Some commentary of mine on Facebook about MeToo

Another member of the Church posted an article from the National Review which fretted about how the Brett Kavanaugh circus is damaging the MeToo movement, and we should all be worried about that.  There was some lively discussion, but here's my take on it.  I thought it worth documenting in a venue somewhat less ephemeral than comments on a Facebook post.

The MeToo movement never had very much credibility to begin with; it has absolutely zero now. It also has no momentum, and no energy; the last time I saw a story in the news—ANY news—that bore the tag MeToo was over a month ago, and it was about a few minor celebrities distancing themselves from and disavowing the movement. I don't know who the National Review is fooling by dragging around the corpse of a disgraced and long-dead movement and pretending like it still has some currency or social cachet, but at least when Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy did it in Weekend at Bernies, they had the sense to do it while the corpse was still fresh. Facebook isn't a very good medium to explain in depth why the movement is less serious than the brief hysterical moral panic in the 80s about Satanic cults taking over day care centers, but I'll do my best to be both brief and as complete as possible. 

1) Everybody already knew what Hollywood and NYC careers were like. It's been well-known since the 1920s. Even if it wasn't, Shirley Temple's autobiography and Judy Garland's biography were published decades ago and were best-sellers. Nobody can profess ignorance with a straight face anymore. It's hard to take seriously the claims of alleged victims of sexual impropriety when they willingly and even ambitiously courted people who were well-known for it to advance their careers. Also; if they WERE sexually assaulted or molested, why are they coming out years after the fact, in most cases? Why did many of them take payments, and then CONTINUE WORKING WITH THEIR ALLEGED MOLESTORS for years, and even decades in some cases? Normal Americans saw MeToo start, and rolled their eyes, saying, "Yeah, even Grandma knew better decades ago than to get involved in a career like that if chastity were something she valued." It's a little bit like suggesting that soldiers made an honest mistake if they thought joining the Army were just about getting snazzy uniforms and were shocked to actually be asked to go to war. 

2) The most visual voices of MeToo, which propelled it into brief, faddish moral hysteria status, were all so incredibly flawed that they substantially and materially damaged the movement. Rose McGowan had older pictures of her standing basically naked on the red carpet back when she was younger and a more in demand commodity, and then she was arrested for possession of large amounts of cocaine, plus her hysterical behavior on social media made the whole thing seem absurd. Ashley Judd was revealed to have worked with Weinstein on several projects AFTER she was allegedly harassed, which calls into serious question her sincerity. She clearly is nothing more than a huckster and fraud attempting to get in front of the parade and pretend to be leading it. Asia Argento was one of its most vocal proponents, and she was revealed to be a sexual predator herself, engaging in under-age illicit liaisons while married to Anthony Bourdain. The MeToo movement was largely a victim of its own incompetent and dishonest so-called leaders. Normal Americans saw this movement as a freak show coming out of a clown car and paid little attention, other than to note with some satisfaction that at least a few absolutely terrible people were publicly scalped and driven from the public eye in disgrace. 

3) The timing could not have been worse; it was only;what, a year ago that the Rolling Stone frat house rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud, that the mattress girl rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud and not that long before that the Duke lacrosse team rape hoax was revealed to be a fraud. Anyone paying attention has noted two things: a) the oft-cited numbers of 1 in 4 women sexually assaulted in college is obviously a fraudulent number, based on flawed and even simply made up statistics. If it were anything at all of the sort, nobody would ever send their daughters to college. In reality, the number is closer to 1 in 500. b) several studies, two of which that I'm familiar with because I've read them myself by the DoD and the CDC, have independently confirmed that somewhere between 45-60% of all rape allegations are outright false and never happened. 

Now, granted, in the case of some of the public MeToo scalps, they never even contested the allegations, so they were obviously true. But again; normal Americans saw all of this and realized that there was a strong element of mass hysteria associated with the whole thing. 

4) The targets started to get really uncomfortable. It was one thing when it was a bunch of Hollywood moguls, but when it spread into the news media industry, reports and stories started to dry up. After all, it's not a very good career move to go on the air saying, "Tonight's top story; is my boss a sexual predator?" Also, some people started tallying the accused and realized that over 75% of them were Jewish. It got so bad that both the Jewish Times and Haaretz felt like they had to address it by questioning whether or not there was something specific to the Jewish male character that made them susceptible to this particular problem, and Larry David even commented on it during an SNL monolog. All of them were pretty much fluff pieces that amounted to little more than some smoke, some mirrors and loads of gratuitous Holocaust references and dark implications, but nobody ever really addressed the issue in a way that was substantive, and the media rather quickly moved to other topics. 

5) In spite of the hysteria, it was clear that the root of the problem wasn't touched, and only a few disposable targets that Big Hollywood and Big Media didn't have any use for anymore were offered up to be lynched by the mob. And even some of the accused skated through. Did anything actually ever happen to Al Franken? Nope. What about Corey Booker? Nope. Story buried. What about the ubiquitous chatter about pedophilia and child abuse in Hollywood? Discussion about it spiked briefly several months ago, but absolutely nothing happened, nothing changed, nobody was arrested or even investigated, and the media mostly tried to distract everyone from thinking about it too much. A handful of new stories from Corey Feldman and a few others saw the light, only to be forgotten as quickly as they surfaced. 

Again, normal Americans saw the movement as hypocritical and useless. It was all a bunch of virtue signaling and mob hysteria, but the real problems that it was dancing around remain as strong and untouched as ever. 

And Angie's comment way up above is also outright false. It absolutely IS a partisan issue, because there is a strong correlation between political affiliation and sexual assault, to the tune of liberals are over 50% more likely to be guilty of it. (That number would be statistically even MORE stark if liberal Republican politicians were properly classed as leftists and not rightists.) The partisan nature of sexual assault is scientifically unassailable, and what's more, it's hardly surprising anyway because its common sense. When one ideology preaches hedonism and lauds sexual libertines, is anyone surprised that that's the ideology where sexual assault is much more common? Of course not. Also, the entire thing is predicted by r/K-selection theory applied to politics anyway, which is one of the most useful models of describing the political landscape that I've ever seen, because it never fails to not only describe but even correctly predict what other models simply cannot.

UPDATE:  Also; surprise, surprise!  https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/10/09/human-resources-study-shows-a-stunning-unintended-backlash-to-the-me-too-movement/  Granted; that's maybe not actually bad news.  Getting women back home and recreating the nuclear family that we've largely had culturally stolen from us is a good thing in general.  But it can be a disaster specifically to some individuals, of course, to have their livelihood cut out from under them.

Last word on numbers and the dating market

Maybe not the last word, but just a data point that shows things are getting worse, not better.  MGTOW, or "men going their own way" basically means men deciding that the dating and marriage market is simply too harrowing to bother with.  Embracing bachelorhood, sometimes permanently.  Going Galt.  Refusing to engage in a system that is rigged against them.

It's a cowardly approach, and one not worthy of a Priesthood holder, in my opinion, but I can understand certainly why it happens.  But what it means is that the odds, which are already not good for girls in the Church, are actively getting worse.

What is real nationalism?

I don't mean the "I'm better than you because of my nation" nonsense, which Elder Ballard has rightly condemned.  I mean, what is nationalism?

I've been struck while reading the Book of Mormon with my family recently; we just got finished with Alma's mission to the Zoramites, and tonight we'll start on his instructions to Helaman, then Shiblon and Corianton, and then the Lamanite Wars and Captain Moroni start in earnest.  But what struck me was the Ammonites.  When the Nephites granted them sanctuary, they gave them unused land to be a land for their inheritance, in Jershon.  When the righteous Zoramite converts left the land of the Zoramites, they sought refuge among the Ammonites, and the Ammonites also gave unto them a land to be their inheritance.

This wisdom, which was so apparent to most generations of humanity that nobody really had to mention it, has been totally lost in the wake of Holocaust and globalist propaganda, and the idea of the nation-state is now considered passe, if not in fact evil.  It's not.  Sovereign nation-states are no more evil than sovereign homes owned by a family, and in fact, are basically the same thing anyway.  It's the best path towards peace; everyone has their home.  They can visit another home.  They can intermarry with another home, even.  But their home is their home and someone else's home is someone else's home, and respecting boundaries and the sovereignty of the family within the home is the solution to peace, not some bizarre notion of doing away with homes altogether, of having no homelands, of having no land for our inheritance where we can practice our culture in peace and allow others to do the same in their own homelands.

Anyway, a few quotes.  First, Teddy Roosevelt.  Civic nationalists, who believe that Paperwork Americans are as real as Heritage Americans love to quote parts of this out of context, but they don't really want to quote the entire thing, or think about what it really means if they do.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts ‘native’ before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else. 

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

What do you do with those who do have divided loyalties?  How many people are comfortable with telling at least half (if not more) of American Jews that they have to go to Israel, because clearly their loyalty is stronger to Israel than to America?  For instance?  As Vox Day says about this very quote, and the person (Peter) who brought it up:

No doubt that is true. But the problem with Peter's thinking is that loyalty to an artificially constructed "nation-state" cannot be manufactured simply by everyone of goodwill electing to pretend that they are all part of the same nation. Even after centuries of being unified under a single British crown, the Scots voted for independence - it was the votes of the non-Scots resident in Scotland that caused the "Scottish" independence vote to fail. 

And even Teddy Roosevelt himself said that "there ought to be no room" in the country for those who do not consider themselves to be Americans and nothing else. That means forcibly deporting most of the post-1965 immigrants, all of the Jews, and all of the African-Americans, just for starters. And that's a more extreme position than that espoused by the average member of the Alt-Right. I very much doubt most of the civic nationalists who cite Roosevelt's stirring rhetoric realize precisely what it is they are implicitly endorsing. 

The rise of 4GW has broken the state's monopoly on violence. Once nukes or other weapons of mass destruction are accessible to non-state actors, that will break the state's monopoly on political legitimacy as well, because there will be strength without the numbers provided by unity. 

And like nukes, identity politics are not going to disappear simply because some people happen to find them distasteful. Identity politics are not a Marxist plot or a "right-wing SJW" tactic, they are nothing less than the political environment in which Americans now find themselves due to their foolish and ruinous immigration policies of the last 53 years.

And as Stilicho (not the famous, historical one) says, in addition:

European immigrants are generally capable enough of intermarriage with Americans to integrate into a single nation (although that nation is/will be significantly different than the original). And we are too far gone down that path to avoid those changes. Non-European immigrants are not acceptable to Europeans for marriage in sufficiently large numbers to integrate in that fashion, so there will be no meaningful integration and they cannot ever be a part of the American nation outside of a few outliers (but even those will experience a reversion to the mean if their children don't intermarry with Americans). So the 35 million or so Africans will have their own nation (they already do in one sense, but they will need a land of their own if they are to survive). Ditto for those among the 50 million or so "hispanics" who don't intermarry and become Americans. There will be war. Only the details remain to be worked out. A South African ought to realize that no amount of money, education, good intentions, wishful thinking, or pixie dust will make an African anything other than an African or ever make him resemble a European in any meaningful way. They are different. Aceept it.

And as another guy (who's LDS and who has worked as an expat for the State Department and lived overseas with his family) says:

Not too many years ago I was a civic nationalist kind of guy. As far as I could tell the melting pot more or less worked and that failure to assimilate more recent groups was just more due to their size and recentness. Figured everyone would more or less get with the program. I didn't believe in cabals of people hellbent on unmaking my country for their benefit. I was always conservative and didn't like a lot of the social changes taking place but did not make the connection somehow that culture is downstream from demographics. 

Now...I cannot unsee what I have seen. My place of work has been uniquely instructive. I have learned a whole lot. About how some groups are more equal than others. About nepotistic practices. About separation of church and state for "thee but not for me." About personnel from some groups that cannot be gotten rid of no matter how disastrous they are because they have too many pokemon points. Etc.  

Waking up to all of this was totally depressing. But the world makes much more sense as things fall apart. 

I also note that while I often call myself a pretty much exact picture, physically, culturally, by personality, etc. of the backwoods southerner descended from the Anglo-Scottish and Scots-Irish Borderers, that's not really completely true genetically.  On my mother's side, I'm pretty much a typical Utah Yankee Mormon, with ancestry from Massachusetts and the rest of the New England area before moving west along with the Mormons.  That doesn't seem to have contributed much to my personality, I don't think, but it is what it is.  Perhaps more interestingly is that the "pureness" of the Anglo-Scottish Borderer ancestry isn't really pure.  In the late 1600s, Arnold Jahn (spelled Yonn and even Yawn in later generations) was the descendant of a Prussian Jew.  In the earlier 1800s, Antonio Henriques from the Portuguese island of Madeira made his way with his wife, Anna Julia de Freitas.  His son, born in Illinois, married another Portuguese immigrant, but his grandson did not (a good, old-fashioned American of Scottish descent named Galloway.)

The point is, these people, who contributed what is now a thin thread of genetic legacy to me, abandoned their old identity and became Americans, to Stilicho's point above.  They gave up their religion (in fact, it looks like they did before even leaving the Old Country, which was probably a significant contributing factor in their decision to emigrate), married locals, gave up their language, named their kids American names.  The Henriques even disavowed their Portuguese heritage, and my great-grandmother (a Galloway) refused to her dying breath to believe that her husband had been ethnically Portuguese even after my uncle (who served a mission in Brazil) and my dad did the research to figure out exactly who they were and where they came from.

So, they're the outliers mentioned by Stilicho.  But you can see how they managed to become outliers; by not holding on to their original culture and identity, but rather by crafting an American one, and by intermarrying with Americans, and by raising kids who were American.  There's often a reversion to mean when the difference is very visible, but after many generations, I'm very, very, little Jewish and Portuguese, to the point where I only mention it occasionally as a point of curiosity, and don't consider it to have contributed meaningfully to who I am, really.

A bit more information, from Vox, in the comments to his comment:

Why specifically all of the Jews and all of the Africans versus other ethnicities post 1965? 

Because Jewish-Not-Americans and African-Not-Americans are far and away the worst offenders with regards their absolute refusal to assimilate and become unhyphenated Americans. Jews openly describe assimilation as "a silent Holocaust" and Africans overtly reject even the use of American-style names. 

The two groups are also the most visible in actively waging war against American history and American cultural traditions in their own perceived interests. 

I have no problem with either group protecting its own identity. But they're not Martians, they're not fish, and they're not Americans. And pretending otherwise isn't fooling anyone anymore.

Yes, true. This is easy enough to suss out if one goes to the trouble to try and do so.