EVERYTHING IS OUR FAULT

I'm waiting for the next phase in the James O'Keefe saga -- the phase in which right-wingers declare that, yes, O'Keefe is a bad guy, but his sleaziness, and the sleaziness of associates of his, doesn't reflect poorly on conservatives because the sleaze is all the fault of ... "the liberal culture."

The classic right-wing move here is to write an essay declaring that the quintessence of liberalism is rap music (or "gangsta rap," which most righties think is a catch-all term for all rap, except for right-wing rap). O'Keefe and his boys probably did watch a few too many boat-based hip-hop videos in their youth (I'm not thinking of Andy Samberg's parody song "I'm on a Boat" so much as songs and videos that inspired it, like Jay-Z's "Big Pimpin'"). Why these idealizations of wealth and female objectification should be called liberal, I'm not sure, but that's the standard righty line.

The only reason the wingers might not blame O'Keefe on "liberal" hip-hop this way is that the righties may be dialing down the race-baiting a tad: after the president gave that interview to Rolling Stone in which he said there were Nas and Lil Wayne songs in among the Coltrane and Stones and opera, Fox Nation started a thread called "President of the United States Loves Gangsta Rap." However, it's been deleted, and now exists only in cached form. Somebody on the right must think it's not the best time to go this route, for reasons I can't fathom.

There's another angle here, which Aimai noted in the comments to an earlier post:

One thing that leaps out is that O'Keefe and his mentor probably have a lot of training in ... humiliation dating techniques.

... Google "Pick-Up Artist" and you will get a creepload of scary stuff all of which revolves around the idea that women are easily manipulated by stronger men....

Key texts on this subject include Mystery's book The Pickup Artist and Neil Strauss's book The Game (avialable bound in imitation leather!). I guess we should expect some winger bloviators, especially the more socially conservative ones, to blame this on liberalism, too, just because we liberals tend to believe premarital sex is not a horrible thing. But most of us kinda think this crap is pretty horrible.