Culture chronicle: 2nd Thoughts on the Sexual Revolution
No one living under Soviet Communism imagined the “revolution” failing — until it did. Dan Hitchens at First Things wonders if a similar reckoning is coming for the sexual revolution. “In 2010, a horrifying Der Spiegel article urged” Germany’s sexual revolutionaries to examine their past, including “fashionable kindergarten networks [that] openly discussed whether sex with children should be part of the program.” Brits, meanwhile, “remembered that the Pedophile Information Exchange achieved respectability in progressive circles,” while David Steel, “the architect of Britain’s abortion liberalization, has said he never expected ‘anything like’ the number of abortions that followed.” And in #MeToo Hollywood, Roman Polanski has gone from “receiving a standing ovation at the Oscars to being kicked out of the Academy.” Yes, “these may seem like small concessions. But it is with such concessions that ideologies start to fall apart.”
House beat: Dems’ Coming Pro-Impeachment Majority
Though Robert Mueller’s testimony was a bust, FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon, Jr. expects a majority of House Democrats to eventually come out in favor of impeaching President Trump. With just nine more, pro-impeachers will be more than half the caucus, and “plenty of Democrats who have yet to come out for impeachment . . . face similar political pressures to those who already have.” That includes 29 from districts Trump lost by at least 38 points in 2016. But even then, “maybe [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi still keeps impeachment proceedings on ice. Maybe some of the pro-impeachment members know that they are taking a stand with no consequences, because Pelosi has assured them privately that” she won’t let it happen.
From the left: Williamson’s ‘Mean-Spirited Individualism’
As some warm to self-help author Marianne Williamson’s presidential campaign, Noah Berlatsky warns at NBC News’ Think that her “supposedly empowering rhetoric masks a mean-spirited individualism.” Indeed, she “often blames material problems on personal failures.” Overlook her “loopy hippie rhetoric,” embrace of reparations and “very friendly interview” on “popular socialist podcast Chapo Trap House”: She still “argues that transforming the world is less important than transforming the inner self.” And while “this reactionary glorification of individuality was part of the 1960s counterculture,” it was also “central to the Reagan era attack on regulations and the welfare state.” Tellingly, “Williamson’s most extensive exercise in victim-blaming can be found in her writing on weight loss.”
Libertarian: Buttigieg’s Bid To Kill the Gig Economy
Pete Buttigieg keeps repeating his call to let gig-economy workers unionize. That would mean reclassifying them as full-fledged employees, notes Billy Binion at Reason — which “would be fairly devastating to the gig-economy business model that makes that work possible and those services accessible and affordable.” Forcing app companies to provide benefits and pay minimum wage would send “labor costs through the roof,” bring “a significant spike in prices” that would “disproportionately affect low-income individuals” who use the services, reduce demand and “make such jobs less available.” This, when unions are fading from the private sector: As America moves away from industrialized labor, “workers have moved away from unionization.”
Web watch: Now Snopes Is Fact-Checking Satire
With such jokes as “Futuristic, Utopian Paradise of Baltimore Completely Baffled By Trump’s Attacks,” the satirical site Babylon Bee “is like The Onion,” and even advertises itself as “Your Trusted Source for Christian News Satire,” notes Bill Zeiser at RealClearPolitics. Yet the fact-checkers of Snopes.com have taken to vetting its stories for accuracy, warning that the “Bee has managed to fool readers . . . in the past” and calling it a “ruse.” As Zeisler notes, Facebook, etc. “use such verdicts to justify reducing the distribution of pieces deemed false.” So the Bee has “retained legal representation.” Snopes’ response? An editor’s note stating, “We are in the process of pioneering industry standards for how the fact-checking industry should best address humor and satire.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board