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Too soon indeed.
Never again back a Democratic candidate that isn't an HR lady because a heterosexual male with any semblance of sexual history is at risk of getting MeToo'd just before the election.
There's a reason why none of these accusations are ever about something that happened last night, and there's always some string of enthusiastic text messages that are totally at odds with the way the accuser currently remembers things. Yet we're expected to accept unverified SA allegations influencing politics and woe be on he who dares question the word of Her Holiness, The Victim™.
This guy is probably the most obvious sexual assaulter we've had in recent memory, even more obvious than some of the people who have previously down weird sex stuff.
The guy has posted about fantasizing about raping and killing people...and joined the military to do that (in how own words!), claimed to be a huge WWII buff but got a Nazi tattoo, has significant infidelity problems that aren't contested, and I'm not even sure that's all of it.
Hearing that he was a rapist or a sex pest is more unsurprising than anything.
Would you be shocked if President grab-her-by-the-pussy is outed as a rapist tomorrow? And would you be shocked if those allegations were then found to be fabricated next week? There's always nebulous "signs" that seem obvious in hindsight, especially when characterised with a more "flexible" personal ethics than what's normal. But the allegations need to stand on their own legs as well. Or we could simply chuck legal procedure, cede to the court of public opinion (read: mob rule) and do only what's optically feasible.
Shocked? No.
But Trump is vulgar, being a sex pest makes sense, rapist maybe less so but not shocking. This guy is HEINOUS. He bragged about having thoughts of raping men for dominance, like it makes more sense than not!
Vague, nebulous post-hoc signs are a problems but this guy is not that!
If you had to make a most Sus guy in a lab it would look like this guy.
I followed it up with another question.
You know why MeToo ran out of mileage?
The signal-to-noise ratio of the allegations was probably the worst we've ever seen at the time. Becky accuses Brad on twitter, incident happened somewhere in LA several years ago so no evidence exists, she was super scared so no police complaint was filed, you know the drill. And she's definitely not lying because "you don't lie about these things and it's hard to lie about it rape".
Except, it's the digital age. It's never been easier to lie! People lie, casually and often, about far more outlandish things than SA. And the online mob will reliably follow her word to lynch Brad.
You can't reason with the mob, why allow them to get involved at all?
There are people who want Trump gone, we know that. We have precedent within the decade for smear campaigns (see Russiagate) to delegitimise his Presidency. An unverified rape charge at a politically critical moment? Is that not Sus?
You're confusing MeToo with the campus rape allegations. I'm not aware of single MeToo incident that involved a single individual making accusations about an isolated instance of sexual misconduct that happened decades ago. The closest was Brett Kavanaugh, but even that isn't a great instance because it was a presumed attempted rape and it didn't prevent his Supreme Court confirmation. The New York Times did a postmortem in the fall of 2018 documenting over 200 incidents, the overwhelming majority of which involved some kind of workplace harassment. The perpetrators often admitted the accusations or at least to some kind of vague wrongdoing "I apologize for any inappropriate behavior...", and most of the cases involved multiple accusers, witnesses, or some other kind of corroboration.
I said several years ago, not decades ago. Meaning a large enough window for people to forget or misremember key details about the incident and for key pieces of evidence to no longer exist. Aziz Ansari comes to mind, and he even apologised to her afterwards. There was also Jeremy Soule in the games industry, accusations surfaced 10 years after the alleged incident and he went off-grid afterwards. Chris Avellone was accused of sexual misconduct that allegedly took place in undisclosed time periods, two of his accusers retracted the accusations and settled a libel suit outside of court. I don't know if this counts, but Depp v Heard involved alleged incidents (including sexual) spanning years.
Because the GOP is understood to be on the "man" side of gender politics, which allows for presumption of innocence (not just legally, but socially and professionally). If he was a Democrat, he would've been dropped like a hot potato.
I don't doubt the stories NYT picked up and ran with actually met some degree of plausibility to formally report, but MeToo was an ambient enforcement of social pressure to listen and believe countless stories with varying levels of believability. We have to just accept that misconduct allegations could surface at any point and we should take every one of them very seriously, but never seriously ask critical questions.
Soule's accusations came in 2019, and Avellone's in 2020. The Johnny Depp allegations became public during his 2016 divorce but disappeared from the headlines for years and didn't become a major part of public discourse until the 2022 defamation trial. I bring these dates up because your post implied that MeToo petered out because of a raft of similar claims that people stopped taking seriously. MeToo took off with the Weinstein accusations in November 2017 and continued apace until the following summer, during which they slowly petered out, with the Asia Argento and Les Moonves allegations being the last major ones. The Ansari thing came out in January of 2018, and while it sort of fits the pattern you describe and was controversial at the time, even among ardent MeToo supporters, it didn't have much of an effect on the momentum of the movement as a whole.
There was always a sort of motte and bailey going on with the Kavanaugh case, at least insofar as it was discussed by Kavanaugh's defenders. There were also political considerations involved that swamped the whole thing, and I'll state for the record that neither side covered itself in glory throughout the affair. For some background, Ford privately reported what she remembered to Diane Feinstein, who was the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in July, amid speculation that Kavanaugh was on Trump's short list to replace Kennedy. Feinstein kept this information to herself until Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings were nearing conclusion in September, which required them to be extended for some time while the claims were investigated. The Republicans may be broadly described as on the "pro-man" side of the argument, but I don't think they defended Kavanaugh purely based on ideology but through political necessity. Had Feinstein quietly informed the White House and the rest of the committee of the potential scandal, there's a good chance that Kavanaugh isn't named, nobody asks any questions, and nobody has ever heard of Christine Blasey Ford. By timing the revelations when she did, Feinstein ensured that the administration couldn't pull the nomination without causing the Supreme Court to start the fall term short one conservative justice, which would have benefited Democrats.
To make matters worse, there wasn't really even time to adequately investigate the allegations. Which is why I also disagree with your characterization that their position was one of a presumption of innocence, as that implies merely a presumption, not a conclusion. The GOP and most conservative commentators did not take the position that the matter should be investigated and adjudicated, but that the accusations should be discounted on their face. "Believe all women" may not be a tenable policy, but neither is "assume all women are lying for personal or political gain". Whatever problems there were with Ford's story, it was difficult to conclude that they were fabricated out of whole cloth; she had made the accusations privately on several occasions beginning in 2012, and it would be ridiculous to assume that it was all part of some long-term setup as if she had a crystal ball and knew that he'd be nominated for the Supreme Court one day. In their hast to confirm Kavanaugh before the first Monday in October, the administration tried to limit the Senate investigation as much as possible, and when several senators said they would only vote for confirmation if Kavanaugh was cleared by an FBI investigation, the administration micromanaged the investigation in an attempt to limit its scope and conclude it quickly.
Of course we have to take them seriously. The entire movement was based on the idea that, despite awareness campaigns and legal protections dating from at least the 1980s, this kind of behavior was still disturbingly common and still not taken seriously. None of the big names that came out of MeToo—Harvey Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, Mario Battali, etc.—have been exonerated, and I haven't heard any suggestion that the accusations against them were fabricated. There simply isn't any evidence that a lot of people were getting railroaded or that nobody was asking serious questions. To the extent that most of this was controversial, it was cases like Ansari's where there was no factual dispute over what happened, just whether it was appropriate. This is why I don't understand the blowback from it, which largely suggests that none of these claims are credible and that we should just ignore them, because even subjecting the accused to an investigation would be too much of a punishment. What basically happened in the end was that women came out and said that something was true, that this kind of behavior wasn't being taken seriously enough, and conservative opponents came out and told them that they had no desire to take it seriously. That's what it all boils down to.
I'm not claiming the movement petered out cleanly in one summer. But it did break down into a lower grade yet persistent cultural enforcement mechanism. The timeline nitpicking doesn't take away the fact that MeToo normalised treating accusations as sufficient grounds for professional and social destruction in far too many cases. The cases involving high-profile names going unpunished were the motte. The bailey was many, many smaller cases with varying levels of credibility, but decisions being made purely to appease the online mob. This is like nuking an entire city to kill a couple hundred terrorists. The online mob, a phenomenon that did not exist to nearly the planetary proportions just a few years prior, was the backbone of MeToo. A self-righteous and frankly, ignorant social force animated by a twisted sense of justice, that does not believe in a process beyond believing the accuser's word (sourced from social media, the uncontested bastion of truth and objectivity), and is so easily manipulated, probably should not have a say in these matters.
And that reveals the double standard at the heart of the whole affair. Yes, Feinstein sat on the letter for strategic reasons. Yes, the timing was political. But that's exactly the problem. The Democrats weaponised a decades-old, uncorroborated allegation at the last possible moment to derail a nomination. They didn't bring it forward early for a proper vetting, they leaked it (or allowed it to leak) at the eleventh hour for maximum damage. It was calculated lawfare and the GOP knew it. The process was already a circus by this point.
You call it "discounted on their face." I call it recognising a political ambush when you see one. The fact remains, the presumption of innocence wasn't abandoned by the GOP. The false dichotomy of "believe all women" versus "assume all women are lying for personal or political gain" is exactly the problem. The sane position is simpler and more rhetorically humble: "I'm sorry for what you're going through but I don't know you. I don't know the accused. I wasn't there. I don't possess the means to verify your claims. I'm not implying you're lying, I'm asking you to show basic merit to your claims when you're asking the public and institutions to defenestrate someone over them." This is where the online mob fails the bar, not that they intended to pass anyway.
Ford's story had serious problems from the start. Massive memory gaps (duh), no corroboration from people she named, changing details, and a history of left-wing activism. "She mentioned it privately multiple times since 2012" is weaksauce, frankly. People tell stories to friends for all kinds of reasons, including (mostly) personal. And none of those supposed confidants came forward with contemporaneous evidence anyway. You don't need a "long-term setup" to explain this. And FYI, I'm not saying this was the case. But it is a possibility that cannot be ignored. Point being, we don't know.
Look, I wasn't expecting to debate MeToo on TheMotte in 2026. In hindsight, the movement blew up well beyond its stated principles. The "overwhelming majority was workplace harassment claims with corroboration" line is true for the NYT's carefully curated list of big fish. It is necessarily not true for the ambient cultural wave that swept through every industry, university, and social circle. MeToo created an environment where a single accusation - often years old, often with no contemporaneous evidence, often from someone who may or may not have a vendetta - was enough to trigger professional death. Believe women became the default. This didn't stay confined to Weinstein and Spacey, it also infected the middle ground, and that's where the real damage was done.
This isn't a decibel contest, there are no objective metrics to quantify social media noise that I can just link to. There was a cultural norm where accusations, especially from women, carried enormous presumptive weight, and questioning them was socially radioactive.
The fact that a bad date with pressure but no clear non-consent became national conversation under the MeToo banner shows how far the evidentiary bar had dropped. And it wasn't even the alleged victim that went to the tabloid, a friend of hers did. This was not an outlier. It was the new standard in action.
You keep weakmanning again and again. The blowback was "normal standards of evidence and skepticism should apply before we treat an accusation as sufficient grounds for professional and social destruction." The movement was trying to replace those norms with faith-based decision making. No one was arguing against investigating claims, that is exactly what they were advising. Go to the right authorities and let them do the job. If a decision was made following an exhaustive investigation and your claims were substantiated, great. Not a problem. But the online vigilantism was the real engine. This is the part that MeToo's defenders keep minimising. A self-righteous digital crowd that wasn't there, doesn't know any of the people involved, has no access to evidence, is motivated to lie for clicks and engagement, and is primarily driven by signaling virtue. That mob gets to have the loudest voice in deciding someone's fate, treating due process as an annoying inconvenience at best? That is what made the signal-to-noise ratio catastrophic.
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