Greeks Bearing Gifts

Trust not the horse, O Trojans.  Be it what it may, I fear the Greeks even when they offer gifts.  –  Virgil, Aeneid (II, 48-9)

In general, people are not stupid; they are, however, extremely gullible.  Given the information that there is a problem to be solved and the information with which to solve it, the average person can generally come up with a workable solution.  But when that person does not realize that there is a problem, he won’t even attempt to find a solution even if all the necessary information is readily available.  In other words, the average person is insufficiently skeptical; unless he is warned that someone may be trying to deceive him, he will not expect deceit and in fact may even deny the possibility if the deceiver is someone he has been taught to trust, such as a leader.

This childlike trust is why propaganda works, and why names have such a powerful effect; if a group calls itself “The Physicians’ Committee for Responsible Medicine” the natural tendency is to assume it’s a group of physicians fighting malpractice or the like, and if politicians call a law the “Violence Against Women Act” most people will presume that it is intended to combat violence against women.  Unfortunately, those natural assumptions would be incorrect.  As I explained in “The Anti-Life Equation”, the PCRM is actually a fanatical vegan group which uses lies and exaggerations to scare people out of eating meat.  And though the original VAWA of 1994 was bad enough, every successive reauthorization has loaded the horse with ever-increasing numbers of hoplites, which credulous women then browbeat men into taking inside the walls built to protect the citizenry from our own predatory government.

Let’s start by getting one thing out of the way right now:  VAWA does not protect women.  When it was enacted there were already laws against domestic violence in every state, and most states had already tightened and strengthened those laws due to increased awareness of the problem.  The law was therefore totally unnecessary from a practical or criminological point of view, and instead of reducing violence against women there is evidence that the law has actually increased it; a Department of Justice study associated the overly-aggressive policies spawned by VAWA with a increase in homicides of women, a National Institute of Justice study warned that “No-Drop” prosecution laws (see next paragraph) may place women “in greater jeopardy”, and mandatory arrest or prosecution laws make normal women far less likely to call police.  Other reasons the law is bad for women specifically (aside from the ways it’s bad for free people of either sex) include encouragement of aggressive arrest and prosecution (the number of women arrested in California increased 446% after VAWA); flooding the legal system with trivial and false abuse allegations which hide the real ones; denial of women’s agency; and promoting destruction of relationships instead of reconciliation.

Neofeminists wanted VAWA so women would have a gigantic government club to use against men, to promote criminalization of men, to encourage breakup of heterosexual relationships and to provide a precedent for infantilization of women who make sexual choices (such as sex work or BDSM) with which neofeminists disapprove, and it has been very successful in achieving those goals.  But as I’ve explained before, neofeminists are useful idiots to whom lawmakers cater because their rhetoric provides a Trojan horse for anti-civil rights measures, like a gigantic My Little Pony with which silly, brainwashed women are too enchanted to notice its dangerous payload.  Take “No-Drop” policies; these are programs authorized and funded by VAWA which render women powerless to stop the machinery of injustice once an accusation of domestic violence is made.  As soon as the woman (or in some states, anyone at all) calls the police to report an incident, the husband is arrested (no matter what the wife says, in many cases even if she is the aggressor) and prosecuted.  Because many wives rightly refuse to cooperate with such proceedings, the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW, the DoJ office which enforces and funds VAWA) authorized so-called “evidence-based” prosecutions, kangaroo courts in which any evidence (including hearsay) is allowed and the accused man is denied the constitutional rights of confrontation and cross-examination.  Is it any wonder domestic violence convictions have doubled under this regime?

The implications of this policy are twofold:  first, women are established as moral imbeciles, with the state acting in loco parentis to make legal decisions on our “behalf”; second, once civil rights are abrogated for men the precedent of “equal treatment under the law” allows them to be abrogated for women as well, and indeed they are with increasing frequency.  Other VAWA-enabled abuses include subjugation of women in shelters to a neofeminist political agenda and prosecutorial power to abduct the children of women who refuse to participate in the demolition of their husbands.  And that’s just the beginning; subsequent VAWA reauthorizations have loosened the definition of “domestic violence” so much that a psychotic New Mexico woman was able to get a restraining order against David Letterman for supposedly “tormenting” her with “facial gestures” and “code words” on his TV show, and empowered the police to collect and indefinitely retain DNA from anybody they care to point a finger at.  The most recent lowered the burden of proof for male university students accused of sexual misconduct to “a preponderance of the evidence” and gave the accuser (who need not even be the supposed victim) the right to appeal an acquittal.  The version currently under consideration will allow a man to be jailed for ten months if a woman says he was “disrespectful” to her but did not physically harm her.

I’m sure y’all can connect the dots.  If dirty looks can be crimes and feelings constitute evidence, any woman can have any man arrested on a whim…even if that woman is, say, a politician, and that man is, say, a vociferous detractor; all she has to say is that she “felt threatened”.  And under policies of “equality”, male politicians will soon be able to do the same.  To anyone, male or female.  Under the newest iteration of VAWA, cops, bureaucrats and politicians will be able to have anyone arrested, and even if he can’t be convicted under a preponderance of the hearsay, he can be bankrupted by repeated prosecutions or framed for something else via his DNA sample.  The proponents of VAWA include cops, prosecutors, career politicians, neofeminists and the brainwashed followers of any of the above who can’t be bothered to read something before giving it their support; they are personified by a comic actor-turned-legislator weeping crocodile tears and Republicans targeting throwaway additions about homosexuals and immigrants in order to call attention away from the flagrant civil rights violations they so desperately want to pass.  They want you to believe that to be against VAWA is to be anti-woman, but take a look at the bylines on the articles I linked above, and on all these articles as well. And no, they aren’t all Republicans or “conservatives” either; as I stated above, the Republicans want VAWA just as much as the Democrats do.  The only people who are against it are those who care about concepts like liberty, fairness, civil rights and the recognition of women’s capacity for adult decision…and unfortunately, there aren’t enough of us to stop the fools from breaking down the wall to drag this artfully-disguised menace inside.

One Year Ago Today

“Where are the Victims?” examines the absurdity and injustice of the federal prosecution of a man whose business helped make escorts’ work safer.