[Pod] Values or Power
Are we committed to the truth or will we think only about power for our team?
In the past few weeks, the story surrounding the sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade against Joe Biden has started to pick up some steam in the mainstream media.
By now many outlets have gone through and detailed the facts of the allegations, so I won’t waste too much time describing the situation, but I encourage you to take a look at the timeline of events released by Axios which is pretty comprehensive.
Basically, Tara Reade, a former staffer for Joe Biden in the ‘90s, has recently come forward with a sexual assault allegation against Uncle Joe; she claims that Joe Biden pinned her to the wall in a relatively public place after being asked to deliver a gym bag to him and that he, for lack of a better phrase, ‘grabbed her by the pussy’ (penetrated her with his fingers).
At this point, we have seen multiple corroborated sources surface including her brother, who she told at the time, a clip of her mother who called Larry King’s show in the 90s mentioning the incident, a neighbor who recalls that Tara told them about what happened within a few years of the incident, some staffers who recalled her sudden reassignment in duties, and court documents where her ex-husband testified citing how this event affected her and their marriage.
This issue doesn’t really affect my decision in November, I already had many problems with Biden as a candidate before this, but this moment has shed some light on some blatant hypocrisy from some prominent #MeToo movement figures and public officials that is definitely worth highlighting.
First, I think we can address the mainstream media who chose to cover this and use their vast array of resources so late; Tara had come forward a year ago has been trying to be heard throughout the primary but no-one at any reputable outlet thought it would be prudent to investigate a sexual assault allegation against the former vice president who is running to get power again, especially in the age of #MeToo. It would have been important to vet this claim during the primary so Democratic voters could weigh their options while they had them, but conveniently the New York Times released their first story on this 3 days after Bernie dropped which was already weeks after Tara gave her first public interviews on Katie Halper’s show and Rising.
We also have to call out the Democrats who were running against Joe Biden for not picking up on these issues and making clear distinctions between them and Biden. Elizabeth Warren was disappointing in particular because of how good we know she can be; she had a great line in that infamous debate addressing Bloomberg’s sexism.
“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women ‘fat broads’ and ‘horse-faced lesbians,’” she said. “And no, I’m not talking about Donald Trump, I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”
Tara did claim that she approached the Warren campaign last year and only got back a form to fill out, so one could say that the Warren campaign could have pushed this story forward to be investigated, but because all of this reporting and vetting wasn’t done then, I can understand why they didn’t take it on board so quickly. But now that we have all of these reports that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence, where’s the outrage? She called out Bloomberg for something he said, and now we have a credible accusation of what Biden may have done to this woman, and yet we are being fair to him and not calling this into question?
Putting the political context aside, what’s most disappointing about the way this story has been handled by the media and most Democrats is that it completely betrays the standard that these very same people had a few years ago when the GOP was ramming through Brett Kavanaugh. The media had wall to wall coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings which fuelled the rise of the Me Too movement. For Biden, crickets until Ryan Grim and other independent journalists dragged them kicking and screaming to cover the story.
Democratic leaders like Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand took definitive stances for Dr. Ford’s case which had much less corroborated evidence and now have all been quick to cover for the former Vice President. Stacey Abrams drew a pretty clear line in 2018 with statements like the one in this tweet.
On the other hand, when Stacey was first asked about Tara’s allegation in her interview on CNN, she was quick to use the Biden campaign talking point that cited the original New York Times article which first covered Tara’s claims. The Times had to come out a week later correcting the false claims the Biden campaign was distributing to his surrogates which gave the impression that the Times definitively said this didn’t happen.
I really have begun to question what Stacey’s values are because she set a clear standard in 2018 but was very quick to toe the line for Biden this time around, likely because she is on the short-list for becoming his VP. I would expect if she was applying the same standard she applied in Dr. Ford’s case, she would be able to be honest and take even a neutral approach, asking for media to investigate further, rather than quickly piling on to the ardent denials coming out of the Biden campaign. This to me is certainly a case where we have more than “even a hint of impropriety,” and this primary technically isn’t over, democrats could replace Uncle Joe in the convention, so I would take her advice and say we “pause … rather than rush forward.” She has made a choice to compromise her supposed values in exchange for potential power, so honestly, I don’t know how much I can trust what she says and any standard she will set going forward.
The starkest example of hypocrisy came from Kirsten Gillibrand; her statements in 2018 speak for themselves.
I believe Dr. Blasey Ford because she’s telling the truth. And I know it by her story, we know it by the fact that she told her therapist 5 years ago, it was documented at the time, we have the therapist notes. She told her husband. This is a trauma she’s been dealing with her whole life. … She told a friend a year ago, she told a reporter before Dr. Kavanaugh was ever named. These are the hallmarks of truth.
She also was famous for being the person who spearheaded the internal democratic campaign to push Sen. Al Franken out for the allegations leveled at him regarding his “groping during photos.”
Regarding the accusations leveled against Joe Biden though she said:
I stand by Vice President Biden. He has devoted his life to supporting women and he has vehemently denied this allegation.
So for Dr.Ford accusing Brett Kavanaugh, therapist notes and corroboration from her husband represented the “hallmarks of truth,” but Tara Reade’s corroboration from her brother, mother, friend, neighbor and even former staffers, as well as court documents where her husband also identified the trauma do not? So Al Franken’s groping photos and accusations are enough to push him out of congress but the accusations from several women that Uncle Joe had inappropriately touched, hugged, and kissed them warrants no criticism?
It seems that when the tables were turned, mainstream Democrats were quick to abandon their #MeToo values so that they could get their guy back in power. We can now clearly see that to them, this movement was really just a hashtag to be used for political convenience and that they set a standard that was crushed in the face of the intense fear of a Trump re-election.
I would hope they’d have the integrity to be honest like Linda Hirshman who’s opinion piece in the New York Times was titled, I believe Tara Reade. I’m voting for Joe Biden anyway. It’s okay to say you are going to support Joe Biden and also acknowledge that Tara’s evidence meets the bar you set two years ago; it’s only fair for those women who you claimed we wanted to protect. Why give the powerful man a pass this time?
Finally, we should examine the response from that powerful man and his campaign. From the beginning, the campaign came out with a blanket denial, not only denying that this ever happened but denying that any kind of harassment was ever reported among Biden staffers. When the media finally decided to ask Joe about the allegation he adamantly denied it and went further to say that those who believe Tara shouldn’t vote for him; if there’s one thing Biden has been really good at it is telling people not to vote for him. This certainly is an interesting stance given that Joe himself said back in 2018 that “for a woman to come forward in the glaring light of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.” It’s also important to note that the NYT covertly altered a line in its original story after its publication, and according to Times editor Dan Baquet, this was done essentially at the behest of the Biden campaign.
I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct. And that’s not what the sentence was intended to say.
The sentence read “The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden; ” but before the omission, it went on to say “beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” Does the Biden campaign have something to hide?
Personally, given the evidence that I’ve seen, I do believe Tara. I generally do agree with the principles set forward during the #MeToo movement that we should give the benefit of the doubt to women because this harassment and assault is happening a lot more than we know. It’s not hard for me to understand that Joe Biden grew up in an era way before #MeToo in which abuse and harassment were far more common, rampant, and not looked down upon like today; e.g. ‘boys will be boys.’ We also know that oftentimes when it is a very powerful man committing the harassment or assault, like in the case of Harvey Weinstein, these truths can become ‘open secrets;’ the victims aren’t the only ones who are usually reluctant to publicly address these issues. And finally, it’s hard to look past the awkward touching and kissing of younger girls he’s done on TV and his consistent record of lying that I documented in a previous episode. If there’s anyone in Congress that I’d expect to be creepy, abuse his power over women, and lie about it, its Joe Biden.
Now obviously there is still reporting being done and Tara’s claims will continue to be vetted, so we can’t know for sure what happened there, but we can make sure that we respect those women who believed in the supposed progress we made with the #MeToo movement and hold Biden to the same aggressive standard we held Brett Kavanaugh to.
I hope that all of us who are stuck knowing that we need to support Biden in order to defeat Trump understand that pointing out Joe’s flaws isn’t necessarily going to ‘help Trump;’ we can be honest about who Joe is and what he’s done and at the same time be honest about the need for him to beat Trump to avoid another round of chaos and incompetence in the Whitehouse. We should probably be grateful that this story came out now and not closer to election day when Trump could have seized on it.
Unfortunately, our media and mainstream Democratic representatives seem to be intent on choosing power over their supposed values and will do their best to polish Joe Biden’s image; anything to defeat Trump. Going forward I will certainly be more skeptical of the standards these people set and the expectations I have of them to remain true to the values that they claim to have.
This week, I brought on my first guest! Djovan Henriques of the Belligerent Nature Podcast joined me to talk about this story a bit over a month after he had me on his show to talk about Tara’s initial claims as they were first coming to light. Thank you Djovan for having me on and coming on! After the break, I will play our conversation for you.