The Start of a Reaction?

It is good to see that there are twelve sane people left in this world.   It was starting to look doubtful that this many could be found.   Somebody managed to find them, however, and appointed them to the jury which last week unanimously found Kyle Rittenhouse “not guilty” of all the charges including first degree murder under which he was being persecuted.   No, that is not a typo.   

 

 

Now, since many people have spent the last two years hiding under their beds in their basements, sucking their thumbs and clutching their security masks tightly, hoping that the bat flu Bogeyman won’t get them before they can take the magic needle that will make him go away, at least until it is time for their next in an interminable series of jabs, it is possible that there are many people who don’t know the name Kyle Rittenhouse.   Granted, these are for the most part the sort of people who are the least likely to ever wish to read a word I have to say, but just in case this essay finds its way to one of them, I will remind you of who Kyle Rittenhouse is.

 

 

On the twenty-third of last August a woman in Kenosha, Wisconsin called 9-11 to report that her ex-boyfriend, against whom she had a restraining order, was trying to steal her vehicle.   The police, who had a warrant for this man’s arrest on charges of criminal trespass, sexual assault and domestic abuse involving the same woman, showed up.   The man, Jacob Blake, resisted arrest and, reaching into his ex’s SUV, probably for the knife he had there, was shot several times, which left him paralyzed from the waist down.   Since Blake was black and the cop who shot him was white, Kenosha soon found itself besieged by the same sort of agitators of racial violence and strife who had been rioting and looting and burning down cities all over the United States since earlier that year when George Floyd had become the only exception to the rule that anyone who dies with the bat flu virus in his system must be counted a bat flu death regardless of other co-morbidities not excluding decapitation and dismemberment.

 

 

A note about these agitators.   These are a new kind who make the shakedown hustlers of thirty-forty years ago – the kind brilliantly parodied by Tom Wolfe in the character of “Reverend Bacon” in his Bonfire of the Vanities – look tame by comparison.    The latter were, for the most part, merely concerned with using accusations of racism – and the threat of discrimination lawsuits – to browbeat companies into paying them off.   The new kind, who claim to be advocates of justice in the face of a society that holds black lives cheap, care very little themselves about the black lives that are taken by black criminals, although each year these far exceed the number of black lives taken by white cops.   A similar phenomenon can be found here in Canada in those who loudly proclaim that every child matters, although they never seem to include the thousands of unborn children lost each year in abortion, talking only about kids who died mostly of smallpox over the course of a century at the Indian Residential Schools, in an attempt to slander and libel our country and her churches with a trumped up charge of genocide.  It is actually quite rare for a white cop to kill an unarmed black man.   It only seems to be otherwise because every single time it happens the liberal allies of the race agitators in the media talk about nothing else for weeks, if not months.   Every such victim becomes a household name.  These new race agitators are driven by ideological racial hatred of the kind peddled by Ibram X. Kendi, Nicole Hannah-Jones, and Robin D’Angelo.   The kind that looks like it was plagiarized from the writings of Adolf Hitler, with “Jews” scratched out and “white people” written in on top.   Come to think of it, the same thing could be said, mutatis mutandis, about the rhetoric that most mainstream politicians, media commentators, and medical associations use about the “unvaccinated”.

 

 

Kyle Rittenhouse is a young man from Antioch, a village in Illinois that is just across the state border from Kenosha of which it is essentially a satellite community.   He was seventeen years old at the time and had come into the city the day after Blake was shot to stay with a friend.   The violence, looting, destruction, and general mayhem that had been begun the previous night continued into that one.    The next day, the sort of thing that the lying corporate news media liked to call a “peaceful protest” was scheduled to occur and, predictably, it broke out into a riot.   Rittenhouse and his friend, after participating in the city’s clean-up efforts earlier that day, went to an automobile dealership that had been targeted by the rioters the two nights previously.   They had armed themselves to protect the property.   Rittenhouse carried an AR-15 rifle that he kept at his friend’s house.   

 

 

Towards midnight, a serial pederast named Joseph Rosenbaum who had been convicted on multiple counts of raping prepubescent boys confronted Rittenhouse and, backed by a mob, chased him across a parking lot throwing things at him, before cornering him and attempting to seize his gun.   The mob urged him to kill Rittenhouse, but Rittenhouse – obviously in self-defense – pulled the trigger and fatally shot Rosenbaum.   Rittenhouse, heading towards the police to report the killing, was attacked by the mob.   One of them knocked his hat off, then, when he had tripped and fallen into the street, another jump kicked and curb stomped him.   Another rioter, Anthony Huber, also a convicted felon, grabbed the barrel of Rittenhouse’s gun and whacked him with his skateboard.   Rittenhouse, again in obvious self-defense, shot Huber in the chest, killing him.   At this point Gaige Grosskreutz, who claimed he was present as a volunteer paramedic and an observer for the American Civil Liberties Union, approached Rittenhouse.  When he was a few feet away from him, he pulled out his own Glock semi-automatic pistol for which his conceal-carry permit had expired (he had pleaded guilty three years previously to carrying a firearm while intoxicated).   Aiming it at Rittenhouse’s face, he lunged towards him.    Rittenhouse, still on the ground, shot Grosskreutz in the arm, wounding but not killing him.  He, that is Rittenhouse, then turned himself in to the police.   

 

 

Rittenhouse, if he had been the kind of dangerously violent serial killer/domestic terrorist the deceitful liberal corporate media later portrayed him as being, could easily have taken out dozens of people with the kind of semi-automatic rifle he was carrying.   He only shot three people, each of whom attacked him first, each of whom was a convicted criminal participating in a violent, rioting, mob.   Any sane, non-corrupt, prosecutor with any sense of justice and decency, would never have charged him with a crime at all, much less had him tried as an adult.   Especially when the media were already preparing to crucify him in their court of manufactured opinion.   As these events had taken place in the midst of a riot in which the state governor, city mayor, and other high civil officials had taken the side of the anarchistic mob and tied the hands of law and order, it is hardly a surprise that the prosecutor jumped on the “lynch Rittenhouse” bandwagon and charged him.

 

 

The liberal, or more accurately left-wing extremist, media subjected Rittenhouse to intense vilification.   It was not a mere Two Minutes Hate, as with Emmanuel Goldstein the object of the ire of Orwell’s Big Brother, or even a Hate Week, but what is now going on Fifteen Months of Hate.   They accused him of being a “white supremacist”, although they could produce no evidence of this accusation, such as statements of a racial supremacist nature that he had made or proof of his membership in a white supremacist organization.  

 

 

The accusation seemed particularly odd to several who took note of the fact that all three men whom he had shot were white.   They ought not to have been surprised.   Had they been paying attention they would have noticed that the extremely illiberal “liberal” left is now using “white supremacist”, which formerly was reserved for people ideologically committed to formal doctrines of white racial supremacy such as National Socialism and attached to groups that promote the same, the way they used to use “racist”, that is to say, as a slur thrown at anyone who stands up to their agenda, whether it is on a point that has anything to do with race or not.  

 

 

The crazier among them attempt to back up this practice with Critical Race Theory, the aforementioned anti-white ideological racial hatred that is promoted in academe.   It uses the same kind of irrationality that was employed by Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, and others in the lunatic fringe of the second-wave of feminism, a lunatic fringe that quickly became the mainstream of that movement, in coming up with their arguments for their positions that all men are rapists and that all heterosexual intercourse is rape.   Those arguments were along the following lines: rape is not about sex but about power, its function is to keep women subordinate to men, all men benefit from this whether they commit actual rape or not, all women are oppressed by this whether they are actual rape victims or not, therefore all women are victims and all men rapists, and because of the imbalance of power between the sexes there can be no real consent in heterosexual intercourse ergo it is all rape.   If you think I’m making any of this up, read Brownmiller’s Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (1975) and Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987).   Feminism has since doubled-down on this insanity and in women’s studies and gender studies courses across academe indoctrinate their victims with the idea that lesbianism is the norm and heterosexuality is a false social construct imposed upon women by the patriarchy.   Critical Race Theory imputes white supremacy to all who commit the sin of existing while white by a similar process which starts with the premise that everything in Western civilization, down to and including the words we speak and the way we do arithmetic, exists for the purpose of oppressing “people of colour” and empowering white people, especially white men.   It is this sort of nonsense that has so rotted the liberal mind that in a civic-minded young man, defending a business against attack from violent rioters, looters, and arsonists stirred up by agitators of racial strife and then killing in self-defense when said anarchists attacked him, they see something like a Klansman or a goose-stepping, swastika and jackboot wearing, sieg heiling skinhead.   Ironically, a strong case could be made that someone who actually is one of those things is today likely far less filled with dangerous and violent racial bigotry and hatred than the average “liberal” news commentator as  “Peter Simple”’s prejudometer might show if it actually existed.

 

 

Mercifully, despite the prosecutor’s politically-motivated mala fide prosecution and the left’s attempts to sabotage Rittenhouse’s chances of a fair trial by trying him in the media before the jury had a chance to hear the evidence much less deliberate, justice has prevailed.   Hopefully, Rittenhouse will now sue everyone from the creep currently occupying the top position of state in the American republic down for all the character assassination he has been forced to endure.   The Washington Post and CNN agreed to settle out of court with Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic high school student who was similarly subjected to a hate fest by these and other media after he was accosted by a drum-beating Native Indian activist while attending the March for Life at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC in 2019 and dared to stand his ground, over the multi-million dollar defamation suits his family filed against them.   While under ordinary circumstances I would be loath to suggest making an already too litigious society more so, the only way the corporate media is ever going to stop demonizing non-leftists in this manner is if enough such defamation suits cause them either to re-think their behaviour or to go bankrupt.

 

 

Predictably, the left has been throwing a collective tantrum ever since the verdict was announced.   Up here in the Dominion of Canada, the leader of the furthest to the left of all the parties with representation in the House of Commons, Jimmy Dhaliwal, issued an idiotic tweet in which he said that the verdict “feels like another failure by a broken system designed to protect some and hurt others”.    If you ever want to know what the truth about any hot topic issue is, find out what Jimmy Dhaliwal has said about it.   The truth will almost always be the exact opposite of that.

 

 

Down south, the left has just thrown one of their own, one Mary Lemanski who had been the social media director for the Democratic Party of DuPage County, Illinois under the bus for connecting the Rittenhouse acquittal to the actions of one Darrell Brookes Jr., who drove into a crowd during the Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin on Sunday, killing five people and leaving about forty more wounded.   Lemanski called the act “karma” and said “You reap what you sow, Wisconsin”, tweeting out that “it was probably self-defense”, as if mowing down a crowd with a car was the same thing as shooting three people who were attacking you.  This is the sort of confusion that is only to be expected from the sort of twits who do not understand the difference between what Kyle Rittenhouse was doing in Kenosha - protecting property as a private person against the threat of destructive crime and vigilante justice.   The latter is what happens when private persons, after a crime has been committed, track down the person they think or know to be guilty, and exact vengeance upon him as cop, judge, jury, and executioner rolled into one.  Whether the verdict was connected to Brookes’ act in the sense of being its motivation, or part of its motivation, is not yet clear, although the vehemence with which some portions of the left are denying it would seem to suggest that it probably was.   Indeed, I only bring this up because what happened to Lemanski is so unusual.  The left does not ordinarily police its own for language considered to be extreme in this way.    This suggests that they are terrified that more people will make the same connection that she did, although racial activist Vaun Mayes said something similar – he suggested that Brookes’ actions were the “start of a revolution” in response to the verdict, and does not seem to have been punished for it.

 

 

For my part, I hope the Rittenhouse acquittal is the start of a reaction – that “opposite of a revolution” that the great Joseph de Maistre called for - and a return to common sense, law and order, the right of self-defense, and all other aspects of civilization that have been in short order during the racial madness of recent years.

 

“Social” Injustice

I was a theology student back in the 1990s when I first noticed how many liberals or progressives seemed to think nothing of casually throwing the accusation of “racist” against other people. Even liberals or progressives who were also professing Christians and presumably acquainted with the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” At the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the label “racist” had the power to destroy a person. Being labelled a “racist” could cost a person everything – his livelihood, career, reputation, social standing, friends, and in some cases, family. It did not sit well with me that a word that had this kind of destructive power could be thrown around so lightly with little to no consequences to the person doing the throwing. Especially, since there was no acceptable defence against the accusation. Anything anyone might say in his defence, from a simple denial to making reference to friends of other races, was taken as being itself evidence of guilt. This was a disgusting repudiation of the idea of the presumption of innocence, similar to feminism’s demand that women who accuse men of rape or other forms of sexual assault should be automatically and uncritically believed.

If anti-racists had too much power and too little responsibility then, twenty to twenty-five years ago, it is much, much, worse today. This is true even though the only time that comes immediately to my recollection in which someone actually faced discipline for an unsubstantiated accusation of racism occurred this very week when Jagmeet Singh, the federal leader of the socialist party, was ejected from the House of Commons for calling a member of the Bloc Quebecois a racist. Sadly, his suspension was only for the rest of the day.

Despite Singh’s slap-on-the-wrist, the power mixed with unaccountability of progressive anti-racists is much worse today than it was when I was a student. Back then, most people still understood racism in terms of overt acts – calling someone a derogatory slur, turning someone down for employment because of his skin colour, outright stating that you don’t like such-and-such a race. The concept of institutional racism was around but for many the expression did not convey what the Cultural Marxists intended. Instead it suggested such things as slavery, segregation, and other laws and policies that had treated specific groups negatively in an overt way. What the Cultural Marxists had intended by the term, was a “racism” that was unconscious, that was built into institutions but not in an overt way like segregation, a “racism” in the guilt of which all the members of the race which supposedly benefits share whether they know and acknowledge it or not.

Like I said, that idea was already around when I was a student, although at the time it was largely contained within the campuses of academia. It has obviously become much more powerful since. Today anyone with any sort of civil or ecclesiastical authority is expected to confess the “systemic racism” of his country, and many have lost their position or been threatened with the loss of it for denying “systemic racism.” This is partly a matter of all the students whose heads were being stuffed with that drivel decades ago now being in positions of influence outside of academia. The change in terminology also likely contributed to it. “Systemic racism” does not as easily bring to mind the slain dragons of slavery and segregation as “institutional racism” and is thus easier to sell as a present day problem.

Whether it is called “institutional” or “systemic” however, it is still nonsense. It is parallel to the theory in feminism that argues that rape is not primarily a criminal act of sexual violence by a specific man against a specific woman but an instrument whereby men as a class dominate women as a class in the guilt of which all men share. No, I am not making that up. You can find it in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975). A related theory reasons that because power is not equally distributed between males and females, and inequality of power apparently nullifies consent, therefore all heterosexual intercourse is rape. Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987) was widely interpreted as teaching a form of this theory, although she approached a similar conclusion through a much less syllogistic avenue of cultural critique. Clearly related to this last theory is the theory that women are naturally lesbians and that heterosexuality is itself a false social construct created by the patriarchy to oppress women.

Whether we are talking about the mental flatulence that feminism has produced in its rapid descent into total lunacy as outlined in the previous paragraph, or anti-racism’s equally kooky idea that all whites are guilty of a kind of unconscious “racism” because property rights, the rule of law, and every other fundamental element of Western Civilization supposedly have a built-in bias that favours them against other races, we are talking about theories that are fundamentally and deeply unjust, even though their proponents claim to be advocates of “social justice.” Feminist theory and the theory of systemic racism allow feminists and anti-racists to make blanket accusations of crimes of oppression against all men as a group and all white people as a group. Intersectionality theory compounds the guilt for those who are both male and white. Individual men, individual white people, and even individual white men, according to these theories are guilty, even though they may not be conscious of it. This, however, is to declare huge numbers of people to be guilty, in the admitted absence of mens rea.

Mens rea, which is literally translated “guilty mind”, is consciousness of committing a crime. While ignorance of the law is no excuse, criminal culpability requires mens rea. This, like the presumption of innocence, is a fundamental principle of Common Law justice. So, for that matter, is the principle that laws, especially those defining new offences, ought not to be applied retroactively. This principle is being torn to shreds by those who are presently demanding that we raze all monuments to the ground, erase all history, and start again from Year Zero, because they have judged the past to be guilty of failing to live up to their freshly coined standards.

These new standards, furthermore, are expressed in terminology coined by Cultural Marxists, whose modus operandi is to identify a group within society as being oppressed, coin a term, usually ending in –ism or –phobia, and assign it the meaning of an irrational and pathological prejudice against the group in question, and then apply it to any attitude, action, or even word that members of the group or even a single member of the group, claims to personally experience as the –ism or –phobia, and then heap tons of moral condemnation upon anyone and everyone, past and present, to whom those attitudes, actions, and words could be attributed. Since the experience of the “victim” is held to be incontrovertible, the extension of each of these neologisms is infinite. Anything a “person of colour” experiences as “racism” is held to therefore be “racism”, anything that a woman experiences as “sexism” is held to therefore be “sexism”, etc. Cultural Marxism is an outright assault on yet more principles of Common Law justice. It places the accuser beyond cross-examination and weighs the scales heavily in his favour and holds people responsible for what it itself claims to consider to be irrational pathologies.

Common Law justice is not perfect, nor has anyone ever claimed that it was. No human system of justice is ever perfect. It is far better, however, than anything that has gone by the name “justice” in any country that has been foolish enough to allow itself to be governed by a form of Marxism. Like all long-standing, traditional institutions, it corrects itself over time, which a rigid ideology like Marxism simply cannot do. It is far closer to true justice, than any form of Marxist justice, Cultural or otherwise, can ever be.

Therefore, when feminists, anti-racists, and the like tell you that what they are demanding is a form of justice, don’t believe them. It is injustice that they are demanding.

Do Black Lives Really Matter to Black Lives Matter?

Does the Black Lives Matter movement really believe what is asserted in its own name?

That this is highly questionable has been pointed out on the grounds that if the movement really believed that black lives matter, it would not be wasting all of its time protesting the miniscule fraction of black deaths that are caused each year by white policemen and instead would be protesting the intraracial violent crime in the black community that is responsible for a much larger percentage of black deaths and would undoubtedly be responsible for many more were it not for the very police they hate so much.

Today, I would like to approach this question from a different angle – that of the Black Lives Matter movement’s position on abortion.

Although it is a single issue movement dedicated to fighting what it perceives as - or, more accurately, labels as systemic or institutional racism against blacks, particularly on the part of the police, it does seem to have a position on abortion. It is in favour of it. To be more precise, it supports and demands what it calls “reproductive justice.” This, of course, is just an absurd euphemism for abortion. It in turn is supported by pro-abortion groups such as NARAL and Planned Parenthood. Anyone familiar with the founder of the latter group, Margaret Sanger, her views on eugenics, and who all she worked with to promote those views, will find this deliciously ironic.

Black Lives Matter is not the first anti-racist group to support abortion. Years ago I noticed that Anti-Racist Action, a gang of punks similar to the skinheads but with an anarcho-Marxist ideology and Communist backers that was a forerunner to what is now called Antifa, gave support for abortion rights a prominent mention in its manifesto, which was not a long document.

That single-cause leftist groups would support other leftist causes than their own is not particularly surprising. Indeed, the concept of “intersectionality”, that was originally thought up by the non-white wing of third-wave feminism but which has since become the dominant interpretive grid in progressive theory in general, would be reason to expect that such would be the case. The gist of the concept is that someone who on the ever growing list of “victim of discrimination” categories can check off more than one box, might be the victim of discrimination not on the basis of any of these alone, but several or all of them in combination. While it is clearly a crackpot notion thought up to justify the ongoing existence and mission creep of the anti-discrimination industry long after any complaints that rational people might have thought had merit had been redressed, it has proven very useful to the left in the coordination of causes that taken on their own might be considered incompatible with one another.

What we are seeing here is an example of this. Ever since its second-wave – the wave that began in the 1950s and 1960s with the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the founding of NOW and NARAL – feminism has held it to be one of its fundamental tenets that not to give women the special right to murder their children while the latter are still unborn is to discriminate against women. The anti-racist movement of today, of which Black Lives Matter is a part, is the successor to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Its raison d'être is to fight what it considers to be discrimination in favour of whites and against non-whites, even though it has been the case for decades that the only real institutional racial discrimination in Western countries now runs in the opposite direction. Both movements are crazy in their own right, and since both define themselves in opposition to something they irrationally and falsely perceive to be discrimination, intersectionality brings them together.

There is a major contradiction in the linking of these causes, however. I am not referring, although it is interesting to point it out, to how the more radical wing of second-wave feminism grew out of what was essentially the women’s auxiliary of the Civil Rights Movement when it objected to being treated as the kitchen staff by the male leadership of the latter movement (see Susan Brownmiller’s history In Our Time) or to how the same elements of American black culture that frequently use aggressive and hateful anti-white language also express themselves in violent misogynistic language. I am referring to the fact that blacks have the highest abortion rate in the United States.

William Robert Johnston has compiled all the available statistics on abortion by race in the United States from the years 1965 to 2017. His first two graphs and the accompanying table show the number of live births per year for each race and the number of abortions per year for each race. The third graph shows the abortion percentage. This is the number of abortions considered as a percentage of the live births and abortions taken together. From the mid-1970s until late in the first decade of this millennium, this percentage was between 40 and 45. For the same period the percentage for all races taken together was between 20 and 30. For whites in this period it was between 15 and about 27.5. The next graph shows the white percentage of total abortions declining from 1965 to 2015 and the black percentage of total abortions rising in the same period. Interestingly, the graph after that shows the white percentage of total live births undergoing a similar decline, whereas the black percentage of total live births remains pretty constant.

The point, if it is not by now obvious, is that unborn black lives are far more likely to be aborted than the unborn lives of other races.

If Black Lives Matter really thinks that black lives matter why, then, does it support abortion?

The fact that it does support abortion demonstrates that black lives obviously matter more to all those anti-abortion, right-wingers, whom they routinely accuse of “white supremacism” than they do to Black Lives Matter. Come to think of it, we right-wingers are also the ones who support the police against the black criminals who prey on other blacks rather than the other way around.

It seems to me like some people are marching under a banner that ill suits them.

A Toxic Narrative

Lydia McGrew, a regular contributor to the website What’s Wrong With the World, in a recent post on her personal blog Extra Thoughts, took umbrage with those who have been sharing a particular meme in response to the controversy over the tape of Donald Trump’s lewd boasting of about a decade ago. She described the meme as toxic because it “represents the intrusion of vicious, misogynistic, manospherian attitudes into something more like mainstream culture.” The meme in question goes “If American women are so outraged at Trump's use of naughty words, who in the hell bought 80 million copies of 50 Shades of Grey.” Among the reasons Mrs. McGrew gives for condemning this meme, the first was that it downplays what Trump said, making it out to be about “naughty words” rather than “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it.”

The question of whether or not that meme is “toxic” is not of interest to me here. There is a narrative, however, one that is prevalent in institutions of higher learning today, that most definitely is toxic. Many of the responses that I have seen in social media over the last week to memes like the one Mrs. McGrew was discussing draw heavily upon this narrative and there is a hint of it in Mrs. McGrew’s own analysis even though it is not a narrative with which she is likely to have much sympathy given her stated views on a number of issues. The narrative I refer to is the feminist narrative of “rape culture.”

People who have shared memes similar to the one mentioned above have been accused of defending “rape culture” by those who accept Mrs. McGrew’s interpretation of Trump’s comments as “bragging about grabbing unwilling women by their private parts and getting away with it” rather than bragging that one of the benefits of his celebrity is that women are willing to let him do certain things which is the more natural interpretation of his words.

What is this “rape culture” to which they are referring?

Is rape culture the culture that we find when we drop the e off of rape and get rap? It would make sense to equate the two because rape and sexual aggression in general are frequently glorified in the lyrics of the noise which tries to pass itself off as music under that name. This is not, however, what is meant by rape culture and it is worthy of noting, in passing, that another recent meme has drawn attention to the fact that Michelle Obama, who claimed that the Trump tape “has shaken me to the core in a way that I couldn’t have predicted” and, like Mrs. McGrew, interpreted the comments on the tape as bragging about “sexually assaulting women” is herself a fan of rap music. The Obamas have hosted Common, Jay Z, and Rick Ross at the White House, noted misogynists, all of whose lyrics glorify violence in one form or another, including, in the case of Ross, drugging and date raping a girl.

Alright, if rap culture is not included in rape culture, how about a culture which encourages male family members to kill female family members who have been victims of rape in order to save the honour of the family? Last year, on New Year’s Eve, members of one such culture, Islamic culture, who had been foolishly admitted as refugees by female Chancellor Angela Merkel, ganged up on women in major cities all over Germany and sexually assaulted them. Is this the rape culture that everyone is talking about? Unlikely, given that it is Hillary Clinton who wishes to repeat Merkel’s mistake in the United States, and who has condemned as bigotry Mr. Trump’s call for members of this culture to be banned from entry into the United States until they could be strictly vetted.

No, what is meant by “rape culture” is nothing more or less than our culture, twentieth and twenty-first century Western culture, as seen through the lens of a narrative drawn up by the radical wing of the second wave of feminism. These radical feminists have been given an inordinate amount of influence in the halls of academia. The “women’s studies” and “gender studies” classrooms which have been established in major universities over the last fifty years serve little to no real academic purpose but exist solely to indoctrinate impressionable young minds with the message of feminism. The idea of rape culture is central to that message.

In 1975, Susan Brownmiller, a journalist who had been involved in several left-wing causes in the 1960s, including the more radical version of Second Wave feminism of which she would later write a history, had a book published entitled Against Our Will: Men, Women & Rape, which contained all of the main elements of the rape culture narrative: that rape is about power not sex, it is an instrument by which men as a class intimidate and oppress women as a class so as to keep power in the hands of men, and that Western culture normalizes and legitimizes rape in order to perpetuate the male power structure. The same ideas were put forward in other feminist writings at the same time but Brownmiller’s was by far the most influential.

The narrative, which relies heavily upon presuppositions drawn from Marxist theories that were long ago debunked, is itself utter nonsense. Western culture has condemned rape from time immemorial. One of the legends of Ancient Rome was that of the rape of Lucretia, the daughter of a Roman nobleman, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of Tarquin Superbus the last king of Rome. Lucretia, after exposing the crime to her father which led to the revolution in which the Senate drove the Tarquins out and formed the Republic, plunged a dagger into her heart. Lucretia’s final act was honoured by the Romans as the ultimate evidence of her chastity but St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo presented a very different view of the matter in his De Civitate Dei. Having argued that the guilt of rape is imputable only to those who commit it, leaving the chastity of the souls and bodies of its victims intact, he argued that suicide is a completely inappropriate response to rape for it imposes the ultimate penalty upon the innocent party (Book I: Chapters 17-19, the last of which specifically addresses the case of Lucretia).

St. Augustine’s view, which could not be further removed from that of the cultures which think that a victim of rape should be killed to save the family’s honour, was informed by the Holy Scriptures, for the Book of Deuteronomy prescribes the death penalty for the man who commits rape, adding that “unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death.” Writing in the aftermath of the sack of Rome by the Goths, his ideas became foundational to Western Christendom.

Western civilization has changed a lot since the days in which it could be credibly called Christendom but the changes, while many of them are lamentable in my eyes, have mostly been ones of which feminists like Brownmiller would approve – women have been given the vote, access to higher education, recognized rights to own property in their own name, and access to careers outside of the home. Furthermore, all of this took place long before Brownmiller penned her tome. Yet it was the Western, and specifically North American, culture of the late twentieth century that the feminists indicted as rape culture.

Anybody who had two brain cells to rub together would not take this narrative seriously for a second, which is perhaps the reason it is so ubiquitous among academic intellectuals. It has only survived this long because feminists, by interweaving their ridiculous accusations against Western culture with the testimonies of actual rape victims have welded the two together in such a way as to make opposition to the narrative's interpretive grid seem like an attack on the personal experiences of rape victims ensuring that those indoctrinated with the narrative will undergo a negative emotional response to any criticism of it The narrative is passed on in an environment in which it is isolated from opposing viewpoints, ostensibly to create a “safe space” for victims, but more realistically to shield the narrative from criticism. It is completely toxic in its effects. It is used to transfer the guilt of a crime traditionally regarded as a capital offence off of its specific perpetrators and onto the entire male sex while condemning as encouraging rape the culture which is arguably the least condoning of it that the world has ever known. Feminists use this evil narrative to justify their insistence that those who make accusations of sexual assault have a “right to be believed” – to call their claims into question is supposedly a part of rape culture – an insistence that contradicts and undermines the fundamental Western right of the accused to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Those who have been evoking this toxic feminist narrative ought to be ashamed of themselves for doing so.