The Warlock Hunt

Claire Berlinski offers a different perspective to the #MeToo crowd:

If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just fired an editor for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name, vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to pick over my flesh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the mafia, al-Qaeda, or the Kremlin?
But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime–like any other serious crime–requires an unambiguous definition. We have nothing of the sort.

h/t Waren K. Smith

11 Replies to “The Warlock Hunt”

  1. I liked the part where she talked about how odd that the fans of these guys didn’t put two and two together. There’s a reason these sexual predators are 90% leftists, after all…
    What Louis CK did is not as banal as offering a woman a backrub or touching her knee. But it’s exactly what you’d expect from him if you’d ever watched his routines. If the man has a delusional view of the appeal to women of watching a self-loathing man whack off, shouldn’t it be relevant to our moral assessment that we, the American public, are the ones who nourished this delusion with applause, laughter, money, and massive crowds at Madison Square Garden screaming his name?

  2. I don’t think so, but of course that’s my own authorship speaking.
    She’s saying what a lot of people think about this but have difficulty articulating. There is little doubt that these days the power of an accusation can topple a career even if that accusation comes about years later and upon deep re-interpretation of the memory.

  3. Claire is an good thinker and writer, but like all folk on her part of the political spectrum, she’s blind to the organizing epistemology of the authors and players alike in this, the most recent of moral panics (the previous one being the still-ongoing, but slowly expiring, Great Climate Panic – likewise a leftist construct): the fact that it is almost exclusively a creation of progressivism, both in its architects (the misandrist hyperfeminists of the pussy-hat left) and its victims (the so-called “male feminists” of leftist politics, media and show-business). Everyone who points at Roy Moore forgets that the alleged offences occurred 40 years ago, when he was a card-carrying Democrat, like virtually every other ghoul at this sod’s picnic. In addition to this obvious blindness on Claire’s part, she has the colossal gall to devote three paragraphs to the boorishness of Donald Trump – a man who, at the very worst, may be accused of poor taste – while completely ignoring the 8 years of the Clinton presidency, featuring a moral troglodyte who has credibly been accused of serial rape, who used a starry-eyed intern as a humidor, and of whom alone in the entire 220-year history of the United States we have empirical knowledge as to the curvature of his schwanz. The entire feminist movement imploded the moment one of its vanguard harpies argued that every woman should be willing to fellate Slick Willy’s slick willy to thank him for keeping abortion legal.
    Claire’s right about what’s going on – a moral panic that will lead somewhere that women really don’t want to go – but she’s wrong about how and why we got here. The show trials of the Stalinist progressives, the culture wars of the “social justice warriors”, the ANTIFA brownshirts…bolshevism is in the air, and it’s all down to the Clinton refuseniks, the mole-work of the deep-state leftists still clinging to the levers of state power, and the ongoing treason road-show by Obama. What astonishes me is that I cannot figure out their end-game. If the progs achieve their aim – which, let’s face it, is civil war – then the fact that the other side has all the guns means that it’s not going to turn out well for them.

  4. When they trigger the civil war, they honestly expect 99% of the armed forces and police to help put down the reactionary rabble within a couple of days. And this will, of course, almost all take place in flyover country.

  5. Sure Claire Berlinski is right, but that ain’t gonna help anyone now.
    Too little too late, sarcasm and extreme violence are probably the only rational response to hysterical Social Justice Warriors.
    The only useful response to any accusations;”BURN the WITCH”.
    And accuse them of cannibalism and eating domestic pets.
    Seems being stupid,irrational and violent are modern progressive social discourse.
    As the Auzzies used to say”I will be hung for a lamb?,may as well dine on mutton.”
    Having been cast as the vile,beasts of society, white working males,well any working male for that matter, may as well accept the facts, you have no rights in the Progressives World..Except the Obligation to pay the bills.
    Vulgarity and insolence are the proper means of addressing our “Betters”.
    Funny how the reality,rather than threat, of a cruel and violent response does wonders for removing useless freeloaders from your property.
    Now the poor snowflakes are accusing normal people of “Coarsening the dialogue”.
    that dialogue being the one where they cut off the microphone,shout down opposing views and sneer at the messenger,ignoring the message.
    Gee wonder why they feel threatened? After denying all other citizens the right of free speak and to live an unmolested by idiots life.

  6. I agree. Her example of the Soviet show trials was a brilliant example of what is beginning to take place. Just this afternoon, on a two hour road trip, my wife and I discussed these events similarly to what Claire wrote.
    I do not have a link, but I read this morning, I think on a CTV website, that all the “rape” crisis centres are being overloaded with women coming in.

  7. She could have written the article 15 years ago, but she would have been defending the treatment of non-famous men who have been falsely accused. The current round of accusations don’t seem like a panic to me. Instead, they seem to be cracking the protective shell the famous and powerful have been surrounded by.

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