Back in 2017, when the Me Too movement broke on the heels of the widespread accusations of sexual assault against Harvey Weinstein, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Hollywood full of sexual predators? Color me shocked. The next thing you’re going to tell me is that Wall Street is full of crooks and the Catholic Church full of child molesters. When Weinstein was indicted the following March for rape and sexual assault, I raised one of my eyebrows. We live in a culture where powerful men, even serial rapists like Weinstein, rarely if ever pay much of a price for their crimes. Court settlements and gag orders basically allow the wealthy to buy the right to commit rape or sexual assault. This February, when Weinstein was found guilty and handed what was in effect a life sentence, however, I was flabbergasted. I assumed he would simply plea out to a lesser charge, get a slap on the wrist, and perhaps have to fork over some more money.

The Me Too movement, along with the Black Lives Matter, rose up in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the murder of Trayvon Martin by a self-appointed vigilante and the murder of Michael Brown by a police officer. By the mid-2010 is became clear the the criminal justice system in the United States was broken. While the courts would impose draconian sentences on working-class, minority youth for drug possession, or threaten Aaron Swartz with decades of jail time for what basically amounted to an ill-thought-out protest against the price of academic journals, it essentially gave police officers the license to kill. No District Attorney would mount an effective case against local police officers, with whom he, or she, worked closely on a regular basis. Black Lives Matter took advantage of the widespread availability of good quality video cameras and high-end cellphones to document just how widespread police brutality against minority youth really was. The Me Too Movement, in turn, set up what was essentially a court of public opinion to shame rich and powerful sexual abusers in a way their victims, who were usually bound by court settlements and gag orders, couldn’t, and in a way the criminal justice system wouldn’t.

Me Too was a necessary corrective to a bought and paid for criminal justice system that refused to punish the rich and powerful. Soon, however, it became infected with an extremist ideology that refused to make any distinction between an Al Franken and a Harvey Weinstein, a Louis CK and a Bill Cosby, a “shitty media man” who might have sent a few creepy personal messages to a strange woman online, and a Roger Ailes. Not only did some women deliberately conflate wealthy and powerful serial rapists with the male gender as a whole — there’s nothing worse in radical feminist circles than to state the obvious that “not all men” are rapists and sexual abusers — many radical feminists seemed to focus on trivial social offenses at the expense of serious crime. There was almost a kind of feminist version of “broken windows policing,” the now discredited idea that if you arrested fare beaters in the subways and handed out sentences for public drunkenness the more serious crimes would take care of themselves. Catcalling, acting like a jerk after having had one too many drinks, making off color jokes, inappropriate behavior online indicated that sexual abuse was universal in a way that the Harvey Weinstein rape mill didn’t. Most men can’t afford court settlements and gag orders. Almost any man can afford to shout out “smile” at an uninterested woman in the subway.

Of course, as a man, I’m not really in a position to judge how common rape and sexual assault. are. I don’t get cat called. Nobody tries to slip knockout drugs into my drink at bars I never go to anyway. I can walk pretty much anywhere I want, anytime I want without having to be worried about getting assaulted by someone bigger and stronger than I am. What’s more, it became obvious reading personal testimony on social media by woman who didn’t strike me as particularly radical that the problem of sexual assault was far more common than I had realized. Every woman seemed to have a story, not of some bad experience with a drunken 19-year-old in college who couldn’t hold his liquor and who hadn’t yet learned how to socialize with the opposite sex, but of being propositioned by men in their 30s and 40s when they were children. I started to believe that women who hadn’t been sexually harassed were a tiny minority, that almost every teenage girl at some point in her life had some creepy 40-year-old uncle trying to corner her in the closet at the family reunion, that every recent college graduate got propositioned by her boss at her first job or internship.

Then along came Joe Biden and Tara Reade. Reade, who worked as a low-level-staffer for the then Delaware Senator Biden has gone public with an accusation that back in 1993 the current Democratic nominee shoved his hands up her skirt and penetrated her vagina with his fingers. I have no idea whether or not it’s true. I probably never will. In spite of the Me Too movement, rich and powerful men still rarely if ever pay any penalty for sexual assault. Donald Trump has had multiple rape accusations leveled against him and it hasn’t hurt his popularity, even among Republican women. Brett Kavenaugh, who was accused of sexual assault by a former schoolmate, sits on the Supreme Court. To this day, no major figure on Wall Street, as far as I know, has been publicly shamed for inappropriate sexual behavior. With the notable exception of Al Franken, who could have easily fought the accusations against him if he had wanted to, the fallout from the Me Too movement seems to have been limited to powerful men in the media and entertainment industry. They obviously have better lawyers at Goldman Sachs than they do in Hollywood. Nevertheless, in spite of how I probably won’t ever really know the truth about Joe Biden and Tara Reade, the tawdry little event that allegedly took place back in 1993 seems believably commonplace. A powerful man assaulting an employee? Haven’t feminists been telling me for years that it happens all the time?

Tara Reade, 56, worked as a staff assistant to Mr Biden from 1992-93 when he was a senator for the US state of Delaware.

In recent interviews, she has said that in 1993 her former boss forced her against a wall and put his hands under her shirt and skirt after she delivered him his gym bag.

“There was no exchange, really, he just had me up against the wall,” she said to podcast host Katie Halper in March 2020.

“I remember it happened all at once… his hands were on me and underneath my clothes.” He then penetrated her with his fingers, she said.

“I remember him saying, first, as he was doing it ‘Do you want to go somewhere else?’ and then him saying to me, when I pulled away… he said ‘Come on man, I heard you liked me,'” she said.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52462113

How is it then that the same radical feminists who have been trying to convince me for years that men who don’t commit sexual assault are far more common than men who do commit sexual assault so reluctant to believe that Biden, who not only has a long history of inappropriate behavior towards women, but stood in the way of credible testimony of detailing similarly inappropirate behavior by Clarence Thomas, is not only innocent of Tara Reade’s accusations but is being set up by Vladimir Putin and the Russians? Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times, for example, argues that “Reade seems almost engineered in a lab to inspire skepticism in mainstream Democrats, both because her story keeps changing and because of her bizarre worship of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.” Amanda Marcotte at Salon, in turn,  suggests that Reade has been duped by the ever disreputable Oliver Stone into thinking too much of those wily Slavic untermenschen.

When asked about it, Reade told Salon she had been writing a novel about Russia at the time and “the blogs read political because I was kind of in that immersion of doing Russian stuff for this novel.” She also told Salon that she had been influenced by Oliver Stone’s pro-Putin documentary and a Russian friend who praised Putin.

After doing “more research,” she told Salon she now feels differently about Putin, although if that’s true her change of heart seems to be quite recent. In February 2020, Reade scolded actor and major Sanders supporter John Cusack “not to repeat xenophobic propaganda against Russia” and lamented that “Putin in 2006 was Hollywood A listers darling now he is the evil master mind.”

https://www.salon.com/2020/03/31/a-woman-accuses-joe-biden-of-sexual-assault-and-all-hell-breaks-loose-online-heres-what-we-know/

(Note: Back when I had a Twitter account Cusack blocked me for being too pro-Russian but that’s another story. Nevertheless, if I ever get mugged, please let it be known that I hate the Russians as much as any good American. In fact, as a Lithuanian American, it’s in my DNA to hate Russians. Bad Russians. Bad Russians. Send the Germans back in. Resurrect Zombie Napoleon. Nuke the bastards. USA USA USA. )

My gut feeling is that Michelle Goldberg and Amanda Marcotte probably think Joe Biden is guilty. I doubt either of them is dumb enough to believe Putin put Tara Reade up to it. They’ve simply decided that beating Trump is so important that one little sexual assault 25 years ago is the lesser of two evils. Indeed, we saw a similar dynamic back during the Monica Lewinsky affair, when so many feminists chose to defend Bill Clinton against the Christian right, even though his actions towards his 23 year old intern were clearly predatory, if not necessarily illegal. What’s more, it seems to be the sad case that American women have not only accepted the idea that most men are toxic, but that there’s little use in hoping that things could get any better. All men are sexual predators, but men also have most of the money and the social status. Men, like capitalism, are going to be in power forever. So you condemn some and you protect others. Trump should go to jail, just like Harvey Weinstein. That mangy looking guy who spread his legs next to you in the subway needs to be shamed. Louis CK should never been allowed to perform again. But Bill Clinton and Joe Biden are so important to the feminist cause that you have to look the other way when they get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. In other words, the Me Too movement, which has brought genuine sexual predators to justice, has temporarily been canceled.

As Karl Marx remarked in his classic account of the Revolution of 1848, in order to make sense of a present crisis, we often resort to the rhetoric and the imagery of the past. “Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.”

Here in a typical bedroom community of New York City, epicenter of the Coronavirus pandemic, one of my neighbors has put up a display invoking the only two times in the recent past the New Jersey bourgeoisie has faced a life-threatening crisis. The crudely handmade sign “Cranford Strong” invokes the good old days of Hurricane Sandy and the Chris Christie of “Jersey Strong.” The more professionally done sign thanking the “front line,” the troops that stock the shelves with toilet paper and canned tuna fish at the local ShopRite, reminds us all of 9/11, when in response to the way Islamic terrorists “hate our freedom,” which isn’t of course free, the American people rallied around George W. Bush and offered to give up our freedom, to sign the Patriot Act into law, to invade Iraq, and to get to work laying the foundations for the torture/surveillance state.

What I’ve noticed, however, is how muted my neighbor’s patriotic display is compared to what I saw in October of 2001. There are no flags, just an acronym, FLAG. There’s no call for war against China. I have yet to see any sign referring to the “Wuhan Virus.” No new bumper stickers have been mass produced. The overwhelming mood isn’t violent patriotism, but tired resignation. All anybody really wants to do is to be able to buy toilet paper again, to send their kids back to school, and to take their dogs back into the park. No coherent narrative has emerged. While Donald Trump and the far right have attempted to stir up hostility towards China, and while there have been hate crimes against Asian Americans, it pales in comparison to the drumbeat of Russopobia that liberal Democrats maintained for years after the election of 2016, let alone the overwhelming consensus that emerged after 9/11 that “we” had to “support the troops” and invade Iraq. The corporate media’s attempt to make Andrew Cuomo the 2020’s Rudy Giuliani — it’s a little hard to remember these days just how much of a hero that nasty little fascist troll was back in 2001 — seems to have petered out.

Back in March, the Democratic Party crushed a mild mannered insurgency from the very moderate left in Bernie Sanders, but in retrospect it’s a little difficult to figure out why they even bothered. Sanders, who fell in line and voted for the recent corporate bailout as obediently as Amy Klobuchar or Corey Booker, presents no threat to the American ruling class. Those “Bernie Bros,” so feared on social media, are no more likely to produce a Lenin or a Robespierre than I am to get a job doing shampoo commercials. While there may be something resembling a general election this November — a second wave of the pandemic may cancel it altogether — I can’t imagine that it will have much legitimacy. Both candidates will be old men in cognitive decline. Neither will be able to campaign in public. There won’t be much debate. Don’t look for Lincoln Douglass in 2020. I suspect that whichever elderly reactionary wins, the one with the R at the end of his name or the one with the D at the end of his name, the corporate elite will control the government from behind the scenes. Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the intelligence agencies, and the big tech companies in silicon valley are going to dangle the puppet in the White House on their knee, and drink a glass of water while they lecture us on how for our own good we need to give them anything they want. The democratic system was on its dying legs, a frail, elderly resident of the American nursing home. Coronavirus has killed it.

I don’t know what’s going to happen after the pandemic dissipates. I don’t know what our ruling class has planned. I don’t know how the rest of us will react. But I suspect that we’re going to see a heavy push by the media to increase surveillance and control — whether its by the government or the corporations makes no difference — for our own good. That’s the real tragedy. People in the Middle East don’t hate us for our freedoms. They hate us for our hypocrisy. Coronavirus, on the other hand, does. To be more accurate, Coronavirus loves our freedom because it hates us. Coronavirus thrives in a free society. It breeds in warm, sunny Mediterranean cultures like Italy. The coldblooded Germans, by contrast, seem to have defeated it. Coronavirus makes protest, political rallies, social gatherings, even Holy Communion, deadly. It requires us to shun one another, to fear each other’s presence. It puts all society online, on a corporate controlled Internet that the wealthy can shut down any time they want. It transforms any act of defiance — illegal fishing in the local pond, walking your dog in the park, conversing with strangers — a form of stupidity. Coronavirus, at long last, is the final stage of neoliberal capitalism.