Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
The Slap Not Heard Round the World
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The Slap Not Heard Round the World

Was Me Too was nothing more than politics as usual?

When the New York Times asked professional women if they’d ever been sexually assaulted, I answered them, and my story appeared just before the Harvey Weinstein allegations broke. It was Trump’s Access Hollywood tape that turned our world upside down. We’d convinced ourselves that America had just elected a “racist” and a “rapist.”

As a Democrat, you have to be willing to lie. Elections can be won if everyone is on board with the same lie. We lie about our candidates. We lie about the opposition. We lie about ourselves. Otherwise, we’d show weakness. We’d be thrust back into the era of disunity, feckless candidates, and elections we could not win. Oh, but the new Democratic Party knows better.

I lived those lies for years, pretending inwardly that even if it wasn’t the whole truth, it was for the greater good, so it was okay.

When the story broke with a credible accusation that Doug Emhoff, the “wife guy” of Kamala Harris, slapped a woman so hard she turned around, it might have become the kind of story that dominated the headlines for weeks. Only in ordinary times would the press chase a story like that. These are not ordinary times.

If I were still a party loyalist, I, too, would be dismissing and debunking the serious allegation that Doug Emhoff went to a glitzy event at the Hotel du Cap, drank too much, and assaulted his girlfriend of three months because he thought she was flirting with another man.

I would have cheered Jen Psaki on as she helped prop up the image of Emhoff as the shining example of men who stand behind women and support them, not as the guy who allegedly paid off the nanny he knocked up to keep her quiet.

And maybe that’s why the Republicans can’t win elections. They aren’t willing to do what it takes to win. They aren’t willing to come together as one unbreakable chain that goes along with every lie.

If only those who dissent at the National Review or the Wall Street Journal were fully on board with pretending Trump wasn’t who he is - a deeply flawed candidate who happens to be tough enough to go up against the machine. Ah, but the machine didn’t get there by accident. It got there because everyone agreed that lying was the better path forward.

Look at all the trouble the Bernie Sanders supporters caused when they dared to tell the truth about Hillary Clinton or at least talk about her flaws as a person and as a candidate. That resulted in Trump’s win. After that, everyone knew better. Even AOC. Even Bernie himself. Say nothing. Keep your head down. Go along with the lie.

After 2020, maybe even after 2016, the media became a willing participant. They might as well be working for the Democrats because someone still tells them what stories they can and can’t pursue. And as they attempt to bury the Doug Emhoff abuse allegations like they buried the Hunter Biden laptop story because they worry it’s an October surprise to hurt the Harris campaign, any shred of credibility they might have had left is gone.

The accusation against Doug Emoff is serious. There were witnesses. The victim told her friends it happened way before Harris ran for president.

The story has been reported extensively. The victim and witnesses wish to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Still, one thing is true beyond any doubt: the image the media is putting forth about Emhoff is, at best, dishonest and, at worst, a blatant lie.

The Daily Mail’s story doesn’t name names, but it reveals how the victim might have been troubled by the hypocrisy on display by Kamala Harris during the Kavanaugh hearings. That was the first time the victim told at least one of her friends about the assault. It’s not hard to imagine why.

Harris repeatedly treated Kavanaugh as though he was already a convicted rapist. They did everything they could to block his confirmation, but in so doing, they put their credibility on the line. Because now they were and supposedly still are the party of BELIEVE WOMEN.

The protests outside the Supreme Court, the screaming women inside the Court, the media was there for all of it. One story after another, they couldn’t get enough. They wanted to block his confirmation too.

The Kavanaugh accusations were 30 years old. This one isn’t. It happened in 2012. Harris would marry Doug Emhoff just two years later.

Emhoff’s victim could have pressed charges, and a prosecutor like Harris would have taken those charges seriously, but now, no one is saying a word. The BELIEVE WOMEN brigade has gone silent.

What will Harris do, continue to lie about Emhoff once they move into the White House? That he’s some upstanding role model for men? Is that the plan? Are there more women that might come forward? How big is this story going to get?

Already, a new story has bloomed about accusations of misogyny and discrimination in the workplace while Emhoff was married to Harris. No harassment or assault has been alleged, but it’s all a little creepy that he always liked to hire and travel with pretty young women.

Already, we know this is a guy who couldn’t keep it in his pants and had an affair with the nanny - what else is in his past that might rear its ugly head, and how will the media feel that they ignored this story?

These are their rules. This is their language. They were the side that said zero tolerance for abusers. They were the side that said BELIEVE WOMEN.

And we all know it went too far. We know that it helped cause the crisis of men in America. The fear, the hesitation, the doubt, the worry that any of them might, at any time, be accused because any time anyone is accused, we’re all supposed to believe them, right? Well, not this time.

I can imagine how Doug Emhoff’s victim must have felt watching Harris defend Christine Blasey Ford, say she believed her, and how Kavanaugh was not a fit nominee because of her accusation. I can also imagine why it stayed with her. As many relationships as I’ve had, some of them with abusive men, no one has ever slapped me across the face, and you bet I’d remember that.

This was not in private. This was in public, making it even more humiliating. He supposedly did this in the valet line after the Amfar gala at the Hotel du Cap in Cannes. Who knows who else might have seen it? But to attend an event like that requires getting dressed up - hair, makeup, heels. Men who hit women often do it when they feel powerless. She probably looked beautiful that night, and it made him feel small. Word has it, she hit him back, at least.

It just so happens I was at the Cannes Film Festival that year. I attended an event with Harvey Weinstein. It wasn’t the AmFar gala where Emhoff was a plus-one to the woman now accusing him of abuse. But I remember what it was like before everything changed. Emhoff’s victim would no doubt remember, too.

Of course, none of this has been proven, and Emhoff has a right to the presumption of innocence. There is no excuse for the media, however, to have ignored this story as they’ve done just to do the bidding of the Democrats. It is something they will regret one day.

“But I’m not voting for Doug Emhoff.”

So said one of my Democrat friends, like it doesn’t matter. LIE, LIE, LIE. They know it matters because if the situation happened in reverse, it would dominate the headlines for weeks. It would be fodder for morning shows and cable news. It would be sanctimonious monologues on Maddow.

Look at how much ink has been spilled on these men and their wives.

Flying a flag upside down or denying the results of an election is nothing compared to the physical assault of a woman by a man, and every honest person on the Left knows that. What should bother the Democrats and the press is how they’re treating those allegations now, how suddenly they no longer BELIEVE WOMEN.

All the power women attained to be believed vanished instantly because they needed to win the election. Great, maybe they can now bring back Senator Al Franken after Harris and others in the Senate pushed him out with no due process.

Doesn’t the hypocrisy bother them even a little bit? Here is what Harris sent out in September of this year on the Violence Against Women Act:

Was it all just empty words?

Emhoff denied it, but Trump has denied that he raped E. Jean Carroll, and none of that matters to the Left because they believe women. Right?

If we had ethical media, the Doug Emhoff story would be the focus of their attention because it says so much about who Harris is, how she has defined her career, and what the Democrats say they stand for.

It comes at an enormous cost to them and is the main reason why more and more people are turning away from traditional media and toward more independent outlets like Megyn Kelly and others.

In their desire to defeat Trump at all costs, the Democrats and their obedient press corps sold out every principle they once held. But this one cuts the deepest.

The same “well-funded cabal” that manipulated the media narrative throughout the Summer of 2020 around the protests and COVID is clearly running the same game now, ensuring no “October surprise” will derail the Harris campaign.

For many of us, 2020 was the moment we could no longer tolerate lies, deception, and delusions just to win an election. We had to break free and find some kind of truth, and now I’m left wondering whether any of it meant anything at all. Or was it really just politics?

At the very least, the Democrats and the press would be forced to make a statement about domestic violence. Instead, they’re paving the way for a potential abuser to be the First Gentleman of the first woman President of the United States.

They believe that if they keep it out of the headlines, they can continue to trick the American people into voting for them one more time. But the truth has a funny way of bobbing to the surface like a dead body after a rainstorm. That’s the kind of thing you can only hide for so long.

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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com