Scott Grannis at Calafia Beach Pundit notes that Kevin Williamson is “one of today’s greatest philosopher-journalists”.  I agree and RY readers will find many excerpts from his articles in my posts.

From The Democrats’ new puritanism will lead to their undoing by KW in The New York Post:

The Democratic Party is in the grips of a moral panic having to do in part with Donald Trump and #MeToo. In another aspect, it is a belated and desultory reckoning with the fact that Democrats have for a long time been willing to overlook a great deal of bad behavior in pursuit of power: not only Bill Clinton’s shenanigans (and those of a couple of Kennedys and many others before him) but also the footsie-playing with anti-Semites that has been so lamentably common among African-American Democrats from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to Barack Obama and Ilhan Omar. It is difficult to run a campaign of moral indictment against Trump when the best alternative you had to offer was a Clinton.

What’s lacking is perspective and judgment. Given his scurrilous campaign against his Republican challenger Ed Gillespie, Northam does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but no serious-minded person believes he is a closet white supremacist or that he hasn’t grown up a bit since he was a 24-year-old graduate student. The accusations against Fairfax are both more serious and more recent. But the new progressive puritanism, powered by social media, inhibits their ability to make such distinctions.

The irony is that the Democrats do not know how and when to move on. About 22 minutes into Bill Clinton’s intern-diddling scandal, Democratic activists formed a group called MoveOn.org, whose members argued that it was time to “move on” from the president’s misdeeds, which involved not only adultery but also perjury and suborning perjury — serious matters for the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. That was then. In 2019, MoveOn.org is calling for Northam’s resignation because of an episode combining callousness with bad taste 34 years ago — many years before the original event from which MoveOn.org wanted to move on.

The Democrats are simultaneously attempting to enforce a zero-tolerance approach to these scandals while also handing out plenary indulgences to such figures as Sen. Warren, whose career as a “professor of color” is in many ways more repugnant than literal blackface. Democrats want a zero-tolerance rule that doesn’t cost them very much — puritanism on the cheap, morally speaking.

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