The recent death of Sandra M. Gilbert at the age of 87 sent my mind reeling back decades to the first time I came across her name. With Susan Gubar (who still lives), Gilbert wrote The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, which is now regarded as a pathbreaking text of feminist criticism and which came out the same year, 1979, that I began graduate study in English literature.  They took the study of literature … and turned it into a crude, cheap means of slamming men.  Madwoman was one of the first shots in a revolution in literary studies that has, in one form or another, been underway ever since. It’s hard to imagine it now, but there were actually professors in our English department who opposed the proposition to add a feminist critic to the faculty — not because they opposed women’s rights, but because they viewed feminist criticism as a political project rather than one of aesthetic inquiry. And they were right. But they lost that battle, and for those old-timers who fiercely opposed the politicization of literary studies, it was the beginning of the end.  In a 2021 interview, Gilbert and Gubar recounted how their classic had come into being. Together they’d taught a course in women’s writing, and for both of them it was “an experience of consciousness-raising,” “a revelation,” “an apocalypse.” Why? Gilbert: “Suddenly we were reading only female writers, all together in the classroom, and finding incredible connections. I would go home every night just gasping in amazement.” Never before, the women explained, had either of them ever studied female writers.  Really? They were professors of English literature and had never studied Jane Austen, the Bröntes, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, or Virginia Woolf? All I know is that I studied them, and it didn’t take a feminist professor to lead me to them. But then again, I didn’t read them to discover apocalyptic feminist messages between the lines. I read them because they were great literature — a concept that people like Gilbert and Gubar have done a great deal to wipe off the academic map. (Incidentally, my favorite novel was by a woman, Mary Renault — about whom I knew enough to recognize that she’d have been as put off by Gilbert and Gubar’s narrow enterprise as I was.) (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Dana Gioia on the Opera, From Tosca to Sweeney Todd) Anyway, Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist criticism won the day. It swept through America’s English departments like a tornado. In 1985, W.W. Norton published a massive volume, edited by Gilbert and Gubar, entitled The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English. New editions followed in 1990, 1996, and 2007.  The fact that the latest edition of their anthology came out almost two decades ago points to an uncomfortable (for them) fact: Gilbert and Gubar’s victory was short-lived. Indeed, the brand of feminist criticism that they championed in the late 70s and 80s looks almost quaint now. Gilbert and Gubar’s Privileged ‘White’ Feminism For theirs was a middle- and upper-middle-class feminism, a white feminism. It was a feminism that took its cues from Virginia Woolf, a rich and privileged woman who belonged to an elite circle of highly cultured Londoners and who was waited on by servants day and night, but who nonetheless saw herself as cruelly oppressed. (Gilbert and Gubar, by the way, weren’t too badly off either: Gilbert went to Cornell, NYU, and Columbia, and taught at places like Stanford and Princeton; Gubar went to CCNY, Michigan, and Iowa, and spent her career — she’s now retired — teaching at Indiana.)  No, Gilbert and Gubar were only the start. After they kicked it off, Women’s Studies developed in much the same way as the Reign of Terror in France, with each new wave of rebels being replaced and slaughtered — in this case only metaphorically — by the next. Soon enough, for example, black women came along and insisted that they were far more oppressed than their well-off white sisters and therefore deserved to run the movement. (They even came up with their own word, womanism, as a means of distinguishing their own battle against both male sexism and white racism from white women’s war on the patriarchy.)  Latina women, too, demanded a slice of the cake. So did lesbians and, later, those women who chose to identify themselves, more broadly and meaninglessly, as queer. Finally the trans women marched in and cowed all the others into submission, thereby bringing the whole thing full circle, with biological women once again being put in their place by biological men. Somewhere along the way the movement embraced the concept of intersectionality, which views sexism as only one ingredient in an elaborate gumbo of oppression, along with racism, classism, and so on.  At the same time, the blatantly political preoccupations of Gilbert and Gubar were largely supplanted by postmodern theory, which distances itself from reality — and which, of course, includes gender ideology, a preposterous phenomenon that wasn’t even on Gilbert and Gubar’s radar when they started out. Still another new twist was that Women’s Studies, which had originally stood up for oppressed women in the Third World, now taught that white women had no right to criticize men of color, no matter how much they abused their wives and daughters; to do so was to become tools of Western hegemony.  In the midst of this maelstrom, Gilbert and Gubar and other second-wave feminists, as they’re called (if you’re counting, the movement is now on its fourth wave), had to do their best to keep up, to stay relevant, to try not to be given the heave-ho by their successors. This required them to continually adjust their own most deeply held beliefs, their own politics, and their own rhetoric to the movement’s latest priorities. It wasn’t easy. At one point Gubar found herself being told by newer arrivals to Women’s Studies that she was a “trogolodyte,” insufficiently devoted to theory and promoting female writing that was deficient in its representation of lesbians and women of color. But they gave it the old college try. In their 2021 interview, after gushing over the Woman’s March that took place on the day after Trump’s 2017 inauguration, mourning “the terrible downfall of Hillary Clinton,” and expressing “admiration for Dr. Jill Biden” and “for Kamala Harris,” they pretended to be grateful to the inane Queer Studies doyennes Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick for having “contributed enormously to the conversation that led to queer theory and that also resulted in trans studies.” Yeah — you can take it to the bank that Gilbert and Gubar felt precisely the same way about the advent of Butler and Sedgwick as Hillary Clinton felt when Barack Obama came out of the woodwork and stole the Democratic presidential nomination from her.  Still Raging The occasion of Gilbert and Gubar’s 2021 interview, by the way, was the publication of their book Still Mad: American Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination. In it, they explained that they’d decided to write it “because we are still mad.” That, they explained, is what feminism’s all about: never-ending rage at the “patriarchal structures that have proven to be shockingly obdurate.” It was those structures that, in their view, had made possible the election of Trump, who they described as “boorish,” “utterly unqualified,” “misogynistic,” “rabble-rousing,” and “nearly psychotic” — as opposed, naturally, to the “educated and experienced” Hillary Clinton, who, they asserted, would, if elected, “surely not govern by tweet, not deny or evade the existence of a major medical threat, not foment rebellion among the citizens of her land or counsel people to ingest Lysol or enlist the military against civil rights protesters.”  (READ MORE: Revolution at the LA Times) Lies, lies, lies. But then again Gilbert and Gubar’s entire project was founded on lies. These were, after all, a couple of incredibly privileged women posing as downtrodden — an insult to every one of the hundreds of millions of truly downtrodden people on earth — and posturing as warriors even as they luxuriated in cozy homes in college towns that would’ve made most people around the world weep with envy. They took the study of literature — which, properly understood, is an exercise in subtly and delicately teasing out the truth, beauty, and moral content in works of the human imagination — and turned it into a crude, cheap means of slamming men.  Well, in one sense, they won: the increasing toxicity of man-hatred in the academy, which began with professors like Gilbert and Gubar, has led more and more young men to give up entirely on the idea of higher education. But in another sense they lost — for the revolution they initiated has reached a point of utter self-parody and sparked a magnificent backlash, the result of which is that the most venerable universities, like the most established media, are headed, along with the reality-defying ideologies that have captured them, for the chopping block. In the end, alas, that’s the unenviable legacy of Sandra M. Gilbert and her sisters in arms. The post Sandra Gilbert and Feminism’s Endless Rage appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the co-leaders of President-elect Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), have announced ambitious goals for cutting unnecessary government regulations, an effort in “retrospective review” that is long-overdue.   Our current federal governmental structure is devoted almost exclusively to so-called administrative “experts” developing and promulgating new rules and regulations. But the government never goes back to assess systematically whether existing regulations are actually needed or achieving their stated goals.  This uncontrolled expansion of federal regulation is exactly what was foreseen in 1973 in a perceptive but obscure book, The Institutional Imperative, by an experienced Washington lawyer, Robert Kharasch.  There is even a chance that some sensible Democrats might cross party lines to support a freeze on enforcement of … unnecessary federal regulations. Kharasch argues that the real goal for people in government is not to solve problems, but to maintain the institution and assure the public and the Congress — and I would add, themselves — that the work they are doing is important and worthy of expanded funding. In other words, our current governmental structure does not include any mechanism to declare victory and go home, a situation that predictably leads to uncontrolled growth called “hypertrophy.”  As the 19th century polymath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, “Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that will itself need reforming.” This critique rings true to my experience as a former General Counsel of one of the worst offenders, the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as practicing and teaching environmental and administrative law at Yale for almost fifty years.  As I outlined in a 2012 article in The Atlantic, “The Case for Trimming the EPA,” as the environment had gotten much cleaner over the decades since 1970, EPA has only gotten bigger and its regulations more expensive, complex, and intrusive. The agency has consistently found new and often fewer and less significant problems to justify its existence and expand its funding.  (READ MORE from E. Donald Elliott: Are the American People Smart Enough to See Through the Political Theater?) A good example are the recent draconian regulations I have criticized in these pages that will cost trillions to “clean-up” PFAS, a chemical that hasn’t been proven to cause any substantial harm at low levels.  (Note: any chemical with letters for a name is scary to the public.). However, enter “the resistance” to much needed change.  A recent article in The Washington Post quotes George Washington University administrative law professor Richard Pierce arguing that DOGE is a fools’ errand because it will take two to three years plus extensive litigation to get rid of even one existing regulation. To paraphrase Lloyd Benson’s famous rejoinder to Dan Quayle during their vice-presidential debate, “I know Dick Pierce, Dick Pierce is a friend of mine.”  Professor Pierce has a valid point but there is a way around it. The conventional way to get rid of administrative regulations is to revoke them.  The Reagan Administration tried to do that with a rule requiring all new cars to have air bags or automatic seatbelts that strapped in their occupants whether they wanted to fasten them or not.  The Supreme Court slapped down that previous de-regulatory effort in an (in)famous case taught in every administrative law class, Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Ass’n v. State Farm Mut. Auto Ins. Co., 463 U.S. 29 (1983).   That case held, more or less as an unjustified ipse dixit, that in order to get rid of a regulation, an agency had to go through the same process of notice and comment rulemaking and benefit-cost analysis plus judicial review that was used to create it in the first place.  That’s what Professor Pierce is referring to when he is quoted as saying that Musk and Ramaswamy are “‘utterly ignorant’ of the realities of federal law, which mandates strict procedures for repealing existing regulations.”   Starve Regulations of Funding However, a much faster way exists: appropriations riders that forbid agencies and the Department of Justice from enforcing antiquated or unnecessary regulations.   As I point out in a forthcoming article in The Harvard Journal of Public Policy, a draft of which is available here, appropriations riders are one of the few tools left to the Congress and the President to reel in the administrative state.  As a result of the Republicans’ “trifecta” in the recent elections, they now control not only the White House but also both houses on Congress, although by narrow majorities.  As a result, they can probably enact appropriations riders, but even if they cannot, in my experience, agencies typically respect even report language from a single house, which is much easier to obtain that a law passed by both house and signed by the president. What DOGE should do is solicit nominations from the public concerning existing rules that are unduly burdensome and/or unnecessary.  Then, after looking into the claims, DOGE should provide the White House, the Congress and the public a list of those it thinks should be paused immediately. Congressional committees should then hold hearings and enact riders in appropriations bills that prohibit the government spending any more money to enforce those rules while the government decides whether to revoke those rules permanently or simply leave them on the books as “dead letters.”  (Admittedly, this may not always be a perfect solution, because a few federal laws, particularly environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act, provide for lawsuits by states and/or private parties to enforce existing rules.) Ample precedent exists for de-funding as a strategy.  For example, in 1972, the Congress in its wisdom — or in this case, lack thereof —enacted the Noise Control Act of 1972, which gave EPA broad powers to regulate noise from all products “distributed in commerce,” which essentially means everything.  However, a decade later, in 1982 under the Reagan Administration, Congress de-funded EPA from using any federal funds to enforce that statute in order to return control of noise back to the states, a prohibition that lasts to this day.  Thus, while the Noise Control Act technically still remains on the books, it is a dead letter in practice. (READ MORE: Are the Criminal Cases Against Trump Unconstitutional?) Congress should use one of the few legal devices left to rein in the administrative state, its power of the purse.  There is even a chance that some sensible Democrats might cross party lines to support a freeze on enforcement of particularly burdensome or unnecessary federal regulations. The post How DOGE Can Suspend Unneeded Regulations appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The defeat that the Democratic Party has just sustained is being blamed by its more fanatical adherents on racism, misogyny, reaction against ‘lawfare,’ the stubbornness of Biden, the inarticulateness of Harris, the rubbishing of the Catholic church, open borders, potential involvement in foreign wars, the effects of COVID and inflation, and the focus on Trump’s personality. Yet American elites resisted the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, twice vetoed by President Clinton before he ultimately signed. But the sweep of Republican victories and near-victories suggest larger causes at work. Harris under-performed Mrs. Clinton and Obama as well as Biden and did so nearly everywhere. The Republican disaster in 1964 was a vote to sustain social security and the welfare state, such as it was. This year’s vote was a vote against seventy years of leveling down of standards of behavior. Americans do not like sumptuary legislation, particularly federal sumptuary legislation. The extension of prohibitions against state-imposed racial discrimination first to private discrimination and then to ‘disparate impacts’ and ‘hostile environments’ has taken its toll. The devaluation of marriage with the invalidation of sodomy laws, abortion on demand, the compulsory validation of ‘gay marriage,’ the legitimization of male homosexuality in all its aspects, and the validation of transgenderism even to the point of public financial support and insulation from parental authority convinced large portions of the electorate, particularly those charged with the up-bringing of adolescents, that the federal government was their enemy, not their friend. The Clinton administration discarded the reports of two national commissions concerned with people at the bottom of society: the Dunlop commission recommending building-level labor organizations and the Barbara Jordan commission recommending skills-based immigration reform. (READ MORE from George Liebmann: Democrats Want to Lower the Voting Age) Even the Bolsheviks reacted against sexual libertarianism, pressed to its limits. The 1918 Soviet family law with its instant divorce and free abortion was stiffened in 1926 in reaction to the depredations of fatherless youths. The Democratic family agenda or lack thereof has been sustained by concealment of inconvenient facts. The proportion of births to unwed mothers increased from 4 percent to more than 40 percent from 1970 to 2020, among blacks from 30 percent to 70 percent, and among black high school dropouts to more than 90 percent. More than half of fatherless black men were involved with the criminal justice system by the age of 40. The likelihood of venereal disease infection is ten times as great for unprotected anal sex as for unprotected vaginal sex. Although there are thankfully drugs that allow AIDS sufferers a normal life span, until recently the cost to the government of these drugs approximated a million dollars a person over a lifetime, and the federal AIDS budget exceeded $40 billion per year. The incidence of suicide among the beneficiaries of transgender treatments is about six times that in the general population. The effects of well-intentioned affirmative action programs are self-segregation, enhanced racial tension, and grade inflation leading to a reduction in studying, as a quest for meaningless grades is forsworn in favor of extra-curricular activities. “Disparate impact” ideology has prevented any serious effort through drug testing to curtail the consumption of both licit and illicit drugs by student populations, to the point where 20 percent of male youth are disqualified from either the military or labor market, with macro-economic costs. As long ago as 1927, Bertrand Russell wrote about the purposeless lives of young men whose consorts had “married the state” through provision of child care, food, medical care, and housing. Fifty years ago, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observed that the problems of blacks in large cities were the typical problems of urban proletariats the world over, which would not yield to the moralistic fault-finding of black ministers ascribing social ills to Confederate mores. America’s northern liberals still have not taken on board these lessons, seeking to inculcate among blacks an ideology of self-pity forsworn by all other ethnic groups. Both Isaiah Berlin and George Kennan have analogized them to the well-born late 19th century Russian narodniki, who pitied peasants but did not understand them, and who paved the way for Bolshevism. The gains that should have resulted from the civil rights movement have been largely negated by the effects of the welfare rights movement, the sexual revolution, and the drug war. Yet American elites resisted the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, twice vetoed by President Clinton before he ultimately signed; the Dobbs decision backing away from free love; and the beginnings of drug decriminalization, on which Democratic governors and the Biden administration have dragged their feet. In 1947, Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma, lamenting the downtrodden state of American blacks, The dietary deficiencies and outdoor privies he deplored have since yielded to government programs, but the crime, family breakdown, and venereal disease statistics have grown markedly worse. (READ MORE: Firearms Control: It’s Time for a Common-Sense Bargain) Perhaps a change will be wrought by November 5. Donald Trump is the opposite of a moral exemplar. His social conscience is well concealed, but he appears to possess at least a semi-efficient bull**it detector. Dislike of Trump does not justify disregard of the ordinary folk who brought him to power, and who want to think that the national government is not educating the young in false values. The writer, who expresses his individual views, is President of the Library Company of the Baltimore Bar and author of works on law and history, most recently The Tafts (Twelve Tables Press, 2023). The post The American Electorate Revolted Against False Values appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

by Mac Slavo, SHTF Plan: An elderly member of the Rothschild banking cartel dynasty is believed to have been killed in a house fire in Los Angeles. The blaze at a property on Lookout Mountain Avenue in the Hollywood Hills broke out on Wednesday, with 45 firefighters requiring just over half an hour to extinguish the flames, […]

by Amy Furr, Breitbart: Data shows that the Biden-Harris administration has been targeting faith-based colleges, a study found. According to the American Principles Project (APP), actions by the Department of Education have “unfairly” targeted Christian colleges and universities while ignoring Ivy League schools, the organization reported on November 18. TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/ The report said almost […]

from SGT Report: The house of Rothschild is on fire, kinda literally – at least one one of them. And the crimes against humanity committed by the houses of Rockefeller and Rothschild are being exposed like never before, and NOTHING can stop it. Meanwhile Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn in yet and many conservative […]

from ZeeeMedia: TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

by Ronan Manly, BullionStar: Have you ever thought about what pennies are made of? At first glance, it may seem like a minor coin, almost negligible in value. However, the cost to produce each penny actually exceeds its face value, which has led to debates about whether keeping the penny in circulation is worth it. […]

A fight broke out between Michigan and Ohio State Saturday afternoon following the Wolverines’ 13-10 upset victory over the No. 2 ranked Buckeyes. The brawl erupted after Michigan football players brought a school flag onto the field after the win and tried to plant it at center field at Ohio Stadium, commonly referred to as “The Horseshoe” by Ohio State fans. Police used pepper spray to breakup the altercation that ESPN reported lasted for approximately five minutes. A fight has broken out between Michigan and Ohio State after The Game pic.twitter.com/XPwdAjfYzN — FOX College Football (@CFBONFOX) November 30, 2024 Ohio State Police said in a statement that “officers from multiple law enforcement agencies assisted in breaking up an on-field altercation.” “During the scuffle, multiple officers representing Ohio and Michigan deployed pepper spray,” the statement said. “OSUPD is the lead agency for games & will continue to investigate.” CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE Following the game, officers from multiple law enforcement agencies assisted in breaking up an on-field altercation. During the scuffle, multiple officers representing Ohio and Michigan deployed pepper spray. OSUPD is the lead agency for games & will continue to investigate. — OSU Police (@OSUPOLICE) November 30, 2024 Buckeyes head coach Ryan Day later blamed Michigan for starting the melee by planting the flag. “I don’t know all the details of it, but I know these guys are looking to put a flag on our field and our guys weren’t going to let that happen,” Day said. “I’ll find out exactly what happened. But this is our field and certainly we’re embarrassed of the fact that we lost the game, but there’s some prideful guys in this team that weren’t going to just let that happen.” Wolverines head coach Sherrone Moore said that emotions were running high on both sides. “I did see they had the flag and guys were waving it around and their guys charged us. There’s emotion on both sides,” he said. “It can’t happen. Rivalry games get heated, especially this one, it’s the biggest one in the country, so we got to handle that one better.”