Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Victim Culture Is Killing American Manhood



By David French
Tuesday, September 29, 2015

I grew up in rural Kentucky, where the process of becoming a man meant gaining toughness, shedding weakness, and learning how to take care of yourself and others. This was simply understood, not just by fathers and sons but also by mothers and teachers. In one grade-school incident, I got into a playground fight with another boy and knocked him to the ground. As the teacher rushed up to separate us, she demanded to know what happened. “He said I hit like a girl,” I told her. “Is this true?” She asked my friend. Rubbing his face, he nodded. “Well then, you deserved it,” she said. And that was that.

I thought of that minor playground scrap — and many others like it — when reading through Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning’s brilliant new paper, “Microaggression and Moral Culture.” (The full article costs $30.00, but Jonathan Haidt has written an excellent summary on his website). Campbell and Manning contend that we’re in the midst of a key cultural change. Prior to the 18th and 19th centuries, we lived in an “honor culture,” “where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own.” And while the honor culture tended to be somewhat violent — dueling is a classic response to an aggrieved sense of honor — it also carried with it an inherent limitation: Because personal insults required a personal response, people were more likely to count the cost of confrontation.

As western civilization built an elaborate rule of law, “dignity culture” replaced honor culture. In a dignity culture, in Haidt’s words, people “foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means.” The southern culture of my childhood was a hybrid, where honor was earned. Violence was certainly possible in this culture, but all parties would appeal to authority when life or limb hung in the balance. The bottom line was that you either ignored minor transgressions or you learned to step up, personally, to deal with offense.

The honor and dignity cultures, however, face new competition from an insidious development: victim culture. In victim culture, people are encouraged “to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized.” This is the culture of the micro-aggression, where people literally seek out opportunities to be offended. Once “victimized,” a person gains power — but not through any personal risk. Indeed, it is the victim’s hypersensitivity and fragility that makes them politically and socially strong.

Not only is this mindset destabilizing — there is high incentive for conflict, with little to no personal risk to balance the desire for vengeance — it’s unmanly. In victim culture, a person cultivates their sense of weakness and fragility, actively retarding the process of growing up. There is zero incentive to mature, because maturity can actually decrease your power and influence.

While I don’t mean to say that women haven’t traditionally gone through the process of becoming tougher — of building thicker skins and handling conflicts directly — developing toughness used to be a defining male characteristic. We were to put aside the childish weakness and vulnerability of our early years and work out our conflicts man-to-man, the better to deploy them judiciously since we knew their price. The concept of appealing for help because one’s “feelings were hurt” was frankly bizarre.

Raising boys to be whiny victims isn’t exactly new. When I first moved to the Northeast in the mid-1990s I noticed that many of the boys raised by the liberal elite weren’t “men” in any sense I could recognize. They were whiny, petulant, hypersensitive, and incapable of either physical self-defense or even the most rudimentary tasks of manual labor. I thought they were so self-evidently off-putting that their cultural influence would be limited. I was wrong.

I’d underestimated the allure of victim status — the ease with which one can achieve power and sympathy all at once. Victim status is so desirable that it’s constantly faked and exaggerated, and claims that one is not a victim are met with indignation. It’s almost amusing, for example, to see wealthy kids at America’s most elite colleges — among the most privileged children in world history — compete to claim the most horrifying story of upset and oppression.

At the time, my schoolyard tussle wasn’t that significant — just another day in the life of a boy growing up in the South. My response to my friend wasn’t right, but it wasn’t a big deal, and no one treated it as such. Today, it would change my life in all the wrong ways. At most present-day American schools, both of us would be punished for violating zero-tolerance policies on violence, and the reference to “hitting like a girl” would cause an uproar over gender discrimination, mandatory counseling, and possible expulsion.

The only proper response to this sorry state of affairs is to confront the crybabies until they man up or shut up. No more yielding to the utter nonsense of social media shame campaigns, hand-wringing deans of students, or idiotic, politically correct corporate press releases. There are real victims out there, and real victims need actual men to stand in their defense.

The Grisly Reality of Wealthy Middle Eastern Thug Privilege



By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, September 30, 2015

You’ve heard endlessly about “white privilege” from the professional social-justice-warrior gripers. But rarely does that crusading crowd — or their spiritual leaders in the White House — acknowledge the brutal impact of wealthy Middle Eastern thug privilege in America.

I’m looking especially at you, Barack, Michelle, and Valerie Jarrett (who hosted Black Lives Matter activists at 1600 Pennsylvania last week).

The latest case of WMET privilege involves a well-connected Saudi prince arrested on Wednesday after allegedly sexually assaulting a woman at his $40 million Beverly Hills rental mansion. Witnesses reported seeing a bloodied woman screaming for help as she scrambled over an eight-foot wall surrounding the property. LAPD officers charged 28-year-old Majed Abdulaziz al-Saud with sodomy, battery, and false imprisonment.

Celebrate diversity!

(No word, by the way, on whether or how this accused brute is related to Saudi princess Buniah al-Saud, who pleaded no contest in 2002 to charges of beating her Indonesian maid in Florida. She was fined a measly $1,000 and let loose.)

So, where is al-Saud now? Long gone, no doubt. His royal benefactors forked over $300,000 to bail out the privileged jet-setter. Neighbors say the estate has been evacuated. Al-Saud has an October 19 court date.

But don’t expect him to show any more respect for our laws than another fellow wealthy Middle Eastern thug who has recently gone on the lam. Sheikh Khalid bin Hamad Al Thani of Qatar, owner of a Ferrari caught racing illegally through another Beverly Hills enclave, is nowhere to be found. A driver believed to be either Al Thani or one of his drag-racing opponents bragged to a witness that he had diplomatic immunity and could get away with murder, and then spat “F**k America” before disappearing.

Meanwhile, three other women have stepped forward to file a civil complaint against al-Saud alleging “extreme,” “outrageous,” and “despicable” behavior by the prince at the sprawling compound. The workers say they were “deprived of their freedom of movement by use of physical barriers, force, threats of force, menace, fraud, deceit, and unreasonable duress.”

Feckless Foggy Bottom bureaucrats at Obama’s State Department, as usual, have no comment on either case. But hey, check out all those White House tweets protesting the “war on women”!

Does Washington apathy about the Saudi sex slave trade on American soil sound familiar? It should. In 2013, I reported on two Filipina women who escaped a Saudi diplomatic compound in Virginia after suffering abuse. They were taken into protective custody by Department of Homeland Security personnel. The gated complex is owned by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Armed Forces Office, whose personnel reportedly enjoy full diplomatic immunity.

DHS refused to respond to my follow-up inquiries about the case. The status of the alleged assailant remains unknown. This spring, Walden Bello, chairman of the Overseas Workers Affairs Committee in the Philippine House of Representatives, revealed that one of the abused workers “was sent back to Jeddah to take care of the mother” of the alleged attacker.

Let’s hope the worker hasn’t run into Meshael Alayban, wife of Abdulrahman bin Nasser bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, who is allegedly back in her home country after wiggling out of felony human trafficking charges in Orange County, Calif., two years ago. A Kenyan maid escaped from Alayban’s compound and told police that Alayban confiscated her passport, refused to abide by an employment contract, and forbade the worker from returning to her home country — where she had an ailing seven-year-old daughter.

LAPD officers discovered four other domestic workers from the Philippines at Alayban’s estate who pleaded to be freed from Saudi bondage. But after handing over a cool $5 million in bail, Alayban’s lawyers had the charges dropped.

You’ll note that most of these cases of oppression and subjugation involve rich and powerful assailants “of color” exploiting poor victims “of color.” Don’t their lives matter, too? Apparently not. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have looked the other way. Once again, political correctness and diplomatic fecklessness in the coddling of our Muslim “allies” trump “progressive” American rhetoric about women’s rights and social justice.

Middle East oil money talks. Sex slave-trafficking, maid-abusing, sodomy-terrorizing defendants walk.

Good Riddance, John Boehner



By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The impending departure of Speaker of the House John Boehner gives House Republicans a real opportunity to accomplish something. But an opportunity is not a guarantee. It is a little like a football team being first down and goal at the ten-yard line.

You have a good chance of scoring a touchdown from there — if you can get your act together. But you could also find yourself having to settle for a field goal. Or for a missed field goal.

And of course you can also fumble the ball and have the other team grab it — and run it all the way back across the field to score a touchdown against you. With Republicans, it would be chancy to make a bet as to which of these scenarios is most likely.

Speaker Boehner had a tough hand to play, given the internal splits among House Republicans. But Boehner’s biggest problem was Boehner. And it is a recurring Republican problem.

Nothing epitomized Boehner’s wrong-headedness like an occasion when he emerged from the White House, after a conference with President Obama and others, to face a vast battery of microphones and television cameras.

Here was a golden opportunity for Speaker Boehner to make his case directly to the American people, unfiltered by the media. Instead, he just walked over to the microphones and cameras, briefly expressed his disgust with the conference he had just come from, and then walked on away.

Surely Boehner knew, going into this White House conference, that it could fail.

And, surely, he knew that there would be an opportunity immediately afterwards to present his case to the public. But, like so many Republican leaders over the years, he seemed to have no sense of the importance of doing so — or for the time and effort needed to prepare for such an opportunity beforehand.

Whoever the next Speaker of the House is, someone should have a plaque made up to put on his desk — a plaque reading: talk, dammit!

If the political situation in Washington is such that many of the expectations of Republican voters cannot be met, then at least take the time and trouble to spell that out in plain language to the public.

Maybe the smug consultants in Washington don’t think the public can understand. But Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections by doing what subsequent Republican leaders disdained to do.

In between, he accomplished what was called “the Reagan revolution” without ever having a majority in both Houses of Congress. He could go over the heads of Congressional Democrats and explain to the public why certain legislation was needed — and once he won over the voters, Democrats in Congress were not about to jeopardize their reelection chances by going against them.

One of the secrets of Reagan’s political success was a segment of the population that was called “Reagan Democrats.” These were voters who traditionally voted for Democrats but who had been won over to Reagan’s agenda.

Contrary to the thinking — or lack of thinking — among today’s Republican leaders, Reagan did not go to these Democratic voters and pander to them by offering them a watered-down version of what the Democrats were offering. He took his case to them and talked — yes, talked – to let them know what his own agenda offered to them and to the country.

Today’s Republicans who proclaim a need to “reach out” to a wider constituency almost invariably mean pandering to those groups’ current beliefs, not showing them how your agenda and your principles — if you have any — apply to their situation and to the good of the country.

You won’t swing a whole constituency of Democrats your way, and neither did Ronald Reagan. But he swung enough of them to win elections and to force Congressional Democrats to respect the “Reagan Democrats” he had won over.

There are issues on which Republicans can appeal to blacks — school choice being just one obvious and important issue. And it is unlikely that all Hispanic voters want open borders, through which criminals can come in and settle in their communities.

But unspoken words will never tap these sources of votes, nor perhaps even convince Congressional Republicans. And if the quarterback is unsure of what to do, being first and goal on the ten-yard line may not mean much.

Lena Dunham’s Successfully Disastrous Hillary Clinton Interview



By Leslie Loftis
Wednesday, September 30, 2015

I had low expectations for Lena Dunham’s interview of Hillary Clinton, which Politico teased last week. Neither are exemplary women outside of profession and money, and even that is a matter of perspective. Are they simply two white women with some combination of family money, name, and connections pretending they are feminist icons? Most of the Right and some feminists certainly think so.

So I expected the interview to use “feminist” as a pose. The term is so unpopular, a pose is really its only practical use any more, signaling to a particular set of professional white women that you share their views on the general uselessness of men and the absolute necessity of abortion. But now, having read the interview, I wonder who in the world does Clinton’s or Dunham’s audience research. She needs another day job.

Hillary needs support from millennial women. Her numbers started falling a while ago, and Dunham is the millennial woman with a ton of press. Hardly all of that press is good, however, and the good stuff comes from an echo of the few women who admire Dunham and her hardly-watched-but-often-discussed HBO series, “Girls.” Women who admire “Girls” are already Clinton supporters, so if I were one of Clinton’s consultants, I would not have recommended a Dunham interview.

Still, it is worse than I expected.

Lena Dunham, Right-Wing Double Agent

First, we have the drawing of Clinton anchoring the interview. The interview is only available as an email, so I can’t link, plus you need to see it with the GIF active for full effect. It is Hillary Clinton drawn from below and on the right. She is in a hot pink (Gendered color!) suit with a string of pearls around her neck. Her arms are crossed, which gives her shoulder to the viewer. One of the two GIF elements has her drumming her right index finger impatiently on her left arm. Her chin is up and out, looking down upon the reader. Her lips are pursed in impatient disapproval, and—I am not making this up—the other GIF element is shifty eyes.
Hillary
Yes, the female candidate for the Democratic nomination, the one with a reputation for coldness and an ongoing scandal about her untrustworthiness, is drawn as smug, impatient, and shifty-eyed. On the drawing alone we need to revisit Mollie Hemingway’s theory that Dunham is a conservative Hollywood double agent.

Second, there’s the fawning. I didn’t expect Dunham to ask tough questions. She is “in the bag” for Clinton, something she says in the introduction. Still, the fawning is impressive. An excerpt about salmon (you know, the fish that swim upstream to spawn and the analogy a famous singer used to describe Bill Clinton when news of his sexual bents started to surface):


    So, so many of our Lenny readers are women in their 20s who are in that hazy space between college and the real world. They’re not sure what they want to be, how they’re going to be that. And we wondered how you felt when you graduated from college. For example, I worked at a children’s clothing store, which I was terrible at. I read that you went and worked at a salmon cannery in Alaska, which sounded like a fairly post-collegiate move. I wondered what inspired that and whether you ever had that moment of indecision.

    Absolutely. I don’t trust anybody who says that they didn’t have some questions in their 20s. That’s a period of such exploration and often torment in people’s lives. And so, when I graduated from college, I had made the decision I was going to go to law school, but it was a hard decision. I wasn’t quite sure that was exactly the right thing to do, but I thought I would give it a try.

    But first, I went off with some friends on this jaunt. We drove all the way up to Alaska, went up the then-unpaved Alcan Highway, and we took odd jobs. I washed dishes. I did end up working in a fishery, where the salmon were brought in, and we had different jobs. My first job was to gut the salmon. That meant that I had a pair of hip boots and a spoon, and there were some gentlemen from Japan who were experts in taking out the caviar. But then they would throw the carcass in the pile, and I had to take each one and clean out all that was left. I was trying to do a good job, so I was scraping and scraping, and they’re screaming at me in Japanese, and somebody else is screaming at me in English. I didn’t last long then.

    Then I was kicked upstairs to do packing, so I was packing the salmon. You had to pack head-tail, head-tail, head-tail. And I noticed that some of them didn’t look really healthy to me. So I raised it with the guy who was running the plant. He said, ‘What do you care? They’re gonna be shipped overseas! Nobody in America’s gonna eat them.’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t think that’s right. We shouldn’t be sending salmon that’s gonna make anybody sick.’ He said, ‘Oh, just don’t worry about it.’ Anyway, I go home that night, I go back the next day, and the whole operation has disappeared.

    Wow.

    Uh-huh. They disappeared. I guess they worried that some of us would have said something to someone. So I didn’t get paid for that work. But it was called ‘sliming.’ That’s what I started off doing. And I’ve often said it was a great experience for being in politics. You get the connection.

    To be a practitioner of sliming!

    Being a slimer, so to speak. Right?

    Of course!

    To be slimed, or slime. So, then I did go to law school…


Oh, there is slime, for certain.

Third, we have the fashion discussion. Dunham asks Clinton about a shoulderless dress from her Arkansas days, and Clinton name-drops Donna Karan. They end the interview on this point, actually, with Karan’s idea that one’s shoulders always look good even while the rest of us ages. (Cult of youth that holds women back!) Dunham signs off with, “Madam Secretary, thank you so much. We value your shoulder stuff.”

It is almost a dance at this point. To woo young female voters, Democrats routinely talk sex or fashion, because that’s what they think the young girls want to hear about. Just as routinely, Democrats, specifically feminists, complain that the Right thinks the young are only interested in sex and fashion. We are pandering, but they are being relevant. That’s the narrative. Again, with so many narratives, eventually they fall apart when the actions do not match the message.

Really, that is what’s on display in the Dunham-Clinton interview. Hillary Clinton is trying to act like an everyday gal who happens to be seeking the office of the presidency of the United States while looking smug, dropping words like “inchoate” in casual conversation, and talking dresses with a starlet not popular for her fashion sense. It all grates. And it all emphasizes that she isn’t who she says she is. Ever. I doubt she even knows herself anymore.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

We’re Not That Far from a Balanced Budget



By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Americans are funny about taxes: When we complain about them, we don’t moan that we are paying too much — we lament that others are paying too little. In a Pew Research Center poll last year, only 27 percent of Americans cited their own tax liabilities among their complaints about the tax code, while 64 percent complained that other taxpayers — the wicked 1 percenters, the dreaded corporations — were getting off too easy.

If you’ve ever met anybody who believes that we can balance the budget by cutting foreign aid, that the Social Security “trust fund” is a real thing rather than a figure of speech, or who is a Trump enthusiast, you know that certain Americans are not about to let their minds be troubled by facts.

But here are the facts:

One, Americans earning $100,000 or more pay basically all of the federal income taxes, about 80 percent. That is far in excess of their portion of national income (“national income” being another thing that does not exist but which we are obliged to talk about), and they are only about 15 percent of all taxpayers. Households earning $250,000 or more, a tiny group (2.4 percent of taxpayers) pay about half of all federal income taxes, which is, again, disproportionate to their income relative to the rest of the population.

Two, wealthy people and corporations do not, in the main, benefit from arcane exclusions and sweetheart provisions in the tax code. As Josh Barro notes in his unimpressed analysis of Donald Trump’s tax plan in the New York Times, exemptions and deductions taken by those earning between $500,000 and $10 million a year add up to about 12 percent of their income. That figure is very much in line with the exemptions and deductions enjoyed by those with less exalted paychecks.

Third, populist rhetoric of the Trump-Sanders variety notwithstanding, hedge-fund managers do not in the main escape progressive taxation. Hedge-fund managers are generally compensated on a “2 and 20” model — they charge a 2 percent management fee on the assets invested with their funds and then a 20 percent performance fee on profits earned by their investors above a certain threshold. The 2 percent management fee is taxed as ordinary income, at the current top rate of just under 40 percent. For hedge-fund managers, much or all of that 20 percent is taxed as ordinary income, too, because hedge funds do not often hold investments long enough to qualify for the long-term capital-gains rate, currently 23.8 percent. Private-equity investors, which range from big, diverse outfits such as Bain Capital, where Mitt Romney earned his fortune, to Silicon Valley angel investors putting money into three-person startups, often do benefit from the lower long-term capital-gains rate, because they take large positions in companies, often acquiring them outright, and hold them for extended periods of time. Which is to say, because they are not the sort of short-term casino-capitalism speculators that stalk the popular imagination.

Fourth, people with moderate and low incomes often pay a lot more in federal tax than they know. All but the highest-earning 20 percent of U.S. households pay more in Social Security and Medicare taxes than they do in federal income taxes; adding insult to injury, the government lies to them about what these taxes are, pretending that they are “contributions” to retirement programs. They pay a lot of other federal taxes, too, on things such as gasoline and telephone services, that are not obvious to them. And of course they pay a lot of other people’s taxes, too, as their employers, landlords, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers all endeavor to pass their own taxes on to their customers and employees in the form of higher prices and lower wages. You think your employer is paying “his part” of your payroll taxes out of his own pocket, or out of yours? But there is very little appetite for cutting those taxes, because of the myth that they support in some special way things such as Social Security and federal highways, and because there is no way to control tax-shifting by businesses and individuals.

At the moment, our national fiscal situation is considerably less bad than it was during the Obama-Pelosi-Reid era of one-party Democratic rule; the 2010 and 2011 federal deficits were 8.7 and 8.5 percent of GDP, respectively, but the 2014 deficit was only 2.8 percent of GDP. Federal spending went from 24.4 percent of GDP in 2009 to 20.3 percent in 2014, thanks in no small part to budget sequestration, the one national policy in which Washington’s Democrats and Washington’s Republicans are united in loathing. The 2017 deficit is projected to be 2.3 percent of GDP.

That puts us within striking distance of having a balanced budget (albeit one that is balanced at a spending point that is too high for my own taste) or at least the reduction of budget deficits to trivial levels. All that is needed to get there is a little sober reform on the taxing front and a little sober reform on the spending front, with the hardest piece being reform of our entitlement programs, which in the long run will be the major drivers of deficits. I like the idea of radical tax reform, scrapping the tax code, abolishing the IRS, and starting over, and then privatizing Social Security and abolishing Medicare and Medicaid to boot. But you don’t actually have to do that to balance the budget.

You do have to stop pretending that you can give the American middle class a big income-tax cut when it hardly pays any income taxes, and stop pretending that you can get spending under control without touching the tiny handful of popular programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, national security) that constitute the vast majority of federal spending. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel; you just have to cut federal spending from 21.4 percent of GDP to 19.1 percent a couple of years from now, and maybe reform the tax code with an eye toward making revenue meet spending halfway. That isn’t going to make everybody happy, but it isn’t landing on Omaha Beach, either.

Instead of working on that, we have an electorate that is, if the pollsters are to be believed, motivated by resentment, thinking it has been cheated, along with a populist Left that seems to believe that the richest society in human history is right on the edge of mass cannibalism and a populist Right that seems to believe that it is involved in an Elizabethan tragedy rather than an American political dispute.

Voters sometimes look around and wonder, “Who is going to be the adult in the room?” Fact is, it had better be you, citizen.