Is the Weinsteingate Purge an Anti-Semitic Protestant Backlash?
12/21/2017
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As Larry David, myself, a guy at the Tablet, and about three other members of the Awkward Squad have noted over the last ten weeks, the current purge of guys accused of sexual harassment has disparately impacted Jews by at least an order of magnitude.

Commenter unpc downunder speculates:

Rather than a power grab, I’m increasingly seeing this as a good-old white Protestant corruption clean up.

As I pointed out in Taki’s Magazine a few years ago, women’s suffrage and Prohibition were fundamentally linked. If America wanted to win the Great War, the feeling was, you couldn’t have a lot of drunken Irish gumming up the gears of the war machine. Unpc downunder continues:

Both Hollywood and the Democrats have become tainted by corruption and despotism in recent years, and this just won’t do in an individualistic, right-wing liberal society like the US. Sexual corruption undermines Protestant values of conscientiousness, business transparency, and meritocracy.

If too many actresses and producers give and receive sexual favors for career advancement that undermines the commercial viability of the American entertainment industry. You can’t produce films, TV shows and Broadway musicals as efficiently with high levels of sexual corruption (fifty years ago, no one really cared that much, since no one thought of movie-making as a serious industry).

Same with the Democrats and their backers. If you have lots of horny old-guys giving jobs to young women in exchange for sexual favours it taints the Democrats image as a progressive party that young, white-collar urban liberals can tie their flag to. Of course if the Dems replace horny old white guys with female minorities it will probably just feed the blames of corruption, incompetence and nepotism, but educated white business people only see individuals and systems, not tribes and religions.

The failure of Prohibition, a Protestant initiative, did much to discredit feminism for a half century. As I wrote in 2013:

Yet this isn’t the first time that the evils of sexism have preoccupied American culture. Beginning soon after the triumph of women’s suffrage in 1919-1920, gender oppression was vigorously denounced in the media until well into the 1960s. Many of the leading intellectuals, artists, and entertainers of mid-century America complained tirelessly about the domination of one sex over another. The nearly universal wail went up: How could human beings be so cruel to other humans just because they were of the opposite sex?

Of course, what H. L. Mencken, Groucho Marx, Ernest Hemingway, Ben Hecht, James Thurber, W. C. Fields, Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder, Robert Heinlein, Norman Mailer, and so many others were kvetching about was how women were crushing their henpecked men under their iron heels.

Wilfrid Sheed wrote of the mid-century New Yorker:

“Thurber’s world cannot remotely be understood without understanding Prohibition, or the locker-room version of it: a plot brewed up by women and Protestant ministers while our soldiers were overseas, in order to end America’s men-only culture and bring the boys all the way home, not just as far as the nearest saloon.”

There’s a good chance that the most talented individuals of the next generation will be, much like the most talented individuals of the post suffrage/Prohibition generation, pissed-off guys.

[Comment at Unz.com]
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