Time has named #MeToo its ‘Person of the Year’ and every other day the hashtag lynch mob drags someone else in front of the spotlight. The accusations range from rape to harsh words. The evidence is hearsay. The target is shamed, fired from every job he ever held and purged from polite society.
Some are guilty. Some might be innocent. But we’ll never know because there’s no investigation. The time frame between accusation and purge is hours or days when it takes your average HR department a week to file a form. Just like in every totalitarian leftist state, the accusation is enough.
And then it’s on to the next one.
There’s nothing American about #MeToo. It’s the revolutionary justice of a leftist purge where random political violence against ideological enemies is used to heal social ills. If there’s poverty, shoot a few rich men. If there’s unhappiness, string up some priests. And if there’s sexual assault, destroy whichever names are passed along by a few influential, but enigmatic figures, Ronan Farrow, Yashar Ali, with ambiguous backgrounds and agendas, through pressure campaigns aimed at their employers.
And don’t ask any questions. Only bad people ask questions. Only bad people want proof. Only bad people don’t instantly believe an accusation. And you’re either with #MeToo or with its targets.
But maybe we should start asking a few questions.
Six years ago, I was stopped by a reporter and asked if I believed a rape victim.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund who was likely to be the next president of France, had been arrested for sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Local tabloids and cable news quickly descended on the case of the suave powerful man who had assaulted a refugee hotel maid who had been gang raped in her own African country.
The French reporter who accosted me asked me if I believed the victim. He wanted to know what Americans thought should happen to Strauss-Kahn. I told him that in this country we put people on trial and we get all the facts before we punish them.
France didn’t wait for all the facts.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s political career ended. Sarkozy became the next President of France. And there were always rumors that the whole thing had been a setup by his political opponents. Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid, had managed to lie convincingly about almost everything. She had even lied about soldiers in Guinea gang raping her and what she had done right after the attack.
Finally, prosecutors gave up.
“In virtually every substantive interview with prosecutors, despite entreaties to simply be truthful, she has not been truthful,” they wrote about their own witness. “The nature and number of the complainant’s falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt.”
She lied.
Like many of the accused men, Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared to have little control over his appetites. But his reputation had been destroyed based on an accusation.
And an accusation alone should not be enough to destroy a person.
In the longest and most expensive trial in American history, members of the McMartin family were prosecuted for Satanic child abuse. The Los Angeles case dragged on for 16 years. The whole thing proved to be groundless.
During the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow and many other leftists championed the case of Jamie Leigh Jones who worked for a Hailburton subsidiary in Baghdad’s Green Zone. Jones claimed to have been gang raped by her fellow employees. After 6 years, the case completely collapsed.
The University of Virginia’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity won millions from Rolling Stone after being vandalized and harassed because of the magazine’s recent rape hoax article. ‘Jackie”, the woman in question, had made the whole thing up. But by then the witch hunt had already been unleashed.
That’s why Believe All Women is a terrible idea.
