Vox Media Sexual Harassment Scandal: Another Sign the SJW Left Is Imploding

Posted on | October 20, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Would you sexually harass Eden Rohatensky? Pierced septum, weird hair — what kind of guy would look at her and say, “Yeah, that girl needs some uninvited sexual attention from a 40-something co-worker”?

Say hello to erstwhile Vox Media VP Lockhart Steele:

 

Steele was once something of a blog wunderkind. He moved to New York in his 20s and launched a site focusing on real estate (Curbed), then spun off a site on shopping (Racked) and another one about restaurants (Eater). He became a managing editor at Gawker, and then in 2013, hired on at Vox with a deal that reportedly paid him $20 million for his sites.

Alas, evidently, Steele was notorious for getting drunk at company events and causing problems. Eden Rohatensky recounts her experience:

Later that weekend, all of my colleagues had attended a party and were headed in a convoy of Ubers to go get something to eat. I was in the back seat, in the middle. To my left was my coworker and friend. In the front, the head of my department. To my right, one of the company’s VPs.
We drove towards our destination and suddenly I felt the VP caress my hand. And then my arm. And then suddenly, in the dark corner of the car, he was kissing my neck. I grabbed his hand and held it down, worried he would try to go further with it. My coworker and my boss were unaware.
I was fired a month later due to lack of productivity. No longer fearful of losing my job, I reached out to a few of the people I had worked with. I reported what had happened with the VP. A year later, I found out that an investigation had been done. That he had multiple victims within the company. That his punishment was being told he could not drink at corporate events any longer. He had too many shares in the company. There was nothing they could do.

Alcohol impairs judgment, and chronic heavy drinking produces cumulative damage to the prefrontal cortex, so that the habitual drunk becomes increasingly irresponsible and impulsive in his behavior, even when he’s not drinking. This may explain why a millionaire online media executive like Lockhart Steele would decide, “Hey, maybe that blue-haired girl from the IT department needs me to start kissing her neck.”

Of course, the saga of Steele’s self-destruction isn’t being told as a cautionary tale about the catastrophic consequences of alcoholism. Rather, it’s about “male power” and the “floodgates of assault and harassment survivors speaking out against their attackers.”

 

 

 

 

What happened was that, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, some female journalists compiled a list of “Sh*tty Media Men” alleged to be guilty of Weinstein-type abuse. Because the accusers were anonymous, Erin Gloria Ryan of the Daily Beast urged caution:

The sheet documents a wide range of violations, lumping in sexual and physical abuse with such crimes as “creepy AF in the DM’s.” It ropes “being a monster” in with “being a jerk.” . . .
[S]ocial media has made “whisper networks” much more powerful, with a low barrier to entry and a high payoff. Now, a woman could conceivably warn thousands of women at once rather than just a few, or a vengeful ex-girlfriend could lob a serious accusation at a lover who spurned her. Exposing the origin of the accusations is against the rules, so it’s impossible to tell the difference between those in column A and column B.

Welcome to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, my friends. The witch-hunt has begun, and the witches are doing the hunting.

Never mind the specific wrongs that Lockhart Steele may have perpetrated. When a witch-hunt hysteria takes hold, differences between minor and major forms of witchcraft soon cease to matter. Amid a paranoid climate of suspicion, any accusation of witch-type behavior will suffice to have the target burned at the stake before sundown.

While we enjoy ourselves roasting marshmallows over the media flames, however, it’s important to keep in mind why this is happening. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Democrats claimed that Republicans were waging a “War on Women,” a propaganda tactic that helped Obama win re-election with the largest “gender gap” ever recorded by Gallup. This helped pave the way for the “campus rape epidemic” narrative that emerged in 2014, a preview of Hillary Clinton’s feminist-themed campaign in 2016. For the past five years, you see, what Andrew Breitbart dubbed the Democrat-Media Complex has been stoking the flames of feminist fury in hopes of thereby gaining a partisan political advantage.

Well, how’d that work out for you, Lockhart Steele? How about you, Sam Kriss? Matt Hickey, Devin Faraci, Sunil Patel, et al.?

What does this remind you of? It reminds me of Leon Trotsky. He was arguably the most crucial figure of the Bolshevik Revolution. A former Menshevik, Trotsky switched sides to join Lenin in urging a violent coup to overthrow the short-lived constitutional republic in Russia. Following the so-called October Revolution, Trotsky became commander of the Red Army during the civil war, and was second only to Lenin in the Soviet regime. Yet after Lenin fell ill, Trotsky was out-maneuvered by Stalin in the struggle to become Lenin’s successor. Trotsky was eventually purged and exiled, and assassinated by an NKVD agent in Mexico less than a year after Stalin had made his murderous bargain with Hitler.

The lesson of Trotsky’s life is that those who associate themselves with radical movements often become victims of their own “success.”

When we see so many soi-disant “progressive” men being destroyed by the regime of “social justice” they have sought to impose upon us, we may be tempted to dismiss this as mere hypocrisy. Yet the real problem is that there is no such thing as “social justice.” The promised egalitarian utopia is a mirage, as Hayek said. The Left pursues a destructive agenda — condemning “all hitherto existing society,” to quote the Communist Manifesto — based on the implicit claim that they have a plan to bring about a social order that is better than what they have destroyed.

You say you got a real solution.
Well, you know, we’d all love to see the plan.

John Lennon’s cynical putdown of 1960s radicals captures the real crux of the problem with the Left, generally and historically. What will the promised “equality” look like? How many people will have to die to bring about the “dictatorship of the proletarian”? Who will become the victims of the totalitarian regime? Why is it that these revolutionaries never produce an actual utopia, but only misery and bloodshed?

Wise people stay far away from radical movements and feminism is inherently radical, an attack on the fundamental structure of society.

“[Feminism is] a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”
— Pat Robertson, 1992

Every word of that is quite literally true. Anyone who wishes to examine the documentation can just buy my book, but my research is always producing further evidence. You can read, for example, Professor Marilyn Frye’s essay: “Do You Have to Be a Lesbian to Be a Feminist?” Professor Frye argues that “the patriarchal institution of female heterosexuality . . . is central to the continuous replication of the patriarchy.” She concludes that a feminist “cannot be heterosexual in any standard patriarchal meaning of the word — you cannot be any version of a patriarchal wife.” This confronts the would-be feminist with a choice of either (a) pondering what a non-patriarchal heterosexuality might look like, or (b) giving up on men altogether and becoming a lesbian feminist.

Unless, of course, she is willing to choose (c) not being a feminist at all.

It’s like the Bolshevik Revolution. If you were a smart Russian in 1917, you would have fled the country as soon as Lenin took over. No member of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie could have been mistaken about what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” would mean for them. Better to get out alive, even if it meant being a penniless refugee, than to stick around and hope somehow to survive The Red Terror.

However, the Soviet regime also imprisoned, slaughtered or starved to death many millions of workers and peasants, the very classes in whose name the Bolsheviks had waged their revolutionary coup. Ultimately, as with Trotsky, the regime turned against the revolutionaries themselves, as the paranoid Stalin purged and annihilated his potential rivals. As with the Bolsheviks, so also with the feminists, who have been waging their own revolution for nearly half a century, but who would have us believe that the “patriarchy” is more powerful and dangerous than ever.

Feminism has now reached its Moscow Show Trial phase. The purges are underway, and their Popular Front strategy will soon be abandoned. Any progressive man who believes he can survive as a “male feminist” is apt to become a target for destruction, like Lockhart Steele. Surely he must be dumbfounded by his sudden and awful downfall. When he was in college, after all, liberals were dismissing the Lewinsky scandal because it was “just about sex” and “everybody lies about sex.” Nina Burleigh declared “American women should be lining up with their Presidential kneepads” to thank President Clinton for his devotion to abortion rights.

Here we are in 2017, however, and Lockhart Steele, millionaire executive for the self-described progressive media company Vox, can’t kiss a girl on the neck without being immolated on the feminist bonfire. Times have changed, and Lockhart Steele didn’t notice the writing on the wall. Perhaps he was too drunk to pay attention to the evidence that feminists were increasingly angry at being groped by “progressive” men who thought they could emulate the Clintonian style. But dear God, how intoxicated must Lockhart Steele have been the night he made a move on Eden Rohatensky? Her aposematic hairstyle should have warned him that she was dangerously crazy. And the septum ring? Hello?

 

Guys, wake up! If you ever encounter a woman with facial piercings, beware. Avoid eye contact. Say nothing. Do not interact with her.

No psychologically healthy woman has a pierced septum. Eden Rohatensky has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and identifies as “non-binary.” Women who cultivate a deliberately weird appearance — tattoos, piercings, bizarre “Goth” makeup, etc. — are presenting the world with a visual warning sign: “Stay away! Leave me alone!”

Lockhart Steele must have been too drunk to understand this. And his folly is symptomatic of the larger problem of the Left in the Trump Age. During the eight-year holiday from reality that was the Obama presidency, the Left got the idea that they could do whatever they wanted to do, without suffering any serious consequences. In 2011, mobs of smelly anarchists launched the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which ought to have been a disastrous embarrassment for the Democrat Party, but Obama got re-elected with little difficulty. All the scandals and failures of the Obama administration seemed to have no impact, and electing Hillary Clinton as his successor was regarded as such a foregone conclusion that, when Trump was elected, Democrats went into a sort of post-traumatic crisis. The Left is now imploding in a genocidal rage, à la Cambodia under Pol Pot, a hunt for scapegoats to be destroyed in order to “purify” the progressive movement.

• Question: Did Hillary Clinton lose because Democrats were too sympathetic to the interests of heterosexual males?
• Answer: No, of course not. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The feminist witch-hunt against sexual harassers in the liberal media is counterintuitive, if the future of the Democrat Party requires a movement that can appeal to more than blue-haired feminist weirdos. Yet feminists now seem determined to destroy any male within the progressive movement who is even suspected of heterosexual tendencies.

A witch-hunt has no statute of limitations, nor any standard of due process and, as for evidence, who needs evidence? If a woman says her ex-boyfriend did awful things to her in 2007 or 1997, feminists will applaud her for her “courage” in “breaking the silence,” and nothing that the targeted scapegoat says in his own defense will save him.

“The politics of personal destruction” — that’s what Hillary Clinton called it when her husband was exposed in the Lewinsky scandal, and now it’s being unleashed by feminists against the men of the Left.

A left-wing bonfire is really such a beautiful thing to watch. . .

Smores, anyone?

 

 

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