MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2025
Today, the backlash is hard to miss: Who the heck is Susan Faludi? We thought you'd never ask!
Long ago and far away, when grandmother was still a little girl, Faludi wrote and published a book which became a major best-seller.
The book was published on October 1, 1991. It debuted on the New York Times best-seller list on November 24 of that year.
Half a year later, in May 1992, it was still appearing on those weekly lists, often listed at #2 or #3 among best-selling non-fiction books. In short, it was a major best-selling book—and the lengthy volume's one-word name was accompanied by a challenging subtitle.
Backlash produced some negative commentary, but also a great deal which wasn't. The leading authority on the book offers this overview:
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women is a 1991 book by Susan Faludi, in which the author presents evidence demonstrating the existence of a media-driven "backlash" against the feminist advances of the 1970s in the United States.
Faludi argues that the backlash uses a strategy of "blaming the victim," which suggests that the women's liberation movement itself is the cause of many of the problems alleged to be plaguing American women in the late 1980s. She also argues that many of these problems are illusory, constructed by the media without reliable evidence.
Faludi also identifies backlash as an historical trend, recurring when women have made substantial gains in their efforts to obtain equal rights. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1991. A 15th anniversary edition was released in 2006.
And so on, at length, from there. The authority offers links to commentary about the book—to the commentary which was laudatory, but also to that which wasn't.
In late October of 1992, Faludi was interviewed by Brian Lamb for the C-Span program, Booknotes. Lamb asked about the book's commercial success—and Faludi tracked its origins to a previous well-known book:
LAMB (10/25/92): How many copies of this hardback version have you sold?
FALUDI: The last time I checked it, it was more than 200,000, but I haven't looked in a while.
LAMB: When you started the project, did you dream that it would sell 200,000?
FALUDI: No! I imagined it would sell as many copies as my mother bought. At the time when I was writing in the depths of the mid-'80s and late-'80s, people weren't talking about feminism except to say disparaging things about it.
[...]
FALUDI: My mother is a product of the feminine mystique era in a way. She was a journalist who gave up her career to marry and move to the suburbs and is someone who in another era would have been a professional journalist. In many respects the book has been formed by observing her experience and the experience of women of her generation who discovered the second wave of feminism.
LAMB: What is "the feminine mystique era?"
FALUDI: The '50s and early '60s. Really, I guess we'd have to date the discovery of the feminine mystique to 1963, when Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique was published. It was an experience that women in the suburbs had of waking up and wondering, "Well, I have every kitchen appliance known to man, but something very basic is missing in my life."
As Faludi noted, The Feminine Mystique was published in 1963, describing "the problem that has no name." Twenty-eight years later, Faludi was alleging that a widespread backlash had formed against the ideas about gender roles which had emerged in the wake of that book.
Backlash was a major book. Like Friedan's earlier book, it's rarely discussed today.
That said, how accurate were the various claims Faludi made in her book? We won't be trying to settle such questions this week.
That said, how big a splash did the volume make? It even penetrated one major Hollywood romcom, as Molly Fischer recalled at the start of this retrospective for The New Yorker.
Fischer's essay appeared in July 2022. This is the way it started, dual headline included:
THE REAL BACKLASH NEVER ENDED
Three decades later, Susan Faludi’s 1991 feminist classic still shows us how to read between the lines.
“It’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to find a husband over the age of forty,” a man tells Meg Ryan’s character, Annie, in the 1993 movie “Sleepless in Seattle.” He’s parroting a statistic that was, at the time, a favored object of media hand-wringing—the dramatic results of a 1986 study on marriage patterns that had exploded onto magazine covers, TV-news specials, and movie screens. Annie, however, knows better. “That statistic is not true!” she says. “There is practically a whole book about how that statistic is not true!” The book in question didn’t even need to be named: it was “Backlash,” by Susan Faludi.
Good grief! As of 1993, Backlash was even lurking in that very popular Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan film!
That was the start of Fischer's retrospective. As the headline on her piece said, she was arguing that the backlash against so-called "second wave feminism" has never actually stopped.
How accurate were Fischer's claims? We won't be attempting to make that assessment either! That said, there's little doubt that a serious pushback against certain tenets of feminism is quite visible, at the present time, within parts of the MAGA cosmos.
In some arenas, the extent of this pushback can seem almost hard to believe. This has generated remarkably little reporting, discussion or commentary from the Blue American world.
We refer, in part, to the remarkable news about the religious movement to which Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth belongs. (He has every right to do so.) Back in August, PBS reprinted this somewhat surprising report by the Associated Press:
What to know about the archconservative church Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attends
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he’s proud to be part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, an archconservative network of Christian congregations.
Hegseth recently made headlines when he shared a CNN video on social media about CREC, showing its pastors arguing women should not have the right to vote.
Pastor Doug Wilson, a CREC co-founder, leads Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, the network’s flagship location. Jovial and media-friendly, Wilson is no stranger to stirring controversy with his church’s hard-line theology and its embrace of patriarchy and Christian nationalism.
[...]
Hegseth, among President Donald Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks, attends Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship, a CREC member church in a suburb outside Nashville, Tennessee. His pastor, Brooks Potteiger, prayed at a service Hegseth hosted at the Pentagon.
CREC recently opened a new outpost in the nation’s capital, Christ Church DC, with Hegseth attending its first Sunday service.
The AP report goes on at some length about the views of Pastor Wilson. We'll stress the fact that a Pentagon spokesman has said that Hegseth does support the right of women to vote.
Still and all, the AP report includes this:
Wilson’s church and wider denomination practice complementarianism, the patriarchal idea that men and women have different God-given roles. Women within CREC churches cannot hold church leadership positions, and married women are to submit to their husbands.
Wilson told the AP he believes the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote “was a bad idea.” Still, he said his wife and daughters vote.
He would prefer the United States follow his church’s example, which allows heads of households to vote in church elections. Unmarried women qualify as voting members in his church.
“Ordinarily, the vote is cast by the head of the household, the husband and father, because we’re patriarchal and not egalitarian,” Wilson said. He added that repealing the 19th Amendment is not high on his list of priorities.
Like everyone else, Pastor Wilson has every right to formulate and state his views about the appropriate roles of men and women in civil society. He has every right to base such views on his reading of religious doctrine, if that is the case in this instance.
Still, when pushback extends all the way to the view that married women shouldn't be allowed to vote, the pushback is taking us well beyond what Betty Friedan was writing about in 1963. It's moving us back toward views about men and women which track to the dawn of time.
Did European literature really begin with Homer's famous poem of war, the Iliad? If so, then European literature began with a famous work in which all major events turn on the assumption that human society was built around the subjugation of women, including the sexual subjugation which forms the basis for the fury of Achilles and Agamemnon at the very start of the text.
Over the past (roughly) three thousand years, the western world has struggled toward a different set of understandings concerning such social relations. But in certain parts of the MAGA world, angry pushback against even the simplest kinds of "feminist" notions may occasionally seem to be visible at the present time.
Faludi used the term "backlash" as the title of her book. We're using a kinder and gentler term—the less abrasive term "pushback."
That said, the noxious pushback to which we refer can be seen on a nightly basis on the Fox News Channel. To our reckoning, the nightly presence of this strange behavior is startling—but so is the way our own Blue America seems to be unwilling to report or discuss that startling conduct.
We refer to the nightly trashing of women which occurs, on a nightly basis, on the Fox News Channel's Gutfeld! show. We also refer to the way major Blue American journalists seem to go out of their way to avoid reporting what happens on this show.
The conduct itself strikes us as remarkable. The Blue American silence may be even worse.
As the Gutfeld! show has gained popularity, profiles of the show, and of its host, have been appearing with some frequency in this calendar year. But over here in Blue America, we've yet to see a serious attempt at describing this program's nightly contents.
In last Friday's report, we showed you what the New York Times' Amanda Hess said she saw when she sat in the studio audience for a Gutfeld! taping last August.
To her somewhat limited credit, Hess didn't exactly seem to be pulling her punches. On the other hand, we'd have to say this:
The ugly reality of this program's backlash strikes us as substantially worse that what Hess described.
The apparent backlash on this "cable news" program strikes us as deeply depressing. Blue America's apparent inability to see this behavior for what it is seems more startling still.
Last week, we barely scratched the surface of Blue America's silence concerning this nightly pushback. If only for the sake of history, we'll offer more detail this week.
Tomorrow: Persistently left unsaid
Needless to say, the women's movement didn't start in 1963 with Betty Friedan nor did it end with Faludi's Backlash. Of course there has been pushback from the patriarchy, including fundamentalist religions of all stripes (Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalist Muslims, Mormons). Religion has been recruited to oppose change for women since the Victorian era when women were supposed to remain illiterate and run the household (if upper class) or work at menial jobs while raising kids (if lower and working class).
ReplyDeleteHow did the women's movement progress beyond Faludi? Emily's List ensured that more women entered politics. Progress was made through the EEOC and women's organizations to help women gain entry to professions and to break the glass ceiling of business management. Lawsuits continued to be brought against employers for sex discrimination. And the problem of domestic violence became more visible through TV and real life court cases. The lack of prosecution of rape cases was publicized. Then #MeToo, which Somerby claims is over and no longer of concern to anyone (except women).
At exactly the time Somerby claims the backlash was happening, people like Woody Allen and Louis C.K. were losing their career opportunities over mistreatment of women. Harvey Weinstein is being retried because he hurt a lot of aspiring actresses, and Harvey Epstein is a scandal today because of the women's movement.
Women have become a force in politics because they have reacted to the attack on women's issues by switching to Harris and Biden in large numbers, presenting a 20 point deficit for Trump and advantage to Democrats generally. This is part of the blue wave expected in the midterms because women vote differently than men and women are not going back to the bad old days that Faludi's mother experienced. And this is not just a middle class issue. Poor and working women, whose jobs are needed to keep their families afloat, recognize the need for higher wages and better job opportunities and they are now part of unions.
Somerby cannot unring this bell by pretending the backlash successfully wiped out all progress for women and now the Republicans are going to reinstate trad-wifery as the ideal. That cannot happen economically, moreso because of Trump's disasterous impact on our economy, and women are used to thinking of themselves as agents, not extensions of husbands or boyfriends.
Here are more current feminist authors:
bell hooks
Margaret Atwood (Handmaid's Tale)
Roxanne Gay
Alice Walker
Rebecca Traister
Kate Manne
Claudia Goldin (on how women's work has changed)
Kate Millett
Kimberle Crenshaw
Judith Butler
Among the classics, the most influential has been Simone de Beauvoir, followed by Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer.
Many men and women today automatically consider themselves feminists. They take for granted the progress made by the 2nd Wave of Feminism. This attack on choice, women's progress in the workplace, military and govt by firing women from high level positions, and the defunding of science, humanities and research grants, community organizations and education (fields where women work) are a shock. That is why women are considering leaving the USA. But women clawed our way to obtain the vote, obtain medical treatment, have legal standing and social ability to travel and control our own autonomy in the world, and we will do it again. Meanwhile, as long as our country remains a democracy women still have a voice.
If Epstein files bring down Trump that will be a women's victory because Epstein and Trump abused girls and women and ultimately neither we nor the men who support women's issues will tolerate such abuse. Trump needs to be removed from office. That should be Somerby's focus, not a lengthy obsolete essay that shows how out-of-touch he is with who women are these days (not in 1980).
Feminists are so boring.
DeleteAttacks on feminists are boring too.
DeleteSo Somerby should write a post on "If the Epstein files bring down Trump"? That post would be hinge on unadulterated speculation on what's in the files and would therefore be neither interesting nor informative.
DeleteThere is no speculation about the 20,000 documents released to the House Oversight Committee by the Epstein estate. These mention Trump over 1000 times and his name appears more often than anyone else's (except Epstein). There are emails that talk about Trump's misbehavior with underage girls and the closeness of his relationships with Epstein and his prior knowledge of Epstein's activities before that became public. In one, Epstein himself says that of course Trump knew about his sex ring because he told Ghislaine to stop [recruiting Mar a Lago pool girls].
DeleteI wouldn't call that "unadulterated speculation" unless you think readers here don't know what unadulterated means. Trump's efforts to suppress release of the unredacted complete Epstein Files by the FBI are already bringing him down as Republicans in Congress and Republican voters move away from Trump due to suspicion about what Trump himself fears about the file contents. Given this shift among Republicans, it is fair to consider what will happen in 2026 and whether the loss of support will make it possible to impeach and remove Trump at some point. Well worth discussing, in my opinion.
Glad you’re back, Bob.
ReplyDeleteSubjects like this invariably draw my mind to Christopher Hitchens. I remember clearly a segment where he was on a show with Behar and Wilson. It was Behar who slapped Wilson with a question any ten-year old would ask, and I paraphrase:
“You don’t believe in Noah’s Ark, do you, with all those animals?” To which Wilson replied, “Yes, because it’s in the Bible.” Yeesh.
This is a cool vid of Hitchens with Buckley and some guy named Tyrell Jr., in which he spoke eloquently on feminism and ‘the left’ in general. It’s lengthy, but worth a view. He easily destroyed Tyrell, and slapped Buckley around a bit too. Lengthy, but really worth a view.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKFGYmZjS4
Leroy
Somerby: Pay no mind and be quiet about all that Epstein nonsense (it is looking very bad for Trump and the Republicans).
DeleteGutfeld's fat jokes and misogyny label him clearly for what he is. He is not the target of the women's movement because he is a throwback speaking to an old, powerless audience. The real danger comes from the institutional changes Trump and DOGE made. These will be reversed when Blue voters gain the House, Senate (in 2026) and the presidency again in 2028. Meanwhile, men and women both are getting a good lesson in why their vote matters, how to evaluate candidate claims, and why the courts are a guardrail against fascism in our democracy. Somerby never talks in those terms, and today he seems motivated to pretend that we are in the backlash still and that feminism is no longer a force in society. All while pretending he knows something about feminism and cares about women -- neither of which is true.
ReplyDeleteSomerby misses the fundamental point that Faludi was against the backlash. Somerby ignores that Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg wrote her bestseller, Lean In, in 2013. He also misses the point that men have lost many of the backlash battles they have been fighting. For example, Sci Fi enthusiasts boycotted the Hugo awards when women started winning them, but women are still reading and writing books that win. Gamergate was an ugly battle to keep women out of game development jobs and playspaces, but men lost that one too. WNBA is thriving (and asking for higher pay) and women's flag football is gaining an audience, and women's tennis is still watched, as is women's soccer. Women are no longer considered bad mothers for using child care services (and children are not thought to be warped for life by the experience). Religious fundamentalists pushing trad-wifery are widely mocked outside the extreme right wing. Women are not going back to the past.
Sci-fi is stupid.
DeleteRelease the files.
ReplyDeleteSomerby claims to support women's rights (at least to not be called fat by TV comedians) but all of women's participation in the wider society (outside the home) rests on the ability to control reproduction. Women are limited to the home by their child-bearing and rearing, because so many men do not participate in raising children and because society does not accommodate pregnancy with policies that allow women to return to their jobs. Claudia Goldin (Nobel Prize winner in Economics) explains the connection between women's employment and birth control and child care services beyond the extended family. She brings the stats and connects the dots on the importance of abortion and birth control to women's fuller participation outside the home. She also connects women's work productivity to our nation's increases in GDP and economic prosperity since the Great Depression. If more men understood these realities they might not support the conservative attack on women's rights happening now.
ReplyDeletePete Hegseth's emphasis on manly identity is identical to Nazi propaganda and fascist beliefs and pushes the patriarchy. It appeals to disappointed men whose sense of entitlement tells them they should have more privilege, more access to compliant women, servants who wait on them, higher pay and greater respect (among other men too) and the right to do whatever they want without accountability (as Trump demonstrates). This is not good for anyone, including men. Older views of masculinity have emphasized duty, responsibility, loyalty, sacrifice for larger goals, dedication to family, which are the qualities needed to make the old traditional family work. The routine infidelity documented by the Kinsey Report showed the failure, and the ability of women to obtain divorces (in the early 1960s) as women fled violent, philandering, controlling and abusive men, revealed the unwillingness of men to adhere to values that might make traditional marriage work. (In the good old days, fathers and brothers and uncles and community members ensured that abusive husbands were set straight via beatings by other men.) Men are up to the job of being trad-husbands and they will quality find out that they don't want that job any more than women want to be constrained to forced servitude to men.
Typo correction: Men are NOT up to the job of being trad-husbands and they will eventually find out...
Delete"Last week, we barely scratched the surface of Blue America's silence concerning this nightly pushback."
ReplyDeleteHow can Somerby say that Blue America is silent on women's real issues (not Gutfeld's silly name-calling) when it is the only viable political party supporting women? Blues advance female candidates (even in the office of president), explicitly incorporate women's issues into their platform EVERY four years, suffer being called "woke" by supporting women's needs (as well as those of other minorities), include women as campaign managers and visible surrogates at all levels, and have pushed for the steady march of progress for women since the second-wave of feminism (the only one Somerby seems aware of). Democrats supported the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) while Republicans worked officially and energetically against it. Now, Blue America is the only party working to support women's health issues especially choice and birth control, which is the foundation of women's participation in work and other activities outside the home.
Somerby is lying today while he advances the right wing talking point that the backlash was successful and that it is time for women to return to home and hearth. As usual, he ends with a lie about Democrats (Blue America) because Democrats don't watch Gutfeld. Thus they do not support any women's issues, Somerby explicitly states (not even a hint today).
Women recognize and appreciate the extent of Blue support for their well-being. That is why Biden and Harris gained 20 points on Republicans even while Trump won with an increased male "bro vote" and a swing among minority men (black and Latino). Women vote more than men do and they know who best represents their interests. Blue America.
Somerby thinks that by being a pretend liberal on his blog and by complaining about Gutfeld's blatant whale jokes, he can convince readers that he is part of Blue America and concerned about women. This is the guy who displays his own misogyny regularly (supporting Roy Moore, calling Stormy a con artist, attacking youngish female journalists and Rachel Maddow, telling us Ketanji Brown Jackson was not sufficiently qualified to be a SC justice, complaining that Hillary and Kamala were misquoting pay gap stats from the Dept of Labor's own webpage because he doesn't understand about the inequalities affecting take-home pay, and of course never siding with women on actual women's issues, such as #MeToo, domestic violence, abortion rights and women's health care, closing the pay gap, banning of Toni Morrison books, Trump's abuses of women, and so on.
Somerby is a fraud when he pretends HE knows anything about and supports women's concerns. He didn't say a word when Admiral Linda Fagan was removed from her position leading the Coast Guard on the second day of Trump's current term. Or any of the other women ousted for being female. That is so much more important that Gutfeld telling fat jokes on Fox News -- who would expect anything less from them?
Republicans have a problem with women voters. Trump's heavy handed approach may play well with men, but it isn't going to fix the women's vote for him. Neither will this kind of insulting Somerby garbage. He couldn't even be bothered to look up current feminist thinking.
Apparently, he got new marching orders from his handler on Saturday and tried to do some remedial research but either didn't know where to start, or had to reach back to Faludi to find anything he could use to talk about rolling back women's progress. He stopped before he got to the good part -- the gains since Faludi's book. He perhaps wants readers to think that backlash is inevitable and women cannot hold the line, but we are proving at the polls that (1) Democrats support women, and (2) 2026 is going to be a landslide that will remove any doubt about whether the right wing's plans for a new Taliban can succeed with voters.
His handler is ready to give up. This is Bob’s last chance.
Delete12:36's long-winded reply is wrong right out of the gate:
Delete"How can Somerby say that Blue America is silent on women's real issues (not Gutfeld's silly name-calling)"
This initial question pretends that Your Gracious Host says something he plainly didn't. How can he say blue America is silent on women's real issues?
He doesn't! He doesn't say that at all! The initial premise of this tiresome tirade is completely invented.
Quaker, don't try to argue that Somerby was only talking about Gutfeld's insults when he said the backlash is continuing and there is silence about it. Somerby said this:
Delete"Backlash was a major book. Like Friedan's earlier book, it's rarely discussed today."
After arguing that Fischer said the backlish is continuing, then he said this:
"In some arenas, the extent of this pushback can seem almost hard to believe. This has generated remarkably little reporting, discussion or commentary from the Blue American world. "
Then Somerby said that male dominance goes back to the beginning of time, existed in Troy, and then he says this:
"Faludi used the term "backlash" as the title of her book. We're using a kinder and gentler term—the less abrasive term "pushback."
That said, the noxious pushback to which we refer can be seen on a nightly basis on the Fox News Channel. To our reckoning, the nightly presence of this strange behavior is startling—but so is the way our own Blue America seems to be unwilling to report or discuss that startling conduct."
You can pretend that Somerby is only discussing Gutfeld's fat jokes, but he has framed that in the context of Faludi's backlash and the current right wing "pushback" (why use a kinder gentler term?) which includes the gamut of sexist behavior, the patriarchy, which is the way Faludi and other feminists have always framed this. Somerby normalizes this by calling it bizarre behavior when the intent to belittle women who have public voices, especially liberal women, is clear.
And he does EXPLICITLY blame Blue America for ignoring misogyny, in the statements above where he says the backlash/pushback is being ignored and at the end where he says Gutfeld is being ignored.
I am correct to point out that Somerby doesn't know what he is talking about, is minimizing the so-called pushback, presents Gutfeld as the sum-total of pushback complaints (which mocks feminism in its triviality) and is lying about Blue America's support for women's issues.
I don't think you are reading what was on the page today in Somerby's essay and I think I am correct in my characterization of Somerby's complaint against Blue America -- that Somerby says it is ignoring the entire backlash not just Gutfeld's stupid jokes.
Gutfeld is not the problem and Blue America is right to ignore him. The problem is the patriarchy and sexism, and it is Somerby who ignores that, not Blue America.
If you think Blue America needs to put a plank its platform saying that fat-jokes against liberal women need to be prohibited, you are an idiot, but that is what it would mean to address Somerby's complaint if that is ALL he is complaining about in today's essay. Obviously, it isn't, but Somerby is not advocating for women today -- he is complaining again about Blue America, even though all of the quoted sources are examples of right wingers trying to bring back women's subordination in our society. When will he complaint about them and not Gutfeld's stupid jokes? Never, is my bet.
Again, I think you have led yourself astray by being too literal in your focus on Somerby's complain, which is different from place to place, focusing first on the lack of Blue focus on backlash and then later on Gutfeld more narrowly. That narrow focus is not going to help any women in our society, not even Behar (who doesn't care what Gutfeld says).
QiB, the mastectomy stuff was pre-prepared and written too for any remarks that Somerby or commenters might make about Kat Timpf and sexism.
DeleteOne of Somerby's pet theories is that fighting for rights results in a backlash that worsens societal conditions.
DeleteThis is patently false and Somerby never offers any credible evidence.
Somerby is a bit squeamish on democracy, he prefers a system of elites that hold a monopoly on information, since it is then easier to keep the masses compliant and easier to manufacture ignorance.
"You can pretend that Somerby is only discussing Gutfeld's fat jokes,"
DeleteI don't have to pretend anything. The very sentence you quoted references "this nightly pushback." It's not at all debatable what "nightly pushback" denotes as it follows five paragraphs discussing Gutfeld's show.
If there's "pretending" going on, we see where it's happening.
Yesterday, no one knew if Somerby was ever coming back to blog again. No one pre-wrote anything. But if they did, what is the crime? Cecelia keeps repeating this as if it made some point but it seems pretty irrelevant.
DeleteQuaker, I quoted the preceding statements that are about Faludi's backlash and the current Republican pushback. None of those is about Gutfeld. Yet Somerby says Blue America is ignoring all of that. That broadens Somerby's point to more than Gutfeld. If you are still insisting that Somerby only cares about Gutfeld because he worked his way around to him at the end, you are being dishonest and I am done talking to you.
Delete"Somerby never offers any credible evidence."
DeleteI think this is because Somerby never advances the theory you ascribe to him.
If Quaker is going to conclude that Somerby only cares about Gutfeld and insists that Blue America's refusal to concern itself with Gutfeld shows a lack of caring about women's issues, then it seems obvious that Somerby only cares about Gutfeld and doesn't care about women's issues either. But we already knew that from Somerby's long history of writing anti-women essays.
DeleteSomerby has several times directly attacked feminists with untrue statements, such as when he said that feminists never defended Hillary against Chris Matthews' misogynistic statements. Readers quoted some of the feminist pushback against Matthews and other gendered attacks on Hillary. Then there was the time that Somerby objected to Stormy Daniels being called a feminist hero. His reaction was to denigrate Stormy, calling her a con artist who was blackmailing Trump, a liar, and so on. Feminists supported her desire to overturn her NDA so that she could tell what happened with her and Trump, after Michael Cohen made the affair common knowledge (two years after Trump's election). I doubt whether feminists used the word hero, but it doesn't matter. Somerby didn't understand the issues then either and mocked feminists who supported Daniels.
Somerby is tone deaf and clueless about feminism. That's why focusing on a triviality like Gutfeld to pretend to care about women, while proclaiming the backlash a success because of current right wing atrocities doesn't work in the face of Somerby's ongoing refusal to support anything really important to women, from abortion to equal pay to prosecution of sex abusers and pedophiles.
If Somerby wrote today's essay on his own initiative, he has proven that he is in favor of the backlash/pushback and not women's well-being.
I think men are probably in favor of women's well-being as long as it doesn't interfere with their own privilege.
DeleteAnonymouse 3:38pm, no, it’s not a crime to prewrite your comments. If it was, you’d be awaiting the death penalty by now. Popping the mastectomy stuff out was wonderfully incongruent. Thanks. I’m sure Bob will revisit Greg and Kat soon, so save something.
DeleteQuaker, deal with the other quotes presented above please. Otherwise you don't get to keep saying that someone else got it wrong. They put up their evidence, you need to put up yours.
DeleteCecelia, you were the first and only one to mention trans. Transmen do get double mastectomies, so it was not odd that someone responding to you would talk about them too, in Kat Timpf's context, which was part of Somerby's essay. Trans people were not.
DeleteThe person who "popped out" the mastectomy stuff sounds like a cancer survivor who went through the process, not someone who wrote a comment just in case you brought up trans (as you did).
Women generally have a lot of sympathy for cancer survivors because it can affect any of us in our lives. We all have friends or relatives who have had cancer. Breast cancer is mostly a woman's problem, although some men can get it. It surprises me that a woman like yourself would not have more sympathy for Kat Timpf and for the commenter who explained her weak joke about breast size (in Somerby's quoted article). I read it because I am concerned about cancer and I feel empathy for women who have gone through that ordeal, even if Republicans on tasteless shows like Gutfeld's. Somerby though the article should have been harder on Gutfeld, even though it was mostly about Timpf and that kind of hostility would have been out of place in such a profile. As I said, Somerby is often tone deaf, but so are you Cecelia.
Cecelia is not obese.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:04pm, the anonymouse who “popped out the mastectomy stuff” is an anonymouse who had written it thinking that Bob would revisit Gutfeld! first thing the morning…and then couldn’t let it just sit there. It’s choice. It’s a classic anonymouse move. You can’t get better that.
DeleteCecelia is a big fat troll. Look what she wrote @5:35.
DeleteAnonymouse 5:51pm, regarding the mastectomy posts you made last night (you assumed that Bob would criticize Kat Timpf today)—did you keep the best ones for later, or did you use them all up today?
DeleteSomerby might have commented on the connection between the right wing's Mar a Lago "look" which both women and men are having plastic surgery to conform to, and the fat jokes that Gutfeld makes nightly. There appears to be a certain appearance that not only women but also men must acquire if they want to get ahead among Trump and his Nazi friends. For men it is a square jaw and strong chin and a muscular tight body with abs like a weightlifter.
ReplyDeleteNow Trump has instructed DHS not to issue visas to people who are fat. Obviously, Gutfeld is playing to Trump and his cronies with his own anti-fat routine. But has he lost any weight himself? Trump applies the same fat-less criteria to his own followers and the people he appoints to offices they are otherwise unqualified to hold. Are men prepared to accept that this weight-tyranny applies to them too? As a standard of manliness.
South Park does a good job of caricaturing that look. Odd that Somerby doesn't mention it, because it appeared first among the female on-screen talent on Fox Network.
Actually, it appeared first among Trump's wives and Ivanka. Then his office staff and Press Secretary.
DeleteLook at the before and after photos of Laura Loomer and tell me that's an improvement! The idea seems to be to exaggerate all of the sex-related body parts so that all women look like bimbos or hookers. Somerby has a prudish attitude toward women. How did he miss this phenomenon? Look at Kat Timpf joking about going bigger with her breast reconstruction after her surgery. That was very on-topic for Republicans.
What do feminists think about cosmetic surgery to make oneself more attractive to men via bigger breasts, plump lips and higher cheekbones?
DeleteFake boobs, lips, and cheekbones don’t make women attractive to me. But I’m just one man.
DeleteAll the more reason why the Republicans should not be specifying what constitutes an acceptable appearance for men or women.
DeleteLiberal women should stop getting into their cars and filming themselves having ranting, and wailing nervous breakdowns that they upload to X. Replete with numerous flipping off gestures, screeching, and turning the air blue. However, they rarely go raving mad wearing an t-shirt and jeans. Oh, no, they do their psycho emoting after getting made-up at a salon and dressing in something alluring (whether they can pull sexy off or not). Liberal women have filmed their psycho breakdowns from Trump ‘45, thru Biden, into Trump ‘47. Just stop, liberal women. Please grow the hell up. There are no cable news bigwigs or movie directors watching your cringey embarrassing shtick.
ReplyDeleteYou are spending way too much time on social media. How do you know these are liberal women? Are you saying this is a stereotype or just disparaging women youself, to show your support for Gutfeld? Influencers are also an easy target.
DeleteWomen aren't usually as annoyed by other women's behavior as men are. I've never heard a female friends go off on women like Cecelia just did. More evidence "she" is more likely to be male than female. Women tend to have more empathy for each other, but Cecelia may just be suffering from that conservative lack of empathy.
DeleteI don't see much difference between Cecelia's complaining about such women and whatever those women themselves were complaining about.
By the way, the word "screeching" is a gendered insult applied to women, because women tend to have higher pitched voices than men. Complaining about voice pitch is one way men use to silence women who might wish to participate in dialog. Referring to women as crazy is another. Cecelia says "psycho emoting," "raving mad," right out of the bro playbook. Men can be angry without having a "psycho breakdown."
This is a two-fer. Cecelia is being Republican and using male insults to suppress other women.
Anonymouse 1:28pm, if I didn’t understand how false anonymices are, I’d suspect that you’re a man. Women go off on other women all the time. You calling me a man is just one example of that.
DeleteThe idea that women are catty toward other women is part of negative male stereotyping of women. It is hard being female and the women I know are supportive of each other. Maybe it is just Republican women who go off on other women.
DeleteIt astonishes me that you would write a parody of supposed liberal women's tirades on X and post it in a thread about feminism. That has to be one of the most clueless flops I've seen here in ages.
You are a dishonest person. Go away.
Cecelia is a troll, a man pretending to be a woman.
DeleteCecelia is a bot. Her comments are products of AI.
DeleteBlue America supports DEI and women's employment and education are part of DEI. How then are Blues not supporting women's aspirations?
ReplyDeleteAnonymouse 1:53pm, so you’re arguing that they’re transwomen and then suggesting that I’m making Gutfeld jokes.
ReplyDeleteWhich comment are you addressing? I don't see anyone @1:53. Put your responses in the same thread with what you are commenting on. Or just go away.
DeleteI choose the latter for 50, Bob.
DeleteAs a man, perhaps Cecelia doesn't understand that when you have a double mastectomy, the breast reconstruction surgery is like that done for breast enlargement, with implants, so the cancer patient can specify the breast size wanted during her reconstruction surgery.
DeleteLosing one's breast to cancer does not make a person trans, whether she chooses to leave the breasts alone after the mastectomy or rebuild them surgically. There are bras with implants built in, so it is not necessary to rebuild the breast itself to have a more normal appearance under clothes. There are health reasons why someone might not reconstruct breasts, such as the inability to tell via mammograms whether the cancer has returned.
You have no empathy for anyone and are nearly as stupid as Trump, Cecelia. It is mean to suggest that if a women loses her breasts to cancer, she must then be a trans anything. We women would call her a survivor and admire her courage. As near as I can tell, both you and Gutfeld are awful people who I am privileged not to know.
No one has ever seen Cecelia and Bob in the same room. Come to think off it, Cecelia is the kind of female name Bob would adopt online.
DeleteAnonymouse 1:38pm, how ridiculous you are to say that men don’t understand breasts reconstructive surgery. You yabbering about breasts in that context is just one more indication that you know nothing about men or women. My charge is that young liberal women are massively unhappy, no matter the president, and starving for attention and you start yabbering about transmen and mastectomies. You’re Exhibit A for my point.
DeleteAnonymouse 1:54pm, no one seen anonymices launch into an argument that didn’t involve whining and accusations of sexism. Youre exhibit A and you’re also the role model for the vast anger and plaintiveness of liberal women.
DeleteAnonymices 1:57pm, you just turned a post about the wrath, angst, and self-indulgence of liberal women into a conversation about mastectomy and breast augmentation. As though that addresses anything about what’s going on their heads. Then you pull out empathy because the only use it has for you is of a spitball against people who don’t cherish your ever utterance.
DeleteCecelia @1:57, you are the one who accused someone else of calling some unspecificed person trans. No one in any of this discussion has talked about trans except you. That suggests you don't know that a double mastectomy is a cancer treatment, not just a way to obtain a flat chest.
DeleteYoung women ARE massively unhappy -- with Trump and his changes to our society. In fact, we are scared shitless. The discussion about where to move to usually also includes voices saying that we won't allow Trump to drive us out of our country, that we will fight to keep what we have gained as women.
Cecelia @2:02 Calling feminism "whining" shows that you are definitely not likely to be female. Yes, there are Republican women who identify with men and parrot their language about women, and you may be one, but that doesn't negate the statistical evidence that women who vote are not supporting Trump, nor are we giving up on America and our lives. We are fighting (as Kamala urged us to) and we are apparently winning, given recent election results and Trump's increasingly disastrous polling.
Men have always "owned" the emotion of anger. Anger, as an emotion, exists to motivate change. It is not a negative or bad thing for women to feel anger because women have plenty of things that need changing. When men call women (or black people or any minority) angry, then are trying to shame women back into their role of being pleasant, nice, cheerful and happy in their second-class citizenship. So it doesn't make me feel less determined when you call me angry (as if that should be shameful) or plaintive (when I want change). Young liberal women are not massively unhappy -- we are enjoying our freedoms and pursuing our goals in ways never possible in the 1980s or 2010s.
I consider your claim that young women are starved for attention to be a projection of your own personality onto a demographic group. YOU obviously seek attention by being here with nothing to say to anyone, yet always having to have the last word in any thread. That doesn't mean others are the same. But, as I said, I think you are a male troll and not female, thus you cannot be representative of any woman, not even Republican women.
Anonymouse 2:19pm, don’t tell women what they’re supposed to say if they are truly women. The reason you accuse me of posing as a man is because I’m not a liberal and you want to control the narrative as to women. I’m supposed to act as though women have it hard in this country and they don’t. They have people like you telling them that they do and telling them that men of any political persuasion are suspect. As a consequence they are angry, empty, and militant. Go look in a mirror.
DeleteI can certainly say what is likely if someone is truly female. You condemn yourself with your own words. Your statement about those women on X is horrifying and I cannot imagine a woman writing it. Up to and including negative female stereotypes, a total lack of empathy for women, and joining men in trying to suppress women's expression. You couldn't have done better if you were Trump writing it.
DeleteAs I took great pains to explain, being angry or militant is not a bad thing, not for men or for women. It shows dedication to a cause, self-sacrifice, and a willingness to put yourself out there for a cause you believe in. Many of us admire that.
How hard does a 10 year old girl have it when she is raped, impregnated, and has to travel to another state to obtain an abortion because her state has made them illegal? Tell me how easy her life is. What if her mama and daddy insist she marry her rapist ASAP? Should a girl's life be ruined at age 10?
Cecelia, you come across as self-satisfied. Does that mean that everyone else feels the same way about their lives and opportunities? You say women don't have it hard in this country, but women still have much less money than men at retirement, despite living longer. They get lower social security payments, as a group. Why? Because they were paid less and had fewer shots at high paying jobs when they were working (or get 1/2 a husband's payment as a housewife). Should they be satisfied about that? Tell me again how women have it great, just not old women, amirite?
Cecelia wants to trigger others, in part by being a man pretending to be a woman, yet he is the one getting triggered and upset to the point of incoherence. It is nearly a laugh.
DeleteAnonymouse 3:00pm and 3:24pm, here’s a list of some the nations that put some mandatory restrictions on abortion. As with having to travel to another state, none of these things are very convenient, but they are the law and women still manage to find the life, love, and womanhood to be a very wonderful thing.
DeleteCountries with mandatory counseling and/or waiting periods
Germany: Requires mandatory counseling and a three-day waiting period, although abortion is not punishable under certain conditions within the first 12 weeks.
Hungary: Requires mandatory counseling and mandatory listening to the fetal heartbeat.
Italy: Requires mandatory counseling.
Belgium: Requires mandatory counseling.
Albania: Requires mandatory counseling and a mandatory waiting period.
Portugal: Requires a mandatory waiting period.
Spain: Requires a mandatory waiting period, though a recent law removed this for 16 and 17-year-olds.
Ireland: Has a mandatory waiting period.
Slovakia: Requires mandatory counseling and a mandatory waiting period.
Latvia: Requires a mandatory waiting period.
Luxembourg: Requires a mandatory waiting period.
Lithuania: Requires mandatory counseling.
Switzerland: Requires a doctor to discuss the matter in detail with the woman.
Austria: Abortion is possible up to 10-14 weeks with varying degrees of procedural requirements.
Czech Republic: Abortion is possible up to 12 weeks with mandatory counseling and a three-day waiting period.
Greece: Abortion is possible up to 10-14 weeks with varying degrees of procedural requirements.
Estonia: Abortion is possible up to 12 weeks with varying degrees of procedural requirements.
France: Abortion is possible up to 12 weeks with mandatory counseling and a three-day waiting period.
Countries with highly restrictive laws
Malta: Abortion is illegal.
Poland: Abortion is illegal except to save a woman's life or health.
Andorra: Abortion is illegal.
Liechtenstein: Abortion is only allowed when a woman's life or health is at risk or the pregnancy is the result of sexual assault.
Monaco: Abortion is only allowed when a woman's life or health is at risk or involves a severe fetal anomaly.
The 10 year old girl in question was entirely forbidden from obtaining an abortion in her state. No one complained about "restrictions". This is your red herring, strawman. When a 10 year old is raped and cannot obtain an abortion even with doctor and parental consent, there is something wrong with how women are being treated. Her life is being made arbitrarily harder via obstructions that have no reason to exist.
DeleteYou did a lot of work cutting and pasting someone's table, to argue what? That life is easier for women in some other countries compared to Ohio? How is a 10 year old supposed to overcome what happened to her without major help circumventing her state's inappropriate laws? Are you suggesting that she is lucky to live close to another state with looser laws?
I said life was hard for women. Seems to me you are proving my point, but also saying it is harder in some other places. That doesn't make it "not hard" for those who are in need of things that women cannot get, cannot do, cannot earn, are punished for being, etc.
Again, you are demonstrating your famous lack of empathy by pooh-poohing the idea that women have hard lives in our society for unnecessary reason imposed primarily by men -- as state laws governing abortion are. It is as if you are saying that the 10 year old should suck it up because she could have been raped and forced to carry that child (with consequent medical risks) in Malta or Andorra. Way to show that life is good, Cecelia.
Anonymouse 4:16pm, many women and men have hard lives in our society. It’s you who is doing the all or nothing argument here. No, it wasn’t hard to cut and paste a table to address your insinuation that abortion is thought of as being similar to a pedicure everywhere else on the planet. YOUR all-or-nothing argument is that abortion must be available at all times in all circumstances, no matter the opinion of anyone else. Yes, a ten-year-who gets pregnant via rape (or consensual sex , it’s interesting that you must juice the scenario up as a rape) CAN go to another state. Although if her life is endangered that’s generally enough in the majority of states. Yes, many countries put some proscriptions on abortion. Let’s say that we made it a law that any girl under the age of fourteen could have an abortion the day it was discovered that she was pregnant. Would that be good enough? Now you won’t have to drag out the 10-year-old who was pregnant by rape. We’ll give you that one. Will it be enough for you?
DeleteNow you are making up things again, attributing things to commenters that were never said. If anyone needs an abortion, it is a raped 10 year old, for whom both medical and life-related reasons apply. What they do in other countries is irrelevant to the discussion and no one here trivialized abortion. I mentioned that 10 year old because it actually happened. I am not going to argue abortion with you except that it is a women's health issue that women should have some say about, and a feminist issue.
DeleteWhat if the ten year old not only consented to sex but initiated it? Suppose she seduces some geezer, and then doesn’t want an abortion?
DeleteAnonymouse 5;49pm, no you pulled out the ten-year-old rape victim who can’t get an abortion in her state as a counter to my suggestion that women have it very well in THIS country and don’t need to be filming themselves screaming in cars….
DeleteYou bemoaned the hardships of women.Why, who could blame them for screaming and cursing out America with one eye on the mirrored visor?!
Why little girls can’t get abortion in their states!
Don’t tell me I’m not attributing the right arguments to you.
Feminism is a tool of white supremacy.
ReplyDeleteFeminism isn’t screaming like a two-year-old while filming yourself in a car.
DeleteNo one said it was, except you. Go away now.
DeleteAnonymouse 2:20pm, the first thing you did was pull out breast cancer and then ridiculously go on to accuse men of not understanding what is involved in mastectomies. Then you accused me of being a man because if I was really a woman I’d understand women cursing and flipping off the world for any sort of engagement they could get on X.
DeleteKat Timpf had breast cancer. It is in the article Somerby himself described. Maybe you didn't read it, but it is there and I didn't introduce it.
DeleteAnonymouse 2:48pm, Kat Timpf had breast cancer and that supposed to make it understandable while young liberal women are filming themselves screaming and flipping off X in cars?
DeleteNo one talked about those women in cars except you. I think they are made up, a distraction from the actual topic. I think you are trying to steer the discourse away from women's actual lives. Go away now.
DeleteAnonymouse 3:01pm, raging women on X is a phenomenon that is significant. The false values of “influencers” on all social media platforms have affected the attitudes of women and men.
DeleteThere are no feminists on X ranting in their cars, that is actually of phenomenon of right wing women ranting about how others (mainly people of color) need to get a third or fourth job and stop complaining.
DeleteRepublicans are so disingenuous and out of touch.
Is Cecelia calling influencers liberal women? Aren't there male and female influencers of various political persuasions operating as influencers? Is she trying to say that liberals cannot be influencers because it violates some liberal creed? This has to be the stupidest argument against Blue America I've ever seen.
DeleteAnonymouse 3:27pm, you’re arguing that feminism is a blanket term for Democratic women. Women who are Democrats can be feminist to one degree or another.
DeleteThat is too. I did not conflate feminist and Blue voter or liberals. Somerby has been doing that. The Democratic Party does support feminist policies, although not all of them. It is the only party doing so. People often choose their party affiliation based on their agreement with what the party stands for. To that extent, there are more women and men in the Democratic party who support feminism than there are in the Republican Party which does not support women's issues expressed in feminist terms at all. They have their own version of what they think is good for women, and it bears little resemblance to feminism and would likely not attract feminists to become Republicans.
DeleteCorrection: word omitted -- too simplistic.
DeleteTo Cecelia, “liberal” is a generic insult.
DeleteAnonymouse 4:06pm, what does any of that have to do with the annonymouse’s attempt to challenge my description of the havoc caused by social media influencers, by suggesting influencers aren’t liberals?
DeleteNo one here was talking about influencers. It has nothing to do with any subject at hand. Labeling them all liberals is silly.
DeleteMy take is that influencers are doing a job, just like actresses in TV commercials or models or the people who give out samples of food at Costco. They shouldn't be confused with what people are like in real life. But why did you even bring them up?
Anonymouse 5:46pm, it’s interesting that no one here was talking about influencers… when I directly mentioned influencers…and the anonymouse responded by suggesting that influencers aren’t liberals…and now you’re talking about influencers even while chiding me for bringing them up…
DeleteYou brought up influencers in a conversation that had nothing to do with them. This is just distraction. Go away now.
Deletehttps://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/40-of-young-women-want-to-leave-us-permanently-poll/ar-AA1QxKNv
ReplyDelete40% of women aged 15-44 want to leave the United States permanently.
If they are replaced by hot Asian chicks, then the US will truly, unequivocally become the best country of Earth.
Iceland requires that 50% of its legislature be female. Ireland just elected a female president again. Everywhere we look, these advanced democracies are treating women better than the USA. Younger women are more educated and perhaps understand this more clearly than older women.
DeleteAnonymouse 2:23pm, then these young liberal women should get off X.
DeleteA country that requires that 50% of its legislature be female is not a democracy. In a democracy, representative democracy, people can elect whoever they want.
DeleteMen are assholes and Democracies need hard rules to keep them in check. Otherwise idiocracy. Look at the Trump admin Ex. A.
DeleteReserving half the seats for female candidates is not saying that people cannot elect whoever they want. It is the same system of democracy as occurred before men allowed women to vote in the USA (up to 1919). And even after that there were not many women on the ballot, much less elected until after the feminist movement encouraged women to run for office (by identifying, training, and providing funding to female candidates).
DeleteAnonymouse 2:50pm, if you were really a woman, you’d know that women keep men in check.
DeleteReserving half the seats for female candidates IS saying that people cannot elect whoever they want.
DeleteIt's exactly what it's saying.
It isn't my job as a woman to keep men in check. It is men's job to keep themselves in check.
DeleteBallots in Iceland do not have names of candidates printed on them. Voters write or stamp the names of the candidates they are voting for.
Delete"Iceland ensures a high number of female elected officials through the use of a voluntary party-based quota system, which requires parties to alternate the genders of candidates on their candidate lists (known as a "zipper system"). While the country has made significant progress, achieving 48% female representation in parliament at times, it has not achieved gender parity of 50% in every election. Other contributing factors to high female representation include the historical influence of feminist movements, a culture of prioritizing gender equality, and a commitment to policies that support women's participation in public life. "
DeleteSo, you were lying when you wrote "Iceland requires that 50% of its legislature be female". Okay then.
No, I am explaining that they have established that as a goal, have a mechanism for achieving it, and are close to parity.
DeleteIs your point that we cannot remain a democracy while trying to give women equal participation in political life? That is fatuous and has been said since women first started asking for our fair share. We get it that you are on the wrong side of this issue. We were a democracy back when black men could not vote either. No one has said otherwise.
Anonymouse 3:02pm, it’s not a job, or a mission, it’s a gender dynamic.
DeleteCecelia, you have lost track that we were discussing Iceland's legislature. It is the law in Iceland that there be parity between men and women in governing the country. That is the "mission" and it is not a gender dynamic (because gender and sex are not the same thing) but a goal for how the people of Iceland want to run their country.
DeleteOh, sorry, you were referring to the crack about women keeping men in check. No, that is not a gender dynamic. It is what some religions teach women is their function. Under the law, individuals are responsible for their own behavior and not that of others. Feminists do not believe that women are responsible for men's behavior.
DeleteThis is the old idea that if a man cheats on his spouse, it is because she wasn't enough of a woman to keep him at home. If he attacks a woman, it is because of how she was dressed, or where she went, or how she behaved (how much she had to drink, Somerby says). If a man steals, it is because she wasn't frugal enough to save money for the household or she demanded too many nice things and pressured him into stealing, or she expected him to be richer than he knew how to be, or she picked the wrong man, or she didn't know how to inspire him to be more honest. Etc. Etc. Etc. This is, of course, nonsense.
Anonymouse 5:43pm, women civilize men, but that dynamic does not suggest that they are inadequate because their husband plays around. That scenario says more about the nature of men than it does about women.
DeleteWomen do not civilize men. Fathers and mothers both civilize children of both sexes. Society further civilizes men and women. Culture is transmitted via family and institutions like school, church, workplace. It is not men's "nature" if they break rules or laws but poor socialization and inadequate social controls. Blaming women for men's behavior is little different than blaming men's nature (boys will be boys) for their behavior. Both allow men to place blame for misbehavior on someone else. Men are responsible for their own behavior, just as women are responsible for theirs. The dynamic of blaming women comes from the idea that women are in charge of the home and raise the children without much male participation. It doesn't work like that any more. How do we know this? Through social science research that tells us not only how things happen but what works and what doesn't.
DeleteWhey did Trump publicly urge House Republicans to support a measure that would compel the Justice Department to release the Epstein files? Perhaps he knows that the measure will pass anyhow and he's trying to get ahead of the news. Regardless of Trump's reason, it seems that the House will surely vote to release all these documents.
ReplyDeleteIt was my understanding that one of the holdups is a judicial ruling. So, I am not sure that all the documents will be released at this time.
Why doesn't Trump just order the files' release? He doesn't need authority from Congress.
DeleteI guess he's trying to make it seem like his hands were tied all along, as if he never had authority over the files.
So to sum up: Trump has authority to murder people in the Caribbean, but not to order his own DOJ to release the files of a defunct case.
That's a great question Hector. As I said, I think there may be some sort of judicial decision holding up the document release. But, I'm not sure.
DeletePam is investigating Democrats. She’ll refuse to release the files. It’s all a charade.
DeleteDavid, there is no constraint on Trump releasing the files. He can declassify them in his mind.
DeleteTrump can veto any bill requiring the release of the files. There is no danger to him in anything Congress might pass. The public needs to demand the release and make it clear they will punish Republicans for not doing so.
DeleteThe Case Against Comey: Trump DOJ Continues to Shine
ReplyDelete“The Court recognizes that the relief sought by the defense is rarely granted,” Fitzpatrick said. “However, the record points to a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding.”