It’s the data most responsible for the sudden shift in Democrats’ tone this week as more and more in Congress give the media hints that they are willing to allocate funding for at least some of the border protection measures being pushed by President Trump. You see, it’s not that these Democrats in Congress think it’s the right thing to do but rather that the vast majority of Americans (nearly 80%) think it’s the right thing to do and so the hands of Democrats are now being forced to do something or face a serious political backlash heading into 2020.
She became famous for showing a sixty second video of Jordan Peterson to a university class, for which she was almost sacked and would have been except she had taped the inquisition with the three-person tribunal who had tried to do her over. She has learned a very great deal since that time.
Berenson begins his book with an account of a conversation he had with his wife, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating mentally ill criminals. They were discussing one of the many grim cases that cross her desk—“the usual horror story, somebody who’d cut up his grandmother or set fire to his apartment.” Then his wife said something like “Of course, he was high, been smoking pot his whole life.”
Of course? I said.
Yeah, they all smoke.
Well . . . other things too, right?
Sometimes. But they all smoke.
Berenson used to be an investigative reporter for the Times, where he covered, among other things, health care and the pharmaceutical industry. Then he left the paper to write a popular series of thrillers. At the time of his conversation with his wife, he had the typical layman’s view of cannabis, which is that it is largely benign. His wife’s remark alarmed him, and he set out to educate himself. Berenson is constrained by the same problem the National Academy of Medicine faced—that, when it comes to marijuana, we really don’t know very much. But he has a reporter’s tenacity, a novelist’s imagination, and an outsider’s knack for asking intemperate questions. The result is disturbing.
When I went with President @realDonaldTrump to the border today I never imagined @Acosta would be there doing our job for us and so clearly explaining why WALLS WORK. Thanks Jim! https://t.co/7wC4rdEsZ2
More at the link, including lots of piling onto Unlucky Jim, the very model of a modern media analyst. He is utterly representative of the class of leftist fools the rest of society must continually contend with.
I’m convinced Tucker Carlson is the only member of the media who’s willing to report uncomfortable facts so we can solve problems rather than run from them.
This past week Carlson said in a monologue that everyone’s goal should be “strong American families.” Sounds innocuous, right? Yet it isn’t, for precisely the reason Carlson gives: America’s elite refuse to address the greatest impediment to reaching this goal.
The dearth of employed men and the subsequent disintegration of marriage.
For stating the obvious, Carlson has been vilified. (Just Google his name and you’ll find all the articles denouncing him for bringing this matter to light.) Even Red Lobster has pulled their advertising from his show. (Note to Red Lobster: What cowards you are!)
Journalists are supposed to report the facts, not make people feel good about those facts. But our politically correct culture no longer allows problems that cause people discomfort to be discussed, let alone solved. So the problems just sit there and wait to be noticed.
And grow bigger and bigger by the day.
The most controversial subject of the last 25 years has unquestionably been the absence of mothers from the home and what this means for children, families and society as a whole. (That was, incidentally, the subject of my first book.)
But America’s new controversial subject, which is evident from the backlash to Carlson’s monologue, is hypergamy, or the desire of most women to marry men who make more money than they do.
You can see why this poses a problem, what with so many women now out-earning men. And yet the stubborn reality of human nature persists. How will we marry our brave new world with the reality of human nature?
There are two main reasons women—even feminist women—prefer to marry men who make more than they do:
1.Because women have babies and men do not, and women want and need the option to cut back or move out of the workforce to care for those babies. No matter how “equal” the sexes seem prior to having kids, it all changes when children come along. At that point, sex differences become glaring.
“It seems to me there’s a blindness to childbearing in gender role statistical analyses,” notes “htg” in response to this article last year in The New York Times about wives who earn more than their husbands. “The simple truth is that I, or any other man, will never be able to grow a human fetus…
Taken to the extreme, the [admittedly somewhat harsh] logic goes like this: the wife will always have a role as the incubator, food supply, and instinctual caretaker; but if the husband isn’t feeding and sheltering the family, then he has no other role and should be discarded. That is not how I or my wife live our lives. We have both been stay-at-home parents at various points of our life, both are active parents, and both are now earning decent money. But despite our marital equality, we also have honest discussions about how the biological differences between men and women have shaped our relationship. After you have lived through pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and maternal instincts, they are impossible to ignore.”
2.Because completely upending traditional gender roles, or having a marriage in which the wife and not the husband is the primary breadwinner, is problematic to say the least. And there’s ample research to support this.
I remember when Michael Noer of Forbes wrote an article in 2006 entitled “Don’t Marry Career Women.” It caused quite the ruckus. In it, Noer highlighted research that shows marriages in which wives work more than 35 hours per week are less stable than marriages in which the wife works less or not at all.
“A word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.
Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat, less likely to have children, and, if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it.”
Again, that was 2006. Imagine if Noer wrote that article today! And yet he might as well, for the precarious nature of these marriages hasn’t changed.
In 2013, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published a paper that looked at 4,000 married couples in America and found, as Mona Chalabi noted on NPR, that
“once a woman started to earn more than her husband, divorce rates increased. Surprisingly, though, this data showed that whether the wife earns a little bit more or a lot more doesn’t actually make much of a difference. So the researchers concluded from that that what really matters is the mere fact of a woman earning more.”
In 2014, Lori Gottleib wrote in The New York Times about a study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage” which found that couples in egalitarian marriages, or marriages that make no allowance for sex differences, have less sex.
“If men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming, couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.”
In 2018, researchers Marta Murray-Close and Misty L. Heggeness found that in marriages in which the woman is the primary breadwinner, both husbands and wives are uncomfortable enough with these circumstances to fudge the numbers and suggest the gap is smaller than it actually is.
In other words, there’s plenty of data to bolster Carlson’s claim that we “consider some of the effects” of women out-earning men. The fact is, he’s right. It’s a lose-lose scenario for everyone.
For men, surely, because an unemployed man who lacks purpose in his life is downright dangerous. And for women, since they can’t find “good” (read: educated and employed) men they want to marry. And for children, who as a result of all this grow up without a dad. It’s a G-damn mess, and no one wants to talk about it except Tucker Carlson.
There really should be no issue about border protection. You either have a nation state or you don’t. Even without denying welfare to non-citizens, a nation is not a nation unless it controls its borders. That the Democrats, and the left generally, sees advantage in bringing in new welfare-dependent hordes to maintain their share of the vote is the only reason this is ongoing. Increasing the numbers of those who vote for a living is the sole reason the left supports open borders. Madness everywhere – Germany, France, Sweden, the UK – but those at the top on the left will take their graft and be gone behind their walls and gated communities by the time the full costs are being paid, just not paid by them.
If you would like to understand the view from the right, there is no one who may have put it better than John Hinderaker at Powerline: Trump Kills It. Here’s the final para:
Our country is being invaded, as President Trump and most Americans understand. It is far past time to defend ourselves. President Trump wins this one, hands down.
The local press is all left and far left, alas including The Oz. It has columnists on both sides, but the editorial line on things like this might as well be Fairfax. Start with its Froeign Affairs editor: Sense and nonsense in Trump’s Mexican stand-off.
Donald Trump gave a frankly weird speech, his first prime-time television address to the nation as President, about illegal immigration and the need for a wall along the US’s southern border with Mexico.
Donald Trump has a right to try to exert greater control over the US border with Mexico but his claims today of a national security and humanitarian crisis are overblown.
For an accurate assessment, this from Slate, as standard left as you can find.
One of my colleagues, who has a bunch of kids, said that when he and his wife were first married they asked a lot of older couples what they liked and didn’t like after years of marriage. Nearly all of them said their biggest regret was not having more kids.
THE CHUCK ‘N NANCY (I.E. CNN) RESPONSE Via Powerline but everyone (on our side) is saying the same. They have no answer, and everyone knows they have no answer, including them.
The Democrats’ response was delivered by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. They came off poorly, I thought. First, they looked ridiculous:
Schumer and Pelosi totally missed the mark, talking not about the border crisis, but about the partial “shutdown” which hardly anyone cares about. They came across as petty and partisan.
Our country is being invaded, as President Trump and most Americans understand. It is far past time to defend ourselves. President Trump wins this one, hands down.
Law of Markets 