You are never too big to grovel to the PC police.

Bill Clinton's recent response to a Black Lives Matter protester was hailed as a moment of political candor.  

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, Clinton, who knows that 95 per cent of his obituary is already written, was defending his own record (specifically welfare reform and the 1994 crime legislation).

Still, it was It was refreshing to hear a Democrat say that people go to prison for breaking the law and not because of society 's racial discrimination. The outrage was instantaneous! David French writes:

Clinton was bold, but 2016 isn’t 1992, and the Democrats aren’t desperate to reclaim the White House but rather are secure in their cultural and political position. The social-justice warriors rule the Democrats, and they were not amused. A Jezebel writer declared that Clinton reached “peak white mansplain.” MSNBC’s

Christopher Hayes called Clinton’s argument “twisted.”

"I almost want to apologize to Black Lives Matter," the former president said. And he pretty much did:

“I know those young people yesterday were just trying to get good television,” Mr. Clinton said Friday of the Black Lives Matter protesters who had accused him and Hillary Clinton of supporting policies that devastated black communities. “But that doesn’t mean that I was most effective in answering it.”

But it wasn't enough:

His statement did not quiet a raging storm of criticism. Still, it was a remarkable reversal for Mr. Clinton, who occupies a singular role in his wife’s campaign as a spouse and a popular former president who can sometimes make himself into a lightning rod. He has had to campaign for his wife in an era when signature policies of his administration have been repudiated both by Mrs. Clinton and her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in London recently, Ian McEwan, the novelist whose Atonement was made into a movie starring Keira Knightley, took what has been characterized as a" genteel swipe" at identity politics. He had the temerity to say that people with penises are men. Brendan O'Neil of National Review writes:

[McEwan] said identity politics is becoming increasingly consumerist, where we now pluck a ready-made “self” from “the shelves of a personal-identity supermarket.” The making up of one’s identity has gone so far that “some men in full possession of a penis are identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges,” he said. Then came his killer line: “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.”

As with Clinton's remarks, the outrage was instantaneous:

Can you guess what happened next? Yes, McEwan was subjected to a Twitch hunt, to that 21st-century bloodsport in which anyone who expresses an unpopular view or makes a less than PC utterance or simply misspeaks a little will be “called out” (shamed) by the bedroom-bound, Twitter-living, self-styled guardians of correct thinking. Twits went berserk over his apparently perverse linking of penises with maleness. They branded him a bigot, weird, a transphobe. Trans-rights activists put the boot in, too. Stonewall, the LGBT activist group, slammed McEwan for being “uninformed” and said his weird worldview doesn’t only “denigrate the trans experience, it denies its very existence.” Paris Lees, a trans woman and journalist, scolded McEwan, telling him his “ideas about penises are outdated.” He should apologize, the mob said.

And he did. All the virtual tomato-throwing at this heretic who dared to say that people with penises are men had the desired effect. It elicited a public backtrack. In an open letter in the Guardian, McEwan accused some of his critics of being “righteous and cross,” yet he then bowed and scraped before the trans religion. Transgenderism “should be respected,” he said. Then, most strikingly, he obediently expressed the key tenet of the trans ideology: “Biology is not always destiny.” Remarkable.


It is remarkable that two men with the worldwide prestige must bow to political correctness.