RUTHFULLY YOURS

The explosion of sexual harassment and assault claims, some going back forty years, is the inevitable consequence of the sexual revolution. Long before Bill Clinton’s sordid sexual escapades led him to impeachment, our culture had normalized public sexual behavior and mores once hidden away in the private realm, and kept there by laws, morals, and customs. Like many of our social pathologies today, our sexually saturated public culture and the unleashing of sexual predators are the bitter fruit of the free love movement of the Sixties.

Those who didn’t live through that period cannot imagine how quickly and radically our society was transformed. And that change was encouraged by certain species of dubious Pop-Freudian psychological ideas that had been combined with left-wing theories of political revolution. This synthesis was predicated on the delegitimization of the “bourgeois” virtues, morals, and values that had created the “false consciousness” empowering capitalist oppression. “If it feels good, do it” and “Fuck authority” became the most important personal and political imperatives.

Thus sexual liberation became an instrument of political “liberation,” and both revolutions enabled personal liberation, a weird mash-up of radical individualism and communist collectivism. Listen to Herbert Marcuse, denizen of the Frankfurt School and guru of the New Left:

The civilized morality is reversed by harmonizing instinctual freedom and order: liberated from the tyranny of repressive reason, the instincts tend toward free and lasting existential relations––they generate a new reality principle.

So too another popular intellectual of the Sixties, renegade classicist Norman O. Brown:

The life instinct, or sexual instinct, demands activity of a kind that in contrast to our current mode of activity can only be called play. The life instinct also demands a union with others, and with the world around us, based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.

One can see this political justification for “free love” in the 1969 Wellesley commencement address of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wrote her senior thesis on the most consequential theorist of modern left-wing activism, Saul Alinsky. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living,” Rodham said. Her three sexually charged adjectives reveal the by then preposterous union of the sexual and the political revolution that starts with “questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government,” Rodham continues, and enables “human reconstruction,” a phrase echoing the leftist “new man” necessary for achieving the collectivist utopia of social justice and equality.

Do these kneeling football players know anything about truly oppressive regimes?

Watching the now weekly spectacle of football players bending their knees in protest when the National Anthem is played makes me wonder if they have ever given a scintilla of thought to the bended knees of broken women as they are sold in the slave markets of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and now Turkey, where “the Islamic State has merely transferred its slave business into Turkey – including a market in Turkey’s capital Ankara. This means ISIS is involved in the slavery industry in a European country.” Moreover, does Kaepernick know that black Africans owning other black Africans has existed in Mauritania for generations and continues to this day?

Has he ever read the searing accounts by North Koreans describing the misery of life in that totalitarian regime? Do his football buddies shed tears for the murder of North Koreans who defect and are shot by their own government, as happened the other day? When these helmeted athletes speak of injustice, do the names Farzana Iqbal and Samia Imran come to mind? These Pakistani women were “honor-killed” by members of their own family because they dared to marry men of their own choosing. Samia’s mother carried out the murder of her own daughter, while Farzana was stoned to death by twelve male relatives, including her father, brothers, and cousins. No one was prosecuted for these heinous crimes.

I dare Colin and his partners on the football field to rail against this ongoing racism, injustice, and evil.

Have these players ever spoken out about the decimation of young blacks in the streets of Chicago, where gangs rule? If they are truly interested in helping, why not work to get the corrupt Democrat machinery out of the inner cities and finally clean up the urban ghettoes so mothers can wheel their baby carriages without fear of being caught in a drive-by shooting?

I wonder as I look in disbelief if these players, who are generally selected more for their brawn than for their brains, even understand what they are doing. According to Doreen S. Felix over at the New Yorker the kneel, having symbolized a protest directed at alleged police brutality against black Americans, has morphed into outright opposition to Trump or even just a gesture “of free speech itself.” Then again…”it’s a reaction to Trump’s ‘buck-breaking’ rhetoric,” or it’s “about broken alliances, presumably between the team owners, many of whom donated to the Trump campaign,” and finally, “it has become ‘about the pride of the N.F.L.'”

In the muddled minds of these men who make millions of dollars throwing a ball around, it is breathtaking to see how they squander what could be their finest moment. It is a disgrace on so many fronts. The only apparent effect of all this knee-bending is that the NFL has lost one million viewers.

A New York Times article by Billy Witz highlights that “Kaepernick was … cleaning up a mess of his own … when photos surfaced of him wearing socks … that featured cartoon pigs wearing policeman’s caps.” But is this really a surprise, given that his “conversion to social activism occurred once he began dating activist DJ Nessa Diab, who has frequently spoken about perceived racial injustices and ‘Islamophobia’ in the U.S.”? Diab is an ardent supporter of Black Lives Matter and Muslim activism. Could one say a vulnerable football player just got played by a savvy operator?

Men accused of sexual taint continue to be beheaded by the media, falling like aristocrats trundled to the guillotine. The latest in the tumbrel full of miscreants to go under the blade is Matt Lauer, who was fired from NBC’s Today show for sexual misconduct. Apparently, Lauer’s tribe numbers in the hundreds of thousands.

Or more.

But just as it seems every man is a predator and every woman has been wrongfully fondled, there is a small cloud on the horizon that augers a storm. The cloud may portend a new revolution.

Revolutions often begin with questions about truth and reality. What is the truth behind the accusations? Are men automatically guilty if accused? Should we consider whether women can be as predatory as men? Are all the accusing women innocent victims? Are none of them looking for power or money?

Maybe there is a little room for realistic cynicism.

As Angelo Codevilla recently pointed out, “Men, but mostly women, have been trading erotic services for access to power since time began.” As he observed sexual power plays during his eight years on the Senate staff, “Access to power, or status, or the appearance thereof was on one side, sex on the other. Innocence was the one quality entirely absent on all sides.”

Codevilla’s point is that all sexual transgression, including bargaining and power mongering, is held to be entirely the fault of men. But not all can be blamed on what radical feminists see as an inherently detestable and predatory patriarchy.

Women can be just as predatory as men, sexually and otherwise. Though assigned invisibility by most contemporary feminists who have a vested interest in the myth of women as always and forever victims of men, Phyllis Chesler and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, both cool-headed analysts, have shown that women can be as cruel and heartlessly manipulative toward men and other women as men can be toward women and other men.

“Mr. Rubio may be setting himself up to run as a social conservative hero in 2024, or even 2020 if President Trump declines to run, and the child credit obsession is a down payment on that brand. Yet voters looking for a candidate who understands what makes America—and American families—prosper will have to look elsewhere.”

The GOP is pushing forward on tax reform, though a receiving line of Republican holdouts are slow-rolling progress. One who deserves special mention is Marco Rubio, who contributed nothing to ObamaCare repeal and now aspires to dilute the tax bill. Voters ought to remember this when he’s next pitching himself for President.

On Wednesday Mr. Rubio and his political sidecar, Mike Lee of Utah, announced that they’ll file an amendment to the tax bill to change the $2,000 child tax credit. They want to make the credit refundable up to a person’s payroll tax liability, among other expensive tweaks. To pay for the changes, Messrs. Rubio and Lee would increase the corporate tax rate to 22% from the bill’s 20%.

If Mr. Rubio thinks payroll taxes are too high, he can propose a payroll tax cut. But then he’d have to weather the political fight of going after funding for Medicare and Social Security. So instead his back-door plan is to expand a refundable credit, which delivers checks to folks who owe no federal income tax. This is a disincentive to work and we would have thought antithetical to conservative principles.

More destructive is his increase in the corporate tax rate, which is the most pro-growth plank in the bill and could significantly increase what Americans earn since much of the tax falls on labor. A point or two more may seem like no big deal but it might be the difference between making the U.S. more competitive than the OECD’s roughly 24% average—or not. And that’s a mere average. One competitor for investment is Ireland’s 12.5% rate.

Mr. Rubio knows this, or ought to, yet his press release could have been written by Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. “Right now, 70 percent of the tax cuts we’re considering would go to businesses,” the Rubio-Lee dispatch says, “and only 30 percent to individuals.” This is a false choice—individuals earn income at businesses—and apes the left’s class-war politics.