{"id":1572,"date":"2016-10-11T22:13:56","date_gmt":"2016-10-12T02:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1572"},"modified":"2016-10-11T22:13:56","modified_gmt":"2016-10-12T02:13:56","slug":"trump-tape-rise-fake-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2016\/10\/trump-tape-rise-fake-outrage.html","title":{"rendered":"The Trump Tape and the Rise of Fake Outrage"},"content":{"rendered":"

On October 7, Wikileaks released more hacked DNC emails<\/a>.\u00a0 The latter confirm what many Republicans, independents, and Democrats have long known: Hillary Clinton, who billionaires back 20-to-one over Donald Trump, is the Bankster\u2019s candidate, the candidate of Wall Street.<\/p>\n

Between 2013 and 2015, Clinton raked in $20 million for speeches<\/a> that she delivered to Goldman Sachs and other big banks.\u00a0 Clinton admits that she needs the support of the banks to get elected to office.\u00a0 She also acknowledges that she is a proponent of open borders<\/a> and precisely the sort of \u201cfree trade\u201d arrangements that many working-class Americans blame for the economic misfortunes that they\u2019ve suffered.<\/p>\n

The middle class, Clinton conceded, consists of people from whom she was \u201ckind of far removed.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Big Media is scandalously apologetic on Clinton\u2019s behalf, there\u2019s at least a slight possibility that we would\u2019ve been talking more about these revelations in the hours leading up to the second presidential debate had it not been for the leaked Trump audio from 2005.\u00a0 Here, in an exchange with Billy Bush of Entertainment Access, <\/em>Trump can be heard using crass language to describe the ease with which aspiring female celebrities permit celebrity men, like Trump, to have their way with them.<\/p>\n

It took me a few days, but I finally realized why we\u2019re all supposed to be outraged over this audio.<\/p>\n

I suppose it has everything to do with this oppressive, na\u00efve Christian morality of mine, but I expected that others would react in disgust as I did to hearing Trump nonchalantly boast about his adultery.\u00a0 <\/em>Trump, whose wife was two months pregnant with their son at the time, talked of his effort to \u201cf**k\u201d a woman who he (presumably) knew was married.\u00a0 As it turns out, though, I was wide of the mark.<\/p>\n

The unpardonable offense, that which sent Republican regimists running for the hills and the leftist press into dizzy spells, is Trump\u2019s\u2026language.<\/p>\n

Trump used such verboten terms as the \u201cf,\u201d \u201cb,\u201d and \u201cp\u201d-words while having a private conversation with a reporter for a television show that regularly covers\u2026.Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Granted, Trump sounded like a classless juvenile.\u00a0 However, that his critics in both parties should swoon and howl over his choice of terms while saying little to nothing about his adultery reveals at least as much about them as Trump\u2019s language tells us about him.\u00a0 The anti-Trumpists are like the Pharisees who Jesus excoriated for straining out the gnat while letting in the camel.<\/p>\n

Their hypocrisy runs still deeper.<\/p>\n

First, it is precisely those on the social Democrat left, Trump\u2019s most vocal enemies, who have been ridiculing and castigating the traditional sexual mores of the rest of us for decades.\u00a0 From the perspective of the self-styled agents of the sexual revolution, anyone who displays the slightest resistance to their agenda is guilty of everything ranging from priggery, religious bigotry, sexism, homophobia\u2014comprehensively, oppression.<\/p>\n

Now, <\/em>though, after spending the last half-of-a-century doing all that they have been able to do in coarsening the culture by hypersexualizing it, the New Libertines want for us to be repelled by Trump\u2019s obscene language.<\/p>\n

Second, the left\u2019s greatest heroes, whether it is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Bill Clinton, make Trump look like a choir boy by comparison.\u00a0 FDR and JFK were compulsive womanizers and serial adulterers while they were president. <\/em>\u00a0The same, of course, can be said of Bill Clinton.\u00a0 What distinguishes the latter, however, is that Clinton had multiple rape charges leveled against him, and in one instance, he paid his accuser hundreds of thousands of dollars<\/a> to settle out of court.<\/p>\n

MLK never ran for the presidency, but he is the closest thing to a secular saint that contemporary American culture has going for it.\u00a0 Yet King bedded countless women while he was married to his wife.\u00a0 His adultery was chronic.\u00a0 In fact, according to the autobiography of his closest friend and confidante, Ralph Abernathy, on the night before he was murdered, King had relations with no fewer than two women.\u00a0 When the one found out that King was with the other, a fight ensued and King struck her, knocking her across the room.<\/p>\n

Since, though, it is potty-talk that has our puritans besides themselves, they\u2019ll be inclined to view the sexual promiscuity and adultery on the part of their heroes as innocuous.\u00a0 King\u2019s remarks upon the sight of Jacqueline Kennedy kneeling with her children next to her husband\u2019s casket may be a little harder for them to take.\u00a0 FBI agents recorded King as saying to his friends: \u201cLook at her, sucking him off one last time<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is worth noting that during an interview with the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Jackie said of King that he \u201cis really a tricky person<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 She also asserted: \u201cI just can\u2019t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man\u2019s terrible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, none of this is intended to justify Trump\u2019s comments or (much less) his actions. Rather, it is intended to illuminate the hypocrisy and phoniness of his detractors.<\/p>\n

Third, it\u2019s awfully difficult for people generally, and heterosexual men specifically, to know respectable society\u2019s rules for gender-appropriate speech and conduct in 2016 America. The goal posts continually shift depending on ideological and political expediency. On the one hand, we\u2019re told that gender is a \u201csocial construct,\u201d that women are men are virtually interchangeable physically and mentally.\u00a0 This explains (I suppose) why feminists have decried expressions of chivalry as proof of \u201csexism.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, we\u2019re also assured that expressions, whether crude or otherwise<\/a>, of sexual desire on the part of men for women are equally manifestations of \u201csexism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Can anyone seriously doubt that if Trump was gay and had been overheard speaking crudely about a man <\/em>in whom he took an erotic interest that the very same folks acting outraged today would be castigating the judgmental for their \u201chomophobia?\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a morally juvenile generation indeed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On October 7, Wikileaks released more hacked DNC emails.\u00a0 The latter confirm what many Republicans, independents, and Democrats have long known: Hillary Clinton, who billionaires back 20-to-one over Donald Trump, is the Bankster\u2019s candidate, the candidate of Wall Street. Between 2013 and 2015, Clinton raked in $20 million for speeches that she delivered to Goldman…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Trump Tape and the Rise of Fake Outrage<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2016\/10\/trump-tape-rise-fake-outrage.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Trump Tape and the Rise of Fake Outrage\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On October 7, Wikileaks released more hacked DNC emails.\u00a0 The latter confirm what many Republicans, independents, and Democrats have long known: Hillary Clinton, who billionaires back 20-to-one over Donald Trump, is the Bankster\u2019s candidate, the candidate of Wall Street. 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