What a fascinating article from the British hard left tabloid “The Guardian!” Simultaneously taking aim at a legitimate target and exploding into a furious attack on the United States and Donald Trump, it is invaluable for plumbing the depths of how the extreme progressive Left takes in information, filtering it through a confirmation bias to reach false but—for them—comforting conclusions. Stephen Green nailed some of what’s wrong here, “writer Moira Donegan’s utter lack of self-awareness while decrying our lack of self-awareness.” She uses Blue Origin’s all-female passenger flight to as evidence of U.S. decline, but the too-obvious-to-mention reality is that the U.S. has more than one private company capable of putting humans into space, and the crumbling U.K. can’t come close to producing the same.

How can an essay be simultaneously astute and idiotic at the same time? Easy. Donegan accurately writes that for the most part, the high visibility female celebrities taking this expensive joy ride embarrassed themselves and their sex by acting like sorority girls exclaiming, “Like, omigawd! Stars!” Leaving out the gratuitous political shots, Donegan writes in part,

Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic….the flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man….There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur…But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness. In an interview with Elle, the crew members paid lip service to the importance of women…but mostly, they seemed interested in talking about their makeup and hair. “Space is going to finally be glam,” Katy Perry said…“Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.” “Who would not get glam before the flight?!” asked Sánchez, who evidently can’t imagine that women might prioritize anything else. “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule.” Bowe, too, joined in, saying that she had gone to extreme lengths to make sure that she would be, of all things, well coiffed for the experience. “I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good,” she said. “I took it for a dry run.”

Ethics Alarms registered my disgust at Perry’s dumb exclamations without the anti-feminist angle, which, upon reflection, I should have mentioned. But the writer’s declaration that American feminism is dead because the Space Women “so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine– positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity…a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly” is itself deeply, deeply silly.

Reality bites. The sad fact is that for all the progress women’s rights have made over the decades, women tend to want to be attractive to men, as their genetic programming has made them, and just as sexually and conventionally attractive men have an advantage in society, so do sexually and conventionally attractive women. How many over-weight and/or homely news hosts can you name? How many fat actresses get leading roles? Even most female members of Congress were elected while looking slim and sharp; the same with female governors. As for Bezos’ main squeeze being “deeply antifeminist” because she has the billionaire to thank for her literal ascension…come on. Both of the recent defeated Presidential candidates the Democrats have foisted on the American electorate owed their political careers to male political stars to whom they hitched their career wagons. Blaming the Blue Origin flight for reflecting what has been the raw facts of American feminism forever is scapegoating. It’s the culture, stupid! And for the most part, American culture has been holding up a lot better than Great Britain’s. “Tend to your own knitting,” as my father liked to say.

The rest of the article is standard issue America- and Trump-bashing. For example,

• “Is this the future that awaits women in Donald Trump’s America: one where the only way to achievement is through sexual desirability, the only way to status as an ornamental attachment on a man who really counts, the only subject on which we are qualified to speak is whether lash extensions will stay in place?”

Oh, bite me. Donald Trump is a product of this culture, not the author of it. This isn’t Donald Trump’s America, it’s Bill Clinton’s America, Barack Obama’s America, Jack Kennedy’s America and my America, in short, America. By now I’d think you Brits would have stopped throwing sour grapes our way. Saturday is Patriot’s Day. Can you remember why? Hmmmmm?

• “Blue Origin itself is a product of state abandonment of space exploration…Once, NASA was the pride of the American experiment: a testament to how a society dedicated to legal equality and passionate hard work could expand the horizons of human possibility. Now, Blue Origin is a testament to the corruption and circumscribed possibilities of the profit motive run amok. Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic. The Blue Origin flight does not make me feel like humanity will reach new heights of achievement. It makes me feel like everything that is coming is grimly predictable, tailored to the impulses of the richest, least responsible and least morally intelligent people on Earth.”

How hackneyed: British socialists calling successful entrepreneurs irresponsible and immoral. The system she is mocking has produced a vibrant creative culture that encourages innovation, with Amazon and Bezos standing as exemplars. A statist, the author naturally assumes that it is the government’s job to take citizens’ money to do everything worth doing, and to do it badly. What crippled NASA was a series of disastrous management decisions and a loss of the will to accept risk, thanks to the creeping progressive fear of adverse consequences as the necessary fare for advancement. The private sector stepped in when the government failed. That highlights the best of America, not its “decline.”

• Amusingly, Donegan twice mentions that the Blue Origin pod was “phallically shaped” and sees anti-feminist significance in that Every rocket is phallically shaped. Idiot. She would know that if her country had ever launched a space rocket.

Read the whole thing. If nothing else, it will help you appreciate Patriots Day.