RUTHFULLY YOURS

We are in the midst of an act of culturecide…..

We live in an age in which things are no longer what they are supposed to be. Words have come to denote the opposite of what they signify. Cultural institutions on which we rely to serve our personal and national interests have morphed into caricatures of their original intentions, working against their foundational purposes.

Linguistic and institutional inversion is the time-dishonored strategy of totalitarian systems and is generally associated with the theory and practice of the Left, which has infiltrated the culture and polity of the free world, particularly in the areas of language use, the media, education, the arts and gender relations. The democratic West is now at the mercy of its own reverse polarity.

Language

One recalls the famous slogans of Orwell’s Ingsoc: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. These contradictions are no longer as absurd as 1984 makes them out to be. What Orwell called Newspeak has entered the practice of the West at levels never before seen. A society in which language has been so denatured as to operate on the principle of inversion, beyond even the institutional euphemisms of political correctness, has no future. Samuel Butler saw this coming in his premonitory steampunk novel Erewhon, an anagram for Nowhere. We have got things backward.

Thus a blood-saturated religion is rinsed for public consumption as the “religion of peace.” An insurgent army of fascist brownshirts calls itself Antifa. “Inclusion” has come to mean the exclusion of those who do not conform to a prescribed ideology. “Diversity” is an antonymic synonym for monolithic groupthink. “Affirmative action” affirms racism in the guise of anti-racism. Sexual jokes, lewd comments and even innocent displays of affection or interest on the part of men are subsumed under the category of “sexual assault” and are said to constitute infallible signs of male depravity; similarly the term “rape culture,” prominent on campus, refers to a non-existent entity and has come to describe normal sexual and romantic behavior.

The mantra of “Social Justice” is the conceptual umbrella under which all such aberrations take shelter. It is nothing but a stand-in for flagrant injustice, exacting tribute from decent hardworking people and struggling entrepreneurs to benefit a largely parasitical class of those who claim to be oppressed or who affect to be offended. Indeed, what Michael Walsh calls the “decriminalization of crime in the name of ‘social justice,’ long a goal of the cultural-Marxist left, [leads to] social disruption, mistrust, resentment, lawlessness and, if left unchecked, anarchy and civil war.” What social justice has to do with a just society escapes us almost perfectly. In fact, the former is the diametric opposite of the latter. As philosopher Roger Scruton writes in The Meaning of Conservatism, “the greatest threat to just dealings between people is the attempt to remake society from above, in conformity with a conception of ‘social justice’.”

The Media

In her recent book The Smear, investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, ostracized by the press elite for her unvarnished truth-telling, has analyzed the scandal of today’s “industry of smears and fake news,” which she calls “transactional journalism,” i.e., returning favors for privileged information, writing what you’re told to write. This has “opened the floodgate to clandestine collusion between reporters and special interests. As a result, it can be impossible to separate fact from fiction.” Moreover, the line between news reports and partisan editorializing has become blurred, so that opinions are routinely cast as fact. “The media had functioned as a powerful institution,” writes Daniel Greenfield, “because of its pretense of objectivity. When it tossed aside objectivity, all it had left was power”—that is, the power to obfuscate, deceive and drive the course of events toward its own political ends.

This violation of journalistic ethics is now pretty much universal. News is agitprop and editorials are political spin, almost always under the sign of left-wing advocacy masking as objective scrutiny and disclosure. Attkisson reminds us of Joseph Goebbels’ dictum in his Diaries, “those who control news policies [must] endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose.” Just as today’s universities have taken a page from the Nazified German universities of the 1930s and the installation of the Nuremberg Laws, so contemporary journalism has learned from the dark master of deception and persuasion. A lie—the bigger the better—repeated with dinning regularity becomes, as Goebbels instructed us, the truth.

Just like aggressive nations, so too people who are not innately moral are deterred from committing crimes by fear of punishment.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/27/the-case-for-sexual-deterrence/

The likelihood of arrest, the good chance of conviction, the probability of jail time or fines, or a permanent criminal record—or all that and more—do their parts to discourage criminality.

In that context, the sudden deluge of sexual harassment claims shares one common theme: lost deterrence.

Those who use their positions of ideological correctness, perceived power, authority, influence, or money to leverage some sort of unwanted sex (from a fleeting grope to coerced intercourse) do so because, in their jaded cost-benefit calibrations, they can.

In our postmodern age, we can no longer rely on now ancient notions of self-restraint. Too many celebrities and power-mongers deprecate the old idea of acting like a gentleman as corny or passé. Many of today’s feminists may find men who open doors, pick up the dinner tab, or postpone sexual intercourse until there is a clear relationship as either condescending chauvinists or utter nerds. Hollywood seems to have idealized the moment when a man rough-handles a woman until his violence leads to eroticism and a willing surrender in his arms—in clinical terms perhaps possible, in real life clearly quite rare.

The majority of high-profile men do not ascribe anymore to religious principles that restrain the libido. Mike Pence was laughed at for his wise counsel of avoiding ubiquitous temptations—as if he were a 60-something innocent babe in the woods of slithering vamps.

In our therapeutic culture born in the 1960s, sex was recalibrated as liberating, free, and without consequences—not as the Greeks once warned of Eros as dangerous and destructive in its power to cloud reason and make even the sober and judicious mere slaves to their appetites.

A sex-sick Phaedra was not a pretty sight.

The Right Politics
Sometimes sexual deterrence is lost through loud liberal politics. Al Franken assumed that as a progressive “giant of the Senate” his professed progressive feminism exempted him from any consequences for his snickering gropes and creepy cheap feels. In Franken’s twisted mind, how many free prods and pokes does voting against confirming conservative federal judges earn?

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) seems to have made a career of exempted perversions, predicated on the fact he was a founding member of the Black Caucus.

Correct politics deterred aggrieved women from coming forward—on the understandable expectation that, even if believed, their elders would insist that their own harassment was not so important as to endanger the cosmic political good.

So abstract morality can offset concrete immorality in a variety of ways: Bill Clinton’s stance on abortion may have earned him a sort of coerced or cheap insurance from “knee-pad” sex. Denigrating a Paula Jones as trailer trash was a small price to pay for having an empowered Hillary as first lady.

According to prominent members of the progressive elite — and a few members of the conservative elite — the election of Donald Trump signaled the rise in the United States of fascism or racism or both. These sweeping smears of Trump and his supporters, which began during the primaries, backfired in 2016: They helped fuel the discontent among ordinary voters that provided the real-estate mogul’s slender margin of victory in key Rust Belt states. The elites’ intemperate condemnation of the people’s judgment bolstered the people’s dim view of the elites.

The elites’ fear, both before and after the election, that Trump was leading a fascist takeover of America has been fueled by his shoot-from-the-hip tweets and off-the-cuff public pronouncements, many of which evinced an ignorance of the rule of law and an enthusiasm for strong rulers. But hyperbole and bombast do not a fascist takeover make. Moreover, elites would be well advised to recall — or learn — that America’s sturdy constitutional constraints, starting with the separation of powers, anticipate the ascendancy of unenlightened statesmen and are designed to keep dark impulses in check. In addition, fascism rests on the acquiescence to a powerful leader of the military, business community, media, entertainment industry, and academy. Trump cannot even unify his own party around his leadership.

The accusation that Trump’s victory represented the recrudescence of a deep-seated American racism was equally scurrilous and equally implausible. Racists still exist in America and some felt emboldened by Trump to purvey their hatred. But there is no reason to suppose that if a white, male, progressive Democrat had governed in the manner of Trump’s predecessor that popular frustration would have been less robust. President Obama rammed through Congress a fundamental transformation of health care in defiance of popular will. He usurped Congress’s lawmaking powers by issuing executive orders that appropriated funds to sustain the Affordable Care Act, that imposed extensive environmental regulations, and that altered the legal status of illegal aliens. He presided over an Internal Revenue Service that methodically impeded his political opponents’ participation in the democratic process. He downplayed or dismissed voters’ anxieties about jobs, trade, and immigration while adopting measures that exacerbated them. Abroad, he coddled adversaries and alienated allies. The notion that ordinary Americans are inveterate racists because they rejected the third term for Obama governance that Hillary Clinton represented exhibits the elites’ own bigotry.

A considerably more illuminating explanation of Trump’s victory comes from understanding the power of populism. The 2016 election returns reflected a revolt of the less well-off and less influential against political elites whom they regard as arrogant and self-serving.