caitlinjohnstone | I’ve
been avoiding writing much about Tara Reade, for a lot of reasons.
Firstly I’m a survivor of multiple rapes and it brings up a lot of ouch
for me, especially since whenever I write about rape as a problem I
always get a deluge of highly triggered men (and sometimes one or two
highly traumatized women) calling me a man-hater and saying all kinds of
nasty things to me. Secondly I’ve been trying
not to spend too much time on the details of an election we all know is
fake anyway between two establishment candidates we already know are
deeply depraved.
But
mostly I avoid the subject because it’s just so goddamn gross. It’s
gross to watch liberals going around pretending they believe that Handsy
Uncle Hair Sniffer would never dream of shoving his fingers into a
woman without her consent. It’s gross watching the language of leftism
being borrowed to defend pure, relentless victim smearing. It’s gross
watching people who’ve built their political identities around
pretending to care about women try to spin these allegations as Reade
being dishonest for partisan reasons, when in reality that’s exactly
what they themselves are doing.
Due
to my experiences with and sensitivity to the subject matter, going
through this stuff feels kind of like getting punched in the privates
over and over again. There are smears everywhere, from the establishment
narrative managers to their brainwashed rank-and-file herd. Yesterday
some “KHive” asshole told me that Reade is mentally ill and talking about her experience will probably drive her to suicide, citing a baseless smear by McResistance pundit Sally Albright as his evidence. There’s a Twitter thread with thousands of shares
going around right now where some liberal combed through all Reade’s
old tweets highlighting typos she made and claiming they show Reade
tweeting “in a Russian accent”.
It sucks because if we’re to build a healthy world we’re going to have
to get rid of all the people who shouldn’t be in power, and the very
first lot we should eliminate are the ones who abuse their power to
assault the sexuality of other human beings. If you use your power to
rape people, you will with absolute certainty use it to do other
unconscionable things as well, so eliminating those who do so is the
first step toward health. That’s step one, and we
can’t even get there, because blind partisan hackery turns
pussyhat-wearing liberals into a bunch of snarling male supremacists.
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