The #MeToo movement has descended into a savage and irrational frenzy

It has created a “presumptive criminalization of all male sexual initiatives.”

By Katie Roiphe

No one would talk to me for this piece. Or rather, more than twenty women talked to me, sometimes for hours at a time, but only after I promised to leave out their names, and give them what I began to call deep anonymity. This was strange, because what they were saying did not always seem that extreme. Yet here in my living room, at coffee shops, in my inbox and on my voicemail, were otherwise outspoken female novelists, editors, writers, real estate agents, professors, and journalists of various ages so afraid of appearing politically insensitive that they wouldn’t put their names to their thoughts, and I couldn’t blame them.

Of course, the prepublication frenzy of Twitter fantasy and fury about this essay, which exploded in early January, is Exhibit A for why nobody wants to speak openly. Before the piece was even finished, let alone published, people were calling me “pro-rape,” “human scum,” a “harridan,” a “monster out of Stephen King’s ‘IT,’?” a “ghoul,” a “bitch,” and a “garbage person”—all because of a rumor that I was planning to name the creator of the so-called Shitty Media Men list. The Twitter feminist Jessica Valenti called this prospect “profoundly shitty” and “incredibly dangerous” without having read a single word of my piece. Other tweets were more direct: “man if katie roiphe actually publishes that article she can consider her career over.” “Katie Roiphe can suck my dick.” With this level of thought policing, who in their right mind would try to say anything even mildly provocative or original?

For years, women confined their complaints about sexual harassment to whisper networks for fear of reprisal from men. This is an ugly truth about our recent past that we are just now beginning to grapple with. But amid this welcome reckoning, it seems that many women still fear varieties of retribution (Twitter rage, damage to their reputations, professional repercussions, and vitriol from friends) for speaking out—this time, from other women. They are, in other words, inadvertently creating a new whisper network. Can this possibly be a good thing?

Most of the new whisperers feel as I do, exhilarated by the moment, by the long-overdue possibility of holding corrupt and bullying men such as Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer to account for their actions. They strongly share some of its broader goals: making it possible for women to work unbothered and unharassed even outside the bubble of Hollywood and the media, breaking down the structures that have historically protected powerful men. Yet they are also slightly uneasy at the weird energy behind this movement, a weird energy it is sometimes hard to pin down.

Here are some things these professional women said to me on the condition that their names be withheld:

I think “believe all women” is silly. Women are unreliable narrators also. I understand how hard it is to come forward, but I just don’t buy it. It’s a sentimental view of women. . . . I think there is more regretted consent than anyone is willing to say out loud.

If someone had sent me the Media Men list ten years ago, when I was twenty-five, I would have called a harmlessly enamored guy a stalker and a sloppy drunken encounter sexual assault. I’d hate myself now for wrecking two lives.

One thing people don’t say is that power is an aphrodisiac. . . . To pretend otherwise is dishonest.

What seems truly dangerous to me is the complete disregard the movement shows for a sacred principle of the American criminal justice system: the presumption of innocence. I come from Mexico, whose judicial system relied, until 2016, on the presumption of guilt, which translated into people spending decades, sometimes lifetimes, in jail before even seeing a judge.

I have never felt sexually harassed. I said this to someone the other day, and she said, “I am sure you are wrong.”

Al Franken asked for an investigation and he should have been allowed to have it; the facts are still ambiguous, the sources were sketchy.

Why didn’t I get hit on? What’s wrong with me? #WhyNotMeToo

I think #MeToo is a potentially valuable tool that is degraded when women appropriate it to encompass things like “creepy DMs” or “weird lunch ‘dates.’” And I do not think touching a woman’s back justifies a front page in the New York Times and the total annihilation of someone’s career.

I have a long history with this feeling of not being able to speak. In the early Nineties, death threats were phoned into Shakespeare and Company, an Upper West Side bookstore where I was scheduled to give a reading from my book The Morning After. That night, in front of a jittery crowd and a sprinkling of police, I read a passage comparing the language in the date-rape pamphlets given out on college campuses to Victorian guides to conduct for young ladies. When I read at universities, students who considered themselves feminists shouted me down. It was an early lesson in the chilling effect of feminist orthodoxy.

But social media has enabled a more elaborate intolerance of feminist dissenters, as I just personally experienced. Twitter, especially, has energized the angry extremes of feminism in the same way it has energized Trump and his supporters: the loudest, angriest, most simplifying voices are elevated and rendered normal or mainstream.

In 1996, a six-year-old boy with Coke-bottle glasses, Johnathan Prevette, was suspended from school for sexual harassment after kissing a little girl on the cheek. This was widely interpreted as a sign of excess: as the New York Times put it, a “doctrine meant to protect against sexual harassment might have reached a damaging level of absurdity.” Yet I wonder what would happen today. Wouldn’t feminists be tweeting, “Don’t first grade girls have a right to feel safe?” Wouldn’t the new whisperers keep quiet?

One thing that makes it hard to engage with the feminist moment is the sense of great, unmanageable anger. Given what men have gotten away with for centuries, this anger is understandable. Yet it can also lead to an alarming lack of proportion. Rebecca Trais­ter, one of the smartest and most prominent voices of the #MeToo movement, writes:

The rage that many of us are feeling doesn’t necessarily correspond with the severity of the trespass: Lots of us are on some level as incensed about the guy who looked down our shirt at a company retreat as we are about Weinstein, even if we can acknowledge that there’s something nuts about that, a weird overreaction.

At first glance, this seems honest and insightful of her. She seems, for a moment, to recognize the energy that is unnerving some of us, an anger not interested in making distinctions between Harvey Weinstein and the man looking down your shirt—an anger that is, as Traister herself puts it, “terrifyingly out of control.” But weirdly, she also seems to be fine with it, even roused. When Trump supporters let their anger run terrifyingly out of control, we are alarmed, and rightly so. Perhaps Traister should consider that “I am so angry I am not thinking straight” is not the best mood in which to radically envision and engineer a new society.

It would be one thing if collapsing the continuum of bad behaviors happened only in moments of overshoot recognized by everyone. But I am afraid that this collapse is an explicit part of this new ideology. The need to differentiate between smaller offenses and assault is not interesting to a certain breed of Twitter feminist; it makes them impatient, suspicious. The deeper attitude toward due process is: don’t bother me with trifles! (One of the editors of n+1, Dayna Tortorici, tweets: “I get the queasiness of no due process. But . . . losing your job isn’t death or prison.”)

The widely revered feminist Rebecca Solnit made a related argument in a 2014 interview, speaking in the immediate wake of California’s Isla Vista mass shooting. “I think it’s important that we look at all this stuff together,” she said. “It begins with these microaggressions; it ends with rape and murder.” Solnit is not arguing literally that all arrogant men will go on to sexual assault. But by connecting condescending men and rapists as part of the same wellspring of male contempt for women, she renders the idea of proportion irrelevant, and lends an alluring drama to the fight against mansplaining. She gives a gloss of mainstream respectability and intellectual cachet to the dangerous idea that distinctions between Weinstein and a man who looks down someone’s shirt don’t ultimately matter.

Because of the anger animating the movement, incidents that might otherwise seem outrageous become acceptable or normal to us. The Shitty Media Men list, the anonymously crowd-sourced spreadsheet chronicling sexual misconduct in the publishing world, is a good example. If we think of how we would feel about a secretly circulating, anonymously crowd-sourced list of Muslims who might blow up planes, the strangeness of the document snaps into focus. And yet the Guardian described the list as an attempt “to take control of the narrative by speaking out,” while the Washington Post said “the point was community.” According to The Awl, “a few false positives is probably an acceptable price,” and Mashable opined: “Maybe the women accessing it will see a name and feel a little less crazy, a little more validated in knowing that weird interaction they had with that media guy in a bar was, in fact, creepy.” There is something chilling about circulating lists like this, with their shadowy accusations capable of ruining reputations and careers, simply so that a woman can be sure that a weird interaction she had at a bar with a media guy was, in fact, creepy. (“It feels Maoist,” says one of the deeply anonymous, while others question whether the list was ever designed to remain clandestine in the first place.)

To do a close reading of the list: some of the offenses on the spreadsheet (“creepy DMs,” “weird lunch ‘dates,’” “leering,” “flirting,” “violent language,” and “leading on multiple women online”) seem not quite substantial or rare enough to put into the category of sexual misconduct. I am not even sure they merit a warning to a hopeful young employee. I have graduate students who go on to work for these sorts of publications, and I am very mother-hen-ish about them. But I can’t imagine sitting with one of my smart, ambitious students in my office, lined with shelves of books like The Second Sex and A Room of One’s Own and I Love Dick and The Argonauts, saying, “Before you go work there, I just want to warn you, that guy might leer at you.” I would worry I was being condescending, treating her like a child who doesn’t know how to handle herself in the world.

I am not trying to suggest that the list makers don’t understand the difference in scale between leering and assault, but rather that the blurring of common (if a little sleazy) behavior and serious sexual harassment reveals a lot about how they think. For them, the world is overrun with leering monsters you have to steer around, as if in a video game. And if some of us seem overly occupied with problems of scale, with separating small gross moments from larger criminal ones, it is because we think the very idea of women’s power is at stake.

One man on the spreadsheet—a writer with no authority over anyone, and a drinker himself—is accused of the following: “targets very drunk women.” To me, the verb “target” is eloquent of the motives and the mind-set of the list’s creators. Why is hitting on someone, even with the third drink in your hand, targeting? Surely some of the women are targeting him back, or targeting someone else—the tall guy with a paperback tucked into his jacket pocket, maybe, on the other side of the room. However one feels about the health of drinkers who hang around till the last minutes of the party consorting with other drinkers, I am not sure you can accurately frame this as political oppression. Among other things, the verb makes a series of sexist assumptions about how helpless and passive the women (I mean, targets) at the party are.

In one of the sexual harassment stories in New York magazine’s The Cut, Emma Cline describes a drunken evening during which the head of a literary organization sits too close to her in a cab and asks for her number on the way home from a party. (“Why is this a story?” one of the deeply anonymous says.) Granted, we’re now used to the endless mediation of screens in our personal lives. Still, one wonders when someone asking for your phone number became an aggressive and dehumanizing gesture rather than, say, annoying or awkward. In a way, asking someone for her phone number seems like asking for consent—it’s asking, not assuming, it’s reaching out, risking rejection. It begins to feel as if the endgame of this project is not bringing to account powerful sexual bullies but, as a male acquaintance puts it, the “presumptive criminalization of all male sexual initiatives.”

A couple of days after my friend made this potentially outsized claim, Josephine Livingstone issued a fresh dictum in The New Republic: “You probably shouldn’t kiss anybody without asking.” She insists that everyone, not just college students, must now obtain verbal permission; all those ways you used to think you could tell whether someone wanted to kiss you six months ago no longer matter: “The world has changed, and affirmative consent is now the standard.” Note the friendly yet threatening
tone of a low-level secret policeman in a new totalitarian state.

Men are not entirely deluded if they sense that some of the anger is aimed at all men. Barely submerged in this project is the simmering idea that men have committed the dramatic and indefensible crime of being male. This tweet comes from Kaitlin Phillips (Twitter handle: ­@­yoloethics), a spirited young writer about the publishing world: “It’s not a revolution until we get the men to stop pitching ­LMAO.” In The Outline, a new digital publication, Leah Finnegan writes, “Many men wonder what to do with their entitled mouths and brains at moments like this and the answer is: shut up and go away.” She also tweeted, “Small, practical step to limit sex harassment: have obamacare cover castration.” While this is fairly extreme, its tone is not alien to anyone who dips even briefly into Twitter or Facebook. We are alarmed at the rampant and slippery Trumpian tendency to blame “all immigrants” or “all Muslims,” and blaming all men seems to me only a little less ominous.

Traister writes about men living scared,

the friends and colleagues self-aware enough to be uneasy, to know they’re on a list somewhere or imagine that they might be. They text and call, not quite saying why, but leaving no doubt: They once cheated with a colleague; they once made a pass they suspect was wrong; they aren’t sure if they got consent that one time. Are they condemned?

It seems that they are, because she continues: “Men have not succeeded in spite of their noxious behavior or disregard for women; in many instances, they’ve succeeded because of it.” In this context, it’s not entirely surprising when she reports her husband saying to her, “How can you even want to have sex with me at this point?”

If on some subterranean level of this conversation all men are presumed guilty, then all women are innocent, and I guess my question is, Do we really want that innocence? What is the price of it? In her prescient early-Seventies critique of the women’s movement, Joan Didion wrote, “Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children.” She went on to object to a feminist idea of sex that assumed women were, in her memorable phrase, “wounded birds.”

Didion’s phrase rang in my mind as I read Rebecca Solnit’s comment in the interview quoted earlier:

Every woman, every day, when she leaves her house, starts to think about safety. Can I go here? Should I go out there?. . . Do I need to find a taxi? Is the taxi driver going to rape me? You know, women are so hemmed in by fear of men, it profoundly limits our lives.

(To this, one of the deeply anonymous says, “I feel blessed to live in a society where you are free to walk through the city at night. I just don’t think those of us who are privileged white women with careers are really that afraid.”)

The idea of this ubiquitous, overwhelming fear is repeatedly conjured and dramatized by Twitter feminists. In one of her pieces, Rebecca Traister complains about a man who was fired many years ago from Harper’s Magazine following an instance of sexual misconduct and now writes for New York. She does not mention that he has worked uneventfully in two offices since then. Moira Donegan (former Twitter handle: @MegaMoira; current handle: @MoiraDonegan), the creator of the Shitty Media Men list, tweeted:

What about the women at New York who feel uncomfortable working with him? Why is their ability to feel safe at work less important than his second chance? It’s their first chance.

The man, as Traister herself says, has no women working under him. He does not work in the office. So the looming threat of his mere existence to the safety of the young New York employees seems somewhat overblown. I can’t help thinking it is @MegaMoira here who is endowing him with a power he doesn’t have, and at the same time, not giving those allegedly scared and unsafe young women at the magazine enough credit: Why should they care about a writer puttering at home?

The rage can at times feel like bloodlust. In the essay she wrote about creating the list, Donegan describes her “desire for a kinder, more respectful, and more equitable world.”1 However, after the list came out but before Lorin Stein resigned as editor of The Paris Review, she tweeted: “every profile of Lorin Stein calls him ‘skinny and bespectacled’ but here’s the thing: he’s not that skinny.” She added: “I guess ‘bespectacled, bald, and busting out [of] the bespoke shirts he’s still having made with 15 year old measurements’ doesn’t have the same ring to it.” Later, these tweets were deleted. But if we could think in less gendered terms for a moment, one could reasonably ask: Who is harassing whom?

Can you see why some of us are whispering? It is the sense of viciousness lying in wait, of violent hate just waiting to be unfurled, that leads people to keep their opinions to themselves, or to share them only with close friends. I recently saw a startling reminder of this when Wesley Yang published an insightful and conflicted piece in Tablet called “Farewell to a Scoundrel,” about former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein and the feminist moment.

I teach Yang’s work to my graduate students, so I know a little bit about him. He is a Korean-American man who has written memorably about being viewed as a sexual neuter by the white women in his social circle. Now he is married with a child. Shortly after the Tablet piece appeared, @yoloethics started tweeting:

DAILY REMINDER that the men who can’t for the life of them figure out how to get fucked are more dangerous than those who do.

All I want for Christmas is a list of Male Media Virgins!! Having a child does not exempt you from this list, men who direct their repressed sexual rage at women.

In another tweet, she made fun of Yang for publishing in Tablet. After reading these, I was curious about who she was, and discovered that her work had appeared in places such as n+1, Artforum, and Vice, and that in other moods she tweets about her Margiela boots and fur coat; her feed basically mixes the frivolity of Sex and the City with the viciousness of Breitbart.

I wouldn’t normally quote so much Twitter, but the extremes of vitriol unloosed in this conversation find their purest expression there. Some of these seemingly fringe figures are actually writers and editors who publish in places like The New Republic and n+1, who are involved in setting the tone of the conversation; one can very easily connect the dots between their views and those of more mainstream feminists. I have a feeling that if one met @yoloethics or the rest of her Twitter cohort in person, they would seem normal, funny, smart, well read. But the vicious energy and ugliness is there beneath the fervor of our new reckoning, adeptly disguised as exhilarating social change. It feels as if the feminist moment is, at times, providing cover for vindictiveness and personal vendettas and office politics and garden-variety disappointment, that what we think of as purely positive social change is also, for some, blood sport.

More HERE





Democratic Leaders, Why Do You Find Patriotism Divisive?

Did you ever think you’d see the day when a prominent political party would accuse the president of being divisive and exclusionary for saying “America” too many times during his State of the Union speech?

The American Civil Liberties Union made that very complaint. No, the ACLU is not the Democratic Party, but its positions on such matters are virtually indistinguishable. Besides, many prominent Democrats and media liberals made similar objections after the speech.

MSNBC host Joy Reid brazenly trashed traditional American values and institutions with her tweet accusing President Trump of trying to force the normalization of himself by using “terms of the bygone era his supporters are nostalgic for” — namely, church, family, police, military and the national anthem.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called Trump’s unapologetically pro-America speech, which was widely approved by the American people in flash polls immediately afterward, “dangerous.”

Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), who recently compared Trump’s presidency to a time “right after the 1932 elections when Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor,” took umbrage at Trump’s statement that Americans, like the immigrants whose parents brought them here illegally as children, “are dreamers, too.”

Fox News analyst Juan Williams was deeply disappointed by the speech, saying that this was an opportunity for Trump to reach across the aisle and bring us together but he didn’t take it. More bizarrely, Williams said in response to Trump’s statement that “Americans are dreamers, too,” “David Duke and the KKK would love that.” Seriously?

Obviously, today’s Democratic Party (at least its leadership) has a problem with raw expressions of patriotism, because Democrats can’t seem to look at America through anything but their distorted prism of Balkanized identity politics.

They assume that when Republicans promote church, family, police, the military, the national anthem and wholesomeness and goodness, they are somehow dog whistling to white supremacists, or some such nonsense. Democrats said Trump delivered a “wedge speech,” one that “inflames the cultural divide.”

Perhaps their habit of divining code language in our every pronouncement is simple projection. For all of Trump’s faults, he pretty much says what he believes. His SOTU speech was no exception. Probably the most consistent message he delivered on the campaign trail was his belief in an America-first philosophy — not certain groups in America at the exclusion of others but all Americans.

What these kvetching liberals can’t grasp is that we conservatives don’t view our heartfelt expressions of patriotism as exclusionary or divisive. Indeed, by definition they are not.

Liberals say we promote white privilege. We don’t. They say our policies disfavor minorities, but they don’t; they are race-neutral and aimed at lifting up all people. They say immigration enforcement advocates are driven by nativism and bigotry. We aren’t; we are animated by a love for America and the American idea, which is enshrined in our founding documents. We don’t believe that America is the greatest nation in history by accident, and certainly not because of ethnic demographics.

Rep. Joseph Kennedy, in the official Democratic response to the SOTU, audaciously quoted a U.S. motto, “e pluribus unum,” meaning “out of many, one” — though every other thing out of his mouth and that of his Democratic colleagues undermines that precept. Conservatives, though, actually believe in a melting pot and equality of opportunity and equal justice for all.

Sadly, Kennedy and his Democratic leaders view America only through race-conscious eyes. They are the ones who deliberately divide us, by constantly agitating over race, gender, sex, religion and any other category that will incite their base into a frenzy.

America was mired in a perpetual malaise under Barack Obama, and the Democrats’ goal, when Obama’s scapegoating of George W. Bush had finally extended even beyond the Democrats’ willing suspension of disbelief, was to delude Americans into accepting economic stagnation as inevitable and the new normal.

Already, in one short year, with Trump’s tax cuts, his deregulation, his business-friendly policies, his recommitment to America’s domestic energy industries, and his overall contagious optimism and bullishness on America, this nation is roaring back, and Democrats are conspicuously vexed about it.

They have no viable alternative agenda; everything they tried under Obama failed. Yet they’re still promoting the same destructive ideas. That is why they have reduced themselves to ad hominem Trump slanders, bogus charges of collusion with Russia and blanket smears of conservatives as bigoted extremists.

Democrats are the ones who have become more extreme every year. Yesteryear’s liberal extremism is far too conservative for today’s Democratic Party. With Democrats’ constant westward shifting of the goal posts, they regard mainstream conservatism as radical. Proof of their extremism and intellectual bankruptcy is their maniacal rhetoric, such as accusing Trump of being a dangerous dictator.

Their emotional breakdown over innocuous and uplifting presidential expressions of patriotism and traditional American values — with their perception that such inherently unifying ideas are divisive and exclusionary — screams volumes.

Such utterances of national pride cannot credibly be depicted as divisive. Likewise, Democrats’ quest to force-fit identity-tinted lenses on all Americans so that we can see one another only as members of certain groups cannot be spun as uniting or constructive.

It would be refreshing if Democrats could at least be truthful about where they stand, but as of now, they are saying one thing and at the same time, well, saying another. Please keep it up through November, guys.

SOURCE






Words mean things. Beware when people endeavor to redefine them in service to a political agenda

Language is critically important when it comes to understanding other people. It’s one of the things that separates man from beast. But perhaps ever since the Tower of Babel, we humans are destined to misunderstand each other. Unfortunately, sometimes, that misunderstanding is due to people deliberately reshaping language for political ends. Time and space won’t permit a comprehensive list, but here are a few prominent examples.

Much of the current debate in Washington revolves around immigration, where there’s no shortage of manipulated and deceitful terminology. The technical and legal term “illegal alien” has been not just discarded but rejected with prejudice by leftist open-borders advocates, who for years now have referred to illegals as “undocumented.” Sometimes for good measure they add “workers,” so we don’t think these folks are taking from the system. News flash: they are.

“Dreamer” is another one. Granted, that’s actually derived from an unpassed bill called the DREAM Act (an acronym for Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act), but that title too was a clever spin on the language to make amnesty for certain illegals sound as appealing as possible. Who could possibly oppose “dreamers”? Hence the word play.

In days past, “racism” meant prejudice against another race. Now it’s a catch-all term for conservative policies on taxes, “welfare” (another distorted word), immigration, etc. Leftists don’t argue policy merits, they shout “racism” and spike the football, thinking they’ve won the argument.

The homosexual agenda, too, is rife with redefinitions. “Gay,” of course, used to mean carefree. “Love” once meant selfless acts of compassion for someone else; now that “love wins” is the slogan for same-sex marriage, it means forcing your political agenda upon someone else. “Love” — “tolerance” too — means putting good people out of business for conscientiously objecting to providing artistic services for same-sex weddings.

That agenda has expanded to include transgenderism, so we read and watch emotional stories about boys using feminine pronouns and vice versa with the desired result being our celebration of a “brave” choice. Bruce and Bradley are now Caitlyn and Chelsea. Enabling a young child to decide she’s a “boy” is no longer child abuse, it’s “tolerance.” All that matters is affirming a person’s gender dysphoria, not sticking with facts or science - much less actually helping such people.

“Phobia” is a suffix now attached to numerous words and it serves much the same purpose as “racism.” Conservatives are “homophobic,” “transphobic,” “xenophobic” and so on, because it helps leftists dismiss good-faith policy or moral arguments as irrational fear.

Along a similar cultural vein, media organizations refer to “pro-life” groups as “anti-abortion,” which is true in a sense yet woefully inadequate and deliberately negative. “Life” itself has been shifted from conception to birth. “Choice” is a sick euphemism for ending life. Again, never mind scientific definitions when an agenda is on the line.

One of the more sinister efforts at language manipulation is with guns. Media reports ubiquitously refer to certain guns with the misnomer “assault weapons,” or they speak of “high-capacity” magazines instead of standard capacity. When a deranged individual or a religious fanatic murders numerous people, he is, according to the media, a “gunman,” because that puts the focus on the instrument of death rather than the killer himself. Subtly, that sways people’s emotions against a tool, and it provides - pardon the pun - ammunition for those who would curtail our Second Amendment rights.

Terrorists motived by loyalty to a worldwide entity we in our humble shop call Jihadistan are, to the media, “lone wolves.” And yet fatherless, medicated and unaffiliated killers are somehow motivated by the “gun lobby”?

Far more broadly speaking is calling our “republic” a “democracy.” The latter has become lazy shorthand for getting to vote for stuff, while “republic” is too often associated with communist tyranny that isn’t republican at all, as in The People’s Republic of… For many Americans, accepting this terminology shift is largely just lazy, but make no mistake - Democrats benefit from the widespread good feelings associated with “democracy,” while the converse is true for Republicans. That same marketing technique was employed when the media shifted red and blue states 30 years ago. Ronald Reagan’s map was blue, but Democrats didn’t want the association with communist red. Hence the change.

Walter Williams recently wrote an outstanding explanation of why the Founding Fathers “went to great lengths to ensure that we were a republic and not a democracy.” Moreover, Williams notes, “The word democracy does not appear in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution or any other of our founding documents.” In fact, the Founders warned against democracy as its own form of tyranny.

We could go on ad nauseum, but readers can see the point. Words mean things, and all Americans should beware and reject the mainstream media’s redefinitions, which often advance specific points in the Left’s agenda. Unfortunately, most other conservative media outlets don’t bother getting these words right and thus cede ground to leftists. Your Patriot Post team, on the other hand, has endeavored for more than 21 years to fight for the language as part of our fight for both truth and Liberty. We aim for that to continue.

SOURCE





Australia: New Liberal Party senator Jim Molan posts inflammatory anti-Muslim videos

Good that there is someone who is not afraid to mention Muslim hostility

New Liberal senator Jim Molan has used social media to share inflammatory anti-Muslim videos from Britain First - the same racist hate group Donald Trump was widely condemned for promoting.

The conservative hardliner has also shared articles about banning Muslim migration to Australia, as well as posts highlighting Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's poor polling and advocating for the Coalition to "lurch to the right".

But it is his promotion of Britain First likely to prove most controversial. The US president sparked a global uproar when he shared three video tweets by Britain First's deputy leader Jayda Fransen last year. British Prime Minister Theresa May quickly said the president's actions were "wrong".

Those videos purported to show a group of Muslims pushing a boy off a roof, a Muslim destroying a statue of the Virgin Mary, and a Muslim violently beating a Dutch boy on crutches. At least one of the videos was later exposed as a fake.

Senator Molan - a retired major general sworn in to the Senate on Monday to replace former Nationals deputy Fiona Nash - shared two of Britain First's videos on his personal Facebook page in March last year.

But a spokesman for Senator Molan defended the posts. "The senator often posts material in order to generate debate. The sharing of any post does not indicate endorsement," he said.

The first video - which he shared on March 12 - is titled "Muslim Thugs Beat Girl in Holland" and shows a man punching, knocking down and then kicking a girl in a street. He posted the video - which claims the violence was motivated by the woman's clothes - without comment but many others weighed in on the link.

"Charming. And we're meant to be tolerant, accepting and welcoming of this 'breed' in our country," says one of his Facebook connections.

"Unbelievable," Senator Molan responds.

Other Facebook users refer to the men as "disgusting apes", "disgusting thugs" and "filth".

"Deport them. Send them back to there (sic) shitty country's (sic)," says one.

One commenter however points out the video is likely fake and urges Senator Molan to take it down. There is nothing in the video to suggest the attackers are Muslim or the violence was in anyway motivated by race or religion. Dutch news sites have reported the altercation was actually about a scooter collision.

Two weeks later, Senator Molan shared another of Britain First's videos, this one purportedly showing Muslim men attacking French police cars in a "Muslim no-go area". Again the video has no context or verification.

Senator Molan again does not comment on the video but his Facebook connections contribute comments like "Machine gun them down, take back the streets" and "Drown the rounds in pigs blood before using them though, that'll piss em off".

Mr Trump ultimately apologised for sharing the group's material. He said he knew nothing about who the group was when he retweeted them.

“If you are telling me they’re horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologise if you’d like me to do that," he recently told a British journalist.

Britain First is a far-right political and vigilante organisation, renowned for filming themselves harrassing Muslims and marching through multicultural neighbourhoods brandishing white Christian crosses.

Drawing on white nationalism, the group was founded by an evangelical Protestant minister and also stages "Christian patrols" in armoured vehicles and "mosque invasions", where they confront imams and worshippers.

The group has nearly two million Facebook followers. Ms Fransen is facing charges for using "threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour" during a speech in August in Northern Ireland, and has previously been fined for harassment. The group's leader, Paul Golding, has also been arrested numerous times.

The group has also been indirectly linked to more serious violence. A man who drove into pedestrians outside a mosque in London last June - injuring eight people - had had contact with Britain First and other far-right groups.

Labor frontbencher Doug Cameron said Senator Molan's Facebook activity raised questions for the Liberal Party.  “Fresh from sharing racist hate videos on Facebook, he’s now got a scored a position in the Liberals’ Senate team,” Senator Cameron said.

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

***************************