The Hate Factory - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Hate Factory
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If you want to know why Donald Trump is president, you might begin by examining the career of Marcie Bianco. An alumna of Harvard University (Class of 2002) with a Ph.D. from Rutgers, Dr. Bianco is an atheist, a feminist, a lesbian, and, of course, a Democrat. As president of the Harvard student Democrat organization in 2000, she worked for Al Gore’s doomed presidential campaign and, in 2016, she tweeted up a storm for Hillary Clinton, promoting the “Lesbians for Hillary” campaign for the activist group LPAC. Formerly an instructor at New York’s Hunter College and now affiliated with elite Stanford University, Dr. Bianco is a one-woman combination of almost everything that 62.9 million Americans voted against when they checked the box for Trump in 2016.

Perhaps concerned to maintain her status as the symbolic explanation for why Trump won, Dr. Bianco recently drew attention to herself by publishing (on the NBC News website, of course) a genuinely bizarre screed against heterosexuality. With the headline “Miley Cyrus’ split with Liam Hemsworth isn’t just celebrity gossip — it’s a blow to the patriarchy,” Dr. Bianco turned a recent bit of tabloid fodder into an argument that we are witnessing “an American patriarchy on the edge of a nervous breakdown” because “heterosexuality is just not working.” Somehow, a notoriously ditzy ex-Disney starlet’s lesbian liaison that prompted her husband to file for divorce isn’t a commentary on Hollywood degeneracy; instead, according to Dr. Bianco, it’s a heroic tale from the “vanguard of feminist thought,” with the former Hannah Montana actress “challenging heterosexuality” which is the “bedrock” of women’s “global oppression.” Conservative commentators reacted to Dr. Bianco’s argument in various ways. “THE LEFT IS INSANE,” declared Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit, while the Media Research Center’s Matt Philbin mocked Dr. Bianco’s feminist analysis as second-hand Marxism: “You suffer from false consciousness, Comrade Lady Girl. You don’t realize how unhappy you are. Reeducation will open your eyes to the exploitation of the capitalist, er, patriarchal oppressors.”

Because I’ve spent five years researching radical feminism (e.g., “V Is for Victimhood,” Feb. 13, 2014, and “Warriors Against Human Nature,” March 24, 2015), Dr. Bianco’s ideological animus against heterosexuality was not shocking to me and, in fact, I had blogged about Dr. Bianco in 2016, when she claimed to be a victim of “systematic” discrimination against women in academia. What Dr. Bianco’s most recent anti-heterosexual diatribe perfectly illustrates is the way in which Democrats (and the party’s institutional allies in journalism, academia, and Hollywood) relentlessly demonize any group they identify as a political enemy. Not content to mobilize hatred against Republican officials, cultural leftists engage in smear campaigns targeting broad demographic categories that are associated with the GOP.

For many decades, the business community has been the chief target of this kind of Democrat hate propaganda. Going back at least as far as FDR and the New Deal, Democrats portrayed themselves as champions of the working class, and vilified “big business” as corrupt and oppressive. This tradition endures in the rhetoric of candidates like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who rail against the “rich” whom they promise to punish with confiscatory taxes. Never mind the fact that both Sanders and Warren are millionaires, of course. No matter how rich Democrats themselves might be, they always assail “corporate America” as a force of evil, because this kind of anti-business rhetoric stirs up a sense of envy and resentment among the ignorant poor. Whether you personally are rich or poor, if you actually understand how the economy works, you aren’t likely to vote Democrat; it is therefore only the ignorant poor who respond to such left-wing demagoguery. Despite the woeful ineptitude of our public school system, many millions of Americans are still sufficiently knowledgeable of basic economics to see the error of liberal tax-and-spend schemes, which is why Democrats in recent years have found it necessary to rely so heavily on identity politics.

Dividing Americans into hostile factions according to race, gender, religion, and sexuality for the sake of political power — well, how else are Democrats supposed to win elections? And they have vast legions of journalists, academics, and nonprofit “activist” types helping them promote these divisive themes. Ask yourself how and why, in 2014, the #BlackLivesMatter movement suddenly sprang into existence, with round-the-clock CNN coverage to incite the belief that innocent black men were routinely being murdered by racist cops? It wasn’t as if the shooting of Michael Brown by a policeman in Ferguson, Missouri, was the most potentially newsworthy story of August 2014. As events proved, Brown was a suspect in a strong-arm robbery, and a grand jury determined the officer had acted in self-defense, but by the time the truth was known, “social justice” mobs had turned Ferguson into a televised protest carnival with occasional outbreaks of vandalism, looting, and arson. Why? If the death of Michael Brown was not actually a murder inspired by racism, why was it treated by the media as an event of national significance?

A cynic might point out that, in 2014, Democrats were facing a very difficult November election. They had lost their House majority in 2010 but had managed to keep control of the Senate, where Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s Democrats had a 54-45 majority and were defending 23 of those seats. Could it be Democrats and their media friends believed that, by ginning up a lot of outrage about racist cops, they might help “energize the base” for the crucial midterm elections? One would have to be deeply cynical to think the entirety of the #BlackLivesMatter movement was mere partisan politics, a propaganda campaign intended to help elect Democrats, but considering how the media recently spent two years covering the completely bogus “Russian collusion” story, such cynicism might be justified. At any rate, the mythology of #BlackLivesMatter was conclusively debunked in Heather Mac Donald’s 2016 book The War on Cops, which used Justice Department data to demonstrate that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black man than the other way around. And if the protests in Ferguson and elsewhere were part of a political project to help Democrats maintain control of the Senate, they manifestly failed: Republicans picked up nine seats in 2014, giving Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell a 53-44 GOP majority.

Democrats and their media friends are still doing their best to stoke racial hatred, wildly slinging around accusations of “white supremacy” as the all-purpose explanation for everything. When they’re not busy dividing Americans by race, however, liberals manage to find other scapegoats to target for their hate propaganda — college boys, for example. In November 2014, Rolling Stone published an article claiming that University of Virginia frat boys had gang-raped a freshman. This article inspired a lot of feminist lecturing about an alleged “epidemic” of campus rape before it was discovered the story was entirely false. Eventually, Rolling Stone was forced to pay out millions to settle libel lawsuits, as it turned out that the alleged UVA rape victim had invented her fictional attacker (“Haven Monahan”) in a misguided scheme to elicit sympathy from a boy she wanted to date. Nevertheless, this hoax had been encouraged by Obama administration officials, and the Rolling Stone story was based on a tale told in congressional testimony by UVA student Emily Renda, who was associated with a White House task force on campus sexual assault.

There was never any reason to believe campus sexual assault was an “epidemic” in 2014, but no matter how often the notorious “1-in-5” statistic was debunked (one analysis calculated the campus rape risk was closer to 1 in 50), feminists refused to let it go. An administrative apparatus had been built up during the Obama years, tasked by the “Dear Colleague” letter of 2011 with stopping the alleged “epidemic,” and this machinery kept grinding away. The result has been a raft of lawsuits by male students who say they were falsely accused and denied due process by campus kangaroo-court tribunals that treated mere accusations as proof of guilt. Yale University, for example, was forced to settle with its former basketball team captain, Jack Montague, who complained he was wrongly expelled in 2015 after being falsely accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend. Demonizing college boys as rapists, like demonizing police as racists, served the purposes of the Democrats — providing scapegoats for a political hate campaign intended to mobilize a key electoral constituency. With Hillary Clinton as their nominee in 2016, Democrats hoped to maximize their support among college-age women, and their allies in academia and journalism were only too happy to promote The Campus Rape Frenzy, as K. C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. called it in a book that debunked this media-generated hysteria.

Since Trump was elected despite the best efforts of the Democrat-Media Complex, these political hate campaigns have only intensified and further proliferated. Their crusade has expanded to include a witch-hunt to root out “transphobia.” If you believe that human beings are a species divided into male and female (sexual dimorphism, a basic fact of mammalian biology), you’re the enemy and must be destroyed. Parents who object to “Drag Queen Story Hour,” for example, are considered hateful proponents of transphobia, and even when it is determined that these events are giving sex offenders access to children, the pro-transgender propaganda campaign is unrelenting. As any careful student of history might have predicted, leftist intolerance has boomeranged around against many of its most ardent proponents. Just as Robespierre went to the guillotine in the Reign of Terror and Trotsky was assassinated by the Soviet regime, now many feminists find themselves targeted by the identity-politics hate machine they helped construct. Criticism of transgender ideology is effectively forbidden in progressive circles, and feminists have been banned from social media and prohibited from speaking at universities for falling afoul of the LGBTQ Thought Police. Merely to state basic facts about Jonathan “Jessica” Yaniv, a notorious Canadian transgender activist, is enough to put a feminist on the Enemies List.

When politics is organized around demonizing and destroying enemies, as the Democrats are now organized, no one is safe from destruction. Enraged by Trump’s election, feminists in 2017 began targeting their male “allies” with accusations of sexual assault and harassment. Ask former Sen. Al Franken or ex-NBC Today show host Matt Lauer how they feel about their erstwhile feminist friends. No amount of “progressive” credentials could save the various men targeted by the #MeToo movement, and it took an extraordinary effort by Republicans to defend Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination from the #MeToo mob. Now, if NBC’s embrace of Marcie Bianco is any indication of where the progressive agenda is leading next, heterosexuals might be the next targets to be purged.

Three years ago, Dr. Bianco explained that heterosexuality is “a patriarchal institution … a social construct that allows men to control women’s sexuality.” Feminist theory holds that males (yes, all males) are collectively complicit in the oppression of women (yes, all women). In short, men are evil and therefore heterosexuality is wrong. However obvious this theory may seem to Dr. Bianco’s Harvard-educated mind, it is rather difficult to imagine how it could become the basis of a winning electoral strategy for Democrats, although it’s arguably no less preposterous than “Medicare for All” or “the Green New Deal.” Identity politics ultimately leads to everybody hating everybody else — Bellum omnium contra omnes, the Hobbesian “war of all against all” — and if you have not yet been targeted for destruction, it’s only because Democrats have such a need for scapegoats that their hate factory is struggling to keep up with the demand for new orders. And still they wonder how Trump became president.

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