Democrats Bury the Me Too Movement

I ’m old enough to remember a time when the mere hearsay of a man’s sexual misconduct, regardless of the veracity of the evidence, was deemed to be disqualifying for public office and cause for reputational ruin. Democrats took Christine Blasey Ford’s uncorroborated accusation that a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her when she was 15 years old as gospel, declaring his Supreme Court nomination dead on arrival. This was an unreasonable standard that bore no relation to the one we actually practice in the United States: due process and substantiation of serious claims, especially those with life-ruining potential. But those who questioned this medieval understanding of justice were told they were traitors to women and apologists for predators.

As it turns out, the standard established during the Me Too era is, at least today, conditional on the answer to one question: Can the accused deliver more power to the Democrats? If so, then never mind.

With the candidacy of Maine’s Graham Platner, who won yesterday’s Senate primary as expected, we’ve seen Democrats ditch their supposed reverence for decency and get behind a man with a checkered past involving women, among other serious problems. Unlike in Kavanaugh’s case, the allegations are backed by documentation.

Between his wife catching him in several sexting relationships, the New York Times reporting that he was allegedly abusive with women he’s dated, and his own record revealing a half-nude profile photo on an app that’s been called a “predator’s paradise,” there’s ample cause for Democrats as well as Republicans to drive Platner from public life. But from most mainstream figures in the party, it’s been crickets or waffling, for the single reason that they think he could actually win this thing and thus help Democrats gain control of the Senate.

The mantra of the Me Too movement was “Believe women.” Well, Platner’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield came forward and told the Times that he once, during a heated spat, “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’” But Fifield is a Republican, so Platner’s supporters are pretending not to hear her.

Fifield, armed with saved texts, also charged that Platner is lying when he says he only learned in October that his infamous tattoo was Nazi-related. She says that he bragged about its significance to her and that’s why his ink was a known peculiarity among her peers. Out of all my friends with tattoos, many of them Mainers, not one got one that they didn’t deeply contemplate or even design themselves before getting it etched onto their skin. Yet here, too, Democrats have made excuses, embracing Platner’s shifting explanations that it was a product of the military’s machismo culture, or PTSD, or just pure stupidity, or all of the above.

The point is that what Platner has allegedly done and said to women in his past would have instantly met Democrats’ standard for proof of guilt, warranting social and professional cancellation, not so long ago. When Blasey Ford mustered such teary testimony for the cameras, that was sufficiently compelling to call for Kavanaugh to be turned back.

Even after Kavanaugh was confirmed, the press promoted every new claim that came out against him, and Democratic politicians followed suit. After the New York Times published an essay claiming that a Yale classmate saw Kavanaugh’s friends push his genitalia into the hand of a female student, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris all called for his impeachment. The through-the-grapevine rumor was enough to call for such drastic measures. I remember being on my progressive college campus when the drama was going down and hearing so many female classmates proclaim that Kavanaugh was a pig disgracing the Supreme Court. Where are they on Platner, the Democrats’ new wannabe working-class star? I do wonder.

Some Democrats today might say, “Well, we kicked Eric Swalwell to the curb,” after multiple women in April accused him of harassment and sexual assault. But the party had every incentive to do that now, though his alleged sexual impropriety was one of the worst-kept secrets in Washington for years. With a crowded Democratic field heading into a jungle primary for California governor, Democrats feared a scenario in which Swalwell advanced to the general election against a Republican, who undoubtedly would unearth his opponent’s dirty laundry at the worst possible moment — or, worse, a scenario in which that crowded field allowed two Republicans to advance. Thus, getting Swalwell out of the competition was a strategic play for Democrats, not a come-to-Jesus moment.

In their defense, Democrats can argue, and have done so, that Republicans haven’t exactly platformed peaches lately. But the difference is that Republicans generally did not, over the last decade, throw their weight behind a societal witch hunt asserting that sexual misconduct by men was widespread and that allegations of it required immediate acceptance regardless of the evidence.

It was once a crime in Democrats’ eyes to default to skepticism when a woman came forward with accusations of abuse against a man, as they insisted that victims incur great emotional cost to do so. The same logic has not applied to Graham Platner, whose indiscretions could fill a book, for the simple fact that he is their imperfect tool with which to recover power.

If the standard established during the Me Too era is conditional, then Me Too is dead. Oddly enough, it was the Democrats who killed it.