 Look at that, I'm at 40 here. So it's about time that we speak about the heat that dare not speak its name, right? The great hatred that has gone down through history and has never talked about, right? It's the great hatred of anti- Gentilism. Like, why is it AOK to just assign all sorts of disparaging traits to non-Jews? I think we'd all agree it's very bad, it's very naughty to argue that Jews possess all sorts of negative traits, right? We wouldn't want to engage in that kind of hatred, that there's just something essentially negative about Jews, right? We wouldn't want to promote that sort of gratuitous hatred. But why is it OK to promote needless hatred of non-Jews? Every group, every strongly identifying in group tends to have suspicions and concerns and fears about our groups. That's true for Christians and for Muslims and for Jews and for the English and for Australians and for Russians, right? So it's not surprising to me that people and strongly identifying in groups have negative feelings about our groups. But why isn't it ever caught out with regard to non-Jews? We have this phrase about anti-Semitism, right? The great perils of anti-Semitism. Why don't we ever talk about the perils of anti- Gentilism? Because proportionally, in my life experience, there are proportionally as many Jews who have fears, concerns, worries and negative feelings about non-Jews as there are non-Jews who have negative feelings about Jews. So those who have negative feelings about Jews, they get a special name. It's called anti-Semitism. But why isn't there a special name for people who have like knee-jerk negative feelings about non-Jews? Why isn't anti- Gentilism even a thing? So I was just thinking about this after reading a terrific essay in Quillatt Magazine by Charlotte Allen about Blake Bailey, the biographer of Philip Roth, and Charlotte Allen, who's not Jewish. She has a PhD in medieval studies. She's Roman Catholic, I believe. She writes, Gentiles were among Philip Roth's lifelong fixations as antagonists. So Philip Roth got into a lot of trouble for not providing like more rounded portrayals of women. Anti- Gentilism probably isn't a thing for the same reason that blacks can't be racist, says Gleb Madly. So Philip Roth has gotten into a lot of trouble for his portrayal of women. And Blake Bailey has gotten into a lot of trouble for his portrayal of women. And Philip and Blake have both gotten into trouble for diddling all sorts of women who are almost always of age legally speaking. But why did Philip Roth's portrayal of non-Jews get no pushback? Like where is the equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League for non-Jews? Like why is it open season on the go-yam? That's all I'm asking. Why is it open season on the go-yam? Why is that OK? Why is it OK to just intrinsically in a knee-joke fashion hate and despise non-Jews to hate and despise white Christians of European origins? Why is that OK? Why is there no pushback against that? Why is there no group that rallies to their defense? Like why isn't even a thing? Why isn't it even a category? Why doesn't it get talked about? Why is this hatred OK? So I enjoy Philip Roth novels and I've never been much of a literary critic, right? I just don't know how to write literary analysis. But I find I find something here by Charlotte Allen that kind of embodies what was inchoate in me with regard to Philip Roth. So I often found Philip Roth entertaining, interesting and lightning. He occasionally had a wonderful turn of phrase. But most of his books were mediocre, right? Philip Roth was not a great novelist. He was at times a good novelist. And at times he was hilarious, such as with Portnoy's complaint. But he was not a great novelist. So why was Philip Roth pushed on us as this great novelist deserving of the Nobel Prize in literature? Well, because people with an agenda wanted to push this guy forward because his concerns reflected their concerns. And Philip Roth's main concerns were anti-Semitism, real and imagined, and having as much access to bang non-Jewish women as possible. Right? And that reflects many other people in power who have a great concern about bigotry against Jews, against blacks, against homosexuals. So the worldview of Philip Roth matched the worldview of those who occupy the high ground in American culture. And also many of those who occupy the high ground in American culture, they want to bang as many checks as possible, particularly in the mouth. So they shared this oral fixation with Philip Roth and that therefore transformed Philip Roth mediocre to good novelist into a great novelist deserving of the Pulitzer Prize. But why is this ethnic angle completely ignored? So Gentiles wrote a Philip Roth lifelong fixation, right? Their comely young women, he wanted to eff them in the mouth. But non-Jews, as a category, were, generally speaking, Philip Roth's antagonists. The medley notes Philip Roth's contempt for white Gentiles is what makes him a Jewish novelist, despite his protestation, that he was not a Jewish writer. So Philip Roth was always saying, I'm not a Jewish writer. So what people say about themselves may or may not be accurate. There is no correlation between what people say about themselves and what is true. So which of the leading Jewish writers have displayed the most empathy for non-Jews? Which of the leading Jewish intellectuals, writers and novelists have been the least likely to succumb to anti-Gentilism? Was Luke's desire to dominate and degrade women among the reasons for his conversion? God forbid, God forbid. But yeah, I certainly have had a lifelong desire to dominate and at times degrade women. I plead guilty. I've got a little bit of a problem with women. For whatever reason, I've had this kind of fear, loathing and desire to dominate women in large part because in real life, that wasn't happening. So it started to take over my fantasy life as a compensation for my weak need performance in real life. And I think I've gotten some recovery from this fixation through 12-step programs. Yeah, the Anti-Defamation League certainly seems to dislike white Gentiles. But Philip Roth gets a lot of attention for his portrayal of women, but zero attention for his portrayal of the Goyim. And generally speaking, when Jews say the Goyim, they mean whites. They have different words for Asians, right? Asians are the Chinese or the Japanese and then there are blacks and there are Latinos. But generally speaking, when Jews say the Goyim, they mean people of European origins. And it's not inherently a pejorative term. So Philip Roth was always on the alert for anti-Semitism, both real and imagined. Like he even classified his ex-wife Claire Bloom herself Jewish as an anti-Semite. He was fine for Philip Roth to criticise, critique and poke fun of his fellow Jews, but it was not okay for Claire Bloom to do that. So Philip Roth attends Bucknell University. It's a private Christian college. And at this private Christian college, students in the 1950s are required to attend its weekly Christian chapel. So if Philip Roth finds this so obnoxious, why does he go there, right? You're going to a private Christian college. You're seeking out a private Christian college and then you hate it for being a private Christian college. So the question in the chat, how is the anti-deformation league so powerful? Well, that should be studied. Like what makes them so effective, right? A lot of high IQ people who know how to fundraise and who know how to apply pressure to the levers of power. So how come the anti-deformation league is so effective, so powerful? Why not study it to see what can be learned rather than just studying to put it down? But we can all learn from the competency of the anti-deformation league in applying pressure to those who wield power. So in Philip Roth's fiction, Gentiles are usually a curious mix of alcoholics, layabouts, thugs, wife beaters, nymphomaniacs, gentile underachievers, and nascent Nazis. So he calls it Goish chaos. So the idea is powerful, but unpopular, my guess is lots and lots of money. Yeah, but you can have lots and lots of money, but usually it requires some sequel, some wisdom to extract that money. And then you can have lots of money and not be particularly effective at using that money to taking that money and transforming the money into power. So there's nothing that you know about someone when you recognize that he's a non-Jew, right? There's no inherent essential traits to a non-Jew. Now, in a certain time and place, so you wanna name a particular village in 17th century Poland, we could probably tell you something about non-Jewish life and the type of people who are the non-Jews in that particular village in Poland in the 17th century. But in general, knowing someone is a non-Jew doesn't tell you anything about them. Doesn't tell you whether they're more or less likely to be alcoholic. Doesn't tell you whether they're more or less likely to be affluent, whether they're more or less likely to be low abiding, to pay their taxes honestly, to be a decent person, just doesn't tell you anything. Just like knowing that someone's a Jew that doesn't necessarily tell you anything. You have to combine it with some more traits. Ashkenazi Jew in Israel in 1995, living in Tel Aviv. Then you can get some more outlines on a person. Or Ashkenazi Jew living in Los Angeles in 2021, then you're more likely to be able to sketch out, at least in your mind, some generalizable traits. But just knowing inherently that someone's a Christian, a Muslim, a non-Jew, or a Jew, just knowing that on its own tells you nothing. A Muslim in Thailand is very likely to be very different Muslim from a Muslim in Afghanistan. A Muslim in Iraq is gonna be a different Muslim than a Muslim in Iran. So just knowing someone's a Muslim tells you nothing. So Philip Roth had many Gentile friends. He had many, many, many Gentile lovers, but he would perpetually cast himself as the great maligned and persecuted outsider. And he doesn't really get caught on that. He doesn't get caught out for his anti-Gentilism. Apparently among powers that be occupying the high grounds of culture, this is a okay because apparently they probably identify themselves, even though they have tremendous wealth and power, even though they may occupy the high grounds of American life, they may still insist on seeing themselves as maligned and persecuted outsiders. And that's part of the reason they donate to the Anti-Defamation League. So a lot of success is a matter of situation and timing. So Philip Roth's greatest hit as a novel, Port Noise Complaint, was perfectly timed. If it come along later or earlier, it would not have succeeded nearly as so well. It hit the bookstores in 1969. So this is the time post-war America is rebelling against the perceived prudishness and hypocrisy of the traditional Christian sexual order. So Port Noise Complaint was the beneficiary of the sexual revolution, of the Supreme Court's nullification of obscenity laws in the name of the First Amendment. And it's a time of middle America's receptiveness to Jewish humor, probably as a result of TV and radio. So the overbearing Jewish mother is already a staple in jokes. And Lenny Bruce's transgressive stand-up made making jokes about previously unmentionable topics, such as masturbation, now it was seen as fashionably anti-establishment. Yeah, 1970 was a great time to be loud and rude and to bang. And looking at the chat leftism will never support Israel and the ADL is the leftist organization. That's not true. There are people on the left who support Israel, organizations on the left who support Israel, and the Anti-Defamation League definitely supports Israel. The ADL seems to be instrumental in social media censorship. Yeah, but why is it so good? Why is it so effective? I would guess that it's the combination of competence and having friends in positions of power and money. Corporations give to the ADL, scare old Jewish widows. Yeah, the ADL is very competent at what it does. I mean, occasionally they dramatically have a step and they make an embarrassment of themselves, but it sure seems like from my perspective that the Anti-Defamation League essentially gets to decide what we can say on social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. So we have an ethnic advocacy organization that decides what all Americans get to say on social media. So Freudian psychoanalysis was also at a peak of fashionableness in the 1960s among those who could afford it. And so Portnoy's complaint portrays Alexander Portnoy as protagonist as on the couch in analysis writing with guilt and anxiety, just as in real life was his creator. And Philip Roth's novel was both quite obscene and screamingly funny. So it provides readers with the thrill of seeing things in print that they were forbidden to talk about. So more than four million copies during its first five years in print and it is a brilliantly vivid reading experience. So Philip Roth was often a brilliantly vivid writer. He had a genius for recreating human scenes in sharp-eyed detail and with dialogue that mimicked real-life speech. He could also write lyrically when he wanted to, but he was not nearly as great a writer as he thought he was. He wrote a few great novels. Most of his novels were mediocre and basically unreadable. So perhaps, American Pastoral was his greatest novel. Free of Sacks, the rest range from good to terrible. Now he had this work ethic inherited from his insurance agent father that kind of required him to spend eight hours every day writing. But the result was he wrote way too much. So Philip Roth never knew when to stop and he basically wrote the same novel over and over and over again, even the same passages over and over again. Yeah, Philip Roth because of back pain started writing, standing up. And Philip Roth did not create many believable characters. Almost all these characters are caricatures, right? The type of characters that he was able to pull off most effectively were just various versions of himself, Alexander Portnoy, David Kappesh, Nathan Zuckerman. Nathan Zuckerman shows up in nine Philip Roth novels. And then he even has Philip Roth characters in his novels. So it's not just that Philip Roth had a problem creating like fully rounded female characters or Gentile characters. He had a problem creating vivid, realistic, reliable characters full stop, aside from himself. So Philip Roth's female figures and Gentile figures can be interesting or amusing enough. They can be dazzling, but it's hard to believe that they exist. Philip Roth constantly lied about himself. He would maintain that his novels were not autobiographical when they clearly were. Philip Roth really had a problem making stuff up. He basically just drew from his own life experience and he didn't have an ability to write beyond what he had experienced. So he was not as good as John Updike in that respect. I think Updike was a greater novelist than Roth. So Roth was not able to invent almost anything like his characters and their traits that kind of combined from people he knows in real life. Like his, the parents in Portnoy's complaint are obviously somewhat exaggerated portrayals of his own parents. In 2012, after reading a Wikipedia entry stating that the human stain, the Roth novel had been based on the life of critic Anatoly Broillard, Philip Roth wrote a 2700 open letter to the New Yorker, stating he'd met Broillard only three or four times and had completely made up the human stain plot. But he had actually known Anatoly Broillard well. Roth would bristle when everyone referred to him as a Jewish writer, but he wrote about nothing but being Jewish. Non-Jews have no reality in his books, except as antagonists. So he turned his childhood neighborhood in New Jersey into a cozy fiddler on the roof type shtetl. Bernard Malamud was much more sensitive to the human condition. Yeah, where the hell is half-collision? He needs to be in here defending Philip Roth. Philip Roth was a pornographer and no literary value. No, I think Philip Roth had some literary value, but he wasn't the bee's knees. He was never a great novelist. He was occasionally a good novelist. He was not the equal of John Updike. And most of his novels were at best mediocre. So Charlotte Allen just has a terrific essay here on Quillette. She notes that Philip Roth's problem for women was not that he was a misogynist. His problem for women was that he was an alpha male. So he was the dominant personality in the circle of male friends that he had around him. So kind of like my father, Philip Roth had very few friends, but he had a lot of followers. So he tended to choose to surround himself with sicker fans. He rarely surrounded himself with people who would challenge him. So Philip Roth chose to surround himself with people he could dominate. So Charlotte Allen says, I asked my husband why a man like Philip Roth would be compelled to have sex with so many different women. And my husband answered, women have no idea how attractive they are to men. So apparently Laura Luma went on the same fake podcast that Richard Spencer was on. Too painful, too painful. So Roth slept with dozens of women because he could. How many women would you sleep with? Attractive women would you sleep with? You would sleep with as many as you could. So he once taunted Claire Bloom's daughter, who turned down his advances. And Philip Roth taunted her, what's the point of having a pretty girl in the house if you don't fuck her? That used to be socially unacceptable to say and those were probably better times when it was socially unacceptable to say things like this. So for Roth, chastity, fidelity, just bourgeois pieties. But if everyone had anything like Philip Roth's sex life, civilization would be impossible. Civilization depends upon bourgeois pieties. Civilization depends upon marital fidelity. And there was a sad, pathetic, compulsive aspect to Philip Roth's sexuality. So Inga Larsen, the physical therapist, depicted in the Blake Bailey book, who was the inspiration for the insatiable woman in Sabbath's theater. She told Blake Bailey she had to feign more delight than she actually felt when Philip Roth handed her a semen encrusted napkin, or would call her at work to masturbate over the phone. So spilled semen occupies a disturbingly large space in quite a few of Philip Roth's novels. Yeah, Philip Roth was demonic. So as the 1990s came and went, Philip Roth's hostility towards feminist censoriousness turned into active alarm. Jim wants to know if I'll invite him to my wedding. I'll have to pray about that, Jim. So Philip Roth was worried that women might accuse him of doing something more than making a pass on the stairway and acting obnoxious afterwards. So Philip Roth was not a sexual harasser in the legal sense. So Philip Roth was distraught by Inga Larson's revelations in her interviews with Blake Bailey for the biography that she wasn't really into the sex quite as much as Roth imagined. So fictional counterpart, Dranker of Belich in Sabbath's theater died romantically. But the real Inga Philip Roth dumped her in 1995 after she refused his demand that she not tell her children that she'd be on a trip abroad with Philip Roth. So the entire secrecy of the relationship was what made it so erotically exciting for Philip Roth. Both of them were married. So when Philip Roth broke up with her, she checked into a mental hospital. So she was not the first to Philip Roth's exes to contemplate an attempt suicide. So generally speaking, women regret all sex that they have that does not lead to marriage. So in the pickup artist community, they talk about always leave women better than you found them. Well, no woman's going to be improved by injections of your penis if it does not lead to marriage. So men who are sexually promiscuous, they leave a lot of damaged women behind. Was Philip Roth like Charles Bukowski? Not sure. I'm never, never like Charles Bukowski. Yes, anti- Gentilism must be confronted but before it can be confronted first must be named and shamed. I'm starting the equivalent of the Anti-Defamation League for non-juice. So in his last press interview with Charles McGrath of the New York Times in January 2018, four months before his death, Philip Roth seemed agitated that readers might confuse his fictional protagonist, rampant sexuality with his own attitudes and provoke me to associations. So Sabah's theater debuted a few months after the model for its sidekick heroin that thought about killing yourself. So it was Philip Roth's favorite among his novels and he maintained that the puppeteer Mickey Sabah was the nearest I've come in all my affection to drawing a realistic self-portrait. And this is what I love about Charlotte Allen. It's hard to discern what is supposed to be funny and hilarious. About the 60 something Sabah's public humiliation of his mistress's cuckold husband, his mockery of his wife's psychological breakdown, his repayment of the hospitality of his sole remaining friend by stealing his money, setting up an assignation with his wife and masturbating into the underpants of his college student daughter. So this is a far cry from Portnoy's complaints from Portnoy's complaint and his protagonist attacks of conscience coupled with his rage to revolt that gave the novel an exuberant comic energy. So by Sabah's theater, the Philip Roth character is just sad and pathetic and disgusting. And I like what Charlotte Allen says, I found Sabah's theater unreadable. I just wanted someone to shoot Sabah in the face so it could burn in hell and the book could end. So the feminists who rang down the curtain on this sort of once fashionable outrageousness had a point because the kind of promiscuity that Philip Roth promoted is just destroys people and destroys civilization. So you got Mickey Sabah's reflecting in this novel. There was in these tapes a kind of art in the way he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of innocence. Talking about tape recordings where you'd have highly sexualized phone conversations with his students. I mean, this is a chilling sentence. A kind of art in the way he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of innocence. It's really damaging to people and to society to unshackle girls from sexual innocence like this. I mean, the traditional restrictions on bridal sexual expression made family, community, civilization possible. I mean, sex isn't just some healthy force that requires an outlet. It is frequently uncontrollable, frequently dangerous and it tends to lead to the overpowering of the weak by the strong. So in a modest society, people are more protected but we're the opposite of a modest society. We just think it's cool that we have people out there with a coolly predatory sex life. So strong men, usually physically more powerful. They're usually financially more powerful. They're more insistently aggressive and they can wear down women. And that's not to the benefit of women and not to the benefit of us and not to the benefit of community and families and society. So after the old restrictions, again, sexual expression fell, feminism came up with their own new restrictions and their own new vocabulary. Talking about rape, culture, emotional abuse, harassment, power embalacement. And the rest because society cannot maintain itself with rampant promiscuity. So they're always gonna be checks. Now the checks on sexuality can either come from me to legal threats or they can come from religion. They can come from culture. Philip Roth at times, he could see the dark side of his own nature, the dark side of male nature. So in his Goodbye Columbus novel, the Philip Roth stand in Neil Clugman, strong arms Brenda Potemkin into getting a diaphragm so that Neil can enjoy unprotected sex with peace of mind. And back in the 1950s, this was a task that entailed some effort for an unmarried woman. So in Philip Roth's two marriages, the women that Philip Roth married don't come across too well in this Blake Bailey biography. I mean, Claire Bloom took care of herself in her best-selling 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House. And that left Philip Roth rattled until the end of his days. But Philip Roth's first wife, Maggie, cured in that 1968 auto accident was not so lucky. So this Charlotte Allen essay is titled, Twilight of the Saters. On April 18th of this year, Blake Bailey, 58, the author of Philip Roth, the biography was abruptly dropped by his literary agency. Then he was dropped by his publisher because there are allegations that when he was an eighth grade teacher in New Orleans during the 1990s, he had groomed girls for sexual encounters. And then there was an allegation that he'd raped a food blogger, Valentina Rice. And they were both houseguests of Los Angeles Times and New York Times book critic Dwight Garner in 2015. Then in June, we had more allegations against Blake Bailey that while teaching creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia from 2010 to 2016, he had sexually harassed four women there, including a fellow professor who said he had jumped into a hot tub and fondled her while she was sitting naked there with other male faculty members on a faculty retreat. So if you don't want to be sexually harassed, don't get into hot tubs naked with dudes. If you don't want to be sexually harassed or provoked or raped, don't get naked into bed with men and not expect they're gonna try to do something. So the 1960s sexual liberation that Port Noise Complaint exemplified turned out to be just a few steps ahead of women's liberation. And the women libs did not regard Port Noise brand of male-centric erotica kindly. So there are two memorable characters in Port Noise Complaint. There's the Philip Roth character that is a hysterical Jewish mother. And then there is a sexually voracious, Gentile mistress, the monkey. Game for any lewd deed involving any number of participants. So Philip Roth essentially had two female types for all these female characters. There's the non-Jewish woman who's down for any sexual experiment. And then there is the hysterical Jewish mother type. So Philip Roth hated two ex-wives were portrayed by Roth as monstrously unmanning. So you can look at the three-ring circus of Philip Roth's own sex life as scandalous, adventurously liberated, or highly destructive. Like real people got hurt, real people became suicidal. So Philip Roth kept a photo album of his former girlfriends. So he got bored easily and when it was over, he got rid of his women peremptorily and cruelly. So like his character, Alexander Pointnay, Philip Roth maintained, I simply cannot, I simply will not enter into a contract to sleep with just one woman the rest of my days. So Philip Roth thought writing at various universities. So he was a part-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1991. And he slept with his most attractive female students. And they would get ushered into his otherwise over-subscribed classes by a wink-wink permission of his friend Joe Canaro, who was the chair of the English department there and essentially acted as Philip Roth's pimp. So later, Philip Roth complained that second wave feminism and its reinterpretation of Title IX and the Civil Rights Act had made these pleasant conquests of 19 and 20 year olds a career killer. You go to feminist prison. So when this Blake Bailey book, Philip Roth biography came out early this year, there were some female dissenters to the critical acclaim that made Bailey's book an instant bestseller. So Laura Marsh, literary editor of the New Republic, wrote, women in this book are forever screeching, berating, flying into a rage and storming off as if their emotions exist solely for the purpose of sapping a man's creative energies. So why did Philip Roth pick Blake Bailey to be his biographer? Probably because they shared certain attitudes towards women. So Laura Marsh contended, she was not the only reviewer to do so that Blake Bailey had been all too happy to accept Philip Roth's own take on his relationships with women. They are bothering go the trouble of finding out what the women experience from the man. They remain caricatures. So Philip Roth's women were ports of call in his journey of self-escape. Now Francine Prose, wrote about the book for the Guardian and she was the most damning of all because she had the hindsight advantage of writing on April 25th after the major allegations about Blake Bailey's sexual transgressions had surfaced. So she said she started reading Blake Bailey's book purely for its entertainment value as a gossipy celebrity bio, but then certain sentences jumped out at me, details that seemed unnecessary, excessive, prurient, or strange. It was the odd claim that childbirth had withered Roth's first wife's vagina. Why is that a strange claim? Doesn't childbirth do that to vaginas? The suggestion that Philip Roth was more excited about having dinner with Robert Panwaran and Eleanor Clark, both important writers, when he learned that their daughter was home from Yale. Why is that strange? Of course, men enjoy the company of pretty young women. And then there are the vivid descriptions of Philip Roth's particular sex acts with Maxine Groskey, the real life model for Brenda Potemkin, who is the affluent Jewish girl and love interest in Goodbye Columbus. I wondered, was this a biography of a great writer or of a guy turned on by a woman who let him play around with a vibrator? Well, why are these two things mutually exclusive? Why can't a great writer also be a sexual adventurer? Oh wow, American journalist, historian, and Applebaum has made a video on how she thinks Mike Lindell, my pillow guy, could seriously destroy democracy in the United States. Norman Finkelstein says the left is the real problem with cancel culture. Yeah, and I think the my pillow guy, Mike Lindell, can you destroy democracy? Have I looked into Bertrand Du Juvenile's Theory of Political Power? Nope. Bill Maher says that Tucker Carlson, meeting Hungarian President Viktor Orban, is a dry run for foreblown fascism in the USA, hysterical nonsense. So in light of the sexual allegations against Blake Bailey, Francine Prose concluded, and his neutral responses to Philip Roth at his worst, one can't help thinking they found each other. So for those who tend to view male sexual packadillos solely through the lenses of exploitation and victimization, yeah, cancel them both. But Philip Roth, though he was a cat and a philanderer who's not a sexual harasser, it's no record that any of the participants in his erotic adventures are anything but enthusiastic. Only one woman seems to have turned him down at the University of Pennsylvania. There's a waiting list of female students dying to get into his classes, and the young women who did make the cut would print frantically so as to look their best. So they wanted to get into his class and into his bed. So the sexual history of Blake Bailey displays some similar ambiguities. So apparently, Blake Bailey was an eighth grade teacher, and then he had sex with his students after they became of adult age. So he was teaching girls who were 12, 13, or 14 in his honors English class. Now, the youngest of his students with whom he had sex after lunch date in 2003 was 17, but 17 is the legal age of consent in Louisiana. She was a freshman in college, and the sex was consensual. Another woman, now 36, was 19. She was a college freshman when Blake Bailey married at the time, emailed to say he was passing through town when she liked to meet him for drinks. Next year, he was passing through town again, and he and Heather again had sex in his hotel room. Then another woman alleged that Blake Bailey raped her in 2003, but this is after she says he consensually gave her oral sex. So she was fine with him performing oral sex on her, but she didn't want intercourse. Then Blake Bailey stopped when she told him that she wasn't using birth control. And then he later emailed her a profuse apology. And a fourth student met him in a bar in 2002. He hit on her, put his hand on her thigh, she fled, but they kept emailing back and forth for years afterwards. Another woman met him for drinks, went back to his room, and then was shocked to find that he was gonna have sex with her. So yeah, don't go back to a man's room, unless you are planning on having sex with him. And this woman who claims Valentina Rice, who claims that Blake Bailey raped her, she kept up a conversation with him via email for years afterward. So maybe Blake Bailey was not this horrible rapist and he certainly wasn't a pedorast, but maybe he's a walking argument against co-education for youngsters past puberty. So he was the cool teacher, kind of the equivalent of the cool mom played to perfection by Amy Poehler in the movie Mean Girls. Can I get you guys anything, some snacks, a condom? Let me know. So he designed his eighth graders Kurt Vonnegut, JD Salinger. He liked to skateboard in the class. He would sketch B with some butt head on the blackboard. And he'd have his eighth graders keep journals for his regular inspection and commentary, which was unusually fulsome. This is Brian McLeanahan. We're in cancel culture, woke, the woke environment, everything is coming down. There's a couple of things I wanna talk about in this particular episode, which I find absolutely fascinating, because this is what's happening with history, right? This is the real problem with the American historical profession. I'm gonna give you a parallel to this and the accusations made against another important American figure. And also the end of this article, there's some things brought up to you about Abraham Lincoln. But I want you to read the headline. This is a couple of days ago. University of Wisconsin removes Boulder from campus after students say the rock is a symbol of racism. Citing one news article for 19.25, okay. So the important part is the last site. Okay, here's a good bit from the Charlotte Allen essay. Look at this. Whoa, whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. I don't want this. I don't want this. Oh, he's trying to pop ads on me. So in the past, it would have been considered gross violation of ethics and propriety for a teacher to eroticize, you know, his relationship with his eighth grade students, a relationship that's already too prone to eroticization by female students who are overwhelmed by their teacher's superior knowledge and charisma. Charlotte Allen writes, I speak as someone who had a crush on nearly every one of my male college professors. Also in the past, any query from an adult man to an adolescent girl about her having punched her V card, virgin card, that resulted in a visit from her father with a baseball bat. But with these girls, there weren't many fathers on the scene. So Blake Bailey tended to go for lonely girls who lived with single mothers. Now, according to the school where Blake Bailey taught, it was not a single complaint on record about his behavior during his eight years of teaching there. And just before he left, the nonprofit Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities awarded him its Humanities Teacher of the Year Award. So Blake Bailey probably deserved to be a casualty of Me Too, but he was also a casualty of the curious clash of Me Too and its neo, the studiousness about sexual exploitation with the no holds barred sexual revolution that preceded it. So he was the core teacher, wanted to get down with his students at their sexual blossoming level, only to discover a generation later that his corners would be reclassified as rapey and their sexual blossoming as irrelevant. So he was kind of a pale imitation of his biographical subject, Philip Roth. So Philip Roth liked to think of it himself as an agonist, tormented by a conventional morality. That's what he was rebelling against. In particular, conventional Gentile morality, in particular, conventional Christian morality. So for the non-Jews, essentially Philip Roth's lifelong fixation as antagonists. Bye-bye.