Monday, October 31, 2016

The Witches Ride Tonight

One regrets not having been mentioned in Stacy Schiff’s riff about the men who have been saying that Hillary Clinton is a witch. After all, I have occasionally opined on the topic.

One also regrets that Schiff narrowcasts her definition of witchcraft by limiting herself to the Salem witch trials, thus, to the seventeenth century American version of the witch hunt.

Before we get to the meat of the matter of witchcraft, we note, with Schiff, that on occasion men have been accused of practicing the dark arts of witchcraft. And have been tracked down by witch hunters.

Yesterday, a professor at NYU was hunted down for his politically incorrect thoughts and suspended from his job because he was being uncivil. You can’t make this stuff up.

The New York Post reported:

An NYU professor crusading against political correctness and student coddling was booted from the classroom last week after his colleagues complained about his “incivility,” The Post has learned.

Liberal studies prof Michael Rectenwald, 57, said he was forced Wednesday to go on paid leave for the rest of the semester.

“They are actually pushing me out the door for having a different perspective,” the academic told The Post.

Rectenwald launched an undercover Twitter account called Deplorable NYU Prof on Sept. 12 to argue against campus trends like “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings” and other aspects of academia’s growing PC culture.

He chose to be anonymous, he explained in one of his first tweets, because he was afraid “the PC Gestapo would ruin me” if he put his name ­behind his conservative ideas on the famously liberal campus.

The story continues:

Two weeks ago he posted on his “anti-PC” feed a photo of a flyer put out by NYU resident advisers telling students how to avoid wearing potentially offensive Halloween costumes.

“The scariest thing about Halloween today is ... the liberal totalitarian costume surveillance,” he wrote.

“It’s an alarming curtailment of free expression to the point where you can’t even pretend to be something without authorities coming down on you in the universities,” Rectenwald told The Post.

But the Twitter feed soon sparked a “witch hunt” by the growing army of “social justice warriors,” he said. 

Considering that today is Halloween, it seem appropriate to offer an appalling example of the way professors and others are harassed, persecuted and deprived of their jobs because they have entertained incorrect thoughts. The term “witch hunt” seems perfectly appropriate.

I have often mentioned, but will mention again, that these horrors will continue until the alumni of these institution stop donating to schools like NYU. It has happened at the U. of Missouri. It can happen at NYU.

In the meantime, the real witch hunts began in Europe well before the Pilgrims touched down on Plymouth Rock. In the later years of the fifteenth century a couple of Dominican friars wrote the definitive inquisitor’s manual for identifying witches. It was called the Malleus Maleficarum or the Hammer of Evil. It counts as the first guide to sex therapy!

As I have had occasion to mention, and as Schiff does not seem to know, witches were often identified by the deleterious effect they had on male sexual function. When a man could not perform what the authors politely call the generative act or when his genitalia had completely disappeared, the inquisitors were told that such facts constituted evidence of witchcraft.

Certain voices have claimed that Hillary Clinton’s witchcraft will ruin the planet or will cause unspeakable horrors to descend on our blessed land. We can be more precise in our surmise by noting that Hillary and her BFF Huma Abedin have managed to contract marriages with men whose sexual function seems to be somewhat impaired. Keep in mind that Bill Clinton did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

Is Huma a witch also? Do she and Hillary concoct potions together? In any event, while Bill Clinton is usually thought of a common adulterer, he has also been accused of sexual crimes and misdemeanors. If he were a Republican he would long since have been drawn and quartered.

You know about Bill Clinton’s predations already, so I will not list them. Of course, Huma’s husband, Anthony Weiner, the one who turned his laptop over to the FBI and gave permission to search it, has developed his own special sexual habits, which now apparently involve sexting underage girls. Hmmm.

If a good inquisitor will find evidence of witchcraft in male sexual dysfunction, then one is within one’s rights to point out that the evidence points to Hillary and Huma.

One understands that the Puritans were considerably more prudish in their assessments, but we, having a more capacious understanding than Stacy Schiff, feel obliged to point out that witchcraft, in todays iconography, involves women who have a distinctly negative influence on male sexual function. Whether it was the cackle or the supposed ugliness, witches have for the most part been portrayed as less than attractive. Better yet, as decidedly unattractive.

Whereas women have often been said to have drooled over the prospect of servicing Bill Clinton, how many men will admit publicly to have fantasized about Hillary Clinton or Huma Abedin?

1 comment:

Sam L. said...

I don't care what the NYT says; I find them untrustworthy.