Monster

The Women's March and its collective protest against the election of Donald trump were impressive—in the sense that a few million women (and their male supporters) were galvanized to meet and act against something they believe is a real threat. It doesn't much matter whether the threat is real (it is not), the belief and emotion are real, and that seems to be all that really matters.

The trained hamsters in the main stream media celebrated the protests with drone shots of the massive crowds in D.C., NYC, LA, and elsewhere. Best estimates are that about 1.5 million women participated in all cities—about 0.5 percent of the U.S. population. The other 99.5 percent chose to do other things on a Saturday in January.

I guess everyone who participated in the marches feels good about their actions and themselves, speaking "truth to power" and demanding social and climate "justice" along the way. Those of us who watched from the sidelines can't help but note that there is just tiny bit of hypocrisy in all of this. Roger Simon writes about what motivated this vast outpouring of protest:

Oh, right, Donald Trump, that vulgar misogynist who bragged about pu**y grabbing (asterisks to dissociate myself from Madonna, even though I'm aging too). I'm going to skip over the obvious - these same women almost all ignored Bill Clinton actually doing (not just mouthing off about) similar activities in the Oval Office, not to mention on numerous other occasions, some of which we know about and some of which we may not. Further, these women didn't have much to say -- no demonstrations, no marches, maybe a few hashtags -- when radical Islamists of various stripes regularly kidnapped large numbers of women (Nigerians, Yazidis, Kurds, etc., etc.) from their homes and took them as sex slaves, often beheading them after they finished raping them. Nor did they even pipe up when honor killings were going on in their own backyard.

I could go on. But those are just, shall we say, a few of the minor inconsistencies mixed with, perhaps, a soupçon of cognitive dissonance. Something more must be motivating these hundreds of thousands of women.

Oh, yes, reproductive rights. Break out your clothes hangers. The Donald is going to bring back the era of backroom abortions

Rubbish.

Could it be that there was just a little bit of political motivation going on? After all, the Democrats were crushed in this election so they desperately need: (1) a raison d'etre, (2) a easy boogieman (Trump), and (3) a solid mechanism for keeping the progressive base energized and cohesive. The Woman's March, followed I suspect, by an anti-Racism March in the spring, followed by a Climate Change March in the summer (when its really, really hot) may be the most effective mechanisms for achieved points 1, 2 and 3.

But listening to the speakers and reading some of their tweets, a troubling phenomenon is also present. Again Simon comments:

The success of the demonstrations in terms of size attests to the power of mutually reinforced paranoia. This paranoia is of course magnified by the extraordinarily fractured nature of our society with almost everyone living inside their own echo chamber with fears building upon themselves, much in the manner of the Salem Witch Trials.

This makes demonstrations to a great degree pointless because the demonstrators make little attempt to reach out beyond the converted and convince their opponents of the rightness of their cause. If fact, they rarely even try. Instead, they parade their "rightness," their superiority, to impress themselves, as did the myriad women in the pink pudenda beanies Saturday. They are mostly showing off.

Ironically, these women's marches are strangely behind the times in today's America and therefore largely irrelevant, though the participants may not realize or acknowledge it. More women have been going to college than men for several years and are just now surpassing them in law school as well. Hillary Clinton may have lost the election but women are well on track to win the war. Within a very few years, historically we may be living in a matriarchy of sorts. Instead of freaking out over an election, these women should relax and enjoy their coming power. It's manifested all over the Trump administration already in the persons of Kellyanne Conway (she could run for president herself -- and win) and Ivanka Trump (so could she).

Imagine Ivanka allowing her father to backpedal on abortion rights. Not happening.

Which leads me to a final point -- people who demonstrate all the time should consider they risk morphing into a collective version of the boy who cried wolf. When there's something really worth protesting, no one believes them anymore.

That's a really good point. When you continuously demonize a man who has been in office for less than 2 days, attribute positions to him that he has not adopted, call him a "Nazi" or a "monster," and suggest that he intends to take all rights away from women, you become the girl who cried wolf.

Pussy references are clever, but it is truly disingenuous to suggest that a man who makes a lewd reference in private (that was made public) has the clear intent to somehow create policy that threatens the power of modern women. But then again, it seems to have worked. After all, the paranoia is real.

There is reason to fear an entity that truly does want to enslave women, remove their rights, mutilate their body parts, turn some into sex slaves, smetimes kill them for following their innate sexuality, and otherwise control every aspect of their lives. By the way, that same group wants to do much of the same thing to the LBGT community. The only question is whether the 1.5 million woman who participated in the marches might be looking over their shoulder at a make-believe monster and missing the real monster lurking in the shadows but moving ever closer to them.

UPDATE#1 1-23-17:
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There is a certain smug arrogance among those who claim to be members of #resistance, who suggest that their strategy is impeachment, and who vow not only to oppose (that's perfectly okay) but to suggest that every action taken by this new president (after 3 days!!) is designed to oppress or to victimize some preferred group.

Ed Morrissey comments:

Rather than take on the honorable and difficult task of the opposition party and rebuild themselves for future success, some on the Left have decided that they’re victims of oppression. To excuse that and their actions that have followed, they now wrap themselves in the mantle of the free French in World War II, or perhaps more relevantly, those few and brave dissidents in actual dictatorial regimes like Cuba. That’s not only ridiculous, it’s an insult to those who have had to fight true oppression and who had self-governance stripped from their hands, to the extent they had it at all.

It is laughable to suggest that women, the LBGT community, religious minorities, or anyone else for that matter is under a threat of oppression or victimization that is even close to the threat in places that the Left seems to idealize, e.g., Cuba, not to mention almost any country in the Middle East (but be very careful, we certainly don't want to be accused of Islamophobia). It is obscene to suggest that Trump and/or the GOP is the next coming of the Nazis.

As I've said a number of times since the election, the Left in general, many progressives and Democrats in particular are embarrassing themselves, even though they think they are brave soldiers of virtue and are "resisting" an evil that exists only in their fevered imaginations.

UPDATE#2 1-23-17:
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It just keeps getting better. Uber-left writer Charles Blow writes:

I have given quite a few speeches since the election and inevitably some variation of this “reaching out” issue is raised in the form of a question, and my answer is always the same: The Enlightenment must never bow to the Inquisition.

The Inquisition! Does Blow even understand the meaning of the word hyperbole? Then again, the Inquisition was all about uncovering and intimidating those who the Catholic Church of the 12th century claimed were committing "heresy." And I suppose that the "deplorables" committed heresy when they voted by the 10s of millions to overturn and undermine the influence of the left. Maybe Blow is on to something after all.