Everybody (for a sufficiently small value of "everbody") seems to be talking about The Great Feminization, an essay by Helen Andrews in Compact. It's provocative!
In 2019, I read an article about Larry Summers and Harvard that changed the way I look at the world. The author, writing under the pseudonym “J. Stone,” argued that the day Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard University marked a turning point in our culture. The entire “woke” era could be extrapolated from that moment, from the details of how Summers was cancelled and, most of all, who did the cancelling: women.
[…]
The essay argued that it wasn’t just that women had cancelled the president of Harvard; it was that they’d cancelled him in a very feminine way. They made emotional appeals rather than logical arguments. “When he started talking about innate differences in aptitude between men and women, I just couldn’t breathe because this kind of bias makes me physically ill,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at MIT. Summers made a public statement clarifying his remarks, and then another, and then a third, with the apology more insistent each time. Experts chimed in to declare that everything Summers had said about sex differences was within the scientific mainstream. These rational appeals had no effect on the mob hysteria.
This cancellation was feminine, the essay argued, because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field. That is the Great Feminization thesis, which the same author later elaborated upon at book length: Everything you think of as “wokeness” is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.
The explanatory power of this simple thesis was incredible. It really did unlock the secrets of the era we are living in. Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently. How did I not see it before?
Well, that explains Robin DiAngelo. But how about Ibram X. Kendi? He's a dude.
Also of note:
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Our long national nightmare is … just beginning? Noah Smith is pessimistic about the future of political ideology: After Trump, the deluge. And his jumping-off point: the recently-revealed disgusting attitudes expressed by "young republicans".
The leaks led to a backlash from the GOP, with the New York and Kansas chapters of the Young Republicans getting shut down, a Vermont state senator stepping down, and a handful of other participants losing their jobs. (JD Vance didn’t join in, making excuses for the “kids” in the chat group, even though they were in their late 20s or 30s).
It’s good to see that the institutions of the Republican Party still have enough power — and enough of a conscience — to crack down on things like this, at least a little bit. But it’s unlikely that official censure or condemnations will stem the trend toward authoritarianism and racial hatred among the party’s younger members. The leaked chats are not even slightly surprising for anyone who has lurked in online right-wing spaces and discussions over the past few years.
In fact, if anything, what’s surprising is that the mainstream media seems to have been so blindsided by texts that were so tame compared to what gets said on public forums like X and 4chan every day. Do people really not know that this is what young right-wingers are like now? On social media, there is a lot more unabashed Hitlerism than in the Young Republicans’ group chat. Popular right-wing accounts now regularly ridicule the widespread belief that Hitler was evil as a “religion” or a “myth”:
Noah has more examples, including Tucker Carlson's flirtation with WWII revisionism.
This could be "nut picking", which is easy enough to do. Or he could be highlighting a dangerous and disgusting trend for the future, where fans of limited government, tolerance, rationality, and general liberty are merely a fuddy-duddy splinter ideological sect.
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Hope this works out. The National Review editorialists weigh in on Trump’s Argentina Gamble.
For a president who prides himself on putting America first to throw a massive lifeline to Argentina, a country led by Javier Milei, a fierce opponent of bailouts, is doubly jarring, but that is just what has happened.
The Treasury has finalized a $20 billion swap line with Argentina’s central bank. In practice this means lending Argentina up to 20 billion badly needed greenbacks (without, conveniently, any requirement for congressional approval: The same maneuver was adopted by the Clinton administration as part of the Mexican bailout in 1995). Any such loans are collateralized with Buenos Aires’s unloved pesos. The Treasury has also been buying them in the markets to help prop up the price. All this is intended to head off a broader panic — as it was, the sell-off was not confined to the currency — that might lead to default of Argentina’s dollar-denominated debt and, possibly, set off a panic beyond its borders. To reinforce these efforts, the Treasury wants to round up $20 billion in additional finance from the private sector, sovereign wealth funds, and the like.
I wish Milei and Argentina well, but I read the whole thing, and I'm not sure what winning this gamble would look like. How will we know?
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Book-burning for me, not for thee. Jonathan Turley is rightly appalled at some late-night antics: Jimmy Kimmel and Making Book Burning Fun Again.
Jimmy Kimmel is back on television by less than popular demand. Kimmel’s ratings are hardly robust (Kimmel pulls in 1.85 million in comparison to Gutfeld! at 3.2 million). Still, his suspension for spreading disinformation about the killer of Charlie Kirk became a cause celebre on the left. Kimmel continues to air nightly screeds against Trump and conservatives. Of course, he is hardly unique in appealing to an echo-chambered audience. However, this week Kimmel showed children being read Eric Trump’s book by a drag queen. What was most disturbing was not the use of the children to echo talking points on how great drag queens are, but showing them throwing Trump’s book into a wood chipper. It appears that nothing is funnier for the modern left than a good book burning or chipping.
Maybe someone should write a Fahrenheit 451 followup novel. Here, I'll get you started:
It was a pleasure to mutilate. It was a special pleasure to see things shredded, to see things mangled and butchered…
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Way to go, France. Jim Geraghty has some big fun with recent news: A Brazen Louvre Heist Embarrasses France.
Thankfully, most human beings don’t have much appetite for violence and mayhem. They see no pleasure in murder, or brutality, or war crimes. But being a really good thief, who can sneak into any building, outsmart any security system, and outwit any detective? Heck, Cary Grant plays characters like that, as does George Clooney. The suave, daring, not-quite-so-immoral thief is a stock character in detective novels and thrillers and comic books.
According to the account in the English edition of El Pais, four guys in Paris just executed an astonishingly smooth, fast, and efficient heist of arguably the most famous museum in the world. Whether or not they ever catch these guys, in a matter of minutes, they became legends:
There were four thieves. Two on high-powered motorcycles, the other two in a four-wheeled vehicle. The museum had just opened. It was between 9:30 and 9:40 on Sunday morning, and there were already people inside. The robbers made their way to the Galerie Apolon façade facing the Seine and accessed a first-floor balcony using a truck-mounted electric ladder similar to those used for moving furniture through apartment windows. The hooded men threatened the officers in the gallery with the grinders, which they then used to break the display cases. They stole nine objects and fled the same way they had arrived: on motorcycles.
For my southern New England readers, when it says, “The hooded men threatened the officers in the gallery with the grinders,” it does not mean the thieves threatened the guards with sandwiches. They mean an angle grinder, which is a power tool used for cutting, grinding, polishing, and sharpening materials. Unlike the Venus de Milo, these thieves were armed:
Yeah, I did want to get Jim's "grinder" and "Venus de Milo" jokes in there.
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