It's time for the #MeToo Movement to end. Sexual assault allegations need to be judged on a case by case basis, not as part of some overall movement. The problem with the #MeTooMovement is that every allegation becomes part of a larger narrative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| The case against Brett Kavanaugh is falling apart more and more with each passing hour, and the allegations are just unraveling, and the smear merchants who concocted this character assassination crusade are looking around, it seems, for a way to jump off the bandwagon before it's too late. | |
| They're like that gif, and it is gif, by the way, not jif, We're good to go. | |
| They didn't just rear their ugly head for the first time this week. | |
| They've been there all along. | |
| But if somehow you never noticed them before, I think now anyone with two brain cells can see. | |
| Because all of the problems have been sort of illustrated in the last one or two weeks. | |
| Enough that even just this isolated by itself, even just the last one or two weeks, I think would be enough, should be enough, to discredit the Me Too movement. | |
| And... And maybe hopefully cause us to look away from that and return some semblance of rationality and sanity to the conversation about sexual assault and harassment because it is a very important conversation. | |
| And that's precisely my problem with the MeToo movement is that the MeToo movement has ended the conversation about... | |
| It didn't start the conversation. | |
| It hasn't enhanced the conversation or facilitated it. | |
| It has ended the conversation because we're not allowed to have a conversation anymore about it. | |
| With the Me Too movement. Now there's a narrative, and all you're allowed to do is stick to the narrative. | |
| You're not allowed to actually, you know, ask any questions or make any points or anything like that. | |
| So hopefully now, most of us can see that. | |
| In fact, I think, again, not just from the last two weeks, but in general, I think There are at least six significant problems with the MeToo movement and six good reasons why it should end. | |
| Which isn't to say that our opposition to sexual assault should end, because I don't know about you, I've always been opposed to it. | |
| I didn't need the MeToo movement to tell me to be opposed to sexual assault. | |
| I've always been opposed to it from the beginning. | |
| So I'm not saying that should end, but this thing called the MeToo movement should end, and I'll give you six reasons for that. | |
| Number one, MeToo does not allow sexual assault allegations to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. | |
| So the first and biggest problem with the MeToo movement is that it is a movement. | |
| And because of Me Too, every alleged instance of sexual impropriety is lumped with every other alleged instance, and they're all kind of mixed together into this stew, and each separate allegation is then not seen as a separate allegation, but as an element or ingredient in this stew. | |
| And that's a pretty big problem. | |
| If we're going to get to the truth of any particular case, And if we're going to be fair to the accuser and fair to the accused, we cannot look at each case as another plot point in an overall narrative. | |
| We cannot see Brett Kavanaugh in the context of this movement or this narrative. | |
| You have to look at Brett Kavanaugh as an individual person, And Christine Ford's an individual person and their case is an individual case. | |
| That's how it has to be evaluated. | |
| Brett Kavanaugh is not just the man character accused of abusing the woman character as if these are just broad sort of archetypes. | |
| No, he's an individual person and she's an individual person and their situation is an individual situation which has absolutely no relationship to Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby or any other famous pervert. | |
| They've got no relationship whatsoever. | |
| They're not connected even a little bit. | |
| So when you say Me Too, when you say, oh, well, this is Brett Kavanaugh's Me Too thing, you have just taken him and put him alongside all these other guys. | |
| This is not some conspiracy among all of them. | |
| He's a completely separate situation. | |
| You know, this week I've heard several women say in the media, in fact, one of Christine Ford's friends was interviewed by CNN last night. | |
| And she has no knowledge whatsoever of this situation, which actually should tell you something. | |
| The fact that she's a friend of Christine Ford, had never heard about this before. | |
| But, you know, she was saying this thing that I've heard other women say, other women that are supporters of the Me Too movement, where they've said, well, you know, I don't know if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty, but I do know that those kinds of boys, you know, growing up, I did know those kinds of boys. | |
| And I was aware of those kinds of situations happening. | |
| But see, that... | |
| You know, I'm sorry that you knew those kinds of boys. | |
| If we're talking about those kinds of boys as in rapists, and if you knew about those kinds of situations, I'm sorry, you know, that's unfortunate. | |
| I'm sorry that you grew up around those kinds of boys. | |
| But see, that's not how we can... | |
| That's the problem. | |
| We can't look at this situation through that lens. | |
| Brett Kavanaugh is not a kind, okay? | |
| He's not a kind of person. | |
| He's just a person. | |
| And this thing, if it happened, which I don't think it did, is not a kind of thing. | |
| It's a thing. We're dealing with specific people and specific circumstances. | |
| It is impossible to be objective and rational if we're looking at it through a narrative lens. | |
| If we're looking at it, oh, well, he's just that kind, and this is that kind of situation. | |
| No, that's not right. | |
| Second thing. The second problem with MeToo. | |
| MeToo does not acknowledge the possibility that women can lie. | |
| As we have established, it is a problem when we start making movements and narratives out of our opposition to sexual assault. | |
| Like, we're all opposed to sexual assault, fine. | |
| But when you make that into a movement, when you make it into a narrative, It's a problem, and it's even more a problem in this case when you consider what the narrative is telling us, namely that women don't lie about these kinds of things. | |
| Believe women is what the MeToo crusaders shout. | |
| They say, believe women. Well, no, I don't believe women. | |
| I got news for you. I don't believe women. | |
| I don't believe men either. | |
| I believe individual people, regardless of their gender, if there are good and empirical reasons to believe them. | |
| So no, I don't have a blanket policy of believing women any more than I have a blanket policy of believing men or a blanket policy of believing, you know, people with brown hair. | |
| That has no bearing. | |
| Their, you know, their biological sex and their, you know, their demographic has no bearing on whether or not they're lying. | |
| So it's just the stupidest thing in the world to believe women. | |
| What do you mean by, women lie, just like men lie. | |
| You know, men and women, all people lie. | |
| So if you're going to say, well, women don't lie, well, of course they lie. | |
| Everyone lies. Now, whether or not a particular woman has lied about this particular thing, well, now we've got to look at the situation and come to that determination. | |
| But you can't have any blanket assumptions about which gender is more likely to lie. | |
| It just doesn't make any sense. So when you say, and I've also been told, I saw someone on Facebook link to an article, and the title of the article is, Women Don't Lie About Rape. | |
| Well, I may as well say that men don't rape. | |
| Just because most men would never rape doesn't mean that any specific man who was accused of rape didn't rape. | |
| Just because most women would lie about rape, that doesn't mean that every single woman who says that she was raped isn't lying. | |
| See, it's just... This is a very obvious point that the MeToo movement has intentionally obscured. | |
| You know what it is? It's dogma. | |
| This is what it is. I'll tell you. | |
| It's dogma. Okay? | |
| When you have movements, when you have ideological movements, what you end up with is dogmas. | |
| You end up with essentially points of doctrine. | |
| And you just, with something like this, you cannot go into it with a dogma or with a doctrine. | |
| And so one of the doctrines of the Me Too movement is that women don't lie, which is insane, first of all, but obviously when that's your doctrine, there's no way for you to, you can't analyze the situation. | |
| You're not analyzing it. What you're doing is you're just taking it and you're applying your doctrine to it and you're making a proclamation. | |
| Number three, Me Too equates every kind of sexual misdeed with every other kind. | |
| And so we've already talked about how the Me Too movement equates all different men, equates every kind of man with every other kind. | |
| All accused men are lumped together and equated with each other, so that happens. | |
| But then also, every kind of accusation, every kind of alleged sexual impropriety, is lumped and mixed together with every other. | |
| So that a woman who alleges actual rape is mixed with women alleging inappropriate comments, or alleging that a man groped them, or alleging that a man came onto them too aggressively, or that a man made awkward attempts at flirting. | |
| You know, all of these very, very different sorts of things Are put together. | |
| And the Me Too movement mixes them all together. | |
| Again, there's that stew. | |
| And this is just another... | |
| This is me. I'm mixing the stew right now. | |
| If you're not... That's what... | |
| This is the Me Too stew. | |
| But all of these... | |
| All of these things are mixed together in the stew. | |
| And it just... So you can't make any sense of it. | |
| But they don't belong... | |
| You know... Rape is one thing. | |
| So you've got like... | |
| On the spectrum, you've got rape over here. | |
| Uh, it's, it's obviously the worst kind of sexual abuse, one of the worst things in the world that exists. | |
| And so you've got that. | |
| And then way down over there, you've got like, um, inappropriate comment or a man clumsily trying to come on to a woman or flirt with her, you know, so that that's all the way over there. | |
| In fact, they're not even really part of the same spectrum. | |
| To put them on a spectrum at all is to insinuate that, well, if a man is flirting with a woman, he's only a few steps away from rape, as if that will logically lead to that, which it doesn't. | |
| So there actually is no spectrum in between these things. | |
| There's that, and then there's a wide cavern, a gulf, and then over there you've got flirting. | |
| The problem with the MeToo movement is that they have created this spectrum and they've put all these things onto it. | |
| And then they've also kind of bunched them together so that they're almost indistinguishable. | |
| So that's a problem. | |
| Number two, number four, I should say. | |
| I don't know how to count. Number four, the MeToo movement is tainted by politics. | |
| Now, it's true that they've gone after liberal men in Hollywood, so give them credit for that, but they've also mostly left alone liberal men in politics. | |
| And so, obviously with this Kavanaugh thing, this is 100% politically motivated. | |
| And once, you know, when you claim that you're on a crusade against sexual assault, Once it becomes apparent that your crusade is politically motivated, well then the crusade is completely discredited. | |
| So we can even leave aside everything else I've said so far. | |
| This point alone is you have discredited. | |
| The Me Too movement has discredited itself. | |
| By jumping on the Kavanaugh thing, that alone, because of the politics in it. | |
| Because we all know that if this was Merrick Garland, or if this was any Democratic None of this would have happened. | |
| We all know that. And we also know that... | |
| And this is not a what-about thing. | |
| This is not what-aboutism. | |
| But it's just pointing out the political nature of the MeToo movement, because then you also have Bill Clinton... | |
| Who was very credibly accused of brutally raping a woman and was also very credibly accused of abusing many other women in many different ways. | |
| And yet he still has not had his Me Too moment, has he? | |
| Because it's politically motivated. | |
| Number five, I think this is really important, the Me Too movement infantilizes women. | |
| Now, it's true, of course, that there have been many women who have been raped and then have come forward and they've been shamed and smeared for coming forward. | |
| That's a horrible, evil thing. | |
| Horrible and evil. Absolutely evil. | |
| And those women are victims and they're survivors in more than one sense. | |
| But you notice how now even a woman who's sexually harassed or a woman who has to rebuff advances of a man, or we'll say even a woman who's, let's say, groped or something, which is a horrible thing, don't get me wrong, but now even those women, we call them survivors. | |
| They're survivors. You know, Dennis Prager wrote a column, I think it was in the National Review yesterday, where he made the point that it used to be Survivor meant that you survived the Holocaust. | |
| Survivor meant that you survived cancer or something. | |
| But now a woman hears an inappropriate comment from her boss in 1973 and we say she's a survivor. | |
| It's ridiculous. | |
| It's infantilizing. | |
| Number one. Number two, it is unfair to the women who are actually survivors, the women who have really been abused, assaulted, raped. | |
| Those women are survivors. | |
| As I said, in more than one way. | |
| But once again, you have this lumping together that happens. | |
| And so we talk about, we say, well, the Me Too survivors. | |
| And we understand that when we say that, we could be talking about women who were raped. | |
| We could also be talking about a woman who, you know, in 1987 had an uncomfortable exchange with a guy at work. | |
| We could be talking about that as well. | |
| And it's just, it's ridiculous, frankly. | |
| And also, you know, the other problem, and this is part of the infantilizing, where we're not allowed to expect women To take any responsibility for their own actions. | |
| And this is just a conversation you're not allowed to have because of the MeToo movement. | |
| But in some of these cases, you hear about cases where a woman is in an awkward situation but chooses not to remove herself from it. | |
| Like Louis C.K. says, I'm going to take my pants off and start touching myself. | |
| And the women decide to sit there rather than just getting up and leaving the room. | |
| Or, you know, the Aziz Ansari thing, where a woman comes up to his apartment with him, chooses to do these various sexual things, later says that she felt uncomfortable and awkward, but she didn't want to leave. | |
| Well, but that's, you know, if we're not infantilizing people, what we need to say is, well, in that situation, you need to just leave. | |
| You need to take some responsibility for yourself. | |
| And if you're uncomfortable, which I don't blame you for being uncomfortable, leave the situation. | |
| But because of the Me Too movement, what I'm saying right now, I'm not allowed to say it. | |
| Even though we all know it's true, because we all think the same things. | |
| When you hear some of these cases and you think, well, why didn't you leave? | |
| What are you doing? Why didn't you just pick, get up and leave? | |
| It's not to blame you. | |
| It's not to say it's your fault. | |
| The man who's being a pig and being disgusting, he deserves 100% of the blame. | |
| But if we're actually trying to empower people, then we need to also say, listen, if you're in an uncomfortable spot, leave. | |
| And then the sixth thing is, Me Too is just mass hysteria. | |
| And this just ties back to everything else I've said that, you know, with the Me Too movement, it does not allow for a reasonable discussion, doesn't allow for a discussion at all. | |
| You're not allowed to make any of the points that I just made, especially the last one about, you know, about taking responsibility and being accountable for your actions. | |
| You're not allowed to say that. You're not allowed to ask very basic questions because it's hysteria. | |
| And that's what hysteria is all about. | |
| Where you have to jump on the bandwagon and pick up the pitchfork and go in whatever direction the mob is going. | |
| If you try to say, hey, well, hold on a second. | |
| If you try to, you know, introduce a little nuance, subtlety to the conversation and say, hey, I agree that there are some horrible things happening to women. | |
| We've got to talk about that. But, you know, what about this point? | |
| Well, you're not allowed to do that. | |
| So, when you take all these factors into consideration and you see what happens when they all come together and land on a guy like what happened to Brett Kavanaugh, I think when you consider that, it's clear to me that the MeToo movement just needs to end. | |
| Which, again, does not mean that our opposition to sexual assault ends. | |
| I don't need the Me Too movement for that. | |
| I don't need them to tell me that it's wrong. | |
| I don't think you do either. | |
| But this thing that we call the Me Too movement, I think, has way overstayed its welcome at this point. |