What Is Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret?

Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret Is Sex Crimes Against Children

notes Benny Huang.

Corey Feldman is ready to start naming names. The former child actor says that he is now willing to identify members of a Hollywood pedophilia ring that he claims victimized him more than thirty years ago.

In a recorded statement released on October 25th, Feldman announced plans to divulge specific details—though he wants to do it his way. He intends to make a documentary film about his life. He says he will hold nothing back including the names of men whom he alleges committed heinous sex crimes against children. In order to finance the project he has started a crowdfunding site through which he hopes to raise ten million dollars.

Some people’s reaction has been skeptical. Is this some kind of ploy to raise ten million bucks? Why can’t he seek out a reporter and tell his story for free? Those are very reasonable questions to which I would add my own—what will happen if he doesn’t get his ten million dollars? Will he allow the bad guys to get away?

I can’t answer any of these but I do believe that Corey Feldman is telling the truth. …
Until recently Corey Feldman had maintained that identifying perpetrators was not possible for legal reasons. If he were to name the kind of wealthy, influential Hollywood people he has hinted at he would likely find himself up against the best lawyers in the business and way over his head. Of course, truth is an absolute defense against slander though proving his accusations would be difficult so many years later.

But something has changed. Corey Feldman now appears to be ready for the kind of courtroom slugfest he had previously avoided.

 … To be sure, Feldman is waking a sleeping giant. Hollywood will fight back—through lawsuits, character assassination, and blacklisting. Feldman will learn new meaning to the words “You’ll never work in this town again.” So will anyone who takes his side.

The Historical Documentaries of Ken Burns and His Way of Forwarding the Narrative

In a New Yorker article on Ken Burns that is somewhat reminiscent of the mainstream media's love of "fake but accurate" truth, Ian Parker describes some of the the filmmaker's uses of more or less acceptable "tricks" (is that the correct word?) in order to forward — what else? — the narrative.

Several of the things that the lifelong Democrat says make sense — such as the tongue-in-cheek comment regarding the academy's having “done a terrific job in the last hundred years of murdering our history” — but some of us are not convinced that that an Obamaniac like him is the person to hold the solution to a tone of fairness and impartiality.

Elsewhere, the New Yorker's Ian Parker explains the narrative according to Ken Burns:

Even more than Peter Coyote, the actor who has become Burns’s usual narrator, Burns makes a script sound like a eulogy read by a depressive, with every sentence suggesting slight disappointment. (“He doesn’t like rising tones,” Coyote told me. “Occasionally I get away with it.” He added, “What I’m able to do is thread the listener through sentences with lots of subordinate clauses.”)

 … when the narration [of “The Vietnam War”] begins, its liturgical phrasing, and its reach for a negotiated settlement among viewers, will seem familiar.

 … After the success of “The Civil War,” some academic historians praised Burns, but others lamented his popular reach, and accused him of sappiness and nostalgia. In a collection of essays by historians about “The Civil War,” Leon Litwack noted how the last episode jumps ahead to the gatherings of Union and Confederate veterans, at Gettysburg, in 1913 and 1938: the effect is “to underscore and celebrate national reunification and the birth of the modern American nation, while ignoring the brutality, violence, and racial repression on which that reconciliation rested.” Eric Foner, similarly, wrote that “Burns privileges a merely national concern over the great human drama of emancipation.”

Burns, in a 1994 interview, said that the academy had “done a terrific job in the last hundred years of murdering our history.” He told me that criticism of his work was at times “gratuitous and petty,” or powered by jealousy.

Ian Parker lets Ken Burns take us through an example of a trick he uses:

When I saw Burns in Sunapee, he argued that fastidiousness about photographic authenticity would restrict his ability to tell stories of people cut off from cameras by poverty or geography. He then explained what, at Florentine Films, is known as Broyles’s Law. In the mid-eighties, Burns was working on a deft, entertaining documentary about Huey Long, the populist Louisiana politician. He asked two historians, William Leuchtenburg and Alan Brinkley, about a photograph he hoped to use, as a part of the account of Long’s assassination; it showed him protected by a phalanx of state troopers. Brinkley told him that the image might mislead; Long usually had plainclothes bodyguards. Burns felt thwarted.

Then Leuchtenburg spoke. He’d just watched a football game in which Frank Broyles, the former University of Arkansas coach, was a commentator. When the game paused to allow a hurt player to be examined, Broyles explained that coaches tend to gauge the seriousness of an injury by asking a player his name or the time of day; if he can’t answer correctly, it’s serious. As Burns recalled it, Broyles went on, “But, of course, if the player is important to the game, we tell him what his name is, we tell him what time it is, and we send him back in.” Broyles’s Law, then, is: “If it’s super-important, if it’s working, you tell him what his name is, and you send him back into the game.” The photograph of Long and the troopers stayed in the film.

Was this, perhaps, a terrible law? Burns laughed. “It’s a terrible law!” But, he went on, it didn’t let him off the hook, ethically. “This would be Werner Herzog’s ‘ecstatic truth’—‘I can do anything I want. I’ll pay the town drunk to crawl across the ice in the Russian village.’ ” 

He was referring to scenes in Herzog’s “Bells from the Deep,” which Herzog has been happy to describe, and defend, as stage-managed. “If he chooses to do that, that’s O.K. And then there are other people who’d rather do reënactments than have a photograph that’s vague.” Instead, Burns said, “We do enough research that we can pretty much convince ourselves—in the best sense of the word—that we’ve done the honorable job.”

I later spoke to Herzog, who is a friend of Burns’s. Talking of “The Vietnam War,” he said, “I binge-watched it. I would feel itching: ‘Let’s continue.’ ” When he was through, he called Burns. “I just said, ‘This is very big.’ ” The film had flaws, he told me, “but it doesn’t matter.” The project was at once sweeping and serious. Herzog said, “Let’s focus on the big boulder of rock that landed in the meadow and nobody knows how it materialized.”

Update: Justifying Betrayal of Vietnam Emerges as the Raison d’être Of Ken Burns’ Film on the War by Phillip Jennings in the New York Sun:

The arguments Mr. Burns presents are weak, biased, and insulting. The documentary is scripted to evoke sorrow and moral indignation over what was presented as American error, ineptness, and lack of moral purpose.

The narrative counterposes happy and earnest winners (the communists) with sad and angst-ridden losers (America and the South Vietnamese). It deemed only such perspectives worthy of inclusion. Mr. Burns fails to find even one American or South Vietnamese veteran who wholly supported the war, was proud to have appeared in arms, and sickened by the United States’ abandonment its freedom-seeking ally.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of us.

No doubt, too, there were North Vietnamese who are critical of the brutality of the communist conduct of the war, but Mr. Burns can’t find them either. We have no way of knowing whether the happy and earnest communist veterans who did appear in the documentary participated in the war crimes — the execution of thousands of civilians — in Hue or any of the countless acts of North Vietnamese-sponsored terrorism.

The Burns documentary accepts without question five pillars of the liberal view of the war: …

Read the whole thing™. Phillips ends with his own description of the Vietnam War:

Mr. Burns is wrong in every instance.

Nor is the war hard to understand. The French asked for our help to save their Indochina colony after their 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu. We refused. Ho Chi Minh erected a typical communist dictatorship. He was the kind of a nationalist who slaughters his own people and governs with force. So about a million North Vietnamese fled south to Free Vietnam before America became involved in the war. Yet never during the next bloody 20 years did anyone from South Vietnam flee to the north. Never. None.

The U.S. sent advisors. The communists received arms from China and Russia. The war escalated. We sent tens of thousands of combat troops, beginning with the Marines in 1965. The war dragged on, but the communists could not win a significant battle. The Chinese and Russian “uncles” began to tire of the cost and loss of face and pressured the North to open peace talks. Hanoi begged for and received a last ditch supply (enough to outfit multiple battalions of communist troops).

Convincing themselves that the southerners would rally to their side when they overwhelmed the cities and villages in South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese launched a suicidal attack on 100 towns. They were soundly defeated in every one of them in under a week, save Hue (the royal capital) where they held off the South Vietnamese and U.S. Marines long enough to slaughter thousands of the Hue citizens before being beaten back into the jungle. The Viet Cong, more or less the local boys and comprising most of the 50,000 communist troops lost in Tet, were decimated.
 
Management of the war changed after Tet. Although the American press decided we were losing and began lobbying the public to get out of the war, the military began a four-year pummeling of communist troops. Nixon, elected to stop the war, pulled American combat units out of South Vietnam and simultaneously unleashed U.S. air power, including bombing sanctuaries in Cambodia and the Hai Phong harbor in North Vietnam.

By the fall of 1972, the communists were depleted of morale and arms. Agreeing to a peace conference, they nevertheless tested Nixon by attacking South Vietnamese villages in contradiction of the peace process. Nixon responded with the Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam. Ridiculously referred to as a criminal act akin to the Holocaust and Hiroshima (it killed less than half the number of people killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11), the bombing of the north convinced the communists that they were helpless against the full strength of the American military.

A month later, in January 1973, the North Vietnamese signed the Paris Peace Treaty. At that time, South Vietnam enjoyed a democratically elected government. American combat forces were gone. American POWs were set free. America promised South Vietnam that we would come to its aid if North Vietnam violated the agreement. It looked a lot like victory.

However, the North Vietnamese had not one particle, not one gluon of an intention of adhering to the treaty. They staged increasingly strong attacks in South Vietnam and, while the United States did nothing, were re-armed by Moscow and attacked and overran South Vietnam. The American Congress, controlled by Nixon’s opponents in the Democratic Party, which had driven him from the White House, voted to renege on our treaty obligations and cut aid to our South Vietnamese allies.

They forfeited outright the peace for which almost 60,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese fought and died. They accepted no responsibility for the atrocities that followed.

It is the raison d’être of Mr. Burns’ film to justify the cowardly and morally bankrupt left that supported the communist invasion of South Vietnam and turned its back on the murder, imprisonment, and misery of our former allies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. One cannot be against the South Vietnamese without being for the communists who conquered and enslaved 17 million people. Only by painting the war as immoral, illegal, and un-winnable, and the South Vietnamese government as evil and inept, can the American left hope to rest in peace. It shouldn’t bet the farm on that.

Weinstein Scandal: longing "for the ultimate male/female Safe Space — a space where every male is neutered"

Social-media campaigns often get my back up,

writes Ella Whelan over at Spiked Online,

especially those designed to ‘raise awareness’. And the #MeToo hashtag in response to the Harvey Weinstein scandal is no exception.

 … As with all social-media trends, it’s hard to know what is true and what is exaggeration. #MeToo is particularly tricky to judge. Some have tweeted about actual experiences, ranging from being whistled at to being sexually assaulted. Others have simply said ‘me too’, leaving the rest to the imagination. Some have argued that they don’t need to say what happened to them, and insist that asking women to prove they were harassed is a kind of victim-blaming. One journalist tweeted: ‘Reminder that if a woman didn’t post #MeToo, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t sexually assaulted or harassed. Survivors don’t owe you their story.’

Last week on spiked, Brendan O'Neill argued that the hysteria surrounding the Weinstein scandal was like something out of The Crucible [see excerpt below]. The past few days has borne this out. This is now a witch hunt by social media. Every celebrity and public figure, no matter how low down the pecking order, has felt it necessary to come out and denounce Weinstein and declare that the ‘survivors’ are brave, pioneering and strong.

 … It’s hard not to wince at the morbid excitement among some feminists, who feel they finally have a hate figure through which they can cast judgements on the rest of society. Weinstein was a sexual predator, they argue, and this proves all men are probably predators.

 … And who are these men? What have they allegedly done? Many of the allegations being made by the #MeToo brigade have nothing to do with sexual harassment. Calling someone ‘hot’ or ‘babes’, wolf whistling or shouting ‘show us your knickers’ at a passing woman… that isn’t sexual harassment; it’s immature behaviour. Should women have to put up with idiots with bad manners? Of course not. But should we be labelling such behaviour sexual harassment? Are all rude men sexual predators like Weinstein? No.

It’s time we clarified what sexual harassment really means. It’s not just the occasional offhand comment or unpleasant exchange. By labelling everything from shouts on the street to glances at the bar as sexual harassment, we denigrate the term. The panic about harassment and women’s safety is spinning out of control. Listening to some feminists, you’d be forgiven for thinking women are in danger every time they step into the street. And that we need more regulation and more law to protect women and control men. Cat-calling is now a hate crime in Nottinghamshire. Calling on the state to protect women from men smacks of a Victorian, patronising illiberalism.

In that perspective, Insta-Wife Helen Smith asks a pertinent question: 

Is the Weinstein scandal just an excuse to try and further the anti-male political agenda?

The author of The Kinder, Gentler Military (How Political Correctness Affects Our Ability to Win Wars), Stephanie "Legs" Gutman, chimes in:

Here’s the problem with #MeToo-ism and the chortling over Weinstein (even if he was a big Hillary donor, etc, etc): they have become an excuse for a feeding frenzy. The mantle of victimhood is too tempting to pass up, so accusation and grievance is spreading.

 … It’s all getting balled up together: the subjective and the conflicted with the clear-cut and very serious. And as the show rolls on, other victims are empowered, as they say, to come forward.

 … We all know how this movie ends. The frenzy of accusation and airing of grievance will roll down the proverbial mountain like the proverbial snowball, collecting more people, more hazy definitions and more anecdotes in its wake. What the snowball will crush – what to a large extent it has already crushed – is normal, relaxed, even… can I say it?... flirtatious interactions between men and women. 

 … Sexual-harassment allegations can make you rich.

Women are better protected now from the real, nasty kinds of sexual harassment – the kind we see in the Weinstein case, where someone who has financial power over another demands a quid pro quo – but a lot has been lost.

 … There’s been a lot of speculation about why the Harvey Weinstein charges – which are decades old – are being unearthed now. Perhaps the people who long for the ultimate male/female Safe Space – presumably a space where every male is neutered – are responding, if only unconsciously, to DeVos. Certainly the #MeToo people, who’ve chosen to take a story about one man and make it a story about all men, are.

Across the media and Twittersphere, on TV talk shows and in newspaper gossip circles, the allegations against Weinstein are treated as truths

writes Brendan O'Neill pointedly.

Almost as final judgements. He’s guilty as sin – that’s how you feel, right? Admit it. It’s how I feel. I’m just not sure I should.

That Weinstein denies the allegations is treated as immaterial, as if the right of individuals to deny accusations against them, and to be presumed innocent of those accusations until found guilty of them, were insignificant. As if this right were not the building block of justice and the thing that separates our fair societies from the finger-pointing hysteria of pre-modern or tyrannical regimes.

 … Here are some things about the Weinstein scandal that I think should be causing more concern.

Trial by media

Everyone loses out when the media act as judge, jury and executioner. Even when it’s respectable outlets like the New York Times and the New Yorker, which have been at the forefront of reporting the Weinstein allegations, playing the moralistic role tabloids normally adopt in relation to accused famous people.

 … Media trials are wrong. If you have been assaulted or raped by a man, go to court, please. We want these men off our streets. Trial by media both sensationalises and diminishes allegations. It sensationalises them by packaging them up in as titillating a way as possible, for sales and retweets. And it diminishes them by treating even something as dreadful as an allegation of rape as a thing Ronan Farrow should write longreads about rather than something a judge and jury, on behalf of us, the citizenry, should rule on and potentially punish.

 … If Weinstein did not rape women, then what’s happening to him right now is ugly. But if he did, then it isn’t ugly enough. Alleged rapists should be in court, under the judgement of society itself.

Guilt by association

One of the most disturbing things in the Weinstein scandal is the media and moral pressure being heaped on anyone who ever met him to denounce him now. Loudly and publicly. Actors and actresses are being strong-armed to say how disgusted they are with Weinstein. Tough luck if they believe in the process of justice and would prefer to withhold their own personal feelings until that has been served. That isn’t an option now.

Woe betide any Weinstein associate or contact who doesn’t now point a finger and say, ‘I CONDEMN’. The Guardian went so far as to publish a list of 28 Hollywood names who had failed to respond to its insistence that they slam Weinstein. It’s like a new blacklist. All these people were subsequently ridiculed online. Denounced as rape apologists, enablers of evil, corrupted by their own silence. There’s a pre-modern feel to it. ‘Denounce the devil or we will presume you are in concert with the devil.’ Last night’s Newsnight on the BBC was trailed with this line: ‘Tonight, Jez Butterworth publicly denounces Harvey Weinstein.’ Roll up, roll up. Butterworth will now escape censure. He has saved himself.

This media naming and shaming of people who have merely worked with Weinstein is the thing that most makes this seem like something more than the exposure of one man’s alleged behaviour; which makes it feel more like an act of intolerance, almost of hysteria.

The silencing of disagreement

That possible hysteria can also be glimpsed in the fury visited upon anyone who questions whether Weinstein is evil, or even guilty of everything that has been alleged. When fashion designer Donna Karan rather foolishly asked if some women invite male advances – overlooking that it’s abuse, not advances, that is being alleged – she was turned instantly into a global pariah. Her reputation is destroyed, we’re told. People are boycotting her clothes. Her business will be ‘throttled’, experts say. Some people are posting photos of themselves destroying her garments. ‘BURN IT’, say tweeters of her clothing. She’s a ‘disgusting human being’ and we should ‘burn her clothes’, online commenters cry. What is this? Burn the witch’s wares?

 …That this isn’t an open, level-headed search for justice and instead has become something darker and weirder is clear in these clampdowns on anyone who speaks out of turn. …

The search for moral cleansing

‘Cleanse yourselves’, said actress Rose McGowan on Twitter.

McGowan was paid by Weinstein after an ‘episode in a hotel room’ in 1997. She was telling ‘dirty’ Hollywood to cleanse itself. This is a dominant theme in the commentary on Weinstein: malevolence is widespread, hidden everywhere, and it must be exorcised. ‘We all know a Weinstein’, columnists say. Do we? This is what the Weinstein scandal has become, or threatens to become. A national cleansing; an American cleansing. The use of alleged crimes to search for evil, and expel evil, and make ourselves Pure and Good once more. Again, not unlike Salem.

Related: "Is Harvey Weinstein a monster?", can you learn "to distinguish between real abuse and an unwanted come-on?", and other pointed questions from our victim-worshipping world

• Weinstein Scandal: Isn't the real problem the 1960s sexual revolution, which has lead to leftists spending much of their time scolding us about our sexism, racism, and retrograde morality?

Weinstein Scandal: Isn't the real problem the 1960s sexual revolution, which has lead to leftists spending much of their time scolding us about our sexism, racism, and retrograde morality?

I don't agree with everything in James Kirchick's Daily Beast article, but he starts out with this paragraph:

Weinstein is just the latest in a long line of men whose left-wing politics coexisted harmoniously with retrograde attitudes about women. In his statement, Weinstein said that he “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different.” Many people scoffed at this explanation, as this was precisely the time when women’s liberation brought workplace sexism to the societal forefront. But Weinstein was right in a way he didn’t comprehend. Ever since second-wave feminism became part of the political left, there have been men who, ostensibly enlightened in the realm of gender relations, are in fact deeply misogynist and believe that their progressive street cred somehow obviates their attitudes about women, attitudes as regressive as those held by the Mad Men-era males who ruled the earth just before the sexual revolution.

More to the point, Jon Gabriel writes about the gall Hollywood has to wag its finger (thanks to Instapundit):

America knows that the same culture that enabled Weinstein spends much of its time scolding us about our sexism, racism and retrograde morality.

George Clooney lectured the nation at the 2006 Oscars, saying Hollywood’s “out-of-touch” elites were “the ones who talked about AIDS when it was just being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular.”

Clooney credits Jabba the Weinstein with his big breaks into acting and directing.

At the 2003 ceremonies, Michael Moore thundered "Shame on you, Mr. Bush!" Weinstein has produced several of Moore’s deceptive documentaries, including his upcoming Trump-thrashing screed slated for 2018.

Perennial awards favorite Meryl Streep scolded Trump voters for sexism in her 2017 Golden Globe speech.

"This instinct to humiliate, when it's modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody's life, because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing,” she said. “Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose."

This is the same Streep who used her 2012 Globe speech to thank “God – Harvey Weinstein,” praise be unto him.

 … Americans … expect Hollywood elites to be hypocrites, whether it’s Leonardo DiCaprio flying 8,000 miles in a private jet to pick up an environmental award, or Alec Baldwin attacking Wall Street while working as a pitchman for Capital One.

They also expect Washington elites to be hypocrites. Democrats preach feminism while lionizing abusers like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, and denounce capitalism while nominating ultra-rich candidates like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

As Glenn Ryenolds remarks in USA Today,

For people who keep telling us how fearlessly truthful they are, they sure have a lot of ugly “open secrets.”

What does this tell us about the liberal world? asks The Guardian's Thomas Frank.

Today … Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie producer … is in the headlines for an astonishing array of alleged sexual harassment and assaults, but once upon a time he was renowned for something quite different: his generous patronage of liberal politicians and progressive causes.

This leading impresario of awful was an enthusiastic supporter of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He was a strong critic of racism, sexism and censorship. He hosted sumptuous parties to raise money for the fight against Aids.

In 2004 he was a prominent supporter of a women’s group called “Mothers Opposing Bush”. And in the aftermath of the terrorist attack against the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, he stood up boldly for freedom of the press. Taking to the pages of Variety, Weinstein announced that “No one can ever defeat the ability of great artists to show us our world.”

To call this man a hypocrite is to state the obvious. This champion of women is now accused of sexual harassment on an epic scale. This defender of the press was excellent at manipulating it and on one memorable occasion is said to have physically roughed up a reporter asking tough questions.

  … What explains Weinstein’s identification with progressive causes? Perhaps it was all about cozying up to power, the thrill of being a friend of Bill Clinton.

Perhaps it was all about moral absolution, in the same way that lists of corporations-that-care always turn out to be led by outfits like Walmart, Goldman Sachs and Exxon-Mobil. In the world of the wealthy, liberalism is something you do to offset your rapacious behavior in other spheres. It’s no coincidence that, in Weinstein’s desperate first response to the accusations against him, he thought to promise war against the National Rifle Association and to support scholarships for women.

But it’s also something deeper than that. Most people on the left think of themselves as resisters of authority, but for certain of their leaders, modern-day liberalism is a way of rationalizing and exercising class power. Specifically, the power of what some like to call the “creative class”, by which they mean well-heeled executives in industries like Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Worshiping these very special people is the doctrine that has allowed Democrats to pull even with Republicans in fundraising and that has buoyed the party’s fortunes in every wealthy suburb in America.

That this strain of liberalism also attracts hypocrites like Harvey Weinstein, with his superlative fundraising powers and his reverence for “great artists”, should probably not surprise us. Remember, too, that Weinstein is the man who once wrote an essay demanding leniency for Roman Polanski, partially on the grounds that he too was a “great artist”.

Harvey Weinstein seemed to fit right in. This is a form of liberalism that routinely blends self-righteousness with upper-class entitlement. That makes its great pronouncements from Martha’s Vineyard and the Hamptons. That routinely understands the relationship between the common people and showbiz celebrities to be one of trust and intimacy.

Countless people who should have known better are proclaiming their surprise at Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuses. But in truth, their blindness is even more sweeping than that. They are lost these days in a hall of moral mirrors, weeping tears of admiration for their own virtue and good taste.

Robert Tracinski drives the point home (spasibo to Instapundit):

If you’ve ever wondered where the left gets this idea that America is some kind of hellscape of misogyny and sexual predation by wealthy and privileged men—well, now you know. They were describing the culture of some of their own institutions.

 … [Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi  and far-left, pro-Communist journalist Sam Kriss] got away with their behavior for as long as they did because they had a reputation of fighting viciously for the cause [other journalist heroes include those at NBC, The New Republic, Mother Jones, etc, etc, etc, not to mention Harvey Weinstein's decision to fight the NRA…], particularly when it required someone who was willing to rejecting normal standards of respectability and civility.

What made them so many fans was precisely their viciousness, their willingness to berate and insult, because surely their political enemies are such horribly evil people that they don’t deserve the protection of civilized norms. Kriss was even part of a movement called the Dirtbag Left:

“a term coined…to refer to a style of left-wing politics that eschews civility-for-its-own-sake in favor of subversive, populist vulgarity.”

In other words, these writers were lionized and promoted precisely because of the characteristics that marked them out as predators. It’s hardly a new phenomenon and has even been immortalized on film. These guys are all the hippie boyfriend in “Forrest Gump,” who can’t help smacking around his girlfriend because “it’s just this war, and that lying SOB Johnson.”

 … The … result, as with previous sex scandals, will be a long-term loss of authority when it comes to lecturing the rest of us from a pretended position of moral superiority.

It turns out that Jeffrey Lord has figured out what the real issue is (thanks to Ed Driscoll):

Question. Where did Harvey ever get the idea he could do these things and it was no big deal?

Answer: From a ’60s culture of a sexual revolution that produced exactly the same behavior in fellow Boomer Bill Clinton. Recall in 1999 that by then Bill Clinton had been accused of rape by Juanita Broaddrick, indecent exposure by Paula Jones and groping — in the room adjacent to the Oval Office — by Kathleen Willey. And, of course, he had been investigated by Independent Counsel Ken Starr in the Monica Lewinsky matter, she a White House intern of the ripe old age of 22. The last was detailed in the Independent Counsel’s official report to the House of Representatives, known as “The Starr Report.” It was, to say the least, graphic in terms of what it described of Clinton’s behavior.

With that as background, recall now the incensed response from Democrats and liberals raised in that Baby Boomer sexual revolution culture. They were furious, insisting that this was “only about sex.” Meaning, no big deal.

Exhibit Two: The New York Times

 … [A clip from Michael Moore’s show The Awful Truth, aka Exhibit One] is a vivid expression of just how the ’60s culture out of which Baby Boomers emerged disdained their parents’ sexual mores as a joke, the culture of Puritans and prudes. As if to prove the point, turn no further than a review of Moore’s show in the New York Times. The review says as follows:

Nothing on “The Awful Truth” has been quite as funny or satisfying as a segment from the first episode, in which people dressed as Puritans chase after Ken Starr’s car, waving copies of the Starr Report and howling like extras in “The Crucible.”

Got that? The New York Times — even as Bill Clinton was awash in allegations of rape, groping, pants dropping, and an affair with an employee his daughter’s age — finds Moore’s take labeling Clinton critics as Puritans and prudes “funny” and “satisfying.”

No wonder Harvey Weinstein — a friend of both Bill Clinton and Michael Moore — thought he had carte blanche to do what he has been doing. …

Exhibit Three: The 2003 Oscars

 … Harvey Weinstein deserves all that’s coming. But the interesting question here is what about the 1960s sexual revolution itself that launched, in fairness to Harvey, all manner of Baby Boomers into a sexual culture where everything and anything goes? A sexual culture that was glorified countless times in Hollywood films, sending the repeated message that not only does everything and anything go but that anything and everything are OK.

Liberals — frantic now at the sudden self-undermining of a sexual culture they have spent decades championing, cheering, literally applauding not to mention protecting when they weren’t mocking those who objected — are trying to point accusing fingers at, but of course, President Trump.

Newsflash? Like millions of his fellow Boomers the young Donald Trump grew up swimming in the same culture as the rest of us. And the worst liberals can point to is locker room talk on a bus in a private conversation and what they once liked to call in the Clinton cases “she said-he said” situations, all of which he has not only denied but threatened lawsuits to settle.

The real problem here? It isn’t Harvey or anybody else — it’s the 1960’s sexual revolution and the sexual culture it produced that is so vividly illustrated in those clips from Michael Moore’s mocking of Ken Starr, the loving New York Times review of that episode, and all those cheering Hollywood stars standing to give a rousing round of applause to a child rapist. Not to mention those countless films that glorified all kinds of sexual revolution practices.

Maybe at long last aging Baby Boomers will take some time to reflect on what their — my — generation has wrought. And begin to ask whether what began all those decades ago with the sexual revolution of the 1960s is now taking its long overdue curtain call courtesy of Hollywood’s ultimate Boomer showman — Harvey Weinstein.

Related: Weinstein Scandal: longing "for the ultimate male/female Safe Space — a space where every male is neutered"

What is called human psychology could more properly be called the psychology of American college undergraduates

In a UPI report by Brooks Hays, we learn that Men and women are biologically programmed to be drawn to the arched back of a female, new research suggests (obrigado para Instapundit).

This leads three readers to deadpan the following:

Andy Rem

Thank you science for telling us another factoid that we have long known. 

Good posture has always radiated class, health, strength, and self-confidence.

Mothers have always admonished their children to stand up straight.

Proper posture has long been taught to young ladies of proper breeding.

The military has been requiring its members to stand straight forever.

Michael W. Perry · 

Works at Inkling Books

Quote: "... were presented to 82 undergraduate students -- a mix of men and women."

How typical of today's social science research. It's almost invariably done with college undergrads because they come cheap. If medical research were done that way, everyone would yell "foul." What's the difference here? Do college undergrads represent all of humanity? I doubt it.

Bruce F Webster · 

Principal/Founder at Bruce F. Webster & Associates LLC

Long-standing issue. My older sister, in college half a century ago, said, her psych professor was dismissive of most psychological studies back then, stating that "What is called human psychology could more properly be called the psychology of American college undergraduates."

It seems axiomatic to leftists that it’s hard being “gay” in the South (it’s not) but it never occurs to them that it might be harder being an Evangelical Christian in Manhattan

The online newspaper HuffPost will wrap up its Listen to America Tour on October 30

notes Benny Huang.

The project’s website strongly hinted that the six-week bus journey through places most HuffPost contributors would never have otherwise visited was intended to bridge the gap between red state Americans and the media. It has failed miserably.

In this regard HuffPost reminds me of a junkie who claims to have gotten sober merely to win back his family’s trust. In reality the junkie is still sneaking around and getting high behind the woodshed when he thinks no one’s looking. HuffPost never, ever changes. Ever.

The Listen to America Tour did not listen to America. It lectured to America—about our bigotry, our xenophobia, our “Islamophobia,” and most of all about our “homophobia.” It rolled from city to city writing about issues that HuffPost editors care about rather than trying to hear locals’ concerns. The series was tone deaf and condescending.

HuffPost compounded its false advertising when it broke its promise to explore what unites us as a country. Even before one mile had registered on the bus’s odometer, editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen wrote: “But at HuffPost, we believe there’s still so much that unites us as citizens. We aim to discover and highlight all that, and show what Americans have in common.”

What exactly “unites us as citizens”? These days everything is a political controversy from natural disasters to the NFL to the president’s phone call to a fallen soldier’s widow. Finding common ground is difficult but HuffPost hasn’t even tried. Most of its feature stories have been about hot button issues that divide us: North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law, illegal immigration, and homosexuals, homosexuals, homosexuals.

And I predicted all of this. Back in July I penned a piece called “HuffPost Wants to Meet Middle America. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” In it, I expressed my hopefulness that this media titan would make some needed reforms while also voicing my doubts that it could.

I predicted, for example, that the tour would churn out plenty of what I call “It’s hard being X in Y” stories. Hack journalists love these. They seek out members of what they consider to be “marginalized groups” and create spectacles out of their supposed daily struggles. Favorite “marginalized groups” include illegal aliens, blacks, atheists, Muslims, and above all homosexuals.

These stories are problematic for a number of reasons. First, they rely almost entirely on self-reported anecdotes—e.g. “I got pulled over for driving while black! Waaaah!” Second, reporters seem to have strange notions of who exactly is marginalized in our society. It seems axiomatic to them that it’s hard being “gay” in the South (it’s not) but it never occurs to them that it might be harder being an evangelical Christian in Manhattan. Third, the stories rely almost entirely upon people’s feelings, as if emotions are newsworthy.

This just in! A ‘gay’ kid in Kansas feels bad! Full story at eleven.

Finally, these stories seem designed not to listen to what people are saying in a particular location. They seek out minority groups—the smaller the better—to discuss an issue that is important only to them. Here’s one from Provo, Utah. It’s the obligatory “It’s hard being ‘gay’ in Utah” story which I predicted back in July.

“Located in Provo, Utah, a community where about 90 percent of its residents affiliate with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Encircle: LGBTQ Family and Youth Resource Center opened its doors to the public earlier this year. Motivated by the high youth suicide rate in Utah (one of the highest in the nation) and coupled with the alienation from family or faith communities that too many LGBTQ youth and adults experience, the nonprofit organization’s founder, Stephenie Larsen, decided to build the resource center to save lives and to create community.”

Yeah, puke.

If the reporter was trying to find the pulse of this community she failed. Besides the vitriolic anti-LDS bias, there’s also the fact that this story uses as its starting point the fact that homosexuals’ many, many mental problems don’t resonate with most people in conservative Utah. “LGBTQXYZ” issues aren’t exactly water cooler talk in Provo. So what do people talk about? Heck if I know! I’ve never been there. But if they’re like most people it’s probably jobs and the economy. Very few people in Provo fret over “gay””rights” and if they do they are likely on the other side of the issue.

HuffPost did not visit Provo to hear about issues that the locals care about and to give them a fair hearing. It went to Provo to smear its residents as bigots. It needed a local to give its pre-conceived story some cover and alas, it found one.

The formulaic “hard being X in Y” stories seem to make up a substantial part of the tour’s output. The tour bus stopped in Dearborn to host a panel discussion about the difficulties facing Arab- and Muslim-Americans sixteen years after 9/11.  To hear them tell it, you’d think a bunch of white Christians crashed airplanes into Mecca. It was another trite “Muslims fear backlash” story.

HuffPost likes these so much that it served up a double. Here’s one about two teenaged Muslim girls “navigating girlhood and Islamophobia in their America.” There really is no news here. The reporter simply asked a girl in Missouri and another in Minnesota to kvetch publicly about their daily trials and tribulations which they were more than happy to do.

Look at me! I’m a victim!

The catalyst for this piece was the murder of another Muslim girl, unknown to either of the subjects, in suburban Washington, DC. The victim, Nabra Hassenen, was abducted and killed while walking home from her mosque. For a few days the media loved this story because they assumed without evidence that the girl had been killed for being a Muslim. Other types of people can be murdered for all sorts of reasons but pretty young Muslim girls are apparently only ever killed for their religion.

But then the alleged perp was found and it turned out to be Darwin A. Martinez Torres, an illegal alien from El Salvador. Oops! That wasn’t supposed to happen. It was likely a case of road rage. Once the leading suspect was determined not to be a white male in a MAGA hat the story faded from view.

The “Navigating Girlhood and Islamophobia” piece was a big, juicy nothingburger derived from Fake News. There was nothing in it to indicate that an illegal alien had committed the murder. The two Muslim girls seemed convinced that Hassenen had been killed because of her hijab and the HuffPost reporter did nothing to dispel that myth.

It’s easy to see why. Not only did this inconvenient truth not fit the narrative, it actually supported another narrative that no right-thinking liberal would touch with a ten-foot pole: that there seems to be a lot of violent crime in this country committed by people who are here illegally.

 … HuffPost’s Listen to America tour was an exercise in futility. No one at that publication was at all interested in meeting and engaging with people from flyover country. They were interested in pushing their agenda which remains the same whether they’re back home in their offices or on the road.

File this project under “Epic Fail.”

When you criticize the alt-left, it’s hate speech; When they criticize you, it’s speaking truth to power

Suddenly the alt-left is very concerned about the First Amendment rights of people

writes Howie Carr in the Boston Herald

– some people, anyway.

Specifically, George Soros et al. care about those useful idiots in shoulder pads whom they want to use in their unending attempts to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election.

As for the First Amendment rights to free speech of everyone who isn’t a card-carrying fellow traveler – what rights do those deplorables have?

What about the Christian bakers in Oregon who were sued out of business for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding? Or the clerk in Kentucky (a Democrat by the way) who refused to marry a gay couple?

Don’t they have the same First Amendment rights as the Beautiful People?

Haven’t we been told by innumerable squirrelly adjunct professors of womyn’s (CQ) studies that conservatives need not apply to speak on college campuses because “free speech” does not apply to “hate speech?” Think Middlebury, UC Berkeley, Evergreen State, Oberlin and so forth.

 … The Democrat operatives posing as journalists on CNN-MSNBC-ABC-CBS etc. are shocked, shocked that Trump would insert himself in NFL politics. But when Obama demanded that the Redskins change their name, he was a Profile in Courage. They wanted to give Barry another Nobel Peace Prize.

Which just goes to prove that being a billionaire doesn’t necessarily protect you from a left-wing anti-free-speech crusade – or should I say jihad. Just ask ‘Skins owner Dan Snyder.

You know how it works. When you criticize the alt-left, it’s hate speech. When they criticize you, it’s speaking truth to power.

“Divisive” – any statement the alt-left disagrees with.

“Dogwhistle” – any word they don’t like but don’t want to specifically call “racist,” I mean, “white supremacist,” their new term for the r-word.

How about YouTube demonetizing videos from conservative bloggers, and social media sites like Facebook and Google suppressing posts from right-wing users.

 … I could go on… and on… and on. So could Donald Trump. And he will, you know.

The 2016 Election: “And if the world’s experts had taken the time to read the great American novels instead of their polls?”

In the New Yorker, Lauren Collins reports on America,

a new [French] magazine that, since launching in the spring, has sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in France.

The magazine’s tagline is “America like you’ve never read it.” A trimonthly that will be published until the fall of 2020, America was conceived to help French readers make sense of its namesake in the age of Trump. The editorial mix comprises long interviews with American novelists (Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, James Ellroy); essays and excerpts in translation (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black”); and original reported pieces by famous French writers set loose among the Republicans of the Rust Belt or the bears of Yellowstone Park (“Mon point de départ est Denver, dans le Colorado”). “We’re trying to say to French readers that America is a more complex country than we thought,” François Busnel, the editor-in-chief, said the other day. “There are fantastic parts, there are nightmares, but let’s try to understand.”

When Trump was elected, Busnel realized that many of the American writers of his acquaintance had foreseen what the political experts had missed. “Everybody was saying, ‘Hillary’s going to win,’ but when I read John Irving, Donald Ray Pollock, Russell Banks, Jim Harrison, they told me the opposite: of an America that’s a little disenchanted, a little forsaken; that, since September 11th, doesn’t know anymore where it lives.” The weirder and faker the news got, the more American literature seemed the most credible vector of truth. “We’re living in a profoundly novelistic era,” Busnel said. “America’s a country that was capable of electing George W. Bush two times in a row, and then electing two times in a row his exact opposite, Barack Obama. How can you explain that?”

The magazine’s view of America is both slightly anachronistic (lots of hoboes and road trips) and exceptionally well informed. The first issue offered a sort of CliffsNotes on books that the editors deemed prescient: Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” Bret Easton Ellis’s “American Psycho,” and “The Plot Against America,” by Philip Roth. “And if the world’s experts had taken the time to read the great American novels instead of their polls?” the headline read. “They would have discovered a country haunted by a tendency toward authoritarianism, the spectre of Fascism, the growing shadow of a blond-maned billionaire.”

Needless to say, Lauren Collins's New Yorker article is replete with contempt for her fellow Americans — both as uncouth bumpkins and (as can be seen in the previous sentence) as (neo?) Fascists — while she is enraptured on the wisdom, the tolerance, and the enlightenment of the high-brow Parisians. One typical example:

The magazine is a side project for Busnel, who is well known in France as the host of “La Grande Librairie,” a prime-time television program devoted to the celebration of literature. (Americans might need a special periodical to get their heads around that.)

 
At the end, Lauren Collins asks the people linked to the magazine — conveniently gathered at a costume party on the terrace of a restaurant dressed as cowboys, Native Americans, Uncle Sams, and federal agents (no aggressions, micro- or other, when it's white Americans being mocked or stereotyped) — what their favorite book about America was.

 … Busnel’s favorite book about America is “Travels with Charley,” by John Steinbeck. He was hoping that America, taken in its entirety, would assist not only today’s French people but also future generations in making sense of a tumultuous moment. “I’m interested in how novelists can tell history again,” he said. “If you want to understand France during the last war, I would suggest to read André Malraux or Camus. That’s what we would like to do. The sixteen issues are going to be a map of America, but also a memoir of its time.” 

The problem with novelists — as with Hollywood films and the people behind them (and I write this as a writer of novels, graphic and other, as well as a participant in a number of motion pictures) — or one of the problems, anyway, is that they just about all of 'em are leftists and they just about all of 'em are drama queens.

Says Steven Pressfield (one of my favorite writers):

Art is artifice.

And this is where the problems with the favorite book of Busnel comes in.

Some six years ago, Reason's Steigerwald proved that the whole travelogue was, if not an outright lie throughout then a very exaggerated recounting of what Steinbeck (and Charley) did and whom he (whom they) met.

“‘Travels With Charley’ for 50 years has been touted, venerated, reviewed, mythologized as a true story, a nonfiction account of John Steinbeck’s journey of discovery, driving slowly across America, camping out under the stars alone. Other than the fact that none of that is true, what can I tell you?” He added, “If scholars aren’t concerned about this, what are they scholaring about?”

This brings us to a pointed question by Glenn Reynolds:

How many other portraits of America by iconic figures will turn out to be bogus?

And it is pretty amazing that neither this vaunted editor in Paris nor Lauren Collins herself — not to speak of any member of the New Yorker's editorial staff — speak to this fact about the John Steinbeck travelogue or even seem to have the slightest knowledge about it.

The answer is probably that they don't much care, that it is some kind of fake truth, something that brings up the truth.

You know. Narratives.

Still wonder why people have taken to referring to Fake news?

"Is Harvey Weinstein a monster?", can you learn "to distinguish between real abuse and an unwanted come-on?", and other pointed questions from our victim-worshipping world

This #MeToo stuff could get really stupid

writes Ann Althouse as Glenn Reynolds comments

But they can’t help it, because the herd instinct means no one wants to be left out, even when their only real complaint is that they couldn’t get the boyfriend to leave his wife. Because Me too!

From the comments: “Jump on the wagon and signal virtuous victimhood!”

Before we hear from Sarah Hoyt, a handful of questions:

• Had Harvey Weinstein looked anything near like Brad Pitt, how much would the Hollywood star wannabes have complained throughout the years about "harassment"? (Just askin'…)

• What is a "dirty old man" unless it the (exact) same thing that said male specimen was years, decades, ago, when he was young(er), at a time when being flirted by a (horny?) young(ish) lad was something (eagerly?) welcomed by girls and women alike? In other words, can it be that females aren't bothered that much by "dirty young men", in that what bothers them about the former is not the "dirty" but the "old", i.e., (what to them is) the unattractive? (Just askin'…; Sarah Hoyt dwells more on this below…)

• A word that keeps coming back to describe Harvey Weinstein is "monster." Previously, when I heard that moniker describing a living or a historical person, that person turned out to be Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or either of the Kims who have ruled North Korea for 70 years; is it uncouth, is it scandalous, is it triggering, is it patriarchal to point out that however badly the Miramax producer may have acted, he ain't on the same level as der Führer, the Generalissimo, and the various Dear Leaders? (Just askin'…)

• There may certainly be good intentions in the current campaign (many of 'em) — aren't there always good intentions? — but in the end, isn't this feeding frenzy leading to "the ultimate male/female Safe Space … a space where every male is neutered" going to turn out as another of the left's shaming exercises by the usual drama queens for men (also known as the deplorables), so these deplorables learn to shut up (about their natural rights, I mean, and those of all humankind,  not — only — about any unwanted come-ons to a specific female), remember to keep their heads down, and repent their ways? (Just askin'…)

But hey — don't listen to me. I'm a male, after all.

Don't take my word for it, don't listen to my questions. (Man-splainin'?)

(See, I am already integrating the keep-our-heads-down lesson…)

So, besides Ann Althouse, Stephanie Gutman, and Michelle Malkin ("experience and scientific literature show us that a significant portion of these allegations will turn out to be half-truths, exaggerations or outright fabrications … That's not victim-blaming … It's reality-checking"), let's turn to another female and devote the rest of this post to that writer's thoughts on the subject.

Quick, to the Victim-Mobile! by Sarah Hoyt:

Has someone lit the Victim-signal in the sky?  For the last several days my Facebook page has been lit up with women “me too-ing” about how they also were harassed and are as victimy, helpless, and deserving as any would-be Hollywood A-lister flung across Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch.

It’s all “I too was harassed” and “being a woman is so terrible” and “no one is safe” and “patriarchy.”

It might be unkind of me, but my first thought – right after, “Really, I didn’t know Bill Clinton’s staff was that big” – was “No, you were not sexually harassed, because the penalties for that are straight-up horrendous unless you happen to be a big-time leftist.  At worst you were inconvenienced by having a pass made at you by a guy you found unattractive.”

This thought could be wrong and unkind.  Young and hapless women often allow things to happen to them that are objectively sexual harassment. …

 … in general, that kind of harassment is only a real problem when it’s an industry dominated by very few gatekeepers.  These industries/professions -- the arts, publishing, filmmaking, politics, etc. -- are almost all dominated by the left.

And as we’ve said, leftist guys can get away with anything. It’s like the fact that they’re leftist exonerates them from all peccadillos and outright sins.  The left showed this amply with Bill Clinton: their feminism was of the sort that cared more about the right to kill your unborn child than about the right to have a profession without having to pay for it in sexual favors.  (Imagine for a second if Bush had behaved like Clinton.  He’d have been hounded out of office.)

Oh, and in those fields, particularly as more women rise to prominence, men get harassed too, in the exact same way.

So all these women donning the vestments of holy victim can climb off the sacrificial altar.  This isn’t an #allwomen or #yesallmen.  This is human.

The story of humanity proves that those with power often took their “payment” in sexual favors.  From kings to ministers, history is littered with the excesses of powerful men and their bastards.  But if you look up close, the women who rose to power did the same.  Queens and Empresses, and even noblewomen, often treated young men of no fortune as toys.

It’s a human thing.

Now, this is not excusing it.  It is also human to kill and eat your enemies, and I’ve been assured we don’t do that anymore, no matter how much people annoy you on the internet.

But that sort of bad behavior stops, not by piling on and saying “me too” or worshiping the victims for being so courageous as to admit they let themselves be victimized, but by doing something about it.

 … you can learn to distinguish between real abuse and an unwanted come-on.  Real abuse (“you put out or you don’t have a career”) only happens where the guy (or gal) knows he can get away with it.  Circumvent, refuse, expose.

As for unwanted propositions?  Be real.  You’re human.  Unless you have three eyes and fifteen elbows, some of them on your teeth, someone is going to find you attractive.  Depending on how the come-on is attempted, the appropriate response is a slap (yes, violence does solve something) or a kind “Thank you but no.”

Yes, if you’re a woman it will be mostly men who will give you a sexual come-on.  (Though some of us seemed to attract equal-opportunity interest, at least when young.)  This doesn’t mean all women are victims and all men are predators.

It means you’re a woman and men are attracted to women, and not all of them are couth in their approaches.

“Me tooing” in comments, writing heartfelt sniveling stories of how you’re still traumatized, and hashtag activism will do absolutely nothing.

If women want to be in the workplace (as they more or less always were, other than a few exceptional periods), sex will rear its interesting head.

The way to get around that is to be a grown-up human being, from “thank you, no” to  more forceful and/or formal disciplinary measures, if needed.  And in some industries, yes, it might require going another route and maybe paying the price.  (In publishing, I’d like to remind everyone there’s indie and some people do very well indeed at it.)

You can either stand on your own two feet and call out the transgressors for their abuses, thereby making sure you leave the professional world better than you found it; or you can choose that "all men exploit all women," beat your chest and don the shining robes of eternal victimhood, which does nothing but perpetuate abuse.

But that victim-signal lighting up the sky doesn’t bring equality or the ability to show your professional competence.

All it does is put more shackles on professionals of both sexes until the work world is a minefield where nothing of import can be done for the forest of safe spaces and recovery groups.

And where the predators – who always learn to navigate the craziest rules and use them to their advantage – rule supreme.

Bend a knee to the almighty state or give up your livelihoods: Obamacare isn’t about birth control for crybaby liberals; it’s about bringing religious people to heel

Whenever crybaby liberals can’t impose upon other people they claim that someone else is imposing upon them

writes Benny Huang. Specifically, the Constitution website writer is talking about the fact that

Obamacare birth control mandate now lies in tatters, after President Trump announced new exemptions so broad that it is now basically unenforceable.

 … As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, the next Democratic president will reinstate the mandate. It will surely rear its ugly head again if we don’t put a stake through the heart of this un-American diktat. The logical solution seems to be a full repeal of Obamacare but apparently Republicans—who represent a majority in both houses of Congress!—can’t close that deal. Pathetic.

Predictably, anti-theist groups are up in arms over the decision. This isn’t about birth control for them, you see, it’s about bringing religious people to heel. The goal is to sweep believers to the margins of society by forcing them to either bend a knee to the almighty state or give up their livelihoods. Their endgame is to render the Constitution’s free exercise clause a dead letter.

As usual, the anti-theist groups have spun freedom on its head in order to portray liberation as oppression and vice versa. “Preserving religious freedom does not mean expanding the right to impose beliefs on others,” said Larry T. Decker of the Secular Coalition. “It means ensuring that all Americans have the right to make medical decisions without interference from anyone else’s religious or moral beliefs.”

It takes a certain chutzpah to demand that your employer cover a raft of birth control methods while simultaneously insisting that he doesn’t have a say in your “medical decisions.” If Larry Decker and the organization he speaks for don’t want their bosses in their bedrooms I would suggest that they pay for their own damned birth control. That’s kind of the way it used to work  before 2012, which wasn’t exactly the dark ages.

Until Trump’s most recent executive order the cost of birth control was borne entirely by the employer. The whole point of the mandate was to ensure that women received birth control “with no out-of-pocket costs.” The insurance company certainly wasn’t picking up the tab so that means that the employer paid for the whole thing.

This was not a case of politicians playing Santa Claus and giving away money from the public treasury, as they so often do. This was much worse. This was politicians demanding that someone else pay out of their own pocket for other people’s freebies. Doesn’t the person having his wallet lifted have the right to raise his voice in protest? Well, no. According to the Left, that would be imposing his morality on others.

The only person being imposed upon by the Obamacare contraceptive mandate was the employer. Before it came into existence, all parties—the employee, the employer, and the insurance carrier—were [free] to do as they wished. Many employers did cover birth control but it was their prerogative. Insurance companies were free to offer or not offer birth control. Employees were free to find another job or pay out of pocket. Rumor has it that a month’s worth of birth control pills costs nine whole dollars at Target! That’s pretty steep, I know.
 
Whenever crybaby liberals can’t impose upon other people they claim that someone else is imposing upon them. For their benefit, I will provide

a handy how-to guide for identifying who is imposing upon whom. 

It’s pretty simple. Every time a law is passed, consider what is being prohibited or mandated. Then look at whom the law is incumbent upon. That’s the person who can rightly claim an imposition. That does not mean that that imposition is always unwarranted but it does indicate whose liberty is being abridged. It’s sometimes necessary to think this through because liberals so often portray the one imposing as the one being imposed upon.

The Obamacare birth control mandate is an excellent example. Mandates, by definition, force people to act against their will. Some religious employers oppose all forms of birth control, some oppose only those that dislodge a fertilized egg, and some have no problem at all providing birth control for married couples but don’t feel comfortable subsidizing the sex lives of their unmarried employees. The birth control mandate forced all of these employers to shut up and financially support what they considered immoral. All of the coercive force here was exerted on the employers.

With the stroke of his pen, President Trump made that coercive force disappear. Now no one is imposing on anyone! Pretty cool, huh?

Liberals intuitively understand this, I believe, even if they pretend they don’t. It’s in our American DNA to put a libertarian frame around our arguments: “I don’t care what you do as long as it doesn’t impose on me!” That formulation loses all meaning when the word “impose” is twisted to mean its exact opposite. What liberals really mean is “I don’t care what you do as long as I can continue to impose upon you!”

If this construct were somehow turned against them they would surely understand that this isn’t a “live-and-let-live” attitude. For example, if someone were forcing them to pay for their employees’ guns they would say “Not on my dime!”—and they would be right.

The contraceptive mandate’s poster girl, Sandra Fluke, offers a real life illustration. In 2012, Fluke testified before Congress about the difficulties of going through Georgetown law school without access to free (to her) birth control which was not covered by the university’s health care plan. Did she not know before matriculating that Georgetown is at least nominally Catholic? Apparently, she did know. According to a Washington Post article—which is not, as far as I can tell, an editorial though it reads like one—Fluke researched the school’s health plan before attending. “I decided I was absolutely not willing to compromise the quality of my education in exchange for my health care,” said Fluke.

By “health care,” she didn’t mean real health care. She wasn’t asking for anything that would prevent or treat illness or injury. What she meant was that she was unwilling to compromise the quality of her education in exchange for her sex life.

But Fluke was still completely free to get her freak on. That was not the issue. She could have
a) bought her own birth control pills (which, again, cost about nine dollars for a month supply at Target) or
b) chosen a different university. But that would have required her to make choices. She wanted it all and she wanted someone else to pay for it—in this case, the Catholic Church and its members. That makes her a very entitled brat.

Let’s stop and ask ourselves who is imposing upon whom here. This woman could have gotten her pills elsewhere—and presumably did. Even so, she expected the government to shove its way into Georgetown, overrule Catholic doctrine, and force them to fund her sexcapades. For five years, that is exactly what the government did. The imposition here was entirely one-sided.

Naturally, government coercion is occasionally necessary. All laws impose on someone and I’m not completely opposed to that; only an anarchist would be. Freedom should be abundant but it shouldn’t be unlimited. Even so, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be bamboozled about who is being imposed upon in a given scenario. If the government is telling me that I have to shell out my money to buy someone else’s birth control—or guns, private school tuition, whatever—the government is imposing upon me. If the government stops forcing me to shell out my money, that does not mean that I am now imposing upon the person who is accustomed to getting free stuff at my expense. It means that the imposition has ended.

The end of the birth control mandate—if this really is the end—is a national blessing. It does not mean that anyone is cramming his morality down anyone else’s throat. Quite the opposite. We are freer and better country without it.