The supplied file is a short, single-author polemical essay from June 1993. Rothbard treats the Tailhook scandal less as a factual inquiry into harassment than as a symptom of a wider cultural revolution. His central thesis is that off-duty drunkenness and convention excess were being retroactively criminalized by feminism, bureaucracy, and what he calls a new puritanism.
But since when has debauchery been a high crime, or drunkenness off the job for that matter?!
The essay opens by ridiculing public shock. Rothbard invokes Las Vegas, convention culture, and the antiquated sound of “debauchery” to cast outrage as theatrical moral panic. The first conceptual move is deflation: what others present as institutional scandal he redescribes as ordinary adult misconduct in a predictable setting.
Our culture is getting rapidly crazier at an accelerating rate, and the poor guys at Tailhook are caught in a culture loop, victims of a new and raging form of Left Victorianism.
The middle section turns to Inspector General Derek Vander Schaaf’s report. Rothbard mocks the concern that many attendees preferred social events to professional sessions, arguing that this is normal at conventions generally, not evidence of military pathology.
I have never attended any convention, even the most staid, where the socializers did not outnumber the guys who actually came to the official proceedings.
His next move is to convert “tradition” and warning into consent. Because Tailhook’s rituals were allegedly longstanding and known, Rothbard argues that attendees could not plausibly be surprised by them. This is the essay’s most important argumentative displacement: allegations of coercion are reframed as voluntary participation in a subculture.
So, if this was a well-known tradition, and the sign was up, why did these women show up at the Tailhook convention or at the famed third-floor hallway or hospitality suites? Doesn’t this showing up make the basic proceedings consensual and voluntary?
Rothbard then refuses the expected question of moral approval. He says he is not endorsing fraternity culture, but insists that his own taste is irrelevant: the proper issue is whether state and military authorities should punish men for conduct he presents as consensual and historically tolerated.
The inevitable question: do I “condone” the actions of the young lads at Tailhook? The very question is idiotic.
The essay’s structure then widens from Tailhook to “military culture.” Rothbard’s most explicit thesis is that the aviators, not the complainants, are the true casualties of the affair, because they are subjected to new rules after the fact.
The real victims of Tailhook are the naval aviators who were suddenly, ex post facto, trapped in the vise-like grip of a whirlwind culture change, the accession of an implacable Left-Puritanism.
From there he links feminism, sensitivity training, “gender-blind” integration, and the therapeutic state. The military, in his view, depends on masculine aggression, and Tailhook becomes a test case in whether that ethos will survive.
The military, especially the crack pilots, are trained for discipline, quick-response, aggressiveness—indeed, a macho culture.
The final section argues that contemporary sexual politics are internally contradictory: permissive toward youth sex education and nontraditional identities, but punitive toward heterosexual male conduct. Rothbard’s rhetoric is overtly hostile to feminism and gay rights, making the essay a period document of early-1990s right-libertarian culture-war writing.
How can we possibly make sense out of this crazy quilt of sexual attitudes?
His answer is that the target is not sexuality as such, but “normal” masculine heterosexuality.
Perhaps the answer is this: the Enemy is what used to be called “normal,” or “macho,” hetero-sex.
The essay’s relevance lies in its compressed display of Rothbard’s late political style: libertarian suspicion of bureaucracy fused with anti-feminist and anti-egalitarian cultural polemic. Its core moves are to mock scandal, minimize institutional harm, invoke custom as consent, cast punishment as ex post facto moral legislation, and defend military effectiveness through “macho” hierarchy. As interpretation rather than reportage, it shows how Tailhook could be recoded from a scandal of abuse into an emblem of cultural defeat.
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