Rod Dreher's Blog, page 526

Miley Cyrus > Donald Trump

Sometimes you wonder if ol’ Billy Ray don’t wish he had never left Tennessee:

[Miley] Cyrus, who described herself as attracted to people of any sex or gender, said she realized she was pansexual after becoming a part of the LGBT community in Los Angeles and meeting a gender-neutral person.

“Even though I may seem very different, people may not see me as neutral as I feel. But I feel very neutral,” she said in the Power of Women L.A. issue. I think that was the first gender-neutral person I’d ever met. Once I understood my gender more, which was unassigned, then I understood my sexuality more. I was like, ‘Oh — that’s why I don’t feel straight and I don’t feel gay. It’s because I’m not.'”

Cyrus told Paper magazine in 2015, that she’s open to many different kinds of relationships.

“I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age,” she told Paper magazine. “Everything that’s legal, I’m down with. Yo, I’m down with any adult — anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me. I don’t relate to being boy or girl, and I don’t have to have my partner relate to boy or girl.”

I’m old enough to remember when “That one will screw anything that moves” was an insult to either the man or the woman to whom it was applied. Today, that quality is a virtue, and its gets you fawning notice in USA Today. You literally can screw anything that moves (except minors and animals, for now) and have it celebrated in this culture.

I have been very hard on Donald Trump and his supporters over sexual assault revelations. I had decided before this came out that Trump lacked the character, temperament, and competence to be president, but this just seals it. Conservatives who stand by Trump after these revelations are no better than the liberals who stood by Bill Clinton back in the 1990s. It’s not about morality; it’s about power.

But here’s the thing: I am not interested in hearing cultural liberals get high and mighty about how vile Donald Trump is (and he is!) for his gross sexual behavior, but then have them turn around and cheer for every new manifestation of polymorphous perversity that flops across the transom. I know, I know: consent. Legally it’s an important concept, but it’s not a moral disinfectant. I find it impossible to believe that most liberal parents would be fine with their sons or daughters coming out a “pansexual,” which is a five-dollar word for something infinitely cheaper.

Keeping eros in its place solely with the doctrine of consent is like building levees of grape jelly along a raging river. A college professor friend tells a story about a female student who came to his office seeking advice. She was shaken. She said that she thought she might have been date-raped, but she wasn’t sure if she had given consent or not. Here was a young woman who felt that she had undergone a deep trauma, but all she could think about — because this is what her culture had trained her to think about — was legalistic procedure.

I wouldn’t want my children around Donald Trump or Miley Cyrus. But Miley Cyrus is a far more dangerous  figure to human dignity and the imago Dei. Our erotomaniacal post-Christian culture is embracing the Miley Cyrus model. Maybe it was destined to be this way. Stephen Gardner, from his essay in the 40th anniversary edition of Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic:

As embodied in Psychological Man and his Viennese exemplar, Rieff suggests that the modern revolution is above all revolution, more profound than any merely political or economic one. The engine of this revolution is the rise of democracy, which radically alters the nature of human relations and generates its own indigenous culture. Modern equality utterly transforms social relations, not just on the political or economic level on which human beings act representatively, as members of groups or as bearers of rights, but far more interestingly, in the realm of personal life.

Human relations are at bottom always relations of individuals, and it is here that the democratic revolution has utterly transformed moral understandings sanctified by time immemorial—especially, needless to say, in the realm of relations between the sexes, and by the same token, within the sexes as well. By removing or crippling the old formalities and conventions of social life, democracy creates a culture in which individuals are supposedly free to relate to each other simply as such—as pure individuals or pure “natural” beings, as it were. This idea of nature evidently presupposes the total socialization of man, but in a way unlike any other society. Believing that they are children of Eden, these “emancipated” democrats act out the latest script written for them by popular culture.

More:

Philip Rieff appreciated the real significance of Freud because he was not a psychologist but a sociologist, and not just any sociologist, but one who understood both the religious nature of social order and its crystallization—or decomposition, as the case may be–in the psyche of the individual.The scientist’s loss is the sociologist’s gain. In Rieff’s sociology, there is an intimate link, of a sort that goes back to Plato, between outer order and the inmost structure of the psyche of the individual. This linkage may be designated the sacred; sacred order is psychic order. Social order, in other words, is grounded in religion or transcendental authority, but this principle is maintained only if is realized in the structure of the individual, his character. And it is just this “law” that Rieff discerns in Freud in the way of a photographic negative; there he sees the residual though still potent traces of authority that remain in the mind of the individual, even as that authority loses its traditional status in the social world itself.

More:

The premise ofmodern psychology is the cult of desire.

For this new type, psychology would replace ontology or theology, and therapy would replace community, hitherto the most potent psychic medicines in Western culture. Emancipated by modern technology, commerce, law, and consumerism from integral community, the modern individual found himself abandoned to contradictory passions and impulses and alienated from the remnants of a cultural order that, nonetheless, he could not do without. He thus entered into the twilight zone of modernity, the realm of ambivalences and ambiguities that ensue when every fixed point of reference is dissolved into the sheer interplay of individuals in a culture that can no longer sustain its origins. Freud appeared as his savior and advocate, the inventor of a technique of survival not physical but psychical. He promised to teach the modern individual how to desire in a world where all desires were equal and arbitrary, void of any intrinsic order, but not necessarily equally permissible or socially estimable. Here was a human type where interiority and its dilemmas were not a mark of the spiritual or transcendent but exactly oft heir absence, at best of their fading images–where interiority and the sense of alienation from the outer reflect the social fact of “negative community.”

It is this massive cultural revolution that Rieff’s sociological exegesis of Freud brought into view. The outer world of consumerism and popular culture belies inwardly the world of an individual who is the captive of desires he can neither entirely abandon nor ever truly satisfy. The modern world makes a virtue of this fate and turns it to profitable advantage. In Freud, this individual acquires his first true advocate–not a savior, exactly, but someone who will defend the legitimacy of his condition, his “right”to desire, founded evidently in its inescapable necessity, its tragic fatality.

And:

If Freud insists upon the primacy of sexual passion in the economy of psychic life and human relations, it is because this confirms the Romantic and democratic myth of freedom, the spontaneity of the individual. If he folds ambition (social desire) back into eros (erotic desire), it is not because the empirical evidence supports this (it doesn’t and couldn’t), but because romanticism demands it. Eros must be raised to the level of a religious cult in modern society, not because we really are that obsessed with it, but because the myth of freedom demands it. [Emphasis mine — RD] It is in carnal desire that the modern individual believes he affirms his “individuality.”

The whole essay is here, and I strongly commend it to you.

Society can survive a Donald Trump. Indeed, the fact that Trump is paying a heavy price for doing what powerful men (including beloved Democrats like JFK, Ted Kennedy, and Bill Clinton) have done to women since time immemorial is a sign of moral progress. But society cannot survive a Miley Cyrus. She is an icon of the lack of sacred order, which is to say, in Rieffian terms, of an anti-culture, which negates what any culture must do: direct the passions to socially beneficial ends. She is a high priestess of the cult of desire. Our civilization has embraced what will destroy it. Here’s the thing: so have we in the Christian church. As Peter Leithart wrote nearly 25 years ago:

In Rieff’s view, no successor priesthood has yet emerged, but the culture has instead embarked on the unprecedented experiment of forming a nonmoral culture, a “culture” lacking both religiously grounded interdicts and a priesthood to serve as the guardian of sacred boundaries. Such is, in fact, an experiment in “anticulture.” What is most disturbing, however, is that the Church no longer functions as priesthood in this sociological sense even for Christians. Rieff has called attention to contemporary churchmen’s penchant for abandoning all Christian dogma and practice that does not readily lend itself to therapeutic purposes. The “anticulture” has invaded the Church.

Jesus said that His disciples would be the light of the world, implying that dark ages come when the Church hides its light under a bushel. Christians, therefore, can hardly expect the rebirth of culture in the world without a rebirth of culture in the Church. One is led to echo, in a perhaps more literal sense than originally intended, Alasdair MacIntyre’s suggestion that our culture awaits the appearance of a new, very different St. Benedict.

 

 

Adventures In Gallantry

Adventures in gallantry:

Donald Trump on Friday intimated a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her was not attractive enough to have drawn his interest—just as a new accuser was coming forward.

The Republican nominee, spiraling at ever greater velocity into uncharted political territory with more than three weeks left in the election, showed none of the contrition he expressed last weekend for his videotaped admission that his celebrity enables him to get away with sexual assault.

Explaining that he was ignoring his own advisers, Trump seethed with contempt for the women who’ve claimed he assaulted them. But his rambling, at times incoherent, comments seemed to instantly invalidate two of his defenders’ key talking points: That he regrets past comments judging women by their looks and treats them with respect.

“Believe me, she would not be my first choice—that I can tell you,” he said at a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, referring to Jessica Leeds, a 74-year-old woman who told The New York Times on Wednesday that Trump groped her while the two were seated together on an airplane in the early 1980s. In an interview with CNN on Thursday, Leeds said Trump touched her “wherever he could find a landing spot.”

“I kept thinking, maybe the stewardess is going to come and he’ll stop, but she never came,” she recalled of the 15-minute encounter.

Trump responded with derision, mimicking Leeds and dismissing her story. “I was with Trump in 1980. I was sitting with him on an airplane and he went after me on the plane,” the Republican presidential nominee said, using the voice he often deploys to mock people.

Read the whole thing. Read it, and try to grasp that it’s being spoken by a 70-year-old man who holds the Republican nomination for President of the United States, and he’s speaking it less than a month before the election.

But wait, there’s more! He said Hillary Clinton, his opponent, is homely:

Repeat after me: a 70-year-old man. The GOP nominee for president. Said this. About his female opponent.

Now that Al Goldstein is dead, is there any other elderly man so willing to be so piggish in public?

Again: by the time this is over, Trump will have indelibly stained every single person who held on to him for this last month of the election. Jeff Jacoby talks about what prominent religious and social conservatives have thrown away by embracing him.

If you haven’t seen GOP activist and blogger Marybeth Glenn’s amazing tweetstorm explaining why she’s left the Republican Party over Trump’s treatment of women, here it is:

So let me get this straight: I, a conservative female, have spent years defending the Republican Party against claims of sexism. When I saw Republican men getting attacked I stood up for them. I came to their defense. I fought on their behalf. I fought on behalf of a movement I believed in.

I fought on behalf of my principles while other women told me I hated my own sex. Not only charges of sexism, but I defended @marcorubio during Go8, I fought in my state to stop the @ScottWalker recall, etc… Now some Trojan horse nationalist sexual predator invades the @GOP, eating it alive, and you cowards sit this one out? He treats women like dogs, and you go against everything I – and other female conservatives – said you were & back down like cowards.

Get this straight: We don’t need you to stand up for us, YOU needed to stand up for us for YOU. For YOUR dignity. For YOUR reputation. Jeff Sessions says that he wouldn’t “characterize” Trump’s unauthorized groping of women as “assault.”

Are you kidding me?!

Others try to rebuke his comments, yet STILL choose to vote for a sexual predator – because let’s be honest, that’s what he is. “What he said is wrong, and the way he treats women is wrong, but it’s not wrong enough for me to not vote for him.”

Thanks, cowards.

Various men in the movement are writing it off as normal, confirming every stereotype the left has thrown at them. So I’m done. I’m sooo done.

If you can’t stand up for women & unendorse this piece of human garbage, you deserve every charge of sexism thrown at you. I’m just one woman, you won’t even notice my lack of presence at rallies, fair booths, etc. You won’t really care that I’m offended by your silence, and your inability to take a stand. But one by one you’ll watch more women like me go, & you’ll watch men of ACTUAL character follow us out the door.

And what you’ll be left with are the corrupt masses that foam at the mouth every time you step outside the lines. Men who truly see women as lesser beings, & women without self-respect. And your “guiding faith” & “principles” will be attached to them as well. And when it’s all said and done, all you’ll have left is the party The Left always accused you of being.

Scum.

Three more weeks.

The Disuniting States Of America

The Federalist‘s Ben Domenech says if Trump loses, don’t look for major changes at the top of the GOP. Excerpts:

It’s notable that all the voices calling for a grand post-Trump reunification and rethinking are the same ones calling for internal reform of the Republican Party for years. They were largely ignored up to now, and provided the leadership of the party remains the same, they’ll be ignored after November 8th as well. There is no current movement afoot to challenge Mitch McConnell, even after the agenda he pushed through the Senate proved so unpopular among Republican voters. The expectation is that things will stay the same – the Republican agenda, safely ensconced in amber, starts again once Trump departs the stage.

More:

The Republican Party is about to be torn from two different directions. Trumpists will abandon it because they believe it was insufficiently pro-Trump. Anti-Trumpists will abandon it because it nominated Trump. And the fact that the party is not interested in sending an obvious clear message that it is changing – that it ought to accept responsibility for the failure at Klendathu – means that visually and practically there will be no significant shift in leadership, no dramatic change in policy, and above all, no new personnel.

Imagine David Cameron stayed [after Brexit]. That’s where the Republican Party will be after November 8th. And that’s how it’s likely to remain heading into a midterm that will have more fractious primaries than ever.

I would remind everyone that Trump did not come from nowhere, and he did not steal the GOP nomination. Tucker Carlson explained back in January why the failures in the leadership class of the GOP gave rise to Trump. If the Republican Party had changed in meaningful ways at any time after the Bush administration, it might not be in this miserable place today.

In a powerful piece in today’s WSJ, Peggy Noonan denounces the nation’s political leadership class as “decadent”. She brings up the corrupt deal among Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Russian uranium magnates. Excerpts:

While it was under consideration the Clinton Foundation received more money from Uranium One. Bill Clinton got a $500,000 speech fee. Mrs. Clinton approved the deal. The Russian company is now one of the world’s largest uranium producers. Significant amounts of U.S. uranium are, in effect, owned by Russia. This summer a WikiLeaks dump showed the State Department warning that Russia was moving to control the global supply of nuclear fuel. The deal went through anyway, and the foundation flourished.

Peter Schweizer, who broke the Uranium One story, reported in these pages how Mrs. Clinton also pushed for a U.S.-Russian technology initiative whose goals included “the development of ties between the Russian and American people.” Mrs Clinton looked for U.S. investors and found them. Of the 28 announced “key partners,” 60% had made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation. Even Russian investors ponied up.

She’s brutal, and rightly so, on the snotty conversation among John Podesta and Hillary insiders regarding conservative Catholics — lines that came out in this weeks Wikileaks dump:

Here’s what you see in the emails: the writers are the worst kind of snobs, snobs with nothing to recommend them. In their expression and thoughts they are common, banal, dumb, uninformed, parochial.

I don’t know about you but when people look down on me I want them to be distinguished or outstanding in some way—towering minds, people of exquisite sensibility or learning. Not these grubbly poseurs, these people who’ve never had a thought but only a sensation: Christians are backward, I saw it in a movie!

It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.

Read the whole thing.

Here’s what I see happening after November: a further, and faster, decline in public trust in our nation’s leaders and institutions. Political, media, academia, military, ecclesial — find one that you can really put your confidence in. The military is the most solid of them all, but it’s transforming itself into a force of Social Justice Warriors. Besides, who has confidence that hawkish President H.R. Clinton can be trusted to use her powers as Commander in Chief responsibly, and not run off involving the United States in wars we have no business fighting?

In the extremely unlikely event he were to be elected, Donald Trump, that notorious immoralist and narcissist, will not be able to arrest this trend, and will in fact exacerbate it as much and maybe more as Hillary Clinton would.

And let’s not even get started on the followership class.

We are disuniting, and nobody seems to know how to stop it.

The Ben Carson Option

"Sometimes you put your Christian values on pause to get the work done" #BenCarson #morningjoe pic.twitter.com/hK6eMCsbpF

— David

Is There An Anti-Trump Media Conspiracy?

Mollie Hemingway is no fan of Donald Trump. She says he deserves the public roasting that he’s getting for his lecherous behavior. But she finds it more than a little suspicious that despite Trump’s known reputation as an alpha male sexual aggressor, the news media didn’t manage to turn up any of this stuff until right here in the final weeks of the election. Excerpt:

Enter yet another #NeverTrump guy on Twitter, who goes by the handle @PoliticalMath. He wrote a lengthy series of Tweets that I’ll reproduce here:

To my liberal friends: I know you think this is paranoid & conspiratorial but let me try to paint for you how it feels to be on the right. For a year, we’ve been saying ‘the press has massive dirt on Trump but they won’t release it until after the nomination.’ Every anti-Trump person said this over and over ‘they have so much dirt on him, they’re not telling you what they have’ and we got mocked. ‘Hey if we had a dirty Trump story, we’d publish it before the [nomination].’ ‘We’re doing our job, your voters are just dumb.’

The more realistic of us on the right suspected the press wasn’t ‘holding’ a story so much as not really looking too hard into Trump. So Trump got to be on every cable channel non-stop, oppo was very thin, investigative pieces were weak sauce for months & months. We on the right accused the press of not doing their job & we just got laughed at, people saying we were ‘blaming’ the press for Trump. Which is kind of true, we did blame the press (I tried hard to say that this was the fault of MANY actors). But it’s been months of this.

After a year of saying ‘they have dirt on him.’ After there is no chance he’ll step down. All this comes out. This *could* be a coincidence. It’s totally possible that the press discovered a decade old story JUST IN TIME for the election. In which case, I suppose we are lucky they didn’t discover it 4 weeks too late. Whew. We dodged a bullet on that one, didn’t we?

It’s possible that it’s just an uncanny coincidence. But, as PoliticalMath continues, “this fits EVERY theory about a dishonest, vicious, conniving press. Down to the last prediction & detail. Make your excuses about how the press MIGHT not be culpable but know that this was predicted in detail by media skeptics on the right. And when you predict something to this level of granularity & it comes true, you can’t just call the people who predicted it ‘crazy.’”

To put a fine point upon it, unless you claim to believe that every single person involved in these allegations just happened to be spurred at the same exact moment to go public and only because Cooper just happened to force magic words out of Trump’s mouth, we have three explanations for the current timing of the opposition research dump. None of them looks particularly good for the media.

1) The media had the information, but chose not to write about it until now. 2) The media didn’t bother looking for any of the information until after Trump had clinched the GOP nomination. Or 3) the media didn’t look for the information during the primary and didn’t look for the information during the general, and only used what the Clinton camp gave them over the last few weeks.

Even a combination of those answers doesn’t look too good for them.

Read the whole thing. 

It’s important to emphasize that Mollie says Trump deserves what he’s getting. She’s not claiming that he’s a victim:

Perhaps if the target weren’t someone as reprobate and immoral as Donald Trump one could muster some sympathy. But he chose the wanton, unscrupulous lifestyle and bragged about it.

And she is unsparing towards Trump supporters who are shocked by this:

Again, if you thought anything other than this would happen to Trump, you are an idiot. I’m sorry, but you are.

Nevertheless, Mollie is making what I think is a very good point about the appearance of collusion between the media and the Clinton campaign. There’s no smoking gun here, but it do make a man think, don’t it?

The media’s behavior will all be a part of the post-election “stab in the back” myth (the Drumpßtosslegende) that we all know is coming from Team Trump. The candidate is already laying the groundwork:

Trump’s remarks, which he read from a teleprompter, were laced with the kind of global conspiracies and invective common in the writings of the alternative-right, white-nationalist activists who see him as their champion. Some critics also heard echoes of historical anti-Semitic slurs in Trump’s allegations that Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty” and that media and financial elites were part of a soulless cabal out to destroy “our great civilization.”

“It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” Trump said.

Republican politicians in Washington will be especially eager to embrace the media portion of the legend, because a) there’s probably some truth to it, but more importantly b) they will hope it will deflect Trump’s fire against them towards a scapegoat that’s already unpopular with Republican voters. And, c) conservatives, even those who did not vote Trump, will be eager to direct their own despair and rage over the return of the Clintons and the Aleppo-ization of the Republican Party, to some outside force.

These next four years of Clinton government are going to be one gaping wound. The nation won’t soon heal from this. Nobody should look forward to what’s to come, even if your candidate is going to win.

(And by the way, as many on the Right are now asking, what the hell were the GOP primary candidates’ opposition researchers doing re: Trump, if they didn’t gather this and dump it on him back then? Not their jobs.)

Trump & Consequentialism

It finally hit me what all these conservatives — especially conservative Christians — defending Trump, despite more and more evidence of his propensity for sexual assault, remind me of: apologists for the Catholic Church during the abuse scandal.

We have to vote for Trump because if Hillary wins, things will be worse! they say. The enemies of the faith will have a field day.

And you know what? If Hillary wins, things will be terrible. The enemies of faith will in fact have a field day.

Yet this is the same argument I heard personally many times from fellow Catholics — including priests — during the abuse scandal. We have to keep it quiet because enemies of the Church would use that information to discredit it. It will give those who would destroy us ammunition.

Yeah, it would, and it did. But that puts us in the position of the bishop of a large diocese (now retired) who was very blunt when he met with an abuse victim, her lawyer, and the psychiatrist who was treating her (a faithful conservative Catholic, by the way). The victim had not been a child when she was abused by her priest. She was an adult who, in a sacramental confession, admitted that she had cheated on her husband. The priest used that information to blackmail her into a sexual affair. She finally had a nervous breakdown, and sought psychiatric help. Once the bishop found out about it, he sent the priest to Ireland, then met with the victim and her team.

Both this woman and her psychiatrist told me in an interview that the bishop told her that if she filed a lawsuit against the Church or went public with what happened, that he would see to it that she was ruined. Said the bishop, “I have to protect the people of God.”

I think this bishop honestly thought that’s what he was doing. He went on to be transferred to an even larger diocese. By the time he retired, his name had been all over the papers for covering up child sexual abuse in the dioceses where he had served.

But see, that bishop was protecting the people of God. Just not all the people of God.

Let me be clear: I don’t think what Trump is alleged to have done equals the horror of child molestation. And unlike what that priest in the confessional did, Trump has not been accused of rape. But the principle that many of his Christian defenders are using is the logic of an enabler. When I was covering the scandal back in the early 2000s, over and over I saw in court documents evidence that church communities, church employees, other priests, even family members of victims, knew what was going on, or had reason to know … but they turned a blind eye. If what Father was doing was true, then our world would fall apart if anyone knew. Therefore, it must not really be happening, or if it’s happening, it’s no big deal, certainly big enough to justify the damage that would result from making a big deal of it.

That’s the logic. I don’t buy it. If we can’t do evil even if good comes from it, we also can’t overlook evil for the same reason. Everybody has to make prudent decisions, and the world is rarely black and white. This same logic could be used regarding a vote for Hillary: dismissing all her sins and failings because anything is worth keeping Trump out of office.

Still, I wish that I saw less consequentialism at work in the increasingly shrill defenses of this sexual predator offered by Christians. The dreadful consequence of a Hillary Clinton presidency is not a moral disinfectant.

 

Trump The Pervert

Maybe you’ve seen the 1992 video clip in which Donald Trump chats with a group of little girls at Trump Tower. When they leave to ride the escalator up, he says, “I’m going to be dating her in ten years. Can you believe it?”

My daughter turns 10 today. If a grown man said anything like that about her in my presence, I would slug him. He would have revealed himself as a lecherous pervert. Trump saw that child only as a potential sexual conquest. That’s not the same as a pedophile, but it does reveal the depths of his narcissism and his inability to see women — even little girls — as anything but potential sex partners. He allowed Howard Stern to refer to his own (adult) daughter Ivanka as “a piece of ass.” Any normal father would have belted Stern. Not Trump. Because he’s a pervert.

Liberty U. Students Ring Falwell’s Bell

Liberty University students lower the boom on Jerry Falwell Jr., the college’s president:

To which Jerry Jr responded:

I am proud of these few students for speaking their minds but I’m afraid the statement is incoherent and false. I am not ‘touring the country’ or associating Liberty University with any candidate. I am only fulfilling my obligation as a citizen to ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ by expressing my personal opinion about who I believe is best suited to lead our nation in a time of crisis. This student statement seems to ignore the teachings of Jesus not to judge others but they are young and still learning.

Voting Vengefully

So, to absolutely no one’s surprise, two more women are out with credible accusations that Donald Trump sexually assaulted them (groping, etc.). The modus operandi he bragged about on the Billy Bush tape? That’s what he did with these two women, they say. To which Trump replied:

In a phone interview on Tuesday night, a highly agitated Mr. Trump denied every one of the women’s claims.

“None of this ever took place,” said Mr. Trump, who began shouting at the Times reporter who was questioning him. He said that The Times was making up the allegations to hurt him and that he would sue the news organization if it reported them.

“You are a disgusting human being,” he told the reporter as she questioned him about the women’s claims.

Asked whether he had ever done any of the kissing or groping that he had described on the recording, Mr. Trump was once again insistent: “I don’t do it. I don’t do it. It was locker room talk.”

Liar. More:

Ms. Leeds was 38 at the time and living in Connecticut. She had been seated in coach. But a flight attendant invited her to take an empty seat in first class, she said. That seat was beside Mr. Trump, who did not yet own a fleet of private aircraft, records show. He introduced himself and shook her hand. They exchanged pleasantries, and Mr. Trump asked her if she was married. She was divorced, and told him so.

Later, after their dinner trays were cleared, she said, Mr. Trump raised the armrest, moved toward her and began to grope her. Ms. Leeds said she recoiled. She quickly left the first-class cabin and returned to coach, she said.

“I was angry and shook up,” she recalled, as she sat on a couch in her New York City apartment on Tuesday.

She did not complain to the airline staff at the time, Ms. Leeds said, because such unwanted advances from men occurred throughout her time in business in the 1970s and early 1980s. “We accepted it for years,” she said of the conduct. “We were taught it was our fault.”

Read the whole thing. Or not. There will be new ones soon, no doubt.

Reading that sad last quote (“We accepted it for years. We were taught it was our fault”) really gets to me. I can well imagine that a lot of women — and not just Democratic women — will cast a vote against Trump in part as payback to all the men who have treated them that way in the past. Can’t say that I blame them. What pleasure it must be to see a jackass like Donald Trump get his comeuppance on a national stage, losing the presidency to a woman, in part because women he piggishly mistreated over the years came forward to rat him out. There’s something cosmically just in that.

(Though you know who I have no respect for? Feminists and other liberals who justified Bill Clinton acting this way because if they stood on principle, it might help the Republicans. They’re in the same boat as the conservatives today who condemned Bill Clinton but who today defend Trump, because if they stood on principle, it might help the Democrats.)

On the subject of vengeance voting, I want to commend to you this fantastic piece in Cracked sent in by a reader: “Six Reasons For Trump’s Rise That No One Talks About.” It’s long and profane in parts, but dead on target. Author David Wong grew up in Trump country (small-town Illinois), and explains Trump’s rise in terms of rural vs. urban. Excerpts:

As a kid, visiting Chicago was like, well, Katniss visiting the capital. Or like Zoey visiting the city of the future in this ridiculous book. “Their ways are strange.”

And the whole goddamned world revolves around them.

Every TV show is about LA or New York, maybe with some Chicago or Baltimore thrown in. When they did make a show about us, we were jokes — either wide-eyed, naive fluffballs (Parks And Recreation, and before that, Newhart) or filthy murderous mutants (True Detective, and before that, Deliverance). You could feel the arrogance from hundreds of miles away.

“Nothing that happens outside the city matters!” they say at their cocktail parties, blissfully unaware of where their food is grown. Hey, remember when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans? Kind of weird that a big hurricane hundreds of miles across managed to snipe one specific city and avoid everything else. To watch the news (or the multiple movies and TV shows about it), you’d barely hear about how the storm utterly steamrolled rural Mississippi, killing 238 people and doing an astounding $125 billion in damage

But who cares about those people, right? What’s newsworthy about a bunch of toothless hillbillies crying over a flattened trailer? New Orleans is culturally important. It matters.

To those ignored, suffering people, Donald Trump is a brick chucked through the window of the elites. “Are you assholes listening now?“

More:

The cities are always living in the future. I remember when our little town got our first Chinese restaurant and, 20 years later, its first fancy coffee shop. All of this stuff had turned up in movies (set in L.A., of course) decades earlier. I remember watching ’80s movies and mocking the “Valley Girl”stereotypes — young girls from, like, California who would, like, say, “like” in between every third word. Twenty years later, you can hear me doing the same in every Cracked podcast. The cancer started in L.A. and spread to the rest of America.

Well, the perception back then was that those city folks were all turning atheist, abandoning church for their bisexual sex parties. That, we were told, was literally a sign of the Apocalypse. Not just due to the spiritual consequences (which were dire), but the devastation that would come to the culture. I couldn’t imagine any rebuttal. In that place, at that time, the church was everything. Don’t take my word for it — listen to the experts:

via Gallup

Church was where you made friends, met girls, networked for jobs, got social support. The poor could get food and clothes there, couples could get advice on their marriages, addicts could try to get clean. But now we’re seeing a startling decline in Christianity among the general population, the godless disease having spread alongside Valley Girl talk. So according to Fox News, what’s the result of those decadent, atheist, amoral snobs in the cities having turned their noses up at God?

Chaos.

The fabric has broken down, they say, just as predicted. And what rural Americans see on the news today is a sneak peek at their tomorrow.

The savages are coming.

Blacks riot, Muslims set bombs, gays spread AIDS, Mexican cartels behead children, atheists tear down Christmas trees. Meanwhile, those liberal Lena Dunhams in their $5,000-a-month apartments sip wine and say, “But those white Christians are the real problem!” Terror victims scream in the street next to their own severed limbs, and the response from the elites is to cry about how men should be allowed to use women’s restrooms and how it’s cruel to keep chickens in cages.

Madness. Their heads are so far up their a**es that they can’t tell up from down. Basic, obvious truths that have gone unquestioned for thousands of years now get laughed at and shouted down — the fact that hard work is better than dependence on government, that children do better with both parents in the picture, that peace is better than rioting, that a strict moral code is better than blithe hedonism, that humans tend to value things they’ve earned more than what they get for free, that not getting exploded by a bomb is better than getting exploded by a bomb.

Or as they say out in the country, “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.”

The foundation upon which America was undeniably built — family, faith, and hard work — had been deemed unfashionable and small-minded. Those snooty elites up in their ivory tower laughed as they kicked away that foundation, and then wrote 10,000-word thinkpieces blaming the builders for the ensuing collapse.

One more:

The rural folk with the Trump signs in their yards say their way of life is dying, and you smirk and say what they really mean is that blacks and gays are finally getting equal rights and they hate it. But I’m telling you, they say their way of life is dying because their way of life is dying. It’s not their imagination. No movie about the future portrays it as being full of traditional families, hunters, and coal mines. Well, except for Hunger Games, and that was depicted as an apocalypse.

So yes, they vote for the guy promising to put things back the way they were, the guy who’d be a wake-up call to the blue islands. They voted for the brick through the window.

It was a vote of desperation.

Read the whole thing. Trust me on this. Wong says if he hadn’t moved away, he’s certain he would be voting for Trump.

I totally get what Wong is saying here. What’s weird is I get it as much as I get why a female voter would take so much pleasure voting for Hillary to throw a brick through the window of Trump Tower (“Trump Tower” being a symbol for powerful men who get away with sexually harassing women). I get hating the Other so much that you would vote for someone you don’t have any confidence in, just because you want Them to hurt like you do.

This is a crappy election. But you knew that already.

UPDATE: Now a magazine journalist says he did it to her in 2005, when she was covering him for People

Then, in December 2005, around the time Trump had his now infamous conversation with Billy Bush, I traveled to Mar-a-Lago to interview the couple for a First Wedding Anniversary feature story.

Our photo team shot the Trumps on the lush grounds of their Florida estate, and I interviewed them about how happy their first year of marriage had been. When we took a break for the then very-pregnant Melania to go upstairs and change wardrobe for more photos, Donald wanted to show me around the mansion. There was one “tremendous” room in particular, he said, that I just had to see.

We walked into that room alone, and Trump shut the door behind us. I turned around, and within seconds, he was pushing me against the wall, and forcing his tongue down my throat.

Now, I’m a tall, strapping girl who grew up wrestling two giant brothers. I even once sparred with Mike Tyson. It takes a lot to push me. But Trump is much bigger—a looming figure—and he was fast, taking me by surprise, and throwing me off balance. I was stunned. And I was grateful when Trump’s longtime butler burst into the room a minute later, as I tried to unpin myself.

The butler informed us that Melania would be down momentarily, and it was time to resume the interview.

Democratic Conspiracy Against Catholic Church

The new Wikileaks dump from Clinton campaign chief John Podesta’s emails reveals that Podesta created a couple of activist groups for the sake of undermining the Catholic bishops and the Church’s authority.

In the 2011 e-mail chain, a progressive activist named Sanford “Sandy” Newman e-mailed Podesta to suggest collaboration on a way

There needs to be a Catholic Spring, in which Catholics themselves demand the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic Church.

Newman, who is Jewish, concedes that he doesn’t know much about the Catholic Church, but he sure does want somebody to undermine the hierarchy:

Even if the idea isn’t crazy, I don’t qualify to be involved and I have not thought at all about how one would ‘plant the seeds of the revolution,’ or who would plant them.”

Not to worry, said Podesta, who is Catholic, and who was at the time head of the Center For American Progress. They have progressive front organizations prepared to act when the time is right:

We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this. But I think it lacks the leadership to do so now. Likewise Catholics United. Like most Spring movements, I think this one will have to be bottom up.

Catholic journalist Thomas Peters explains the significance of this revelation:

5/ i’ve been writing about CACG and CatholicsUnited as fronts for the Dem agenda since at least 2010. @CatholicVote too. We were right.

— Thomas Peters (@AmericanPapist) October 12, 2016

6/ to repeat, the head of Clinton’s campaign has been organizing to fracture a major religion. Clinton claims to be for all Americans.

— Thomas Peters (@AmericanPapist) October 12, 2016

7/ what if Podesta had created organizations to foment “Revolution” among the American Muslim community? Would that be worthy of dismissal?

— Thomas Peters (@AmericanPapist) October 12, 2016

8/ CACG was founded in 2005. Podesta email from 2011. That’s at least six years of planning and execution. It was more than a hobby of his.

— Thomas Peters (@AmericanPapist) October 12, 2016

9/ how much of his plans to fracture Catholics did Podesta share with Hillary as a campaign strategy? Does she agree with his strategy now?

— Thomas Peters (@AmericanPapist) October 12, 2016

10/ remember @HillaryClinton said “deep-seated religious beliefs have to be changed” – @johnpodesta emails show he was doing just that!

— Thomas Peters (@AmericanPapist) October 12, 2016

This is chilling and infuriating — though I suppose not surprising. It’s simply that now it’s undeniable. It shows that at the senior level of the Democratic Party’s brain trust, a Clinton political operative — a Catholic! — created front groups specifically to undermine the authority of the Catholic bishops, and to separate the bishops from the people, as well as to secretly undermine Catholic teaching to make it more friendly to the Democratic Party’s agenda. Podesta ought to be excommunicated.

So now we know what’s coming under a Hillary Clinton presidency: a war on the Catholic Church and any other church that stands in the way of progressives in power. At an international conference last year, Hillary Clinton said that the fight for global abortion rights must never end:

Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed. As I have said and as I believe, the advancement of the full participation of women and girls in every aspect of their societies is the great unfinished business of the 21st century and not just for women but for everyone — and not just in far away countries but right here in the United States.

As Peters points out, the Clintonistas have long been conspiring to do exactly that to Catholicism in America. I use the word “conspiring,” because Podesta, in the text of his e-mail, says that “we” created these two Catholic fronts “to organize for a moment like this” — that is, to exploit a perceived weakness in the Catholic church. Here’s more.

It’s clear now that believing Christians are going to have to fight these powerful, deceptive, amoral progressives for the rest of our lives. Dark days ahead. A Catholic friend e-mails to say, “So we knew the KGB infiltrated the Russian Orthodox Church, but who knew the Democrats were sponsoring activists inside the US Catholic Church? Wow.”

For those who say that the Benedict Option is all about walking away from the fight, let me set you straight. These progressives are coming to power very soon, and they are going to come at us subtly (at first) but relentlessly. After November, there won’t be much of a Republican Party left with which to fight them, and even if there were, the Republicans in general are so afraid of being called bigots that they would be next to useless on religious liberty.

Yes, we have to fight the Clintonistas and the Anti-Christian-Industrial Complex politically, in every way we can. But you can’t fight them with something you don’t have. We in the American church (Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox) are weak. The Ben Op is in large part about strengthening us in our convictions and practices, so we can endure whatever they throw at us without losing our faith. What’s more, the Ben Op is about forming networks of small-o orthodox Christians to protect, assist, and sustain each other through what’s coming.

We lost the culture war, and now live in what you might call occupied territory. Now we have to be resistance fighters, and that requires a lot of patient, careful, deliberate work. The old-guard Christian leaders who think the main battlefront is in politics are incapable of leading the kind of resistance we need. They are fighting the last war. We need a Charles de Gaulle. We need a St. Benedict. If we are going to get them, they’re going to have to come from within our own ranks.

Liberals will call this post hysterical and overwrought. Don’t listen to them. These e-mails are a sign of what’s coming. Prepare. 

UPDATE: I don’t think some of you get what I’m saying. I have no problem with a political party or political activists organizing to try to appeal to Catholics, or any other religious group. That’s normal. What Podesta confesses to doing here is working quietly to organize people to take advantage of a political moment to spark a revolution within the church. So what if he was not successful at it! The point is, John Podesta and his comrades are the kind of people who think it’s okay to burrow within an American religion and undermine its leadership for the sake of gaining political power.

And as for people who think the conclusion I draw for the future based on this are overwrought, I refer you to the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

Haven’t we seen this vindicated often enough these past few years? Don’t be fooled again.

UPDATE.2: Back in 2012, Tim Shipe, a pro-life Democrat running for a seat in the Florida state legislature, wrote this. Excerpt:

A few years ago I would have thought the title of my piece was too extreme- I bought into the charisma of Barack Obama- never publicly supported him- but I thought he was someone who could bridge some of the serious difficulties that pro-life Democrats faced within my political party. I read his books, I thought he respected the Catholic Church as much as a secular political liberal could be expected to. Around that time I was trying to work from the inside of the Democratic party- running for Florida State House as a pro-life Democrat, and later serving as Vice President for the Florida Democats for Life organization. This was also the time period where I was invited to become part of a national Catholic Democrats listserve which included such notaries as : Vicki Kennedy [wife of Sen. Ted Kennedy — RD], Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College, Rev. William D’Antonio and Rev. Anthony Pogorel of the Catholic University of America, Peggy Steinfels of Fordham University, Rev. Thomas Reese of Georgetown, Vincent Miller of Georgetown/U. of Dayton, Dan Maguire of Marquette, Doug Kmiec of Pepperdine, Suzanne Morse of NCR, Chris Korzen of Catholics United, Alexia Kelly of Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, Steve Callahan of the AFL-CIO, and others (Eric LeCompte, Nicholas Cafardi, James Salt, Morna Murray, Fred Rotondaro, Kari Lundgren). I never agreed to keep all that passed before my eyes confidential, but I never publicly revealed the basic content until now.

My reason for going public now is due to the recent event where the Worcester Bishop Robert McManus weighed in to prevent Vicki Kennedy from speaking at the Anna Maria College commencement. The press I read portrayed the Bishop as being overly vindictive and Kennedy milked the rejection, playing innocent, as though she is doing nothing to try to upend the Catholic Church as we know it- as a Hierarchical Institution. It was my experience on the Catholic Dem listserve that Vicki Kennedy was essentially my nemesis. I defended the Church as a Hierarchy, and the official teachings on abortion et al, and she took me to task almost every time I wrote pro-orthodox Catholic commentary- with plenty of Amens from her fellow travelers on the listserve. I did receive a few positive private emails from some on the listserve, but on the whole it was a very discouraging experience trying to defend the Church as a convert, who would be at a total loss if the Catholic Church put no stock in the teaching authority of the Pope and the Bishops, and taught that contraceptives, legal abortion, and gay marriage were just fine and dandy things. So Soon after posting this on the listserve-

“It is deeply troubling to me that this Catholic Democrats listserve membership seems more intent on finding reasons to pull some kind of palace coup against the Catholic Church Magisterium and Hierarchy in general, than to address specific issues related to the Catholic interests in American politics. I am a convert to Catholicism, I knew what I was signing up for in becoming a Catholic, I accepted the teachings and authority lines as prescribed by the latest Catechism. I simply cannot understand why those who seem to relish openly trashing the Apostolic successors retain membership in the Church- that is something that I can only address as an appeal to someone else’s good conscience. Most of my family is of the Protestant variety, I understand that thinking and worldview but reject it, but they are acting in good conscience- they don’t believe what the Catholic Church teaches about her role, so they don’t invest in the Catholic narrative and authority line. Maybe what I’m finding here at Catholic Democrats are many good protestants but not orthodox Catholics as I understand things?

You can remove me from your rolls if it displeases many here that I don’t conform to the groupthink on display here, otherwise I will continue to offer my two bits to challenge the establishment views of liberal, anti-Catholic Hierarchical voices which parallel the hard Catholic Right- in their wrongheadedness- in my humble opinion anyway. One is certainly free to criticize the clerical/Hierarchical handling of sexual abuse cases over the years- but how this all fits in with being a Democratic Party member is something I can’t fathom. Tim Shipe”

My offer to leave was accepted after Vicki Kennedy wrote a smack-down on me; and shortly thereafter I severed my own Democratic party membership and ended my leadership role with Florida Dems for Life- I took Archbishop Chaput route of becoming a political Independent and remain such today.