RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Pussy” was the primary symbolism and message of the January 21st Women’s March. From protest signs to the thousands of pink hats, it was in your face throughout the march.

The hats with the cute little cat ears were called “pussyhats” and were sponsored by the “Pink Pussy Project”. The women behind the ‘Pussyhat Project” decided that inundating the National Mall with a million handmade, cat-eared knitted hats, dubbed “pussyhats,” was the perfect emblem of solidarity and support for women’s rights. Their explanation was that the “pussyhat” was a play on the word “pussycat” but also referenced President Donald Trump’s infamous comments on a hot microphone from an “Access Hollywood” video.

They were successful. Both visually and substantially the Women’s March was characterized by cute cat-eared hats and the word “pussy.” Signs read: “Get Your Politics Out of my Pussy”; “The Pussy is watching” (which included a picture of a vagina); “My Pussy My Choice My Body My Voice”; “My Neck, My Back, My Pussy Will Grab Back”; “Stay Cunty”; “Pussy Trumps Tyranny”; “Not My Pussydent”; “Fear The Pussy”; “My Vagina has a better lineup than Trumps inauguration”; “Viva la Vulva” and much more. Other signs had images of fallopian tubes and vaginas. Several women were dressed as giant vaginas.

On the Pink Pussy Project website under the subtitle “Power of Pussy,” they explained the symbolism of their hats. “We chose this loaded word for our project because we want to reclaim the term as a means of empowerment.”

Perhaps someone should have explained to them that a significant aspect of the original feminist movement was to stop the sexual objectification of women. Equating women’s rights with the theme of “Pussy” is not a revolution — it is a devolution of women’s power. Reducing women to sexual objects was the substance of the criticism of President Trump’s private leaked conversation. If we follow the logic that was employed for the theme of the march, then there should have been women’s marches against Bill Clinton with thousands of women wearing torn pantyhose. They could have all bitten their lips in solidarity with the women President Clinton assaulted. They could have reclaimed the term “rape” as a means of empowerment and held up the exact same signs: “Get Your Politics Out of my Pussy”; “Not My Pussydent.”

The few men that attended the march held signs that read “I’m with her”; “We All Should Be Feminists” and “Men of Quality Do Not Fear Inequality.” The expression “pussy whipped” arguably fit nicely into the Women’s March theme.

These privileged, spoiled, angry women predicated their march on a locker room insult from 12 years ago. They could have had a platform on women who are sexually trafficked, on the millions of Muslim women who have no rights, on female genital mutilation, on prostitution, on honor killing, or on girls being sold into slavery. Instead they were more concerned about how they looked in their “pussyhats” and who held the most creative vulgar sign. They should have tried to march with their placards and outfits in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Nigeria and any number of other countries. Then they would have seen what real persecution and injustice look like. Their march was literally a day in the park where they could go home safely afterwards and feel self-righteous — as if they made a difference. However, their primary achievement was to stick their heads back in the sand instead of helping real persecuted women in any significant way. Indeed, they will not face the harsh realities of women being kidnapped and enslaved. And they will not acknowledge that the women who are doing their manicures and pedicures may be victims of human trafficking, or that they are endangering their little girls by dressing them provocatively. From their distorted self-hating worldview, sexual violence perpetrated by adversary cultures and ideologies is a myth.

It is ironic that the “pussy” theme is attributed to the new administration. But that word, if anything, might in fact be the perfect symbolism of the last administration — which did not have the courage to maintain redlines, help 200 Nigerian schoolgirls that were kidnapped or protect Yazidi women, who are being tortured and raped everyday of their lives. It is an administration that had a female Secretary of State who left Americans in Benghazi to die.

White people concerned about their country need to shut their mouths and have their future dictated to them by radical racist left-wingers, was the apparently unanimous verdict of the angry Democrats seeking to chair their party’s governing body at a recent candidate forum.

As Washington, D.C. radio host Chris Plante quipped, “They haven’t been this upset since we took away their slaves.”

White Americans, Democrats say loud and clear, are the enemy.

It is part of the ongoing meltdown among Democrats apoplectic that Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. It manifests itself in the indignant screaming we now hear every day from the mainstream media every time President Trump makes it clear he really does intend to fulfill his campaign promises.

It is a result of the accumulated intellectual detritus from the Sixties mixed in with the identity politics that took over American campuses in the Eighties. “Politics is downstream from culture,” my late friend Andrew Breitbart observed, and now the culture has thoroughly infected the body politic.

Democrats are doubling down on the anti-white racism and identity politics-driven lunacy that became the norm during the Obama years.

So obsessed with nailing whitey to a cross were the DNC candidates that they overlooked the most glaring injustice of the past electoral cycle.

As Michael Sainato wrote in the New York Observer, all of the candidates attending the forum, including the Sen. Bernie Sanders-backed candidate, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), “refused to acknowledge the Democratic primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary Clinton.”

“There was so little dissent among the seven participants that at one point, when asked whether they thought the DNC tipped the scale for a candidate [Hillary Clinton] in the 2016 primary-a criticism lodged frequently and vociferously by Sanders’ supporters-none of the participants raised their hands,” he wrote, quoting Real Clear Politics.

Candidates to chair the Democratic National Committee all agree that their party needs to be more racist than it has become after eight years of incessant race-baiting and guilt-tripping by former President Obama.

Whites in the Democratic Party need to check their race-based privilege and zip it, according to DNC chairman candidate Sally Boynton Brown, who is executive director of the Idaho Democratic Party.

“Black lives matter and it makes me sad that we’re even having that conversation and that tells me that white leaders in our party have failed,” said Brown during the recent “DNC Chair Candidates Forum 2017” moderated by MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid. We have to teach Democrats “how to be sensitive and how to shut their mouths if they’re white.”

In 1972 Congress prohibited discrimination in America’s schools — that is, discrimination based on gender. This law, Title IX, had a safety clause to prevent preferential treatment to women if there was an imbalance between women and men in some activity.

Unfortunately, the safety clause did not work. Colleges found that in practice they had to balance the number of young men and women in their sports programs numerically. As a result, they had to eliminate entire teams of young sportsmen — including swimming teams that produced Olympians. They often also had to eliminate “walk-ons” that is, people who were not recruited on scholarship, but decided they wanted to try out for a sport.

Before I go into the details, I will say that my impression is that laws that forbid discrimination become sticks to beat squares into circles by activists who believe that equality of opportunity means equality of result. And while it would seem that such bad logic could be ignored by the colleges, it cannot be.

When Heather Sue Mercer sued the Duke University football team, under Title IX, for dropping her off their roster, she won two million dollars. The Duke president testified that she had been given extra chances to make the team, and the coach said she didn’t have the strength to boot long field goals. But no matter, Heather got rich, and Duke learned a lesson. And not just Duke. When a Supreme Court ruling in 1992 made monetary damages available to Title IX plaintiffs, lawsuits alleging discrimination exploded in colleges and universities. As Jessica Gavora says in her book Tilting the Playing Field, “eager trial lawyers and women’s groups scoured the country for aggrieved female athletes, and found them — or manufactured them.”

In many of these lawsuits, the complaint was that the percentage of women in sports did not match their percentage in the student body. The percentage of women could be high. I noticed in one case more than 40% of women at a campus were in sports — but if the percentage of men in sports was higher, that was considered discrimination.

So is it really true that the interest in sports is equal between men and women? A survey was done at California State which showed that 57 percent of men were interested in participating, as opposed to 43 percent of women. But the university had to institute quotas anyway.

The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) became, per a former employee, “populated with zealots who had lost all objectivity. I knew something had changed when they began to refer to complainants as clients”.

It should be noted that it is not just the OCR that created the situation. There was blame to go around. There were activist groups, lawyers who wanted to make a buck, and of course the students who felt victimized, or claimed to feel victimized.

Thus men’s baseball, volleyball, soccer, cross-country, swimming, gymnastic, and wrestling teams all lost funding. UCLA dropped a swimming team that had produced twenty-two Olympic medalists, Brigham Young cut its top-ten-ranked men’s gymnastics team; and the University of Miami eliminated its men’s swimming program; which had sent swimmers to every Olympic Game since 1972. According to Robert Carle in “The Strange Career of Title IX”, a Chicago wrestling coach named Leo Kocher used data from the 1997 National Collegiate Athletic Association Gender Equity report to show that more than 20,000 male athletes disappeared from the ranks of the NCAA between 1992 and 1997.

President Trump is reportedly considering eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA, created in 1965, has become politically tainted and ill-equipped to handle today’s challenges. Mr. Trump and Congress should ax it as soon as possible.

According to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, the NEA is “a public agency dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established.” It is charged with “bringing the arts to all Americans,” as well as “providing leadership in arts education.” The endowment is no longer fulfilling its mission.

Arts education has been severely wounded over the better part of two decades through systematic reduction of arts studies in the classroom. Federally mandated standardized tests have unintentionally squeezed out arts curriculum by forcing educators to focus on the subjects included in tests. Due to either political allegiances with education reformers or the inability to predict this trend, the NEA has proved feckless. Why continue throwing money at an organization that hasn’t provided results?

For the American arts to flourish—and for art to reach all Americans—artists must be able to make a living from their efforts. Silicon Valley has methodically dwindled the financial rewards that come with copyright protection. Musicians, photographers, authors and filmmakers have in many ways lost control of the distribution of their art—with search engines and social networks filled with unauthorized copies. Meantime, tech platforms have achieved historic growth using the work of artists as their own content.

User-generated content platforms have successfully lobbied for the continuation of “safe harbor” laws that shield them from the copyright infringement of their users, as well as legislation that has resulted in forced licensing agreements—to the vehement opposition of creators. The NEA hasn’t successfully addressed this critical challenge because the Hatch Act prohibits it from lobbying. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump repeated his vow Tuesday to “send in the Feds” if the authorities in Chicago are unable to quell the violence there. His sense of urgency about what he rightly labels the “carnage” in Chicago is welcome. By contrast, President Obama last year dismissed the rising homicides nationwide as a mere “uptick in murders and violent crime in some cities.”

Some uptick. Fifty-four people were shot in Chicago last weekend alone, six fatally. That brings the homicide total so far this year to 42, up from 34 during the same time last year, according to the Chicago Tribune. Comparing 2016 with 2015, homicides were up 58% and shootings were up 47%. Last year’s shooting victims included two dozen children 12 or under, including a 3-year-old boy now paralyzed for life.

Mr. Trump is right to draw attention to the growing toll, but he is wrong about what the federal government can do to fix it. His call to “send in the Feds” is ambiguous, but the phrase seems to suggest mobilizing the National Guard. Doing so would require the declaration of a national or state emergency. However gruesome the bloodshed, there is little precedent for mobilizing the National Guard to quell criminal gang violence.

Civil order has not broken down in the Windy City; local authorities continue to deliver basic services in the gang-infested South and West sides. The homicide rate, relative to population, is higher in Detroit, New Orleans and St. Louis. If Mr. Trump or his defense secretary, James Mattis, is going to declare Chicago a national emergency, those other cities deserve the same. And although Mayor Rahm Emanuel has asked Mr. Trump for money, it’s unlikely he’d welcome troops.

If Mr. Trump’s reference to “the Feds” means federal law-enforcement officers, they’re already there. Local police in Chicago work on joint task forces with agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The Trump administration could—and should—direct the U.S. attorney in Chicago to rigorously prosecute federal gun crimes, a focus that withered under President Obama’s denunciations of “mass incarceration” for minorities. But such a reorientation is a longer-term matter.

Policing is overwhelmingly a local function. As much as Mr. Trump, to his credit, wants to ensure that children living in inner cities enjoy the same freedom from fear and bloodshed as those in more stable neighborhoods, Washington has few law-enforcement levers to achieve that goal directly.

I’m not as sorry as the editors to see the Trans-Pacific Partnership laid to rest. Because I agree with our editorial on a number of points, and because I fear that what I dislike about TPP is actually appealing to President Trump (and likely to recur in any bilateral deals his administration strikes), it is worth adding a few thoughts of my own.

1. The manner in which the Obama administration went about negotiating TPP has been wrongly maligned, undoubtedly because of (and contributing to) the distaste in which international trade is held these days. I have negotiated about a million plea agreements, some of them quite complicated. Had they been negotiated out in the open, with running commentary on the possible terms by non-parties or agencies whose interests might be affected, they would never have been consummated. The moving parts of an international trade deal — even a bilateral one — make it infinitely more complex than a plea deal.

While Congress has a critical constitutional role in reviewing international agreements, it is the president’s job to conduct international relations and make treaties. Eleven other countries cannot be expected to negotiate with 535 legislators plus the executive branch. Thus, the complaint about Obama’s having conducted secret negotiations with foreign governments in order to spring a damaging agreement on the United States was meritless in the case of TPP. (It is an apt complaint in the case of the Iran nuclear deal, which Obama never intended as a treaty.)

While TPP could have been damaging, that is because of its terms, not the secrecy in which they were negotiated. The question was not whether Congress should have had the opportunity to review aspects of the deal while it was being negotiated. (Lawmakers did in fact have that opportunity, under conditions of confidentiality that were appropriate no matter how much Congress complained about them.) The question was whether Congress was given an opportunity for meaningful review after the agreement was finalized by the countries taking part. There is no doubt that legislators had that opportunity — and, indeed, that TPP could not have been imposed on the U.S. without their consent.

2. Which brings us to Trade-Promotion Authority — the “TPA” that, regrettably, was conflated with TPP in the public debate. I continue to believe that TPA, which obliges Congress to give the president an up-or-down vote without amendments after the president has negotiated an international agreement, not only makes eminent sense but is the best way to avoid bad international agreements.