jihadism in the 1960s and 1970s that turned air travel from a swift, pleasant process into the demeaning nightmare it is now. We’ve been bedeviled for a long time by this mindset. It doesn’t do us any good — nor does it do any good for the generations of people trapped in that cruel world — when we pretend that fundamentalist Islam is a good thing that we should respect.

The new Salem witch hunt on American campuses. I know young men who have been chased off of college campuses based upon completely unfounded rape claims. They were not allowed to face their accusers, the claims were ridiculous on their face, there was no due process, and there certainly wasn’t enough to take the matter to the police. Nevertheless, these young men’s lives have been destroyed.

I’ve also been told that there are even more young men out there than I realize. The cover was that we were told that a lot of those boys came back home because “college wasn’t working for them.” In fact, they too were victims of the Progressive campus witch hunt.

If you want to learn more about this unconstitutional, anti-male horror, a book I’ve seen recommended is The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities. It’s definitely a book I’ll be buying for myself in the near future (or, better yet, maybe it will come to my library, so I won’t be the only person in Marin to read it).

Addendum: Peter Berkowitz suggests ways in which the Trump administration can bring constitutional due process back to American campuses.

Trump’s whirlwind of work. My Progressive Facebook friends are very excited about a post that’s making the rounds claiming that Trump is throwing out all sorts of executive orders and hiring decisions to destabilize America preparatory to a fascist takeover. It’s evil, they tell me, evil!!

In fact, Trump’s whirlwind of work is because he’s that kind of guy. He’s a ferociously energetic person who has what Scott Adams calls a rapid-iteration, A/B testing approach to management.

Incidentally, America has had another president like that: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Democrat. FDR significantly worsened the Depression by coming into office and, in a mad frenzy, doing all sorts of stuff, much of it unconstitutional, as a way of tinkering with the American economy to see what worked. Progressives loved his energy and his innovation, as well as the fact that he interned Japanese-Americans and that he refused admission to Jewish refugees facing certain death in the Holocaust. Funny (not!) how he’s still so popular with modern Progressives.

Does torture work? Strategic torture aimed at eliciting information necessary to America’s security is on the agenda again, now that Trump says he’ll defer to General Mattis about using it. Scott Adams (who proves to be an absolutely fascinating thinker, whether or not one agrees with him) notes that, Progressive claims to the contrary, of course torture works as a way to elicit information — but it’s not in America’s interest to admit that it works or that America occasionally uses it.

Pope Francis the communist. Three years ago, I pointed to liberation theology as the underlying problem with Pope Francis’s many worst instincts. My instincts, as it happens, were right on the money, with Pope Francis recently explicitly praising that communist attack on the Catholic Church.

Bad things happen in a post-Judeo-Christian era. The Judeo-Christian faith, unlike any other, has an exquisite reverence for the value of human life. You know what happens when that value is gone, don’t you? One of the things that happens is that licensed euthanizers in Holland are given a pass for forcing a woman to die (after they enlisted her family to hold her down for the fatal injection).

Identity politics should not be a factor in school choice. Apparently conservatives are feeling marginalized now that their former Leftist allies in the school choice movement are calling for an infusion of identity politics. They shouldn’t be. Let me explain.

One of the things that broke through my Lefty carapace was a conversation I had 25 years ago with a brilliant friend who took me on when I said vouchers were a terrible idea because my taxpayer money could be used to fund (gasp!) Christian schools. First, he explained that the government doesn’t have its own money. It only has what it takes from us. So giving people money in the form of vouchers is kind of like returning a lost wallet.

Second, he told me that all parents want what’s best for their children, even parents with beliefs I don’t support. And ultimately what’s best for children is that they are able to get a job and live a decent life. If their voucher-supported school doesn’t do that for its graduates, that school won’t last. The marketplace will eventually weed out the bad schools . . . which is unlike the situation now, where our money endlessly funds hard-Left, academically-failed public schools.

The fight should be for vouchers. After that, let’s see how well those poor kids trapped in snowflake social justice schools manage when they get out into the real world.

Incidentally, this self-identified teacher might end up at one of those social justice, BLM voucher schools. Serious language warning:

Okay, I’ve exhausted myself and I can’t even guess how tired you must be from reading all this. I’ll be back tomorrow, though.

The post Bookworm Beat 2/1/17 — the “Democrat Implosion” issue appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Sherif Gaber, an Egyptian dissident in hiding, takes a look at Islam’s bloody history of conquest and concludes that ISIS is extremely Islamic.

If you haven’t heard the name Sherif Gaber, allow me to educate you about a brave man who, having had an epiphany about the Islamic world in which he was raised, tries his best, even while living in hiding, to educate the world about Islam’s true face. He does not indict all Muslims, but he understands the truth of the faith in which he was raised and will speak about it.

As best as I can tell, until early 2013, when he finally spoke up while a student at the Suez Canal University in Ismailia, Egypt, Gaber was not trying to change the Muslim world. He shared his ideas on social media, but otherwise did not advertise that he was skeptical about some Islamic doctrine. That changed when the professor in his “science” class announced this bit of “scientific” Islamic wisdom: “Homosexuality is a sin. Gays and lesbians shall be crucified in the middle of the streets, stoned, and burned to death!”

Rather than silently accepting this murderous religious indictment in the context of a science class, Gaber spoke up, suggesting that the science class actually look at homosexuality from a scientific, rather than moralistic, perspective. The professor turned on Gaber, harassing and threatening him for the remainder of the class.

Now that the professor knew that Gaber craved knowledge even if it ran counter to Islamic doctrine, the professor joined with other faculty members to scour Gaber’s social media pages for anything that could be deemed “un-Islamic.” The professor than gave to the public prosecutor the papers he had printed up from Gaber’s Facebook. To add insult to injury, he also gave Gaber an “F” in the class.

In October 2013, the state police raided Gaber’s home and arrested him. Eventually, Gaber was released from prison when he paid the government 7500 Egyptian pounds (about $420), 2500 of which was for the “Contempt of Religion” charge and 5000 was for “spreading immoral values and abnormal thoughts that provoke and disturb the public peace and the national security of Egypt.” This payment did not settle the matter. It was more akin to bail, and the government continued to prosecute its case against Gaber.

Eventually, in February 2015, the Egyptian government sentenced Gaber to a year in jail for his seditious un-Islamic activity. Rather than paying 1,000 Egyptian pounds for the right to an appeal, Gaber went into hiding. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

From his hiding place, the internet is giving Gaber a voice. He’s making videos in which he says all of the things that he could not freely say in Egypt. The ones that interest me most are those aimed directly at moderate Muslims and soft-minded Westerners.

Through them Gaber attempts to educate these Islamic apologists about Islam’s bloody, repressive history. His latest effort explains that ISIS is not, as President Obama insisted, “un-Islamic.” Instead, it is absolutely consistent with Islam.

The myriad facts Gaber states in the video go by very quickly, but I urge you to watch the video and, if need be, re-watch it — then share it with your friends. Hearing this indictment in Arabic (close-captioned in English) is almost overwhelming. By the way, close-captioning is in multiple languages. If it doesn’t automatically go to English, click on the settings button — that’s the little gear-shaped thing — to make your choice.

Also, if you are so moved, you can contribute to Gaber’s future video-making here.

Incidentally, I don’t agree with everything Gaber espouses. In his escape from Egypt’s and Islam’s stifling intellectual conditions, he’s embraced Western ideas, such as atheism and support for transgenderism. As to the later, you know that I think the current Western view is as scientifically suspect as Islamic notions about homosexuality. Unlike Islam, however, which wants to kill homosexuals, when it comes to transexuals, I simply believe we do them and society a whole a vast disservice when we accept their body dysphoria as reality, instead of working with them (and tincture of time) to help align their minds and bodies without hormones and surgery.

But I digress. What overwhelms me about Gaber is that, when he gets to Islam’s fundamental lack of enlightenment, he’s right on the money. Take, for example, his challenge to Arab girls to break free of Islam’s misogyny:

Do you remember the NAACP’s old slogan, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste”? Gaber reminds us that, aside from its genocidal propensities, one of the worst sins Islam commits, is to waste minds. It envelops them in ignorance and murders them if they seek to escape. Gaber escaped and watching his free mind at work is a wonderful thing.

The post [VIDEO] Sherif Gaber, Egyptian dissident, shreds the notion that ISIS is not Islamic appeared first on Bookworm Room.

It’s no laughing matter when Leftists insist that men are cruel for giving women orgasms; this is just another way to advance state control over individuals.

If they look compatible, the man must be a chauvinist pig.

I haven’t yet processed the longer term implications of the House Republicans’ Obamacare debacle, so I’d much rather talk about Cosmopolitan Magazine’s insistence that it’s sexist for men to enjoy giving their female partners orgasms. I’m not the first one to address this ridiculousness. Ace and Robert Tracinski already wrote excellent posts on the subject. However, I believe I’m the only person who’s written a long American Thinker article entitled Sex and State Power, which intersects with this latest example of Leftist craziness.

If you don’t have the stomach to reach Cosmo’s article, something I fully understand, let me summarize for you the pertinent points in the article. According to a study in the Journal of Sex Research, men who successfully bring their female partners to orgasm are proud of themselves. It is, say that study’s authors, a “masculinity achievement.”

Before I go any further, do keep in mind that one of feminism’s chief complaints starting in the 1960s was that too many men had a “wham, bam, thank you, ma’am” approach to sex. Women, said the feminists, were complicated and therefore needed delicacy and attention in order to get sexual pleasure. Meanwhile, men were single celled amoebas would could pop out their own orgasms and then just walk away.

For the last forty or fifty years, the message to American men has been that, to be a good partner in bed, it’s not enough to say, “This is great, wasn’t it?” Instead, men need to be attentive, skilled, caring, compassionate, empathetic and, above all, patient so that their partner can get as much pleasure from sex as men routinely do. No wonder that men, most of whom really can orgasm through very simple stimulation, feel proud when they delay their own pleasure, and make the extra effort and take the extra time to see to their partner’s pleasure. I applaud those men.

Modern feminists, though, do not applaud those men. The problem, you see, is that, to the extent that men get pleasure from pleasuring women, those evil men are robbing women of control over their own orgasms. And no, that is not bad writing on my part. That is utterly appalling thinking on the part of Sara Chadwick and Sari van Anders, the *ahem* researchers behind the study:

In a separate statement from Chadwick and van Anders, they explained why it’s a bad thing for men to gain masculinity points for bringing female partners to orgasm. “One reason is that it might pressure some heterosexual men to feel like they have to ‘give’ women orgasms, as if orgasm is something men pulled out of a hat and presented to women,” they wrote. “This ties into cultural ideas of women as passive recipients of whatever men give them.”

They also mention another sexist orgasm trope: women feeling pressured to fake orgasms in order to appease a male partner, or in their words, “to protect men’s feelings.” For women who have sex with male partners, the pressure to orgasm is a relatable feeling. Hence all the faking that we know is going down in hetero bedrooms all over the country.

[snip]

The researchers draw a fairly frightening conclusion from the research findings. When women’s orgasms begin to serve as a masculinity achievement for male partners, the orgasms cease to be about women’s liberation or sexual pleasure. They just become another opportunity for men to flex, or “shore up their sense of masculinity.” (Emphasis mine.)

You know what? If you want to shore up your masculinity by giving me incredible pleasure . . . I’m good with that.

Before I get to sex and Leftists, I want to add here that the study’s authors, not surprisingly for Leftists, totally don’t get altruism or sacrifice, both of which Western culture has previously considered to be virtues. The deal with true altruism or sacrifice is that the actor’s pleasure comes, not from direct sensory pleasure, but from the thought that he or she has done something valuable for someone else. The ability to put someone’s pleasure ahead of our own is a sign of maturity, separating us from children who think only of their own pleasure.

(Do I point out here that Mussolini was reputedly brutal in bed, preferring prostitutes, enjoying inflicting pain, and completely focused on his own pleasure? Yes, I guess I do point it out.)

Before that daft study came out, most women would have said that a man who looked to her pleasure, rather than focusing solely on his own, was virtuous, if only in that regard. Sexual pleasure is a good thing, insofar as it’s mutually beneficial and . . . it strengthens relationships, which is where I get to my whole “sex and state power” shtick.

The point of that article was that the Leftists have always been desperate to uncouple people from their own bodies. To that end, they’ve encouraged women to treat sex as men have traditionally (or at least reputedly) done — without emotional commitment.

Because women connect sex and emotional commitment, separating the two actually disempowers women. It turns sex into something that is alien to their basic nature. From the Leftist point of view, that’s a good thing. When people feel disconnected from their bodies, which are the single thing over which they’re supposed to be able to exercise control, then they can be more easily controlled by others.

But what are Leftists supposed to do when men come along — and damn their evil hides! — start doing things that reconnect women’s bodies, brains, and emotions? It’s all well and good if a man crudely uses a woman’s body because there is parity there. She, after all, has been trained to crudely use his as well. Also, you can use his insensitivity as a bludgeon. The Left likes bludgeoning straight males who are, to the Left’s horror, the ballast and engine of Western civilization.

Things go to pieces, though, when a man is caring, thoughtful, generous, and patient. Not only has the Left lost a cudgel that it can perpetually swing at straight men, something even worse has happened. Suddenly, the same woman who has been conditioned to separate sex from emotions gets an inkling that, for her at least, things are better when she’s more than just a body. They’re better when the man treats her as a unique person, with unique responses that a man can learn and then use, not just to his benefit, but to hers as well.

This kind of symbiotic pleasure runs the risk of reminding women that good men matter. If a woman really thinks about it, she might conclude that she needs a good, caring man a whole lot more than a fish needs a bicycle. And then where is modern feminism?

It’s a good thing that, back in the first years of this century, nobody told Robin Williams that he was a sexist pig for joking about men’s desperate efforts to leave women happy and satisfied in bed (language and content warning):

The post Time to talk about mean men daring to give women orgasms appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Despite a small spark of rationality, Macalester College’s weekly paper displays the Progressive hate, ignorance, and nonsense at an American college.

Knowing my passion for free speech, someone sent me a small sign of hope: a link to a student-written opinion piece from the weekly student newspaper at Macalester University in Minnesota. To give a little context, in 2014 College Magazine ranked Macalester as the “Most Progressive Campus” in America. It’s also No. 10 on the Best Colleges’ “Most Liberal Colleges” list. In other words, it’s your average American college, right up there with some of the most prestigious, such as Yale, Harvard, or MIT, or some of the most embarrassing, such as Missouri or Pomona.

Unlike those other American colleges, however, Macalester is never in the news. I suspect this is because no student or faculty member would ever dream of inviting to the campus someone who doesn’t meet the Progressive purity scale. Without any opposing views, there is no call for violence.

It was therefore a great and pleasant surprise to discover that one young man is defending the free exchange of ideas. What moved Jacob Hill to write was the fact that the staff of the college radio station, perfectly emulating a Maoist re-education camp, grouped together to castigate a fellow employee for having dared to place on the college Facebook page a meme that “satirized the prevalence of white Adidas sneakers among women who claim not to conform to societal norms.” I’m having trouble envisioning how offensive such a meme could be but for the student’s cohorts at the radio station, it was a bridge too far. It was Mao time:

Less than 24 hours after the meme was posted, the original poster (a Mac Radio staff member) went to his WMCN staff meeting as usual. One of the commenters on the meme decided to make a speech calling him misogynistic, racist and homophobic. The speech was met with applause, and much of the WMCN staff agreed that his offensive behavior did not represent the culture of WMCN. He was not offered a chance to respond but rather asked to think about his actions for a week.

Showing a grasp of logic denied to most young Progressives, Hill points out that advancing feelings as the alpha and omega of all disputes ends rational discussion:

A later comment on the original post read: “you don’t get to decide what’s offensive to other people—if it’s offensive to them, that’s it. You don’t get to critique that fact.” This ‘fact’ is particularly what makes offense so messy. No one knows exactly what will offend others. It’s an ongoing dialogue. Macalester students, in their haste to eliminate every suggestion that may be perceived as offensive, missed the opportunity for this dialogue. I don’t personally believe that the poster had malintent, but even if he did, is calling him a racist/misogynist/homophobe really the best way to make your point? Too often, liberal Millennials believe they can end a conversation by calling out someone’s “isms.” Yes, these claims are powerful, but that is precisely why they must be backed by context, logic, and most of all, truth.

There’s more and Hill deserves kudos for every word he writes. This is a young man who, somehow, somewhere, was exposed to an intellectual world that transcends navel-gazing emotionalism that’s par for the course at an American college.

As of this writing, Hill’s short article had garnered three comments: The first agrees with and encourages respectful dialog; the third agrees with Hill and expresses surprise that The Weekly Mac published Hill’s piece; and the second . . . well, the second comment shows that the writer has embraced an authoritarian worldview that brooks no criticism:

I question the decision of the Mac Weekly to publish such a targeted opinion piece, especially as the author writes of the pitfalls of “isolating and humiliating” specific people in the name of a greater conversation. [The author did not name anybody, although it’s reasonable to assume that in a small community, most students could identify not only the daring Facebook transgressor but also his Maoist accusers.] Also: this idea of “listening politely” looks to be teetering quite close to the edge of a compulsory silence.

Hill, as I said, gave me hope. Scanning the rest of The Mac Weekly’s offerings depressed me. In just one week’s worth of writing, there are so many bad ideas. These are bad ideas arising from a solid basis of factual ignorance, unexamined bias, Marxism, Alinsky-esque thinking, self-loathing, third-wave feminism, misandry, and anti-Semitism. Here are just a couple of examples:

I mentioned that Macalester probably avoids ugly news stories, a la Middlebury or Cal, because no one would ever dream of inviting someone who is not reliably progressive to speak to the students. Mac did, however, invite Jackson Katz, a well known SJW (who, incidentally, found a niche marketing to the American military under Obama). Here’s is Katz’s bio from his website:

Jackson Katz, Ph.D., is an educator, author, filmmaker and cultural theorist who is internationally renowned for his pioneering scholarship and activism on issues of gender, race and violence. He has long been a major figure and thought leader in the growing global movement of men working to promote gender equality and prevent gender violence.

He is co-founder of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP), one of the longest-running and most widely influential gender violence prevention programs in North America, and the first major program of its kind in the sports culture and the military. MVP introduced the “bystander” approach to the sexual assault and relationship abuse fields; Katz is a key architect of this now broadly popular strategy.

Since 1997 he has run MVP Strategies, which provides gender violence prevention/leadership training to institutions in the public and private sectors in U.S. and around the world.

He is the author of two critically acclaimed books, The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How all Men Can Help, and Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity.

He has published numerous academic and journalistic articles on topics as far-ranging as Eminem, the gender politics of conservative talk radio, violent white masculinity in advertising, juvenile detention, pornography, and sports metaphors in presidential politics.

He is creator, lead writer and narrator of the award-winning Tough Guise videos. He lectures and trains widely in the U.S. and around the world on violence, media and the many intersections of gender, sexual orientation and race.

What Katz doesn’t mention in his bio is that he was the first man to minor in women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Here’s a video so you can get the feel for his communication style and message:

Regarding his comments in the video, I just want to say in the world in which I grew up, a world of gentlemen and ladies, men were already discouraged from being violent against women. Interestingly, I cannot find anything Katz has written or said talking about Islam’s doctrinal support of violence against women (or gays, of course).

You can draw your own conclusions about Katz. He strikes me as a bland, generic social justice warrior casting everything in SJW victim language. (“Hey, I may be a white, Jewish male, but I’m not a member of the patriarchy and I’m rejecting my white privilege.”) All the while his core message is the old one: Gentlemen don’t strike ladies. Katz also reminds me strongly of a guy I know who studied dance at college so he could get dates. Just saying.

Anyway, even Katz’s shtick wasn’t good enough for Elizabeth Levi:

A major part of the feminist methodology is understanding how the feminine is consumed and constructed as subordinate within a patriarchy. Jackson Katz is correct in his analysis that in order for gender violence to be reduced, we need to understand how masculinity is also a part of the patriarchy and how this institution affects men in a variety of harmful ways. Yet Katz misunderstands the relationship that needs to subsequently change between feminine and masculine attributes. Katz’ advocacy for “male” leadership as a way to keep men in line and treat women with respect only further perpetuates that men’s nature is violent and that women’s nature is subordinate. This is a destructive way of treating individuals and theorizing gender violence.

Katz misses the point that feminism calls for: dismantling the idea that the feminine is passive and not as powerful or deserving as the masculine. Uplifting feminine attributes and qualities needs to happen in tandem with understanding how masculine qualities are made powerful. The goal is to remove these default assumptions, not keep them as the norm. Katz instead uses his acknowledged privilege and position to merely nod to the feminist method without understanding his position in it. The call for change that Katz advocates for is perhaps beneficial for men educating other men and inviting introspection into their lives. This call should not be mistaken, however, as a feminist method or as a mouthpiece for the work that feminist leaders have been doing for decades. I fear that Katz leadership will only further silence and subordinate women, without giving feminine voices the space to be heard in the same way he knows he can be.

This third-wave feminism is what passes for a thinking person’s education at Macalester — or at any other American college, for that matter.

And then there’s the self-loathing, hard-Left, J-Street Jewish antisemitism. With Passover in the air, four Jewish students felt that it was time to attack Israel:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, meaning that for the past 50 years, our community has supported the horrors of the occupation while celebrating our own liberation each Passover. This year, we need to discuss the fact that an entire generation of Palestinians has spent their whole lives under occupation—that living under occupation means a constant threat of violence, a denial of civil, political and economic rights, and support for the idea that Palestinians are less deserving of freedom and dignity than their Israeli neighbors. We need to talk about the Palestinian villages being demolished, the roads being blocked and the resources being withheld from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. We need to talk about how the occupation is a daily nightmare for those who live it and a moral disaster for anyone who supports and administers it. As IfNotNow, we believe that the celebration of Passover presents an important opportunity to address American Jewish support for the occupation.

If you’re thinking that the above sounds like computer-generated antisemitic gobbledygook straight out of Hamas headquarters, you’re not far off. At the end of this screed that took four students to generate, we find these words:

Language for this article is borrowed from IfNotNow #The5thQuestion Action Guide.

IfNotNow is a relatively recent Leftist Jewish group, founded only in 2014, and targeted specifically at millennials. Its website gives no information about its financial support or its board. I was able to glean only a small amount of information about it from an article involving a rich, Leftist Jewish couple who were disappointed that the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles rejected their recommendation to fund the group:

“The Foundation was being asked to act as the vehicle to provide support for an organization that is hostile to established Jewish institutions, indirectly including The Foundation itself,” the statement read. “We concluded that such a course of action would directly conflict with our core values, requiring us to deny this recommendation.”

Additionally, JCFLA wrote of IfNotNow, “it provides only limited public transparency, including no disclosure of its board of directors or financials.” Because the organization was officially formed in 2015, its financial disclosures are not yet publicly available.

IfNotNow admits to openly challenging the Jewish establishment. The group gained national attention during Israel’s last incursion in Gaza in 2014 by reading the Mourner’s Kaddish for Palestinian victims in front of major Jewish organizations, including the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in New York City, an umbrella group.

“The Foundation learned that [IfNotNow] has routinely included among the targets of its hostile activities such highly regarded Jewish organizations as the Jewish Federations of North America, with which The Foundation is affiliated, the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International,” JCFLA wrote in its statement.

Call me cynical, but when IfNotNow releases its funding, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that there’s a Soros behind it.

The group garnered kudos from Peter Beinart, one of the young generation of hard-Left, anti-Israel “journalists”:

The millennial activism that has spawned IfNotNow is very different. It stems not from the hopes that Obama inspired, but from disillusionment with what he failed to achieve. Occupy was a response to Obama’s failure to fundamentally reform Wall Street. The “dreamer” protests were a response to his record-level deportations of undocumented immigrants. Black Lives Matter was a response to his failure to curb police violence. And IfNotNow is a response to his failure to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.

[snip]

By bypassing Washington, D.C., politics, IfNotNow can ignore red lines that J Street must respect. J Street opposes the boycott, sanctions and divestment movement. IfNotNow does not. J Street treads cautiously when Israel goes to war in Gaza. ItNotNow stands in front of American Jewish offices and says Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, for the dead.

Even this encomium, including the admirable fact (to Beinart) that IfNotNow members are “agnostic on Jewish statehood,” is not enough for the activists at IfNotNow. First, they were proud that Beinart publicized them; then, they realized that it just wasn’t good enough. Beinart, it appears, by comparing the group (favorably, I might add) to Black Lives Matter apparently missed the point.

Before distancing themselves from the black folk, INN asserts its intersectional bona fides:

IfNotNow is a movement to end the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation. This work is inextricably linked to building a Jewish community that is committed to solidarity between Jews of color, Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and White Jews, and drawing connections to fighting larger systems of anti-Black racism, anti-Arab racism, and Islamophobia.

Interesting that these proud self-loathing Jews don’t mention the intersectional needs of women (treated badly in the Muslim/Hamas/Fatah world) and the LGBTQ crowd (beaten to death, imprisoned, thrown off buildings, flayed alive, hanged, burned, etc., in the Muslim/Hamas/Fatah world).

For all this proud intersectionality, though, INN’s leaders want you to know they’re not black:

The specific way that Beinart compared IfNotNow to Black Lives Matter missed the mark and distracted from the larger, strategic point he was attempting to make. Though we are humbled by being linked to one of the most important mass movements of our time, Beinart’s article title is inappropriate for a number of reasons. First, it dismisses the existence, experience, and resistance of Black Jews, many of whom are active as leaders both in the Jewish community and Black Lives Matter Movement. Second, this comparison fails to acknowledge the difference in privilege and power dynamics within our movements — IfNotNow is a mostly white-led movement and unlike Black Lives Matter, is not a movement of those most directly impacted by the problem it seeks to address.

Beinart’s writing is and has been a source of inspiration and insight for many of us. We write about the ways his piece missed the mark in the spirit of intellectual inquiry and public challenging of our community to do better. We recognize that Beinart drew the comparison in order to highlight the dynamics between established institutions and protest movements. We see ourselves as part of an entire generation that is rising up and organizing mass movements for real change — a generation that includes those fighting for Black Lives, immigrant rights, climate justice, and economic equality.

I seem to detect a real stench of intersectional racism there.

In any event, this is what passes for knowledge and intellect at a pricey private Leftist college — mechanically repeated antisemitic screeds copied out of the Hamas playbook.

By the way, if any Macalester students somehow wander over here and say to themselves, “But Israel is evil,” I humbly recommend that they spend a few minutes watching these videos:

Moreover, if those same students can tolerate the above four videos, perhaps they would be willing to check out all the Prager U short videos on foreign policy issues. The students might then learn things they’re not teaching at Macalester. Moreover, even if the students disagree, at least that disagreement will be predicated on an honest understanding of opposing views, rather than on mindless emotionalism and Leftist tropes unrelated to facts.

Here’s the reality about America: If you want your poisonous tree, the fruit of which is trying desperately to turn America into Venezuela, look no further than American colleges.

Take scientists, for example. American scientists (which means people who work in STEM fields even if they have an aversion to the scientific method) like to contend that they are rational beings who must therefore always be believed. They forget that all modern fascist societies (societies that have almost without exception come from the Left side of the political spectrum) have relied upon scientists to support their tyrannical theories and provide their weapons of destruction.

It’s no wonder, then, that American scientists too hew to the  statist side of our political spectrum.

Why are Jews hostile to Israel? American college.

Why do Asians support the party of affirmative action, even though it locks their kids out of a quality education? American college. (Keep in mind that the Asian kids trying to get into good colleges now, and getting blocked, are second or third generation Americans, whose parents and grandparents are already products of American colleges.)

Why are media figures Democrats who hate America as she is and desperately want America to be Europe (a failing Europe, I might add)? American college.

Why are corporate executives, who ought to embrace the free market, instead hostile to it? American college. Sadly, these same grads have figured out that they can benefit from the profoundly anti-free market notion of “crony capitalism,” which is really just government favoritism, which is really just another word for fascism. Fascists, as you may recall, allowed private ownership and profit, provided that it was subordinated to, dependent on, and in cahoots with the state.

Wherever you look at a hard Left cohort, hostile to the free market, free speech, individual liberty, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the melting pot, etc., you will find one common denominator: American college.

The best thing that Donald Trump can do for America is to announce that the moment an American college or university denies free speech to a conservative, whether a student or an invited speaker, all federal funds will instantly be withdrawn. Even better, he should announce that the withdrawn funds will be redirected to trade schools.

The post A microcosm of the maddening mix of Progressive hate, ignorance, and nonsense at an American college appeared first on Bookworm Room.

It’s another superb illustrated edition, with thought-provoking posters about politics, social issues, and foreign policy. You won’t want to miss it.

This is first and foremost an illustrated edition post except . . . before you even look at these posters, please read Victor Davis Hanson’s “Regime Change by Any Other Name?” It’s phenomenal. And now the pictures:

Sexual harassment: Trump talked about it hypothetically. Biden never stops actually doing it.

The post The Bookworm Beat 5/23/17 — the illustrated edition and open thread appeared first on Bookworm Room.

The Black Lives Matter movement will be a dead-end until American blacks start focusing on the scourge of missing fathers in their poorest communities.

Buzzfeed, of all places, has an excellent article about the turmoil in the upper echelons of the Black Lives Matter movement. The article was a reminder, if one was needed, that the Black Lives Matter movement is an entirely outward looking movement. That is, it targets non-blacks — in law enforcement, education, employment, etc. — and demands that these people and institutions change for the benefit of American blacks.

As best as I can tell, the Black Lives Matter movement never had an inner focus, looking at the black community to see what changes it can make to improve the quality of black lives, including those black lives that intersect with law enforcement, education, etc.  Indeed, at least on college campuses, as one looks at self-segregation and demands that education be brought down to an infantile level, ostensibly to benefit blacks, the Black Lives Matter movement seems to have had a negative effect on blacks, leaving them less, not more, capable of functioning in the world of money and power.

This is a shame because there is one thing above all things that the Black Lives Matter movement can do to ensure that black lives do in fact matter — that thing is to encourage the magical middle class model of education, job, marriage, and family, in that order. Even more, within that model, black lives activists should push for a dynamic in which heterosexual couples have monogamous relationships that see the man stick around to parent his children.

Study after study shows how much fathers matter. When it comes to girls, girls with supportive fathers are happier people who engage in safer relationships with the opposite sex:

The hallmark characteristic of a fatherless daughter is fear of abandonment. Because they never got the direction needed from a father figure, they learn to make up their own survival playbook. This can lead to negative coping skills such as sexual promiscuity, total avoidance of intimacy, isolation, substance abuse, anxiety and depression.

Fatherless daughters report having difficulty in relationships and in the workplace interacting with men because they were never taught how to feel comfortable with a man in their father’s absence. They can also carry into adulthood conflicting issues with their mothers from becoming her caretaker for a time or witnessing so much chaos in the home. Financial distress or poverty often follows father loss, and this can have a significant impact in every area of a girl’s upbringing.

For boys, having an engaged father is also a huge benefit, particularly when it comes to staying out of trouble and having healthy relationships with women:

Adolescents living in intact families are less likely to engage in delinquency than their peers living in non-intact families. Compared to peers in intact families, adolescents in single-parent families and stepfamilies were more likely to engage in delinquency. This relationship appeared to be operating through differences in family processes—parental involvement, supervision, monitoring, and parent-child closeness—between intact and non-intact families.

Source: Stephen Demuth and Susan L. Brown, “Family Structure, Family Processes, and Adolescent Delinquency: The Significance of Parental Absence Versus Parental Gender,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 41, No. 1 (February 2004): 58-81.
http://familyfacts.org/briefs/26/marriage-and-family-as-deterrents-from-delinquency-violence-and-crime

– A study using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health explored the relationship between family structure and risk of violent acts in neighborhoods. The results revealed that if the number of fathers is low in a neighborhood, then there is an increase in acts of teen violence. The statistical data showed that a 1% increase in the proportion of single-parent families in a neighborhood is associated with a 3% increase in an adolescent’s level of violence. In other words, adolescents who live in neighborhoods with lower proportions of single-parent families and who report higher levels of family integration commit less violence.

Source: Knoester, C., & Hayne, D.A. (2005). “Community context, social integration into family, and youth violence.” Journal of Marriage and Family 67, 767-780.

(For a whole litany of the ills that come for fatherless children, check out the National Center for Fathering’s full summary.)

Naturally, there are situations in which the father, through no fault of his own, cannot be around. Thus, fathers who pass away or go off to war obviously have no control over their continued relationship with their children. Likewise, if a mother is bound and determined to have a divorce, for good reasons or bad, the court might deprive the father of access to his children. Moreover, this is a good thing if the divorce results from a man’s abuse towards either his wife or his children.

Too often, though, fathers are missing because societal forces fail to keep the father with the children. Feminism is certainly one factor. If First Wave Feminism was about the vote, and Second Wave Feminism was about equal work for equal pay and equal opportunities, Third Wave Feminism is a direct attack on men, painting them as crude, stupid, violent, and unnecessary.

Seen in this negative light, there really isn’t a lot of incentive for women in a “bleh” marriage to stay married or to give their children access to a father. If you’re invested in the idea that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, you’re likely to forget that children need a father like human life needs oxygen.

Another barrier to fathers is the way in which our welfare system gives women an incentive to ditch men. If you’re a single mother, you get a broad range of welfare services, from food stamps to free healthcare to subsidized housing. Getting married to a working man, no matter how small his salary, diminishes these benefits. Conversely, having more children out of wedlock, without a stable male partner, increases them.

I assume that many reading the above paragraph will point out that life on welfare is a very marginal existence. There are two answers to this observation: First, life on a small salary without welfare is also a marginal existence, and you don’t get extra money for more children.

Second, if you’re thinking the welfare life is a distasteful, marginal existence, you’re thinking through your middle class prism. The reality is that poverty as it has historically existed — meaning people starving to death on the streets — does not exist in America. Instead, American poverty means a small dwelling in a lousy neighborhood with cheap, low-quality food and clothes from thrift stores or Walmart’s. Unlike Third World poverty, the poor in America have all their basic needs met — i.e., shelter, food, and clothing, and up to and including smart phones — but the quality of everything is low.

While low quality may bother you, I can attest from time spent with the other half, the non-upper-middle-class half, that this low quality isn’t necessarily repugnant to everyone. There are a lot of people who are happy with basic shelter, a full stomach, thrift store or Walmart’s clothes (and you can get great stuff at Walmart’s, including good food), a bottle of beer, and a bit of spleef. The fact that your car is a junker and your home a wreck may not matter if you don’t have to work. And honestly, if you’re stoned all the time, too many in the welfare class seem to be, you’re not a very good worker to begin with.

This is a world in which women can live without their child’s father, and in which many have a different absent father for each child. Indeed, a rotating crop of men may be the norm — and that rotating crop, sadly, is even worse for children than having no father at all. Living with a boyfriend or stepfather can be as dangerous to a child as living with a hungry pit bull:

This new federal study [from 2011] indicates that these cases are simply the tip of the abuse iceberg in American life. According to the report, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are about 11 times more likely to be sexually, physically, or emotionally abused than children living with their married biological parents. Likewise, children living with their mother and her boyfriend are six times more likely to be physically, emotionally, or educationally neglected than children living with their married biological parents. In other words, one of the most dangerous places for a child in America to find himself in is a home that includes an unrelated male boyfriend—especially when that boyfriend is left to care for a child by himself.

Middle class American blacks embrace middle class values, including stable marriages and a present father. Unfortunately, too many American blacks are in a vicious circle that sees fatherless children go on to parent fatherless children, with each generation creating a cadre of depressed, promiscuous, dangerous young people.

These fatherless cohorts are black lives that, sadly, don’t seem to matter to the ones producing them. No wonder, then, that New York has at times produced more aborted black fetuses than living black babies. Again, in the dysfunctional word of fatherless poverty (with men fulfilling a biological function and then disappearing), these black lives truly don’t matter.

I used to serve on a school board that was trying to get grants for certain projects. One of the things I learned then is that, if the school community doesn’t first have 100% participation in the project, even if some people can only contribute a dollar or two, the grants just won’t happen. After all, why should a third party care more about the school than its own community does?

The same holds true for American blacks. Until they start treating their own lives with reverence — following the path of education, work, marriage, and children with a present father — why in the world should the rest of America take them seriously?

Please understand that I don’t intend my statement to mean that non-black Americans, watching the savage chaos of America’s inner cities, have license to abuse and destroy blacks. I’m saying, instead, that human nature is such that it’s very hard to bully, cajole, or even bribe people to get excited about a problem that seems to be intractable at its roots because those with the problem keep demanding that others save them without modifying their own behavior. In other words, if your behavior, as opposed to your rhetoric, shows that you don’t matter to you, why should you matter to me?

Black lives matter needs to clean its own house. Once its done that, I think it will be surprised at (a) how well blacks do even without making demands on greater America and (b) how any demands will be met with more enthusiasm and follow-through.

Coda: Apropos black lives and their interaction with police, this post is not meant to give police a free pass. I believe that, for the most part, police do their job well and have no murderous animus towards blacks. Having said that, police do make mistakes or act viciously.

The full video now released showing the lead-up to and death of Philando Castile reveals a police officer making a dreadful decision. Those Leftists who claim that the NRA should be speaking up about this shooting are correct. Castile did everything a legal gun owner should do and he still ended up dead because a police officer either panicked or was a genuinely cold-blooded killer. David French has a good and thoughtful post on this subject.

Photo credit: Black Lives Matter by Gerry Lauzon. Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.

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Insiders and observers are giving good advice to the Democrat party, but it all avoids the obvious: Democrats cannot tell the truth about their goals.

Several articles in the news recently combine to highlight a salient point about today’s Democrat party. The first is from Dan Balz, at Wapo, the title of which succinctly states Balz’s points: “Beyond opposing Trump, the Democrats are still searching for a message.” Balz identifies what is slowly becoming obvious to Progressivs — after four special election losses, while opposing Trump is enough for them, it is not enough for everyone else, including people who voted for Trump in 2016. You’d think they would have been quicker to realize that constantly telling voters “I hate you and everything you stand for” is not persuasive. Still, it’s a sign that Progressives can learn that, as Balz notes, at least some are calling for an emphasis on the economy.

For those looking to make a sale to Trump voters and undecided voters, though, a Democrat party emphasis on the economy is going to be a hard sell. It’s only the base that’s honest enough to admit that, from the top down, the only economic goal the modern Democrat party has is full frontal socialism:

For progressives, the answer to this problem is clear: a boldly liberal message that attacks big corporations and Wall Street and calls for a significant increase in government’s role in reducing income and wealth inequality. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been aggressive in promoting exactly that, as he did during the 2016 campaign, with calls for a big investment in infrastructure and free college tuition at public colleges and universities. He has said he intends to introduce legislation he calls “Medicare for All.”

The other article, which comes from The Hill, notes that some Dems, seemingly those not on the hard Left, are pushing their congresscritters to stop talking about Russia all of the time.

Taking these two articles in conjunction, there is little doubt that, subject to a small (and easily ignored) subset of semi-sane Democrats, Progressives (aka the Democrat Party) see talking about Russia as far more edifying than the economy. One can’t help but be fascinated by what the Democrat Party power brokers mean to do if they “turn towards the economy.” How does one push socialist ideas while denying their socialism, even as the base is screaming “We love you, Karl Marx”?

The hard reality that the Progressives face is that Obama pulled us hard Left, with higher taxes and a tsunami of regulations, and he did so with the Democrat Party’s enthusiastic support. At the end of the day, of course, nothing that the Dems did “created jobs.” Indeed, the Dems are currently hoping that nobody notices that, in just the first five months of his presidency, the Trump effect elevated black employment to heights not seen for the last 17 years. So what exactly would their turn to the economy be?

The Democrats have cut out the middle option in regards to the economy. You could talk about green jobs in 2008; you can’t do so without getting your lunch eaten in 2016. And that is just one example. To go towards the middle now means to go to the right, towards Trump. But therein lies the trap for the Democrats, as their rabid Prog base would eat them alive.

Moreover, Democrats have no intention of taking on their ever more culturally radical base. No one on the right has yet to make that an issue, but it is an issue, and a huge one.

Most people have no idea of the crap being taught in our colleges. They don’t understand the social justice warriors’ goals nor the utterly insane foundation on which their goals are built. They do not understand that third wave feminism truly hates men, especially white men, and sees its ultimate revenge in destroying America. Nor do they realize that radicalized blacks want to do the same, in addition to wanting to establish government discrimination against whites and, again, white men in particular.

Unless you’re as fixated with news as we are, and unless you follow enough non-MSM media to be made aware of what’s going on in America’s Progressive milieu, you really cannot fathom how radical the American Left is. Moreover, while some may be aware that the far Left gets full support from — and, indeed, is incubated in — academia, the MSM adeptly prevents them from seeing that the Proggie infrastructure, from Obama to Pelosi to Perez to Nancy Whats-her-name-I-know-nothing-Schultz, provides it with vast sums of money filtered through government unions and taxpayer-funded subsidies. (A recent example of the latter is the way in which an Obama holdover in the NEA gave $20,000 to a Leftist mime group doing a musical about a mentally-ill lesbian illegal immigrant — and she’s the sympathetic star of this zippy new show.)

This ignorance isn’t just among those who prefer ignorance. Women who graduated from college more than 20 years ago, before the campus madness took center stage, consider themselves good Progressives and therefore free of racism’s stain. They were therefore quite surprised when they arrived at the Womyn’s Marches against . . . who knows what, suitably attired in their little pink hats, only to find that if they wanted to march, they first had to acknowledge their white privilege and then get to the back of the march.

Perhaps the most rational analysis of the progs electoral problems comes from a Brit, Piers Morgan. He is himself well left of center, but unlike every pro-in-good-standing in America, he does not seem to hold President Trump in contempt – and thus, his rationality. This from his most recent offering at the Daily Mail:

Democrats lose again (0-4),’ gloated President Donald Trump last night after his party won Georgia’s vacant 6th Congressional District.

Then he added an extra ball-spiking slam: ‘Total disarray.’

Unlike some of Trump’s public statements, this was one that no Democrat could legitimately contest for factual accuracy.

They really HAVE lost all four special House elections since he won the White House.

And they really ARE in total disarray.

I’ve spent the past few months warning liberals their constant hysterical behaviour in relation to Trump would backfire and simply strengthen his position.

All completely correct. Morgan then goes on to add his prescription to cure the Democrat ills. The list, which he expounds upon in some detail, includes:

1. Dump Hillary. . . .
2. Stop abusing Trump. . . .
3. Find a leader. . . .
4. Get positive. . . .
6. Get out into the heartland. . . .
8. Tell your celebrity fans to shut the f*** up. . . .
9. Do deals with Republicans. . . .
10. Learn to win again. . . .

That said, his analysis fails at two points. First, there is his fifth prescription, which you might have noticed is missing from the above list. Morgan tells Democrats to “be inclusive.” That advice is more than simply problematic for today’s Democrat Party. There is no possible way to reconcile, honestly at least, the goals of the key Democrat victims groups, black radicals, radical feminists, and the LGBTQ powerhouse, all of which want to destroy straight white men and America’s traditional moral underpinnings, on the one hand, with the goals and needs of the white working class voters who have gone over to Trump, on the other hand.

As Rep. Debbie Dingell, who represents white working class voters in Michigan, stated recently, she “feels like a stranger” in her “own party.” That’s because the Democrat party of 2017 is no longer the big tent party it was throughout our history. It is now solely devoted to individual victim groups. Dems are the opposite of a big tent today. When Reagan complained in 1964 that he “didn’t leave the Democratic party; the Democratic party left” him, he couldn’t possibly have imagined how far his former party still had to travel into Karl Marx’s open arms.

Dingell is figuring out that, not only is this no longer her grandfather’s Democrat party, it’s no longer her father’s either. The penny is also very close to dropping for Piers Morgan. Here is what he writes for his seventh prescription:

7) Stand for something, and mean it. Everybody knows what Trump stands for because he’s banged the drum for his core issues – like The Wall, bringing back outsourced jobs and his travel ban – more times than Charlie Watts has banged his for the Rolling Stones. I honestly haven’t got a clue what the Democrats currently believe really matters to either themselves or Americans. And that’s a big problem when you’re trying to beat one of the most skilled brand-managers in American political history.

And that is the rub. It is not that the Democrats don’t stand for anything. They most certainly do: Socialism. Cultural Marxism. Atheism. Anti-White Male bigotry. The debasement of the Constitution. State control over the family. One can go on and on. The problem is every one of those things that the Democrats stand for, all of which many of us saw at their base for decades, their power brokers still have to hide or they will lose most every election outside the Peoples’ Republics of California and New York.

(Although this post goes out under the Bookworm byline, it is a joint project between Bookworm and Wolf Howling. The latter did the lion’s share of the work, including the intellectual insights, but Bookworm polished it a little and published it.)

The post The Democrat party is hamstrung because it can’t tell the truth about itself appeared first on Bookworm Room.

Unquestioning groupthink is a Leftist hallmark, especially for blacks. Antonia Okafor details how she escaped from that intellectual prison.

The post [VIDEO] Escaping the groupthink the Left demands, especially from blacks appeared first on Bookworm Room.

I recently wrote posts about both Disney Princesses (and their dresses) and about Tesla and other electric cars. These are a few fun updates to those posts.

I wrote two posts in the past few days that have already been overtaken by events. The first post was about my disdain for Tesla, which I see as a rich people’s car built on poor people’s backs. The second post was about the impact Disney Princesses have on American women — and why.

My Tesla post is adequate, but the comments my readers have left are splendid, including updated information about battery technology. I have one more comment I want to add to the subject, plus a great link to a post at Zero Hedge. The comment is that, yes, it’s true that America’s rich people pay most of America’s taxes, so one can reasonably argue that they’re just getting their own money back — which is a point I’ve made in past posts over the years regarding electric cars. However, to the extent the taxpaying working class has any of its taxes siphoned off to Tesla, I think that’s wrong.

Also, a significant percentage of America’s tax revenue comes from corporations (corporations other than Tesla, I guess). You know and I know, though, that corporations don’t hang on to the deficits occasioned by their tax obligations. Instead, they pass those costs on to consumers. So when Wal-Mart has a hefty tax bill, it raises the prices on its products by a few pennies here and a few pennies there. I can easily absorb those increases. Poor people cannot, making corporate taxes an extremely regressive form of taxation.

The other update I want to add to my Tesla post is that Zero Hedge points out that governments around the world are announcing that all cars within their jurisdictions must be electric within “X” number of years. Those laws will bring problems even an elementary school child should be able to predict:

Most people will never accept this. Would you accept waiting 30-45 minutes (absolute best-case scenario, if a “fast” charger is available) to put a partial charge back into your EV? Were you aware that at the high-voltage “fast” chargers, due to the nature of the thing (and for the sake of battery life) you cannot put more than 80 percent charge back into the thing?

So, whatever the advertised best-case range of the car is, subtract 20 percent.

That puts even the longest-ranged of them in the same class as the fiercest-guzzling IC-engined SUV. Maybe 200 miles or so. But the fierce-guzzling SUV can be refueled to 100 percent in 5 minutes.

Which would you prefer to take on a road trip? One where there might not be a “fast” charger available when you run out of juice. What then?

Then, you spend overnight wherever you happen to be.

Electric car freaks peddle a Disney-esque fantasy to counter this objection. They envision everyone plugging in at home, overnight – or at work, while they work. The problem with this idea is the ant-like uniformity of use it assumes. Everyone going to work – and back home – at pretty much the same time.

Exactly! You also need to factor in the fact that, if California goes all-electric, but neighboring states don’t, there’s no way California drivers can take their cars outside of California borders. The moment you get to Nevada or Oregon, your electric car becomes a huge problem.

I don’t have any changes to make or new ideas to add to my Cinderella/Princess dress post. However, With perfect timing, the conservative blogosphere has been lighting up about the fact that a leftist mommy took it upon herself to edit her almost-3-year-old daughter’s Disney book:

Danielle Lindemann thought that as a sociologist who studies gender roles she was pretty attuned to gender stereotypes, but having a daughter of her own “cranked that awareness up to a whole new level.” When she came across one of her daughter’s favorite Disney princess books, she decided to give it a bit of a feminist makeover to teach her nearly 3-year-old daughter some important lessons.

“The constant inundation with princess stuff drives me crazy,” Danielle, a professor of sociology at Lehigh University, told POPSUGAR Moms. “Because it’s basically teaching these little girls that their worth lies in looking nice and hooking up with the right guy. Still. In 2016.” When her daughter received the princess book as a gift, this feeling drove Danielle to add little comments onto each page to make it a bit more badass.

[snip]

“A princess is kind of a badass.”

 

“A princess is a dreamer: ‘It would be great to see more women in the Senate . . .'”

 

“A princess loves to see new things, like a federal standard for paid maternity leave.”

 

“A princess is brave: ‘My body, my choice.'”

 

“Jasmine flies through the sky. She holds onto Aladdin because he is scared.”

 

“A princess likes to dress up in her medical scrubs when she goes to work as a neurosurgeon.”

You know what? I bet that, when this gal’s little girl grows up, she is still going to want a Princess dress and, assuming she’s straight, will still hope one day to fall in love and get married to her own personal prince. With a Mom like that, though, it’s hard to imagine that little girl having a sense of humor.

The post Updates for my past posts about Disney princesses and Tesla appeared first on Bookworm Room.

My friend Lulu weighs in on the fact that the Marie Claire review of the Dunkirk movie suffers from fatal hetero-normative gender identity assumptions.

I must take issue with Mehera Bonner of Marie Claire and her review of the World War II film Dunkirk in which she states,

. . . my main issue with Dunkirk is that it’s so clearly designed for men to man-out over. And look, it’s not like I need every movie to have “strong female leads.” Wonder Woman can probably tide me over for at least a year, and I understand that this war was dominated by brave male soldiers. I get that. But the packaging of the film, the general vibe, and the tenor of the people applauding it just screams “men-only” — and specifically seems to cater to a certain type of very pretentious man who would love nothing more than to explain to me why I’m wrong about not liking it. . . .

Honestly, how dare she? As Bonner should well know, gender is determined by a personal identification based on an internal awareness. It is what we feel inside, what we know ourselves to be. Our external parts do not always conform. How could she not know that some of those soldiers had to have been non-binary. Some were undoubtedly queer or transgender on the inside. In fact, some of those soldiers were no doubt women — despite their penises.

I would advise Bonner to remember that when she assumes that the movie is men-only and caters to pretentious man-splaining men. How wrong she is. I did not see a toxically masculine film as she did. On the contrary, I envisioned brave transgender women soldiers fighting alongside male, hetero-normative, cis-gender soldiers and proving the historicity of the struggle against restrictive gender roles. Those were our brave sisters out there too and they deserve Bonner’s respect.

The post Dunkirk review in Marie Claire: Fatally flawed gender identity assumptions appeared first on Bookworm Room.

There’s a lot of unintentional humor in What Happened, as Hillary Clinton cluelessly reveals that she is a foolish, deceitful, entitled, nasty woman.

I’m still slogging my way through Hillary’s turgid tome, What Happened. The more one reads it, the more one realizes how accurate the joke in the post to the left: What Happened [by] Hillary Rodham Clinton really is a book that has both the question and answer on the front cover.

Hillary, working hard to sell herself, comes across as just an awful woman or, on second thought, an awful simulacrum of a woman. There’s no there there. Instead, there’s a narcissist defined by her core emptiness.

Two recent reviews perfectly sum up everything that’s wrong with the book. If you ignore the usual Trump-bashing that is required from all Progressives, you cannot do better than to read this review from the Huffington Post. It is vicious and entirely on point. Also, Kyle Smith’s review perfectly articulates my thoughts as I slog my way through the book.

Given the quality reviews already out there, this post is not going to be a book review (especially because I’ve only read 30% of the book so far). Instead, I’ll share with you those passages that I found hilarious (Hillary-ous?) although Hillary did not mean them to be so. I’ll also throw in a few ironies, some sarcasm, and the occasional moment when common sense runs into Hillary’s self-serving arguments.

To begin with there’s the endless name-dropping from someone who keeps insisting that she’s just an ordinary person, completely tuned in to the lives of ordinary people around her. Here’s a representative passage, describing her idea of some R&R during the campaign:

One beautiful summer evening, Jimmy and Jane Buffett hosted a concert for us at their home in the Hamptons on Long Island. I was the first presidential candidate Jimmy ever endorsed, and he wanted to do something special for me. So he, Jon Bon Jovi, and Paul McCartney played a set in a tent full of twinkly lights, and everyone danced on the lawn under the stars. It was magical. (Clinton, Hillary Rodham. What Happened (Kindle Locations 1379-1382), Simon & Schuster edition.)

I don’t know that I’ll ever feel the same again about Jimmy Buffett. I already lost interest in Paul McCartney because of his Bush bashing.

One of the points critics have made about both Hillary and her book is that she’s the ultimate “Progressive as micromanaging expert.” There really is no big political picture. There’s just Hillary’s “I know what’s best” attitude, one that sees her following every meeting with a “regular” person by announcing that she has a new policy initiative in her bag of tricks. For example, she took on bullying:

Many kids asked what I would do about bullying, which made me want to become President even more. I had an initiative called Better Than Bullying ready to go. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1387-1388).)

First of all, this is really not a presidential issue and a presidential candidate shouldn’t be wasting time on it. Second of all, the lack of self-awareness is hysterical. After all, this is the same First Lady described as a monster of abuse when it came to Vince Foster:

One of Hillary the Monster’s favorite targets was Vince Foster, according to Byrne, a member of the Secret Service who was stationed in the White House during the Clinton administration.

Foster was the lawyer who relocated to Washington from Arkansas after his childhood pal, Bill Clinton, was elected president.

“Word circulated that (Hillary Clinton) berated (Foster) mercilessly … I knew what it was like to be yelled at by superiors, but Mrs. Clinton never hesitated to launch a tirade,” wrote [Gary] Byrne.

Hillary also abused staff, including those who were defending her with their lives:

[Ronald] Kessler exposes Hillary as an epically abusive Arctic monster.

“When in public, Hillary smiles and acts graciously,” Kessler explains. “As soon as the cameras are gone, her angry personality, nastiness, and imperiousness become evident.”

He adds: “Hillary Clinton can make Richard Nixon look like Mahatma Gandhi.”

[snip]

Former agent Jeff Crane says, “Hillary would cuss at Secret Service drivers for going over bumps.” Another former member of her detail recollects, “Hillary never talked to us . . . Most all members of first families would talk to us and smile. She never did that.”

[snip]

One former Secret Service agent states, “If Hillary was walking down a hall, you were supposed to hide behind drapes used as partitions.”

Hillary one day ran into a White House electrician who was changing a light bulb in the upstairs family quarters. She screamed at him, because she had demanded that all repairs be performed while the Clintons were outside the Executive Mansion.
“She caught the guy on a ladder doing the light bulb,” says Franette McCulloch, who served at that time as assistant White House pastry chef. “He was a basket case.”

I can imagine that Hillary’s “Better Than Bullying” initiative had, as its first sentence, “Don’t be like me.”

At times, it’s staggering how disconnected Hillary is from reality. Take this sentence:

It’s the debate prep team’s job to put me through my paces so I’m not hearing anything for the first time during the actual debate. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1457-1458).)

Really? She can really write this even though we know that Donna Brazile leaked debate questions to Hillary so that she definitely would not be “hearing anything for the first time during the actual debate”? Hillary is either senile or an unregenerate liar — take your pick.

Hillary speaks disparagingly of Trump’s debate performance:

Winning, we realized, would mean hitting hard (since he couldn’t bear it), staying cool (since he often resorted to viciousness when cornered), throwing his own words back at him (since he couldn’t stand hearing them), and making my own arguments with clarity and precision (since he couldn’t do the same for himself). (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1494-1496).)

Later on, she says that sexism played into the matter too:

You’ve got to give it to Trump—he’s hateful, but it’s hard to look away from him. He uses his size to project power: he looms over the podium, gets in interviewers’ faces, glowers, threatens to punch people. I watched a video of one of our debates with the sound off and discovered that, between his theatrical arm waving and face making and his sheer size and aggressiveness, I watched him a lot more than I watched me. I’m guessing a lot of voters did the same thing. I also suspect that if a woman was as aggressive or melodramatic as he is, she’d be laughed or booed off the stage. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1881-1886).)

None of the above squares with an experiment showing that, when a man perfectly mimicked Hillary and a woman perfectly mimicked Trump during a debate, audiences still favored the female Trump character and disliked the male Hillary one. It’s not prep and it’s not gender and it’s not wandering around the stage. It’s that Hillary’s mannerisms and positions are inherently off-putting, whether they’re attached to a man or a woman.

Hillary really picks up steam when she gets to the “poor little female me, I lost because I’m a woman” shtick. To begin with, as noted above, Hillary’s offensive no matter her presented gender.

Moreover, Hillary’s defensive feminism is wearisome. Real women recognize two things: First, women have children and children affect our choices. For many, pregnancy itself can put a career on pause. Mostly, though, children aren’t that into feminism. They want Mommy and that reality, more than the father’s or the boss’s “male chauvinism,” will drive a woman’s career choices.

Second, while being a man comes with some built-in advantages (especially the peeing standing up part), being a man comes with some serious disadvantages too. Men die younger; men do the dirtier, more dangerous work; and men are still the ones sent into battle. Oh, and men can’t have multiple orgasms. Everything in life comes with trade-offs.

It’s true that, when Hillary was a little girl and a young women, there were genuine legal and societal barriers blocking women from taking certain jobs or engaging in certain activities. By then, thanks to the First Wave feminists, women had long had the vote, but it was the Second Wave feminists — Hillary’s generation — who got them equal pay for equal work, and equal opportunities for equal skills.

The Third Wave feminists, however, who are the ones Hillary both parrots and courts, are not so nice. They’re the shrill, man-hating women who destroy young men’s lives on college campuses, scream like pink-hatted harpies on America’s streets about the evil that is man, and have staked their flag on unfettered abortion. These are not nice people and they’re not reflecting the lives, concerns, and joys of most American women.

It’s in the above context that I found much to laugh at about Hillary’s claim that sexism jettisoned what would otherwise have been a cakewalk into the White House.

Please keep in mind Hillary’s relentless iteration during the campaign season that she was special because she was a woman. (Carly Fiorina, interestingly, was not special, but whatever….) We were told repeatedly that she would break glass ceilings, stun the world, and make an earth shattering noise because of her being female. And then Hillary writes this:

I didn’t want people to see me as the “woman candidate,” which I find limiting, but rather as the best candidate whose experience as a woman in a male-dominated culture made her sharper, tougher, and more competent. That’s a hard distinction to draw, and I wasn’t confident that I had the dexterity to pull it off. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1564-1566).)

For once, Hillary, you are correct: You totally lacked the dexterity to pull that one off. I never believed that being a woman in a man’s world made you sharper, tougher, or more confident. I always believed that you felt you were owed the Oval Office simply because of your gender — and that’s a tough one to sell considering that you were also on the side of the whole gender fluid team. If gender is fluid, who’s to say you’re really a deserving woman in the first place?

Oh, and there’s the fact that, just a few paragraphs after disavowing the whole woman thing, Hillary had this to say — and, as she herself confesses, she really had to say it:

This has to be said: sexism and misogyny played a role in the 2016 presidential election. Exhibit A is that the flagrantly sexist candidate won. A whole lot of people listened to the tape of him bragging about sexually assaulting women, shrugged, and said, “He still gets my vote.” (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1573-1575).)

Just for the record, that’s not what I, a woman, did or said at all. I still stand behind my belief that Trump said, correctly, that if you’re blindingly wealthy or famous, women will let you get away with things. Certainly Bill Trump is living proof of that. Trump never said “I did those things;” he just said “these things happen.”

Hillary also believes that her past haunts her, not because of anything she did, but because she’s a woman:

I know some of the distrust people feel toward me is because they’ve watched as I’ve been sucked into partisan investigations over the years—Whitewater, Travelgate, emails—each one carried out at significant taxpayer expense, each amounting to exactly nothing, but all of them leaving a mark on my reputation nearly impossible to erase. But I think there’s another explanation for the skepticism I’ve faced in public life. I think it’s partly because I’m a woman. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1672-1673).)

Hillary is always near the dead bodies, but she’s comforted by the fact that she’s never caught holding the knife or the gun. Others, however, are not so generous. They have to ask “What are the odds?”

Remember how Hillary said that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, although his ascent to the top of Mt. Everest occurred years after she was born? I thought of that historic illiteracy when I read this stunning paragraph:

In short, it’s not customary to have women lead or even to engage in the rough-and-tumble of politics. It’s not normal—not yet. So when it happens, it often doesn’t feel quite right. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1683-1684).)

Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Isabel Martínez de Perón, Lidia Gueiler Tejada, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Agatha Barbara, Corazon Aquino, Benazir Bhutto and all the other women who have held world leadership positions could not be reached for comment. In any event, none of them matter to Hillary. She’s the only woman who counts.

The last, funniest part of the book I’ve read so far (as I said, I’m about 30% of the way into it and that’s been a long slog) is the part in which Hillary talks about the fact that she’s the emotional heart of her marriage and her friendships. Maybe the following sentence is true, but it just made me laugh:

In my marriage, I’ve definitely been the one to perform the bulk of the emotional labor. (What Happened (Kindle Location 1858).)

The funniest thing, though, is Hillary’s description of what ties her long-standing friendship group together:

That labor extends to my friendships. In March 2017, a few of my close girlfriends came to New York for the weekend. A new friend joined us and asked, “How do you all know each other?” That led to my friends going around the table explaining in great detail how I have lovingly interfered in their lives over the years. “When I got sick, Hillary hounded me until I went to her doctor and called me immediately after for a full report.” “That’s nothing! When my little girl cut her face, Hillary insisted I get a plastic surgeon and then called back ten minutes later with the best one in Washington on the phone.” They knew me well. (What Happened (Kindle Locations 1864-1869).)

Distilled, the above paragraph says that these women have remained friends over the years because Hillary is such a wonderful human being. That’s the tie that binds.

If nothing else, Hillary’s endlessly self-serving lack of awareness goes a long way to explaining why she never connected with Americans. It’s not just that her policy proposals serve only Blue City denizens and people outside of America’s borders who desperately want to get in (some to work and some to be lilies of the field enjoying taxpayer jizya).

It’s also that she’s a really awful woman — a busy-body who assumes much, knows little, and constantly bustles around interfering and organizing in a way that aggrandizes herself and her cronies, while merely irritating and offending others. She’s a narcissistic black hole surrounded by arrogance and hubris.

The only thing I can say in Hillary’s defense is that she probably believes in her own honesty. As I’ve noted before, to a narcissist, the truth is always defined by the needs of the moment. When Hillary says something to fill a momentary need, no matter how false it actually it is, it still represents her truth.

Ultimately, What Happened establishes once and for all that Trump was right when he said of Hillary that she is a “nasty woman.” She is indeed a very nasty woman.

The post Mining “What Happened” for Hillary’s unintentionally humorous moments appeared first on Bookworm Room.

The Me Too meme on Facebook encourages a sense of victimhood in women, and is part of the way we deny biological reality and cultural anti-rape bulwarks.

If you’ve checked out Facebook in the last 24 hours, you’ve probably seen a lot of your female friends post two words: “Me too.” This is a shorthand version of a meme that started yesterday:

Me too.

If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too.’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.

Please copy/paste.

As you’ve surely noticed, the meme jumbles together harassment and assault, which are entirely different things. Assault is a criminal act. It involves any unwanted physical touches on the person, from the butt grabbing Ben Affleck apparently enjoys, to the pussy-grabbing that President Trump noted rich guys get away with (without ever saying he’d done it himself), to out-and-out rape. Harassment, on the other hand, doesn’t involve physical contact. It involves mental contact, with the man using words or touch-free motions to impose his power or sexual desires on an unwilling female.

Just about every woman I know who routinely appears on Facebook has put up a “Me too” post. I suspect, though, that few of them have actually been raped, something for which I am grateful. One of the virtues of life in America is that women aren’t raped often, even on college campuses.

In addition to rape, of course, there are other sexualized (not sexy) touches that men visit on unwilling women. I once had a guy twerk on me on a crowded bus, years before twerking was a thing. Technically, this was probably an assault, but I simply ignored it. In my mind, it wasn’t a “guys are animals, I’ve been assaulted” moment. Instead, I took it as a “there are way too many crazy people wandering around San Francisco” thing and got on with my life.

From what I gather reading my female friends’ posts and comments, many of the “Me too” women had that type of interaction — unwanted touches that were fleeting, offensive, and part of life in a world with men — and characterize it as an “assault.”

What most seem to have experienced, though, is some form of non-physical sexual harassment. That’s the kind of contact between men and women that is purely a head game — the man doesn’t lay hands on a woman, but he speaks or behaves in a way that’s purely sexual and can range from scary to offensive to (yes) funny, depending on how pathetic their genitals are when the raincoat opens to how genuinely funny their dirty, or slightly risque, jokes in the workplace are. (Yes, I will laugh at a clever, and not too dirty, dirty joke.)

Thus, the women I know have been writing about flashers and masturbators, whistlers and hustlers, dirty joke tellers and close talkers. In other words, these are men who, if they were behaving physically (masturbators and flashes) used to be called perverts, and if they were merely using words used to be (and in Hollywood still are) called “boss” or “that awful James in the film editing room.” I’m not excusing these men, but what they’re doing is not the same as physical assault. (Or, as Whoopie Goldberg so delicately put it when exonerating Roman Polansky, who had drugged a 13-year-old and sodomnized her, it’s not “rape-rape.”)

I’ve never actually experienced the above type of mental harassment. I can’t figure out if I’ve been so locked in my own head that it happened around me and I didn’t notice or if I simply give off vibes that tell the would-be pervert that, whatever he’s looking for, I’m not it.

Having read about Weinstein, having read my friends’ narratives, having paid attention to O’Reilly, and Cosby, and Trump, and Allen, and generally having lived a few years, I have come to a few conclusions about what’s going on. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Men are predatory. It’s their nature. They are hardwired to spread their seed. In broken cultures (i.e., the Muslim world and too much of Africa), they simply rape women — and by rape I mean the actual crime of using superior strength or weapons to fornicate with an unwilling woman.

In my home, I’ve tried to teach my daughter to be wary, without instilling in her any dislike or disrespect for men. Most, I say, readily control those lizard brain urges. But it’s her responsibility too to protect herself from those who haven’t subdued their lizard brain. If these men act, they may be criminally and morally guilty, but it’s her life that will be affected, so she should behave sensibly: Don’t wear overly provocative clothes, don’t get drunk, don’t hook-up with strangers. End of story.

[UPDATE: One other thing I meant to add earlier but forgot, is that men and women have very different responses to overt displays of sexuality. If a man flashes a woman, she’s usually disgusted and sometimes afraid. If a woman flashes a man, he’s titillated.  Men and women are wired differently. Men therefore need to be socialized to respect women’s wiring. Calling men names, as the Left likes to too and as the Pajama Boys do to virtue signal (and, apparently, to hide their own disgraceful conduct towards women) is not helpful.]

2. Culture matters when it comes to rape. The West has long tried to protect women from Whoopi’s “rape-rape.” In the Middle Ages, two narratives arose — chivalry and the cult of the Virgin — that elevated women’s status. That women were still raped is separate from the fact that cultural norms were changing in such a way as to protect women from assaults. The problem with these narratives was that they allowed men to determine which women were deserving of the narratives’ protective umbrellas.

So as centuries passed, the West added something else to the arsenal: It kept men and women separate. It didn’t go the full Muslim way of imprisoning women, either in their homes or in tent-like clothing. It simply insisted that women and men should never be left alone together unless married. This allowed women to engage in society, without being at the mercy of a man with bad intentions. It’s still a good rule today, for both men and women. Women can prevent being raped and men can prevent being wrongly accused of rape by staying out in the public when they’re with the opposite sex.

In addition to mechanical methods for separating men and women, the West did do what feminists keep demanding: It taught men not to rape. Rape is a criminal act in the West. If a woman is raped, it’s not her father or brother who kills her for bringing shame on the family. Instead, it’s society as a whole that punishes the rapist. That’s a strong message to men.

And you know what? That message — “do not rape” — still works well in the West. Despite a culture of hook-ups and Tinder and drunkenness and slut walks, all of which appeal to men’s predatory sexual instincts, rapes in America are statistically fairly low. In America, in 2010, the last year for which Wikipedia offers neatly organized statistics, only 27.3 out of every 100,000 women were raped. That was 27.3/100,000 rapes too many, but it was still lower than Sweden’s rate (63.5/100,000) or South Africa’s (132.4/100,000).

As of 2010, most European countries had fewer rapes than America. I rather wonder what those statistics look like now, two years after Angela Merkel’s immigration experiment. An article from a year and a half ago suggests that there have been big changes in Western Europe (and England) and none have been for the better. Those changes are a reminder, as if we need one, that Western culture worked well in the 20th century to protect women. When Western culture breaks down, women are less protected.

3. Feminists have encouraged rape. I know I’m going to catch hell for this one, but it’s true. As I point out above, when it comes to rape, culture matters.

But even culture can do only so much. There are still men who will rape. They’ll rape because, like Clinton and Weinstein, they can get away with it. They’ll rape because they’re too drunk or drugged out to listen to the voices in their heads telling them forced sex is a bad idea. They’ll rape because they’re narcissists or sociopaths or psychopaths, or whatever other type of garden-variety criminal is out there. They’ll rape because, even though they live in a Western culture, they have a non-Western view of women. They’ll rape because they’re insane.

There’s no way to protect against all of the above types of rapes. However, it is possible to protect against some of these rapes, the opportunistic ones, just as a homeowner, by locking the door, protects against opportunistic robbers.

Clothes: American women don’t need to wear burqas to prevent rape. They simply need to choose clothes that, in American culture, do not have prostitute connotations. (I don’t know how else to say that.) Any American looking at the two outfits below, each of which shows a woman’s legs, hips, waist, and cleavage, can tell immediately which, by American, not Saudi, standards, is selling sex and which isn’t:

There’s a difference between sleaze and elegance in our culture and feminism refuses to recognize it. Hence the Slut Walks that encourage women to dress like Miley Cyrus:

Photo credit: Studio5Graphics’ Slut Walk 2013. Creative commons license; some rights reserved.

Those clothes may feel empowering when parading down a city’s streets in the presence of other women wearing equally ugly sex costumes, but those clothes are not meant to stand up to the lizard brain that functions in a small percentage of men who enjoy coerced, violent sex.

This is not to say that a woman dressed in clothes that would work at a Soviet-era fashion show cannot be raped by men with evil intentions. It’s just to say that part of keeping safe is to highlight your beauty, not your f**kability.

Conduct: Feminists also encourage rape by insisting that women should be able to behave as men do: Getting drunk and/or engaging in impersonal sex with people they’ve only just met. Men can do that because they are not wired the way women are (fewer regrets about cheap sex) and because they are stronger than women are.

Life isn’t fair, and it’s not fair that women are generally weaker than men, handle liquor less well, and prefer an emotional connection to a merely physical one. Pretending otherwise simply places women in the path of men who are perverts, predators, and temporarily incapacitated, all of whom are likely to do bad things.

In other words, feminists have taken centuries of carefully established Western bulwarks against rape and just thrown them away.

4. The whole victim thing. I know this “me-tooism” is supposed to be empowering, but it strikes me as just another attempt for women to regain the victim status they’ve lost recently to transgenders, Muslims, and illegal immigrants.

I don’t like being a victim. That’s why, when that one guy twerked on me on a bus, I placed it all on him. I was neither assaulted nor harassed in my mind, because I’m not a victim. He was a perv. End of story.

I’ve also worked hard for decades not to be a victim. I’ve read books (I highly recommend this one), taken self-defense classes, and practiced martial arts.  When I go out on the street, I’m not the weakest gazelle; in my mind’s eye, I’m the biggest, strongest wildebeest and predators would do well to leave me alone — and, so far, they have.

All of which is to say I find the “me-tooism” of the “Me too” meme kind of disturbing. It doesn’t speak to me of power; it reeks to me of victimhood.

I’d rather see a Facebook meme going around saying, “Next time some pervert exposes himself to me, I’m going to grab his balls and twist until he’s a permanent soprano.” Or one saying, “If my boss ever suggests sexual favors in exchange for a raise, I’m going to leave the room and announce in a loud voice to everyone in the office that the boss just pulled a Weinstein.”

I’m sure you too can think of other empowering memes a lot better than “Me too. I’m a victim too.”

UPDATE: Here’s Reason 6 why I find it hard to get on board with feminists and their me-tooism — they’re all anti-gun. As Katie Pavlich reminds people, guns protect women:

*****

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