It has happened, the New York Times bubble of bullshit (BBS) has exploded over the front pages, and the webosphere and the public are given a rare glimpse into the gory innards of the BBS and the mainstream narrative machine that yawns thetale of tyranny and repression and cultivates the new left corporate agenda of newspeak – which decries the old school of journalism that masticates facts and information and history before expounding a point of view. Out with a splash, a great time to enjoy the insights and dwell on the writing that led to her ill-repute and final resignation.

Yes, the story is a sensation as FoxNews Reports and the New York Times flounders as the veil is lifted, as a result of an accidental journalist being recruited to the post, and to resist the pressure of CANCEL Culture and conformity and normity, which isn’t even a word yet!…could someone speak to that, the emerging new language of conformist main sewer press propaganda and mind-numbing news machine.

Radical way back in 2017 to break ranks and ponder and postulate the MeToo movement, a courageous move that cemented her foot in the museum of rare and exquisite journalism.

(Readers are WARNED that the views expressed by this journalist may offend, awaken or challenge your acceptance of the BBS machine, biting the hand of the ass that feeds her.)

Ever since Eve gave Adam that forbidden fruit, demonizing and disbelieving women has been the planet-wide policy. You don’t need to reach back to the Pleistocene to see the truth of that.

“You’re just a child,” Roy Moore is accused of saying to Beverly Young Nelson, age 16 at the time, when he molested her in his car. “I am the district attorney of Etowah County, and if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you.”

Things have not changed much since 1603, when Shakespeare presaged the conversation between that Alabama district attorney and his teenage target. In “Measure for Measure,” Angelo, a government official who is a strong proponent of his society’s morality code, tries to get a young woman named Isabella to give up her virginity to him in exchange for pardoning her brother, who is on death row for having violated that code by having sex outside marriage.

Isabella calls out the vile quid pro quo: “Or with an outstretch’d throat I’ll tell the world aloud/What man thou art.”

Ever since Eve gave Adam that forbidden fruit, demonizing and disbelieving women has been the planet-wide policy. You don’t need to reach back to the Pleistocene to see the truth of that.

“You’re just a child,” Roy Moore is accused of saying to Beverly Young Nelson, age 16 at the time, when he molested her in his car. “I am the district attorney of Etowah County, and if you tell anyone about this, no one will ever believe you.”

Things have not changed much since 1603, when Shakespeare presaged the conversation between that Alabama district attorney and his teenage target. In “Measure for Measure,” Angelo, a government official who is a strong proponent of his society’s morality code, tries to get a young woman named Isabella to give up her virginity to him in exchange for pardoning her brother, who is on death row for having violated that code by having sex outside marriage.

Isabella calls out the vile quid pro quo: “Or with an outstretch’d throat I’ll tell the world aloud/What man thou art.”

This — despite, or perhaps because of, the predator in the Oval Office — is a cultural watershed.

The biggest sign of it in my life has been the conversations I’ve had with friends and family. While we women revisit our sexual histories, the men I know — old and young, liberal and conservative — are doing the same from the flip side. An older conservative friend told me that he was considering reaching out to a girl he went on a date with in high school to apologize for kissing her in the car. She didn’t say no, and she kissed him back. But he worries that she felt pressured. A close friend, a progressive, told me about a college hookup he regrets. He is spending time wondering about how the woman thinks about the experience: Did it leave a scar? Or is it arrogant to even assume she remembers his name?

This reckoning would never have happened without Gretchen Carlson and Lara Setrakian and Selma Blair and Rose McGowan and Kyle Godfrey-Ryan and the hundreds of others who told reporters their stories. They deserve our praise and our gratitude.

And hasn’t the hunt been exhilarating? There’s no small chance that by the time you finish this article, another mammoth beast of prey, maybe multiple, will be stalked and felled.

The huntresses’ war cry — “believe all women” — has felt like a bracing corrective to a historic injustice. It has felt like a justifiable response to a system in which the crimes perpetrated against women — so intimate, so humiliating and so unlike any other — are so very difficult to prove.

But I also can’t shake the feeling that this mantra creates terrible new problems in addition to solving old ones.

In less than two months we’ve moved from uncovering accusations of criminal behavior (Harvey Weinstein) to criminalizing behavior that we previously regarded as presumptuous and boorish (Glenn Thrush). In a climate in which sexual mores are transforming so rapidly, many men are asking: If I were wrongly accused, who would believe me?

I know the answer that many women would give — are giving — is: Good. Be scared. We have been scared for forever. It’s your turn for some sleepless nights. They’ll say: If some innocent men go down in the effort to tear down the patriarchy, so be it.

Emily Lindin, a columnist at Teen Vogue, summed up this view concisely last week on Twitter. “I’m actually not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations,” she wrote. “If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.”

Ms. Lindin was widely criticized, but say this much for her: At least she had the guts to publicly articulate a view that so many women are sharing with one another in private. Countless innocent women have been robbed of justice, friends of mine insist, so why are we agonizing about the possibility of a few good men going down?

I think the worry is justified. And it’s not because I don’t get the impulse to burn it all down. It’s because I think that “believing all women” can rapidly be transmogrified into an ideological orthodoxy that will not serve women at all.

If the past few weeks have shown us the unique horrors some women have faced, the answer to it can’t be a stringent new solidarity that further limits the definition of womanhood and lumps our highly diverse experiences together simply based on our gender. I don’t think that helps women. Or men.

I believe that the “believe all women” vision of feminism unintentionally fetishizes women. Women are no longer human and flawed. They are Truth personified. They are above reproach.

I believe that it’s condescending to think that women and their claims can’t stand up to interrogation and can’t handle skepticism. I believe that facts serve feminists far better than faith. That due process is better than mob rule.

Maybe it will happen tomorrow or maybe next week or maybe next month. But the Duke lacrosse moment, the Rolling Stone moment, will come. A woman’s accusation will turn out to be grossly exaggerated or flatly untrue. And if the governing principle of this movement is still an article of faith, many people will lose their religion. They will tear down all accusers as false prophets. And we will go back to a status quo in which the word of the Angelos is more sacred than the word of the Isabellas.

There are limits to relying on “believe all women” as an organizing political principle. We are already starting to see them.

Just yesterday The Washington Post reported that a woman named Jaime Phillips approached the paper with a story about Roy Moore. She claimed that in 1992, when she was 15 , he impregnated her and that he drove her to Mississippi to have an abortion. Not a lick of her story is true.

It appears that Ms. Phillips was collaborating with Project Veritas, an organization that tries to expose mainstream media “bias” through undercover operations, and that the group’s intent was to embarrass The Post — and, ultimately, to discredit Mr. Moore’s other accusers.

The mission failed spectacularly, thanks to the professionalism of The Post’s reporters, but it’s clear that Project Veritas was exploiting this moment. It’s also not hard to imagine how this episode might have played out if Ms. Phillips had announced her accusations on, say, Twitter. Or even if she’d taken her story to a less fastidious news organization. In this climate, it would have caught on like wild fire.

That’s exactly what happened, at least in the right-wing media bubble, in the case of an Al Franken accuser, Melanie Morgan. There are now several women who have accused Senator Franken of groping, but in the days immediately after Leeann Tweeden’s original charge, Ms. Morgan, a radio host, claimed she was “stalked and harassed” by him after an appearance in 2000 on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.” The internet lit up with the fact that another woman had come forward to accuse Mr. Franken.

Breitbart and Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh seized on her story immediately. And no wonder. Melanie Morgan has praised Sean Hannity’s “tenacious search for the truth in the Roy Moore sex allegation story.” Melanie Morgan has said that Bill O’Reilly was fired for “dubious reasons.” Melanie Morgan is a birther.

She also claims that Mr. Franken “scared the living hell out of me” … because he called her three times. Do you believe that Mr. Franken stalked Ms. Morgan? I don’t.

The zeal of “believe all women” can also lead down a strangely pedantic path, in which women are told how to properly understand their own pasts. The same year that Ms. Morgan claims Mr. Franken stalked her, Arianna Huffington did a photo shoot for The New York Post with the then-comedian, in which he is pictured grabbing her butt and her breast. Now those photos are being trotted out as evidence of his sexual predilections. An anonymous source from the shoot said: “Arianna was pushing his hands away. He was groping her. There was some fun attached to it, but she wasn’t enjoying it. She definitely told him to stop and pushed him away.”

But Ms. Huffington says that’s not true. The notion that she was being assaulted, she tweeted, “trivializes sexual harassment because he was no more ‘groping’ me than I was ‘strangling’ him in the photo.” The disturbing assumption behind the blind item is that Ms. Huffington was necessarily the victim because of her gender. In fact, as she reports, she was in on the joke and grabbing Mr. Franken right back.

Arianna Huffington isn’t an uncomplicated figure: She has been accused of overlooking sexual misconduct at her company. But do we not believe that she knows what happened to her?

From time immemorial, men have been allowed to just be people while women have had to be women. I thought feminism was supposed to liberate us from this flattening of our identity. It’s supposed to allow us to just be people, too.

What we owe all people, including women, is to listen to them and to respect them and to take them seriously. But we don’t owe anyone our unthinking belief.

“Trust but verify” may not have the same ring as “believe all women.” But it’s a far better policy.

Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) is a staff editor and writer for the Opinion section.

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The original article in NY Times, Ads and ALL.

Cover image sourced #MeToo Movement in South Korea

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