Peggy Noonan did pundits everywhere a colossal favor in her July 4 weekend Wall Street Journal column: made it safe again to talk about things women do because they are women.
To wit: “Only a woman would have done what Cassidy Hutchinson did because only a woman, in a place of such power and prestige, would have registered everything and taken such close notes instead of spending that time swanning around being important.”
Put aside for a moment that, per the Washington Post, Ms. Hutchinson’s White House job was pretty much exactly to take notes. And that she nonetheless, apparently, did do so much “swanning around” that “(s)ome derisively called her ‘Chief Cassidy’” and felt “she had inordinate power.”
Ms. Noonan gushes, “By being there this week, she showed a lot more guts than the men of that White House.”
Indeed. If you think “guts” means seeing those men and their allies denounced as “corrupt” in prime-time hearings; harassed with subpoenas; having property illegally confiscated; rousted outside in underwear in a “Stasi-like” raid; and clapped in cuffs on a flight. And then turning tail to tattle on the bosses who offered such “power and prestige,” and thereby win mainstream media plaudits and warm hugs from Liz Cheney.
Ms. Noonan also jumped into the pointless discussion of whether Ms. Hutchinson engaged in “hearsay.” Pointless because committee hearings aren’t legal proceedings, and her testimony revealed no illegal actions by Donald Trump.
What Ms. Hutchinson actually engaged in was unadulterated gossip, which, yes, is traditionally associated with women. And defined as “casual or unconstrained conversation … about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true,” or “idle talk … about the personal or private affairs of others.” A no-no in polite society, but especially in powerful positions of trust.
Which doesn’t stop Ms. Noonan, inveterate anti-Trumpers, and the Jan. 6 panel from concluding that such unconstrained, unconfirmed and idle talk “made criminal charges against the former president more likely.”
By all means. Let’s criminalize politicians’ temper tantrums. (Amy Klochuchar and Hillary Clinton, call your lawyers.)
Elevating Gossip Girl into a heroine – and dishing dirt into criminal evidence – speaks volumes about the feminization of our politics and culture: systematically strengthening females as erstwhile male leaders transition into, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once pegged them, “girlie men.” A term perfectly describing the House Select Committee’s two most prominent figures after Ms. Cheney, prissy fussbudget Adam Schiff and teary-eyed Adam Kinzinger.
Or if you prefer, political “pajama boys” such as Justin Trudeau, Eric Swalwell, Gavin Newsom and Jon Osoff. Not to mention “metrosexual” Barack Obama, variously spotted working out with women’s dumbbells and throwing out a first pitch like, well, a girl.
“Girlie power” – empowering women, emasculating men – lurks not just behind the Jan. 6 inquisition but every extant progressive notion. “Toxic masculinity” rendering manhood itself anti-social. The “risk-free” lockdown response to COVID, commanding childlike dependence on and obedience to the Nanny State. Terminating well-paying, male-dominated fossil-fuel jobs. The Black Lives Matter movement, founded by three women whose platform includes breaking up traditional families to empower single mothers. “Soft power” approaches to immigration and foreign policy. And the “Pride” crusade, literally mutilating both males and females into “girlie men,” from opposite directions.
But to keep it all going, the you-go girls and girlie men must neuter the anti-politician who embodies toxic masculinity and refused to bend to COVID lockdowners, Green New-Dealers, BLM rioters and shakedown artists, “America Last”-surrenderists, and the transgender agenda.
It’s no coincidence that their champion to bring down The Donald represents the cohort of entitled, 20-something Gen Z females calling the shots these day. Even the New York Times reports that in Corporate America – where women captured the commanding heights of HR, Legal, Marketing and Communications, then opened the Pandora’s Box of woke ESG and “stakeholder capitalism” – “the 37-year-olds are afraid of the 23-year-olds who work for them.”
Intercept, relating the same destructive force across progressive non-profits, is more explicit: “We’re dealing with a workforce that’s becoming younger, more female, more people of color, more politically woke … and less loyal.” (emphasis added)
The ironic result: “(T)he progressive advocacy space across the board … has, more or less, effectively ceased to function” with leftist organizations “locked in virtual retreats, Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.”
Ah, the “patriarchy.” Those privileged but inferior males who only won America’s independence; freed slaves; defeated imperialism, fascism and communism (until the all-female “Squad” reawakened the discredited doctrine of socialism); landed a man on the moon; invented just about everything worthwhile; and instilled the quintessential American work ethic. All without a Chief Diversity Officer in sight.
But move aside, boys, says Ms. Noonan, for Chief Cassidy and her crowd of “gutsy” Brutus-ettes and organizational havoc-wreakers. You’ve lost your nerve.
Or, just maybe, your megaphone. It’s no slight against the highly professional women with whom this correspondent has worked to suggest that it’s time to win it back. And continuing, unlike Ms. Hutchinson, to keep standing tall against the “girlie-powered” Jan. 6 Select Committee is as good a place to start as any.
Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.
But, but, but …. Honor where honor is due, what about all those sandwiches that were made. And all that baloney that was sliced?
This is an aside, but what happened to Ms. Noonan? She has evolved from someone who in 2008 could mock Barack Obama for his pretensions in comparing himself favorably against Lincoln (or maybe comparing Lincoln favorably to Barack Obama), to someone now thoroughly in the pretend class herself. Weird.
After 23 years in industry I entered the world of education which is very woman-dominated. While I had a couple of great woman bosses, overall I am not too impressed with women run organizations. They exhibit all the dysfunction of men dominated organizations, but in slightly altered, perhaps cloaked is a better word, form. One ugly characteristic I noted was how they sabotaged men first, then women to make room for themselves on the escalator of professional advancement. Women inside the group treat women outside the group horribly.
The sellouts of the Bushies reveal they had no true principles beyond promoting their own clan – the UniParty. The Obama bashing was controlled opposition. The jabs and ankle-biting OP-eds and articles are accepted as necessary evils when behind the scenes it’s all fist bombs and hugs.
Women are typically good at managing children. Few men far fewer women are capable leaders with critical thinking and decision making skills. Our social and government breakdown clearly shows this.
It is really brave the throw your former boss under the bus because he didn’t give you a new job, and now other mean girls are making sure you can find another one in DC? Or is that petty middle school chick behavior?
Girls today go to college and learn that they are superior. Shortly after college the learn they are inept. From there on it is simply about destruction.
Forget ” gender” there are 2 sexes, 2 forms of sexism, masculinism and feminism. One is a vice the other a virtue, that is the core of the issue.
One is a vice the other a virtue…
Pithy. I like it.
Seems a lifetime ago when Noonan’s articles were not pro-democrat. What a sickening crotchety old sellout she became.