At The Federalist, Robert Tracinski writes:

So a team of scientists landed a space probe on the surface of a comet for the very first time ever, and that’s not really news. What’s news is that one of the guys who did it was wearing a tacky shirt. No, really. … Since the shirt in question had cartoon images of scantily clad women, you see, it was deemed off-putting toward women in science. Let’s stipulate that scientists and engineers have a tendency to not be able to dress themselves in a way that is fit to be seen in public. That’s why, back in the day, the guys at mission control used to wear a pretty basic uniform of white dress shirt and skinny black tie. It didn’t make them look suave or hip. All it did was make them look like the kind of guys who could calculate interplanetary trajectories with nothing but a slide rule. Which, ultimately, is way cooler. The irony here is that the wearer of the offending shirt, astrophysicist Matt Taylor, seems to be some hybrid of geek and hipster. Note all the earmarks: the beard, the big glasses, the “sleeve” tattoos on his arms, and the retro “kitsch” of an obnoxiously colored, comic-book-themed bowling shirt.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the pictures of this guy carefully crop out his forearms, which are covered with tattoos down to his wrists. In other words, this rocket scientist has low class trashy taste. But you are supposed to pretend that his stupid tattoos are “transgressive,” while his stupid shirt is “oppressive.” But what if he had cheesecake tattoos? (See #3 below.)

So he was trying to be stylish after a fashion—and it is, in fact, the current fashion—and he still got into trouble. In one respect this is all a tempest in a teacup. Who cares what shirt the guy was wearing while he landed a spacecraft on a comet? But our culture does care, and it made him care, reducing him to a tearful televised apology. That’s what makes this a cultural turning point. There are three big lesson we can learn from #ShirtStorm about the brave new world of feminist grievance-mongering that we have just landed on. 1) They’re not just going after the frat boys. … 2) The new orthodoxy is total. … 3) There are no logically consistent rules. …

It like when you first get off the bus at Marine Corps boot camp and extremely angry people start shouting at you. If you had time to think, you might point out to them that some of what they seem to be angry about logically contradicts some of the other things they seem to be angry about. In fact, you have a little list of contradictions that you’d like to share with them. But that would just make them angrier, so it’s probably not a good idea.

Which is to say that this is a power play. It reminds me of what Shelby Steele has written about the phenomenon of “white guilt”: the presumption that all white people are complicit in the crimes of slavery and segregation and are therefore guilty until they prove themselves innocent. And they can prove their innocence by embracing whatever political agenda the guardians of racial grievance choose to decree. So call this new system “male guilt.” Every man is presumed sexist until proven otherwise, and his only hope is appease the self-appointed arbiters of offensiveness.

It’s pretty easy for a woman to exploit men by claiming to represent the rightful wrath of Team Women. When you get old enough, you realize that most women don’t really care about Team Women, they care about Team Me and (hopefully) Team My Family. But they know that guys are crazy for being on teams, so it’s simple to get guys to assume that Team Women is a real thing and not just whatever an individual woman happens to be worked up about at the moment.

This will all acquire a laser-like focus very quickly, because accusation of sexism will soon have an urgent, concrete purpose: destroying all opposition to Hillary Clinton’s presumed presidential campaign. As Stephen Miller observes: “If you want to know what #ReadyForHillary will look like for 4 years… This is it.” …

Read the whole thing there. This guy Tracinski has an agile style.