The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Probably Not a Trump Voter

Posted on | January 25, 2017 | 1 Comment

Browsing around feminist Tumblr blogs, I encountered this headline:

DC Metro Rape Highlights Why
Women Are Always Aware of Rape

The blog links a Huffington Post column by Soraya Chemaly last May:

This rape has made the police and media sit up and pay attention to street harassment, which is common on DC streets and elsewhere. While the DC Metro system can be faulted for many egregious and dangerous faults, in point of fact, the system is pioneering in it efforts to understand and address the risks that users, particularly women, face in public transit.
For more than a year now the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority (WMTA) has been working with Stop Street Harassment and Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS) to raise awareness and develop responses to the problem. . . .
Most men I talk to don’t think the threat of rape is a real consideration on a regular basis for the women they know and many openly dismiss the idea that women think of rape when they experience street harassment.

About 20 years ago, I moved to the D.C. area and for many years, rode the Metro system to work almost every day, on the Red Line from Shady Grove to Union Station near the Capital. Anyone familiar with the area around Union Station knows that aggressive panhandlers (i.e., the “homeless”) are a common nuisance, and the D.C. government doesn’t seem to care about this problem. Being a Caucasian in business attire makes you an automatic target for these dope-addled moochers, who evidently believe that any white guy wearing a tie must be rich.

The D.C. government seems indifferent to the negative impact that these hordes of persistent beggars have on perceptions of the city, and if it bothered me, certainly it is not difficult to imagine that women in Washington fear for their safety. It’s the “Broken Windows” phenomenon, where tolerating minor public disorder sends a signal that the community is not serious about enforcing the law. And, of course, racial identity politics is a factor because the panhandlers in D.C. are black, and one can imagine the uproar that might be caused by a crackdown on Washington’s “homeless” population. So day after day, people endure these hassles and I don’t doubt that the problem of “street harassment” for women in D.C. is as bad as Soraya Chemaly describes it.

Well, Soraya Chemaly is not only a feminist, but also a liberal Democrat, and when such people talk about “street harassment,” they do the kind of politically correct tiptoe dance that requires them to ignore the, uh, demographics of this problem. Everyone remembers the 2014 video of a woman walking through New York City and being catcalled. This video was intended to be the great “a-ha!” moment proving the pervasiveness of misogyny and objectification in American society, but then people started noticing the ethnicity of the catcallers. Hannah Rosin at Slate:

But the video also unintentionally makes another point: that harassers are mostly black and Latino, and hanging out on the streets in midday in clothes that suggest they are not on their lunch break. As Roxane Gay tweeted, “The racial politics of the video are f–ked up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?”

“It’s a racist production about white women not wanting attention from black and Latino men,” as Professor Glenn Reynolds observed. And that was the last we heard from the feminist “street harassment” discourse, because the Race Card always trumps every other card in the identity-politics deck. So when I was browsing the “rape culture” tag on Tumblr, in my daily search for fresh feminist craziness, this Soraya Chemaly column from May 2016 caught my eye:

Rape is what gives pervasive and damaging harassment its power. Thirty-seven percent of girls in high school report not wanting to go to school because of harassment. . . . Between 65% and 85% of women in the US report experiencing street harassment.

And the headline item which Soraya Chemaly employed as the hook for her diatribe about “harassment” was a rape on the D.C. Metro. Hmmm.

 

A 39-year-old woman was raped at knifepoint on a moving Metro train just before 10 a.m. [April 12] in the Wheaton-­Glenmont area of Montgomery County, prosecutors said in court [May 23].
“This is a horrifically terrifying experience. It certainly was for the victim in this case,” Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Haynos said in court. . . .
The suspect, John Prentice Hicks, 39, of Northeast Washington, was making his first court appearance in Montgomery County District Court in the case. . . .
According to Haynos and Metro Transit Police, on April 12, Hicks approached a seated passenger aboard a northbound Red Line train and began speaking to her. He allegedly pulled out a knife, forced her to a different part of the car, raped her, then ordered her to another area of the car, and forced her to perform a sex act, court statements and records allege. . . .
According to an arrest document signed by Metro Transit Detective C.H. Dorrity, investigators used high-definition surveillance video inside the Glenmont station, records from the suspect’s Metro SmarTrip card, and the woman’s recollection to identify Hicks.
Metro police officers also recognized him as the suspect in an indecent-exposure case that took place on Metro, according to Haynos.

Now, according to Chemaly’s column, what makes this relevant is that indecent exposure is “an every day form of street harassment.”

Every day? Really? But never mind that. More importantly:

The man accused of raping a woman aboard a moving D.C. Metro train in April dodged arrest just a week before the brutal attack for an indecent exposure charge aboard the Metro. . . .
Court records revealed the Metropolitan Transit Police Department positively identified Hicks as the likely culprit of an indecent exposure incident on a Metro car April 2, reports The Washington Post.
Despite reportedly having strong evidence to arrest and charge Hicks for the April 2 crime, police failed to get a warrant for Hick’s arrest. It is unclear why authorities failed to arrest Hicks in the week before the April 12 rape.

In other words, this is a story about the failure of law enforcement to apprehend a dangerous criminal. But wait — there’s more:

In court Monday, Haynos cited a series of earlier convictions for Hicks: first-degree sexual abuse in 1995, attempted second-degree child sexual abuse in 2000, and unauthorized use of a vehicle in 2000 and 2007.

This guy already had three criminal convictions on his record, including two sexual abuse charges, and yet when he allegedly committed indecent exposure on the Metro, police failed to put him in jail?

Beyond providing further proof of how shoddy the police are in D.C., what this story (and Soraya Chemaly’s column about it) shows is the way liberal arguments create distorted perceptions of reality. Feminists want to use “street harassment” as a way to demonize men and why? To encourage women to support the feminist cause and vote Democrat. But when we start taking a closer look at the facts of “street harassment,” we notice that the perpetrators aren’t likely Republican voters.

It’s all about the narrative, as the late Andrew Breitbart used to say. One of the incidents that caused Andrew to rethink his youthful liberalism was the 1991 Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing. Here was a highly accomplished black man, nominated for the Supreme Court by a Republican president and yet, because Democrats had cynically calculated that “harassment” was an issue that could help them get a large share of the women’s vote, Thomas was subjected to what he called a “high-tech lynching.” If the GOP had done to a black Democrat what Democrats did to Clarence Thomas, we never would have heard the end of the accusations of “racism” from liberals. There is a partisan double-standard in the media, confirmed a few years later when liberals circled the wagons to protect President Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

This kind of dishonest and manipulative exploitation of divisive issues is entirely partisan. It’s about electing Democrats. The crude “feminist” messaging that accompanied the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign was transparently an exercise in political propaganda. As last weekend’s Women’s March on Washington showed, “feminism” is now simply a partisan movement which seeks to convince women that they are “systematically oppressed,” that their oppressors are Republicans, and therefore, women should vote Democrat.

Well, OK, fine — let’s turn rape into a political issue and just start grabbing stories about rape arrests to prove our point: Timothy Wayne McLean Jr. (Durham, N.C.), Marco Antonio Garcia Perez (Highland, Calif.), Allen Mays (Lincoln Parrish, La.), Arturo Bedolla (Memphis, Tenn.), Toney Moore (Harlan, Ky.), Kamai Clerveaux (Miami, Fla.) and Rafael Alfredo Pabon (Cabarrus County, N.C.). That’s seven rape stories from around the country this week, and so far I haven’t seen a single feminist blogger or columnist mention any of these crimes. Why do you think feminists don’t want to talk about these accused rapists? My hunch is that it’s because the suspects are probably not Trump voters.



 

 

Category: Crime, Sex Trouble

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One Response to “Probably Not a Trump Voter”

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