Salon writer Amanda Marcotte has always, always! been insistent on women’s rights, a frequent writer — and jumper-to-conclusion — concerning sexual assault, and a proponent of the so-called “slut walks,” in which women demonstrate concerning their right to wear whatever they wish or act as they please and not be looked down upon or seen as “asking for” rape.

Thus, when Henriette Reker, the Mayor of Cologne, in response to multiple sexual assaults in her city on New Year’s Eve, said that women needed to have a “code of conduct” to lessen their risk of being assaulted, I anticipated an indignant response from Miss Marcotte, claiming that the mayor was, at least in part, blaming the victims of those sexual assaults. Yet, when I checked Miss Marcotte’s author page on Salon,¹ while I found fifteen articles by her since New Year’s Day, including one talking about “blaming the victim” concerning a completely unrelated topic, one telling us the difference between the sexual assault accusations against Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby, which, to no one’s surprise, is meant to defend Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and one condemning Republicans for concerns over Islamic terrorism, when it comes to Mayor Reker’s statements, or to the sexual assaults by men of “Northern African or Arab” appearance,² who were speaking “a foreign language,”³ not one word do we hear from Miss Marcotte. I checked her twitter feed as well,⁴ and again, not one word did I see, searching back until New Year’s Day, concerning those sexual assaults or Mayor Reker’s response to them.

Of course, Miss Marcotte’s decision to ignore a story about topics on which she so frequently writes is hardly something rare for the left; Feministing’s front page⁵ indicates two stories on rape so far this year, but neither of them concerned the Cologne assaults. ThinkProgress’ front page⁶ has one story about a rape in high school, and another titled Migrants In Europe Are Getting Stereotyped As Dangerous Criminals, but only to tell us that the sexual assaults in Germany shouldn’t be more widely attributed to Middle Eastern immigrants in general, despite the fact that it was such a big story that the nation’s leader addressed it. Even The New York Times didn’t report on the story until four days later, after German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke about it. Once the Chancellor spoke on the subject, the professional media had to take notice; prior to that, the story was reported — at least as far as I could see on the internet — solely by conservative blogs. The left didn’t want to touch the story, because reporting the details accurately might call into question the European — and President Obama’s as well — policy of taking in so many Arab refugees. Just because some cultures, in this case Islamic cultures, happen to allow things that any Western civilized society abhors doesn’t mean that we should let that stand in the way of being good multiculturalists!

Allow me to be brutally honest here: despite anything that Miss Marcotte or Jessica Valenti or any of the other feminist writers would say, feminism has been completely subsumed by leftism in general, and is, and always must be, held subordinate to the wider goals of leftism. Thus, when a story which ought to provoke widespread feminist anger runs contrary to the wider meme of the left in general, that anticipated widespread feminist ire has to be tamped down, kept in check, and silenced. Had the King of the Left, whomever that might be, simply patted Miss Marcotte on her pretty little head and told her to just keep her mouth shut on this story, he could have silenced her no more effectively than she silenced herself. Miss Marcotte apparently knows her place.
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Cross-posted on The First Street Journal.
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¹ – Accessed at 6:51 PM EST on Sunday, January 10, 2016.
² – Twenty-two of the men sought for these crimes are asylum-seekers.
³ – Meaning: not German.
⁴ – Something which required me to log off of Twitter, since Miss Marcotte has blocked me from seeing her tweets; I cannot begin to tell you just how much this upsets me!
⁵ – Accessed at 8:08 PM EST on Sunday, January 10, 2016.
⁶ – Accessed at 8:15 PM EST on Sunday, January 10, 2016.