On October 18, I told you that a Hillary Clinton presidency was bound to bring us four years of war . . . between the sexes:
When Hillary Clinton is elected (it’s going to happen, Trumpers), brace yourself — because it will be time for a new “national conversation.” But this time, instead of race, the never-ending topic will be supposed inequality between the sexes. You hadn’t thought about it before — but now that you do, you know I’m right. . . . Every single criticism of Hillary will be called “sexism” by the collectivism crowd.
Always trust content from Patterico.
In fact, I was so right, I didn’t even know how right I was — because, bonus! we don’t even have to wait until the inauguration for the sexism blame game to start! Why, we can start right now! as we learn from Robin Lakoff, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, who has a piece in TIME titled Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women:
I am mad. I am mad because I am scared. And if you are a woman, you should be, too. Emailgate is a bitch hunt, but the target is not Hillary Clinton. It’s us.
There are two kinds of people in this world: 1) people whose eyes involuntarily roll back in their heads upon reading something like that, and 2) idiots.
Lakoff lazily steals from the language of the black grievance industry, hardly bothering to repurpose the wording to suit her own grudge:
Clinton is guilty of SWF (Speaking While Female), and emailgate is just a reminder to us all that she has no business doing what she’s doing and must be punished, for the sake of all decent women everywhere. There is so much of that going around.
. . . .
But here’s Hillary Rodham Clinton, the very public stand-in for all bossy, uppity and ambitious women. Here are her emails. And since it’s a woman, doing what decent women should never do—engaging in high-level public communication—well, there must be something wrong with that, even if we can’t quite find that something.
Lakoff seems to picture James Comey as a cigar chomping, beetle-browed Neanderthal, lumbering up and down the halls of FBI headquarters, asking people: “What do you tell a woman with two FBI investigations? Nothing! You already told her twice!”
(I know, I know: it’s four investigations, not two; I just made it two for the joke.)
Lakoff repeats, again and again, her assertion that this sort of investigation could never target a man, with passages like this:
If the candidate were male, there would be no scolding and no “scandal.” Those very ideas would be absurd. Men have a nearly absolute right to freedom of speech. In theory, so do women, but that, as the creationists like to say, is only a theory.
and this:
The only reason the whole email flap has legs is because the candidate is female. Can you imagine this happening to a man?
Actually, perfesser, I don’t have to “imagine” it . . . because I can show you example after example. They have names like John Deutch (investigated for having classified information on his home computer), Bryan Nishimura (prosecuted for retention of classified materials from Afghanistan, with no evidence he intended to distribute them), and Donald Willis Keyser (sentenced to prison for taking home classified documents).
How do these ravings get published, then, when they are so obviously shrill, illogical, and off the mark? I could guess. TIME knows that publishing an article with a provocative headline like that will get a lot of clicks. They know conservative bloggers like me will fly into a rage, and write spittle-flecked polemics lashing out at the author . . . and all this means clicks for TIME, and money in the bank!
Yeah, I suppose that could be the reason. But I suspect a far darker reason: SEXISM. They published her piece because she’s a woman!
How do I justify this charge? What is my evidence? I don’t need no stinking evidence! In this Brave New World, my suspicions — when added to my righteous sense of anger and hurt feelings — provide all the justification I need.
[Cross-posted at RedState.]
