POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

Working-class voters didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left them

Jeff Jacoby

MARCY KAPTUR, THE longest-serving female member of Congress in US history, has represented Toledo, Ohio, in the House of Representatives since 1983. Nicknamed "Glass City" because of its many glassmaking companies, Toledo is known to fans of TV's "M*A*S*H" as the hometown of Corporal Max Klinger — who was played by Jamie Farr, a Toledo native. It's also the city where Jeep is headquartered and where the Mud Hens have played Minor League Baseball for well over a century. "But perhaps nothing sums up the Glass City better than hard work," the Toledo Blade observed in 2019, describing the city as a place whose "collar was blue" almost from the day it was settled.

Kaptur, a Democrat, was born and raised in Toledo and absorbed its working-class ethos. But her party, she fears, has lost touch with blue-collar voters like the ones she represents.

For years Kaptur — who describes herself as "a hardscrabble working-class person" — has been warning Democratic leaders that they are losing their traditional connection to working-class Americans. She has compiled a chart that ranks every congressional district by median income, with Democratic-held districts highlighted in blue and those held by Republicans in red. The wealthiest district in America, with a median household income of $157,049, is California's 17th Congressional District, represented in the House by Democrat Ro Khanna. At the bottom of the list is the Puerto Rico district represented by Republican Jenniffer González-Colón, with a median household income of just $22,237.

That is no anomaly. In Washington today, Democrats overwhelmingly represent the wealthiest districts in America, while those with lower incomes are far more likely to send Republicans to Congress.

Things were different when Kaptur came of age.

"In the era in which I was raised, Democrats represented those who have less and Republicans represent those who have more," she has said. In an interview with Business Insider last week, she asked: "How is it possible that Republicans are representing the majority of people who struggle? How is that possible?"

The answer is that Democratic priorities are increasingly out of step with the needs and concerns of voters in poorer, working-class communities.

Upholding the dignity of blue-collar work used to be an integral element of Democratic messaging. In 1968, for example, Lyndon Johnson urged Congress to authorize a manpower program that would help unemployed Americans find jobs — not merely for income, but because work would give them "dignity, independence, and self-sufficiency."

But while Democrats continue to pay lip service to the interests of the working class, they have become the party of cultural elites and intellectuals who have little in common with the non-college-educated working people in heartland communities. "The sad truth," University of California, Davis professor Lisa Pruitt wrote last year in Politico, "is that coastal progressive condescension toward workers has become second nature to many Democrats."

At times that condescension is so raw it makes headlines. Speaking at a San Francisco fundraiser during his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama notoriously described blue-collar residents of "small towns in the Midwest" as "bitter" individuals who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them." Even more notorious was Hillary Clinton's remark in 2016 that half of all Donald Trump's voters fit in a "basket of deplorables," which she characterized as "the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it."

Such disdain helps explain why so many voters who once would have been firmly in the Democratic camp have migrated to the GOP — and why so many Democrats have been unmoved by their departure. "For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania," Senator Chuck Schumer said in July 2016, "we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin." That strategy proved a bust: In the November election four months later, Trump carried Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

At least in a numerical sense, the GOP is now the party of blue-collar America. In 2022, Republicans won an outright majority of working-class votes cast in US House races. Last month, a new Harvard/Harris poll found that in a hypothetical 2024 contest between President Biden and Trump, or between Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, voters without a college degree would support the Republican by a 10-point margin.

Kaptur's valiant efforts to move her party back to its traditional focus on the interests of working people aren't likely to succeed. The Democratic base — blue America — is now in the nation's wealthiest, most highly educated enclaves. Democrats have bid goodbye to the working class, and working-class voters are returning the favor.

https://jeffjacoby.com/26874/working-class-voters-didnt-leave-the-democratic

***********************************************

Women work harder than men – phooey!

Bettina Arndt

‘Women work harder than men,’ so read a sexist headline for an article earlier this year. Hardly unusual, given that the overburdened woman is a favoured theme with a media intent on singing women’s praises and denigrating men at every conceivable opportunity.

But this anthropological study takes the cake. It involved two female anthropologists who, believe it or not, gave Fitbits to farming and herding groups in the Tibetan borderlands. Fitbits are activity trackers which were used by the herding groups to measure the steps taken by men and women in their working day. The anthropologists found that these Tibetan women walked on average just over 12,000 steps per day, while men walked just over 9,000 steps.

‘Women work much harder than men,’ proclaimed the elated anthropologists, claiming that this ‘sheds light on the gender division of work across many different kinds of society’. That makes the assumption that the number of steps matters more than other metrics for measuring work, such as effort in physical lifting, danger in jobs like the village blacksmith, let alone the value of the job, the skills required, and the income generated.

No matter. More grist to the mill celebrating women and putting down men…

The overworked women theme gets a run every time The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes data on how Australians use their time. In the past whenever this data set was released, the Bureau pandered to the feminist narrative with press releases highlighting men’s failure to do as much housework and childcare as women, rarely even mentioning the hugely disproportional amount of paid work done by men.

There’s been complaints to the Bureau about this and finally the organisation responded with a more balanced headline last year when the latest results were published. ‘Females do more unpaid work, males do more paid work,’ said the ABS media release, but naturally this resulted in flurry of news reports highlighting women’s burden and not even mentioning the male contribution. Totally omitted from all media coverage was the fact that the amount of extra work done by men is huge – men work 46 per cent more paid hours than women.

The ABS does not make it easy to figure out who really works harder overall. We decided to take a look at total contributions to the household, including childcare, domestic activities, as well as time for education and employment-related activities. That gives a measure of how busy men and women are, but excluding personal activities like recreation, shopping, personal care, social interaction etc.

Looking at the data this way, we find all the previous surveys showed men were busier contributing to their households than women. But last year the results were from a survey taken during Covid lockdowns when there wasn’t so much paid work going on, and this showed women as fractionally busier, namely 15 minutes per day.

But here’s the truth about how men pulled their weight during Covid for their families and the response they should have received if we had a fairer media.

Fathers worked 70 per cent more hours than partnered males without children – an average of 5:33 per day vs 3:16. Thanks Dads for working so hard to provide for your families.

Partnered women without kids worked 27 per cent less time than unpartnered women – 2:34 vs 3:32. That’s so generous of you to support them, guys.

Male sole parents spent 170 per cent more time educating themselves than females. What a great example for your kids.

Male sole parents also coped much better than females – being much less likely to feel rushed or pressed for time. Good job, Dads.

Men spent 38 per cent more time helping out friends and neighbours. Your community appreciates that support.

Men also increased the amount of time spent on domestic activities by 34 per cent (women’s time didn’t change). You showed them that given a chance, men do their bit.

When child-care facilities closed down during Covid, it was mainly fathers who stepped up – increasing child-care time by 67 per cent compared to previous surveys (female increase was 10 per cent). Thanks, Dads. We know many of you loved that extra time with your kids.

All this talk about unpaid work provides a convenient smokescreen diverting attention from the central fact that men’s hugely greater paid working hours make male earnings absolutely critical to the family enterprise. It may be very unfashionable to talk about men as breadwinners but that’s still the yoke that most partnered men bear.

Many years ago, I wrote an article for the Fairfax newspapers’ Good Weekend magazine about who gets the better deal in marriage. It was a real struggle getting the article approved.

In it I told a story about a Victorian teacher, Mary, who had been planning to retire early from her job. But then her surveyor husband, John, accepted his company’s early retirement package to pursue his life-long dream to work as an artist. When I interviewed Mary, her husband was painting three days a week and spending the rest of his time on community work. He was as happy as Larry.

Mary loved her job but wasn’t keen on spending ten more years in a very demanding, stressful position. ‘I’d prefer to be part-time but then I think, “No, I can’t. I have no choice.”’

She envied John’s freedom. ‘Who did you have lunch with today?’ she’d ask him, through gritted teeth. ‘I ask about his day and feel like stabbing him to death!’ she said, with a good-natured chuckle. She admitted she can’t understand why men aren’t complaining more about their side of the deal. ‘I don’t understand why it doesn’t build up more resentment.’

Well, we live in a society that is so busy highlighting women’s drudgery that men simply aren’t allowed to complain about being forced to work full-time all their lives to pay the mortgage, often in jobs they hate, whilst many women still have choices. They often have the option of dropping out of the workforce to care for young children and then, returning to shorter working hours if at all, and retiring far earlier.

The result, of course, is far less superannuation. I wrote two years ago exposing feminist myths about older impoverished women and privileged men, pointing out that women’s lower super is a direct result of a lifetime spent working less than men. They get to spend their partners’ higher earnings – women control the purse strings in most relationships – and they are usually beneficiaries of their partners’ retirement benefits.

Naturally, in a civilised world, there wouldn’t be a competition about who works harder. Sensible folk realise men and women must work as a team to share the burdens and rewards of family life. But that reality doesn’t suit the feminist narrative promoting winners and losers in their endless gender war.

Finally, two funny little good news items.

The first emerged with the release of another survey from the ABS – this time the Personal Safety Survey, the source of Australia’s best data on domestic violence. The Australian reported the exciting news that despite all the alarmist reporting predicting a second ‘pandemic’ of domestic violence during lockdown, that violence actually fell during that period. This important news was ignored by all other media.

Back in August 2021, I wrote a blog about the feminists’ great Covid domestic violence fundraiser which revealed that all the proper evidence at that time was showing no increase in violence. But despite this, the feminist’s lobbying produced an astonishing 150 per cent increase in the domestic violence industry’s annual handout from the Feds – leaping from $100 to $250 million per annum at least until 2022-23.

Surely, we can find some parliamentarians to ask questions in Senate Estimates suggesting this money be paid back, now that official proof is in that it was based on a fraud?

Then there was delightful news from ANROWS, showing we may be winning the propaganda war. Their latest four-yearly survey shows almost half of Australians believe women and men equally commit domestic violence, more than 1/3rd believe that women going through custody battles make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence, while a similar number believed it is common for sexual assault accusations to be used as a way of getting back at men.

The ABC naturally expressed much alarm at this development. But we were rejoicing. The truth is finally winning through. Hallelujah.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/women-work-harder-than-men-phooey/

*******************************************

SPLC to Face the Music for ‘Hate Group’ Defamation as Lawsuit Clears Major Hurdle

The Southern Poverty Law Center routinely brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, but most lawsuits aiming to hold the SPLC accountable for this alleged defamation have failed.

On Friday, however, a federal judge denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit, allowing the case to proceed.

The SPLC branded the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society an “anti-immigrant hate group” in February 2018 after the SPLC had previously stated in 2011 that it did not consider the society a “hate group.” The society, named after a 16-year-old Georgia boy killed in a 2000 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant, aims to combat illegal immigration.

“After telling the Associated Press in 2011 that we were not a ‘hate group,’ the SPLC changed their mind and made us an ‘anti-immigrant hate group’ within days of their registering as active lobbyists against pro-enforcement, immigration-related legislation here in the Georgia Capitol,” D.A. King, the society’s founder and president, told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement Tuesday.

King claimed that the SPLC’s “goal was clearly to paint us as the extremists and to marginalize us in the eyes of state lawmakers and the media. That effort was largely successful.”

As I explain in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC took the program it used to monitor the Ku Klux Klan—the Intelligence Project—and weaponized it against conservatives and Christians, branding them “hate groups” in an effort to raise money and demonize its ideological opponents. The SPLC has an endowment of more than $500 million and bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. Amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal in 2019 that led the SPLC to fire its co-founder, a former employee came forward, calling the “hate” accusations a “highly profitable scam.”

King’s lawsuit quotes Heidi Beirich—then-director of the Intelligence Project—who told The Associated Press in 2011 that the SPLC did not consider the society a “hate group,” but rather listed King as a “nativist.”

“His tactics have generally not been to get up in the face of actual immigrants and threaten them,” Beirich said. “Because he is fighting, working on his legislation through the political process, that is not something we can quibble with, whether we like the law or not.”

The lawsuit claims that the SPLC did not indicate that King or the Dustin Inman Society had changed their activities between 2011 and 2018—in fact, many of the statements and activities the SPLC cites as evidence that the society is a “hate group” date back to before 2011.

The lawsuit cites an SPLC definition for “anti-immigrant hate group” that dates back to 2020, which no longer appears on the SPLC website—although the center appears not to have adopted a new definition:

Anti-immigrant hate groups are the most extreme of the hundreds of nativist groups that have proliferated since the late 1990s, when anti-immigration xenophobia began to rise to levels not seen in the United States since the 1920s. Most white hate groups are also anti-immigrant, but anti-immigrant hate groups single out that population with dehumanizing and demeaning rhetoric. Although many groups legitimately criticize American immigration policies, anti-immigrant hate groups go much further by pushing racist propaganda and ideas about non-white immigrants.

While the SPLC brands the society an “anti-immigrant hate group,” it does not point to any specific evidence that King or the society “maligned an entire class of people” or fit the definition cited above. “Further, a cursory review of [Plaintiff] DIS’s website would have revealed that the Board of Advisors of [Plaintiff] DIS is a diverse group of Americans with a variety of racial and immigrant backgrounds,” the lawsuit alleges.

Inger Eberhart, a member of the society’s board and its director of communications, is a black woman; Everette Robinson and Catherine Davis are also black; Mary Grabar is a legal immigrant from Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia); Maria Litland is a legal immigrant who appears on the Austrian Society of America website; and Sabine Durden-Coulter immigrated legally from Germany. Durden-Coulter lost her son in a 2012 car crash caused by an illegal immigrant (with no connection to the crash that killed Dustin Inman).

While the SPLC claimed not to have any knowledge of the society’s board in legal filings, the SPLC’s article on the society notes its “eight-member board of advisors.”

The lawsuit alleges that the SPLC twisted statements from King and Fred Elbel, another member of the society’s board, out of context.

The SPLC quotes King in a 2007 Georgia Republican Club meeting, warning that certain illegal immigrants are “not here to mow your lawn—they’re here to blow up your buildings and kill your children, and you, and me.” King sent The Daily Signal a link to the original report on the meeting, which shows that King was referring to illegal immigrants “from countries with known ties to terrorism.”

The SPLC also quotes Elbel’s words—in which the board member claims to “hate ’em all,” listing a broad swath of ethnic and other groups including White Anglo-Saxon Protestants—from a 2004 internal Sierra Club offshoot discussion group post Elbel says he intended as parody.

King sent a demand letter on Feb. 10, 2020, ordering the SPLC to retract its “hate group” accusation. The SPLC did not respond and continued to repeat the “verifiably false fabrication and accusation,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit notes that “by repeatedly claiming the mantle of specialized knowledge and expertise, and using a specific, fact-based definition to determine what a ‘hate group’ is,” the SPLC’s accusation “causes severe reputational damage and for the target to live in a climate of constant fear for personal safety and that of his family.”

The lawsuit cites the 2012 terrorist attack in which a man targeted the Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., after finding the council on the SPLC’s “hate map.” The man pleaded guilty to committing an act of terrorism and received a 25-year prison sentence. The SPLC condemned the attack, but has kept the Family Research Council on its hate map ever since.

The lawsuit also cites the March 2017 protest against Charles Murray, instigated by the SPLC’s accusation that Murray engages in “racist pseudoscience.”

The lawsuit also lists a plethora of statements the SPLC has made about the society, which King claims to be blatant falsehoods. Among other things, the SPLC has claimed the Dustin Inman Society was incorporated in 2003, when King in fact founded it in 2005; it has claimed that the DIS was previously known as the American Resistance Foundation; it has claimed that King worked on immigration issues since the 1990s, although he did not become interested in the issues until 2003; and it claimed King worked for the Georgia Coalition of Immigration Reduction in the 1990s, which he claims to be false.

“These admissions taken together show that Defendant SPLC not only fails to investigate or have expertise at all on groups it monitors, but instead shows reckless disregard for the truth and does not appear to perform any fact-finding at all, before labeling … DIS a ‘hate group,’” the lawsuit states.

King is seeking a trial, compensatory damages, punitive damages, and a permanent injunction ordering the SPLC to remove its accusations and issue a public retraction and apology.

While a judge dismissed a previous version of King’s lawsuit without prejudice in March 2022, the society’s president filed a new lawsuit in June. Judge W. Keith Watkins denied the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the new lawsuit on Friday. The judge’s ruling allows the lawsuit to proceed to the discovery phase, in which the society can demand the SPLC hand over documents to prove its case and the SPLC can demand society documents to defend itself.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/04/breaking-splc-face-music-hate-group-defamation-lawsuit-clears-major-hurdle

**********************************************

The Guilty Rich aren't 'Woke', they just want to look 'Woke'

In an excellent essay on Unherd, Kathleen Stock, while looking at whether or not Britain has a liberal elite, hit on a very important social phenomenon: what I call the ‘guilty rich’.

“What they do have is a suppressed sense of guilt for being so rich, a vague fear that they might make the wrong joke, and a fervent hope that the moralising will stop soon so they can talk about the football or cricket instead. Many of them also have children who lecture them about social justice. They can’t stand up to them either.”

We have a generation of successful people who, if not intellectually certainly emotionally, have swallowed the marxist claptrap about their riches being somehow obtained at the expense of people who aren’t rich. This sense of guilt, to my thinking, explains the continued existence of the Liberal Democrats as a sort of scapegoat onto which these guilt-ridden millionaires can offload their sins by voting for trendy-sounding (“Layla’s a pansexual you know”) people espousing right-on policies while not rocking their selfish economic boat by, for example, supporting the building of houses, warehouses or reservoirs.

So when we talk about the ‘British Elite’ we are, in part, talking about these people. As Stock points out, such folk are not personally ‘woke’ or even especially liberal it’s just that while they are “... not intolerant of political disagreements; it’s just that people don’t really have them at dinner parties.” These successful people are, to make a link with a more lower class bunch, just richer posher Deanos.

“Deano is a man in his late 20s or 30s, is married (or is at least in a long-term relationship), works in real estate or some similar service profession, is comfortable but not rich, is too busy enjoying the finer things in life to be engaged in politics and crucially – is a homeowner.”

The question is whether the rich and successful but not politically engaged or interested people - mostly men - who Stock describes represents the elite or just a group of people whose wealth and success insulates them from the worst excesses of the ‘woke’ world? Or maybe they embrace ‘wokeness’ - hyperliberalism - publicly at least partly out of fear. Ed West, writing on the same issue seems to suggest so:

“Why do people consistently think that they have to pretend to be more progressive to rise up in their chosen careers? Because those are the establishment views. If I was advising a young person going to work in any area of the British establishment, whether the civil service, MI5, the National Trust, the judiciary, the Girl Guides, the education bureaucracy or anything else, I would advise them to keep any conservative opinions to themselves.”

Perhaps the rich, as well as being guilty, are increasingly fearful. Stories about ‘cancel culture’ and the hounding of people from office for breaking one or other progressive taboo make these people, regardless of their success, ever more worried about what they say and do. This especially applies to those heading up organisations where the middle management now filled with millennial humanities and social science graduates steeped in the ideologies of hyperliberalism. Peter Klein and Nicholai Foss published some research into this suggestion and argued that:

“Wokeness arises from middle managers and support personnel using their delegated responsibility and specialist status to engage in woke internal advocacy, which may increase their influence and job security.”

We can probably argue all day about what we might mean by ‘wokeness’ but it is noteworthy that Klein & Foss’s contention didn’t get dismissed out of hand. Indeed Ed West in the article I cite above hints at the same issues, pointing at ‘Diversity, Equalities and Inclusion’ (DEI) as a factor in creating a more fearful world for ‘unwoke’ senior executives: “...almost every major institution has sizeable DEI departments whose function is to make progressive ideas the social norm.”

So it isn’t just that, as Kathleen Stock hinted, the powerful and successful are guilty about their riches but that they are also fearful of those who work for them, people granted power by the law to assert rights and protections. Senior management fear accusations of racism, misogyny, transphobia or homophobia and tend therefore to behave like The Bear Who Left it Alone and bend over too far backwards in making sure they don’t offend what they see as the expectations of DEI (and very often Human Resources in general). The problem is that this over-reaction creates a new problem for the organisation by making frankly ridiculous things hard to question or challenge. To continue with James Thurber’s teetotal bear:

“In the end he became a famous teetotaler and a persistent temperance lecturer. He would tell everybody that came to his house about the awful effects of drink, and he would boast about how strong and well he had become since he gave up touching the stuff. To demonstrate this, he would stand on his head and on his hands and he would turn cartwheels in the house, kicking over the umbrella stand, knocking down the bridge lamps, and ramming his elbows through the windows. Then he would lie down on the floor, tired by his healthful exercise, and go to sleep. His wife was greatly distressed and his children were very frightened.”

The downside risk of not being woke (as an institutional leader or senior manager) remains, however, far greater than the downside risk of bending over backwards to accommodate a middle management steeped in hyperliberal ideology. In the latter case the worst might be a critical article in the Daily Mail or a Tory MP spluttering about it at PMQs, in the former case the leader might find themselves out of a job. And while being brave and out of a job sounds heroic, our institutional boss has a big mortgage, school fees to pay and the annual skiing trip to fund. A little bit of public wokeness is as nothing next to the instinctive self-preservation of top managers!

I’ve a feeling that, while the guilty rich (as Kathleen Stock and Ed West suggest) are not especially woke, they do not see hyperliberalism as either a threat to the institutions they lead or as a problem for wider society. They may be privately conservative - married, family, old-fashioned personal values, entirely content with capitalism - but they are ideologically liberal in that their instinct is to support greater ‘rights’ and to protect minorities. Our guilty rich know they can protect themselves and their families from the worst of ‘woke’ and worry far more, at least in private, about the left’s economic agenda than about its social aims. And they see value in projecting something of the hyperliberal to the world since it may, as well as protecting them from cancel culture, provide new opportunities for advancement.

I don’t know who is or isn’t elite. I’ve a suspicion that, ‘woke’ or not, most of the people running the nation’s grand institutions have a genealogy encompassing a lot of people who used to run those same institutions 50, 70 or 100 years ago. The fact that Giles with his Oxbridge degree in English Literature prides himself on being very liberal as he climbs the ranks in the civil service doesn’t mean he isn’t, with his Rear-Admiral grandfather and Oxford professor uncle, firmly part of the nation's establishment, with all the privilege that grants. The problem is that Giles, and hundreds of other Giles’, tell us that they aren’t part of the elite and point to anonymous (or merely Tory) people over there as the people who are really running the country’s institutions.

In one respect those Tories and assorted anonymous bankers and businessmen are running the country but these people are dependent on Giles and his ilk to do that running. So they seek to neutralise hyperliberalism by bringing it inside the tent (such as when the new Conservative government in 2010 enthusiastically completed Labour’s Equalities Act) so as to sound good and look right. PR and HR departments shovel out press releases and policies designed to present the right image to what they perceive as a ‘woke’ millennial market - Pride days, lighting up the HQ on Trans Visibility Day, celebrating ethnic diversity, and encouraging non-Muslim employees to forgo lunch during Ramadan. Sensitivity training is given to staff and rules are passed about pronouns and gender identity. And the guilty rich who run the organisations and institutions feel confident their position is safe, they won’t be called out, won’t get cancelled and will get the big promotion when Sir Gerald retires.

https://simoncooke.substack.com/p/the-guilty-rich-arent-woke-they-just