Thursday, November 17, 2016


Feminists need to get out of their mental bubble and stop blaming "privilege" for everything

Janet Albrechtsen, writing from Australia

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democrat heiress, should now be president-elect Clinton. Women were going to rally to put the first woman in the White House. In the feminist dream and the determinist world of identity politics, the only possible event that could follow the election of the US’s first black president was the election of its first female president.

We are now witnessing what happens when reality explodes this take-it-in-turns determinist dream. Clinton was bound to blame something other than her own failings. That’s the calling card of left-liberal feminism. Of course, Barack Obama would blame the tight race on sexism. Identity politics demands that its adherents recast different views into an ism or a phobia — sexism, racism, homophobia, Islamophobia and so on. Clinton said it best when she described Donald Trump supporters as deplorables: “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it”.

The post-election histrionics from so many women reveal why the so-called sisterhood has no claim over what women think, how they live and who they choose in the sanctity of the polling booth. After the US election, Mamamia’s Mia Freedman said she had “shut down”. Trying to process her ­“tumultuous, distressing, depressing feelings” she listed 11 things she learned after Trump’s win. Had Freeman stopped after No 1 — learning that she lives in a bubble of social media where like-minded people blissfully reinforce their own views — Freeman’s flash of self-awareness might have been noteworthy.

Sadly, her remaining list goes like this: facts no longer matter, white people are furious their power is being taken away, Trump appealed to the lowest common denominator and children are scared. This miasma of emotion simply confirms Freedman’s bubble where Clinton’s win was never questioned.

If women want to be treated seriously, they need to choose reason over emotion. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t, with any credibility, attack Trump for saying that Fox’s Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever”, then give yourself over to pure, unadulterated emotion.

Guardian Australia’s Katharine Murphy used the-facts-no-longer-matter theory to explain Pauline Hanson’s success at the last federal election and she regurgitated it last week to explain Trump’s win. According to Murphy’s post-fact analysis, people aren’t just stupid, they are deliberately stupid. “The journalism I consumed was gutsy, intelligent, richly reported, insightful, sceptical and self-aware,” wrote Murphy last week as she explained why the left-liberal media didn’t do a terrible job reporting Trump’s rise.

For all of that apparent consumption of intelligent news, Murphy’s analysis that Trumpland is a place where truth doesn’t matter is wrong and patronising. Nowhere in Murphy’s analysis is there any acknowledgment that millions of US voters, forgotten by the Washington insider class, turned to Trump out of this deep sense of frustration and discontent. Nowhere is there any curiosity about Trump, the outsider, as the powerful change candidate up against Clinton’s status quo politics.

Freedman and Murphy aren’t alone in choosing the superficial over soul-searching. Gillian Triggs remonstrates about it being a dreadful year for women. She has this is common with Clinton: the actions of both women have been their own undoing. Jamila Rizvi prefers to speak over and interrupt rather than listen to Steve Price explain Trump’s win on Network Ten’s The Project.

Those card-carrying feminists who display such a dearth of intellectual curiosity, and honesty, expose the sisterhood as an increasingly sanctimonious, clueless and diminishing clique.

Rebecca Sheehan, a lecturer at the University of Sydney’s United States Study Centre and an expert in feminist, gender and cultural politics, said that white people, with their “part of a college education or less”, voted for Trump because they were “clinging on to privilege”.

Sheehan’s anti-fact, derisory white-lash analysis fails to account for the two white candidates in the 2016 election and that millions of Americans voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. What irks gender experts is that you don’t need a college education — part or whole — to understand that girl power didn’t rally to make Clinton commander-in-chief. Neither did Latinos, blacks or millennials. On election day, Clinton was predicted to grab the white college-educated female vote by 27 points. It fizzed to six points. Clinton’s share of the overall female vote — 54 per cent to Trump’s 42 per cent — was behind Obama in 2008 and only one point ahead of Obama in 2012.

Inadvertently, Sheehan’s comments explain Trump’s win by expressing the high-horse disdain, the ignorance and determined ­divisiveness of feminists.

It’s not a privilege to watch your dignity dissolve when you lose your job or see your weekly wage stagnate for two decades.

It’s not a privilege to be forgotten by an insular political class.

It’s not a privilege to watch Clinton enrich her private coffers through her public office.

It’s not a privilege to watch a woman who held the office of secretary of state to imagine a different set of rules apply to you, deleting 33,000 emails after congress subpoenaed her to produce them.

It’s not a privilege to watch Hollywood stars line up for Clinton, perpetuating the insider-outsider divide.

There’s nothing privileged about a once proud culture of Western enlightenment being crushed by a pervasive leftist culture that infantilises students: last week students at Cornell University gathered for a “cry-in” with tissues and hot chocolate provided. Tufts University offered Play-Doh to distressed students. The University of Kansas made therapy dogs available to comfort students.

The biggest danger to women is not Trump: it’s the snobbish nastiness and division perpetuated by gender studies experts.

Contrast the offerings from Freeman, Murphy, Sheehan, Triggs and Rizvi with Tina Brown’s observations. Last week, the writer and former editor of left-wing opinion website The Daily Beast wrote: “Here’s my own beef. Liberal feminists, young and old, need to question the role they played in Hillary’s demise. The two weeks of media hyperventilation over grab-her-by-the-pussygate, when the airwaves were saturated with aghast liberal women equating Trump’s gross comments with sexual assault, had the opposite effect on multiple women voters in the Heartland.”

“These are resilient women,” wrote Brown, “often working two or three jobs, for whom boorish men are an occasional occupational hazard, not an existential threat. They rolled their eyes over Trump’s unmitigated coarseness, but still bought into his spiel that he’d be the greatest job producer who ever lived. Oh, and they wondered why his behaviour was any worse than Bill’s.”

And it has taken a man to say what many left-wing women should be saying. Last week, Matthew Dowd from the US ABC News wrote: “I want to take this opportunity to say I was wrong about who would win the election. But my biggest regret, and what I would like to apologise for, is the arrogant, close-minded, judgmental, and sometimes mean-spirited way I related to many who believed Trump would win. They were right, and I was wrong.”

Bunkered in the New York bubble, Dowd admits he didn’t spend enough time listening to Trump supporters and understanding the communities “where another portion of America lives and breathes”.

It took a cool head to deliver a rational and informed mea culpa. The ill-informed and often emotional responses from so many women on the Left over Clinton’s loss confirms that the gender prism has become an anti-intellectual prison, locking them away from exploring, let alone understanding, the world beyond them.

SOURCE





Radical social agenda cost Democrats big

Many reasons exist for why Trump will swear the oath of office on January 20, 2017. But among them is the fact that the Democratic Party has become beholden to Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, adopting a radical pro-abortion and anti-religious freedom agenda that leaves no opportunity for compromise.

Social conservatives supported Trump in the general election. And to his credit, Trump adopted clear pro-life and pro-religious liberty positions, seeking to justify their support.

The 2016 Republican Party platform is the most pro-life and pro-religious freedom it has ever been. But even so, it is no secret that many Christians and social conservatives were conflicted despite these stated positions. Many supported other candidates in the primaries, and Trump’s history and comments caused social conservatives who had consistently voted for Republican presidential candidates to at least hesitate to support the Republican nominee this time.

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory, it’s easy to forget the potential danger that this posed to the Trump candidacy. The pro-life vote has been a key part of the Republican constituency for decades. A Republican presidential candidate who could not depend on overwhelming support from evangelical and Catholic, socially conservative voters would likely have been doomed.

Parties are formed to win elections. Throughout our political history, when party A senses that a core constituency of party B is dissatisfied with its “natural” party nominee, party A looks for ways to compromise and peel off those voters.

For example, African-American voters shifted from Republican to Democrat as Democrats—once the party of slavery—sensed an opportunity to reach African-American voters by supporting civil rights laws. Ronald Reagan famously made inroads with blue-collar workers who had traditionally been part of the Democratic base.

Hillary Clinton might have had such an opportunity. After Trump had secured the nomination, “Never Trump” Republicans sought out third-party options. Some conservative Christian leaders openly struggled over whether to support the Republican nominee, even as the Libertarian Party failed to offer a better alternative for those concerned about the sanctity of life and religious freedom.

On almost any other issue imaginable, the opposing party candidate would seize this opening and move closer to the center to offer these voters an olive branch—perhaps a compromise position that would assuage their concerns about voting for their natural political opponent.

But this was not an option for Clinton. She couldn’t offer that olive branch to pro-life and pro-religious freedom voters even if she wanted to because Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign would never let her.

As recent as the early ’90s, Democrats at least tolerated social conservatives. While most pro-life voters identified as Republicans by the Reagan years, pro-life Democrats were still a real thing. Even in the Clinton administration, Democrats called for making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” President Bill Clinton even signed a pro-life conscience law as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

But by 2016, the Democratic nominee could no longer offer any compromise. Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider and recipient of over half a billion dollars in annual taxpayer funds, spent $38 million advocating for its favored (Democratic) candidates this election season. Planned Parenthood even endorsed Clinton in the primaries—the first-ever primary season endorsement in its 100-year history.

So even as Americans were repulsed by its trafficking of baby parts and its numerous financial and other scandals, Planned Parenthood still wielded enough political clout to ensure that the Democratic nominee wouldn’t dare compromise in the slightest on abortion.

No late-term abortion limits, no ban on sex-selection abortions, no health and safety regulations on abortionists, no prohibition on compelled abortion coverage for churches—not even a commitment to maintaining the 40-year-old Hyde Amendment, which prevents taxpayer funds from going to pay for abortions and has traditionally received Democratic support, until this year.

There could be no compromise. Even in the third debate, Hillary Clinton could not only not offer any compromise to conflicted social conservatives—she actually defended partial-birth abortion, a horrific practice that has been banned for almost a decade.

The Human Rights Campaign, too, having secured a national constitutional right to same-sex marriage, could not permit even the mildest compromise with social conservatives.

Instead of agreeing to compromise on religious liberty concerns, it and its allies have opposed religious freedom laws aimed at protecting florists, bakers, photographers, T-shirt printers, and even pastors and churches from participating in this newly created “right” in violation of their consciences. While faithful Christians seek simply to exercise their faith, these far-left groups are demanding their personal destruction.

This is not to say that an olive branch from Clinton would have been accepted by all conservatives. Not every blue-collar worker became a Reagan Democrat, after all. Many pro-life voters would have rejected any half-measure as insufficient, especially in light of Trump’s pro-life reassurances, and the margins in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, Michigan, and other key states were indeed narrow.

Nevertheless, conservative Christian voters who for the first time became open to voting for a non-Republican candidate still found no interest in opting for the Democrat. Their choices were either to vote third party, write in, or simply choose “the lesser of two evils.” Clinton would not—could not—offer an olive branch to these voters.

Democrats who now wonder how they’ve managed to lose the White House, Congress, and potentially the Supreme Court have plenty of blame to go around, but the pro-abortion, anti-religious freedom extremism now characteristic of the Democratic Party should rank high up on their list.

SOURCE






Why hasn’t Hillary denounced the anti-Trump riots and violence?

If you ask a liberal, hate and sex crimes have boomed across the country since the election of Donald Trump. A Muslim female student at the University of Louisiana claimed she was attacked by two white men wearing Trump hats. A gay man was allegedly beaten on election night by Trump supporters in Santa Monica. There was a KKK rally in North Carolina in honor of Trump’s victory. Southern Illinois University students posted blackface selfies after Trump’s win.

But what do all of the above incidents have in common, besides their Trump-inspired hate? They never actually happened.

Never mind their validity, though. The mainstream media still implored Trump to comment on the hate allegedly being carried out in his name — and he firmly told everyone to “stop it.”

Meanwhile, anti-Trump riots have exploded across America. Trump supporters have legitimately been assaulted and beaten for their opinion. But there’s been no call by the media for Hillary Clinton to denounce this hate, and she remains silent:

Twitter is chock full of blue-checkmarked celebrities, journalists, and politicos calling on Trump to denounce. Denounce this. Denounce that. Denounce Trump for hiring this person. Denounce Trump for not hiring that person. Denounce, denounce, denounce.

What’s curiously missing among this deluge of denouncement demands, however, is a single demand that Hillary Clinton denounce the violent, anti-Trump protests that are being waged in her name. After all, it’s not Trump’s supporters who are tipping over cop cars, torching businesses, or beating up Trump voters.

The rioters won’t listen to Trump, but they might listen to Hillary or Obama. Did Hillary Clinton make a big, public show of denouncing the violent protests raging in cities like Portland, and I just missed it? That seems to me to be the only innocent explanation for the refusal of so many of her most prominent acolytes to call on her to denounce the violence....

If the media truly care about ending the violence and reducing the temperature of the protests around the country, shouldn’t they be calling on Clinton and Obama to explicitly denounce the protesters? Shouldn’t they be calling on Clinton’s voters to put down the torches and pitchforks? Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton be forced to denounce the violent, hateful acts being perpetrated on behalf of her candidacy?

As Sean Davis concludes, “The clock is ticking, progressives. Show us what you actually stand for.” And if what you stand for is violence carried out against your ideological opponents, then by all means — please continue to stay silent.

SOURCE






Hispanic Vote for Trump Greater Than for Romney, Dole

Accoridng to exit polls, Republican Donald Trump won a greater percentage of the Hispanic vote on Election Day 2016 than did Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 race and Republican Bob Dole in the 1996 race.

As reported in USA Today, citing exit poll data from Edison Research, Trump won 29% of the Latino vote and Hillary Clinton earned 65%, a 36-point spread.

In the 2012 race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney, Obama earned 71% of the Latino vote and Romney gathered 27%, which is two percentage points lower than what Trump garnered.

Also, back in 1996, according to the exit polls, Democrat Bill Clinton earned 72% of the Latino vote and Republican Bob Dole pulled in 21%, which is eight points lower than what Trump earned. In 2008, Republican John McCain gathered 31% of the Latino vote, two points more than Trump.

Despite Trump's tough rhetoric about securing the border and halting illegal immigration, a greater percentage of Hispanic citizens voted for him than voted for Romney or Dole.

SOURCE

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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, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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