From John Ray's shorter notes




November 12, 2016

Why Trump prevailed despite the cloud of sexual assault accusations over him

I thought I would put up the diatribe below as vivid evidence of how little Leftists understand and how one-eyed feminists are.  The author is Jenna Price, a long-time Australian Leftist journalist and academic.  Her publicity picture is below.  

Right from the start you can see that she is not a normal woman.  Active feminists rarely are.  What normal woman would allow a publicity shot of herself to go forward showing her with such messy hair?  She has no pride in her appearance at all, most unusual in normal women.  If she wants to represent women generally, she has certainly chosen a strange way to go about it.



But her hair is only a most incidental matter. It just enables her to refer to me as a patriarchal, sexist, xenophobic, racist, pedophilic member of the Ku Kux Klan -- and other such hate-speech.  The important thing is what she says.

And what she says is a classic exhibit of how Leftists never care about the full picture.  They have simplistic, narrow-focused explanations of everything. To read her, you would have to think -- and many Leftists do think it -- that Trump's attitude to women was important to the voters.  In fact, Trump voters  were quite clearly uninfluenced by it.  What does that mean?  Does it mean that Americans as a whole are unenlightened sexist pigs who delight in female suffering and inequality?  That is what Ms Price would have you think.

In fact, as many interviews with Trump voters show, most of them thought his attitude to women was bad but of incidental importance.  Astounding though it is to feminists, many Americans, including female ones, don't see feminist issues as all that important.  They have -- surprise, surprise! -- other political issues in mind that they think are far more important.  But reading Ms Price you would get no inkling of that.

You would never know that most Americans, including Bill, are quite uninterested in what Hillary has betwen her legs. Her ascent to to the presidency or not would prove nothing about glass ceilings. They have been shattered long ago on the world scene. Note the following female heads of government in recent decades: Indira Gandhi, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Sheikh Hasina, Benazir Bhutto, Yulia Tymoshenko, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Cristina Kirchner, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, Helen Clark, Julia Gillard, Ameenah Gurib, Park Geun-hye, Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May. And stodgy old Britain has had TWO female heads of government. Capable women CAN rise to the very top. Hatshepsut, Sobekneferu and Boadicea proved that long ago but you can't expect feminists to know any history.

So let me tell Ms Price and her ilk why feminist concerns were ignored by Trump voters.  Leftists claim that they voted for Mr Trump because they were ignorant snaggle-toothed, mouth breathing hillbillies who just hated everybody, including women.  But all the analyses of Trump support show the opposite -- that his vote was up among Hispanics and blacks compared with previous elections, that his vote among women was down only a little from the usual rough 50/50 split and that all social classes were well represented among his supporters.

So if demographics cannot explain the Trump vote, what can?  It's extremely simple.  Trump was the only one who offered liberation from Leftist oppression.  Those wonderful "progressive" changes that Obama and Hillary were offering could only be achieved by making most Americans do things that they were strongly disinclined to do -- make mainstream Americans love rampant homosexuals, Muslim Jihadis, black criminals and low-IQ Hispanic illegal immigrants -- etc.

Leftists are tyrants.  They think it is all in a good cause but it is still tyranny and those tyrannized don't like it.

Had Leftists been less one-eyed in their policies towards minorities, they could still have accomplished much without antagonizing the majority. They could for instance have improved rights and services for homosexuals without pushing it all the way to a demand for homosexual marriage. Homosexual marriage did virtually nothing for homosexuals that they did not have already -- through civil partnerships, for instance.  But it did greatly antagonize believing Christians who know perfectly well what their Bible says about homosexuals.

So THAT is why so many voted for Trump. They see him as their liberator.  All other concerns faded into insignificance compared with the chance to throw off tyranny


There are still different rules for men and women.

Rules which make it possible for men to win and for women to lose. Rules which make it possible for a man to become president but not a woman.

Here are the rules for men. If you seek higher office, your history can include incitement of violence and abuse towards women. Your history can include the kind of racism and bigotry which echoes Hitler's rise to power. Your history will include running businesses which are still refusing to pay those who worked for you.

You can be as post-fact and as post-truth as you like because the population will not judge you. Your history can include a rejection of equal rights for the LGBTQI community. You can even intersect a couple of those, by demeaning Ghazala Khan, the mother whose son died fighting for the US.

Yet no one has put it better than Amelia Paxman, a 27-year-old documentary film maker in Queensland, who tweeted yesterday: "Tell me again how rape and sexual assault accusations will ruin a man's career".

Because, much more terrifying than electing Trump as president, more serious than that, is the permission this gives to treat women in a particular way, as s**** and w*****, as Miss Piggy and Miss Housekeeping, as commodities.

This was not the traditional political confrontation, of right versus left, or even of Right versus Left. This was about a decent flawed woman versus an indecent highly flawed man, a man who could tap into all the anxieties felt by those whose lives are changing around them.

We knew that Clinton's mistakes were made in the course of her career as a public servant, political transactions taking place in a political arena. Trump, on the other hand, hates people who are not like him. Women, blacks, Hispanics, gays and lesbians. And when he dismantles America's fledgling attempt at universal healthcare, he will target the sick, the elderly and those living with a disability.

But right now, Trump's target is women. They are the majority, and they are also deeply divided. For weeks we heard that evangelical and conservative women would vote for Clinton yet the figures tell us that many of those women voted for Trump. Maybe they thought violence and abuse was better than a woman who supported Roe v Wade.

Clinton's womanhood has always been considered fair game for public commentary, considered either unwomanly or not a good enough woman. Her steely ambition to reach the top job is in stark contrast to the expectation that women are compliant and accommodating. At the same she has been reviled for being too accommodating, too Stand By Your Man, shamed for not leaving her philandering husband.

Clinton shows us that women can never get it right. If women want to succeed we are coldly ambitious. You have trouble warming to us. We aren't authentic. Sometimes, we are shameless s**** and w*****, sometimes we asked for it. Sometimes we didn't say no loudly enough, often enough.

And yesterday for men, some men, many men, the defeat of Hillary Clinton was their dream come true, the ever-lasting buck's night, the moment in time when big swinging d**** proudly emerged to celebrate the death of another ambitious woman's dreams.

Powerful men are p****-grabbers yet powerful women p****-whip their men. This is still the world in which we live. There are different rules and different ways in which women are held accountable. Men have excuses, women are constructed as evil.

When Clinton won the nomination – as my women friends told me it would be all right, that I was over thinking things, that times had changed – I did what I always do: I worried. Worried that the US was not ready for a woman to lead; and that entrenched sexism and misogyny would destroy Hillary Clinton in the same way it had destroyed women before her.

Hillary parties? I wrote about them but I didn't go to any (was that it? Should I have gone? Please excuse my magical thinking).

And now it's done and so is she, the most qualified person ever to have stood for president.

When Amelia Paxman asks, "Tell me again how rape and sexual assault accusations will ruin a man's career" I can only reply that it won't. And it may not ever.

I read this from Clinton this morning: "To the little girls watching this, never doubt that you are valuable & powerful & deserving of every chance to achieve your dreams."

And those of you sitting on the sidelines, lips pursed, commenting about how this isn't about sexism and misogyny, race or class, please f*** off.

Or get off your behinds and join with people who want change; women's groups, human rights groups, environmental groups, anti-racism groups, unions. Yes, unions. Join with people who want your daughters and your sons to live in a world where even the poor, the black, the disenfranchised, hell yes, even the women, have a chance to shape a better world. Stop being divided and defeated. Build unbreakable coalitions for the good of the many. Please, please, as so many have said before me, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

And in the meantime, never tell me to be grateful – and to appreciate – how far women have come. We have not.

SOURCE





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