RadixJournal - The MeToo Mythology

00:00:00.000 but my fault no problem oh uh so welcome back uh whenever you're here we talk about sexual 0.97

00:00:09.200 harassment yeah it's a real rape party well i've heard that the uh the cold hand of me too has 0.91

00:00:16.260 actually touched you mr tracy that you you have been accused of vile acts by a uh entity known 1.00

00:00:24.620 as Mr. Pussy. 0.99

00:00:27.020 Yeah, I'm not even going to talk about that. 0.99

00:00:28.600 It's not worth talking about. I'm not going to credit

00:00:30.680 it. I mean, it's just so stupid. 1.00

00:00:32.500 So I'm not either going to address it. 1.00

00:00:34.480 Okay. Well, I'm just saying, if you can't

00:00:36.580 trust a man named Mr. Pussy, I mean, 1.00

00:00:38.460 who can you trust? Just leave 1.00

00:00:40.580 it there. It's just a joke. So it's not even

00:00:42.580 worth discussing. Okay.

00:00:44.960 Okay. So

00:00:46.540 I wanted to talk about a few

00:00:48.760 things. Plattner himself,

00:00:51.060 obviously, and the

00:00:52.680 allegations and where the democrats are and i sort of wanted to go a little bit deeper in terms of

00:00:59.840 the morality of me too and and what that means because i i don't i don't want to just say like

00:01:07.260 oh it's it's mean women who are attacking their ex-boyfriends that that might be the case if

00:01:13.380 we're honest but i i don't that's not deep enough you know it we need to like really understand

00:01:19.040 what's happening but so we can go we can expand you know kind of later in the conversation but

00:01:24.360 i always think we have to retire the me too coinage at this point because it doesn't really

00:01:27.460 capture whatever is going on in this present era i mean we're nearly a decade removed from me too

00:01:32.860 at this point yeah and i think whatever has given rise to the platner thing and related things

00:01:40.300 recently i think it's a little bit too simple and even lazy to just kind of refer to it in

00:01:48.020 shorthand as somehow a manifestation of me too like it's not harvey weinstein being reported

00:01:53.460 on the new york times and then there's like a cascade of people from the entertainment industry

00:01:56.920 and whatever who get called out because like me too was like oh you were abused by this person

00:02:03.840 me too or right i mean who cares what the providence of it is necessarily but i mean

00:02:09.180 sure there's i guess there's a me too lineage here but it is something that's distinctive that

00:02:14.220 i wouldn't want to be too blase about well let's let's put platner aside for the moment then

00:02:20.640 because and also you've talked about platner at length so let's go in a in a different place so

00:02:25.560 i i did do did a little background research me too originated as a hashtag uh actually 20 years

00:02:34.520 ago and it was done by a woman i think rather genuinely who was working with um rape survivors

00:02:41.580 and then it resurfaced again with alissa milano and harvey weinstein so it's even in 2026 people

00:02:51.380 are still kind of refuting alissa milano in absentia based on like a handful of tweets of

00:02:56.640 from november of 2017 right it's kind of like a bizarre redundant cycle but i i guess maybe we

00:03:03.600 should make this distinction because i i don't know enough about the woman who was actually

00:03:08.520 using this hashtag at the early days of social media. 0.99

00:03:11.260 And I'll just assume that she was like a women's rights NGO person.

00:03:14.680 Yeah.

00:03:14.920 And I'll just assume that she was acting with very genuine motives and it was about real

00:03:19.620 survivors and helping them out.

00:03:21.180 You know, I don't obviously have any problem with that, but it emerged as sort of social

00:03:27.240 media outrage.

00:03:28.660 And but I think it gets to this bigger moral problem that we have.

00:03:35.800 It's used politically against Donald Trump.

00:03:38.520 against, uh, Epstein, Weinstein, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it is intensely political,

00:03:46.060 but I think it gets to this bigger issue, which is how can we be moral today? Because we're moral

00:03:54.700 beings. You know, we want to think that we're on the right side. We're, we're not a bunch of

00:04:00.040 psychopathic, uh, you assholes. We, we want to feel like we're doing good. The, the reality is, 0.99

00:04:06.840 is that we live in a situation

00:04:08.480 that has been this way

00:04:09.600 throughout my entire adult life.

00:04:11.800 And that is you date online,

00:04:14.800 you date through Bumble or Tinder,

00:04:17.240 you meet people at bars,

00:04:19.120 you have some one night stands,

00:04:21.880 you have a relationship,

00:04:23.320 maybe it's the third date,

00:04:24.560 maybe it's the fourth, 0.73

00:04:25.480 you have sex,

00:04:26.720 you move into each with each other

00:04:28.460 before marriage, etc.

00:04:30.900 We are, let's just say,

00:04:33.100 lax in comparison to other points

00:04:36.340 and world history and we don't want to give this up but then we also want to be moral and so we've

00:04:43.800 kind of like i guess what i'm arguing is that like puritanism and victorian morality etc has sort of

00:04:52.840 found a way through and it's entered our modern age where we we are like puritanically judging

00:05:02.420 people while not giving up on the background that has led to problems like Graham found

00:05:11.380 himself in. 0.71

00:05:12.900 A girlfriend, maybe a side chick, says she wants a butt massage and he comes over and 0.96

00:05:20.340 yeah, I've heard of millions of situations like this. 0.69

00:05:24.480 I've been in situations like, I mean, it's just a gray area, but we're not willing, we

00:05:30.660 want to be puritan puritans but we're not willing to give up the historical background that is going

00:05:37.840 to cause problems like this so i i do you understand what i'm i think so maybe i could

00:05:43.400 address it this way which is that in the early days of me too what was seen as a quintessential

00:05:50.060 me too case or me too accusation would have to do with something sexually violative or harassing

00:06:00.300 that was alleged to have occurred in some sort of workplace setting, right?

00:06:04.800 So Harvey Weinstein was accused of doing things in his capacity as a movie producer

00:06:11.540 where he could exert power over younger women who were eager to flatter him

00:06:18.600 or curry favor with him.

00:06:22.220 And that was pretty much seen as the hallmark of Me Too, right?

00:06:26.240 Or the thing that the cultural adoption of Me Too style mores was supposed to remediate in some way.

00:06:37.660 Or like Matt Lauer, for example, the accusation with him, if memory serves, and I think this is correct.

00:06:45.320 I think there were several because, you know, you would get like a rollout of one after the next.

00:06:50.720 but it was about him having a woman come to his office

00:06:54.180 and there was an allegation that he had some remote locking device

00:06:57.340 to lock the door from a button under his desk or something.

00:07:00.200 I think that turned out to be not true, actually.

00:07:01.900 That was alleged and it was very sort of vivid

00:07:03.640 in terms of what it would signify.

00:07:05.080 Kind of like Aaron Stavro Blofeld or something.

00:07:07.180 Yeah, it was almost like what a Bond villain would do

00:07:09.540 before the final confrontation or something.

00:07:13.480 But he was using or alleged to have used his stature

00:07:17.980 in the unemployment hierarchy to solicit sexual liaisons with younger, attractive women.

00:07:29.120 Now, I'll make sort of a case, a qualified case for me too here in some respect, right?

00:07:35.480 I mean, it's not that far-fetched to kind of just have a roughly working assumption

00:07:43.380 that throughout the years, especially since women have entered the workplace en masse,

00:07:47.200 since only really like the 70s there have been situations you know where a uh a male boss

00:07:54.880 does seek to use whatever leverage or power or control might be conferred upon him by virtue

00:08:01.100 of that position to kind of cajole or entice or even prep even coerce at times women subordinates

00:08:09.760 into engaging in a sexual relationship with with him that they would not have otherwise wanted

00:08:14.520 or they weren't interested in.

00:08:15.860 Now, of course, there are situations

00:08:17.040 where maybe that power discrepancy

00:08:19.760 or power imbalance could have been something 0.97

00:08:21.400 that a woman would have found genuinely attractive 1.00

00:08:24.640 or was part of the package

00:08:26.140 that she found attractive about the man

00:08:28.600 and then had done so willingly,

00:08:30.540 even though the new norm became

00:08:32.320 wherever a power imbalance of that kind exists,

00:08:36.580 consent cannot be legitimately obtained

00:08:39.920 and the relationship itself is sort of violative.

00:08:43.120 So that kind of removed a whole category of potential like mating partners or

00:08:47.980 a mate situations whereby mates could encounter one another.

00:08:52.640 But,

00:08:52.920 you know,

00:08:53.240 on the other hand,

00:08:54.000 yeah, 0.64

00:08:54.140 I'm sure there were situations where like a woman did feel a coerced or or

00:08:58.840 as though she was being compelled to do something through less than her own

00:09:06.020 free will or through less than something that she would have won.

00:09:09.520 I mean,

00:09:09.640 I know I've spoken to women who are not,

00:09:13.120 in any respect, zealously pro-MeToo

00:09:17.140 or liberal kind of ideologues,

00:09:21.180 even conservative women, frankly,

00:09:22.920 who attest to stories akin to this

00:09:25.180 that they have personally experienced

00:09:28.560 and I have no reason to doubt.

00:09:29.800 People think I don't believe anything

00:09:31.040 that a woman ever alleges,

00:09:32.140 but like, you know,

00:09:32.780 if I am able to evaluate

00:09:34.360 the totality of circumstances,

00:09:35.780 yeah, it's perfectly credible,

00:09:38.960 you know, some of these, you know,

00:09:40.120 just pranted anecdotes.

00:09:41.280 I've been told that I have no reason

00:09:42.240 to doubt the veracity of the women who told me in certain instances.

00:09:47.140 It's just that, you know, by and large, they wouldn't like make a whole political crusade

00:09:50.860 out of it or, you know, do like a Me Too medium post or like some kind of social media spectacle.

00:09:58.640 But nonetheless, I mean, it's something that clearly happened.

00:10:00.400 So if there was a way in which the inculcation of a new set of expectations or mores having

00:10:08.360 in association with Me Too, maybe at least created some kind of deterrent effect whereby

00:10:13.380 a genuinely exploitative situation in that category would be less likely to come about

00:10:22.720 because the male power possessor in the situation could feel that it carried certain risks that

00:10:33.840 maybe it wouldn't have carried or they wouldn't have been cognizant of carrying in the past.

00:10:37.380 i don't think that's altogether horrible i mean i think that's i think that could be beneficial

00:10:42.000 um but you know it's not but at the same time it doesn't mean that every

00:10:47.660 every uh downstream kind of reverberation of that shift in cultural mores is positive there

00:10:56.320 could be some negative ones but like and i under you but you understand i guess i'm saying that

00:10:59.660 because you understand as to why there was like in terms of like how to be moral right that's how

00:11:04.100 you sort of introduced this um yeah but i think that we are in a puritanical situation and i would

00:11:10.740 go a little bit further here i mean like yes i'm trying to run a thought experiment where i'm trying

00:11:15.200 to be as generous as possible toward like a pro a pro a pro me too sort of person here who's like

00:11:20.400 increasingly hard to find maybe in like circles that we're familiar with right um don't you think

00:11:27.280 there's something natural to the power imbalance like it isn't power and aphrodisiac and the words

00:11:33.580 of Henry Kissinger or something.

00:11:35.100 I mean, is it totally outrageous

00:11:37.280 that a professor would have a sexual liaison

00:11:41.040 over the summer with his students?

00:11:43.200 Like, isn't this the most natural thing in the world?

00:11:47.920 And the idea that that is treated as criminal, maybe,

00:11:53.420 but this like stepping way over the bounds,

00:11:56.760 I think just kind of shows that we're out of touch

00:12:00.460 with human nature and human history no i i agree i thought i thought you know i thought i had made

00:12:07.360 reasonably clear in my little soul before but i'll try to make even clearer okay that certainly

00:12:12.500 as human nature if nothing else would tell us there are situations or it's not exactly

00:12:20.660 uncommon for a woman to find as legitimately attractive whatever quote-unquote power imbalance

00:12:26.940 might exist between her and a certain male i'm just saying that come on i mean it's not

00:12:32.900 crazy that that could there could also be situations where the power imbalance was

00:12:40.160 leveraged in a way that a woman did not want to did not find attractive or did not find something

00:12:48.200 that would literally alert her that legitimately alert her to a male and it was kind of like

00:12:53.740 something that was exploitative and abusive especially if you're holding over her head

00:12:57.080 her standing within a corporate hierarchy or employment structure so that's all i'm saying

00:13:04.000 i'm not saying that um i'm not saying that i'm dismissing in any way the possibility that

00:13:08.900 the existence of such a power dynamic could consensually yeah result in a in a dynamic

00:13:15.300 that breeds some kind of mutual sexual attraction of course it could and yes it is true that one of

00:13:21.820 the new more

00:13:24.040 that seems to have been inculcated

00:13:25.500 you know

00:13:28.220 first in these sort of more

00:13:29.360 left liberal

00:13:30.640 sectors of societies, NGOs,

00:13:34.200 academia, what

00:13:36.060 have you, you know of course gradually

00:13:38.080 seeped into just kind of

00:13:40.180 mainline corporate culture as well

00:13:42.260 and

00:13:43.720 it is taken now as something presumptively

00:13:46.460 quote unquote problematic for there

00:13:48.100 to be a power dynamic whatever

00:13:50.000 and

00:13:51.580 um and and it's assumed that no consent could be freely given such that those these sorts of

00:14:00.920 relationships have to be barred um in the first instance by like hr codes and things yes and they

00:14:09.480 can even be used after the fact if there's like maybe uh some kind of ancillary political motive 1.00

00:14:16.980 should arrive to even allege something like assault because the idea is that even if a woman 1.00

00:14:25.260 in a situation where there seemed to be an impermissible power dynamic contemporaneously

00:14:31.300 believes herself to be freely consenting to something she is still endowed with you know the

00:14:40.260 right to claim after the fact that although she had given every any signal that you could think of

00:14:48.720 of like consent the existence of the exploitative power dynamic means that it was not in fact

00:14:55.200 consent freely given and therefore any sexual act that might have occurred in that context can be

00:15:01.560 justifiably characterized as something abusive or assaultive or even even rape and that's kind

00:15:09.300 of what happened with Eric Swalwell um yeah and you know which we can get into because it's

00:15:14.980 directly relevant to Plattner but um uh so so yes I mean I think uh you know

00:15:21.760 I I've uh I've I did a tweet that I think I might have subconsciously

00:15:28.360 uh plagiarized from an earlier tweet that I saw somewhere but um you know essentially I think I

00:15:34.440 think it's roughly true um i plagiarized like the concept anyway but i think i obviously would

00:15:40.960 phrase it differently but the idea was that like you know uh you know nine times out of ten

00:15:45.740 you're like it was some kind of like hortatory statement on twitter slash x where somebody you

00:15:51.680 know somebody who's like rightoid leaning is saying look everybody you're so obsessed with

00:15:58.400 what what is and is not problematic but if i surveyed like nine out of ten of your grandparents

00:16:03.580 as to how they met by contemporary standards it would be problematic and like not entertaining

00:16:08.860 you would never been born right right millions would not not exist if sex in the workplace or

00:16:16.240 sex age gap relationships authority gap relationships were outlawed you know and and you know maybe we

00:16:23.700 could change or something but it's just it's just that very fact seems to just be a argument case

00:16:31.120 closed about what we're doing and i think we're we are we're in this weird situation where we're

00:16:38.320 sort of criminalizing sex while everything is permitted i guess that's what i'm saying because

00:16:44.240 you know like previously in in human history if you had if a man say an adult had sex with his

00:16:54.320 secretary once, you know, they just did it. He could still be considered a moral, if flawed

00:17:03.360 human being if he, you know, maintained his marriage and had a family and so on. People

00:17:09.560 make mistakes. However, if he were homosexual, no, all bets are off. That's over. If he had 0.88

00:17:19.300 sex with interracially, you know, with a African-American woman. Absolutely. That's 0.99

00:17:25.120 totally immoral. But now we're in this sort of weird situation where we've decriminalized those

00:17:32.980 kinds of things, interracial relationships, interracial marriage, or of course, you know, 0.97

00:17:38.800 on board homosexuality, wonderful thing, et cetera. But that sex with the secretary has now 0.98

00:17:46.640 become criminalized and so we're we're sort of like it might have been it might have been it

00:17:52.260 might have been you know quote-unquote criminalized meaning not in a formalistic sense in the past

00:17:58.580 just in that infidelity marital infidelity might have been taken much more seriously

00:18:04.600 as a violation i mean not it's not true across the board right but like it happened i mean yeah

00:18:11.480 yeah or you know if you talk if you if you hear people whose parents were divorced when no-fault

00:18:18.260 divorce became more allow uh widespread or like when the laws were liberalized around divorce

00:18:24.520 right um you'll hear them talk about like they were the only kid they knew in their town who

00:18:30.600 had parents who were divorced so they felt that they were stigmatized or that they were carrying

00:18:34.840 around like a scarlet letter or something um and obviously that would be nowhere close to the case

00:18:41.160 now so i don't know i guess i'm just thinking it through in that if there was uh if marital

00:18:47.440 infidelity is what led to that you know hypothetical person kid in the 70s uh parents

00:18:51.660 getting divorced maybe there would have been a certain kind of moral program attached to it

00:18:57.100 um in the sense of breaking you know breaking your vows or something i get it and then also

00:19:04.840 denounce christian imagination it's a power dynamic violation right it's a it's a power

00:19:09.640 dynamic violation and so we we've sort of everything is permitted in a way but they're

00:19:16.040 the new like moral center of sex in the modern age has to be consent and so you can do what you 0.70

00:19:25.240 can be in an interracial throuple homosexual relationship and that's great so long as you 0.71

00:19:31.780 don't cheat or you get consent constantly and so we're we're just in this new realm and i don't

00:19:38.400 think we can handle it. And so we're grasping for a kind of puritanism because that's what I find

00:19:47.320 here. This attack on Graham Plattner is just it reminds me of people in the Middle Ages wanting

00:19:55.020 to put him into the stocks or Victorian moralist attacking someone who was cool, to be honest, or

00:20:04.020 you know throwing oscar wilde into prison although that was kind of his fault we're honest about it

00:20:09.400 but um you you get my point and i i get your point but i think maybe what is a hallmark of

00:20:19.000 the present era however you want to describe it which you know i'm i i do posit we should figure

00:20:26.260 out a way to kind of distinguish from the me too era me too would be a a uh an antecedent

00:20:31.880 but it doesn't it doesn't exactly workplace harassment but it's now everywhere it's not

00:20:37.060 because i'm saying consent you would think is kind of the decisive variable that everybody

00:20:42.420 agrees upon as to what makes a sexual encounter or any kind of romantic situation um acceptable

00:20:49.320 however i mean the the swabble thing is instructive here because we had a

00:20:53.780 some of the allegations quote unquote were for example him in a car with a woman who yes i was

00:21:04.340 a staff a younger staffer so there there you go power dynamic violation um and but yet what was

00:21:11.440 the what was the offending act that got blasted out into the media and then within like 36 hours

00:21:19.760 led to his, you know, ruthless defenestration

00:21:23.840 when he was leading the polls

00:21:25.100 in the California gubernatorial primary, okay?

00:21:27.480 Not by a huge margin, but he was leading the polls.

00:21:29.540 He was a leading candidate.

00:21:32.200 And he would have to obviously withdraw from that race

00:21:34.640 and then resign his seat in the House entirely

00:21:37.320 because there were threats to actually expel him.

00:21:38.900 For the House of Representatives to use this very rare tactic

00:21:46.180 or intervention of expulsion, which, you know,

00:21:48.820 If you go and look on Wikipedia as to when, uh, how many times members of Congress have

00:21:53.780 been expelled, it's like, you know, less than 20 in, you know, since the founding of the

00:21:58.280 United States.

00:21:58.640 So this is what was seen as something that rose to the level that would warrant an expulsion

00:22:02.820 from the United States House of Representatives.

00:22:05.200 Okay.

00:22:05.560 He was in a car with, I think the woman may have been 21 or 22.

00:22:10.100 She, he, he, it was report, this is what was reported in terms of how she apparently told

00:22:14.640 it to some journalists.

00:22:16.420 I think it was the San Francisco Chronicle. 1.00

00:22:18.860 He asked her if she would perform oral sex. 1.00

00:22:23.720 She agreed to perform oral sex. 1.00

00:22:26.300 She then began to perform oral sex. 1.00

00:22:28.960 And then in the midst of the act, she stopped performing oral sex because she became worried 0.99

00:22:35.220 that some passerby might see them because they were in like a parking lot or something. 0.98

00:22:40.200 Right.

00:22:40.360 So that was the extent of the allegation.

00:22:42.020 so that is that's a scenario where by all accounts even probably during the peak of the me too era

00:22:50.940 right 2017 people might have objected on the grounds that it's a lewd swalwell was a boss

00:22:57.940 well not even on the grounds of lewdness they would have objected on power dynamic grounds in

00:23:01.860 that swalwell was the superior he was the boss and he was doing this with a subordinate right

00:23:06.780 but like it wouldn't have been i don't think as i mean as far as i can cast my mind back to them

00:23:11.620 i don't think it had been denounced as some kind of ipso facto sexual assault right but that's how 0.74

00:23:18.180 this was framed as of april of 2026 when the you know shit show erupted around swallow so consent

00:23:24.960 so we're now even past the point where consent can demarcate what conduct is seen as morally

00:23:31.820 defensible i don't know how i don't know what stratosphere we're now in or how to like distill

00:23:38.500 it into like a pithy short now attacking sex yeah because i i think the whole consent thing i mean

00:23:44.920 look i could get in trouble for saying this and and you don't have to agree with me in in the

00:23:50.960 slightest bit but everyone's every woman has said no at some point and it's a sort of natural

00:23:59.960 dynamic now i'm not saying that rape is not a real i i get it no at what stage though like

00:24:07.140 what i'm saying is that before the moment of penetration of oh go you know no we can't do

00:24:12.440 that go but that's like during a flirtation though or a courtship right i get it that's

00:24:16.540 what i'm saying as a person consent is not given though if we're if we're taking this like verbal 0.75

00:24:22.740 qualification now it is i mean look i guess i i'm not saying this to be like a uh a libtard but

00:24:29.940 like i i guess i am of the mind that like that if a if a woman if like if a man seeks to insert 0.98

00:24:37.300 his penis into a woman's vagina and in the moment before he goes it goes to do that she says no 0.95

00:24:43.540 don't do that like that's a no that would probably carry some weight right yes i get it i've never 1.00

00:24:50.480 experienced that myself like if the man did that hypothetically if yeah hypothetical situation

00:24:56.580 if and and if the man then did go ahead and do it despite her objections okay that's in it that's

00:25:03.980 something that we can incredibly say is like a problem yeah i i i definitely get it but i again

00:25:10.400 you know i'm not going to force you to agree with me or something but let's just say that in romance

00:25:16.460 throughout the ages there's been a little bit of rebuffing and resistance oh no and that's just

00:25:23.560 sort of where it is and we still maintained even though everyone accepted that we still maintained

00:25:29.460 concepts legal concepts and ethical concepts of rape so it didn't prevent us we weren't just like

00:25:35.180 morally uh diabolical outrageous people we actually were sensible and reasonable but now

00:25:43.040 high fidelity i never actually saw this movie but the quintessential image of it is john

00:25:47.260 cusack with the boom box outside the girl's uh bedroom window right right yeah now i always sort

00:25:52.960 of inferred that that was because you know he was chasing after this girl she had rebuffed him

00:25:58.200 and or maybe rejected him but like he was so persistent that he was willing to show up

00:26:01.880 outside her uh window with a boom box to get her attention right uh and i've thought that that was

00:26:07.200 seen like whenever when did that come out 1993 who knows something like that that was seen as

00:26:11.720 like just charming a charming example of like male persistence uh it and what would it be today

00:26:18.140 it would be it could easily be sexual harassment or whatever foul you know uh um epithet you can

00:26:27.100 think of like it would definitely be in the realm of bad um yeah now i'm not i'm not endorsing

00:26:32.480 anybody to go about doing that to like you know live a trad life or something just noting you

00:26:36.800 know one maybe small uh indicia of uh the changing mores that obviously me too it seems like that

00:26:44.420 was one of the purposes of the purposes of it i mean it was obviously a decentralized thing

00:26:48.400 but to the extent that you could like lean a central uh aim behind it that was one of the

00:26:52.600 purposes so that that succeeded to a large extent even if there later came somewhat of a pushback

00:26:58.220 that kind of like moderated whatever they were attempting to do and then whatever in the midst

00:27:02.060 we're in the midst of now is also aiming to push those moral boundaries even further in that

00:27:10.340 direction i call it the zombie epstein era i don't know how better to describe it yeah but

00:27:15.160 aren't we criminalizing sex itself now like we've almost gone at least heterosexual sex i mean i'm

00:27:22.360 sorry like we've almost gone beyond consent which in my mind is it has gray areas in it and we're 0.95

00:27:31.380 now attacking the notion of getting a blowjob in a limousine well i mean like what what is i mean 0.88

00:27:39.500 are the only in my mind legitimate perspective of criticizing that is if you are a genuine 0.99

00:27:47.960 traditionalist catholic or or upstanding uh protestant or or muslim and you say no that

00:27:55.420 act itself is wrong well i mean didn't they don't think that act itself is wrong that they

00:28:00.300 in in certain circumstances people who would who are part of this movement that were we'll just

00:28:05.360 use the name me too just so we can you know keep track of things they they think that's great or

00:28:10.860 wonderful like when can we have sex now because they seem to be attacking sex itself or at least 1.00

00:28:17.380 heterosexual sex well katherine mckinnon the feminist um what would you call her scholar 1.00

00:28:24.240 a writer something 0.98

00:28:25.800 I believe this is correct

00:28:28.940 I hope I have the right

00:28:30.840 figure it might be one other

00:28:33.060 person that maybe I'm mixing it up with but I'm pretty

00:28:35.040 sure it's Catherine McKinnon

00:28:35.960 it was either in the 80s or 90s where

00:28:38.880 she introduced a theory

00:28:40.900 that didn't become 0.66

00:28:42.420 a majority 1.00

00:28:45.040 view in feminist

00:28:46.980 circles but had somewhat 1.00

00:28:48.960 of a following which is that

00:28:50.700 the very act

00:28:53.180 of

00:28:54.240 heterosexual um sex or intercourse between a male and female is inherently violent just given the

00:29:02.860 nature of the act meaning the manner in which the act is carried out is itself a form of violence so 0.50

00:29:08.840 obviously that's going to the conceptual extreme but like if you just go a few steps

00:29:13.840 sort of remove from that and then like see what kind of behaviors are sweeping up into whatever

00:29:19.460 kind of morally condemnatory sort of paradigm

00:29:21.820 that kind of animated that theory of hers.

00:29:26.800 I mean, you could see,

00:29:28.980 anyway, I'm just kind of like teasing out something

00:29:30.760 that gets to the point that you're sketching.

00:29:33.700 Right, well, I think that's sort of true

00:29:35.600 in some kind of poetic way.

00:29:38.300 You know, I mean, Shakespeare described orgasms

00:29:40.760 as a little death, and he wasn't alone.

00:29:43.820 We use sort of poetic metaphors for these things.

00:29:47.720 Andrea Dworkin, thank you.

00:29:48.700 Somebody corrected me.

00:29:49.360 Yeah, that's right. It was Andrea Dworkin, not Catherine. Yeah, I kind of agree with her on some level of metaphor of, you know, the man's on top, the man's entering the woman is being violated on some level.

00:30:04.940 Now, only a madman would call or a madwoman in this case would call like all sex, you know, brutally violent, obviously. But I think there's almost like a what's the right word? Almost like autistic, like taking a metaphor literally or something, finding one aspect that is true and then claiming that it's all a crime or something.

00:30:32.620 I yeah, but it does seem like that's almost where we're headed. 0.98

00:30:37.320 I mean, like how at least for the Democratic Party to have sex now, at least where the Democratic Party is headed.

00:30:43.360 Yeah, I don't know. I don't know in MAGA if they would necessarily abide by the same strictures.

00:30:50.160 No, of course not. And I would they would endorse it as as political retaliation against their adversaries.

00:30:57.280 Yeah, they would endorse it for their own lives.

00:30:59.080 Yes. I've actually heard that there's a lot of wife swapping going on at like Trump rallies. I've heard this. I've actually never been to a Trump rally, but I've been to quite a few. I can't see I had any firsthand experience of witnessing. 0.98

00:31:14.060 Well, maybe the polls have sort of flipped in a way. Because, you know, growing up in the 80s and 90s, what it meant to be a Republican, it meant that you were Protestant, that you owned many pairs of khaki pants, and you wore a blue blazer, and your dad was a businessman or a physician, and you were an upstanding person.

00:31:38.520 That's what it meant to be a Republican. You were basically Mitt Romney. And the liberal, you know, being a liberal or kind of edgy, you know, like you you had premarital sex. There was that three way you had that time back in the day, you know, like being it's almost like the polls have weirdly flipped.

00:32:01.380 We now have Cheyenne Hunt, where I think you could genuinely ask her, seriously ask her a question, how am I able to have sex now? 0.91

00:32:11.380 Like, what what do you find appropriate for for me or millions of people like me to engage in sexual intercourse with a woman? 0.97

00:32:22.160 Like how she is married? 0.86

00:32:23.680 How do I do this?

00:32:25.220 she was profiled yet again uh in the san francisco standard i think it is um you know in that

00:32:32.740 profile they of course make a point to remark upon how she is saying that she's so overwhelmed

00:32:38.740 with their profile requests from all these prestigious media outlets she doesn't know 0.81

00:32:42.700 what to do with herself but apparently she is married so interesting maybe she could she and

00:32:48.980 her husband, who I don't know anything about, could hold a seminar about what, not just

00:32:55.360 sexual conduct, but even just courtship practices, they find to be acceptable and they are willing

00:33:05.600 to sign an affidavit in advance while not in three years from now get hurled against

00:33:13.960 you at a politically opportune moment, if the circumstances seem to call it.

00:33:18.980 call for it yeah um so i mean seriously because like i mean yeah especially if in this in a

00:33:25.300 courtship type situation like if even if there's sort of like an um an implied rebuff right or uh

00:33:31.980 just sort of like a give and take or something um you know that given given the new the new

00:33:37.920 standards that seem to have been inaugurated then you know this year especially there's

00:33:42.340 ever reason to think that could be um used by cheyenne hunt to to uh to to take down a a

00:33:50.320 particular uh target in her sights yes no i don't think this is gonna happen for normal people

00:33:57.160 look how this whole thing started with platner right i mean again this this to me is what kind

00:34:01.180 of um is is most emblematic of whatever era we're currently in as distinct from me too to some degree

00:34:07.800 that june 4th new york times article which which hilariously even though this conservative this 1.00

00:34:15.840 like republican operative woman lindsey ended up successfully convincing these two female 1.00

00:34:21.340 journalists in the new york times to just like launder her commentaries on flattner and put it 0.53

00:34:27.820 out in a way that it's framed to somehow suggest something like really horrible happened like if

00:34:33.160 you like read it carefully you can't even discern what exactly there is what it is that

00:34:37.800 platner was alleged to have done um and yet lindsey and like her kind of uh her colleagues

00:34:44.800 in this you know dc con inc uh back slapping uh circuit they became they convinced themselves

00:34:51.740 that actually the new york times did it did this to um as sort of an underhanded way to support

00:35:01.600 platner like it was a catch and kill operation they have theorized i'm serious this is like

00:35:06.440 taken as gospel now in these circles, um, that, that, uh, they, or, or, or like they

00:35:14.240 wanted to get out ahead of Lindsay saying something about Platner so that, so they kind

00:35:19.160 of presented her allegations in a way that they found to be not sufficiently, um, crediting

00:35:25.860 of their veracity.

00:35:28.360 So somehow the New York times victimized Lindsay and the conservative, uh, Connick DC kind

00:35:34.540 a networking social network 1.00

00:35:37.400 by laundering her claims

00:35:39.560 and getting the ball rolling 0.86

00:35:40.460 that within about a month

00:35:42.040 led to Plattner getting

00:35:43.720 like the fatal blow delivered, right?

00:35:46.360 Anyway, the marquee allegations

00:35:49.720 in that New York Times story

00:35:51.660 to the extent that they're already

00:35:52.820 that you can discern

00:35:53.640 are these women who Plattner had dated, right?

00:35:58.140 Or had been on and off relationships,

00:36:00.780 they'll call them.

00:36:01.200 So just like casual, I guess, you know,

00:36:04.540 hookups semi quasi romantic kind of acquaintances let's say they're not like sometimes will be

00:36:10.440 called girlfriends i don't even know if that's quite right right um but whatever you want to

00:36:15.080 call them right uh so so so what the new york times did was they weren't right waiting around 0.97

00:36:21.420 to see if they would got a tip about some younger female subordinate maybe having some kind of

00:36:27.720 grievance against an older male in her kind of uh corporate or ngo uh or whatever uh congressional 0.99

00:36:33.920 office hierarchy no what they did was they made a point in these two women journalists to set out

00:36:40.740 on this grand expedition of investigative journalism whereby they just like started 1.00

00:36:47.360 indiscriminately serving anybody that he ever dated or had been in one of these relate kind of

00:36:54.440 situation uh you know romantic kind of situations with like i don't know if i have the right the

00:37:00.520 right word for it because maybe they don't even consider it dating um and just to see whatever

00:37:05.680 they could sift out right so they didn't they didn't even really start with a premise of some

00:37:11.280 kind of wrongdoing that then had to be like further investigated they were just doing this

00:37:14.680 blanket you know forensic examination of anybody they could get their hands on who might be able

00:37:20.980 to attest to having some kind of like personal or intimate encounter with with platner um and then

00:37:27.100 And the best they could come up with after what they say in that New York Times article on June 4th was months of reporting by a team of reporters.

00:37:35.200 pretty much the best they could come up with was was the republican operative

00:37:39.240 and saying and and i think maybe you know two or three others uh basically being invited by these

00:37:46.360 journalists to produce like an emotional narrative of their recollections of their

00:37:54.340 relationship with platner from you know a decade or more ago so that's so you had the woman who

00:38:02.580 then would then would level these rape accusations this week um jenny rasko i think it's rasko i

00:38:13.040 think that's how you pronounce it it's like a strangely it's a strange french sermon i think

00:38:18.180 she's like i think she's uh acadian so like the french descendants in maine um so anyway so um

00:38:26.680 but she in that new york times article she had she had been quoted in that article right

00:38:30.600 uh and in that article the extent of her allegations at the time was again her

00:38:36.500 describing what her perceptions now are of the nature of the relationship that she had

00:38:43.820 carried on with platner from years before i think in her case it was like 2019 to 2021 or something

00:38:49.480 um and she says all she and she only and she like just imputed sort of abstract

00:38:56.200 characterizations to Plattner

00:38:58.100 it's almost like they're doing like a psychological

00:39:00.320 profile of the guy where she

00:39:02.160 says that you know she at times

00:39:04.300 would find his behavior at times found

00:39:06.180 his non-specified behavior

00:39:07.900 unsettling and

00:39:10.160 and reckless

00:39:12.240 okay and now and Lindsay 1.00

00:39:14.160 I think said toxic she also

00:39:15.940 said that she now surmises

00:39:18.120 that Plattner quote hated women this is a Republican 0.51

00:39:20.060 operative right when 0.92

00:39:22.040 that Plattner had been quote contemptuous of women's

00:39:24.220 emotions but that's about the best they could come up with

00:39:26.200 now there was like a little vignette that they got from lindsey where she says

00:39:31.560 during one night together like he there was some kind of i don't know confrontation or dispute

00:39:39.220 where he ends up sort of physically kind of bringing her into a room and like having her

00:39:44.540 and have her like sleep something off and she goes the door like okay not it wasn't like something

00:39:49.480 that that was like the extent of any kind of physical allegation but by in by and large if

00:39:53.600 go back and read that article it's like it's these like subjective emotionalized reinterpretations

00:39:59.140 of things that they're giving to the new york times in like may or june 2026 in light of his

00:40:03.580 now his new political stature so that that to me there's got to be something new about that right

00:40:09.320 um and then it shouldn't be a huge surprise that as little as there was to go with initially

00:40:18.380 again after this exhaustive investigation we're told happened that like you could have now i think

00:40:24.840 i'm going to coin a new term which is like accusation escalation like you could have this

00:40:29.580 phenomenon that the what whatever minimal accusations had been aired initially that

00:40:35.460 were really just in the realm of kind of like some kind of psychic extrapolation or like some

00:40:41.100 therapeutic kind of rendering of the of the past conduct all of a sudden within a span of a month

00:40:48.380 you know through mechanisms that we can discuss if you'd like i mean i don't have the full story

00:40:53.000 but i know enough but anyway like through whatever mechanism that interceded in the in that in the

00:40:58.540 month between june 4th of the new york times article and then july 6th then it becomes just

00:41:04.080 a full-blown rape accusation by by jenny um so to me there's something striking about that because

00:41:10.140 that that's that's the type of thing which you could easily imagine on a smaller scale obviously

00:41:17.140 not necessarily in the national spotlight but like also ensnaring others where you know if if

00:41:26.200 there's just kind of like a if like a little consensus emerges that like you you did things

00:41:30.500 that some cohort of women found emotionally troubling right or disturbing at least in

00:41:35.200 retrospect we don't know really contemporaneously how they felt about much of this at least in

00:41:39.160 terms of how they're kind of like reconstructing things then that is seen as almost as an opening

00:41:43.840 to kind of like continue reimagining things

00:41:46.700 until you finally get to an outright rape accusation,

00:41:49.560 which of course is like, you know, game over

00:41:54.080 for most people, whatever field they're,

00:41:56.840 maybe with the exception of Donald Trump,

00:41:58.460 but like pretty much everybody else,

00:42:00.080 that's probably going to derail whatever life endeavors

00:42:05.060 they thought that they were, have been embarked upon.

00:42:08.420 There's also just the aspect of memory,

00:42:10.780 which I don't think this is controversial to say. Our mind is not a photographic camera. Our mind

00:42:19.520 is not a hard drive. We're reimagining our past constantly in order to serve the present and the

00:42:27.700 future. When you or I think about our childhood, we'll sort of maybe see it from a different angle

00:42:33.120 and give a different meaning to something that happened or overcoming trauma in a very

00:42:40.700 positive way means to sort of reinterpret it and understand it in a way so you can kind of manage

00:42:47.080 something that might well have happened to you. But to take that into criminal accusations is

00:42:54.640 insane. It is truly insane. I really think it would behoove people to familiarize themselves

00:43:01.080 with the literature on the unreliability of human,

00:43:09.200 the fallibility of human memory.

00:43:12.280 And, you know, journalists in particular, okay,

00:43:14.300 because they clearly, you know,

00:43:16.040 take things totally at face value if they're told,

00:43:18.700 here's my first, here's like my,

00:43:20.680 like they will attribute some kind of like

00:43:23.220 corroborative evidentiary value to something

00:43:25.460 that they're told, which is like a memory

00:43:26.960 of a memory of a memory of a reinterpreted memory

00:43:29.720 with like a political valence now like imbued to it um and that's enough for them to like you know

00:43:36.840 put out a blaring headline but like any person really i think would benefit from being more

00:43:41.780 familiar with this because you know there was there's a famous experiment run by elizabeth

00:43:45.900 loftus who is a professor of uh of neurology neurobiology or maybe psychology something in

00:43:54.960 at the university of california davis and she's somebody who um has almost become notorious

00:44:00.540 because she's one of the few expert witnesses that are available to defendants to testify on

00:44:05.980 their behalf in a criminal trial or a civil trial where the defendant is seeking to uh refute claims

00:44:14.460 of like i things that had been remembered from you know yeah years or even decades in the past

00:44:19.880 so Elizabeth Loftus testified on behalf of

00:44:21.980 Ghislaine Maxwell

00:44:23.220 she testified on behalf of Harvey Weinstein

00:44:26.500 in one of his trials

00:44:27.760 and there are many other

00:44:30.100 high profile cases but she ran an experiment

00:44:32.180 I want to say maybe

00:44:34.000 in the early 2000s

00:44:35.000 where

00:44:36.140 the test subjects

00:44:39.920 were told

00:44:41.200 that they had

00:44:43.940 that as children

00:44:45.440 they

00:44:47.920 had been

00:44:49.360 lost in a grocery store maybe or they were with their parents somewhere as small children and

00:44:57.200 they had been separated from their parents and that this had then been gone down in like family

00:45:01.740 lore and it was just a fabric they were told the fabrication like this didn't actually happen

00:45:05.180 but then I might not be explaining like the mechanics of the study 100% accurately but

00:45:11.040 the the the takeaway was that the people who had been kind of implanted with a totally like a

00:45:16.540 purposely fabricated memory about something that took place in their childhood came to

00:45:20.460 unswervingly believe that it did actually happen to them right because yeah especially from early

00:45:25.920 childhood obviously it's especially susceptible to kind of uh suggestible um introduction of

00:45:35.360 purported memories um and yeah so now we have uh and so again that's just like one example of many

00:45:45.220 i can give you about this fallibility of memory but like it can be extended out into so many

00:45:48.900 different fields there's the classic it even causes me to like try to like be it's rationally

00:45:54.340 doubtful of my own memories oh yeah you should yeah yeah there are many cases where eyewitnesses

00:46:00.320 have they truly sincerely believe that they saw someone at the scene of a crime and that person's

00:46:07.320 alibi is foolproof because they again you're you it's not a photograph it's not a hard drive our

00:46:13.900 mind. We're recreating the past in order to serve the present and the future. You don't need this

00:46:20.160 expert. You can just read Nietzsche. I mean, I guess that's my answer to everything. But there's

00:46:24.340 another famous experiment, which you probably heard of, which is they asked people, you went

00:46:29.480 to Disneyland when you were 10, right? And they're like, now, do you remember that time that you and

00:46:35.020 your mom got photographed with Bugs Bunny? And they're like, oh, yeah, of course I do. All you

00:46:40.300 had to do is suggest that bugs bunny now bugs bunny is not at disneyland because that's disney

00:46:45.880 and warner brothers or whatever yeah exactly yes yeah i've heard of this one all you have to do is

00:46:49.980 a little bit of a suggestion and your mind has already created that photograph i think that

00:46:54.320 might have been elizabeth lofters too actually it probably was yeah yeah and and so again memory is

00:47:00.820 active it's not passive and this whole platner situation is just an example of it where there's

00:47:08.660 an escalation of the memory there's memory escalation it's what we've just seen uh this

00:47:15.700 summer it doesn't have to be memory it could be the memory could itself be kind of stable in terms

00:47:21.720 of their ability to access it but it could be kind of imbued imbued with different meaning

00:47:26.700 especially given how expansive concepts of consent even uh rape you know trafficking which is like a

00:47:34.700 big one for you know epstein and more um power dynamic wait what does it mean to have given

00:47:40.900 consent or not uh when that can kind of like be retroactively uh applied to the memory even if

00:47:47.460 you're even if you have a reasonably accurate memory of just like whatever had impinged on

00:47:53.620 your like you know your sensory uh organs in in terms of like how you captured whatever it is that

00:47:59.680 you experienced just just assigning it reframing it with like an entirely different meaning or

00:48:06.000 or context is alone enough where you don't even have to necessarily tinker with the memory per

00:48:10.120 se it's just like the emotional content of the memory you know um and you know that that's a

00:48:16.100 huge aspect of the of a lot of the epstein stuff actually in terms of like what might distinguish

00:48:20.620 this current era from me too well we're having a bit of a research is now in recovered memories so

00:48:26.700 So whenever recovered, like recovered memories, it had been kind of, it became consensus at

00:48:33.460 least until like the two thousands, right.

00:48:35.180 That recovered memories were no longer credible or could not be used as admissible evidence,

00:48:40.300 especially in criminal trials, uh, for the most part, like by maybe 2009, 10, that had

00:48:47.460 been pretty much agreed was, uh, not, not something that the courts could, um, could

00:48:55.720 fact we have to just in terms of like the scientific ambiguity of it right um but now we

00:49:02.440 there's been a bit of an upsurge around recovered memory as something that people uh are are citing

00:49:09.020 or get or have faith in um i don't know of it really re re uh being reintroduced necessarily

00:49:17.400 into into criminal trials as much anymore but you know one thing that i've you know something that

00:49:22.780 i discovered early on when like what the first phase of the epstein files came out in december

00:49:27.060 of last year um and i still haven't done like the full story on it but like it's a work in progress

00:49:32.840 is that it's shocking how much recovered memory how much of a role recovered memories or purported

00:49:41.440 recovered memories plays in the epstein saga writ large but in particular as relates to one of the

00:49:47.420 central claimed, uh, victims that the government actually hinged Epstein's 2019 federal indictment

00:49:55.800 on.

00:49:55.980 I think I might've discussed with this, this with you a little bit when, whenever we last

00:50:00.340 spoke about the, uh, the Epstein stuff, maybe in February, but, um, yeah, it's the, the,

00:50:05.980 the government was prepared to, uh, again, hinge its case against Epstein federally on

00:50:12.960 a purported victim

00:50:15.940 who later

00:50:18.000 has disclosed that she

00:50:20.060 bases her perceptions of

00:50:22.020 her victimhood on

00:50:22.820 recovered memories that she says she only

00:50:25.660 realized that she had

00:50:28.140 when they were implanted

00:50:29.040 in her by others 0.71

00:50:31.540 meaning others in the Epstein sort of like

00:50:33.940 survivor click or

00:50:35.900 network

00:50:36.440 and

00:50:38.260 then that also kind of you know

00:50:42.960 And then the, uh, the Swalwell thing, right.

00:50:47.440 So the first wave of accusations were these women who had been either his younger staff

00:50:54.640 or who he had met through some political, uh, function, right.

00:50:58.540 Um, or like in his more professional capacity, but then there, there came, there was another

00:51:02.640 woman who was debuted, who the media outlets ran wall to wall, her press conference with

00:51:08.440 Lisa Bloom, the daughter of Gloria Allred, where they were seated together at a table

00:51:13.360 solemnly in Beverly Hills. 0.88

00:51:16.180 And this woman says that Swalwell Allred raped her in 2018.

00:51:23.580 And when Lisa Bloom, the lawyer representing this accuser, would go on to elaborate on

00:51:31.280 the nature of her client's accusations against Swalwell, she confided that the client had

00:51:38.280 undergone emdr therapy with the express intent of if not recovering a memory somewhere something

00:51:46.820 like recovering a memory meaning crystal it's it's it's it's this therapeutic technique that

00:51:52.660 was invented by a woman in the 1980s a therapist who claims that she was on a walk in the woods

00:52:01.540 one day near her home and she realized that if she moved her eyes around that that would have

00:52:10.320 some effect on kind of like stabling her stabilizing her emotional state or somehow affect

00:52:17.300 her her ability to to kind of cognize her emotions right so they came up with a technique

00:52:24.380 where like an instrument is waved in front of people's eyes to get like movement in their eyes

00:52:29.500 And then that's supposed to unlock some capacity in their brain to release memories or sensations or things that have been stored in their brain, but otherwise you wouldn't have access to.

00:52:41.780 That sounds like mesmerism.

00:52:43.860 It's quackery.

00:52:44.800 I mean, it's quackery.

00:52:46.120 It's quackery.

00:52:47.060 I mean, there are people who say that they got some value from EMDR therapy if they say they have PTSD or something.

00:52:53.100 But there's no real evidence that they're finding sort of a method in EMDR therapy, meaning the waving of an instrument in front of the eyes to get the eyes to flutter, that that has any kind of salutary effect.

00:53:07.240 So the people could just be attesting to, okay, they're in a therapeutic environment and they're talking about stuff and whatever.

00:53:12.160 Maybe that has some benefit.

00:53:13.240 but um but the quackery becomes like all the more sort of pernicious if it's being claimed that it

00:53:20.460 is being used to discover memories that then can be used to add to this snowball you know snowball

00:53:27.960 effect against a guy who's being you know run out of town uh with this these mounting uh accusations

00:53:34.180 and that's what happened in april now did was did anybody cover that critically at all of course not

00:53:38.300 i mean uh maybe it's because they didn't like swallow i don't know i never particularly cared

00:53:41.860 for him politically but like sorry when this kind of stuff gets just allowed to persist without

00:53:46.640 challenge then we get a new precedent or a new moray right and then you know one thing leads to

00:53:51.980 another in platner's being platner gets called toxic because it's something that happened in

00:53:56.400 2015 and all and you know the next thing you know the he his uh his ability to secure the most

00:54:05.100 democratic primary votes for any senate candidate in the history of maine is just summarily overridden

00:54:09.360 and his career is over and his life may be i mean his reputation is obliterated so

00:54:17.980 i mean i i see kind of like the swallow thing i mean the swallow thing has to be looked at in the

00:54:22.800 same continuum not least because cheyenne hunt who you mentioned earlier was like literally

00:54:26.560 she literally facilitated both i mean she she facilitated the swallow thing or she claims that

00:54:32.240 she played an integral role in it then she starts an ngo she said she openly declares okay

00:54:39.300 next is my next my next target is platner and then she proceeds to do what she did with platner by

00:54:44.680 feeding the new like the the victim from the new york times story with like newly intensified or 0.82

00:54:51.020 you know dramatized accusations and she's the one who says hey politico here you go hey cnn here you

00:54:57.980 go let's make sure that we have this pr offensive where we have the politico thing out and then

00:55:02.140 like within an hour we have her uh you know her you know touching interview with jake very sensitive

00:55:07.460 jake tapper on cnn um what what do you because we've been treating this matter as a moral panic

00:55:17.800 in some way and as sort of organic in some way and and i think that that is correct and i don't

00:55:23.780 think even if it were a political scheme it wouldn't work if there wasn't some organic moral

00:55:29.520 panic but what what do you think is i mean let me just throw some things out there and these are

00:55:36.600 These are too broad, too easy, but is it just the case that Plattner is calling out the Gaza genocide and people in the Democratic Party are like, no, let's let's get rid of him through hook or crook?

00:55:54.000 What do you think about that?

00:55:55.420 No, I don't.

00:55:56.000 I don't buy wisdom, but I guess I don't I don't see a basis for that, really.

00:56:00.020 I mean, there have been a recent spate of victors in Democratic congressional primaries who, in some cases, unseated incumbents.

00:56:10.700 I mean, I was surprised that, for example, this guy, Adriano Espaillat, who's a pretty well-established member of Congress from basically Harlem, was ousted by this woman who mostly was emphasizing their differences on Israel.

00:56:30.020 I think APAC, what I've noticed watching somewhat casually to all these primaries, but APAC is something that the winning candidate will mention like right up front.

00:56:41.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:56:41.580 I mean, Dan Goldman was so proud not to be, you know, APAC is over.

00:56:45.880 I'm so proud not to have received a dollar from them.

00:56:48.020 Yeah, I mean, Dan Goldman was trounced in his primary by Brad Lander.

00:56:55.740 And again, the main point of emphasis by Lander really was their differences on Israel.

00:57:02.780 You know, Lander's criticism that Goldman would refuse to say genocide.

00:57:08.260 I would refuse to say that as well because like I don't even buy the whole concept of genocide as conceptually coherent any longer.

00:57:14.400 But like that's another subject.

00:57:16.500 You would be a great politician, Michael.

00:57:18.480 I'm certainly not the first one.

00:57:20.100 I know, I know, exactly.

00:57:21.080 i would run on my not anti-genocide policy from the standpoint of like opposing a particular

00:57:27.420 reported genocide but opposing the terminological construct right yeah that's a winning um way so

00:57:32.860 i mean i know a lot of people would like to believe because it would like flatter their

00:57:36.220 sense of beleaguered political sort of self-righteousness that platner was ousted

00:57:44.260 because there was a target on his back over his stance on israel i just don't think that really

00:57:47.420 holds up i mean i think that these tactics can be ruthlessly employed against you know

00:57:53.240 parasexual democratic party men regardless of where they happen to fall on the party's

00:57:58.660 ideological spectrum so like andrew cuomo is not really in the same quadrants ideologically as

00:58:04.500 platter within the democratic party but like you know pretty much not quite the same tactics i

00:58:09.820 mean cuomo was never accused of outright of rape but like a similar kind of snowball effect thing

00:58:15.120 where, like, you chisel away at his ability to deal with, you know, et cetera.

00:58:20.120 And, you know, but Cuomo is actually an interesting parallel

00:58:22.080 because I argued at the time, of course, because nobody else would cover it.

00:58:25.940 And at one point, like, the entire New York press corps was, like,

00:58:28.760 in revolt against me because they thought I was being fed stuff

00:58:31.540 by, like, oppo researchers for Cuomo, which I wasn't.

00:58:34.460 But my thesis at that time was that Cuomo,

00:58:40.680 because there's no term limits for the governor of New York, right?

00:58:43.200 and Cuomo at that point had been in office for, uh, around 10 years in 2021.

00:58:48.040 And he was by all accounts preparing to run for another reelection in, uh, in 2022.

00:58:54.460 And although his popularity, um, among democratic legislators had been seriously diminishing

00:59:04.640 because in 2018, the new class of Democrats had been like in one of the, like the first

00:59:09.140 sort of DSA wave.

00:59:10.140 Right.

00:59:10.300 so they they they were hugely antagonistic toward cuomo and there are all kinds of disputes right

00:59:14.540 actually that was when zoran mamdani was first elected as a state assemblyman um and so actually

00:59:20.400 zoran himself was part of this effort to uh galvanize calls for cuomo to resign the instant

00:59:29.880 that anything at all was alleged not even any kind of like sex something not even an assault

00:59:34.480 just being italian yeah i mean we don't get into all the details but like it was so

00:59:40.960 silly what like the first sort of like things that were even alleged but that wasn't that

00:59:45.140 was itself enough for zoran to say cuomo must resign you know whatever um but my thesis was 0.90

00:59:51.880 that the depth like the kind of the quote-unquote progressives or socialists or like more leftward

00:59:56.820 elements of the democratic party in new york who were antagonistic to cuomo would have to recognize

01:00:03.320 that they were not going to be able

01:00:04.480 to defeat Cuomo electorally, okay?

01:00:06.580 He had had progressive primary challengers

01:00:09.140 in 2018 and 2014.

01:00:11.300 They got much hype by the media,

01:00:12.560 like the New York City heavy,

01:00:13.780 kind of like lefty type media.

01:00:16.040 Cynthia Nixon and Zephyr Teachout.

01:00:19.000 And it was a bust.

01:00:19.980 I mean, he overwhelmingly wins

01:00:21.080 because like he got 90% in the Bronx,

01:00:24.020 black voters,

01:00:24.820 and like he would do well in Buffalo

01:00:26.000 and then in the suburbs.

01:00:27.960 And like he might lose like, you know,

01:00:30.280 Manhattan or something,

01:00:31.180 but he would still win

01:00:32.440 the Democratic primary handily. So in lieu of defeating him electorally, what is this cohort of

01:00:41.080 newly kind of emboldened, quote-unquote, progressive legislators do? Well, they seize

01:00:46.640 upon the first possible opportunity to dislodge him through an alternative political method that's

01:00:54.300 incredibly high salience from the Democratic Party coalition, if you allege any kind of

01:00:57.820 impropriety that has a sexual component right and uh that they they correctly calculated we would

01:01:04.540 it be eventually enough to compel his uh his removal that they wouldn't have otherwise been

01:01:08.840 able to obtain through ordinary electoral means just given his kind of like command over the

01:01:13.580 party infrastructure at that point over the course of a decade um and so i think you saw something

01:01:18.380 similar here not quite the same circumstances but like again platter just won what anybody would

01:01:24.120 have to say is like if anything would exist as an electoral mandate in the context of like a

01:01:28.620 democratic primary votes yeah ever in a democratic primary yeah but not only that he was so for he

01:01:33.980 was so entrapped he was so formidable in his political influence right that the incumbent

01:01:40.560 democratic governor whom chuck schumer and others of that ilk court courted to run against platner

01:01:49.040 she didn't even bother she she she she came to a recognition that there was so little chance of 0.93

01:01:57.800 her even being competitive with platter that she had to withdraw her candidacy as the sitting 0.96

01:02:03.000 incumbent governor like a month or two in advance and you know there was um there was a there was a

01:02:08.500 campaign event where the the all the democrats running for governor of maine in 2026 so all the

01:02:16.400 democratic primary candidates for maine prior to the primary they all appeared with plattner like

01:02:21.620 on the same stage as you know as they were running against one another because they all

01:02:25.320 wanted to share a platform with him and you know be be bolstered by his you know remarkable

01:02:34.000 generation of democratic party enthusiasm right um so so they couldn't get rid of him

01:02:43.600 through that means and so what did they what did this woman cheyenne hunt do who knows who exactly

01:02:48.540 she was coordinating with she launched this ngo of hers reckoning action in may alongside like 1.00

01:02:54.920 debbie wasserman schultz and other members of the democratic women's caucus so it would stand

01:03:00.300 to reason that she's like in touch with some of these people who knows i'd like to know more um

01:03:05.360 but what do they do they execute an op of sorts to um to defeat platner through a tried and true

01:03:15.040 political method that's hyper salient within their co the elite strata of their coalition

01:03:19.180 and i i know i'm asking you to to speculate but i i actually agree with you that we should

01:03:26.100 uh dampen the the sort of uh zionist angle because the democratic party this is happening

01:03:32.780 everywhere. Is it just, is it because he's so rough and tumble that they feel like he might 0.91

01:03:39.400 be a liability, like maybe an electoral liability or a liability in Congress? He can't be controlled

01:03:45.100 because he, I mean, look, the guy is flawed. I mean, we can all, I mean, he's a bit of a wild

01:03:50.360 man. I mean, is Susan Collins flawed? I mean, people say, oh, he's a flawed person. All right.

01:03:54.460 I mean, is Susan Collins flawless? Well, she's just boring. He's not boring. He's, you know, 1.00

01:03:59.600 he is is that it or is this just an attack on heterosexual white men i mean you know

01:04:08.180 i think it would be overstating it a little bit to say it's just a a full scale you know broadside

01:04:17.960 against all heterosexual white men yeah what does tend to be the case increasingly in the

01:04:23.540 Democratic Party is if any heterosexual white male has any semblance of a kind of liability

01:04:31.380 in terms of their personal history or their dating record or anything to do with that

01:04:39.740 sort of like area of life, then that could be seized upon in a brutally effective way

01:04:49.080 by their opponents,

01:04:50.320 but then it's,

01:04:51.500 it's presented as though

01:04:52.660 it's just this noble

01:04:53.800 defensive, 1.00

01:04:55.280 like women as such, 0.99

01:04:58.840 or, 0.90

01:04:59.400 you know,

01:05:00.320 defending some higher principle,

01:05:02.100 which of course it's,

01:05:02.740 it's not.

01:05:03.500 Although the fact that

01:05:05.920 so many of the most like

01:05:06.760 activated kind of

01:05:07.520 Democratic Party coalition members,

01:05:10.260 not,

01:05:11.260 it's not so much the quote

01:05:12.040 grassroots,

01:05:12.620 like the Democratic primary voter,

01:05:13.800 although a lot of them would agree,

01:05:15.100 but I'm talking about people who,

01:05:16.280 you know,

01:05:17.120 would be the ones who would be

01:05:19.020 in a text chain with somebody who they would be demanding

01:05:23.660 had now to rescind their endorsement of Plattner

01:05:27.800 like within 20 minutes of the Politico article coming out.

01:05:31.580 So like the operative class or consultants or media.

01:05:35.980 Do they just want boring people?

01:05:37.720 I know this is very kind of flippant to say this,

01:05:41.460 but say what you will about Graham Plattner.

01:05:44.740 He's not boring.

01:05:45.900 and they actually want everyone to be boring like them it's a revolt of the midwits it's

01:05:55.340 it you know uh or take a gossip you know revolt of the masses it's like the revolt of the middle

01:06:01.200 against anyone who's interesting whether they're rough and tumble like grand platner or kind of

01:06:07.740 fallen elite in a way like grand platner or they're just kind of cool like i'm being i'm

01:06:14.720 being really deadly serious because we are driven by resentment and rage that's sort of hidden

01:06:20.880 often and it it leads us to bias and they just want to attack anyone who's interesting you know

01:06:27.720 i think i don't think that quite captures it either okay i think that the some of the trajectory

01:06:33.780 of this is like is sui generis to platter but that then interfaces with the um overall dynamic

01:06:44.660 of how certain tactics can be employed

01:06:47.080 against any heterosexual male

01:06:49.140 with a liability as to their personal life, right?

01:06:51.920 But so before the revelation, quote unquote,

01:06:56.560 that he had a Nazi tattoo in October,

01:07:01.220 as far as I was able to ascertain,

01:07:04.180 I wasn't following it that closely, 0.98

01:07:05.400 but even the kind of more rad lib women rights 0.90

01:07:09.820 kind of segments of the Democratic Party

01:07:12.100 were kind of um enthused by platner or like or happy to happy to cheer his seeming rise in

01:07:21.540 popularity right but then all of a sudden comes out this you know bombshell of a quote-unquote

01:07:27.820 nazi tattoo now think about what political quote-unquote moment we're in i hate that cliche

01:07:34.120 but like these these people democrats who are like going to be the ones who are real invested

01:07:41.440 in following a main senate race over a year before it takes place they're going to be

01:07:47.880 disproportionately the types of people who had thought of themselves as like on the the bleeding

01:07:53.200 edge in the fight against trump and fascism we're not like oral literal nazis like perhaps

01:07:58.540 including yourself richard um uh meaning in i'm saying in their perceptions right like it would

01:08:04.520 be weird if i had a nazi i mean i don't have any tattoos but like i that would sort of like fit

01:08:10.700 the script but then they elect a guy who actually has one like if i ever went to a tattoo parlor and

01:08:17.280 i saw a totenkopf i might be like it's a little too on the nose but but grim platner did it now 0.98

01:08:24.400 you of course have a hammer and sickle on your ass as we as we all know so hopefully no it's too 0.93

01:08:29.680 but like but but the moment that the moment that the quote-unquote nazi tattoo became a quote thing 0.99

01:08:39.300 then was the moment that blue sky okay which i out of morbid curiosity have found myself

01:08:46.920 checking in with just to like just to absorb whatever their whatever quote vibes they're

01:08:53.280 going on over there plattner became like their number one enemy he platter might have even

01:08:58.380 surpassed donald trump as the the the person who was most loathed that's interesting yeah i didn't

01:09:04.860 know that yes interesting it's it's it's it was almost it was almost unanimous on blue sky that

01:09:11.860 plattner was this menace that it was shameful for anybody to countenance his being embraced

01:09:21.200 by the democratic party as some kind of you know tribune of what it means to be a progressive

01:09:26.420 in the trump second term um they they they and that did and you know blue sky is very you know

01:09:35.280 the demographics of blue sky as far as i could tell are very heavy on like um gender fluid folks

01:09:40.880 trans lots of you know it's definitely it seems to skew heavily women um so i do think that bound

01:09:48.480 up in their resent in the resentment that was prompted by the revelation of the quote-unquote

01:09:53.640 But Nazi tattoo was also a resentment toward this idea that Plattner was this model Democrat that the party was desperately in search of to appeal to, I don't know, younger, to appeal to men, to appeal to people who were more masculine in their kind of cultural coding.

01:10:14.760 um and they didn't like that because they view that as almost itself

01:10:21.320 connoting some kind of um accommodation to fascism right um and but you know at a certain

01:10:30.220 point like even though that they have you know there are a lot of misgivings and i'm generalizing

01:10:33.640 about the entire platform but this is pretty much it at a certain point like you know they

01:10:38.800 you could tell them maybe they were a bit

01:10:40.280 resigned to Plattner becoming

01:10:42.500 the nominee, and

01:10:43.600 although they had misgivings, they didn't really believe him about the tattoos,

01:10:46.740 so they were going to keep a close eye on him.

01:10:49.100 But then, you know, when

01:10:50.340 some kind

01:10:52.580 of sexual misconduct could be

01:10:54.380 alleged, starting with the vagaries

01:10:56.400 of the New York Times article,

01:10:58.620 then they smelled

01:11:00.400 blood, right? Then they knew that there was a

01:11:02.420 real way that they could

01:11:04.460 dispatch with somebody whom they already

01:11:06.480 had these

01:11:08.800 cultural animosities toward um or whom they resented the democratic party for um as they saw

01:11:17.020 kind of bending over backwards to kind of integrate into their coalition as like the new face of what

01:11:21.300 the progressives should be um so yeah i mean i don't i so if there had been no revelation of the

01:11:30.420 nazi ted nazi tattoo i don't think you would have had set into motion the chain of events that then

01:11:34.340 led to the rape claim this week so um again some of it's got to be sui generis to platner

01:11:42.820 i'm not sure how many more prospective uh democratic senate candidates would have a

01:11:47.300 quote-unquote nazi tattoo so you might be alone or a sort of anomalous in that um but like it's

01:11:53.360 in the context of this kind of like burgeoning resentment toward what not not just what he

01:11:57.720 represents but what they take it to mean that the democratic party is so eager to showcase him or

01:12:03.280 hold him out as like this this emblem of the their their their trump second term political

01:12:10.280 you know project um and so in that in that context they could go in for the kill the minute there was

01:12:16.380 any kind of there was any whiff of sexual impropriety yeah let me ask you a few questions

01:12:21.020 as we as we bring it to a close of of going forward um first off just as a political 1.00

01:12:27.260 prognosticator uh susan collins is she gonna roll into victory now or or not maybe i don't know is

01:12:34.800 it does this help the democratic party because they don't have to deal with this guy whose life

01:12:39.460 is messy to to put it mildly or i don't know you gotta think that there is gonna be some segment

01:12:45.400 of the people who voted for platner who are um angered enough about this yeah that because i

01:12:56.760 I mean, look at what Plattner himself said in his video where he at least says that he intends to withdraw his nomination.

01:13:03.020 He hasn't done – or his candidacy.

01:13:04.680 He hasn't done so formally yet.

01:13:06.540 He hasn't submitted the paperwork to the Secretary of State's office.

01:13:08.880 So who knows?

01:13:10.020 Could have a plot twist by the deadline on Monday.

01:13:14.180 But, I mean, look at what he says.

01:13:15.620 He says the party establishment colluded with the media to destroy our movement.

01:13:20.920 This is what always happens when anybody challenges the status quo, et cetera.

01:13:23.760 He gave a very strident, you know, unapologetic statement.

01:13:28.700 And he said that the claims are outright fabricated.

01:13:30.600 Okay.

01:13:31.360 So, I mean, there are going to be some people now, because like this has been, this has

01:13:34.340 been one of the top, um, most nationally, uh, fixated on Senate races now for some time.

01:13:41.820 And then in Maine, which is not a huge state, even more kind of, uh, saturated, um, in,

01:13:49.680 in, in its coverage.

01:13:50.380 So people, there's going to be some segment of these voters who felt, you know, some kinship with Plattner, who I think are going to be not just, you know, blithely willing to vote for whomever they can field against Collins.

01:14:10.040 Now, it's not going to be the people who are like hardcore Democratic partisans, maybe, like who are just, you know, are overwhelmingly just.

01:14:19.160 there's enough people who are against the democratic party and i think plattner was

01:14:24.480 running against the democratic establishment to a very large degree there are enough people

01:14:28.980 who are demoralized or who get that kind of negative polarization where they're just like 0.99

01:14:33.580 fuck you i would rather have collins as a like outright enemy than have a turncoat wishy-washy 1.00

01:14:44.200 champion. And that is a real human emotion. I mean, yeah, I think Collins is going to walk 1.00

01:14:52.120 into victory. That's my prediction. And there's a certain kind of like hardcore Democratic

01:14:55.400 partisan in Maine. Let's say it's like, you know, a prototypically would be, I don't know,

01:15:00.460 like a. A 70 year old, you know, a crunchy liberal cable news watching woman who for 1.00

01:15:09.540 years and years and years has had more and more resentment fester against Collins because

01:15:13.880 although she will not align with trump you know 100 of the time still is uh still by her very

01:15:26.720 presence in the senate allows the republicans to control the chamber and uh you know we'll vote

01:15:32.080 for a supreme court nominee like you know uh kavanaugh etc so like so there are people who

01:15:36.740 in maine and you see them quoting a lot of these kind of like just uh man on the street type

01:15:41.180 campaign reportage stories where they say they don't care about anything else than beating

01:15:45.060 collins whatever the cost right but you know that's not going to be the entire yeah that's

01:15:50.100 not going to be what comprises the entirety of whatever coalition was behind platter to get

01:15:54.020 deliver him that you know uh history making a victory right so yeah i could see some of them

01:16:01.000 being being too chastened to to vote for uh whoever they uh replace him with and you know collins

01:16:06.860 if you recall in 2020 right

01:16:11.180 And Democrats were convinced, you know, the Democratic intelligentsia was convinced that that was the year that they were finally going to do away with Collins, right?

01:16:19.920 And the polls actually showed it neck and neck or even the Democrat, Democratic nominee leading. 0.69

01:16:26.960 And Susan Collins, hilarious.

01:16:28.560 And this is the funny, like, this is just the straight up funniest outcome of the 2020 election.

01:16:31.700 She ended up winning like by a landslide.

01:16:33.160 She won by nine points, I think it was.

01:16:36.760 Now, that was a presidential election.

01:16:39.260 So it's just an entirely different electorate.

01:16:41.180 I think this is going to be a sizable democratic wave year.

01:16:45.280 And you know what?

01:16:46.200 I know this is going to,

01:16:47.280 people are going to say,

01:16:47.960 Oh,

01:16:48.040 you're just saying this because you're contrarian.

01:16:51.080 I think that there is a non-trivial chance.

01:16:55.000 And I'm talking about like a,

01:16:56.200 a floor of like a 30% chance probably,

01:17:00.380 or at least a 30% chance that Plattner could have still won the election.

01:17:05.300 Oh yeah.

01:17:06.540 I mean,

01:17:06.980 first of all,

01:17:07.480 he says that the allegations are fabricated unless he's just like a title,

01:17:10.420 total psycho then i don't know why why doesn't he say the stat say make a statement saying that

01:17:18.620 the statute of limitations in maine as of 2021 for any uh for sexual assault per the statutory

01:17:24.160 you know code is was 20 years so there should be no barrier to this being reported to the police

01:17:30.640 and then we can have a proper investigation and then you know etc etc so like there's a there's

01:17:35.280 a chance, right, that the claim could be investigated and it would prove Plattner to be vindicated

01:17:42.820 for one thing. But even if there was no vindication in that sense, I don't know. I mean,

01:17:49.740 I still think that, you know, just buoyed by the national environment, it's certainly possible.

01:17:56.500 It's not impossible, right, that he still could have won the election. So I don't know. I just

01:18:03.860 think uh i'm uncertain um you know susan collins now it's like kind of has this mythology around

01:18:13.240 her where she like defies all the odds and she has this just you know place in the in the lore 1.00

01:18:19.740 of like main politics or something where she can like win whatever the yeah whatever the

01:18:24.780 circumstances but that doesn't necessarily have to be the case forever right so i don't know i

01:18:29.340 I think, you know, what I would be willing to say is, like, the people who would just, like, declare stupidly that there's just no chance that Plattner could ever win under any circumstances, in spite of the, quote, accusations, whatever their merit, right? 0.51

01:18:42.520 I think that's silly. 0.91

01:18:45.560 I totally agree.

01:18:46.380 Do you think that there's going to be a move away in the Democratic Party from what Plattner represented?

01:18:54.380 represented which what you know if we're just going to be honest like let's let's find a

01:18:59.760 democrat he's pro-choice he's against trump but etc he's he's more in line with health care policy

01:19:07.420 all that kind of stuff but he's coded right wing this is sort of tim waltz military service not

01:19:14.560 not not perfect for that uh no but it was 100 platner so he he reads red but his policies are

01:19:22.060 blue he's white uh he goes hunting uh he he's but he actually did that stuff without doing it to

01:19:29.980 like strategically signal anything like so that was what made him unique right it wasn't like

01:19:35.260 john carrey going quail hunting right week before the 2004 election in like camo gear

01:19:40.000 right and it just came across as like totally contrived right uh yeah i mean by all accounts

01:19:46.240 you know actually did you know he's commercial efficient work and you know was into the more

01:19:50.620 masculine coded sort of like cultural uh milieu um without having to like when kamala harris

01:19:56.440 competed in that paintball competition i mean i didn't buy it did she i don't even remember i'm

01:20:02.000 joking oh okay i mean you know that actually didn't sound implausible enough for me to realize

01:20:07.700 you were joking like i could imagine some dopey overpaid democratic consultant telling her to do

01:20:12.520 that um move away i don't know what i'm not sure what that you know i think just in the narrower

01:20:17.300 or circumstances of this main thing

01:20:19.060 because what's going to happen now

01:20:21.080 if he does go through with the formal withdrawal

01:20:22.940 is that a very unspecified kind of opaque process

01:20:27.380 gets triggered where the party kind of apparatchiks

01:20:30.180 can just devise some ad hoc process

01:20:33.500 to install some new nominee.

01:20:35.980 So I'm certain that there's going to be some contingent

01:20:40.160 within who's ever in the kind of decision tree there

01:20:43.160 to say, look, I mean, to atone for our sins,

01:20:46.380 we have to nominate a woman like that's that's not even something that can be argued um now

01:20:54.300 will they do it i mean i i see somebody in the running potentially is this guy troy jackson

01:20:58.140 who appears to be a male so who knows but i'm sure that will at least be kind of like a school

01:21:02.160 of thought right um look what happened when al franken was kind of compelled to resign

01:21:07.880 during the peak of me too right um part of the logic there for uh for democrats in terms of why

01:21:16.100 they came to agree that for the good of the party and the nation, you know, and to sort

01:21:23.400 of solidify their moral standing against Trump was that, yes, Al Franken, although he had

01:21:29.920 done a wonderful job, you know, at the Senate committee hearings, he did have to resign

01:21:33.960 and then he would be duly replaced by a woman.

01:21:39.480 I don't think Waltz was the governor at that time, but I think it was maybe Mark Dayton.

01:21:42.600 And so, yeah, Martin says, yes, of course, I'll appoint a woman. 0.97

01:21:45.040 So they put in this kind of generic woman, Tina Smith.

01:21:48.000 And I think that's kind of the logic. 0.99

01:21:49.560 And yeah, I'm sure there will be demands for some kind of like penance to be done on.

01:21:55.180 I mean, actually, there's this there's this intraparty now almost like purging thing going on where anybody, any consultant who had been party to Plattner's ascendance is being right.

01:22:09.340 Their past are now being scoured through.

01:22:12.600 to see if there's anything harassing

01:22:15.420 that maybe they did five years ago.

01:22:19.820 And so there's going to be some kind of reckoning

01:22:21.800 to quote Cheyenne Hunt's organization

01:22:26.680 where it will be argued that the faction

01:22:34.040 that had been the masterminds of Plattner's emergence

01:22:39.220 It's going to be told, look, look at this fiasco that you beset us with.

01:22:45.460 Yeah.

01:22:45.860 And they're going to, they're blaming like Bernie Sanders and, you know, because Bernie

01:22:49.060 is like the big first endorsement that he got because this, you know, 27 year old supposed

01:22:53.140 Svengali, you know, boy genius, Morris Katz, who was behind, you know, who advised Zoran

01:22:59.120 on a media strategy.

01:23:01.100 He, he then, you know, swooped into the main thing and he facilitated, was involved in

01:23:06.700 facilitating you know bernie coming to to maine over labor day last year and like being the first

01:23:10.640 big endorsement rally for platner so i mean there's there's gonna be a way and there's some

01:23:14.680 like score settling in terms of like factional uh disputes but in in the party but like i just

01:23:20.960 i think overall i mean look

01:23:22.660 how would it be effectuated right that the part for the party to move on from platner types like

01:23:31.760 what what in particular would any particular like faction do to to to realize that that's kind of

01:23:39.560 what i'm clear on i i think i i think joe biden was settled on by the party and remember he was

01:23:46.240 losing those early primaries and things like that i'm just gonna say it because he was an old white 0.97

01:23:52.620 guy it's like trump is a well okay well hear me out trump is a dangerous white nationalist and 0.92

01:23:59.260 Bernie Sanders was pretty old and he won the primary in a landslide. 0.90

01:24:03.980 Yeah. 0.93

01:24:04.520 The only way to defeat him is with a really, really old white man. 1.00

01:24:08.460 And they thought Hillary lost because she was too feminist or cringe or whatever. 0.99

01:24:16.160 And they moved to an old white man. 0.80

01:24:18.960 And then they sort of, they got rid of him. 0.60

01:24:22.560 They're very similar to the, in the ways that they got rid of Plattner.

01:24:26.380 Yeah. 0.99

01:24:26.580 And they went to a woman.

01:24:28.080 i voted for kamala harris and i don't even i and i don't even think her campaign was that terrible

01:24:34.740 i think i thought it was pretty good when you judge i did not just for the record in case any

01:24:39.200 comments this is sort of funny in a way but um i proudly voted for uh mamala but um i recall that

01:24:47.540 i recall being very inspired by your uh endorsement uh statements yes but they're they're just going

01:24:55.740 to go back to the well again i don't i don't hate kamala harris i i think she's fine but there there 0.74

01:25:03.220 i get the fact that this giggling you know biracial woman who does i i get it how that can turn off 1.00

01:25:15.180 people in central ohio and they're just gonna keep doing this forever because that's the only 0.92

01:25:23.980 safe option and that's the only person who could never be accused of rape and i and again i'm not

01:25:32.780 i'm not dunking on kamala i'm just saying the reality right so tara reed yeah um so so so just

01:25:42.180 so i'm uh make sure i understand what you're suggesting is that although democrats in theory

01:25:49.240 might like to nominate a masculinity projecting older male candidate that's kind of like just a

01:25:56.820 classic president archetype right um they feel that it's no longer tenable so they're going to 0.58

01:26:02.120 keep going back to some sort of like poc woman yes and they're going to lose because of that

01:26:08.260 and i i say this with sadness in in a way i don't know i mean joe biden won the democratic primary

01:26:16.600 in 2020 going away when we were told all along when he seemed to be struggling or he only had

01:26:23.020 like a modest national lead in the polls that this was because the Democratic primary electorate

01:26:29.320 was hyper-focused on the identity traits of the candidates, right? That's why Kamala was seen as 0.80

01:26:35.040 like an early favorite. That's why Nate Silver in like January of 2019 infamously came out and said

01:26:40.580 like kamala harris is the front runner her campaign totally uh was a was a was a um

01:26:47.020 it was a botch in in the in the primaries right um because like you know nate silver just thought

01:26:54.820 that a uh a half uh half jamaican half indian a former prosecutor from berkeley california

01:27:02.100 was going to immediately connect on identitarian grounds to like church going

01:27:06.540 ados uh aados uh black people in south carolina um no not quite uh who do they who do they vote

01:27:17.680 for overwhelmingly joe biden the older white guy um and so i don't know i think i think there was

01:27:28.020 kind of like there were pundit prognostications in terms of how that primary process would shake

01:27:33.480 at that were totally dispelled by the actual voter

01:27:35.220 behavior.

01:27:38.780 I mean, even

01:27:39.400 Bernie was, if you

01:27:41.240 took that identitarian theory

01:27:43.480 to the fullest extreme,

01:27:45.580 he too was considered a quote, old white

01:27:47.420 guy. I guess I know he's Jewish, but like, that's

01:27:49.380 how it was presented. And

01:27:51.420 you know, he won

01:27:53.480 the New Hampshire primary

01:27:54.860 convincingly and

01:27:56.600 arguably tied with Buttigieg

01:27:59.240 in Iowa.

01:28:01.520 I just, I don't know, I don't think

01:28:03.280 I don't think that's gonna happen

01:28:05.100 I'm not certain that that's how we would pan out

01:28:07.380 like I think a person like you know Ossoff

01:28:09.320 I could easily

01:28:11.720 see a situation where

01:28:13.000 he becomes

01:28:15.580 a consensus pick for the party

01:28:17.240 he's not exactly coded masculine if I'm being honest

01:28:19.600 masculine enough

01:28:20.500 yeah

01:28:23.260 he's not like a platner right

01:28:25.580 where he's going to enrage these blue sky

01:28:27.920 they thems

01:28:29.160 just by virtue of his

01:28:30.920 identity but

01:28:32.880 he could be masculine enough that like some of the some people in the party okay say he's

01:28:36.680 talarico is maybe an example of this i mean like you know he looks a little bit like a choir boy

01:28:42.960 he's kind of neutralized like he's not gonna rape anyone yeah i mean this is basically

01:28:48.240 on the other hand i mean i don't know everybody's so hyper fixate on this one senate race that like

01:28:54.180 tell me if you were even aware that the democrats basically uh the democratic kind of leadership

01:29:00.520 structure in the senate um just without fanfare recruited roy cooper who was the former two-term

01:29:06.540 quintessential older looking older white male democratic governor of north carolina to run for

01:29:11.300 the senate seat he seems to have a pretty comfortable lead they got they brought back

01:29:14.960 sherrod brown older white guy to run in ohio seems like he's got a pretty good chance of of winning

01:29:20.760 um so those people are more just sort of classical politicians they are older white men and the

01:29:30.200 the party was 100% on board with, again, hardly anybody even like raising a question that they

01:29:37.840 were the best candidates to field for those races. Um, you know, on a presidential level,

01:29:42.840 I mean, yeah, I do think, you know, again, I'll have mixed minds about it because it seems almost

01:29:49.540 a certainty to me that anybody, any, any heteros, any type of heterosexual male, um, probably more

01:29:57.940 off in a white male but you know it could you know they they managed to oust john conyers at

01:30:02.520 the height of me too who was like one of the most like the lions of the house of representatives

01:30:06.440 have been in office since like 1962 or something um because of some sexual harassment thing that

01:30:12.920 got it ended up being alleged and then like he had died shortly thereafter i mean it was kind of

01:30:16.620 remarkable almost callous um and like this is like one of like the you know this guy was

01:30:21.980 like a civil rights hero you know etc etc you'd think if anybody was going to be immunized

01:30:26.820 the uh the onslaughts of me too it would have been him but nope um so um real quick because i i i do

01:30:36.060 want to bring it to a close because we're almost here at two hours do you think me too is gonna

01:30:41.340 burn itself out or we're in a new era this is the paradigm it's already been burned out i'm

01:30:48.640 i'm postulating that we are in a distinct era so when i say me too i'm not you understand i'm

01:30:56.380 using that as a a term that that categorizes like the whole thing because obviously these are

01:31:02.040 genealogically whole thing like what starting in 2017 or starting like yes on of humanity

01:31:06.900 no starting in 2017 okay a new type of morality that is distinctive and do these things burn

01:31:18.860 themselves out or is this actually kind of a paradigm that we're going to be in for a while

01:31:25.000 again i think like me me too as it would have been understood as a cultural or political

01:31:31.880 phenomenon circa 2017 2018 did kind of burn itself out yeah obviously it's still

01:31:38.140 settled into the cultural political ether to some extent where it could have like

01:31:44.280 kind of more uh it could have certain manifestations that just kind of draw on

01:31:50.980 like the lineage of it um but you know i i'm i'm i'm postulating that we're in what i'm calling

01:31:57.520 the zombie epstein era because we just went through a year of like legitimate moral panic 0.94

01:32:02.860 and mass hysteria over yeah ever present pedophilic predation like a pedo behind every bush 0.61

01:32:09.040 trafficking can mean anything to anyone anytime anybody who you know so much as sent him a

01:32:16.160 cheeky email in 2015 had to you know issue a groveling statement and perhaps resign and

01:32:23.640 probably lost a lot of business uh contacts and what you know etc um i think that is more the

01:32:29.780 more proximate caused here kind of layered onto me too than than me too alone um i mean look at

01:32:37.280 what cheyenne hunt cheyenne hunt through her organization uh reckoning action put out a thread

01:32:42.180 today on X where

01:32:43.960 they came

01:32:46.200 out and said that their

01:32:47.560 proximate motivating

01:32:50.380 cause for why

01:32:52.160 they went after Swalwell and then

01:32:54.000 set their sights on

01:32:55.400 Plattner and the way they did was because of Epstein.

01:32:58.320 Wow. For the reckoning that is

01:33:00.100 due, long overdue, around

01:33:02.000 Epstein and how

01:33:03.800 Plattner might have railed against the Epstein

01:33:06.200 class, but it turns out he was actually 0.82

01:33:08.120 deploying the

01:33:09.980 abusive power uh the sexually exploitative kind of power that is characteristic of the epstein 0.94

01:33:14.740 class to undermine our righteous efforts to actually oppose the epstein class something

01:33:20.500 like that right um and then even even what even in terms of why everybody even why there was like a

01:33:26.280 frenzied sweepstakes that broke out the afternoon the politico story broke

01:33:31.620 is because you have guys like ossoff nationally ambitious uh male democratic figures roqana who

01:33:38.320 is like central to it uh but also you know ruben gallego who um you know have been rehearsing these

01:33:46.340 presently prospective presidential stump speeches where they're invading against the epstein class

01:33:52.640 so that means that they're gonna they're gonna have high exposure risk to hypocrisy allegations

01:33:57.780 if they're not instantaneous in their willingness to disavow or repudiate or call for the termination

01:34:05.160 of the candidacy of somebody who has been accused of anything like this.

01:34:09.260 So I don't know.

01:34:10.160 So we're not burned out on that moral panic at all because it's not even conceptualized

01:34:15.260 widely.

01:34:15.760 I mean, unless you happen to subscribe to my sub stack pretty much, granted, it's gotten

01:34:19.920 a little bit more traction in the past couple months.

01:34:24.140 But unless you're aware of some kind of niche online commentariat spaces, I don't even know

01:34:32.460 that you would, um, be conceptualizing Epstein as having been a moral panic or a mass hysteria,

01:34:38.060 really, or that it could have these kinds of cultural, um, uh, more, more, more subtle,

01:34:44.660 uh, cultural and political, uh, ramifications.

01:34:46.960 Um, so, I mean, and you gotta remember like how, I think we might've talked about this,

01:34:51.740 but like in terms of, there's a reason why that story is, has been so salient.

01:34:55.940 It's like a pop culture story as well.

01:34:58.700 Right.

01:34:59.100 You know, it's something that, like, the 19-year-olds on TikTok are super into.

01:35:05.060 They're not going to be super into the main Senate race, right?

01:35:08.460 But this thing, I think, has had these, has had a lot, you know, especially after the mass release of Epstein's files,

01:35:15.820 has had, you know, reverberations that we haven't fully appreciated.

01:35:20.700 and I think this

01:35:22.600 this Walwell to Platner kind of thing

01:35:24.540 in terms of how they were

01:35:26.240 their demises were executed is

01:35:28.480 just one of them I don't see any sign of that burning

01:35:30.800 out anytime soon because it

01:35:32.760 hasn't even been grappled with yet

01:35:34.900 I mean you tell me if I'm wrong yeah

01:35:36.300 I

01:35:38.360 I agree with you

01:35:40.460 I think saying that it's I mean

01:35:42.360 I was speculating actually before you got

01:35:44.720 on air that we're going to

01:35:46.760 enter a sort of new mode

01:35:48.680 of sexuality um there was the uh sexual revolution which was very shocking and paradigm changing

01:35:56.760 in the 60s and we sort of ended up where we were for most of my adult life which was that you are

01:36:05.780 free to have sex here and there you can go on apps you can have a one-night stand no one's

01:36:10.840 going to really judge you can move in with your partner before you get married etc etc and i think

01:36:15.920 we're actually exiting that period.

01:36:18.180 I mean, these things sort of have

01:36:19.700 like generational 30-year waves.

01:36:24.240 And I don't know exactly

01:36:26.840 where we're going to be,

01:36:29.440 but, and I know this is speculative

01:36:31.740 and might even strike some as hysterical,

01:36:34.480 but I wonder if we're entering

01:36:36.780 some ironically puritanical age

01:36:40.460 in which sex itself,

01:36:44.220 or at least heterosexual sex,

01:36:45.620 is criminalized or

01:36:47.440 demoralized, delegitimized

01:36:50.160 and

01:36:51.200 looking at people the wrong

01:36:53.780 way. I mean, basically, it's going to be

01:36:55.740 some bizarre Muslim-like 1.00

01:36:57.880 society where there's 1.00

01:36:59.480 an interest in covering or

01:37:01.560 men will be wearing the burqas this

01:37:03.660 time and women. I don't know

01:37:05.640 what it is. Mandatory vasectomist?

01:37:07.940 Yeah, mandatory 1.00

01:37:09.340 vasectomy, male burqas. 1.00

01:37:12.000 And I know this sounds 0.99

01:37:13.400 outlandish, but 1.00

01:37:15.220 history changes you know like things things do things like this happen and there was a pre-islamic

01:37:26.380 society before there was one where women are completely covered and it's not outrageous to

01:37:33.820 think in these ways but it is speculative and maybe i'm being a bit outlandish but i wonder

01:37:39.500 if we're going to enter a world

01:37:41.540 where, you know, it's like

01:37:43.400 it won't be what the trads want

01:37:45.560 but it's going to be

01:37:47.500 because the people like

01:37:49.560 Cheyenne Hunt, they've got legitimacy

01:37:51.420 on their side. It's going to be their world

01:37:53.100 but it's going to remarkably 0.99

01:37:55.080 and ironically resemble

01:37:57.020 an Islamic society. 1.00

01:38:00.080 I don't know if I'll go that far

01:38:01.280 but quick concluding thought here

01:38:03.280 just for something for people to

01:38:05.120 think about that might

01:38:06.200 bear on this

01:38:09.500 thesis as to what era is now dawning in terms of how proper sexual conduct is being circumscribed.

01:38:23.120 There was a class action settlement that was finalized or approved by a federal judge in

01:38:29.920 New York in April against Bank of America by the same sort of crew of plaintiff's attorneys

01:38:35.520 who sued all kinds of entities

01:38:37.000 like financial institutions

01:38:38.000 and the upstate

01:38:38.920 when attracted

01:38:40.100 to these giant financial settlements.

01:38:41.400 So they have a new one

01:38:41.980 that's underway now

01:38:42.580 in terms of them seeking claimants

01:38:44.880 for their approved

01:38:46.480 class action settlement.

01:38:47.460 So one thing that they told the court

01:38:49.060 that they are going to do

01:38:50.800 and that the court has agreed

01:38:52.860 that they are required to do

01:38:55.040 in the process of sort of

01:38:56.120 setting up this class action

01:38:57.420 settlement structure

01:38:58.140 is to go to Europe

01:39:01.760 and put advertisements or put notices in newspapers in Poland

01:39:10.620 and other places in the Russian language and other languages

01:39:16.720 where they're attempting to locate women

01:39:19.760 who can claim that they had been trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein

01:39:24.760 between 2008 and 2019.

01:39:27.420 Now, that span of years is notable because between 2008 and 2019,

01:39:30.600 the only women whom jeffrey epstein had ever even been accused of having any kind of relations with

01:39:37.100 whatsoever were exclusively adults pre-2008 different story okay but 2018 to 2019 which

01:39:45.380 is the time period that this lawsuit covers that the the pool of potential victims who can say that

01:39:51.700 they qualify under the criteria that's been set up to designate trafficking they would have been

01:39:58.000 all adults right and they would have been overwhelmingly people uh women who believed

01:40:04.980 themselves contemporaneously to having been engaging in consensual conduct uh but you know

01:40:11.800 they were they were receiving you know um amenities travel whatever money certain things that have now

01:40:19.660 been construed as the component parts of a sex trafficking venture um and of course like with

01:40:25.640 the financial incentive there's all the reason for them to come out the woodworks and you know

01:40:29.500 get a couple million dollars tax-free from bank of america which kind of just

01:40:34.960 buckled and agreed to this these settlement terms without really much of a fight so

01:40:40.060 look now look at the look at now like what um is is it's the criteria for what can supposedly

01:40:53.220 establish a trafficking situation is so loose and so ever expansive so elastic that anybody who

01:41:01.340 exchanges a thing of value anything exchanges a thing of value like it doesn't even require

01:41:06.160 transportation i don't want to get into the whole speech that i have on this right now but like it's

01:41:10.880 just so amorphous right that it can encompass so such a broad range of potential sexual encounters

01:41:19.160 or even like prospective sexual encounters between male and female

01:41:24.720 that it's going to now prohibit or preclude lots of ways

01:41:34.020 in which people had previously gone about obtaining sexual romantic companionship

01:41:41.180 because who wants to even run the risk of being labeled a trafficker, right?

01:41:47.120 um that's kind of like the nobody even knows really what it means but like it seems to mean

01:41:51.340 something real bad so you're gonna probably forego any any uh any any situation where hey

01:41:58.540 it might be nice to see if this attractive young woman wants to do xyz but like if that means i 0.97

01:42:03.860 could be branded a trafficker and be like embroiled in years of litigation and maybe even criminally

01:42:09.700 prosecuted for a sex trafficking conspiracy probably not worth the gamble um now i'm not

01:42:15.380 saying everybody's aware of this, of the terms of this bank of America suit. I'm probably the

01:42:19.620 only maniac who actually read it, but I'm saying it still has kind of, um, it's instilling

01:42:26.240 these shifts into the legal architecture of the country that kind of, um, uh, coincide with

01:42:36.400 changing cultural just mores and political, um, political mores. So that's just like one little

01:42:44.380 data point for people maybe to consider in terms of how, again, the domain of what is seen as

01:42:51.020 permissible sexual conduct is being newly demarcated as we speak. Because we are in the zombie Epstein

01:42:58.940 era. There's an Epstein angle to everything. Yes. Michael, thank you for coming back on. I really 0.94

01:43:06.700 enjoy speaking with you, and I'm sure the audience does as well. And this is really enlightening

01:43:12.980 stuff and it's something you can't get everywhere uh you can only get it at a few few places so um

01:43:18.880 so thank you if any of you uh if any of you crazy people actually sat around listening to that for

01:43:23.020 two hours at least you know maybe uh consider subscribing to my own sub stack definitely nice

01:43:27.680 but you don't you don't have to send everyone i don't ask for much yes uh so thank you michael

01:43:34.560 and um you're doing god's work and i will uh we'll be in touch uh the next time one of these

01:43:40.640 all right sounds good is this video just going to be uh it will be totally available as that as

01:43:45.520 your prayer request yes yes yes won't hide any glad i impressed that upon you okay take care

01:43:51.000 thank you bye

01:44:10.640 Thank you.

01:44:40.640 You

RadixJournal - July 11, 2026

The MeToo Mythology

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