What is the Unfinished Revolution? It is the fact that the overwhelming majority of unpaid labor necessary to keep the world running falls on the shoulders of women in our homes.

I am a feminist. I strongly believe that the most basic injustice in this world, common to all times and all cultures, is mistreatment of women. Until the chains on women are broken, all the world remains in bondage. The heaviest links on those chains are forged from the tedious, backbreaking, and unpaid labor women have to do to keep our lives smoothly on track. Few of these tasks provide any chance for creativity or even personal expression; none of them carry any prestige or status. Nevertheless, if they don’t happen, nothing else does. The Unfinished Revolution in my title refers to the fact that we haven’t figured out how to get these chores done without exploiting others, either all women or poor women that wealthy women hire to do the shit work that must be completed in order to do the creative or at least remunerative tasks of life. Until we solve that problem, the feminist Revolution and all other Revolutions will remain unfinished.

While thinking about the problem of the Unfinished Revolution recently, I was reminded of this essay, “Feminism, The Body, and The Machine,” by foolish liberals’ favorite reactionary, Wendell Berry. Berry wrote an essay, published in Harper’s Magazine in 1987defending his refusal to buy a computer. He mentioned in passing that he wrote his manuscripts in pencil and had his wife type the fair copy for publication on a manual typewriter. When confronted with some blowback for making his wife do shit work while he did the fun part of writing, he wrote the linked response. In the most petulant manner possible, Berry sniffs that his critics judged him unfairly, but he never provides any real evidence demonstrating that his wife was not exploited by their relationship.

Berry wrote one specific line in the linked piece that demonstrates better than anything else why feminism is stalled and in retreat. He claims, in the middle of his Peak Privileged White Dude Whine, “I understand that one cannot construct an adequate public defense of a private life.” This is immediately and effectively contradicted by his own statement that his critics fail to consider a number of other possibilities: “that my wife may do this work because she wants to and likes to; that she may find some use and some meaning in it; that she may not work for nothing.” He obviously knows that some facts could blunt his critics and yet provides no evidence of any of those things. Since he mentions that his wife might find some “use and meaning” in doing his shit work, I think it’s worth examining how he describes their respective tasks.

In the linked reply to his critics, Berry describes his process of writing as follows: “The act of writing language down is not so insistently tangible an act as the act of building a house or playing the violin. But to the extent that it is tangible, I love the tangibility of it. The computer apologists, it seems to me, have greatly underrated the value of the handwritten manuscript as an artifact. I don’t mean that a writer should be a fine calligrapher and write for exhibition, but rather that handwriting has a valuable influence on the work so written. I am certainly no calligrapher, but my handwritten pages have a homemade, handmade look to them that both pleases me in itself and suggests the possibility of ready correction. It looks hospitable to improvement. As the longhand is transformed into typescript and then into galley proofs and the printed page, it seems increasingly to resist improvement. More and more spunk is required to mar the clean, final-looking lines of type. I have the notion—again not provable—that the longer I keep a piece of work in longhand, the better it will be.” He lyrically describes his creative process: “Going off to the woods, I take a pencil and some paper (any paper—a small notebook, an old envelope, a piece of a feed sack), and I am as well equipped for my work as the president of IBM. I am also free, for the time being at least, of everything that IBM is hooked to. My thoughts will not be coming to me from the power structure or the power grid, but from another direction and way entirely. My mind is free to go with my feet.” Writing is, for him, a creative and active process that allows him to think and get into the fresh air.

I said I would compare his tasks to his wife’s, but Berry does not at any point in all of his works, as near as I can tell, describe the process of typing, and does not allow his wife to provide her input on this question. He provides her a stack of random notes in smudged pencil marks and she provides him a text he can submit for publication. He does not bother with any discussion of what, exactly, she does. We know he has an interesting task. What is hers like?

In order to fairly compare his creation process to what she has to do, it is necessary to know something about using a manual typewriter. He does not allow his wife the chance to describe her task, so I have to find other sources. Here is one person’s description of using a manual typewriter. Note that typing on manual requires the typist to set the side margins and use the return to set the top margin. She had to type exactly what was written from smudged pencil marks in handwriting on paper of various sizes and make it into a coherent page. Unless Berry himself has perfect handwriting, a lot of his wife’s job involved decoding blurred marks that could be any one of a dozen letters. If the page has footnotes — and Berry’s nonfiction work has a lot of footnotes — the process was a lot more complicated. All of this was in service to someone else’s creation.

Is there anything in his writing that provides a clue to what Berry thinks about typing? He has a low opinion of working in offices. He mentions how offices monitor the keystrokes of employees, nothing that the “oppressiveness of some of this office work defies belief.” If it’s ‘oppressive’ for a boss to demand an easier form of typing, it should be presumed that a much more onerous kind of typing is equally oppressive, yet Berry never bothers to address that point. He ignores the substance of the task his wife does for him.

That bit, that refusal to see the concrete substance of the task he requires, lies the last remaining part of the Unfinished Revolution. Berry’s entire defense of himself lies in the fact that he and his wife are married and that theirs is a joint enterprise which gives them ‘a measure of economic independence and self-employment, a measure of freedom, as well as common ground and a common satisfaction.’ He never defines what he means by ‘economic freedom’ here or any place else. I assume he means they make enough money to avoid having to get other jobs as ‘corporate drudges.’

The problem with his ideal lifestyle of both spouses working at home, especially his own marriage, is that the money is ALL HIS. If his wife worked as a clerk for another company, her paycheck would be her own and independent of him. He couldn’t demand it from her and she would have it regardless of what he did. She would be really independent and able to exercise agency in her own life. As it is, she can’t. She depends on him to write so that they can continue to eat. He is not so dependent on her. Her name appears on none of his published works, including the essay to which I have such a great exception. She has effectively no identity while he exists as a public figure.

That is the crux of my objection to Berry’s position: Wendell gets the sugar and Tanya gets the shit. Her task is tedious and confining while his is fascination and liberating, and he never once acknowledges that difference. Berry states that it is not possible to make an adequate defense of his private life as his explanation for why he doesn’t even try to do so. He asserts that it is not reasonable to presume his wife is exploited and not compensated for her work, but never shows what compensation he provides her. Their life is that he does something fun while she does something tedious and he calls it even. I’m going to mimic Berry’s rhetorical trick, and note that Tanya never gets to speak for herself. She never explains what else she might like to be doing instead of banging away on a typewriter while decoding smeared pencil marks.

Since you’re all wondering what the text of this post has to do with the title, it’s that the Berry essay perfectly illustrates the assumption that most men have that women have nothing better to do than to accommodate men’s whims. Tanya Berry raised three kids and tended a hobby farm with little help from her husband. Instead of explaining how the two of them make their system equitable, and showing that Tanya has ample time to pursue her own creative interest, Berry whined that his critics didn’t assume the best of him. The reason his feminist critics did not assume that their relationship was equitable is that the relationship he described is not in fact just, which makes his marriage like almost every other marriage in human history. Until men start deferring to their wives’ desires for a creative life or remunerative career, our revolution is not finished!

Wendell Berry has a lot of liberal fans, for thoroughly misguided reasons. His latest book. The Need To Be Whole, has, for once, attracted some real honest criticism. The negative reviews in my opinion don’t go nearly far enough into condemning Berry’s thoroughly bigoted worldview. They correctly condemn the Confederate apologia, but never acknowledge that this has been part of Berry’s work since the very beginning.

Berry, as the Slate review indicates, gets a lot of love from some liberals because they see his work as being anticapitalist. He condemns factory farming and mountaintop removal mining, so they think he must also be in favor of the basic liberal project of increasing individual autonomy. He absolutely is NOT. His work falls within a long tradition of right wing anti-market writing, lamenting the fracturing of ‘communities’ and families by market forces. He is a defender of old, rigid hierarchies and has little use for the idea of concrete, legally enforceable rights.

The book’s subtitle is ‘Patriotism and the History of Prejudice,’ and his purpose is to address racial prejudice. He sees bigotry against Black people as the result of a denigration of useful work adopted by slaveowners. On page 297, he quotes John Quincy Adams’ recollection of a conversation with John C Calhoun. Calhoun stated that he himself would lose all his standing in his community were he to employ a white servant in his home, because domestic work was fit only for Black slaves. Berry claims that this denigration of manual labor seeped out from the plantation aristocrats into Southern white people in general, and therefore caused white people to dislike Black people, especially if those white people were poor themselves and had to do their own shit work.

His position on the nobility of manual labor is, to say the very least, ahistorical. Genesis 3:17 -19 makes it clear that hard work is Adam’s curse: “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Aristotle and Plato both believed that leisure — the absence of hard work — was the only source of culture and that some people were just born to be slaves doing shit work. The idea that exhausting manual labor should be avoided wasn’t invented in 1800.

In furtherance of his contention that we can solve racism by doing really hard manual labor, he spends a lot of time praising the freedom of subsistence farming. On page 94 he states that in 1945 ‘’nearly all the people who lived [on the 1,501 farms in Henry County KY] on those farms, whether owners or tenants or hired help, also lived from them, and did so entirely by the employment of (free) solar energy.” Subsistence farmers, in his ideal world, would almost never be consumers, whom he argues are ‘captives’ of the industrial economy. (Page 302.) On page 95, after he talks about those Henry County farmers living entirely from their own production, he mentions that the consumer goods the farmers bought — “sugar, spices, coffee, etc” — were “luxuries, things that could have done without.” He actually argues that slaves had more ‘freedom’ because there were ‘rainy days when there was less to do’ (page 303). He notes that slaves could hunt for meat and often that hunting provided most of what they ate. This meat was, usually, possum, raccoon, or squirrel and rarely venison.

So, does he have any examples of white people abandoning their bigotry after doing farm labor with Black folk? No, of course not. In fact, the example he does give states precisely the opposite. On page 451, he quotes Prof Pete Daniel: “in rural areas, blacks and whites necessarily worked side by side, and despite white supremacy, friendly relationships developed across the color line. Industrious African American farmers deferred when necessary and earned the respect of their white neighbors.” (italics mine.) Berry glosses on this quote: “By ‘deferred’ Prof. Daniel pretty clearly means that the black people, in dealing with their white neighbors, observed the etiquette of conventional prejudice. The deference indicates at least that the convention was mutually understood, dealt with and surpassed.” By completely abandoning any pretense to dignity and self-respect, Black people could have decent relationships with their white neighbors.

Berry actually gets worse in that paragraph. He goes on to say “This suggests that, under the influence of those ‘friendly relationships,’ the need to defer might gradually have worn away if the rural communities had not been unsettled by more war, depression, and the onset of ‘social mobility.’” He might just as well have blamed ‘outside agitators.’ As much as this quote demonstrates Berry’s appalling insensitivity, it also shows his ‘solution’ to all social problems: ‘community.’ In his world, ‘neighborliness’ can overcome any and all conflicts. He gives an example earlier in the same chapter, on page 450, of how his neighbors used to ‘work swap’ during harvest time. Local crews took turns helping each other complete the harvest and were ‘paid’ by the help they recieved on their own farms at the same time. This system was, as Berry describes it, ‘orderly and informal.’ That is, there were no messy contracts or documents delineating each participants’ rights or obligations; the system just sorta happened. So long as everyone was a ‘neighbor,’ everyone got help.

The obvious problem with this system is summed up beautifully by the question posed in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who then is a ‘neighbor?’

I will defer my answer to that to Berry’s fellow Kentuckian, Tom T Hall, as performed by Jeannie C Riley: Harper Valley PTA.

So long as the ‘community’ gets to define who is a ‘neighbor’ with no outside oversight, the community is going to exclude some people for very bad reasons. The entire justification for the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was that the South WASN’T ‘dealing’ with the conventional prejudice! Further, anyone who didn’t fit in for reasons of having sex wrong, doing religion wrong or not at all, or being female and not deferring to men was excluded from ‘neighbor, ‘ which then had harsh economic consequences. Anyone outside Berry’s charmed circle had to have enough money to pay for the work others got without paying, which of course damaged their own farms. Their choice was to conform or leave.

This last point, the ‘conform or leave’ aspect of Berry’s informal community of ‘neighborliness’ goes unspoken in his book, but is the main force behind today’s fascist resurgence. Paul Kingsnorth describes how the “Machine” — his word for the industrial, consumer-oriented market economy — destroys the family and ‘spiritual’ life, by which he means traditional authorities like local rich people, the Church, and fathers. Their position is that if we just left everyone alone, these local authorities would care for ‘their people’ adequately. This is the same argument used by George Fitzhugh in defense of slavery, that slaveowners and husbands knew what their families — including slaves — needed and would provide it. (See Fitzhugh’s book ‘Cannibals All! Or Slaves Without Masters.’) If this were true, we would have no need for child abuse laws or domestic violence shelters.

I became a liberal because I want to live in a world where everyone can rely on having enough food, shelter, health care, and education to live a decent life even if their families of origin can’t provide it. I don’t want anyone to have to tug their forelocks to their Betters to get to eat or live indoors, or, ‘observe the etiquette of conventional prejudice.’ The market economy is the best solvent to destroy those old structures of enforced conformity.

I think there is a need to examine further just how reactionary and oppressive the world Berry wants would be. Helpfully he provides an example that can be analyzed to show how rotten life under Berry’s ideals would be for most of us.

On page 52, he describes the work of an Amish family he knows in their dairy:

“An Amish family long dear to me bases the commercial part of its economy mainly on a dairy herd of forty-five Jersey cows, for which the family’s small farm produces the necessary feed. From this modest enterprise the family achieves a “quality of life” that is admirable. They recently built themselves a new house. At the time of my last visit the farmwife (Ed: note the use of a coined word here) and her two daughters, then seven and ten years old, were busy at the evening milking. It was a happy scene. The mother and daughters cooperated perfectly, each doing her share according to her strength. They kept steadily at work without haste or fuss. Each of the cows was known by her looks, character, and name. The family’s living was being made within a pattern of familiar relationships. The people and the cows knew (Ed: how on Earth did Berry conclude that the cows ‘knew’ anything?) understood, and respected done another which was why the band stayed so noticeably quiet. The physical work, to which our society has cultivated an aversion, was done with skill, with care, without stress, without lasting too long or becoming in any way a hardship, and allowing for conversation with visiting friends. This twice-a-day chore was taking place where both the people and the animals were at home, and at a scale permitting a careful like to be drawn everywhere between enough and too much. The work was limited by the size of the farm, which was limited by the practice of neighborly love that prevails among the Old Order Amish.”

First, note that he never actually describes concretely the work being done or by whom. The entire paragraph is based entirely on Berry’s own observations and and assumptions. He never examines or analyzes anything. Do the little elementary school aged girls actually milk cows? A Jersey cow weights between 750 and 880 pounds. How do little girls manage animals nearly eight times their own size? (Enjoy some information about Jerseys, the best dairy cows.) It is important to note while reading this rosy picture of grueling farm labor that Every three days a child dies in a farm accident. The median age for admission to the hospital for traumatic injury among Amish farm children is 5 years old. A better person would have asked whether those two girls were in danger from the cattle.

Berry neglects to give any information about how much time it takes each day to perform this task. note that milking has to be done twice each day. Here is a description of an Amish farm. Milking machines are permitted in this ‘circle,’ which sells milk to Organic Valley as noted in Berry’s book, so it is likely that the farm he observed is part of this particular group. It takes about 5 minutes to milk a cow using a milking machine, plus time to get the cows into the barn, clean their udders, and attach and then remove the milking machine. Berry fails to tell us how many cows can be milked at a time, so it’s difficult to gauge how much time the whole chore takes, since the girls and their mom — 7 and 10 year olds are NOT women and should never be referenced that way -— would have to spend time getting one set of cows out of the barn and the next set inside. My assumption is that the mother and her daughters spend about 4 hours each day on this exhausting chore.

Why am I spending so much time trying to analyze the time spent milking cattle? Because that’s time those girls can’t spend in school, with friends, or on their own tasks. Those two kids — who would be in the 2nd and 5th grade, remember — are dragooned into hard, dangerous farm labor twice a day. Berry never pauses to consider that those little girls might do something else in life besides being a drudge for some other Amish farmer. Amish children only go to school through the 8th grade anyway. The lack of opportunity to form their own tastes, customs, and practices forecloses any opportunity to do anything else. Berry never considers the opportunity cost to those girls, and their mother, of spending 4 hours a day milking cows.

Fundamental to Berry’s entire worldview is that ‘stickers,’ people who stay where they were born, are superior to ‘boomers,’ who leave and wander around. Since the Amish stay in one place, he admires them. He advocates ‘rootedness,’ despite being a huge hypocrite who wandered around until he got tired of it. Having always been at the top of his local food chain, he refuses to imagine that someone might find being at the bottom of it unpleasant and want to leave. As the quoted passage here indicates, he simply refuses to acknowledge the possibility of any perspective but his own.

It is his refusal to consider that small, rural communities can oppress their members that render all of Berry’s work reactionary and, to me at least, worthless. This is deeply sad, because small towns and rural places need an advocate right now. Letting these places rot is wasteful and unhealthy. Further, even us suburbanites need community. Humans aren’t meant to be hermits. We need more groups like churches, unions, service clubs, hobby clubs, to allow us to form connections to other people. We can’t do that effectively if we only use foolishly nostalgic pictures of the past drawn by upper class twits. We need communities with guardrails protecting their members from the Harper Valley PTA problem, and we’re not going to get that from Berry’s sepia-toned posed portraits that leave out all the bad stuff.

Authenticity just means the quality of being true or genuine. It derives from a Greek word meaning, in modern English, ‘official’ or duly authorized.2 What actually matters when someone talks about authenticity is ‘authentic WHAT?’ A thing can be genuine and really, really bad. Klansmen are quite genuine in their bigotry but that doesn’t make the bigotry good.

Klansmen make a good example here. Too often ‘authenticity’ is nothing but a synonym for ‘lazy, ignorant, and crude.’ Platner’s swearing was proof that he wasn’t spoiled by “Dem HR Lady politics:” his crudeness showed he was a ‘man of the people.’ This of course assumes that ‘men of the people’ are all crude jerks. Talk about the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations.’ Good manners and educated speech are not simply the product of privilege; they are essential for life in a decent society. Good manners simply make life more comfortable for all of us, especially those who didn’t learn the proper form of address for an archduke in childhood. (We don’t have archdukes here, and if we did, the proper American address is “Mr. Lastname.” Americans don’t have titles of nobility and it is good manners to respect that when in the US.)

When considering politicians, the first question should never be whether this person is ‘genuine.’ It is a nice quality if the person seeking my vote heartily believes what they’re saying, but it’s more important that what they advocate is actually a good idea. Further, it’s important to see that this person has the knowledge and experience to get the good policies enacted. Obviously someone who believes deeply that a particular policy is worthwhile will work to get the policy enacted, but simple conviction on a point isn’t enough to move the gears of lawmaking. A lawmaker needs to know what can be compromised to get the desired result and what can’t be. “The Art of the Possible” requires, y’know, that something is actually possible.

Let’s look at some examples of good politicians who failed the ‘authenticity’ test. First is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, easily the least 'working class’ person elected to the Presidency since the Civil War. FDR’s ancestor owned the land that later became midtown Manhattan. Educated by private tutors and then Groton and Yale, FDR never worked an actual job for an actual boss in his life, yet he oversaw the greatest expansion of working class protection this country has ever seen, including the vital program Social Security.3 Other necessary New Deal acts were the National Labor Relations Act which protected and encouraged labor organizing.

An even better example of a politician who failed the authenticity test is Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was absolutely a man of his time and place, meaning he was a racist. His mentor in the Senate was Richard Russell, who led a boycott of the 1964 Democratic National Convention because Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Despite his private behavior, Johnson dismantled the Jim Crow system through the 1964 Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.4 Johnson expended an enormous amount of political capital and alienated his oldest friend in the Senate because he knew that segregation was WRONG. His now-famous remark to Bill Moyers about losing the South for a generation shows he understood what those laws did. Even though he wasn’t committed to Civil Rights in the way he should have been, he nevertheless did the right thing.

Platner had a significant number of advocates and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life addressing all of their points. The one point that I do think needs to be stomped into oblivion is the idea that were it not for snooty “Karens”1 imposing our trivial and fake rules on an Authentic Man Of The People. This attitude is distilled in Matt Stoller’s offensive Tweet: “Graham Platner represents is the end of Dem HR lady politics.”2

Human Resources professionals are mostly but not exclusively women. It’s 71% according to that link, but it should also be noted that women in the profession “earned an average of $91,981 a year, while their male counterparts reportedly earned $103,644 — a 13% difference.” Even in a profession with a large majority of women in it, men earn more money.

The sexist assumption behind “HR lady” isn’t the worst part of Stoller’s idiot — and since deleted — Tweet. The worst part is the implication that HR doesn’t do anything worthwhile; that the women in it spend all their days wasting Important Male Time with their training and scolding. I think it’s important, therefore, to review what it is, exactly that HR departments do and then how that applies to election campaigns.

According to Indeed.com, Human Resources professionals

have a variety of duties and responsibilities, from recruiting, hiring and onboarding new talent to administering fringe benefits such as health insurance and approving PTO days and leave requests.

Other human resources responsibilities include training new workers and ensuring they understand company policies. They may do this by creating or amending existing employee handbooks and scheduling and leading workforce-wide meetings that explain changes in benefits or rules. Another more unpleasant part of your HR department’s job is terminating employees. To do this, company HR staff must understand applicable labor laws and handle the process in a thoughtful, professional manner.3

I’m only going to focus on the initial hiring aspect of HR here, because that’s the closest analogy to what happened in the Platner fiasco. Let’s take them in order. “Recruiting, hiring and onboarding new talent” requires someone to create job descriptions, placing advertisements, and reviewing applications. They figure out what the tasks of each job are and then list the essential and desirable requirements the applicant must have. This isn’t easy and I will show you how hard it is through a hypothetical:

We’re an electrical contracting company. We need a new apprentice electrician. What qualifications must an apprentice electrician have? First and most importantly, an apprentice electrician must have a valid license. We in HR have to check each applicant to make sure that person actually has the license they claim to have. Thanks to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation this is not burdensome, but failing to do so leaves the contracting company open to a bunch of very nasty consequences, including losing ITS license. After confirming that the applicant is licensed, HR then checks references and confirms that the applicant really did complete the education level claimed. They check references and confirm that the applicant really did work at the jobs listed on her resume. All of this takes time away from the contractor which could be spent bidding on jobs or contacting clients, so it makes sense to have a few employees whose entire job is doing this stuff.

Does it really matter if a person lies on a resume about their experience or education? If the applicant needs a license, damn straight it does. Even in industries that don’t require government permits4have requirements that the applicant must meet, and applicants do lie about this. Jeffrey Epstein lied to get his first job, and of course that didn’t ever have any terrible repercussions at all. If Epstein’s first finance industry employer had listened to his HR department, the world would have avoided a lot of misery.

An election campaign is an extended job interview. We the people are the boss here, and we’re reviewing candidates — and note that we use the same word for job applicants and politicians — for a job running the government. This means we need someone to check the candidate’s qualifications and experience for us. What is the job description of US Senator? It’s found in Article I, Section 3 of the United States Constitution. It can be summarized as passing laws and approving appointments by the President. Our National HR Department needs to figure out if a candidate has experience necessary to do those tasks.

The appeal, such as it is, of people like Platner and Trump is, according to their fans like Stoller, that they are ‘outsiders’ and ‘not polished’ and other synonyms for ‘inexperienced in government.’5The idea is apparently that it takes someone with no knowledge of the job whatsoever to actually do the job. If the HR Ladies, with their rule and laws and other such red tape, our Brave Outsider could ride in a fix everything. Only in running the most complicated organization humans ever created — the United States government — do people like Matt Stoller think complete ignorance is a qualification. I seriously doubt that Stoller takes his car to an ‘outsider’ mechanic who’s never looked under a hood before, but for one of the one hundred most powerful legislators in human history, sure!

This is the real problem with Stoller’s foolish Tweet. Yes, it’s sexist and insulting. Yes, it denigrates an actual profession. Most importantly, it denigrates the job of being a US Senator. Our HR professionals will tell you that the lowest paid, least important jobs are the ones that don’t require any experience in similar areas. If any moron can be a US Senator, it’s not really that important a position, is it? Asking that one of the one hundred most powerful legislators in human history have actually passed a law at some point before their first day in office is a waste of time because nothing they do is particularly important.

One response to this is to say that lots of Americans feel disconnected from our government and if more people like that were in office, maybe those people might feel more connected. I agree with that, but I also note that there are ways to get that experience at lower level offices. There will be a ton of offices on next November’s ballot that will have only one candidate. Most of these are local offices that have a direct effect on our lives, like city council and county commissioner or public utility commissioner. Lots of local jobs aren’t even full-time commitments. Someone like Platner could make a lot of difference in his fellow Mainer’s lives if he ran or volunteered for, say, county hospital board. Instead of starting at the top, start at the bottom or middle and learn from there. Thinking that only the jobs that make the news every day are the only ones that matter is a much more snobby position that asking candidates for the top offices spend some time doing lower ones. This is very much an HR Lady position, however.

I realize that it is neither a glamorous nor easy solution to the problem of disconnection from politics to tell people to run for their local school board. As I said, it’s very much HR Lady stuff. I do think, though, that asking our candidates to follow the same rules we ask of people applying to be a retail clerk or apprentice electrician is the authentic way to run a democracy.

I need to define what I mean by ‘leftist’ in order to make the distinction between an actual progressive and the ‘Aesthetic Leftist’ easy to see. There are people who spend much of their adult lives advocating for government action designed to make life better and more secure for people who aren’t from rich families or are from groups that in most of the past were kept out of education, government, and advancement up the social ladder by law and custom. The Civil Rights Act and the Equal Rights Amendment are good examples of these kinds of progressive policies. The key here is that a real progressive focuses on policies and not on appearances. The best possible example is Franklin D Roosevelt, a scion of the oldest money in this country, whose economic policies saved capitalism. Roosevelt looked and talked like the rich kid he was and yet his policies created the American middle class. He was a true progressive.

FDR is a good introduction to the second element of a true progressive: pragmatism. He pushed through the Social Security Act which has kept old people out of poverty and freed up uncountable amounts of their kids’ money for other uses. When it was originally enacted, Social Security excluded agricultural and domestic workers. This had the result, whether intended or not, of excluding about half of the employed people in the US and a very large percentage of Black people. All the New Deal programs were products of brutal fights in Congress and even more brutal fights in the federal courts. FDR, having been Navy Secretary and governor of New York, was a veteran of government procedures and knew how to compromise to get some of what he wanted. He’s idolized by people today who have no idea what he and Congress had to do to get social programs passed, and that’s with 72% of Congress from his own party.

Aesthetic Leftism, in contrast, is much more of a purely appearance-based movement. Graham Platner is the current poster boy for Aesthetic Leftism. This Slate article very specifically notes that aesthetics were why Platner got so much attention:

His left-leaning ideology was essential, certainly. And Mainers have spoken about his talent for riling up a crowd with an uncommon magnetism. But what really made Platner appealing to Moraff and Fan didn’t have anything to do with the kind of person he was or what was, or wasn’t, on his résumé. It was his unvarnished aesthetic. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats,” Moraff told the Wall Street Journal. “They want people who are real human beings, and they want people who do not look and sound like the vat-grown people who’ve been leading this country off the cliff for the past century, and that was Graham.”

Platner’s backers were dazzled by what the Slate article calls “a series of signifiers fetishized by white-collar consultants like Moraff who think they know what working-class voters want: forearm tattoos, earrings, a cruddy trucker hat, a facility with raw shellfish, a litany of offensive Reddit posts, and a history of drinking too much.” Matt Stoller described Platner as ‘a rejection of Dem HR lady politics.’ This leads me to another element of Aesthetic Leftism: performative anger. Platner looks like he’s in an ad for Ralph Lauren flannel shirts, but that’s not enough for Aesthetic Leftists. Platner’s anger at the System and The Establishment, especially the establishment of his own political party, appealed to the pundits who supported him. He looked and acted like a guy who’s going to get into a fistfight over Medicare for All.

So what’s my problem? Don’t I want a fighter for my causes?

Yes, but mostly I want to WIN on my issues, and Aesthetic Leftism doesn’t really allow for winning. The question has never been who is most sincere in his beliefs about Medicare for All or Justice for Palestine; it’s who can actually DO something to achieve those goals. Who has the experience and temperament to get good laws passed? Platner may be the most sincere advocate for Gaza ever but if he loses the election or wins and can’t get anything through the Senate he has failed.

That’s the real problem with Aesthetic Leftism — it’s all about appearances and has no substance at all. Stoller’s insult about ‘HR Lady politics’ isn’t insulting just because it’s sexist, but also because it’s stupid. As I noted yesterday, Human Resources ladies are the people who check references, confirm resume entries, get transcripts and license documents, and generally ensure that the employees at a job have the qualifications to do that job. They do not care whether or not someone told the truth when they said they dreamed of being an insurance adjuster since 2nd grade; they do care that the person has a valid driver’s license and no disqualifying criminal history and they do this before the applicant has a chance to crash a car or steal from a client. Without the substance of qualifications, the appearance is irrelevant.

I am not saying that ‘passion’ doesn’t matter or that there’s no place in politics for people who haven’t spent every moment since completing toilet training perfecting their CV’s for Congress. What I am saying is that passion needs some discipline and planning. Anger is a deadly sin and basing an entire political program on one deadly sin is, as the consultants say, suboptimal. Neither Platner nor Trump know anything about how government works and we’re living in the wreckage their ignorance caused. Real leftists have experience working or volunteering or just living in the world of the marginalized and from that, developed feasible ideas to improve their lives. Once reason LBJ could get the Civil Rights Ac and the VASTLY more significant Voting Rights Act passed was that he had taught in a poor school and knew the lives of those kids, and also because he knew how to manage Congress. He never made passionate speeches but he certainly knew what was needed to really improve lives. We got Medicare and Medicaid out of his calculating pragmatism and not from anyone’s slogans.

Aesthetic Leftists don’t care enough about their issues to win, which makes them both useless and dangerous.

gans he repeats, but that doesn’t come close to making him an effective progressive legislator. I mentioned FDR above for a reason — he knew how to get his agenda accomplished.

Platner’s campaign caught fire because he was perceived by a certain kind of Leftist as ‘authentic.’ The problem is that they have no actual definition of ‘authentic’ that includes anything like a qualification to be US Senator or President. This New Yorker article summarizes the problem with the current Leftist discourse on ‘authenticity’ really well:

the term has come to stand for a range of attributes—intemperance, ordinariness, outsiderness, likability, spontaneity—that aren’t especially related philosophically, either to authenticity or to one another. Worse still, it has come to stand for the skilful performance of such things. Whether acting or not, Platner—white, macho, sweary, Midwestern-coded (if not actually Midwestern)—seemed to fit the bill.

“Authentic” is a synonym for genuine; it’s just another adjective. It has a positive connotation in the world or art and antiques but really can’t be applied to people in the same way. Is it ‘authentic’ for me to enjoy opera despite not having any family members who took me when I was a child? Should I be barred from eating Mexican food because I’m not Hispanic? (Try to take my tacos and I’ll hit you on the head with a “Come And Take It” flag. Some things cannot be endured.)

The job of US Senator is approving Presidential appointments and passing legislation. ‘Authenticity’ is a completely useless category here unless it means nothing more than ‘knows how to pass laws.’ Getting laws passed means making unpleasant compromises and having a cold-eyed assessment of what can pass and what cannot. In 2016, Hillary Clinton correctly stated that Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All plan would never pass Congress. We know how that ended. Clinton was actually the ‘authentic’ one there, but she never got any credit. By the standard of ‘can you get laws passed?’ Platner is about as fake as a Rembrandt found in a Mississippi flea market.

Instead of defining ‘authentic’ as ‘does this person actually have the skills required for the job?’ the Platnerites shared with the Trumpets a belief that ‘authentic’ is purely a matter of aesthetics. The Leftist men, most notably from Pod Save America, fell for the idea that Platner’s appearance as a horny-handed son of toil mattered more than his actual behavior. From the New Yorker piece cited earlier:

“I do swing kettlebells, I lift weights, I work on the ocean with my hands, I shoot guns,” he said recently. “It’s just, kind of, my existence.” Indeed, Platner would quickly win praise for coming across as a real person: in the weeks following his campaign launch, a local labor official likened him to “somebody who I would meet in a union hall”; Bernie Sanders, in an endorsement, called him “a Mainer through and through.” When Lisa Wood Shapiro profiled Platner, for this magazine, she asked whether he’d rein in his notably foul mouth if elected. “I know what rooms not to swear in,” he reassured her. “But what I’m not gonna do is purposely change my personality, or put on some kind of adaptation to try to appeal to folks.”

I like to call the Platner appreciation ‘Aesthetic Leftism.’ What matters is not what policies a person intends to advocate once in office; the important thing is looking like a picture from a Ford sit-down strike from 1933. Platner is himself guilty of this. He’s a preppy from a rich family. As I noted in May, in this piece, Platner is no more working class than I’m a Russian Grand Duchess. He simply adopted a lot of hobbies and behaviors of a certain kind of male. (The gendered aspect of this kind of ‘authenticity’ is worthy of its own long discussion.)

The unspoken but essential evidence of ‘Aesthetic Leftism’ is that any idiot has the skills to pass legislation or administer the government; that “President” or “Senator” is an easy job because only jobs that involve lifting things are Real Jobs. Matt Stoller, graduate of St. Paul's School and Harvard College, in a since-deleted Tweet praised Platner as a ‘rejection of Democrat HR lady politics.’ I think it’s relevant that Human Resources Departments screen applications for qualifications as well as scold men for talking about the interns’ tits. HR ‘Karens’ — it should be obvious how I feel about THAT particular slur — do something really important by making sure candidates for jobs have actual qualifications and employees keep their minds on their jobs during the workday. Platner isn’t qualified to be Senator and doesn’t have the discipline to learn quickly. Had someone listened to the HR Ladies, we would not be in this mess.

There is of course the problem that the only way to get experience in a job is to have experience already. How, exactly, does one get the experience necessary for the US Senate before actually being in the Senate? Should we establish something like the old Roman cursus honorum? How can people who don’t have Ivy League degrees get elected if we require experience before electing them?

These questions have an easy answer: local elections. Democrats in general and Aesthetic Leftists especially think that only the top jobs matter. In fact, a lot more government takes place at the level of city, county, and school board than in the US Senate. The Democratic Party allowed its precinct and county parties to atrophy such that there have been local races without any Democratic candidates for decades. Actual functioning local parties can start recruiting local people to run for local offices, which means there will be ordinary people with experience in government who have also been reviewed in more than one contested election. It’s not perfect but it does have a greater chance of getting the garbage out in the open when it’s less catastrophic.

Doing this kind of local work is, to Aesthetic Leftists, extremely boring. Nobody gets headlines in the New York Times by being a precinct chair in Bailey County, Texas, but the precinct chair is much, much more important. If we’ve learned anything from Donald Trump it’s that effective resistance to fascism depends on local actions like in Minneapolis more than anything Congress does. The local people who formed that resistance did something else; they gave themselves a redemption story if they needed it. If anyone who opposed ICE last winter had some sketchy history and now wants to run for city council, they can show their work last winter as restitution.

There is an alternative world in which Graham Platner decided to run for city council and spent several years reviewing the budget for the city’s rape crisis center or the police department’s rape kit processing. He listened to statements from survivors and learned that sexual assault causes a lifetime of trauma. He got therapy and some control of his demons, and instead of running for higher office, worked to recruit ordinary people into public service as candidates and volunteers. He and the world would be better for it. I titled this piece Will Get Fooled Again in honor of the Who song because the lyrics perfectly describe what happens when we change the boss but not the system. The men — and I do mean MEN — who spurred on Graham Platner need to put down the shotgun, real or metaphorical. We need a lot more HR Ladies now. 1

First, let me note that as bad as the substance is, the form is worse. Tracey is an appallingly bad prose stylist. In this case, he includes TEN paragraphs discussing Nazi imagery connected with the now-defunct Azov Battalion in Ukraine. Ten paragraphs, including three quoting himself from a few years ago. Here is the first one:

One might retort: Hey, what about that big controversy over the past several years about a certain military unit in Ukraine, the Azov Battalion/Brigade/Regiment? Didn’t you used to complain that soldiers in this unit were routinely being spotted with Nazi insignia emblazoned on their uniforms, vehicles, and so forth? OK, fair question. It’s true that I would sometimes point out the prevalence of Nazi-type imagery among Azov fighters and followers, and I’d comment on various political tensions brought to bear by this conundrum: namely, that Democrats and left-liberals were deafeningly silent about the heavy arms being funneled to the seemingly Nazi-friendly unit, even though they’d otherwise be on hair-trigger alert to declare a blithering moral crisis anytime some schlub loosely affiliated with Trump or “MAGA” could be claimed to have exhibited a tenuous, theoretical affinity with purported Nazis.

One could squint and just barely shoehorn that into something relevant to Platner’s Tattoo Turbulence, but not by following it with nine paragraphs going into extreme detail about American support for Ukraine in 2022. This is the kind of thing that gets an essay docked ten points for padding.

He’s also terrible on the substance. I am not aware of anyone suggesting that Platner is an actual Nazi or in sympathy with the programs of Hitler’s Third Reich. The image, which I will not link and not look up and recommend that none of my readers do either because HOLY JESUS will that do horrible things to the almighty algorithm, is a skull and crossbones, not a swastika or the SS lighting bolts. Here is a Wikipedia entry about skull and crossbones used in military symbols. What the tat does show is that Platner has demonstrated bad judgment in the past, which is something that matters in the US Senate. There is nothing to indicate that Platner wants to build new Auschwitzes and Treblinkas in New England, but he also shows that he doesn’t always think things through.1 Tracey never manages that level of analysis and simply asserts that:

My take is that whatever the exact details of Platner’s tattoo folly, everyone should just relax in general about Nazi-related symbols, because they’re really not that big of a deal anymore.

The idea that we should quit condemning Nazi symbols is certainly an opinion.2

Tracey then achieves something exceptional; he writes something substantively worse that dismissing Nazi imagery as “not that big of a deal anymore.” He claims that he has no interest in whether the Democrats or Republicans control Congress.

I honestly can’t bring myself to care that much one way or another about whether Platner beats Susan Collins, or by extension, whether the US Senate is controlled next year by John Thune or Chuck Schumer. That’s just not something I envision myself getting overly exercised about, or psychically invested in. To the degree I am currently interested in the Maine senate race, it’s to document the deluge of propagandistic sleaze being pelted at Platner, with a nice assist yesterday from the New York Times, whose star correspondents Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer decided it was of paramount journalistic importance to survey Platner’s ex-girlfriends, going back to his 20s, and have them pontificate on his character traits.

He doesn’t care whether the Democrats or Republicans control the national legislature of the United States. He sees no difference between mindless deference to Donald Trump or resistance to him. His only concern is that New York Times journalists spoke to Platner’s ex-girlfriends.

Of supreme newsworthiness, evidently, is that a handful of these women recalled their past relationships with Platner could sometimes be “volatile” and “emotionally wrenching.” If this is super-newsworthy stuff, then as I proposed in the UnHerd piece, it’s only right that Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer also have their ex-boyfriends canvassed, and invited to share their recollections of any “volatile” or “emotionally wrenching” relationship dynamics they might call to mind from back in the day.

I cannot cite an authoritative source for my opinion that a man with a history of emotional and physical violence toward woman has no place at any level of government. Platner is seeking a job as one of 100 people with an insane amount of power over the most powerful nation on Earth. He will have access to highly sensitive data about our armed forces, our intelligence services, our monetary policy and financial reserves. Whether he is emotionally suited to that job really is an issue for the voters, and one piece of evidence toward that conclusion is how he’s treated his wife now or his girlfriends in the past. Adultery is bad, since it can lead to blackmail, but I think ‘emotional volatility’ is even more disqualifying. Someone who loses his emotional control with someone he’s supposed to love is also someone who will lose his emotional control with sensitive government documents. If he’s done something about this, great. I would like to see evidence of it.

What is worse to me about Tracey’s response to these allegations is his suggestion that the NYT reporters’ romantic history is relevant at all. They are reporters, looking for information and reporting it about someone seeking a prestigious and powerful office. Tracey thinks, apparently, that their reporting will be affected in some way he never defines by having had bad relationships in the past. This is punishing women for reporting on a man’s troubled history with women, something that is certainly of interest to women voters who will, unlike Michael Tracey, be affected by laws and policies the US Senate passes.

Tracey claims that his only interest in the race is because “the Maine Senate race is poised to become yet another national bellwether of the Great Pedo Panic, with Platner having been predictably declared a pedo already, on predictably scurrilous grounds — because there are seldom any non-scurrilous grounds on which pedo accusations are flung as of late.” Platner had an account on a messaging and chat app Kik which offers an unusual level of anonymity and, per the linked Wikipedia, has hosted accounts devoted to child sexual abuse material. No one has found — yet — that Platner has used Kik to molest children, but the fact that he used an application with a shady reputation is certainly worth examining.

Sex with minors and possession of child sexual abuse material are serious felonies that would disqualify anyone from serving in the US Senate. Dismissing concern about such felonies as a ‘panic’ and ‘scurrilous’ makes me want someone to audit Tracey’s search history. Sex crimes in general, and especially sex crimes with teenage girls, are woefully underreported and under-prosecuted. Most men who commit such crimes never face punishment. Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein's convictions have been overturned. (Weinstein is still in jail in California; his New York conviction was overturned.) Donald Trump is President. Donald Trump is ordering the taxpayers to foot the entire bill for his revenge against a woman he sexually assaulted. In this world, it is essential to investigate every instance of a grown man creeping on girls and young women. If Platner didn’t do anything wrong, he will be able to show that fact. Platner is not being prosecuted; he is being vetted for a powerful office, and if he has committed felonies, the voters need to know.

After reading Tracey’s dreadful ‘defense’ of Platner it is hard to conclude anything other than the fact that Tracey doesn’t consider men abusing women a problem. At all. Men like Tracey dismissing sexual abuse as nothing more than a ‘panic’ is why we cannot be rational and analytical in specific cases. If we were to create a system that allowed women to complain and have our complaints heard, then there would be less scope for ‘scurrilous’ accusations. Men like Michael Tracey, however, prefer a world where women are powerless, voiceless objects for the use of men because as long as woman have any ability choose our mates, men like Michal Tracey will be very much alone.

I have written before that I think Platner is a bad Democrat. He’s better than Susan Collins but good grief is that bar buried deep in the Earth’s core. We should have higher standards. Platner has committed the signal sin in a campaign of making his own conduct the issue instead of focusing on how wrong his opponent is. Worse, his existence makes it harder for squeaky clean candidates like Talarico to attack slimeballs like Ken Paxton. I have every confidence that Talarico is smart enough to do this, but the problem should have been avoided last fall. Still, because misogyny is respectable even for liberals, we’re stuck here.

The linked defense of Platner by Ken Klippenstein could have been written by the Paxton campaign staff. It positively drips with misogyny.

People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly. I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.

The caption to unflattering photographs of Susan Collins and Janet Mills:

Susan Collins and Janet Mills would never be embroiled in a sexting scandal (too much integrity?)

The conclusion:

And let’s be real, Platner’s story here is a pretty common one. This and his other “scandals” sound a lot like other former Marines I know. So when Washington acts like it’s disqualifying, what they’re really saying is that ordinary people aren’t fit for higher office. And to the public they are saying: Go back to the kiddie table at Thanksgiving and pick from the pre-approved smoothgroins we’ve selected for you

First, ‘smoothgroin’ is openly misogynist. He lists three specific Democrats under this category: Gavin Newsome, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg. Each has problems, but being insufficiently macho is very much not one of them. There are many words in the English language that could describe the three men that aren’t gendered insults: ‘artificial,’ ‘constructed,’ ‘poll-obsessed,’ and ‘slick’ are all reasonable descriptions of each of them. Instead of thinking, Klippenstein defaults to middle-school taunts about gender.

Even more offensive is Klippenstein’s assertion that ‘ordinary people’ have pasts as sex pests. James Talarico, to use one example, doesn’t have this problem. Neither to Susan Collins nor Janet Mills. In fact, there just aren’t many women politicians with sex scandals at all — even Laura Boebert’s theater escapade didn’t involve coercing her partner. (The other ticket holders have an understandably different perspective.)

The examples Klippenstein gives of other sex scandals are hardly ordinary either:

Tony Gonzalez whose affair with an aide caused her to commit suicide in a particularly gruesome manner.

Eric Swalwell who had to quit Congress and the race for California governor.

John Edwards included as a blast from the past.

Further proof that Klippenstein hates women is that he lists Pete Hegseth has a “personal scandals of a non-sexual nature,” when in fact Hegseth has more than one, including a serious allegation of sexual assault. Additionally, Hegseth is closely associated with people who want to deny women the right to vote. Opposing women’s suffrage is, in my mind, also a sex scandal.

I realize that in a world with Dominique Pelicot and the 'rape academy' and Andrew Tate in it, it’s easy to think that the listed sex pests are normal. I think that the fact that at least some of these guys have faced some consequences argues against that conclusion. Most men aren’t rapists or sex pests. Rapists and sex pests aren’t a class of people who need to be represented in the United States Congress. Women are that group. Running for office is, as I have often said, an extended job interview. Instead of excusing Platner’s behavior as just one more boy being a boy, Klippenstein could have analyzed whether his behavior is bad enough to disqualify him for high office even against an opponent who furthers policies as harmful as Susan Collins does.

Platner’s appeal has always been more aesthetic than anything else, and Klippenstein’s piece is very much within than category. Klippenstein’s isn’t even the worst example of aesthetics replacing politics. The worst example I’ve seen recently is this one, by the Last Blue Dog. The gist of the piece is that Democrats and progressives can’t attract male voters because we don’t get that “ambition, assertiveness, strength, courage, and risk taking” are, in his words, “distinctly masculine.” He says boys need hierarchy and a chance to show off in order to get the approval of girls. What he never does is explain what any of this has to do with politics.

Claiming that ambition, assertiveness, strength, and courage are ‘distinctly masculine’ IS claiming those traits don’t belong to women. Women are in essence weak, stupid, cowardly and boring, none of which are desirable traits in elected leaders. So, his argument boils down to saying that women don’t belong in politics. He cites no evidence supporting any of his assertions, so, again, his ‘politics’ are nothing but aesthetics. Men are hierarchical and women are not, and men insist that everything in life support their hierarchies. At no point does he discuss any kind of policy or action by government; he simply wants progressives to validate his opinion about what men are.

And he claims to be a Democrat.

Politics is about government and public policy. Who goes to jail for doing what? How much money do we spend on road building or national parks or missile systems? None of those things has a gender. If anything, since politics is about solving problems in the nation via words rather than bullets, women might be better at them since, according to the Gender Essentialists, have better verbal skills. (As it happens I don’t think that.3) In the same way that the civil rights laws actually require employers to hire people based exclusively on what skills the job requires, and sexual harassment law is about making workers do their jobs instead of make gross sex jokes,4the purpose of politics, especially progressive politics, is to use laws to make our society more just and open for everyone who lives here. There is no need for a ‘positive’ view of masculinity because politics is about policy, not childrearing. Like God in James Talarico’s theology, society is ‘nonbinary’ and it should be nonbinary. Laws don’t have genitals or gender. We need to recognize that!

That, as we say in Texas, ain’t gonna work.

To illustrate just why asking men won’t make things better for women and children, look at the first attack launched against James Talarico by Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race. ALL of Ken Paxton's attacks are rooted in Talarico's alleged failure to conform to a macho gender ideal. Some examples are “Tala - FREAK - o,” which led the Democrat to sell t-shirts with that on them. Stephen Miller called Talarico ‘transgender’ and said the Democrat doesn’t bleed, he oozes soy milk. There are also ‘Low T Talarico,’ and the weird one lie about Talarico being vegan.

Note that not a single one of those things is about any actual policies. Ken Paxton is acting like he’s a 7th grade bully, calling his opponent names in the locker room. Given that Paxton’s record of personal and professional corruption should disqualify him for any public office, he obviously can’t discuss his own lack of achievements. Still, choosing to use such childish lies ought to show every Texas voter what a pathetic creep Ken Paxton is. The fact that there will be plenty of people here who think these attacks have merit demolishes the base for Libresco’s solution to the problem she ably describes.

There is a deeper connection between Paxton’s schoolyard-level attacks and Libresco’s intellectual project: the belief that men and women are so completely psychologically distinct that they cannot be addressed using the same language or policies. Libresco’s version is much nicer, focusing on showing men that they are also dependent as children and old people and asking them to support women and children with economic and political decisions favoring the weak and dependent. She implicitly acknowledges that men are independent all through adult life. She explicitly states that public life is designed for the male body and male life-pattern. (See my earlier review for specific examples. So long as attacks like Paxton’s on Talarico work at all, we’re never going to get any of the policies Libresco wants. Paxton understands that believing that men and women are significantly different always means believing women are inferior.

The solution to the problem Libresco outlines is simple but very hard: it is to destroy the system that supports attacking James Talarico for failing to be macho. I know Paxton is lying about his opponent, but the nature of the lies matters. Fighting these attacks on the ground of their accuracy cedes too much to the enemy. Behavior isn’t gendered. We should assume that, outside of the size of their gametes, there are no significant differences between men and women. Instead of fighting for accommodations for ‘dependence,’ fight for a set of fundamental rights for all people: healthcare, the opportunity to work and contribute, decent wages, housing, and, especially, time away from work to be used for whatever the user wants. Assuming men and women are vastly different only reinforces the effectiveness of Paxton’s lies.

Mormonism: There are nine sitting members of the US Congress who belong to the Church of Latter Day Saints. All of the current ones are Republican; the most prominent Democrat was former Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who was the most powerful Mormon to serve in Congress. What does Mormonism teach about the nature of God? God was once a mortal male. Mormons reject the Nicene Creed. Again, and I cannot stress this hard enough, IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT MORMON OFFICEHOLDERS BELIEVE ABOUT GOD IN ORDER FOR THEM TO SERVE IN OFFICE. It is true, however, that Mormon beliefs about God are far different from standard Christian doctrine. Further, Mormons specifically ascribe physical gender to God, which orthodox Christians do not. If it’s fair to attack Talarico for believing that God is a disembodied and genderless Spirit, then why isn’t it fair to attack Harry Reid for believing God lives on the planet Kolob and once was a mortal male?

(Some) Catholics. To some Catholics, Mary is considered “Co-Redemptrix.” The Vatican has rejected this idea, but it lives on. I can’t find evidence that any member of Congress adheres to this particular belief, and as I continue to emphasize, it would not be appropriate to question them about it at all. The idea of Mary as any kind of mediator between God and humans directly contradicts Holy Scripture, yet millions of people believe it. The idea of attacking a Catholic for believing that Mary has a non-Scriptural role in salvation is, correctly offensive. Paxton would never do that because the majority religion in Texas is Catholicism. Still, Mary as Mediatrix or Co-Redemptrix is not found anywhere in the Bible.

The obvious reason Paxton doesn’t complain about Mormons or extremely conservative Catholics is that he knows they vote for him. Talarico’s sincere faith doesn’t deserve respect from Paxton because he can use it to rile up his supporters. Like everything else in the modern Trumper Cult otherwise known as the Republican Party, this is aggressively hypocritical of him. If belief that God doesn’t have a gender is a disqualification for public office, then that same principle should disqualify Mormons and Marian Catholics, who also believe things about God not found anywhere in the Bible.

I do NOT want religious tests applied to public office and as a result, I do not care that Mitt Romney or Harry Reid believed that God lives on Planet Kolob and might once have been married. Theology does not appear anywhere in the job description of a US Senator. What I DO want is a level playing field. If Talarico’s religion matters, so does every other candidate’s religion. So long as officeholders aren’t imposing specific theological doctrines through their offices, their private beliefs are their own. Paxton’s ad crosses a line set by our Constitution and should for that reason alone disqualify him for the US Senate.

I wrote about Platner back in November. He is a preppy failson who has a history of offensive Reddit posts and a Nazi tattoo. On the basis of some good ads and good facial hair, he has forced Maine’s governor Janet Mills to drop out of the race.

It should be noted that Mills is 78 and had to be chivvied into the race by Chuck Schumer. The Democrats really should be able to do better than forcing an unwilling senior citizen to run for what will likely be one single term. Of course, 83-year-old Bernie Sanders was re-elected in 2024 and has filed to run again in 2030, when he will be 88, but Sanders is male and therefore never ages. I have not seen one single solitary mention by anyone that Sanders is too old to serve despite him being five years older than Mills. r with dudes — and I do mean DUDES — on the Internet any more than Mills is.

Platner’s success demonstrates that progressives are just as misogynists as anyone else. When I express some dismay at having a Democrat who thinks rape victims ask for it on the top of our ticket anywhere, I am bombarded with statements about how Mills vetoed popular legislation against data centers. I agree that Mills’ veto was wrong. I also know that the reason this data point exists is because MILLS IS THE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE. She’s doing her job and creating a record. Platner has been able to speak at six events a day because Mills has to do her job.

The reason Platner doesn’t have any embarrassing votes to explain is because he’s never held any elective office in his life. He was in the army, so he has some government work experience, which he loved so much he worked as mercenary for years afterward. Janet Mills spent her career amassing experience as a lawyer, prosecutor, and legislator. She has a great deal of expertise in drafting and applying laws.

Platner has a beard.

Somehow, in the minds of male progressives, the beard is better than all the experience. Platner, who is about as authentic A Man Of The People as I am a Russian Grand Duchess, performs angry white male on some well-made ads and become a progressive hero. Platner can’t be attacked for making unpopular decisions because he has never made any decisions similar to Janet Mills’. He has no experience even vaguely related to being a US Senator. 1

Why does he have to start at the top? Maine has publicly-financed campaigns for the state legislature. Why not run for the state house? County Commissioner? Why do white males always want to start at the top, something they will NEVER allow women to do?

The Maine Monitor piece I linked above is a fair analysis of this race and the issues involved. It shows his fake prole act really well, including this explanation for his Nazi tattoo:

Under the pre-Trump rules of American politics, those posts might have doomed Platner. The same goes for his Nazi-linked tattoo. In 2006, after participating in brutal fighting during his time as a Marine in Iraq, Platner and fellow machine gunners got drunk and wandered into a Croatian tattoo parlor, intent on getting something to memorialize their experience and the U.S. fighters who didn’t survive. They saw a skull and crossbones option and decided to get it — because, as one of the gunners, Phil Proschko, told me, “We weren’t gonna get matching fucking unicorns.”

Proschko and Platner both said they were unaware that the skull and crossbones was a Totenkopf, a symbol adopted and worn by the Nazi SS. And Platner said he didn’t know what it was until it became an issue during this campaign. Even when someone working with his campaign told him there was a rumor going around that he had a white supremacist tattoo, he said he didn’t connect it to the skull and crossbones on his chest. “I was like, ‘Well, that’s the fucking most retarded shit I’ve ever heard in my life,’” he told me. “‘No, I don’t have a white supremacist tattoo,’ and I never thought about it again. And then it came up later on, and I was like, ‘God fucking damn it.’” (He had the tattoo covered in late October.)

Note just how very male this whole bit is. He got drunk. He and a buddy decided to get tattoos as some kind of memorial to their combat experience, including the ‘fighters who didn’t survive,’ which somehow meant a skull and crossbones instead of girly ‘matching fucking unicorns.’ They were in the Marines. The globe and anchor is an actual emblem used by that branch of the service; the skull and crossbones is not. His reaction to being confronted with his awful decision reinforces the impression that Platner makes bad decisions: he responded by using ‘retarded,’ a slur against developmentally delayed people that should be treated in exactly the same way we treat using the N-bomb. Just because he has a job that involves sun exposure should excuse him from basic common good manners, but he’s a male so no one cares.

Honestly, the Nazi tattoo doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the ‘rape victims deserved it’ stuff. He can, and should, be criticized for poor judgment in both getting drunk and getting a terrible tattoo, as well as for being so ignorant of 20th Century history. Still, Nazi-adjacent symbols get used by heavy metal bands — all the umlauts and Gothic typefaces — and biker gangs. It should also be noticed that heavy metal bands and biker gangs are a huge, um, sausage fest. No Icky Girls Allowed.

And that brings me to the most infuriating thing about Platner. He is a perfect example of how we just don’t care much about misogyny. At all. Platner wrote a bunch of woman-hating garbage on Reddit; his political career has prospered despite that. The Nazi tattoo was one drunken bad decision but there’s no evidence to believe he’s actually a Nazi. The Reddit posts are perfectly typical of Millenial males. There is every reason to think those posts accurately describe his opinions of women. I have never seen anything indicating that he has genuinely understood why saying rape victims asked for it is wrong. He’s said he was sorry, and horrified by rereading it, but I have not seen any evidence of him actually working on domestic violence issues. I have seen no evidence of any real contrition or understanding on his part. I refuse to extend what the excellent philosopher calls "himpathy" to Platner without more evidence that he understands why what he did was wrong. Reading from a script that says he was ‘horrified’ is just not enough.

If I lived in Maine, I would vote for Platner because the alternative is the hypocritical Trumper Susan Collins. Defeating Republicans is our first job. Our second job, however, is making sure Democrats don’t excuse misogyny out of some ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ that men who have sweaty jobs lifting things can’t be expected to be decent to half the human race. Assuming we survive Trump, I want the Dems to discourage men with a history like Platner’s from running for office. I want the Platners of the world to cede their place in public life to qualified women, or at least to women with the same lack of qualifications as Platner. I want mediocre white men to accept that being mediocre is not actually a career path. Graham Platner should be Maine’s next Senator because it’s a choice between only two people. He should never be model for any other race or any other person.

First the good: Sargeant is not a hypocrite of the Mollie Hemingwayor Phyllis Schlafly mode. In an interview with Lila Rose, she stated that she often out-earned her husband.2 The book jacket describes her as ‘a writer and speaker.’ She is a senior policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. In the Lila Rose interview she makes a point of praising how accommodating her employer was when she needed more time doing remote work after her last pregnancy. Given that all other prominent conservative women lie constantly about the horrors of women having paychecks, it is really refreshing to find one who is proud of her career.

In this book, the best thing she does — and it really is good — is describe in exhausting detail, how ‘the world is the wrong shape for women.’3 She means this in the strictest, most literal sense: the human-constructed environment is measured and constructed according to male average sizes. Some of these are surprising, like the fact that factory-produced kitchen cabinets are manufactured at a standard height of 36 inches, which is six inches too tall for the 5’3” typical American woman.4 As she notes in the Lila Rose interview, the kitchen, the place so many men want women locked into, is designed for men.

Some of the statistics she cites are downright horrifying. Countertops may be annoying, but vehicle airbags are a matter of life and death. Air bags deploy in a collision using a rapid expansion device that is supposed to completely inflate and absorb the force of the driver and front seat passenger at the end of the inflation. Women are mostly shorter than men and drive with the seat closer to the steering wheel, meaning that women get hit with the air bag during its forceful inflation phase much more often. Headrests and seat belts are also designed for men. As a result, women are 17% more likely to die in a crash and 73% more likely to be injured than a man in the same crash.5 She collects evidence discussion drug dosages, surgical tools, and even mentioned crude humor as examples of women being treated as exceptional instead of as ordinary humans. She specifically states that it is ‘unjust’ to force women to choose between protection like airbags because we can’t make them safe for our sizes.6

She recognizes that all women have to face the question of ‘when is it worth it to us to call attention to our embodied difference?’7 She illustrates the problem of women having to adapt to a male-normed world with the personal anecdote of being the captain of her high school’s Mathlete team and the only girl on it. The boys on the team threatened to break into her hotel room at night, which she doesn’t see but I interpret as a direct threat to rape her. She described the male chaperone as ‘unsympathetic.’ She accommodated by dragging a chair in front of the door and making sure her windows were locked.

Unlike most her ideological sisters, she thinks that women are something more than irrational breeding livestock. In the Lila Rose interview, she noted that if a mother was as dumb as antifeminists portray us, no one would want us raising their children. She recognizes that care work is vital to society and seeks ways to make the people who do it less economically and physically vulnerable.

This gets us to the insurmountable problem with her book: she has no solutions that aren’t private adaptations. The title is her summary of her idea that all of us are dependent on others at some point and that women, especially, should never seek total autonomy.

When I read that auto manufacturers design safety features that save men but kill women, I think that we need to get a lot more women into auto design and construction. We need women decision-makers and contributors. She mentions that working class women have a real problem with work-life balance and obtaining sufficient maternity leave, but never mentions unions. Apparently the only way to change social problems is to ask men to be nicer to us.

This refusal to seek government or collective solutions to private problems is typical conservative; it’s not the worst thing about her position. The Bad in her argument is her insistence that women are defined by our bodies. She states:

Our culture offers other ways to annihilate the female body in order to opt out of the way women are treated. Part of the sleight of hand relies on de-essentializing womanhood. The the difference between men and women can be described as social, not biological, the easier it appears for women to “catch up. Women are marked as different by customs, not by our bodies, and thus we can aspire to equivalency without having to lose anything of ourselves. [emphasis added.]

Sergeant put this passage in a chapter on anorexia, which she compared to deciding to adopt a non-binary identity and also using birth control, especially a form that allows for a woman to escape menstruation. A woman exercising agency over her own body is, in Sargeant’s view, a pathology like self-starvation.

To her credit, Sargeant again isn’t imposing something on everyone else that she isn’t willing to shoulder herself.

For my own part as a woman, I’ve grown gradually grateful for the way my body enforces self-gift and suffering for others as a regular habit of my life. It’s a relief to me that there’s vulnerability and generosity that comes to me unchosen, and even sometimes unwanted. 8

She is perfectly entitled to believing that physical weakness carries some theological meaning so long as she keeps that to herself in her own life. It is very much a problem that she does not do that.

This takes us to the Ugly part of her book and her opinions in general. She wants to completely ban abortion. She can write movingly about how dangerous pregnancy is for women,

The United States has a higher maternal mortality rate than other rich nations. American women are more likely than women of other nations to be in poor health prior to pregnancy, and the most vulnerable women don’t get the more attentive care they need. . . Even riches and fame are not enough to make a woman safe when she delivers a baby. Tennis superstar Serena Williams nearly died when her doctors ignored her documented, pre-existing condition, even as she explained to them what was happening from her hospital bed. But even if we did much more to provide adequate prenatal care, and to resolve the biases than lead doctors to neglect their more vulnerable patients, childbearing would still be one of the more risky routine things women do.9

In the cited interview with Lila Rose, Sargeant equates pregnancy for women with the draft for men. In both cases, Sergeant says, the person may be required to lay down their life for others. This makes it clear that she would ban abortion EVEN IF IT WERE REQUIRED TO SAVE THE MOTHER’S LIFE. Ancient Sparta only allowed headstones on the graves of citizens in two cases: a man who died in battle and a woman if she died in childbirth, but I don’t think Sparta should be anyone’s model polity. It should also be noted that the US hasn’t had a draft since 1973 but we still have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. Sargeant is equating a hypothetical — the military draft — to a very concrete reality of dying in childbirth. This is not in any way justice for women.

It is extremely disappointing that a woman who understands sex discrimination so clearly, from the stats about countertops and crash test dummies, to her experience of brutal sexual harassment in high school cannot see that abortion and birth control are bedrock necessities for women’s participation in society. As I noted, she doesn’t advocate for collective solutions like unions. She sees only private solutions to public problems, other than advocating for a ban on women’s reproductive medicine. She praises some men for being decent, but can’t seem to understand that just asking men to be nice isn’t going to ever work. I hope that she re-connects to real feminists and can finally formulate interventions that will serve women, but this book really doesn’t do that.

The answer is implied from the linked article: husbands. One of her policy recommendations is:

No more preferences for women in hiring and promotion, and no more risk of damaging lawsuits to employers who choose married male employees, whose salaries support their wives’ choices to stay home.

This is the old “family wage” system, never particularly effective, which in theory required employers to pay male employees enough to support a family on one income. The history is complicated, but one principle source is Rerum Novarum, an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII, namesake of the current American pope. This was one of the first papal reactions to the Industrial Revolution and is foundational to Catholic social theory. Most of the document is a condemnation of socialism, but a lot of it discusses the obligation to pay men — and only men — enough to support families. That encyclical makes it very clear that the wages belong to the man, who is supposed to use them for everyone’s benefit, but the money is still HIS. “A family, no less than a State, is, as We have said, a true society, governed by an authority peculiar to itself, that is to say, by the authority of the father.”

Rerum Novarum clearly states that women don’t have a place in the workforce. It even calls for governments to take action to stop “if in workshops and factories there were danger to morals through the mixing of the sexes.” Late on the Pope states that: “Women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adapted at once to preserve her modesty and to promote the good bringing up of children and the well-being of the family.” Women are to be restricted to the home, by law if necessary.

I have to be clear and state that I have not found any statement by Stepman related to Rerum Novarum. Her arguments are, however, the same as those presented in 1891 by the guy the current Pope admires.She clearly thinks that, except for her own precious self, women should depend on our husbands if we want to eat and live indoors. So let’s look at some examples:

Larry Summers.

Dominique Pelicot

Pete Hegseth

Mr. Lindy West, whom she obliquely references in the article.

Ex-Congressman Eric Swallwell

Ex-Congressman Tony Gonzalez

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton

And no list of awful men would be complete without twice-divorced adulterer Donald John Trump.

That’s a decent bi-partisan list and including all social classes. I didn’t even include the long list of famous men who beat their wives. It is very much not politically correct to say this, but anyone with eyes and ears knows that if given a chance to cheat, a man WILL cheat. Marriage is a great deal for men, but not so much for women. A woman who doesn’t have her own independent income has no choice but to endure this and no recourse whatsoever when it happens.

Let me make a detour here and state that I absolutely believe that domestic labor is absolutely vital. Clean, orderly houses are essential to a decent life. Searching for clean underwear every day is a waste of time that could be used on other, more important things. Cooking is cheaper and healthier and just plain nicer than the outsourced alternatives. Cleaning is extremely boring, but the alternative is learning to live with cockroaches, mold, and dust which I hope all of my readers want to avoid. More than this, however, some traditional women’s tasks are lots of fun. Cooking a fancy meal is an accomplishment! I am an excellent cook and even make a lot of my own preserves. It’s a delightful hobby. Gardening and needlework also provide useful objects or just beautiful ones as well as creative outlets. I will this more later, but just know that I really love cooking and needlepoint and other girl stuff and think those tasks deserve respect. More men need to do these things.

My objection to Stepman and all the other Schlafly-clone hypocrites is that they argue for putting women in an extremely vulnerable position. Either starve or put up with being abused in some way. They know they’re lying because, like Ms. Stepman, they don’t live by their own stated principles.

I do actually think that marriage is worth preserving for lots of reasons. For one thing, loneliness kills. We need more connection in our lives! The problem with the system Stepman wants to impose on every but herself is that it doesn’t actually make marriages stronger unless one things captivity is a good model for human relationships. If we want a world with stronger families, then we need to ensure that both parties are there entirely voluntarily and that each has a way out if things go sideways. Institutions can provide that insurance. Individual people cannot.

The Myth of the Independent Girlboss was published April 13, 2026 in First Things. It is typically of its genre: poorly written, deceptive, lacking anything resembling evidence supporting its assertions, and recommending exceptionally bad ideas. Taking apart every incorrect or dishonest statement would require an entire book, so I will focus on two of her assertions and her proposals.

Her overall thesis is that single working women are not actually independent and self-supporting; they are “propped up from every angle by laws, taxpayer dollars, and the ability to externalize the costs of her lifestyle onto others. In other words, the girlboss is often as much a dependent as Betty Draper, but her dependence is less honest, laundered through public policy.” Ms. Stepman does not compare the laws, taxpayer dollars, and lifestyle externalities of married men or billionaires or any other person who might benefit from our system. Only women who, LIKE MS. STEPMAN HERSELF, are in the paid workforce are dependent on anyone else.

She starts by blaming working women on “the outsourcing of domestic labor that became normative by the end of the 1970’s.” This howler of a falsehood implies that no one worked as a domestic servant before the Bicentennial year. Lest my Gentle Readers think she has some kind of novel work in mind, no, she specifies that she’s talking about ordinary domestic service jobs.

Someone has to cook, clean, and look after the children. Some of the slack continues to be picked up by women working the “double shift,” a full-time job outside the home while being the primary homemaker (an arrangement maligned by feminists as yet another unfair burden placed on women by the patriarchy, though it is more realistically a result of women’s higher standards for domestic order).

In 1900, somewhere close to 16% of the wage earners in New York City were domestic servants.2These servants worked in ordinary middle class houses, not only for Astors and Vanderbilts. A typical block in Brooklyn in 1900 had 10 - 20 live in domestic servants, working as ‘kitchen girls’ or maids.3 The women working in those houses were doing brutal, exhausting work for families in which the women did not have jobs. Long before either Betty — Friedan or Draper — women were hiring other women to clean, cook, and mind the kiddies.

Stepman’s lie about domestic help is bad enough — and unless she is quite uncommonly stupid, she knows that servants existed before 1976 — her contempt for domestic work is evident in her statement that the second shift of cooking and cleaning is the fault of women having ‘higher standards for domestic order.’ It’s just women’s idiot insistence on clean clothes and dishes that keeps us out of the C-suites or at least able to binge-watch Bridgerton. There is no better demonstration of the statement that ‘women can’t win’ than Stepman asserting that women burden ourselves with unreal standards for cleanliness AND also that our refusal to cook and clean is causing the downfall of civilization.

And she does blame women for the ‘externalities’ caused by our insistence on earning a living.

In major cities such as New York and Los Angeles, up to half the nannies on the books are immigrants, and the real number is likely higher, with many skirting labor laws. The profile of other domestic task-replacers looks similar, with cheap delivery services such as DoorDash and Grubhub, staples for two-income households too harried to cook dinner, incentivizing an enormous black market that rents verified accounts to illegal immigrants.

This creates externalities. Even accounting for the downward pressure on wages from high rates of legal and illegal migrant labor, the care of young children is so expensive that its normalization as a major expense for the average family creates political pressure to transfer at least some of those costs to the taxpayer. New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani capitalized on this during his campaign, promising a “free childcare” plan similar to what Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed on the federal level. Less quantifiable than the tax hike are the societal costs of the negative behavioral effects of all-day non-parental care for young children, the effects of dual income stress on marriage, and the diminished life outcomes of children raised in such arrangements.

So women are responsible for illegal immigration, unsafe streets, downward pressure on wages but also upward pressure on taxes, and ‘less quantifiable’ things such as ‘the societal costs of the negative behavioral effects of all-day non-parental care for young children, the effects of dual income stress on marriage, and the diminished life outcomes of children raised in such arrangements.’ The linked pieces discussing house servants in the 1900’s note that lots of them were immigrants then, too. Please read those pieces to see how wrong Stepman is just on that question alone.

Let’s take the ‘less quantifiable’ things in order. First, the ‘negative behavioral effects of all-day non-parental care for young children.’ Stepman never mentions anything specific that she considers a ‘negative behavioral effect.’4I think it’s reasonable to use crime statistics as evidence about ‘negative behavioral effects,’ since crime is both directly harmful to victims and costs the state enormous sums to investigate, prosecute and punish. The rate of nonfatal violent victimization declined 85% in the 30 years from 1993. Youth arrests peaked in 1993. 5The number of murders in the US has been declining sharply since 1991.

Let’s look a couple of other stats. Teen pregnancy: 2024 had the lowest rate of births to teens ever recorded. Alcohol and drug use: 2024 had record low levels of teen use of alcohol, cannabis, and vaping. So kids aren’t committing crimes, having kids, or using booze and drugs. Since Ms. Stepman refused to tell us what negative behavior effects she was discussing, I can’t address anything else, but at least from my perspective this shows that kids are actually doing quite well. If they experience ‘diminished life outcomes’ it’s not from crime, unprepared childbearing, or substance abuse.

Ms. Stepman has some recommendations she wants adopted to make sure women other her own sweet self are pushed out of the paid workforce.

• No more illegal labor or mass immigration undercutting American workers. This will reset the price of nannies and burrito taxis to their free-market value.

• No more preferences for women in hiring and promotion, and no more risk of damaging lawsuits to employers who choose married male employees, whose salaries support their wives’ choices to stay home.

• No more lawsuit paydays for complaining to HR about subjective jokes in the workplace.

• No more federal loans and subsidies for universities and female-dominated majors and degrees that don’t pay for themselves; if gender studies degrees are economically self-supporting, private banks will loan students the tuition money without need for the taxpayer’s intervention.

• No more federal funding of the female-dominated NGO complex.

Of course she provides no details about how any of these proposals would work. Immigration is far beyond my capacity to address, but I can discuss the other four proposals.

The second proposal is actually two bundled together. The first is ‘no preferences for women in hiring and promotion,’ which presumably refers to affirmative action that encourages employers to hire people from underrepresented groups including women. At the moment, however, most professions are either dominated by women or close to parity, and with girls being about 60% of college students, this is only going to get worse. Employers won’t need to give preferences to women lawyers, because 56% of their applicant pool will be women. It’s the same for medical students. Women are already 63% of the active veterinarians in the US. Women don’t need preferences anymore, so what’s she talking about here? One can only assume that she wants employers — except hers, of course — to hire unqualified men instead of qualified women.

That qualification difference is important for the second part of this proposal: paying married men more. Marital status is not relevant to any occupation. Married men are not better employees just because of that fact. What she wants here is for employers to have to pay men higher for something entirely unrelated to skills or job performance.

The third recommendation is connected to her desire to have employers consider factors outside of actual job performance. Sexual harassment suits get portrayed in the Right Wing press as unreasonable reactions to ‘subjective jokes.’ Stepman quotes the godawful Helen Andrews “Great Feminization’ essay: “Women can sue their bosses for running a workplace that feels like a fraternity house, but men can’t sue when their workplace feels like a Montessori kindergarten.” A Montessori school is a workplace; a frat house is not.6 The landmark case establishing the hostile work environment standard is Robison v. Jacksonville Shipyards. The plaintiff won because she presented a ton of evidence that the management of said shipyards tolerated really gross pornography posted all over the workplace. Jacksonville Shipyards was unable to produce anything showing that illustrations from Penthouse improved efficiency in shipbuilding. That is true of ALL sexual harassment cases; unless the business is the actual production of pornography, there is no possible reason for employees to be telling each other sex jokes. By definition such actions are not productive. All sexual harassment law asks is that employees do their real jobs.

The last two recommendations are too vague for me to address without doing a lot more research than my hobby allows. I do note that there were 15,254 degrees in Gender and Cultural Studies awarded in 2023 and they made an average of $99,300 per year. That appears self-sustaining to me at least. As for the female-dominated NGO complex, I would need to know exactly what Ms. Stepman means and see at least one concrete example before I discussed that further.

It is bloody exhausting work analyzing Right Wing bilge like this. Ms. Stepman is a gigantic liar and hypocrite who makes a living telling other women to do the opposite of what she’s done with her life. We feminists have no system of support anywhere near as good as hers is for producing shoddy and dishonest work like this. Perhaps we really are independent girl bosses.

Sasha Stone is an extremely stupid person. She is about the same age I am, born a couple of years after me. Her personal life has been rather messy, but that’s her problem and on one else’s. She first found some degree of fame as a movie awards blogger and really should have stayed in the celebrity gossip lane. Instead, she decided to get on the Trump Train and started producing crap like that at the link.

Sasha Stone herself isn’t at all important. She’s a stereotypical California rich airhead who came from enough family money to cushion her against the consequences of her lapses in judgment. She changed careers from celebrity gossip to political opinionator by guzzling gallons of MAGA Flavor Aid1 until her teeth are stained purple..

For those of you with tender stomachs who don’t want to read the linked piece, the executive summary is one sentence: she defends Trump’s offensive social media post attacking the Pope and sharing a picture of himself as Jesus. She claims Trump didn’t intend to offend anyone and was just joking.

What makes it interesting to me is how perfectly she demonstrates MAGAt rhetorical style. She simply asserts that Trump didn’t mean to offend anyone:

Did Trump post it to be offensive and mock God? Of course not. Marjorie Traitor Brown is now calling him the “antichrist,” along with Sneako, Milo, and the usual suspects of the Woke Right.

I gave up being offended by Trump long ago, after years of being offended by everything he did and said. I accept him, warts and all, because he is the guy who has the audacity to run again after they impeached him twice, indicted him four times, raided Mar-a-Lago, convicted him of a felony, lied about him, called him every name they could come up with from Hitler to pedophile, and now, to war criminal.

To suddenly pull that support because of a meme? Not me. So people will say I always defend him, and I do, but especially about this. He took down the Obama ape video - maybe he’ll take this one down too.

Like everything MAGA, trying to argue against all of this is like B’rer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the more one fights the more one gets stuck and covered in goo.2 Still, it’s worth the effort to show just how vacuous MAGA arguments are.

What is her thesis? There are apparently two: 1. “I do not believe Trump posted this, “depicting himself as Jesus Christ.” I think he saw it, liked it, and posted it, not realizing that it would be considered blasphemy:” and 2. “Did Trump post it to be offensive and mock God? Of course not.” Sentence No. 1 is near the beginning of her post and it’s reasonably clear that “this” refers to the picture of Trump as Jesus. Sentence No. 2 appears in the middle, after she copied and pasted Trump’s Truth Social rant against Leo XIV, which makes the assertion that Trump wasn’t ‘mocking God’ appear to refer to both the rant against Leo and the Jesus picture. I’m going to conclude that “mocking God” refers to the Jesus picture. Based on this I conclude that she’s trying to prove that Trump isn’t committing intentional blasphemy.

The first problem, before we even get to the lack of evidence supporting her assertion, is whether the standard for the President of the United States is ‘avoiding intentionally blaspheming Jesus.” Stone thinks that if Trump didn’t have a direct intent to offend every Christian that he shouldn’t be criticized for that picture. Standards of taste aren’t things that can be proven with objective evidence in the way that, say, one could demonstrate the melting point of lead with a crucible, a flame, and a thermometer. What I can say is that the President is the head of state, like monarchs in Europe. "[The head of state is] an embodiment of the State itself or representative of its international persona."3 Charles de Gaulle said the head of state was ‘l’esprit de la nation,’ the spirit of the nation. Should that spirit be one of tasteless jokes?

Once we get past that question we have to ask what kind of evidence would prove Stone’s assertion that Trump didn’t mean to commit intentional blasphemy. She never defines blasphemy or references any sources that do so.4 Merriam-Webster defines 'blasphemy' as follows:

1a: the act of insulting or showing contempt or lack of reverence for God or to something sacred

b: something said or done that is disrespectful to God or to something sacred

2: irreverence toward something deemed important or inviolable

The listed definitions do not mention intent, but one can infer that the first definition requires it. Insults and contempt require intent. The second definition, however, does not include a mental state. One can be disrespectful without any intent to insult. Stone claims that Trump used the Jesus image because he liked it. The evidence that he liked but didn’t understand the image is simply that he posted it. This is not argument. She needs to provide something from Trump showing that he didn’t believe the image was disrespectful to God or sacred things and she fails.

She admits that Trump isn’t a sincere Christian and never has been. I think we can take that statement as true without further proof. The fact that he isn’t devout actually supports the conclusion that he intended to show contempt for Jesus with that image, since he has no attachment to the figure he’s disrespecting. This is the only thing resembling evidence she ever provides to support her thesis. Everything else she says is either irrelevant or a bald assertion.5

That isn’t how any kind of argumentation works. In court, in academics, in high school English classes, a person makes a thesis statement and then supports it with evidence. In court that evidence is documents and testimony of witnesses. In academic publishing, it’s the results experiments or quotes in texts or other products of research. Other academics then review the paper to see if, to use one example, the math works or the experiment was designed properly and conducted correctly, and if the facts found support the conclusions offered. In all of these cases, the person making the assertion has to find objects or quotes or some kind of objective things that others can see or touch or read. It is not, in contrast to the Big Lebowski’s joke, ‘just your opinion, man.’

If this were just Sasha Stone, I wouldn’t care. She’s an idiot. Unfortunately her work is typical of conservative argument in its entirety. Very few conservatives ever bother to find any evidence that can be independently verified to support their assertions. They do, however, the same thing Stone does — excite the emotions. Stone’s recitation of how much it hurt to be called names by the left is emotional. She wants readers to feel outrage on her behalf and therefore agree with her completely unrelated assertion. Such limbic system arguments are typical on the Right.

I don’t have a snappy conclusion to this one. I hope that by showing how I analyze a really dumb argument that I help others do the same. Whenever you see something from the Right, look for a specific statement, with defined terms, that can be provide by concrete evidence that you can independently verify. If any of those things are missing, then presume the writer is lying.

Yesterday Taibbi provided further proof that he hates women by including the following paragraph in a post titled “Top 10 Symptoms of Conspiracy Brain:”

The dominant theory in academia in this country has been a moral panic for four decades. Students are taught a ghost story about a folk devil (the patriarchy) whose power is maintained at home through sexual abuse and in society through secret infiltration of institutions. The tale has been hammered by an emergent priesthood of people Cohen called “moral entrepreneurs” who always appear in panics, in this case professors, DEI officers, HR officers, and media figures. They constantly updated our language choices for us while also telling us serious threats lay underneath things we thought were harmless, like disagreement (harm) or atavistic word choices (microaggressions) — a phenomenon called “net widening.”

A few years ago the academy was organized against opposite-sounding theories like QAnon and spent much of its time asking the state for permission to censor its adherents. In the Epstein age this reversed! Adherents to once-loathed conservative conspiracy theories are finding kindred spirits on the cultural mainstream, where belief that the world is controlled by secret cabals of privilege networks held together by a glue of sexual violence is now entrenched.

Using the term “Epstein class” is bananas. Whatever Jeffrey Epstein was, he was one of one. The Epstein files show a lot of sordid upper class behavior, but we’re supposed to be surprised that Bill Gates maybe got an STD from extramarital affairs or that Elon Musk tried repeatedly to get to the “wildest party on your island” or that college presidents like Leon Botstein of my own Bard College might stifle a gag reflex to keep a fundraising check coming? Politico put Larry Summers making jokes about the IQ of women as the #1 most “shocking revelation” in the Epstein files. The overwhelming majority of the stuff in these documents is rich people acting like rich people. If anything, the banality of most of the communications is surprising.

“Epstein Class” is just a rebranding of what the left called the Patriarchy and what the right called “elites,” with a hint of weirdo antisemitism thrown in:

The classic five point lead taught to journalists is ‘who, what, when, where, and how?” That formula can be used to analyze this paragraph. First the ‘what:’ Taibbi asserts that the ‘dominant theory’ in academia is a ‘ghost story’ about a ‘folk devil’ called patriarchy. He provides no facts that define this ‘folk devil’ or what he means by ‘dominant theory.’ I would really like to know what parts of academia have been ‘dominated’ by this as well. Are there business or engineering classes taught by feminist theorists? He clearly thinks that patriarchy is fictional and that claims of sexual abuse are also fictional. Sexual abuse of girls in families has always been an epidemic.

The closest he comes to a definition or description is his assertion in the last sentence that patriarchy is the same as ‘the Epstein class.’ The “Epstein Class” can actually be defined as the Great and the Good who maintained close friendships with the dead pimp; ‘patriarchy’ has existed for thousands of years. Taibbi never even acknowledges any of the laws and customs which deprived women of any power or agency. No mention of everything from couverture to widow burning to legal wife beating to the custom of giving men all the best food and killing infant daughters.1 No, in Taibbi’s words, ‘patriarchy’ is an antisemitic fiction.

The ‘who’ in his piece is a little easier to define: professors, ‘moral entrepreneurs’ like HR officials, and media figures. He never specifies anyone, leaving his readers to fill in the blanks from their own experience. This tactic allows him to escape the need to prove an actual case while also exciting the limbic system of his stupid fans who can remember being scolded for talking about the new intern’s tits at work. It’s a common right wing ploy; never identify any specific ‘who’ so that the readers can imagine a monster who might have no actual relationship to any real person. A similar technique is use of the passive voice to delete the agent from any statement, like ‘a tree was cut down last night.’ The sentence doesn’t say who cut the tree. Taibbi and the Right who use this device avoid responsibility for naming the actual person responsible for the actions they condemn, and also deprive readers of the ability check whether their assertions are accurate.

There is another ‘who’ in Taibbi’s rant: the Epstein Class. He asserts that “Epstein was one of one,” implying that there is no group of people who can be identified as part of an actual class associated with the con man pimp. This is obviously false since Taibbi immediately follows this statement by listing a bunch of men who were friends and customers of Jeffrey Epstein. Taibbi specifically mentions Bill Gates, Leon Botstein, Elon Musk, and, again, Larry Summers.

I repeat the Summers link from my first paragraph because it’s worth looking into that one more deeply. Summers used Epstein as his ‘wingman’ in Summers’ sexual harassment of a woman who wanted his professional advice. In their correspondence Summers states that the woman was his ‘mentee,’ that she wanted to maintain a ‘professional connection.’ She clearly didn’t want to have sex with former Treasury Secretary, Harvard President, and Obama economics advisor Larry Summers as a condition of keeping a professional relationship, but Summers wanted sex from her. Summers demanded that she pay a tax with her body in order to keep a professional connection to one of the world’s most important economists.

No male would EVER be in that position.

Taibbi thinks that the only pernicious thing in the Summers - Epstein relationship is a bad joke about women’s intelligence. It does not matter to Matt Taibbi that some of the men who ran the world think women are genetically stupid. He cannot see this group of men as causes of any problems.

The ‘when’ in his post is fuzzy. He asserts that professors have blamed patriarchy for ‘the last four decades.’ This one is just ignorant, since the feminist movement has existed since at least the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, both a bit more than 40 years ago. Women have been objecting to the laws and customs that deprive us of economic and political power since those laws and customs were created. Simply because Matt Taibbi loves all those laws and customs doesn’t mean women enjoy being subjected to them.

Because ‘where’ isn’t really an issue in this rant, we can proceed to ‘how.’ Taibbi conflates professors teaching about the history of abuse of women and human resources officers enforcing rules against sexual harassment with QAnon loons. He, as should be obvious by now, never provides anything in the same galaxy as evidence, not even a fake example, to support this assertion. He simply mentions the professors and HR officials in one paragraph and immediately goes to Q nuts in the next one. This is, even for a writer as lazy as Taibbi is, exceptionally sloppy. His laziness does give him one big benefit in that it is impossible to argue against something that doesn’t even bother with an assertion. Constructing even a hypothetical method by which feminist professors conspire with the Q freaks is beyond my creativity.

After failing to explain any of Who, What, When, or How, Taibbi concludes with the statement that the patriarchy and the ‘elites’ are antisemitic myths. The conclusion is the first time in this section that Taibbi mentions antisemitism. Given that the Right has frequently claimed that feminism is a Jewish plot, this assertion should require more evidence supporting it. Like everything else in his essay, however, I am left more puzzled than anything else.

After reading this many times, and trying to write an analysis of it, I still have no idea what Taibbi’s point is. Does he think women have always had it great and shouldn’t complain about having a rapist President? Does he think women are annoying? What, exactly was his point here? I am open to any suggestions on this.

Let me explain in more detail. People who work for the government make lower salaries than private sector employees and work usually under greater restrictions in personal activity. When I was a government lawyer, to use one example, I couldn’t make any phone calls regarding my political volunteering during work hours even on my personal cell phone. We worked for everyone in the entire state and thus couldn’t even give the appearance of partisanship. We did this because, contra Reagan, we really did want to help people in ways that the private sector, especially businesses, never do. From consumer protection lawsuits through pollution cleanup to teaching kindergarten and catching and imprisoning criminals. government employees did things that the private sector could not or would not ever bother doing, and we did it on shoestring budgets and usually at least weekly phone calls calling us parasites. The secret was that for all the requirement that I buy pens on my own dime and talk down lots of angry morons, most weeks I also provided someone with help they never expected. No employee of Microsoft has ever persuaded a crooked company to repair the damage they caused to a retired librarian’s house. No real estate investor has ever gotten a polluter to clean up a waterway. Only the government ever does that, and we do it working for politicians.

Politicians definitely all have massive egos. Running for office and risking losing requires one. After all, being rejected by the voters is always a possibility. Walter Mondale told a story about meeting George McGovern after Mondale’s spectacular loss in 1984.

Mondale: “George, I’m really suffering right now. How did you ever get over 1972?”

McGovern: “Who says anything about getting over it?”

Even funnier was Bob Dole’s quip about losing in 1996. “I sleep just like a baby. I wake up ever 45 minutes and cry.”

What makes these stories a little more than just funny is that each of these men lost to someone who advocating a vision for the nation directly, perfectly, opposite of their own. McGovern lost to an actual traitor, Richard Nixon.2Imagine seeing Nixon’s second inauguration after a defeat like McGovern suffered, and going back to the Senate and working. That takes extraordinary courage.

Reagan famously stated that the scariest words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ and Reagan worked tirelessly to make sure the government never could or would help. He, elected twice as governor of California and twice as President, claimed that the entities he served were actually damaging, but never quite got around to explaining exactly how? Reagan is a good example of the hypocrisy of the ‘all politicians and the government is all bad,’ because Reagan advocated for banning abortion and absolutely adored the military. Both those things — law enforcement and the military — are parts of the government.

No one, as Reagan demonstrates, really hates the government. They like roads, cops, and soldiers. They like things like the Consumer Product Safety Commission when it bans lead-contaminated toys and exploding gas grills, or, more accurately, they like being able to buy toys and gas grills without worrying about lead or explosions; they just don’t think about the processes necessary to create that level of safety. It’s the government that does that work.

See, the government is the one entity that cannot ever say ‘no shoes no shirt no service.’ We cannot pick and choose our customers. I used to say when I trained new employees at my old job that government lawyers were the only ones allowed to sue our clients, because we represented even the people we sued. We had a duty to our opponents to charge them only with what we could prove and to resolve the cases if possible. We weren’t allowed to rack up judgments just to show off. We weren’t allowed to refuse to investigate a complaint unless there was a really good reason.3

It is the fact that the government is supposed to act impartially and for everyone that creates the ‘I hate politicians’ trope. Very few people believe that anyone could pursue a career in which personal gain is a secondary or lower consideration. The Right really can’t imagine that kind of altruism. They especially can’t imagine that someone would work for people that they don’t like or don’t agree with just because of a principle. Thus, the Right Wing media constantly harps on government employees and politicians as self-surviving power seekers or interfering bullies interfering with honest workers. That they also portray cops and soldiers as purely heroic despite those people being the only government workers who can get away with killing people is not, in their minds, hypocritical. I can’t manage those mental gymnastics myself.

So, remember that anyone who runs for office IS a politician! They’re doing something necessary in a democracy!

‘Redemptive Suffering' as the linked Wikipedia stub indicates, is the idea that a person can ‘offer up’ pain as kind of bribe to God. I’m sure it’s more complex than what I’ve described to the theologians, but in practice what it says is that I can endure some kind of inconvenience or serious pain and God will apply that payment to someone else’s sin debt. Redemptive suffering is a lot more prominent in Catholic theology, it has been incorporated into Protestant thought as well. The Prosperity Gospel, the heresy that my good fortune is God rewarding my faith, is an inverted version of redemptive suffering in that both doctrines teach that our actions bind God to a certain result that is visible on Earth. If I ‘offer up’ the inconvenience of walking an extra few feet from the parking lot — an actual example I’ve seen given by a Catholic writer — for ‘the persecuted church,’ then God is obligated to force the Chinese government to release a dissident. In Prosperity Gospel’s version, f I have enough faith, God will cure my son’s brain cancer. If the dissident dies in prison, then obviously I need to suffer more. If my son dies, then I didn’t have enough faith. In both instances, God is an abuser, beating his family for no particularly good reason.

I believe that in answering any question, it is essential to refer to primary sources. So, the primary source for all Christian doctrine is the Gospels. The quote above is from yesterday’s lectionary reading about the Man Born Blind, John 9:1-41. Like most of the Fourth Gospel, this story is Complicated. There is a lot of stuff about conflict with the Pharisees and whether Jesus calls himself God here. There’s even a reference to the Hebrews slavery in Egypt involved in the method Jesus uses to cure the blind man. Those are issues for Greek scholars and theologians. What I want to focus on is this:

John 9:2 And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?

³ Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

Jesus denies that the man’s blindness was anyone’s fault. What he does is cure it. He does not tell the blind man that his disability is a good example to others. He does not praise his endurance. He does not encourage him to ‘offer up’ the indignities of being disabled in a time and a place that excluded anyone who wasn’t physically whole from being part of the community.1

He heals him.

Every single time in the Gospels that Jesus is presented with someone with an illness or injury, He heals them. When the 5,000 are hungry, He feeds them. He raises the daughter of Jairus, the son of the widow of Nain,2 and most famously, Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha.3At no point does Jesus EVER say that pain is good or that enduring suffering is healthy. Suffering exists so that we can, as Jesus did with the man born blind, heal it.

To the extent that we ever get an explanation of why bad things happen, it is contained in the story of the man born blind: to show forth the glory of God by soothing and healing them. We can’t prevent suffering as long as we live in a physical universe constrained by time. What we CAN do is make things better for everyone. Redemptive Suffering simply provides an excuse to leave things in the unjust and unhealthy place they exist in today. If suffering is good in and of itself, then curing cancer is sinful. If being in pain is good for humanity, then we should make Hitler and Stalin and Mao saints.

We’re in the middle of Lent, a time when Christians fast in imitation of Jesus’ temptation in the desert. How can I condemn the idea that suffering can be beneficial while also observing a fast? Isn’t the pain of Lenten fasting supposed to be good for me? That’s just it. It’s good for ME. I don’t pretend that giving up on line shopping and games is going to do one tiny bit for anyone else on Earth. Giving up doing something I enjoy and that makes my life much easier for 40 days teaches me in a nearly imperceptible way about what really poor people have to deal with every day so that it can inspire me to help make their lives better. I will never equate giving up ordering from Talbots or playing Royal Kingdom with being homeless, but it does give me that small pinch when I’m stuck waiting in line and can’t use my favorite way to kill short periods of time. It’s not the pain itself; it’s the reminder that I have an outlet others do not and I should appreciate my good fortune.

We’re two weeks away from Holy Week. It’s a good time to think about what Jesus really meant, and on the value of suffering, I think his best statement was in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Lord, if it be thy will let this cup pass from me.” Jesus doesn’t need our pain. He didn’t want his own pain. He wants us to solve pain, not spread it.

The best starting point for analyzing Hanania’s views on women and sexual violence is this screed defending large age gap relationships. Of course he means an age gap where the man is much older and the woman much younger.

I’m of the position that the drop in fertility is a serious societal crisis, which means that stigmatizing relationships that can lead to procreation is the last thing we should be doing. It is strange to consider a man who is 50 years old a better person if he dates women his own age rather than 20-year-olds. Even if he doesn’t want kids today, the age gap relationship at least has the potential to lead to children. We might just say that adults shouldn’t judge each other’s relationships. I’m fine with that. But if we have to stigmatize something, it’s better to be hostile to attraction to women who are too old on the grounds that it will not lead to family formation. Maybe older men should be encouraged to suck it up and date college girls for the future of humanity, even if, as middle-aged women on social media assure us, this is something that all normal men must hate to do.

Hanania thinks that relationships between men and women are mostly about producing offspring. If he can get her pregnant, great! Of course, normal people note that ideally children should continue to exist after birth, and that their existence requires a lot of care from other humans, ideally adult ones. If the parents expect to do a decent job of childrearing, they need to get along with each other. Dependence and sharp power differences between the parties make getting along with each other much, much harder. 1

It is possible that a relationship with a large age gap could be egalitarian, but it is unlikely, especially if she has little work experience or little money of her own. I’m sure Taylor Swift would be fine if she married a much older man, but most women aren’t Taylor Swift. (Whose fiancé, Travis Kelce, is the same age she is: 36.) Couples who are closer in age will share more of the same tastes and cultural experiences than ones with large age gaps.2Couples who have things in common they can talk about are happier and stay together long enough to get the kids to adulthood.

It should also be noted that large age gap relationships are not typical ANYWHERE. NOBODY does this. Even in polygamous and Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the typical age disparity is only 7.5 years. In monogamous and liberal countries the age disparity is 2 - 3 years. When women have a choice in the matter, they pick mates that could have been their high school classmates.

Hanania provides no data whatsoever to support his claim that us ‘middle-aged types with a personal interest in the issue’ object to Epstein solely because Epstein preferred girls and young women. That’s because the age gap is only a symptom of our real target: men who abuse women. Our objection is that Epstein PREYED on women who were poor, troubled, and vulnerable to the predatory behavior of an abuser. It’s not their ages, Richie, it’s their relative powerlessness. Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre is pretty typical of the kind of girls the pervert recruited: troubled, poor, and with no options for upward mobility. Epstein exercised extreme coercive control over even the adult women he trafficked. He abused people less powerful than he was and got away with it.

Advocating for inherently abusive ‘romantic’ relationships is not Hanania’s only horrifying opinion. This screed against labor protection posits that the main reason “Europe doesn’t have a Tesla” is Europe’s much more robust laws protecting employees from layoffs. The assertion is that Europe doesn’t ‘innovate’ like the US does because European governments protect workers from layoffs. Hanania doesn’t provide any examples of such innovation, but the article on which he based his screed does: self-driving cars and touch screens. The source article admits that innovation requires a lot of failures:

Building self-driving cars has involved lots of failures. Apple spent $10 billion on its self-driving car project, before scrapping it and never transported a single paying customer. General Motors acquired Cruise, an autonomous taxi company, for $1 billion in 2016, only to close it down in 2024. It had sold just $102 million worth of rides in 2023, making a loss of $3.4 billion that year.

But failures like these are unavoidable in pursuit of innovations that succeed. Waymo is estimated to serve a fifth of the San Francisco ride hailing market, and, as of April 2025, carries a quarter of a million passengers each week in five cities. Uber and Lyft, which had halted their self-driving cars in 2020 and 2021 after years of losses, have partnered with Wayve and Baidu to offer autonomous alternatives to Waymo and the Tesla cybercab.

Waymo has never made a profit. It might be a good investment some day, but to call Waymo an ‘innovation’ is seriously premature. For that matter, Europe probably doesn't want Tesla.

The article has more problems than a poor case for American innovation. It contradicts its own assertion by showing that European companies actually make much more efficient gasoline engines than we do.

Europe’s newest internal combustion engines are engineering miracles. Volkswagen squeezes roughly the same horsepower from their latest one liter engine as Packard could get from an engine five times its size 90 years ago. The average fuel used per kilometer by new combustion cars sold in Europe has decreased by a third since the turn of the twenty-first century.

The author calls this ‘incremental innovation’ but fails to explain what makes that worse than invention of things like Waymo that no one wants badly enough to make the business profitable. European labor law doesn’t even have much effect on total employment. “In the Euro area, about 71 out of every 100 people of working age have a job. This is nearly the same as in the United States, where about 72 out of 100working-age people are employed.” So, robust labor protections cost ONE job per hundred people.

The most serious problem with the assertion that Hanania and Garicano make is that they don’t consider whether European labor protections provide any benefits that make having them worth more than the much-vaunted ‘innovation.’ Garicano admits that there’s no real difference in employment rates. The Europeans actually beat us on incremental improvements. Hanania appears to care only about the effect on employers:

Basically, what this system amounts to is a welfare state, while placing the burden on those who create jobs in the first place. To make another analogy, imagine we wanted to provide healthcare for the poor. But instead of paying for it through general taxation, we said anyone who provides any amount of charity to someone living in poverty must be the one to pick up the tab for their health insurance. How would such a system make sense? And this isn’t simply a matter of finding ways to provide welfare, but something much more extreme, involving locking employers in relationships they can’t get out of. You’re also misallocating labor, since having workers in places where they’re not needed prevents them from making a contribution elsewhere.

At the end of his piece, Hanania references the Bastiat maxim that we favor the ‘seen over the unseen.’

We think about the worker and the employer as the only two actors worth considering. Because they’re not immediate parties to the transaction, we ignore other workers who might be hired, shareholders, consumers, businesses that might benefit from creative destruction, or individuals who might in the future benefit from greater technological and business innovation.

If we’re going to consider fantasy inventions that haven’t happened yet as a reason to trash labor protections, we should at least give a thought to massive social disruptions that removing those protections might cause. Europeans have decided that social stability is worth few less Teslas. The fascist governments that started WWII arose because of mass economic upheavals than immiserated the working class. The US escaped that, mostly, but it would be a good idea to review that history.

I have gone into some detail about his bad arguments against labor law because, like the age disparity piece, it illustrates Hanania’s complete disinterest in the conditions of actual people. Because he thinks we need a higher birthrate, we should encourage relationships in which men abuse and control women. Because we need ‘innovation,’ workers need to suffer. He appears to share Epstein’s eugenicist opinions. Both men think that some people just, well, aren’t people. That is why Epstein matters, and why exposing everything in those files is essential. We cannot afford a ruling class of men who think of the rest of us as things.

1. I believe that all disputes must be resolved by referring to concrete facts. Facts are tangible and observable. Facts are never conclusions. That is, one may say “the trial record states that Defendant stabbed Decedent 16 times in the torso with a butcher knife. Decedent was standing and talking to Defendant immediately before Defendant stabbed her. Decedent died from blood loss caused by the multiple stab wounds inflicted by Defendant.” Those are facts. “Defendant murdered Decedent” is a conclusion drawn from those facts, but it isn’t fact until all the other things have been proven. So, my first belief is “always start with the facts.”

2. I believe in the rule of law. That is, I believe that a functioning polity should regulate itself by through rules adopted by a properly elected legislature or legislative body. Those rules have specific meanings, and must be followed by the people entrusted with enforcing the written laws. The enforcers cannot change the law on their own and may only interpret those laws in ways that follow the intent of the law. The enforcers must follow laws they don’t like until the legislature changes those laws.

3. Being rich, powerful, or well-connected is not a reason to excuse illegal behavior. Stealing with a fountain pen is every bit as bad as robbing with a gun.

4. Banning something doesn’t make people stop doing it; it only gives the state the power to fine or imprison the people who continue to do the banned thing. Murder has always been illegal but we still have 20,000 or so every year in this country.

5. If the populace isn’t willing to pay for prosecuting people who continue to do the banned thing, then the law needs to be changed to repeal the ban. If too many people within the population continue doing the banned thing, then the law needs to change and the ban should be repealed. See, “Drugs, War On.”

6. The law should focus its prohibitions only on those things that actually harm large numbers of people and there should be a direct connection between the prohibition and the harm prohibited. Banning drunk driving is immediately connected to preventing the harm of serious car wrecks caused by drunk drivers. There really is no other way to solve this problem other than aggressive prosecution of drunk drivers. By contrast, prohibiting gay people from adopting children does almost nothing to reduce child abuse because the overwhelming majority of child abuse is ordinary beatings by the kid’s natural parents.1

I believe a lot of other things that are better described as tastes or opinions and that don’t affect my views on public policy. I think every English speaker should know Shakespeare. I think every student in American schools should study Latin for two years and should graduate high school fluent in English, Spanish, and with a decent command of either French or German. I think any university that offers a degree in ‘Advertising’ should lose its accreditation and be forced to refund every dime of tuition it collected since offering such a worthless degree. I believe in the ironclad requirement of sending written thank you notes for every gift and invitation. I believe in strict punctuality. I believe everyone should understand their family’s religion and only reject it if said background is obviously foolish or toxic.

None of those things in that last paragraph should ever have the force of law, except the bit about Latin, and modern languages. That one I stick with.