At RedState, we are generally loath to involve ourselves in the various internecine wars that tend to arise among the Rightosphere. After all, there are Democrats afoot who are busy guiding the country into an epic nosedive, and that’s generally more important than picking nits about the blog posts of others.  This is doubly true of any fracas that involves David Frum.  See, Frum used to be a person very much worth responding to, given his prestigious perches at National Review and AEI.  These days, however, Frum has been shunted aside from both positions and relegated to writing for a blog that no one reads.  If there is a marketplace of ideas, Frum’s goods are sitting around gathering mold on the shelf.

Nonetheless, the most recent flareup between NewsRealBlog and FrumForum deserves mention because it appears that NRB has uncovered that FrumForum has been knowingly featuring the writings of the Internet’s foremost defender of criminal perverts.  For the few remaining people who haven’t been turned off by Frum’s uninteresting ideas, pedantic writing, and delusions of persecution, this revelation will hopefully put the long-overdue final nail in Frum’s coffin as a political commentator.  This is important because Frum’s counsel for the GOP is poison, and would lead it back to the days of massive public disenchantment instead of the current days of massive public enthusiasm.

Click below to see how the saga unfolded. Warning: some of the material quoted here is offensive to the sensibilities of… well, anyone not a NAMBLA member in good standing.

Prior to July of this year, David Horowitz’s NewsRealBlog (edited by Dave Swindle) occasionally ran articles written by an individual named Alex Knepper.  Things started to go off the rails when Knepper began submitting posts about sexual topics that were absurd, offensive, and repeatedly defended the criminally sexually deviant.  For instance, in one post (since removed from NRB but reproduced here), Knepper wrote a lengthy apologia for the rights of child molesters, the most recidivist criminal population in America. In another, Knepper wrote at length decrying all the troublesome and completely unjustified whining from victims of rape. Apparently, Swindle (who had already extended much more rope to Knepper than almost anyone else would have) then flatly told Knepper that he was not to submit any more posts for publication that talked about sex. Knepper responded by submitting this post (which was never published) about Miley Cyrus which cribbed heavily from the NAMBLA playbook about uncontrollable biological urges men feel to have sex with 12-year-olds. 

As noted by Rob Taylor in an excellent and lengthy blog post covering the fracas at the time:

Knepper’s reaction was this piece of pro-rape agi-prop that should have ended the debate as to whether Knepper hated women once and for all. Read this and weep at what cretins like David Frum and whoever handles Knepper at NewsReal thinks is intellectual debate. Here’s Knepper’s response to arguments that women die at the hands of rapists all the time making the term survivor is legitimate:

Characteristic to plane crashes, car crashes, house fires, cancer, and other things that people die from: people die from them. David’s example, Ted Bundy, illustrates my point: he was not only a rapist, but a murderer. We would say that someone survived Bundy’s brand of aggression because he was a killer. But it is impossible not  to survive a non-lethal act. Women die at the hands of rapists, but the rape is coincidental to the fact that they could have died. Women die at the hands of vegetarians, zookeepers, and Deadheads, too — but when evaluating whether one “survived” an act, we have to look at whether they may not have come out alive. All else being held equal, rape is not that kind of experience: it is simply not looking at death in the eye. It is undoubtedly a horrific experience, of course — but it is a particular kind of horror: one of violation, of total loss of physical and sexual control. It is manifestly different than, say, a house fire, or suffering in a concentration camp.

If it sounds a little to you like there’s a disturbing pattern developing you’re correct. Knepper, who is openly gay, tends to write pieces about women’s sexual victimization which fetishize male dominance over a submissive partner while painting women as hysterical, malicious partners in their own abuse, all too eager to be raped so that they can lord their victimization over others. Rape isn’t a “loss of physical and sexual control,” it is a brutal assault by a sadist whose sexual gratification is achieved through pain, degradation and humiliation. Knepper’s definition of rape is more like a visit to a bondage club in the meat packing district than a crime.

Not surprisingly, Knepper was ultimately canned from NRB. Swindle has written at least two lengthy posts about Knepper’s termination here and here.  You can judge for yourself whether Knepper should have been given nearly this much rope with which to hang himself; however, the circumstances of his departure from NRB and the heinous opinions he expressed there were a matter of full public record. Note here that Frum specifically responded to Swindle’s post laying out Knepper’s repeated defenses of criminal perverts, and summarily ignored those concerns, focusing instead on bizarre conspiracy theories about Horowitz.

And where is Alex Knepper now? Still posting happily away at FrumForum. As you can see, his articles regularly reach the “front page” of FrumForum (scroll down), so apparently Frum doesn’t see anything wrong with Knepper’s repeated public defenses of criminal perverts.  Not to overstate the obvious, but such a person does not deserve to be taken seriously on any topic by anyone.

David Frum long ago marginalized his own relevance with his writing.  Now at last he has burned it alive and scattered the ashes with his own voluntary associations. So long, and good riddance.