RUTHFULLY YOURS

Aristotle said it first but no one cared to remind Anderson Cooper or Sixty Minutes of that saying when they headlined Stormy Daniels’ appearance on the show as Porn Star’s Affair With Trump. Turns out to have been Brief Encounter more than Affair to Remember, specifically a one time experience. For many $130,000 would have seemed more than generous remuneration, even for a woman with a sense of self as inflated as her chest, but Stormy has been fortunate in receiving even bigger offers for her ability to add to the media’s hate campaign against the truculent tweeter. The serious journalists who have occupied seats on Sixty Minutes must be chagrined at having Stormy earn the show its highest ratings in years. As for Anderson, he seems to have become the reporter with a specialty niche of asking former Playboy centerfolds and current porn-hackers whether they or their johns used protection during sex. One wonders whether he would ask a gay compatriot a similarly salacious question and whether his concern was for the spread of venereal disease, unwanted pregnancy or just to experience the frisson of rudeness.

Stormy claims that she went public because she feared for her child’s life after receiving a threat from an unknown man on the street; this might explain why she would notify the police but makes us wonder why a woman who occupies one’s entire field of vision would want to amplify that target for additional unhinged people who would see her up close on t.v. Is it possible that someone who has been in a dubious business, known for using underage performers, might have fibbed about her motivation?

The Chinese Cultural Revolution – a terrifying decade of totalitarian purging of everyone and everything that did not conform to Maoist ideology – ended in 1976. But everything old becomes new again, so welcome to the new Cultural Revolution which is not on the rise in China but instead is eroding the freedoms of the Western world.

The architects of the Chinese Cultural Revolution employed the ruthless tactics of totalitarianism everywhere: public humiliation, capricious imprisonment, hard labor, torture and execution, the seizure of private property, and in China’s case, the forcible displacement of much of the young urban population to rural regions where they and millions of others were starved to death. And just as Muslim supremacists strive to erase any pre-Islam cultural and historical artifacts in conquered territories, the Chinese revolutionaries attempted to wipe the slate clean of pre-Communist history as well, ransacking cultural and religious sites.

Certainly such abuses are not underway in the democratic West – yet. But a similar totalitarian impulse is on the move among the radical Left. In America and England, for example, historical relics and artifacts are being destroyed as college activists radicalized by the Marxist professors who dominate Humanities departments clamor for the removal of monuments to the “slave-owning” Founding Fathers, to “colonialist” giants like Cecil Rhodes, and to “mass murderers” like Winston Churchill.

What has been the West’s response to such assaults on its cultural heritage? For the most part, it too often has been self-censorship, naval-gazing self-loathing, and apologetic compliance. The Left’s loud denunciations of so-called white privilege, colonialist imperialism, and cishetero-normativity have resulted not in pushback but increasingly in pre-emptive confessions of racial sin and gender intolerance.

National Geographic, for example, issued an embarrassing mea culpa recently titled, “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It,” in which the editor admitted the magazine’s long history of a self-described “colonialist” perspective in articles and photo layouts featuring racial caricatures. “It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past,” she wrote. But having confessed, the magazine had earned permission to move forward cleansed of its past transgressions.

There is a “gender crisis” in America today, and it has nothing to do with the alleged 63 varieties of genders espoused by leftists. Nor does it have to do with women’s marches. Quite simply it deals with the “expendable male,” where, “in the space of just a few decades[,] American women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and expendable ” (Venker & Schlafly, The Flipside of Feminism).

It is apparent by attitudes from well known women – e.g., Pamela Paul, who authored Are Fathers Necessary and wrote, “The bad news for Dad is that despite common perception, there’s nothing objectively essential about his contribution.” Then there is actress Jennifer Aniston, who once stated, “Women are realizing they don’t have to settle with a man just to have a child.”

Naomi Schaefer Riley at the Washington Post writes that “while our culture often celebrates the single life as empowering, this empowerment rarely trickles down to children. We can cheer the mother who dragged her son away from rioting in Baltimore after Freddie Gray was killed, and we can find it sweet that the former star of ’16 & Pregnant’ is taking her young son on ‘dinner dates’ to teach him how to treat women, but there is something sad about the fact that these boys do not have a father to offer these lessons in a more effective way.”

It is commonplace in the college composition classroom to read where single mothers assert that they do not need men since their own single mothers told them never to depend on anyone else. “Don’t need men since they are childish and immature” is a frequent refrain.

The Jewish holiday of Passover beckons mankind to the promise of freedom. As the late Holocaust survivor, Simon Wiesenthal said, “freedom is not a gift of heaven, you have to fight for it every day.” During the seder or festive meal, Jews the world over are enjoined to remember how difficult their lives were under the yoke of Egyptian slavery and they thank G-d for giving them the choice to be free, responsible, and independent people.

The central motif of the haggadah or text read during the seder is to answer the question “what makes this night different from all other nights?” Peppered with rabbinic ideas, in-depth questions, and insightful commentary, the text is an effort to “learn, study and analyze the events” surrounding the time in ancient Egypt when Hebrews were not free, but were slaves.

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik classifies “two slave systems: slaves owned by individuals, as in ancient Greece or the United States, and slaves owned by the state, as in Nazi Germany, China, and the former Soviet Union where the state is the absolute master.” Slaves in a state system exist in a depersonalized prison. There is no personal relationship imaginable.

As each day brings new horrors emanating from the Islamic world against Muslims and non-Muslims, I am struck by the stark contrast between the message of Passover and the inhumane and slave-like treatment of so many human beings in the Muslim world. The other progeny of Abraham must begin asking their own questions. It will require a sea change of major proportions for Muslims and a realignment of reason over emotion for liberal non-Muslims.

Video of Uber’s self-driving car killing Elaine Herzberg is available on YouTube. It will–or at least should–produce shock waves in the culture. The Silicon Valley cult of Artificial Intelligence (AI) — and the related cult of brain science — is a main source of today’s cultural despair. If the brain is merely a machine that white-coated lab techs can measure and manipulate like any other machine, and if machines can be programmed to emulate the human brain, then human existence has no purpose. Our destiny is fixed in the same way that the paths of the planets and the orbits of electrons are fixed, and our free will, moral responsibility, devotion to the past and regard for the future are the random effluvia of a deterministic process.

If that is the case, then it doesn’t matter what we do. We can pursue whatever pleasures or perversions strike our fancy at the moment, because nothing really matters. We are alone in a hostile universe and find our humanity, if such a thing there be, in arbitrary acts of self-assertion. The highest virtue is to define one’s own identity, because only the willful assertion of individual particularity answers the emptiness of the universe, and the next-highest virtue is to reinforce other people’s arbitrary self-assertion (for example by eliminating offending male-and-female pronouns in order to protect the sensibilities of transgender people).

That’s why Hollywood grinds out movie after movie about computers coming to life, programmers falling in love with their avatars, and so forth, starting with Steven Spielberg’s ghastly “AI” (2001). The liberal techno-utopians of Silicon Valley believe they are beneficent Dr. Frankensteins, creating the New Man.

How did we get along before the Internet?

Young people today cannot imagine living in a world without electronic devices – a time before fast-paced computers, laptops, and smart phones provided instant connectivity. Their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents cannot imagine living in a world without automobiles, airplanes, and television – a time of slow-paced letter writing, waiting, and sailing boats. People live in the cultural, physical, and political historical context of their lives.

Russian-American philosopher and writer Ayn Rand (1905-1982) sailed the month-long journey that brought her from Russia to the United States in 1926.

Ayn Rand rejected the tyranny of collectivist Communist Russia that she was born into and spent a lifetime warning the free world about collectivism and its deceitful motto “for the public good.” Her works of fiction and non-fiction argued passionately for the rights of individuals over the collective. Her philosophy of life championed reason, democracy, and laissez-faire capitalism.

Architect Howard Roark in The Fountainhead (1943) and industrialist Hank Reardon in Atlas Shrugged (1957) are brilliant men whose characters are developed in defense of personal liberty, individual freedom, and ownership of one’s intellectual work and personal property. Ayn Rand’s novels illustrate her philosophy of Objectivism which asserts:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute – facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man – every man – is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The Left’s rules: The personal is political. Belief trumps argument and evidence. Don’t change your mind when the facts change, simply summon a Twitter posse of the abusively like-minded. ‘Shut up’ is a valid argument. There can be no debate with racists/misogynists/climate deniers…

The increasing inability to reach a “sensible center” consensus on important political and cultural issues – what the late Christopher Pearson called “club sensible” – has been much noted across Western countries. The capacity to “reach across the aisle” in the USA, for example, is all but a distant memory. Ideological and partisan opponents have dug into entrenched positions on most issues and refuse to budge. More and more, we find that ad hominem attacks substitute for reasoned, solutions-oriented, respectful conversations among antagonists. There are a number of reasons why this has occurred.

One is the pervasive influence of relativism – the belief that there is no truth, not in relation to anything. Another is the coming of social media, which encourages all sorts of people with all sorts of views to vent them boldly to audiences they may not know personally and will ikely never meet face to face. A third reason is the general shallowness and incoherence of the age in which we live. A fourth is the decline of critical thinking skills that were, in former times, routinely developed in the many classics, humanities and liberal arts programs that now more or less no longer exist. Critical skills that supported reasoned arguments, and therefore reasonable positions on topics of the day. A fifth, I believe, is that now it is just about universally (and erroneously) accepted across most political and cultural institutions that “everything is political”, and that “the personal is political”. Again, this is post-modernism 101. A sixth is the close contemporary alignment of the political with one’s group “identity”, guaranteeing a deeply personal and entirely subjective stake in one’s political positions. This applies specifically to those of the left, who so often are allowed to set the agendas for political and cultural debate.

But there is something else at work. This is an age of ideology, of group identity, of culture wars and warriors. Of in-built, reflexively and tightly held positions on issues. There is much intransigence, often viciously expressed. And the stakes are high. If you are religious, for example, it matters deeply when supporters of gay rights press on beyond the acquisition of agreed, sensible respect for all persons and their dignity, towards dictating whom Christian schools can employ. We see all around the attacks on freedom of speech and of belief, their enemies gussied-up with awards and accolades despite representing the antithesis of that which they are purported to champion. The stakes are indeed high. People can lose their jobs, their careers even, when they express the “wrong” views (especially in public) on a contested subject where there are ideologically entrenched positions in play.

There seems very little desire abroad to say, “Well, you have a point, you know. Let’s sit down and discuss this over a coffee. We might both be right, or at least we might both hit upon parts of the truth.” Yeah, right.

A funny thing happened on the way to the intersectional future. The proverbial knapsack was unpacked in the Women’s March and inside wasn’t just racial tribalism, but racial and religious supremacism.

Why do Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour of the Women’s March like Farrakhan and his hate group?

The Nation of Islam preaches that black people are the master race. It doesn’t just hate white people, Jews and a whole bunch of other folks. It hates them out of a conviction in its own superiority. According to its teachings, “the Blackman is the original man” and lighter skinned people were “devils” created by an evil mad scientist to rule over black people until they are destroyed by UFOs.

It even teaches that monkeys are descended from white people.

Progressive media essays defending Obama, Rep. Keith Ellison, Rep. Danny Davis, Mallory and other black leaders for their Farrakhan links have urged concerned liberals to look at the positive aspects of the Nation of Islam, its love for black people, not the negative, its hatred for white people.

But it is the “positive” that is the problem.

Intersectionality promises to package tribal identity politics into a utopia of social justice. But the essence of tribalism is the superiority of your people and the inferiority of all other groups. Tribalism doesn’t have to be violent, hostile or hateful. Most peoples are tribal after all. But when you combine the most radical identity politics elements, as the left does, then bigoted supremacism is certain.

Most people are blissfully unaware of the havoc wrought by our misnamed “Social Justice” and “Human Rights” ideology until they are themselves hit by a summons, a legal suit or a ruling in law that deprives them of their peace of mind, robs them of productive time and leaves them substantially out of pocket. It is like being struck by a bolt of lightning while believing oneself to enjoy adequate shelter. My wife and I have been struck by such unexpected intrusions into our lives on three separate occasions over the last few years.

Indeed, the first strike was like a political klaxon alerting us to the perils of telling the truth in a climate of moral evasion and widespread hypocrisy. We received a notice of defamation from a large Muslim organization in response to a candid article my wife had written when she was editor of Freedom Press Canada, an online journal run by my publisher at the time. This was our first experience of lawfare in action. Apprized by legal council that a court case could set us back two or three years and up to a quarter of a million dollars with little to no prospect of winning, we had no choice but to settle. Since we live in a country in which Muslims are regarded as innocent victims of bigotry and anti-Islamophobia legislation is pending, the alternative would have been bankruptcy.

A short while later, my wife found herself once again under siege as the result of a complaint of discrimination brought by a disgruntled student before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. The charges were baseless and plainly refutable by email records and other evidence. The fact that there was “nothing there,” as our lawyer commented, did not deter the HRT from pursuing a hearing. After two years of our living under a cloud of anxiety, the case went to mediation and the charges against Janice were “disappeared.” (The proceedings are described in her recently posted Fiamengo File series.) But the legal fees were astronomical and, since we were not engaged in a Civil Court trial but an HRT tribunal operating according to its own arbitrary laws, the costs were not reclaimable. We asked our lawyer whether we could counter-sue the student for defamation and related damages, but it turns out that, unlike the process in Civil Court, HRT complainants are protected from “reprisal.” “My experience was just a little glimpse,” Janice wrote in an introductory comment to the video, “into how a society becomes totalitarian when it decides to work outside the law (or too often, now, even within the law) to create ‘justice for the weak’ rather than justice for all.”