The Two-Tier Society aka Some Identities Are Sacred (8-11-24)

01:00 Kamala Harris’s trajectory, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uORV3iWiLu4
08:00 Whoever was running Youtube in 2018 would have been forced to censor as Susan Wojcicki did, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki
09:45 Do you support order or radical riots?
11:00 Expanding Rights For One Group Usually Comes At The Expense Of Other Groups, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156852
20:00 David Starkey: Mass migration has destroyed the Britain I knew, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwD3zn5nA5I
27:45 Two-Tier Keir Starmer
53:30 Colin Liddell joins the show to discuss UK rioting
55:00 Colin Liddell analyzes GBNews, Spiked, TalkTV
1:00:00 Elite media vs tabloid media
1:05:00 Why did the MSM miss Joe Biden’s obvious senility?
1:13:30 The soft approach vs over-statement
1:19:00 Refugees vs the white working class
1:27:20 Tommy Robinson
1:37:00 The feminization of the UK
1:45:30 Stephen J. James on the UK riots
2:01:00 Sargon of Akkad
2:17:00 Kip joins to talk about the world going to hell once countries left the gold standard
2:56:00 The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156870
3:06:00 Middle East analysis
3:16:00 Melanie Phillips: Britain chooses Labour – will the West Choose SURVIVAL?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Lh56l03Lw
3:18:00 The Left Is Horrified By Revenge, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156903
3:26:00 Most academics are not interested in public writings, https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus/
3:32:00 Self-help books
3:34:30 Atomic habits
3:37:00 Dr K aka Healthy Gamer, Andrew Huberman
3:39:00 WP: A pastor said his pro-Trump prophecies came from God. His brother called him a fake., https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2024/trump-prophecy-josiah-jeremiah-johnson-alabama/

Transcript.

YT comment:

Another great show Luke. I appreciate all the effort you put into your research and the videos you show provide high quality information from leading academics and experts. This show has a little bit of everything and the callers add a touch of variety to the livestreams. I like how some (if not most) of your world view is shaped around self-help/AA. Which is interesting because I feel what self-help/AA tries to get you to do is to confront your own ego. A problem we have on the right is how everyone wants to be unique as possible and refuses to work with others because we are all natural born contrarians. No wonder many of us don’t have good relationships with our family and friends, as we are ready to burn bridges at the drop of a hat if someone dares bring any harm upon our volatile emotions.

This show is a hidden gem and I always leave feeling happy, informed and centered. For the record my world view lines up closely to yours and Steve Sailor’s. I can’t stand the rampant pessimism, hatred and bickering which goes on the DR and this is a show where I can get my views said back to me and sometimes even challenged or confronted. I appreciate your normal and fair approach to charged topics like race, immigration and the Israel/palestine conflict. It tells me you have a social life.

I used to before just say every far right opinion I had and if someone had a problem with it then good one less weak willed, immature person out of my life. I like how you pull from mainstream news sources, even though sometimes it must feel like wading through mud to find pearls because I before had completely written off news websites before you shared a Richard Hanania article about how mainstream news sites are not all that bad and the article you share about the jealous pastor’s brother was very intriguing and provided a fascinating look into the world of end times obsessed Christian fundamentalists even though the journalist is most likely a giga shitlib. I could tell behind her faux neutrality she loathed all the people involved in the article.

Podnotes summary: Kamala Harris has been on the rise in recent weeks, with increasing poll numbers and support from both sides of the political spectrum. Despite previous doubts by Democratic elites who considered replacing her as vice president due to fears she might falter off-script, Harris has run a tight campaign that’s garnered media backing.

She’s now ahead of Donald Trump by four points in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. This leaves Republicans searching for ways to counter her momentum.

Kamala Harris’ team is top-notch; they’re strategic and she follows their lead well—unlike Trump who often deviates from planned messages. Questions about his cognitive ability at age 78 have surfaced among Republicans.

There are concerns within the Harris campaign regarding potential scandals or controversies that could emerge. Tim Walls’ National Guard service portrayal has come under scrutiny, which may distract from Harris’ state tours if amplified by opponents like Trump.

At a rally in Michigan, when confronted by protesters accusing her of supporting genocide, rather than addressing their claims directly, Harris warned them not to help Trump win with such accusations.

Harris also hinted at potential policy changes towards Israel during a private meeting before the rally—a topic that remains sensitive for many voters.

In terms of societal commentary:

– YouTube’s content restrictions reflect pressures from advertisers more than individual decisions.
– The feminist movement aims at removing constraints on female sexuality while restricting male sexuality.
– Societies tend toward feminism until challenged by patriarchal forces; this shift impacts various social dynamics including dating and marriage norms.

The balance between choice and discipline is crucial: too much freedom can be overwhelming whereas structured limitations can guide productive behavior.

As we navigate these complex issues around gender politics and societal expectations, it’s clear there’s no one-size-fits-all answer but an ongoing dialogue about our evolving values and behaviors is essential.

Some women cope with insults to their femininity by turning to hobbies like gardening or arts and crafts, while others express anger through political activism. A few seek revenge on society due to feeling displaced from the dating scene.

Childlessness can deepen despair as it reduces opportunities for nurturing, impacting both personal fulfillment and societal stability. Commentary suggests that masculinity is about invasion, while femininity is about invitation; mistakes made by each gender are influenced by these traits.

The UK faces social media crackdowns following riots sparked by misinformation. Prime Minister K Star warns of arrests for sharing riot footage online. The unrest began after a tragic incident at a children’s dance event led to the wrongful vilification of an immigrant suspect on social media.

Nigel Farage discusses divisions in British cities, blaming unchecked immigration and identity politics for eroding national identity and fueling violence. He criticizes government responses during COVID-19 lockdowns, advocating free speech over censorship on social media platforms like Facebook.

David Starkey highlights ethnic tensions in Britain, noting how multiculturalism has led to differential treatment by police towards certain groups. This approach often exempts historically marginalized communities from criticism but stokes resentment among those who feel excluded from such protections.

In conclusion, divisive issues related to immigration, policing practices, and freedom of speech are intensifying debates within the UK as leaders grapple with maintaining order amid rising discontent.

Tim Walz’s a joyful, effective communicator with an impressive background. Even as a conservative, I acknowledge that. However, the media critical of him focus on his liberal policies in Minnesota and warn against the financial implications if he gains more power.

Tim Walz is known for being progressive and not moderate within his party. His selection has been controversial; critics label him extreme and blame him for unrest in Minnesota.

Contrastingly, Trump confidently faced the media while Harris avoided it. She briefly engaged with press questions but should face more to provide unscripted answers.

The discussion shifted to riots in the UK and their dynamics influenced by racial tensions and new right-wing outlets like GB News funded by foreign interests possibly aimed at sowing division.

Debates also touched on low fertility rates driving immigration and multiculturalism despite resistance from some who prefer understanding over emotional responses.

Media outlets sensationalize news for attention but elite media balance this with maintaining status among certain demographics or advertisers’ support—highlighting Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was avoided due to civility norms despite its obviousness to many outside elite circles.

Lastly, discussions turned to two-tier policing where different communities receive varied police treatment highlighting disparities without much mainstream effort to understand white working-class frustrations compared to other groups’ riots.

The British government has a policy of multiculturalism and has been dispersing refugees across the nation to cut costs and encourage assimilation. This, however, leads to increased housing prices in poorer areas due to contracted private landlords raising rents. The government believes spreading migrants out prevents isolated communities from forming and speeds up assimilation.

In an unrelated incident, I witnessed a father with his children dangerously close to traffic. It raised questions about when it’s appropriate to intervene with strangers who may be at risk.

Regarding political figures like Tommy Robinson and David Starkey, opinions vary on their influence and credibility. Trust in commentators is hard-earned since they often speak outside their expertise.

Domestic politics are equally contentious; Labour’s majority doesn’t reflect its popularity or connection with the white working class. Japan’s societal differences also come into focus when comparing it with Britain regarding optimism for the future despite modern comforts.

Finally, media coverage of politicians requires scrutiny as it influences public perception without necessarily providing substance or encouraging accountability in potential leaders.

I often wonder, if foreign support for a political cause is good or bad. The African National Congress accepted Soviet aid and I can’t blame them—they needed help. But does accepting foreign assistance mean we’re part of the problem?

In Britain, I want my country to improve but worry about foreign influence like Russia’s backing of extreme groups. Are they trying to destabilize us? Arrests during riots make me question the freedom to observe protests.

Our prosecutor-turned-leader seems too eager to punish rioters harshly, with no bail and quick prison sentences. It deters people but also punishes those caught in the moment—like the young man jailed for stealing from a bakery.

Stephen: Discussing politics, I don’t trust mainstream media; instead, I follow independent voices online who dare speak out against current issues. People are apolitical in real life; they accept gender equality on the surface but avoid discussing sensitive topics openly due to fear of repercussions.

Online speech restrictions have grown significantly though people still speak freely in private settings. There’s a class divide in political correctness adherence—with working-class individuals less influenced by it than middle- or upper-class ones.

The UK has its own set of problems: work environments without English speakers, healthcare access issues, housing shortages—all affecting deprived communities who feel overlooked by media and elites.

Humor is restricted; feminism isn’t prominent among everyday folks who focus more on practical matters than ideology. Political correctness awareness exists yet doesn’t dominate casual conversations as much as one might think.

As for sexual divides and relationship dynamics among youth—it varies across social classes with different attitudes toward sex and relationships evident between age groups and backgrounds.

Luke: Despite having its issues, England’s government still provides a better quality of life than most people in history or the world today. While it may not be as prosperous as neighboring Luxembourg, it holds up well compared to other nations. However, our perception of the world is often biased by our own attitudes – optimists see positive news while pessimists focus on doom and gloom.

The media feeds into these biases with their stories. For instance, I’ve observed that society has become too comfortable pressing the “easy button,” losing resilience in the process. It seems like genuine grit is dwindling as more people rely on external support systems rather than internal strength.

Kip: Financial concerns have grown even for those who are technically millionaires due to inflation eroding what was once considered wealth. The concept of community and culture feels audacious now; there’s an overwhelming sense that we’re spiraling down into madness.

Financially speaking, debt levels are alarming. As interest rates rise from 3.9% to 4.1%, worries about economic stability increase alongside them. Observing spelling bees reveals how immigrant children outperform native ones, suggesting a decline in homegrown excellence.

Luke: In education too, passion-driven learning seems rarer among local students compared to their Asian counterparts who excel through rote learning and pragmatic approaches—yet innovation typically emerges from those willing to explore beyond test material.

Kip: Concerns also extend to regional banks struggling with low-interest loans and potential bailouts by governments which could lead us further towards dependency on state assistance rather than self-reliance.

Looking at global dynamics, countries like Saudi Arabia have begun questioning long-standing agreements like oil trade in US dollars—a sign that America’s influence might be waning as others grow tired of playing by rules set predominantly for US benefit.

The accumulation of gold by Asian governments contrasts sharply with sales in America over the past decade; this shift signals a possible transfer of wealth and power Eastward despite America’s military might keeping it dominant—for now.

Finally, discussing whether another country could challenge American dominance remains speculative but highlights underlying shifts away from traditional power structures toward something new yet undefined.

In the past, the English Tory party was seen as self-worshipping and undeserving of its own admiration. England’s history is marked by significant advancements such as increased life expectancy, prosperity, health improvements, and mass literacy—all starting here. Yet now we face a unique situation with unprecedented levels of migration since 1997 that surpass even ancient population movements in scale.

Mass immigration began modestly post-World War II but has since escalated dramatically. This surge has had profound impacts on society and has occurred alongside suppressed public debate—a combination that exacerbates problems.

Turning to human rights discourse, historically it was conservatives who championed these ideals in Europe after World War II—not the left as commonly assumed today. Conservatives saw human rights as a means to protect democracy from tyranny—whether from majoritarianism or totalitarian ideologies within socialism or fascism.

After WWII, British Protestant conservatives valued time-tested institutions over popular sovereignty while Catholic French conservatives sought corporate structures reminiscent of medieval times. Both groups were skeptical about universal rights applications; instead, they favored liberties tailored to specific historical communities.

The conservative push for a European human rights court aimed at protecting individual freedoms against expansive state power reflects this tradition. However, they did not extend these protections universally across all peoples—a notion still debated today regarding European identity amidst growing diversity.

Nowadays in Europe and America alike, there’s contention over how much authority courts should wield versus elected bodies—a reversal from past perspectives where conservatives once advocated for judicial oversight over executive actions.

The complex legacy of conservative involvement in shaping modern human rights continues to influence contemporary politics amid discussions around immigration policy and national identity within an increasingly diverse Europe.

Keir Starmer was a staunch leftist, unchanged over time. Unlike Jeremy Corbyn, who supported Marxist dictators and terrorist groups, Starmer’s alignment is different. He believes in the human rights culture that many Western critics of Israel subscribe to—a culture now questioned by some on the right who see it as undermining social cohesion.

Human rights have become politicized; conservatives once supportive now see them hijacked by progressive agendas. This divide affects global standards and national interests, with each side prioritizing either security or personal liberties.

The United Nations Human Rights Council and associated organizations champion human rights but are seen by some as biased against Israel. Critics argue that universities chase popularity rather than truth, often ignoring flawed science for fame or funding—mirroring issues found in corporations and governments alike.

In academia and media, incentives encourage networking over honesty; criticism can jeopardize one’s standing within an institution or community. The quest for evidence-based self-help is challenging since what works varies from person to person without clear scientific backing.

Finally, discussions about addiction treatment highlight how complex clinical advice gets oversimplified online for mass appeal—reflecting systemic pressures across platforms promoting easily digestible content at the expense of nuanced accuracy.

WP: Jose gazed at the wall sign that read, “In the morning when I rise, give me Jesus,” and pondered how his brother Jeremiah was using Christianity to gain fame. With a large social media following, Jeremiah spread far-right beliefs claiming Trump was chosen by God. Jose’s frustration grew as he saw his brother twist religion for political gains.

Jeremiah led a church and school preparing for end times, sold e-courses on prophecy, and shared supposed divine messages about American politics online. Meanwhile, 37-year-old Jose struggled with dead-end jobs to support his small ministry in Alabama.

Their father always sided with Jeremiah which pained Jose who felt compelled to speak out against false prophets leading believers astray. Despite knowing it could cause family strife or attract public criticism from strangers labeling him delusional or worse.

Finally deciding to act, Jose posted a message challenging religious fabrications on Facebook. He knew morality sometimes meant speaking up even if it risked conflict with those closest to you.

The story illustrates complex dynamics within families where success contrasts sharply with struggle; how personal narratives must adapt when faced with such disparities; and the tension between loyalty and truth amidst differing interpretations of shared experiences.

Addressing broader issues like gender roles in combat or cultural oppression claims underscores societal debates over equality versus recognizing inherent differences among groups—highlighting that liberal perspectives often prioritize some harms over others depending on ideological stances.

Posted in America, Conservatives, Human Rights | Comments Off on The Two-Tier Society aka Some Identities Are Sacred (8-11-24)

The Left Is Horrified By Revenge

Dennis Prager points out that all punishment contains revenge.

People on the right are not as horrified by revenge as people on the left because the right wants to strongly punish norm violators.

Other distinguishing features of the right include a reflex that traditional ways of people (such as the nuclear family) are better than untested ways, and more comfort with hierarchy and inequality.

David Remnick writes in The New Yorker:

Amos Harel, a military and political analyst for Haaretz, said that one of the most dispiriting aspects of the current nightmare is the way Sinwar was able to provoke the Netanyahu government into a state of horrific and ruinous fury. “The sense in Israeli society is that we are going down the drain, and Sinwar has helped drag us there,” Harel told me. “When we justify things we never would have justified before, we are in the moral gutter. Words like ‘revenge’ used to be heard only among the Bezalel Smotrichs and the Itamar Ben-Gvirs of the world”—two particularly reactionary ministers in Netanyahu’s cabinet. “Now military units and mainstream colonels are using terms like nekama, revenge. It’s almost part of the norm now. I am not sure it was part of Sinwar’s great plan, but that is where we are.”

Posted in Conservatives | Comments Off on The Left Is Horrified By Revenge

Zombie Anti-Zionism

Izabella Tabarovsky writes for Tabletmag July 30, 2024:

Herbert Aptheker, a senior member of the American Communist Party (CPUSA) and influential scholar of Marxism, argued for framing the Arab-Israeli conflict in terms of “imperialism and colonialism versus national liberation and social progress,” as well as through the lens of racial oppression. Contrary to Israeli rulers’ claims, he declared, the greatest threat facing Israel came not from Arabs but from Israel’s own extremist right-wing government, which had turned Israel into the “handmaiden of imperialism and colonialist expansionism.” He equated Israel with Nazi Germany by referring to the recent Six-Day War as a blitzkrieg, a quintessentially Soviet propaganda term meant to evoke Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. Today, said Aptheker, it was Jews who were “acting out the roles of occupiers and tormentors” of the oppressed. He called on the audience to work tirelessly to unmask “the horror of the June war and its aftermath.” So closely did Aptheker’s speech follow the anti-Israel logic and idiom of Soviet propaganda that it may well have been written for him in Moscow.

The two documents the conference unanimously adopted—the “Appeal to the Conscience of the World” (reportedly signed by 100 members of the Indian parliament) and a “Declaration”—conveyed similar messages with even more bombast. Evoking classic antisemitic tropes, they accused Israel of having cynically violated all “standards of human decency,” and declared that it had made “a mockery of all human moral values.” They dubbed Palestinian terrorism—aka “resistance”—as “righteous and justified.” In an attempt to make the Middle Eastern conflict more relatable, they equated it with the central cause animating the Western left at the time: the war in Vietnam. They called for all the people on the planet to resist “imperialist-Zionist propaganda” and expressed appreciation for the “progressive and peace-loving” Soviet Union and other socialist states and Non-Aligned countries that “supported the Arab cause.”

The message echoed throughout the global leftist universe. The CPUSA, which was almost wholly subsidized by the Soviet Union, published Aptheker’s speech and both statements in full in its theoretical journal Political Affairs. The African Communist, the Soviet-financed quarterly organ of the South African Communist Party (SACP), which was deeply intertwined with the African National Congress (ANC), ran a piece titled “Zionism and the Future of Israel,” closely reflecting the language of the New Delhi conference, complete with the word blitzkrieg. Its author, who claimed to be a South African living in Tel Aviv, accused Zionist “fanatical zealots” of exploiting the biblical concept of Jewish chosenness to fan the flames of Jewish supremacy (“chauvinism” in the language of the day), while equating Israel with apartheid South Africa.

What’s so interesting about this half-century-old Soviet propaganda is how precisely it mirrors the language emanating from the anti-Israel left since Oct. 7. Today’s left, too, speaks of Israel as a racist, imperialist, and colonialist state; equates it with Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa; disparages Jews for having turned into oppressors; and proclaims Palestinians’ inalienable right to resist their colonial oppression by any means necessary.

Posted in Anti-Semitism | Comments Off on Zombie Anti-Zionism

Expanding Rights For One Group Usually Comes At The Expense Of Other Groups

Why are some identities valorized and others despised?

Eric Kaufman wrote Sep. 19, 2023:

Wokeness is about making historically marginalized groups sacred. This religion reinforces an ideology I term “cultural socialism,” which holds that the highest aim of society is to equalize outcomes for disadvantaged identity groups and protect them from harm, such as hearing America described as “a land of opportunity.” How did this ethos, which hides under innocuous labels such as “diversity” or “inclusivity,” wind up as the pinnacle of our culture?

English historian David Starkey said Aug. 7, 2024 about the UK riots: “You heard constantly this word ‘community.’ Now what is this wonderful community whose values we are preserving?”

“These are specially protected [Muslims] groups. Police handle them with kid gloves. They negotiate with them as groups, with community leaders unelected. There is only one group that is not allowed to do that — the white working class. That is why they are rebelling. They are not allowed to have a community, to have their community leaders consulted. ”

Fraser Myers writes for Spiked Aug. 9, 2024:

Two-tier policing is not a myth

Identity politics is at the heart of modern British policing.

The widespread claims that Britain has a problem with ‘two-tier policing’ have clearly touched a nerve with the establishment. Earlier this week, when a Sky News reporter asked Mark Rowley, Britain’s most-senior police officer, if he would ‘end two-tier policing’, Rowley grabbed the mic from the journalist’s hand and dropped it on the ground. He later issued a statement claiming that it is ‘complete nonsense’ that police would treat anyone differently according to their race, religion or political leanings. I dare say Sir Mark doth protest too much.

The media have also declared, in unison, that there is no bias to be found in our police. Almost every major media outlet has carried an article purporting to ‘fact-check’ and ‘debunk’ the claims around two-tier policing. The Times ran with ‘Two-tier policing: the claims fact-checked’. ‘How has the “two-tier policing” myth become widespread?’, asks the Guardian. ‘What is two-tier policing? Nigel Farage and Elon Musk’s claims debunked’, announces an Independent headline. That ‘two-tier policing’ is a myth, invented and spread by the far right no less, is simply taken as a given.

This is a bit strange, no? In some cases, the very same outlets that, until now, have been running near weekly articles on how the police are institutionally or structurally racist, riddled with some ‘-ism’ or ‘-phobia’, proclaim that any suggestion of unfairness in policing is preposterous. Apparently, if you dare to use the words ‘two-tier policing’, or ‘two-tier Keir’, then you have probably fallen under the malign sway of Tommy Robinson…

What the deniers of two-tier policing miss is that differential treatment for different ethnic groups is an unseemly, but inevitable outgrowth of the system of multiculturalism. From the late 1980s onwards, the British state has increasingly related to its ethnic-minority subjects via self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who, in turn, can have a great deal of influence over police and local-authority decision-making. Perhaps the most egregious examples of two-tier policing relate to the ‘pro-Palestine’ marches that have been held almost weekly since 7 October last year. The Metropolitan Police – usually keen to bundle Londoners into a van for using offensive language – haven’t just been turning a blind eye to much of the rank anti-Semitism on the streets. No, they have also actively tried to appease and excuse the most hateful Islamist elements of these marches.

Back in October, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir – now a proscribed terror organisation – gathered outside the Turkish Embassy in London screaming ‘jihad, jihad, jihad’ and calling for ‘Muslim armies’ to invade Israel. In response, the Met put out an extraordinary tweet trying to reassure the public that jihad ‘has multiple meanings’, while chiding those who associate it ‘with terrorism’. In this instance, the police didn’t just turn a blind eye to this call for terroristic violence and war, they were effectively doing the Islamists’ PR for them.

Meanwhile, the Met seem to have a zero-tolerance approach towards anything that might cause offence to Islamists and anti-Semites. Niyak Ghorbani, an exiled Iranian dissident, has been arrested on multiple occasions for holding up a sign that accurately describes Hamas – the anti-Semitic terror group behind the 7 October massacre – as ‘terrorists’. Clearly, the police are aware that opposing Hamas is a provocation to the many anti-Semites and Islamists who attend these ‘peace marches’.

Similarly, last year, volunteers for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were threatened with arrest for a ‘breach of the peace’ over a mobile billboard displaying images of the children who had been kidnapped by Hamas. Police officers have even been photographed tearing down posters of Israeli hostages. The excuse for this anti-Semitic vandalism? To calm ‘community tensions’ – a cowardly euphemism for appeasing Islamist bigots.

What makes for a winning narrative? And what happens to those groups who don’t win with their narrative?

The liberal narrative about civil rights is that it expands human dignity. For example, Humanrightscareers.com notes:

The original meaning of the word “dignity” established that someone deserved respect because of their status. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that concept was turned on its head. Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Suddenly, dignity wasn’t something that people earned because of their class, race, or another advantage. It is something all humans are born with. Simply by being human, all people deserve respect. Human rights naturally spring from that dignity.

What rarely gets attention is that this universal liberal expansion of human dignity always ends up diminishing the dignity and power of less favored groups as it simultaneously lifts up other groups.

Feminism, for example, has expanded sexual choices for women (they are more free now in more feminist societies to have sex with each other, and with people outside of their race). They are more free to display skin publicly, or, on the other hand, to take less care with their appearance.

Dissenters to feminism have argued:

* The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

* Women in HR discriminate against beautiful women, not handsome men.

* No matter how “conservative” a girl is, the inner SJW always waiting to leap out if deemed advantageous…

* Every woman has an inner crisis actress waiting for the slimmest pretext to surface.

* The ol’ strong independent woman/helpless victim switch.

* Theory: As campuses skewed more female past 30 yrs, rape culture myth served as nifty bogeyman to explain shitty dating dynamics for women.

* Women are such strange creatures, willing to abandon their race and their religion when they fail to find a good bf in the one they were born into.

* The only relationship that works is where the man dates downwards, if the woman thinks she is on even footing with the guy, even in her mind she will grow to resent him and look for something better.

* Once a society becomes feminized, it cannot react to threats to it from patriarchal societies. The feminized society instead allows itself to be conquered instead of putting up a fight to go back to its pre feminist roots. There is no record of a society becoming feminist and then returning to patriarchy without being conquered first. Feminism is a one way ticket to destruction by an outside patriarchal force.

* Feminists want a return to primitive times, where they could share the 10% of alpha males while the rest get nothing.

* You can see it in third wave feminism. Marriage, monogamy, religion and tradition are all under attack, because they regulate female activity. But that’s a good thing; society is built on monogamy, polygamous societies are unproductive violent shitholes. Men will do nothing but fight over women. Under monogamy, every man gets a woman, thus everyone has an incentive to work hard, innovate and excel.

Also all feminists ultimately have a yearning desire to submit to dominant men. It’s why they agitate for importing aggressive, less civilised foreigners. Feminists, and a good deal of women, are literally anti-Western civilisations.

* Women naturally slide down the cocks of the conquering tribe. It’s basic evolutionary biology.

* Peter Drucker, in his famous essay Managing Oneself, advised strongly the need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and observed that you can never win by improving your weaknesses, only by improving your strengths. In broader socio-economic terms, we have given women the opportunity to build on their weaknesses (ability to compete against men) and discouraged them from capitalizing on their strengths (youth and fertility). They compete through artifices of fairness and inclusion that are borne on the backs of an ever-dwindling pool of male supporters. We have weakened society as a whole by building on women’s weaknesses in attempts to make them the equal of men, rather than encouraging them in their natural strengths. And while this charade is going on, men are encouraged to adopt feminine attitudes and lifestyles at the expense of their own natural strengths, now deemed unnecessary in the new gender-neutral economy. In most states, the potential child support profits from a one-night encounter are roughly the same as the profits from a short-term marriage. … “Women who want to make money from the system aren’t getting married anymore,” said one lawyer. “The key is recognizing that it is a lot easier to rent a rich guy for one night, especially if he has had a few drinks, than it is to get a rich guy to agree to marriage.”

* All women can be mercenary given strong enough incentives, but luckily (for men) most women still strive to have children within a marriage. Single momhood is not (yet) a desired life outcome for psychologically healthy women, despite its inglorious rise over the past forty years. What this means is that for the typical man, the odds of getting fleeced by a woman pulling the ol’ gotcha pregnancy maneuver are low.

* Steve Sailer writes: “One thing that has changed is that topics for humor have narrowed, with men being the main safe choice left. For example, mother-in-law jokes were huge up into the 1970s (think Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield), but I’ve never heard a single joke about the current President having to live with his mother-in-law in the White House. After all, how could anybody find any humor in that?”

* Women can be shamed into behaving and looking more feminine. Which is a good thing. Too bad we’ve lost that lesson and do the opposite now: shame women for being feminine and looking thin and pretty, and glorify women who act masculine and look like dump trucks.

* Small useless pets like indoor cats are child substitutes. There’s no flim-flamming away that obvious conclusion under a fog of try-hard White Knight rhetoric. The cat provides the single in the city cock carouseler the outlet for her maternal nurturing instinct (however weak) that a real child of her own can’t, because she hasn’t gotten pregnant in the fifteen years she’s been on the Pill.

From Chateau Heartiste:

This is a video of Dutch women at an airport singing a song welcoming Muslim rapefugees to their homeland.

…most of the women are middle-aged hags and depressed-looking hippie retreads who probably stink of patchouli and practice cat yoga. The one young girl in the video glances around wondering wtf is going on.

One outcome of the modern sexual market… was the growth of the demographic of unmarried, unloved, childless, aging, bitter White spinsters who sacrificed their prime fertility years riding the cock carousel (or riding its close cousin, the social media attention whore carousel). The French author Houellebecq has also tackled this theme of a fractured, and fracturing, sexual market, most notably in his book The Elementary Particles.

When women reach a certain age, and the lustful leers of men have abandoned them for younger lure, they realize the best is not yet to be, and a nagging sorrow settles on their hearts. For aging women who don’t have the comfort of a husband or children or supportive family network, this sorrow is very near grief. Some women will respond to this insult to their femininity by turning inwardly, finding release through self-help books, gardening, or arts and crafts. Others will vent their rage at the world, despoiling the political sphere with nonsensical feminist boilerplate.

And then there are those spinsters who react to their dispossession and displacement from the sexual market – and the maternal market – by exacting revenge on their outer world (homogeneous White Europe) with a summoning of succubi from their inner world. These are the women in the video above: benumbed, loveless rejects throwing open their butthurt hearts to trashcanistan migrants, expressing through their imbecilic kumbaya chanting a dual longing for sexual and maternal satisfaction. Merkel falls into this category, but unfortunately her psychological spinster distress could mean the destruction of Germany.

Childlessness greatly exacerbates this state of despairs. A societal decline in fertility means fewer children to care for, watch after, and guide through life, either one’s own children or the children of relatives and even close friends. After an unkind dismissal from the sexual market robs women of their instinct to arouse desire in men, a kinderfrei society robs women again of their other awesome love and yearning: fulfillment of their maternal instinct.

From the Chateau:

Masculinity is invasive, femininity is invitational. Funny how the most fundamental biomechanical sex differences play out similarly in the bedroom and on the geopolitical world stage. A comment from Steve Sailer’s:

When men make a mistake, they invade somewhere they should not have–due to male desires blinding their reason.

When women make a mistake, they invite someone they should not have–due to female desires blinding their reason.

May 12, 2024, Times of Israel noted:

Fighting and dying alongside men for decades, female soldiers finally get their due

According to Women Warriors, 47 female IDF soldiers were killed on October 7, and five more have been killed in the line of duty near Gaza, on the northern border and in the West Bank in the months since.

Martin Van Creveld wrote Feb. 11, 2016:

No Israeli woman does [go through full infantryman’s course], and of those who tried to do so on a more or less experimental basis many have been injured, some of them very badly…

Ultimately the reason why there is something deeply wrong with having women guard men and sacrifice themselves for them, instead of the other way around, is rooted in our mammalian biology. As everyone knows, the mammalian female’s investment in conceiving the young, bearing them, and bringing them into the world is huge. Not so that of the male who takes just a few minutes to do what has to be done and withdraws. Females can only have so and so many offspring during their lifetime; for males, so large is the number as to be practically unlimited.

The mathematics of reproduction explain why, among many mammalian species, the lives of males count for much less than those of females. When there is a threat it is the males which defend the females, never the other way around. Among us humans, the dangers surrounding delivery—at one time, one woman in four used to die in or soon after childbirth—provide another reason why women should not be heedlessly sacrificed. Briefly, nature itself has made women the indispensable sex. Compared with men, in any society they are a biological treasure and must be preserved.

Martin van Creveld wrote April 7, 2016:

Women’s inferiority to men in respect to physical strength, aerobic capacity, endurance and, above all, robustness, is obvious to all. The price is paid by their male colleagues; when a female trainee in a mixed unit breaks down, as often happens, guess who is going to carry her and/or her weapons and pack? But the price women have paid for serving in “combat” units has been much higher.

…Less than 3 percent of IDF “combat troops” are female. However, over the last few years they, or the lawyers acting in their name, have served 10-15 percent of the suits concerning compensation for injuries suffered while on “operational activity” (whatever that may mean). In proportion to their numbers, women sue three to five times more often than men.

Now let’s take a closer look at what “combat” actually entails. The largest group, 442 out of 1,593, serve in three mixed battalions named “Caracal,” “Leopard,” and “Lions of the Jordan” respectively. In each of these they form 60 percent of the total. What all three have in common is that they are permanently deployed along the borders with Egypt and Jordan. Those in turn have this in common that, over the last forty years, they have seen hardly a shot fired in anger. The remaining women are divided between “combat intelligence collection” (meaning that they look for all kinds of interesting things after the battle is over), border police (meaning that they stand guard against terrorists), civil defense, and artillery.

It so happened that, a day after I completed this article, I watched a clip of artillery troops on a route march. The men, heavily loaded with equipment of all kinds, sweated, grunted and did their best to keep up. One or two female soldiers were marching along, carrying a much smaller pack and looking as if they were on a lark. Whatever they may have been doing there, clearly they were not being tested as the men were.

Neither the infantry, nor the armored corps, nor the engineers, nor the special units, which between them form the bulk of the IDF’s “teeth,” have any women at all. Scant wonder that, during Operation Protective Edge back in the summer of 2014, out of 66 Israeli troops who died not one was female.

Why does all this matter? For four reasons. First, as the term “not hot” implies, in Israel as in all other modern countries armed forces the presence of women has contributed to the decline in the prestige of those forces and, with it, their ability to attract high-quality male manpower. Presumably that is why the “Lions” (arayot, in Hebrew) battalion, in spite of being made up mostly of women, is not called leviot “Lionesses.” Or else surely any proper man would have shot himself rather than serve in it.

Second, in Israel as in all other modern countries that presence has led to “gender norming” and, with it, falling standards which, in case of war, could be dangerous. Third, as the above figures show, too many women who, whether out of idealism or sheer penis envy, volunteer to serve in “combat” units are injured, with bad consequences both for themselves and, since they have to be paid pensions, the defense budget. Fourth, outside Israel quite some people, being misinformed about the true state of affairs, still take the IDF as an example to follow.

There are clear differences between men and women, as well as between northern Europeans, West Africans, East Africans, and north-east Asians. These different peoples create different communities and have different life history results.

Seeking equal results, equal rights and equal responsibilities from groups with different abilities and proclivities is insane.

There are many political analogies to this Chateau Heartiste argument: “The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.”

For example, over the past 75 years, those fighting “imperialism” such as Palestinian terrorists have succeeded in removing all constraints on their own behavior while maximally restricting the responses of their targets. In her 2023 essay, Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law, legal scholar Amanda Alexander wrote:

Under Rule 106 [the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) list of customary rules of IHL (International Humanitarian Law], combatants must identify themselves preparatory to attack to be eligible for prisoner of war status.

…The revolutionary writings on people’s war, put into practice in Vietnam, shaped a new language and paradigm of a just war, while advocating for the legitimacy of guerrilla warfare.

This language was adopted by Palestinian movements, which presented their struggle as analogous to the Vietnamese people’s war. Support for the Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation Organization led to a series of United Nations resolutions, proclaiming the rights of national liberation movements and their fighters in a quasi-legal language that would later be repeated at the Diplomatic Conferences.

There was also growing support for the Palestinian and the Vietnamese resistance in the West. Wars against imperial powers were increasingly accepted as just and the means used to oppose them seemed shocking. Popular and academic commentary in the West questioned the lawfulness of counterinsurgency techniques…

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.

* We now believe our freedom ends only at others’ noses. But pre-moderns saw things, and had to see things, very differently. That deviant conduct created no tangible harms and transpired out of sight was not dispositive because facially private misconduct was a transgression, not only against others’ sensibilities, but also against the order of things. Given that everyone’s place in this order depended on its continued sustenance, a transgression against it was a transgression against all.

* Steven Smith observes that the harm-principle—according to which the state may only regulate harmful as opposed to merely immoral conduct—has served as “a trusty weapon in the arsenal of liberalism.” Though conservative defenders of liberty-restricting legislation have sometimes acceded to the principle’s premises and emphasized the harmful “secondary effects” of facially harmless conduct—e.g., pornography’s contribution to urban blight—these arguments have generally been ineffectual, and are also suspected as disingenuous rationalizations for moralistic motivations. Thus, in practice the harm-principle has nearly always yielded liberal prescriptions.

* Much of the legislation that liberals would veto under the harm-principle as unduly coercive can be defended as a response to the “psychic harm” and “communal harm” which the targeted conduct obviously causes. After all, “psychic distress is a kind of mental pain” and “is plainly something that people prefer to avoid.” There is thus an obvious sense in which conduct that causes it—like the consumption or dissemination of pornography—is “harmful” and falls within the ambit of the harm-principle, irrespective of secondary effects. The same holds true of communal harm: “If people get satisfaction or happiness from living in a particular kind of community, then conduct that subverts that kind of community and thus reduces such happiness inflicts a kind of ‘harm.’

* The triumph of the harm principle is a merely rhetorical triumph, however. For liberals have by “sleight of hand” engaged in “rampant equivocation, trading on more ordinary senses of ‘harm’ for rhetorical purposes while importing technical or artificial conceptions of ‘harm’ in order to secure their desired conclusions.” They have “rigged” the concept of harm by exploiting its commonsense “subject-oriented” meaning—which includes psychic and communal harms—in order to establish the harm-principle’s commonsense rhetorical appeal while then narrowing its application to physical invasions of others’ autonomy when dealing with specific controversies, thus securing liberal outcomes. Liberals are thus “like people who insist that an issue should be resolved by democratic vote while working behind the scenes to disenfranchise groups who might be inclined to vote against their cause.” Their professions to the contrary notwithstanding, liberals do impose their values on others, because their tendentious conception of harm disguises the “quintessentially illiberal practice of treating some people’s ideas of the good life as less worthy,” concealing “how harm principle rhetoric actually works to obfuscate the deeper issues, to conceal real injuries, and to marginalize some conceptions of the good life.”

* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives’ “[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of the social order, which they dismiss as “an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.” And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern “fulfillment.” Hence Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself “involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one’s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.” This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective—as mere Hobbesian “annoyance” rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others’ unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the “moral fiber of society” is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.

* If the desire to place a crèche on public property is a purely symbolic aspiration, then so too is the desire to remove it.

* What some women will dismiss as harmless sexual innuendo acknowledging the basic fact of animal attraction may be experienced by feminists as a denial of their personhood, a degrading fall from the lofty heights of that personhood into merely animal passions.

* [Dan Kahan writes in The Cognitively Illiberal State:] “We moderns are no less disposed to believe that moral transgressions threaten societal harm. This perception is not, as is conventionally supposed, a product of superstition or unreasoning faith in authority. Rather it is the predictable consequence of the limited state of any individual’s experience with natural and social causation, and the role that cultural commitments inevitably play in helping to compensate for this incompleteness in knowledge. What truly distinguishes ours from the premodern condition in this sense is not the advent of modern science; it is the multiplication of cultural worldviews, competition among which has generated historically unprecedented conflict over how to protect society from harm at the very same time that science has progressively enlarged our understandings of how our world works.”

* For liberals’ concern with “substantive” equality inevitably draws them into the ambit of leftism, at which point they become no less willing to deploy state power to meddle with a wide array of social practices. Given that the “various maldistributions ”which concern liberals are only another name for what leftists call “social powers,” what get sold as limited correctives to isolated “kinks in the system” always harbor the seeds of leftist totalitarianism. Liberals claim to demand only a “level playing field.” But since there will always be another hither to undetected “maldistribution” waiting to be “discovered” by the anointed, liberalism must inevitably devolve into leftism, which is why conservatives often speak of “left-liberalism” or employ “liberalism” and “the left” interchangeably.

* Alan Kors writes that “[d]espite the talk of ‘celebrating’ diversity, colleges and universities do not, in fact, mean the celebration, deep study, and appreciation of evangelical, fundamentalist, Protestant culture; nor of traditionalist Catholic culture; nor of the gender roles of Orthodox Jewish or of Shiite Islamic culture; nor of black American Pentacostal culture; nor of assimilation; nor of the white, rural South. These are not ‘multicultural.’”86Just like diversity, “sensitivity” is a facially universalistic ideal that is unobjectionable in the abstract. But Kors observes that universities’ solicitude for diverse group identities does not extend to those who reject the dominant dispensation. Campus speech codes protect the sensibilities of left-wing students, but they allow these same students to label conservative blacks “Uncle Toms” and label anti-feminist women “mall chicks.” Students who believe homosexuality is sinful can be charged with harassing their gay and lesbian cohorts. But pro-choice students who surround a silent pro-life vigil and chant “Racist, sexist, antigay born-again bigots go away” are seen as engaged in protected speech. Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so Kors proposes the following thought-experiment:

“Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”

If an “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance” sounds sinister and totalitarian, we might instead envision a new regime of diversity training that encourages incoming college freshmen to examine their conservaphobic prejudices and overcome these to the extent possible in a conservaphobic culture. The goal would not be political indoctrination. This conservative-friendly diversity training wouldn’t call on liberal students to become conservative any more than standard diversity training calls on straight students to become gay. They need only explore their latent fears and biases in order to create a more tolerant atmosphere for all students. But liberals will not accept even this moderate solution. And this demonstrates to conservatives that they are unwilling to play by the same rules to which they hold others.

* radical feminists can treat the “social construction of gender” as established fact, and need not contend with the neuroscientists across campus who study the biological hard-wiring of sex differences. These scientists are not members of “the relevant discipline.” …unlike liberal academics, Christian fundamentalists do not have the privilege of exalting their own echo chambers as respected academic disciplines. Fundamentalists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of human beings in general are disdained as anti-intellectual. But feminists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of sex differences in particular are just being professional. Unlike fundamentalists, feminists have been culturally credentialed to disguise their hero-systems as disciplinary rigor. Having embraced the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, they have been credentialed as “the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful,” and so they are allowed to invent their own intellectual rules.

* progressives have “undermined manliness, feminized your culture, elevated fretful safety and excessive caution into virtues instead of weaknesses.” Following Lakoff, liberals will diagnose the conservative invocation of manliness as yet another symptom of Strict Father morality, for which strict gender differentiation and masculine strength are how one defends “Moral Order” against a threatening world. The Strict Father model, says Lakoff, “takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.” And as liberals see it, this background view is really a pretext for conservative authoritarianism, which is sold to the public as a solution to dangers that liberals in their fretful safety and excessive caution refuse to confront. By contrast, conservatives see manliness as an anti-authoritarian impulse, a force that disrupts rather than upholds established convention. Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control “wants our lives to be bound by rules,” manliness “is dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.” Whilst rational control “wants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,” manliness “favors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,” Manliness “seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.” It “tends to be insistent and intolerant,” just as it is “steadfast…taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one’s context, not being adaptive or flexible.” Manliness must “must prove itself and do so before an audience.” It seeks “to be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.” By contrast, rational control “prefers routine and doesn’t like getting excited” and therefore aims to keep manliness “unemployed by means of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.”113Manliness so conceived is the very antithesis of the buffered distance, a visceral rejection of its “ordering impulses.” It is most fundamentally a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, which is what has made us “adaptive and flexible.” The liberal culture is unmanly because it is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these once embodied—which is what the conservative celebration of manliness aims to resuscitate. Rather than pursuing the “new form of invulnerability” promised by the buffered distance, manliness embraces the vulnerability of the pre-modern dispensation, our exposure to the “anti-structure” that relativizes and destabilizes the conventional social world, revealing the precariousness of all merely human designs. As relative pre-moderns, conservatives are attuned to anti-structure—the inherent flux and fragility of all mortal things—as liberals are not, and this is why they think themselves more manly. This conception of manliness is part of what animates conservatives’ embrace of the free market, whose association with conservatism is not as obvious as it seems… These elements include the chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity of the pre-modern condition of porous selves opened out to anti-structure. These are what enable manliness and the anarchic will of free men. And it is these discounted values that imbue untrammeled laissez-faire with its existential resonance for conservatives. Laissez-faire symbolizes the anti-structure denied by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, affirming our submersion in forces we do not control, our openness to powers that transcend our will and upset our designs. Liberals reject this openness as the relic of a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, which they in their superior enlightenment have overcome… Cold War conservatives looked upon the Soviet Union and the welfare state as “the ultimate symbols of cold Enlightenment rationalism,” by contrast with which the free market stood as “the embodiment of the romantic counter-Enlightenment.”

* Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.

* Feminists now dismiss traditional gender roles as arbitrary. But it was feminists who first engineered these perceptions by enforcing a regime of coerced androgyny. The feminization of men, writes Graglia, was among “the seeds from which women’s discontent grew and which blossomed into the women’s movement.” Absent the support and encouragement of a masculine man, women naturally became disenchanted with a traditional female role—feminism’s ultimate objective. Their dissatisfaction here wasn’t just there waiting to be named by those who courageously spoke truth to power. Rather, it had to be created in order to socially vindicate the self-image of an elite minority of women. To this end, feminists have waged a largely victorious “war against the housewife,” employing any means necessary to denigrate her character, intelligence, and social status.

* While feminism claims to have liberated women from antiquated sexual ideologies that formerly subordinated them to patriarchy, it has in the process instituted a new sexual ideology that subordinates them to feminism itself, reconfiguring gender relations in order to socially vindicate feminist identities and discredit others. Women could never have been drawn into the feminist fold were they not first deracinated of their femininity, which is what feminism pursued. By cultivating a dissatisfaction it could then promise to relieve, feminism turned itself into a self-fulfilling prophesy, concealing all the manipulations by which it finally earned the grudging assent of women.

* what purports to be autonomous self-determination is in fact one historically constructed understanding of human agency among others. The “inner base area” of the buffered identity isn’t something that was lying there all along, albeit concealed underneath various collectivizing illusions, but the product of specific social forces which have conditioned the human organism into its present self-reflexivity. The buffered identity is an imposition for whose sake our “default” human dispositions must be tamed and disciplined. This affect show we see feminism. The subtraction account casts feminism as a revolt against the historical repression of female agency. But the mutation counter-narrative locates feminism as among the forces that created female agency (as understood by feminism). For feminism is merely another extension of modern liberalism’s disciplinary agenda. It was feminism that molded women into the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, repressing the “lax and disorganized folkways” of traditional femininity, integrating them into the extended chains of social interdependence presupposed by the buffered distance and symbolized by the careerwoman. Feminism claims to upholds respect for women’s personhood. But as John Gray notes, personhood is not the essence of humanity, but merely one of its masks. Persons “are only humans who have donned the mask that has been handed down in Europe over the past few generations, and taken it for their face.”

* gender feminists’ motivation is powerfully enhanced by the “faith that they are privy to revolutionary insights into the nature of knowledge and society.” This “inspires them with a missionary fervor unmatched by any other group in the contemporary academy.” “An exhilarating feeling of momentousness,” she notes, “routinely surfaces at gender feminist gatherings,” as feminist theorists invoke Copernicus and Darwin to symbolize the importance of their own discoveries, basking in the “exhilaration of feeling themselves in the vanguard of a new consciousness.” Feminists are seeking to express, not merely a set of doctrines one might or might not accept, but, more fundamentally, a consciousness one might or might not attain. They understand themselves, not only as liberated from traditional expectations and stereotypes, but furthermore as special participants in a privileged epistemic and spiritual dispensation that affords them a special lucidity unavailable to women who stubbornly resist feminism.

* Indian practices “related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions.” Unlike their American counterparts, Indian children did not assign any special status to harm-tracking morality or distinguish it from mutable social convention. For them, “the social order is a moral order.” These children “were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.” Instead, they showed that “almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force.”

* Notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarianism and pragmatism, the liberal elites are committed to their own particular brand of identity politics, complete with its own special kind of otherization. The “bitter clingers” who stand in the way of gun control are not merely criticized as misguided, but despised as occupants of a lower moral and cognitive order, atavisms of a barbaric past that liberals alone have superseded. Whereas now eclipsed traditionalist hierarchies revolved around perceived differences in things like sexual purity, work ethic, religious affiliation, family pedigree, and ethnic bona fides, the new status hierarchy of liberalism is rooted in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged division between those who are “aware” and those who are not. The former have the psychic maturity to accede to liberalism. The latter lack it and must be reformed. This kind of identity politics will always take refuge in some pragmatic-sounding pretext—e.g., the dangers of firearms or the drawbacks of home schooling. But conservatives dismiss this pragmatism as an elaborate façade for a status hierarchy that liberals refuse to acknowledge.

* The liberal virtues are in truth gestures of identity-assertion designed to come at the expense of conservative ordinary Americans.

* The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount.

* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.

* the emergence of a conservative identity politics, a conservative politics of recognition. The tropes and ideals of the Left are being marshaled, not simply to advance one or another conservative cause, like ending abortion or untrammeled free markets, but moreover in defense of conservatives themselves as an unfairly maligned social group. This is what defines a conservative claims of cultural oppression.

* Social meanings can constrain us because they ground our identities. To preserve identity is to contain freedom—to limit the range of possibilities that one can seriously contemplate. This narrowness is the sine qua non of taking oneself seriously, which is what social meanings allow us to do.

* A biological male is within his rights to self-identify as a female and attach more importance to this inner self-conception than to his biological sex. But he cannot reasonably expect others—for who many such disjunction between biology and identity is foreign—do the same and recognize him as a female. His sexual self-identification is a private matter, but his biological sexuality is a public one, and others will respond to what they can see and hear. His perspective is legitimate, but so too is theirs. Both express equal but ultimately incommensurable frameworks of identity. He is on the losing end of this conflict, not because he is morally inferior, but because of a utilitarian calculus resting on 1) a social consensus that the sexes should use separate restrooms, 2) the fact that he is in the minority and3) the fact that the resources available for the construction of public restrooms are finite. Someone is going to be left feeling uncomfortable, and it is the greatest good of the greatest number that determines who this will be.

* The liberal identity is premised on the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, and this places it in direct conflict with those whose patriotism resists that ethos.

* most people’s need for cultural identity affirmation is largely defensive in nature…

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The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention

Prior to reading this book, I was unaware of any major players in human rights who were right-wing.

Here are some highlights from this 2016 book by Marco Duranti:

Conservative Europeanists invoked international human rights norms for different purposes. Nevertheless, they were united in their belief that a democracy in which tyranny of the majority held sway was little better than a dictatorship. The rights of the minority, like the autonomy of the individual and civil society, were not to be sacrificed at the altar of the unitary nation – state.

Pluralism, not popular sovereignty, was their watchword. While their socialist opponents called them anti – democratic, conservatives saw their aim as protecting democracy from itself. Totalitarianism, they believed, was a contagion whose carriers were not limited to communists and fascists, for it could metastasize within democratic movements and persist even after the fall of authoritarian regimes. Socialism was alleged to be its breeding ground, especially that of the Marxist variety, but so, too, were certain aspects of liberalism and republicanism to blame. With domestic courts having proven themselves unable or unwilling to uphold the rule of law against overweening executives, in their eyes, a new international solution was needed. For conservatives, this was not to be found in what they regarded as the soulless internationalism of liberal technocrats, with their naive faith in scientific and technological progress. A return to tradition and older forms of community would form the bedrock of a free and united Europe, not technocracy.

None of this is to deny the centrality of left – wing activism to the history of human rights writ large. In the domestic sphere, the Left had for much of the past century been at the forefront of championing civil liberties, ending discriminatory measures against women and minorities, expanding suffrage, and securing economic and social rights.

* What remains to be explained is why in the aftermath of the Second World War proposals for the creation of a European human rights court attracted the disproportionate support of conservatives and disproportionate opposition of socialists. Socialists also tended to be less enthusiastic about European integration than their conservative counterparts. It is true that those who participated in European assemblies were eventually prepared to accept a European human rights text of some kind once conservatives had taken the initiative of placing it on the agenda. What polarized Western Europeans was the question of which rights such a charter would guarantee and whether it would be implemented by a supranational version of the US Supreme Court — that is, a European high court empowered to overrule the decisions of national executives, judiciaries, and legislatures, as well as deal with claims of rights abuses submitted by private parties.

The European Court of Human Rights was an object of great controversy even before its creation. Judiciaries had long been viewed with hostility on the Left. This was particularly true of Britain and France. In Britain, memories were still fresh of the role that courts had played as bastions of conservative assaults on trade unions and economic planning, as well as their complicity in repressive measures against various left – wing organizations. The ruling Labour Party had not failed to take notice of the US Supreme Court’s efforts in the 1930s to overturn Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. It advocated a strict adherence to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, whereby acts of parliament were not subject to judicial review or other constitutional constraints. In France, judicial power was associated with the aristocratic privileges of the ancien régime . Ever since the French Revolution, the French Left had inveighed against the creation of a reactionary “government of judges” capable of overriding the will of the people as expressed in the National Assembly.

* In domestic affairs, a European supreme court was widely regarded as a mechanism for realizing what socialists described as a discredited conservative agenda too unpopular to be enacted through democratic means. The most avid advocates of a European supreme court were those conservatives who before the Second World War had championed the independence and constitutional prerogatives of domestic courts. They reasoned that the ever – expanding state bureaucracies in their countries, once placed at the disposal of socialist governments backed by left – wing parliamentary majorities, posed a threat to their human rights. Of particular concern to conservatives were the fundamental freedoms of property owners, ecclesiastical schools, and political oppositions.

* It is said that human rights are akin to a secular religion. Some of the framers of European human rights law took this analogy quite literally. A new court whose legal authority and moral suasion mirrored that of the medieval Church was to be constructed from the wreckage of a lost Christian civilization. For some Catholic conservatives, the spiritual reunification of Europe required the subordination of parliamentary democracy to what they called “supranational justice,” a term that rearticulated an older belief that transnational Christian norms should constrain the exercise of sovereign power. Envisioned as a successor to the medieval charters of old, a European human rights treaty held the promise of strengthening the autonomy of Catholic churches, towns, and regions, as well as associations of Catholic peasants and workers.

* In the name of promoting reconciliation, these conservatives called for greater leniency or outright amnesty. They were unhappy that, to varying degrees across Europe, the Left had taken advantage of postwar purges to disenfranchise and silence political rivals, seize the assets of landholders and industrialists, and rid armies, bureaucracies, and judiciaries of conservatives.

* Involvement in the creation of the European human rights system offered conservatives the opportunity to disavow right – wing authoritarianism, which many had once argued was preferable to left – wing revolution and democratic dysfunction, without requiring them to repudiate their prewar worldviews. It placed a renewed emphasis on the anti – statist, libertarian dimensions of conservatism.

* Conservatives correctly identified the propensity of postwar socialists to reject checks on majority rule in their attempts to centralize bureaucratic authority over economic and social affairs. In response, they sought to forge a European human rights system that would replace majority rule with the rule of law, the unitary state with a more pluralistic system, the absolute sovereignty of nations and parliaments with greater autonomy for individuals, families, localities, minorities, and civil society. Such views were by no means exclusive to conservatism, nor did all conservatives share them. Certainly, they are foreign to much of the European Right today. In the immediate postwar period, however, their realization fell primarily to conservatives over a chorus of objections from socialists.

* The decision of postwar conservatives to momentarily place themselves at the vanguard of the human rights revolution in Western Europe did not mark a repudiation of their longstanding political beliefs. Rather, it signaled a recognition born through the lessons of the recent past that conservative objectives would be better realized on the transnational plane than the national one. Participation in the construction of international human rights safeguards occurred in tandem with a shift in emphasis, not a wholesale transformation, in the component parts of conservative ideology. For the most part, it was the application of conservative principles rather than the principles themselves that changed — and even here, the language of human rights was employed to advance economic and social policies that conservatives had advocated since at least the nineteenth century.

* Romanticism remained an important an element of conservatism throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Conservatives by and large remained skeptical of the liberal faith in reason and progress. The modern world was not necessarily a more just, free, and peaceful one than the old. On the contrary, the destruction of social hierarchies in the name of egalitarianism had led to widespread material and spiritual impoverishment, setting peoples against one another in a cycle of perpetual conflict. It was a delusion to believe that rights and obligations could and should be the same for all, for in reality they could only endure if tailored to specific groups. Liberties were not to be deduced from first principles on the basis of cold logic alone. Rather, they emerged organically from the development of human habits and personalities within a particular civilizational or communal framework. Humans were naturally selfish, sinful creatures who could only learn to respect one another’s liberties through the recovery of the traditions that once united them, not the issuing of abstract declarations of principle.

* Conservatives differed to the extent to which they rejected the modern world. They disagreed violently, for example, on the virtues of capitalism, industrialization, and parliamentary democracy.

* Protestant conservatives in Britain, for example, were generally averse to fixing their mast to a set of timeless, universal prescriptions for the organization of human societies, preferring instead to defer to the practices and values particular to a given historical community, though their view of human nature remained a consistently pessimistic one. For them, conservatism meant the defense of institutions that were historically tested — in other words, that had proven their worth over a long span of time — and liberties that were for the most part historically contingent — in other words, that were not necessarily suitable to all peoples in all places at all times. They believed that human rights originated in medieval charters such as the Magna Carta and later the Reformation. While rejecting popular sovereignty as a foundational constitutional principle, they agreed with the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, which for them meant that parliamentarians were entitled to their traditional prerogatives. Their chief concern was limiting the power of the executive, which they argued needed to be constrained through both an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight, particularly as regarded the rights of property owners. Though, historically, conservatives in Britain were more comfortable exalting the virtues of “constitutional government” than those of “democracy,” this proclivity faded across the first decades of the twentieth century, in part as a consequence of the expansion of suffrage and the democratic rhetoric that characterized Allied propaganda in the two world wars.

Catholic conservatives in France tended to be more hostile to parliamentary government than their Protestant counterparts across the Channel, but this was in part because the conception of parliamentary government they associated with the Jacobin republican tradition diverged from that of constitutional monarchies such as the United Kingdom. In accordance with the doctrine of social Catholicism, they were more given to denouncing capitalism and liberalism, promoting in their place a neomedieval form of corporatism that would restore the collective rights of workers while fostering harmony between social groups. Even the most right – wing among them, rather than seek to do away with representative bodies altogether, believed that they should function according to older conceptions of the constitutional order… Catholics following the Vatican’s lead looked to natural law doctrine, particularly that of the medieval scholastic Thomas Aquinas, as a basis for the organization of society.
Others had a more historicist sensibility.

* Ever since the American and French Revolutions, British and French conservatives had generally been uncomfortable invoking the “rights of man.” Yet, none hesitated to proclaim themselves champions of “liberty,” which could mean anything from the inviolability of private property and the autonomy of the Church from the state to the emancipation of the human spirit from a false moral outlook.

* The result was a hybrid human rights doctrine, a strange amalgam of the Enlightenment and the counter – Enlightenment, modern individual liberties and medieval communal liberties, natural rights and historical rights.

* The conservative politicians who championed a European human rights court believed that colonized peoples were not entitled to the same rights protections as Europeans.

* A common thread in Euroskeptic critiques was a perceived contradiction between democracy and human rights, on the one hand, and the supranational prerogatives of EU institutions, on the other.

* The faltering popular legitimacy of European institutions today is due to the fissiparousness of European identity as much as the vicissitudes of domestic politics and economic growth. Attempts to articulate a set of qualities shared by all Europeans often only sow the seeds of fragmentation. To characterize Euroskeptic forces as “anti – Europe” ignores how many of them have their own conception of the history and values that unite Europeans, one that often betrays a longing for the days when the expressions “Europe”, “Western Europe” and “Christian Europe” were interchangeable. In postwar Europe, democracy and human rights were invoked for contrary purposes, with the terms themselves assuming radically different meanings depending on the context in which they were deployed. Appeals to democracy and human rights continue to divide as much as to unite Europeans. Whether found in calls for a greater pooling of national sovereignty or for greater national self – determination, such rhetoric has been mobilized both in defense and in defiance of supranational authorities.

In response, there has been little agreement among “pro – Europe” forces on which markers of European identity should be the focal points of a new vision of the multicultural, multiethnic Europe of the twenty – first century, one spanning east to west, north to south, the continent and Britain.

* Europeanists sometimes speak of the need for a charismatic leader to counter the growing tide of “anti – Europe” sentiment. Charisma, however, is a quality that emerges only if there exists an empathic bond between leaders and the people they aim to inspire and mobilize. This in turns depends on identification between the two on the basis of not only common material interests but also a shared cultural and ethical sensibility.
Charismatic figures are, above all, powerful storytellers. Yet, the grand narratives found in official and scholarly accounts of European integration rarely capture the popular imagination. There is none comparable, for example, to that which Barack Obama used to great effect in the 2008 US presidential election, when he campaigned on the theme of American unity in diversity by invoking the motto e pluribus unum, “United We Are One.” By tethering his own personal story to that of the American nation, Obama was able to momentarily inspire hope for a reunited United States, a new America refounded on old American ideals, a vision that carried with it both great historical resonance and tremendous affective power. At the same time, the unabated political polarization of the United States during Obama’s tenure as president offers a cautionary tale. Charisma and visionary rhetoric alone are not sufficient to effect either national or transnational integration. More critically, the qualities that are said to unite Europeans must resonate with the social solidarities they experience in their everyday lives.

First Things editor R. R. Reno wrote in the May 2016 issue:

In my years as a theology professor, as a rare conservative in higher education, I became accustomed to calls for dialogue on this or that issue. In almost every instance, it was a set-up for mandatory public capitulation. If someone regards abortion as a moral evil and same-sex marriage as an oxymoron, as I do, he cannot say so in a public forum, for it amounts to a sin against dialogue. It “shuts down conversation,” I was told on many occasions. As I learned over the years, there’s dialogue—until there isn’t. Once homosexuality is affirmed on a Catholic university campus, there’s no more “dialogue.” Can you imagine “dialogue” on global climate change? The movement from dialogue to censure and then denunciation is often a smooth one.

…After World War II, human rights came to prominence in Europe as a way to protect the individual from the state.

…in the twenty-first century, human rights has changed its role, at least in the West. Today, it has become a powerful ideology that promises to relieve us of the burdens of political responsibility for the common good.

Case in point: Europeans today must face the very difficult task of determining whether and how to limit migration. Who shall be counted as part of the national community? This is a political question, perhaps the most fundamental one, and it remains our responsibility to answer it. Human rights, however, can become an ideology that rejects this political responsibility, saying that migrants who qualify as refugees must be accepted, regardless of circumstances. By this way of thinking, immigration is a matter of basic human rights and thus transcends the political.

… I’m increasingly against human rights. As an ideology, it has become a patron of negative freedom, pushing against demands and ­obligations arising from our shared culture. In the West, human rights now functions as an enemy of the ­responsible ­exercise of freedom. Exalting human rights as the epitome of social responsibility short-circuits collective judgment and stymies action for the sake of the common good.

…Both right and left in America imagine that today’s social distemper stems from too little freedom, when, in fact, what currently agitates society is the loss of stability, unity, and solidarity.

Consider the increasingly bizarre liberal fixation on transgender rights. As more and more commentators now recognize, our political crisis concerns the disintegration of the once expansive and solid middle class. People feel economically vulnerable, true, but they feel culturally vulnerable as well, something that politically volatile concerns about immigration indicate. In this context, “problematizing” male and female identity—a fundamental point of orientation for every young person trying to figure out where he stands in the world—exacerbates the disintegrating trends that make so much in their lives so liquid.

Author Seth D. Kaplan wrote in the May 2018 edition of American Affairs:

Over the last few decades, the human rights project has become increasingly progressive, advocating a singular way of living the good life, with a concomitant demotion of values that don’t fit in, such as those associated with religious belief or with social institutions such as families, churches, schools, local communities, and clubs…

Although those on the right do not accept the liberal universality that currently drives much of the discourse and action around human rights today, they continue to believe in the inherent dignity of every human being, which includes the right to the security of life and property, due process, and the protection of fundamental liberties. The forms that these rights take can vary across societies depending on historical context, but they are essential.

…The number of rights that concern conservatives is smaller, but what is required to protect them and build a successful society is more expansive. Whereas liberals put rights at the center of their worldview, conservatives see them as dependent on social institutions, a complementary set of duties, and a healthy appreciation of virtue. Rather than being “Against Human Rights,” conservatives could more accurately be said to believe in a different vision of human rights—a vision with values shared by many societies worldwide. Unfortunately, the progressive takeover of human rights promotion alongside an individualist turn in Western culture has blurred this vision…

Anglo-American conservatives have historically had a much more modest and context-specific understanding of rights than the vision prevalent today.2 Recognizing a higher authority, a natural law established by God, that could be learned from the accumulated experience of many generations and which the Bible (and, for Selden, also the Talmud) provided reliable guidance, they rejected the “unrestricted use of pure and simple reason” as a way to govern on the grounds that it would produce judgments that are “intrinsically inconsistent and dissimilar among men.” A purely rationalistic approach would lead to confusion and a breakdown in social and political order. As such, except for a core group of laws that apply everywhere (e.g., the seven Noahide Laws), they prescribed no universal rules for how to organize states. As Selden wrote, “Diverse nations, as diverse men, have their diverse collections and inferences, and so make their diverse laws grow to what they are, out of the same root.”

…There are, broadly speaking, two different approaches to organizing society: one focused on maximizing personal freedoms and the other on maximizing the robustness of relationships and institutions. The first centers on the autonomous individual and emphasizes the liberty of each person as long as they do nothing to harm anyone else; the second centers on the wellbeing of society as a whole, emphasizing the interdependence of each person within the groups and networks they belong to.

These approaches assume and promote different definitions of the good life. Individualistic societies highly value choice and fairness, and they emphasize moral concepts such as rights, liberty, and justice. On the other hand, sociocentric societies highly value order, hierarchy, and tradition; they emphasize moral concepts such as duty, respect, reputation, patriotism, sanctity, and purity.

Not surprisingly, these two social orders have different conceptions of human rights and the role of the state in enhancing human welfare. Autonomy-centered societies prefer a human rights framework that offers broad protections for individual choice and which gives the state a large role in enforcing rules. Cultural differences, traditions, and social institutions can be set aside if they conflict with human rights goals. Sociocentric societies, in contrast, prefer a human rights framework that includes a few core rules that ensure certain minimum standards are met while providing flexibility for local adaptation. The state is still important but plays a different role in enforcing rules. Traditions and social institutions, considered crucial to identity and feelings of dignity, are given a relatively large role. Human rights are seen as but one of many ways to better lives and improve how societies work.

…a diminution of the important role originally played by duties, responsibilities, social institutions, norms, and morality; a debasement of political discourse; and an unnecessarily expansive role for the judiciary in setting public policy, which produces “coerced, and often unsatisfying, social arrangements.” The progressive domination of much of the discourse as well as their overwhelming influence on key institutions (including the media) in the human rights field means that today too often rights promotion is based on a particular, singular worldview about what it means to be a person, and what is just, good, and worth pursuing. As Makau Mutua writes, “They [human rights organizations] claim to practice law, not politics. Although their mandates seek to promote paradigmatic liberal values and norms, they present themselves as neutral, universal, non-ideological, non-partisan, and unbiased.” Values that don’t fit into this worldview are ignored or devalued.

…Western individualists of all political persuasions must recognize that promoting human dignity does not always mean securing individual autonomy. Not only do different societies—and different parts of our society—have different definitions of rights, but they also have a different vision concerning the place or exercise of individual autonomy. Many of the rights currently promoted by progressive human rights activists are highly dependent on a particular culture or worldview—one that has evolved significantly over the past half century. A different vision of society would promote and implement rights differently. For instance, whereas approval of any right to kill or harm oneself was once unthinkable, now ever-widening forms of physician-assisted suicide are becoming acceptable. While the amputation or reshaping of the body was formerly seen as unethical and dangerous, now sex reassignment surgery is accepted and encouraged (while, for some, circumcision is considered a human rights violation). Marriage used to emphasize the needs of children; now it is centered on the rights of adults. Instead of developing a concept of children’s rights that constrains the freedom of parents, a concept of adult rights that often deprives children of much needed social support predominates.3 In all these cases, what is at issue is not the importance of mores and rights, but which rights and harms to emphasize, and who is permitted to make choices.

The evolution of human rights discourse has prompted many of the growing disagreements over human rights between countries (and between different parts of American society). By assuming that, as Sally Engle Merry notes, “human rights are part of a distinctive modernist vision of the good and just society that emphasizes autonomy, choice, equality, secularism, and protection of the body,” progressive rights proponents have converted their own cultural norms into universal rights. This approach produces an ever-growing number of rights while it assumes a uniform value system across countries. It generally views culture as an obstacle that needs to be changed through education and the intervention of national and international authorities—not a very appealing proposition to people who understandably cherish their values, history, and sovereignty.

Indeed, when progressives urge non-Western countries to discard tradition or heterodox ways of living, or adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to various challenges that they face, they engender ill will and undermine whatever consensus on human rights existed in the aftermath of World War II (when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted; see below)—consensus that could bridge differences across cultures and improve human wellbeing—and that was rooted in an older vision of human rights that conservatives were much more comfortable with. Today, autonomy-centric progressives too often incite resistance from sociocentric societies to even those reforms that ought to be acceptable to them.

…When conservatives have discussed rights historically, it is usually with the understanding that they are based on a divine source and represent a sacred moral order.

Feb. 1, 2012, the Hoover Institution published:

When the American section of Amnesty International was first founded in the 1970s, William F. Buckley was one of its earliest supporters. The prime mover behind the American section, Ginetta Sagan, was a mentor to those of all political stripes, including, for example, Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, whom no one has ever accused of being a “leftist.” When George W. Bush called in his second inaugural address for the United States to affirm “the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he was issuing a call with which no human rights advocate could possibly disagree. The board of Freedom House, a prominent human rights organization, is rife with ex-Bush administration officials like William H. Taft IV and Paula J. Dobriansky, and with scholars like Ruth Wedgwood and Joshua Muravchik who are generally identified with the conservative end of the political spectrum.
And yet, despite the political diversity these instances represent, human rights are generally identified as a left-wing cause. There are many reasons for that, perhaps foremost among them the fact that human rights standards are established largely by international instruments, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (udhr), and enforced, to the extent to which they are “enforced” at all, by international institutions, such as the un Human Rights Council. Conservatives tend to resist subsuming American sovereignty to international regimens and to be suspicious of international institutions, in part because they include some member states lacking consent of the governed and basic liberties. As a consequence, the United States has ratified fewer key human rights treaties than the other g20 nations and, when it has ratified them, has tended to attach reservations asserting the preeminent authority of the U.S. Constitution.2

Human rights are generally identified as a left-wing cause, largely because human rights standards are established globally.

Moreover, human rights have come to be associated with a number of causes — notably opposition to the death penalty; the closure of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay; and the assertion of a right to health care — that, justifiably or not, are considered liberal causes in American political terms. The fact that conservatives have played a prominent role in other landmark human rights struggles — such as the promotion of religious freedom; an end to the second Sudanese Civil War in 2005; and the campaign to end human trafficking — has failed to redress the perception that human rights advocates, with the exception perhaps of a handful of neoconservatives, are ineluctably drawn from the left.

…Perhaps no issue has more robustly divided left and right, at least since 9/11, than the challenge of finding the right balance between security and liberty. Without re-litigating, so to speak, highly contentious decisions of the Bush administration, it is fair to say that it erred on the side of security…

There is no international definition of terrorism, and the Geneva Conventions were not designed for nonstate actors.

…Ever since Jeane Kirkpatrick tried to distinguish between authoritarian and totalitarian governments in her 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” left and right have been arguing about when national interests trump accountability for human rights abuses.

For many years Amnesty International claimed that it favored no particular form of government — only governments of whatever stripe that support human rights. And human rights leaders have repeatedly and correctly pointed out that democracy was no guarantee of respect for human rights…

Conservatives have traditionally blanched at social and economic rights.

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