Writing in the National Review, Kyle Smith describes the creepy behavior of former Vice President Joe Biden toward women, and why the media usually ignored it in the past:
Joe Biden is a creepy old goat…There is much photographic evidence of him crossing the line with women….But the Democratic party’s public-relations arm, a.k.a. the mainstream media, has never before had any incentive to hold Biden up to scrutiny. Why bother? When he became veep, any attack on Biden risked looking like casting aspersions on the man who made him his number two, and the media could not countenance any naysaying about the judgment of the Precious.
But now that Biden is no longer Vice President, the media has less reason to ignore his misbehavior. So major newspapers are finally reporting on evidence that Biden inappropriately touches and kisses women without their consent. As Smith notes, the focal point is “a devastating first-person account of what it’s like to be a woman and have Creepy Joe sneak up behind you.”
Lucy Flores was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor of Nevada when she had the misfortune to cross paths with Biden. In New York Magazine, she describes Biden’s actions:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual f***? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me.
Biden has not taken any responsibility for his actions towards Flores, claiming he “does not recall” them. But he has sought to collectively blame white men as a group for the abuse of women. As David Harsanyi noted at The Federalist:
Joe Biden declared this week that the United States had a centuries-old embedded cultural problem with permissive violence against women. “It’s an English jurisprudential culture,” Biden explained this week, “a white man’s culture. It’s got to change.”
This “English jurisprudential culture” Biden attacked is Anglo-American common law, which always gave women more rights than they had in most non-Western cultures. For example, in traditional Chinese culture, misogyny was rampant: A significant fraction of female infants were killed at birth, and girls were subjected to the painful and crippling process of foot-binding. These practices were forbidden under Anglo-American common law. Indeed, they were forbidden even in Medieval Europe. Yet they persisted in China well into modern times.
It was bizarre for Biden to single out “white” culture as the source of women’s problems. The status of women is much worse in many non-white countries than it is in the United States or Europe. As the African-American economist Walter Williams points out, “forcible female genital mutilation” is “practiced in nearly 30 sub-Saharan African and Middle Eastern countries.” Worse, “Slavery is currently practiced in Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan.”
There is no evidence that non-white cultures treat women better than white cultures do. In the African country of Mauritania, domestic violence is condoned more among black African ethnic groups than among its partly white ethnic group, according to a 2018 Reuters article. That article says that wife-beating is frequently “a source of pride” among members of the black African Fulani and Soninké ethnic groups, but is “frowned upon” by members of the Moor ethnic group, which has some white (Berber or Arab) ancestry.
Reuters quoted a Fulani woman saying, “A Fulani woman always takes pride in being beaten by her husband.” And it quoted a Soninke woman saying she “felt like an animal that had to be disciplined,” and that her husband beat her because “of his love for me.” The Soninke woman recounted her own mother’s approval of domestic violence. Her mother told her: “You’re the daughter of a woman whose husband broke her hands. Your grandmother’s legs were fractured by her husband. You must be loved” if you are being beaten. That mindset is fundamentally at odds with “English” culture, and American cultural norms as well.
