#FireChrisHayes is trending because … progressives don’t want the same scrutiny for their guy that they demanded for President Trump and Brett Kavanaugh.
What else can we glean from the disturbing Twitter trending topic that lit up the interwebs yesterday?
The sin committed by the MSNBC prime-time host: he reported straight up on the sexual-assault allegations lodged by a former Senate aide to presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.
That’s it.
He treated a news story involving a prominent political figure as being worthy of a deeper dive.
And this story is very much worthy of a lot more digging.
Tara Reade, the former Biden aide, has offered a rather detailed description of the alleged assault, and has people stepping forward who back up her account of having told them about what she says transpired in the immediate aftermath.
The foundation of the defense from the Biden campaign is that there is no record of a complaint that Reade says she filed, but it doesn’t take much to think through what might have happened to a complaint lodged against a prominent senator in 1993.
Not saying that we know with any certainty there, but we’ve learned in the #MeToo era to look back with skepticism at the culture of previous generations and their handling of sexual-assault allegations.
We’ve already litigated this, right, with the fight over Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, and hours of national TV testimony and debate over allegations from a former high-school acquaintance that you have to concede come from an awfully similar place as what we’re hearing from Reade.
And then there are the lingering stories involving Trump and many alleged sexual misdeeds that get oxygen on social media from time to time.
The standard that we have from #MeToo is to protect the accuser while we consider the nature of the allegations, and whatever we can find in terms of substantiation, which often comes in the form of contemporary third-hand accounts.
It’s fair to point out that what we have here with this Tara Reade story is comparable to what we’ve dealt with on the Kavanaugh and Trump stories.
It’s also safe to assume that, ultimately, that nothing in terms of an actual record of a complaint will ever surface.
Does that mean that no complaint was ever filed, that nothing happened?
The #FireChrisHayes folks will tell you that Brett Kavanaugh, facing similar allegations of misconduct, should never have been confirmed by the Senate, and if they had their way, he’d be impeached and removed at the next opportunity.
But Biden should skate, and Hayes, being an MSNBC guy, has to go, because by reporting on the Biden story straight up, he helped the other team.
This is what passes for political discourse in 2020 America.
Story by Chris Graham
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