Monday, April 18, 2022



What the Left Has Done to Women’s Desires

Dennis Prager

As I’ve documented on a number of occasions, the left ruins everything it touches.

There is no exception. From universities to high schools and now including even elementary schools, to late-night TV, to sports, to the arts and, increasingly, science, the left is a destruction machine.

And nowhere is this damage more evident or tragic than with regard to women.

In fact, nothing demonstrates the power of left-wing ideology as much as what this ideology has done to women. So powerful is leftist ideology, it is more powerful than women’s nature.

Here are five examples:

1) Desire to Bond With a Man

For all of recorded history, virtually all women sought a man with whom to bond. Of course, a progressive would argue that this was true only because all societies implanted this desire in women or because societal pressure gave women little choice about the matter. It is not, progressives would argue, innate to female nature to yearn for a man.

But whatever the reason—innate nature or societal expectation—it is a fact that women desiring a man was virtually universal.

Then along came modern left-wing feminism, which communicated to generations of young women through almost every influence in their lives—most especially teachers and the media—that a woman doesn’t need a man.

In the witty words of one feminist aphorism, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Unfortunately, however, the reality is most women need a man just as most men need a woman. Most men don’t fully grow up without a woman, and most women don’t fully grow up without a man. (I am, of course, referring to heterosexual women and men.)

If you need proof, ask almost any married person, man or woman, if marriage matured them.

2) Desire to Marry

Along with wanting a man, the vast majority of women wanted to marry. It was assumed that wanting that public commitment to and from a man was part of female nature. Yet, the left has successfully undone that part of women’s nature, too.

As a result of feminist and other left-wing indoctrination, the belief that a woman doesn’t need a man led to the inevitable upshot: Marriage isn’t necessary. And it might even be a tool of oppression.

And as a result of that, a smaller percentage of American women are marrying than ever before.

This has serious social consequences. We have long known that single men perpetrate most of the violent crime in society. Single men are a societal problem. What we have not acknowledged—and perhaps not even known—are the deleterious effects of women not marrying.

While single women don’t commit nearly as much violent crime as single men do (though they may be starting to catch up), single women are increasingly a societal problem.

The most obvious problem is that women who have children without ever marrying their children’s father—or another man—produce a highly disproportionate percentage of social misfits.

But many women who never give birth nor marry also constitute a societal problem. They are more likely to be angry and to express that anger in support of radical causes that undermine society.

As Barron’s reported, while overall a mere 14.2% of the population contributed to “racial justice causes,” such as Black Lives Matter, in 2020, “nearly half of single women in the U.S.—a larger percentage than single men or married couples—supported or were actively involved in racial justice protests.”

As reported by one women’s activist organization, Women’s Voices Women Vote, in the 2012 election, “the marriage gap dwarfed the gender gap.”

3) Desire to Have Children

At least as much as wanting to bond with a man and wanting to get married were deemed a part of women’s nature, the desire to have children was regarded as even more embedded in female nature.

Yet, incredibly, leftist ideology is even succeeding in eliminating that part of women’s makeup. More women than ever before—abroad as well as in America—are choosing not to have children.

See, for example, the article “More women like me are choosing to be childfree. Is this the age of opting out?” published, appropriately, in The Guardian.

The author ends her piece this way: “I’ll say it plain: I don’t want children, I never have, and it doesn’t feel like any kind of lack. To me, it just feels like being alive.”

She speaks for an increasing number of women.

4) Desire to Have Sex With Commitment

Another part of women’s nature that the left has undermined is the desire of women to have sexual relations with a man who might commit to her. Or, at the very least, to have sex only with a man to whom she has some emotional attachment.

Left-wing feminist ideology has even been able to undermine that. Three generations of American women have been indoctrinated into believing that their sexual nature is the same as that of a man.

Therefore, she can have “hookups,” i.e., non-emotional, noncommittal sex, just like men can with no emotional fallout. And so, many young women do.

But a far greater percentage of them experience regret or even depression than do young men who engage in “hookup” sex, a form of sex that is indeed part of male nature.

5) Desire to Protect Children’s Innocence

Perhaps the most amazing thing progressive ideology has done to women is to subvert the innate female desire to protect children; specifically, children’s sexual innocence.

The movement to teach very young children about sex, about “gender fluidity,” expose them to “Drag Queen Story Hours,” etc., is overwhelmingly led by and composed of women.

Leftism would appear to demonstrate that ideology can trump human nature. Such is the power of social indoctrination.

One inevitable result is a generation of more depressed young women and more regretful middle-aged women than ever before in American history.

The left ruins everything it touches. You can add women to the list.

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Western civilisation and all its astonishing achievements in culture, science, medicine and free thinking are being erased from history as the product of ‘dead white males’

By DOUGLAS MURRAY

More than 50 years have gone by since the BBC ran Lord
(Kenneth) Clark’s extraordinary 13-part documentary series Civilisation.

It aimed to give a unified history of Western civilisation, and it did so, informing the understanding of millions of viewers around the world.

In 2018, the BBC tried to follow this up. Civilisations (note the plural this time) was a hodgepodge creation of three different historians, trying desperately to make sure that they didn’t sound as if they were saying the West was better than anywhere else and giving a sort of world history that made nothing very clear.

In a few short decades, the Western tradition has moved from being celebrated to being embarrassing and anachronistic and, finally, to being something shameful. It turned from a story meant to inspire people and nurture them in their lives into a story meant to shame them.

Here was just one example of the cultural war going on in our country, a remorseless assault on everything to do with the Western world, past, present and future. Those waging it rail against all the roots of that tradition and everything good it has produced.

They constantly make one-sided arguments and level unfair claims. They corrupt the language of ideas with the result that words no longer mean what they once did.

They talk of ‘equality’ but do not care about equal rights. They talk of ‘anti-racism’ but sound deeply racist. They speak of ‘justice’ but seem to mean ‘revenge’.

In a demented discourse of their own invention, they have pulled us into a zero-sum discussion that insists the history of the West is a history of patriarchal oppression, sexism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, larceny and much more. They try to lock us into a cycle of unending punishment, with no serious effort at (or even consideration for) its alleviation.

An unfair ledger has been created, one in which the West is treated by one set of standards and the rest of the world by another. A ledger in which it seems that the West can do no right and the rest of the world can do no wrong. Or do wrong only because we in the West made them do it.

I have come to the conclusion that the era we live in is defined by one thing above all — a civilisational shift that is rocking the deep underpinnings of our societies because it is a war on everything in those societies.

A war on everything that has marked our societies out as unusual — even remarkable. A war on everything that the people who live in the West have, until recently, taken for granted.

There are many curiosities in all this. Not the least of them is that while the West is assaulted for everything it has done wrong, it now gets no credit for having got anything right. In fact, these things — including the development of individual rights, religious liberty and pluralism — are held against it.

The culture that gave the world life-saving advances in science, medicine, and a free market that has raised billions of people around the world out of poverty and offered the greatest flowering of thought anywhere is interrogated through a lens of the deepest hostility and simplicity.

The culture that produced Michelangelo, Leonardo, Bernini and Bach is portrayed as if it has nothing relevant to say.

New generations are taught this ignorant view of history. They are offered a story of the West’s failings without spending anything like a corresponding time on its glories. Every schoolchild now knows about slavery. But how many can describe — without irony, cringeing, or caveat — the great gifts that the Western tradition has given to the world?

IF THIS war on the West is to prove unsuccessful, then it will need to be exposed and pushed back against. The trouble is, however, that one side — the side of democracy, reason, rights, and universal principles — has prematurely surrendered.

It is now more than 30 years since student protesters at California’s Stanford University demonstrated against an introductory part of the curriculum called ‘Western culture’. They claimed there was something wrong with teaching the Western canon and the Western tradition.

But what was striking was that the university swiftly gave in, replacing the study of Western culture with the study of many cultures. In the decades that followed, nearly all of academia in the Western world followed Stanford’s lead.

The history of Western thought, art, philosophy, and culture became an ever less communicable subject. Indeed, it became something of an embarrassment: the product of a bunch of ‘dead white males’, to use just one of the charming monikers that entered the language. Since then, every effort to keep alive, let alone revive, the teaching of Western civilisation has met with sustained hostility, ridicule and even violence. Academics who have sought to study Western nations in a neutral light have been prevented from doing their work and subjected to intimidation and defamation, including from colleagues.

Just a couple of decades ago, a course in the history of Western civilisation was commonplace. Today, it is so disreputable that you can’t pay universities to do it.

Of course, some swing of the pendulum is inevitable and may even be desirable. There certainly have been times in the past when the history of the West has been taught as though it is a story of unabashed good. Historical criticism and rethinking are never a bad idea.

However, the hunt for visible, tangible problems shouldn’t become a hunt for invisible, intangible problems. Especially not if they are carried out by dishonest people with the most extreme answers.

If we allow malicious critics to misrepresent and hijack our past, then the future they plan off the back of this will not be harmonious. It will be hell.

That’s why this culture war should not be downplayed by those tempted to think it is just a passing phase. Its outcome will impact the lives of future generations. The stakes here are as high as any fight in the 20th century.

In Britain, as in America, this kicking at the foundations has taken on a special fury in recent years. Just as the Floyd protests in America began with debatable figures and then roared right toward the centre of the nation’s history, so in Britain it burned from the outside in at a record pace.

In the days immediately after the death of George Floyd, a crowd in Bristol attacked a statue of Edward Colston (1636-1721), a local merchant and philanthropist who had been involved in the slave trade.

As the police looked on, the crowd pulled the statue from its plinth, rolled it down the street, and hurled it into the harbour.

As in America, there was a clear elation in the air, a feeling that here — in this permissible vandalism — was something to do. A way to right something. One major problem is that critics of Western civilisation venerate every culture — so long as it is not Western. For instance, all native thought and cultural expression are to be celebrated, just so long as that native culture is not Western. The idea that non-Western ‘indigenous’ cultures are purer and more enlightened than Western culture has not only taken root in our universities but in other institutions, too.

Britain’s National Trust is meant to exist to keep open many of the country’s most beautiful and expensive country houses. Its 5.6 million members tend to enjoy wandering around a stately mansion and then having a spot of afternoon tea.

But in recent years, the Trust has decided it has another job: to educate its visitors about the horrors of the past. And not just connections to empire and the slave trade, homophobia, and the crimes of primogeniture. It has recently chosen to push the idea that the English countryside itself is racist and is (as an academic who is part of the Trust’s Colonial Countryside project calls it) a ‘Green Unpleasant Land’.

I select that one example, but you can look at almost any area of life and find that it has been similarly denounced. Everything — from art, mathematics and music to gardening, sport and food — has been put through the same spin cycle.

This drift towards seeing other cultures as, by definition, better than ours also means that non-Western countries are able to get away with contemporary crimes as monstrous as anything that has happened in the Western past.

This is a habit that some foreign powers encourage. Today, we need look no further than Putin and his casual assumption that what he saw as the degenerate West would simply look the other way when he invaded Ukraine.

After all, if the West is so preoccupied with denigrating itself, what time could it find to look at the rest of the world?

IN THIS anti-West culture, racism is presented as though it has never been worse — at the very point at which it has never been better. Nobody can deny the scourge of racism — a scourge that is to be found in some form throughout recorded history.

Yet, in recent decades, the situation in Western countries has been better than ever. Our societies have made an effort to get ‘beyond race’, led by the example of some remarkable men and women of every racial background, but most notably by some extraordinary black Americans, such as Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and author and civil rights activist James Baldwin.

It was not inevitable that Western societies would develop, or even aspire to, the tradition of racial tolerance that we have.

It was not inevitable that we would end up living in societies that justly regard racism as among the most abhorrent sins. It happened because many brave men and women made the case, fought for that situation, and claimed their rights.

But in recent years, it has come to sound as though that fight never happened. As though it was a mirage. Race is now an issue in all Western countries in a way it has not been for decades.

In fact, the discourse has worsened to the extent that racial minorities who have integrated well, contributed to the West and are even admiring of it are increasingly treated as though they are race traitors. As though another allegiance were expected of them.

Black people and others who want to celebrate the West and add to it are talked to and about as though they were apostates. Love of the society they are in is treated as a point against them.

At the same time, it has become unacceptable to talk about any other society in a remotely similar way. In spite of all the unimaginable abuses perpetrated in our own time by the Communist Party of China, almost nobody speaks of China with an iota of the rage and disgust poured out daily against the West from inside the West.

Western consumers still buy their clothes cheap from China. There is no widespread attempt at a boycott. ‘Made in China’ is not a badge of shame.

Terrible things go on in that country right now, and still it is treated as normal. Authors who refuse to allow their books to be translated into Hebrew are thrilled to see them appear in China.

Because in the developed West some different standard applies.

In the place of colour blindness, we have been pushed into racial ultra-awareness. A deeply warped picture has now been painted.

Like all societies through the ages, all Western nations have racism in their histories. But that is not the only history of our countries. Racism is not the sole lens through which our societies can be understood, and yet it is increasingly the only lens used.

Everything in the past is seen as racist, and so everything in the past is tainted. Though, once again, only in the Western past, thanks to the radical racial lenses that have been laid over everything.

Terrible racism exists at present across Africa, expressed by black Africans against other black Africans. The Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are rife with racism. Travel anywhere in the Middle East — even to the ‘progressive’ Gulf States — and you will see a modern caste system at work.

There are the ‘higher class’ racial groups who run these societies and benefit from them. And then there are the unprotected foreign workers flown in to work for them as an imported labour class.

These people are looked down upon, mistreated, and even disposed of as though their lives were worthless. And in the world’s second most populated country, as anyone who has travelled through India will know, a caste system remains in vivid and appalling operation. This still goes all the way to regarding certain groups of people as ‘untouchable’ for no reason but an accident of birth.

It is a sickening system of prejudice, and it is very much alive. Yet we hear very little about this. Instead, the world gets only a daily report on how the countries in the world that by any measure have the least racism, and where racism is most abhorred, are the homes of racism.

This warped claim even has a final extension, which is that if other countries do have any racism, it must be because the West exported the vice to them.

As though the non-Western world is always made up of innocents from the Garden of Eden.

Why open everything in the West to assault? All aspects of the Western tradition now suffer the same attack. The Judeo-Christian tradition that formed a cornerstone of the Western tradition finds itself under particular assault and denigration.

But so, too, does the tradition of secularism and the Enlightenment, which produced a flourishing in politics, sciences and the arts. And this has consequences. A new generation does not appear to understand even the most basic principles of free thought and free expression.

Indeed, these are themselves attacked by people who don’t understand how or why the West came to the settlements that it did over religion. Nor how the prioritising of science allowed people around the world untold improvements in their lives.

Instead, these inheritances are criticised as examples of Western arrogance, elitism and undeserved superiority. As a result, everything connected with the Western tradition is jettisoned. At education colleges in America, aspiring teachers have been given seminars where they are taught that even the term ‘diversity of opinion’ is ‘white supremacist bulls**t’. Similar pernicious attitudes have already arrived here.

Let me make it clear: I do not want to shut down the considerable debate that is going on at the moment. I enjoy that debate and think it helpful. But to date, it has been riotously one-sided.

Politicians, academics, historians and activists are getting away with saying things that are not simply incorrect or injudicious, but flat-out false. They have got away with it for far too long.

There are many facets to this war on the West. It is carried out across the media and airwaves, and throughout the education system, from as early as preschool.

It is rife within the wider culture, where all major cultural institutions are either coming under pressure or actually volunteering to distance themselves from their own past.

We appear to be in the process of killing the goose that has laid some very golden eggs.

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Hardline Denmark also wants to export refugees

While Britain’s plan to process asylum-seekers in Rwanda has provoked bemusement in much of Europe, it has been welcomed by Denmark, which appears poised to conclude a similar deal.

Since 2015, when more than a million asylum-seekers from Syria and elsewhere arrived in Europe, successive Danish governments of both right and left have introduced, or at least threatened to introduce, headline-grabbing measures to dissuade migrants by making the wealthy and otherwise liberal Scandinavian country seem as unwelcoming as possible.

Mette Frederiksen, the Social Democratic Prime Minister, has said her aim is to reduce the number of people seeking asylum in her country to zero.

One law, passed in 2016, stipulated that newly arrived asylum-seekers should hand over jewellery, gold and other valuables to help pay for their stay. Other measures included labelling areas with high numbers of immigrants “ghettos” and limiting the number of “non-Westerners” who could live in them.

Denmark gave refuge to 30,000 Syrians but ­became the first country in Europe to decide that it was safe for some to return to their homeland. But it has been unable to send them back because it does not have diplomatic relations with Damascus. Caught in legal limbo, they have been sent to so-called expulsion centres.

“Everything the Danish state has done for the past 20 years is about deterrence,” Michala Bendixen, the founder of Refugees Welcome, said last year at one such centre in rural Jutland.

“It is about scaring people away from Denmark. “The message is: you should stay in Germany or France or wherever. Everywhere else is better than here.”

Denmark, like Britain, has been negotiating with Rwanda for months but was pipped to the post by last week’s announcement by British Home Secretary Priti Patel.

The British plans are modelled on Australia’s offshore processing of asylum-seekers on Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island.

Though stressing that a deal has not yet been agreed on, ­Mattias Tesfaye, Ms Patel’s opposite number in Copenhagen, said his talks with the Rwandan government included “a mechanism for the transfer of asylum-seekers and should ensure a more ­dignified approach than the criminal ­network of people smugglers that currently characterises ­migration across the Mediterranean”.

Mr Tesfaye, whose father ­arrived in Denmark as a refugee from Ethiopia, has welcomed Britain’s deal as “a step in the right direction”.

Denmark’s policy, which is in stark contrast with the liberal stance of neighbouring Sweden, began under the right-of-centre minority government of Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who came to power in June 2015 at the height of the migrant crisis and depended on the right-wing Danish People’s Party for his majority.

One of his government’s more controversial proposals was to use Lindholm, a tiny ­island a few kilometres off the coast, to house 100-150 migrants who had served sentences in Denmark for murder, rape and other serious crimes but were ­refusing to ­return to the countries of their birth. The island, immediately dubbed Alcatraz, had been used as a research centre into infectious animal diseases and was contaminated with traces of BSE, foot-and-mouth disease and swine fever. With the locals on the mainland opposed and the bill for decontamination put at 759 million krone ($162m), the plan was shelved.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Ms Frederiksen, whose centre-left coalition replaced Mr Rasmussen’s government in 2019, embraced her predecessor’s policies, which go down well with her party’s working-class voters. The measures have provoked controversy – and seen the country hauled before the European Court of Human Rights. It does, however, appear to have reduced numbers: only 1547 people ­applied for asylum in 2020, a 57 per cent fall from 2019 and the lowest number since the 1990s.

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American Occupation

DAVID MAMET

Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?

No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”

Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?

Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.

Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”

Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.

For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.

Yet I believe there is hope for reason and self-direction. Hispanics in Texas are opposing the policies which have infested their state with the gang violence they fled in Mexico; Ron DeSantis and conservative Floridians have displayed irrefutable common sense, responsibility, and probity, opposing “critical race theory” and the sexual indoctrination of adolescents. Black conservatives, similarly, appeal to the reason of their historically reasonable community, to address the horrors the left has made of the cities. In San Francisco, a place where many of us left our hearts but the natives have historically surrendered their brains, the people voted to remove the wicked fools on their school board. And Bari Weiss founded a university in Austin, Texas, for the pursuit of free thought.

As Tennessee said, “Suddenly there’s God so quickly.”

This is a bit more than facetiousness on my part. I’ve found great comfort in the Torah, counseling Moses again and again, when he was reluctant to fight the power of the Egyptians, and unsure he could do it alone, that he would not be alone, as God would be with him.

What we are seeing through these brave dissenters is the wisdom of the Rumpelstiltskin story. The young woman marries a king who locks her in a cell until she is able to spin flax into gold. She despairs at the impossible task, until an elf shows up and says he’ll show her how. He does so. She asks how she can thank him, and he says all he wants is her firstborn child. And she must give him her child until, or unless, she figures out his name. She is terrified and clueless, but she knows she must try. Eventually, after committing to the task, she guesses his name. What prompted her, frightened though she was, to break the sick cycle? She would not visit her plight upon her child.

Now, the disease having proclaimed itself and its dangers having become clear, it is time for us all to overcome the occupation by standing up to those tyrannies under which we are not prepared to live.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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