The Regressive Left Is Eating It's Male Feminist Allies
The regressive left is a world where you are guilty until presumed innocent. This means that their easiest target are the male feminist allies who agree with this worldview. When they make an accusation against one of their own there is no defense, there is no way to come back. The accusations are evidence and there is nothing you can do to prove your innocence. Jack Smith IV is the latest in a long line of male feminists who have had their careers destroyed or hindered by accusations from "social justice warriors" and have been unable to mount a real defense. For those of us outside the regressive left, we believe in the presumption of innocence and that means even if we are accused of doing wrong we will survive.
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About a week ago, we heard that a progressive reporter, Jack Smith, had been terminated from Mike.com after several allegations of emotional abuse surfaced.
Jezebel wrote a story essentially saying that he was emotionally manipulative and coerced women into sex, and because of this, Mike.com decided to fire him.
This is a kind of get-woke-go-broke scenario, but sort of different.
If you're not familiar, get-woke-go-broke refers to when a company tries to pander to the social justice regressive left, and then all of a sudden they lose their customers and they lose money.
Essentially, when you become woke, you get broke.
But this is kind of the same thing.
Because you have these allies, these men who want to be a part of the regressive left, but then as soon as some accusation surfaces, as soon as they wrong someone, they see their careers destroyed.
By choosing to align yourself with this group of people, you will have your career destroyed at any point for any reason.
Because within the regressive left, there is no presumption of innocence.
In fact, many people are arguing that there is no way for Jack to even prove he's innocent at all.
The idea is that because these women have accused him, that's proof enough, and no matter what he says, it's proof that he's just trying to weasel his way out of it.
Jack Smith is not the only example.
There have been several men who have aligned themselves with the aggressive left, who have seen their lives destroyed, and have no way to escape the crisis that they've found themselves in.
People who have been accused can't even defend themselves because of the beliefs held by the aggressive left.
From The Wrap, Mike fires reporter after multiple disturbing allegations of misconduct.
Jack Smith was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct on Monday.
Mug.com announced on Tuesday that it had fired longtime reporter Jack Smith
after a lengthy series of sexual misconduct accusations were published in Jezebel on Monday.
Because of the multiple disturbing allegations made in the story against Jack Smith,
we have terminated our contract with him, effective immediately,
executive news director Kenny Lowerman said in a note shared with staff
late Monday evening obtained by The Wrap.
This is not a decision we have taken lightly, and we'll have more to say in the coming days,
but wanted to let the staff know of our decision tonight, given the nature.
On Monday, Jezebel published a story by editor-in-chief Julianne Escobedo-Shepard, detailing multiple accusations of misconduct from five different women.
All of these women accused Smith of behavior they variously describe as emotional abuse, manipulation, and gaslighting, Jezebel wrote.
Three of these women say, independently of one another, that these tactics led to coercive sex.
In her story, Shepard also said that Smith had attempted to use legal threats to keep the piece from being published.
On July 12th, an attorney for Smith, Rose Mead Hart, sent Jezebel a cease and desist letter with expressed intent to sue for defamation should the piece be published, she wrote.
The piece also reported that Mike first became aware of an investigation into Smith's personal conduct in July, and that the company responded by putting him on paid leave and launching an internal investigation, which ultimately cleared him.
A rep for Mike declined to offer further comment about its handling of Smith's case.
And I think that last point should be stressed.
Mike.com launched an internal investigation into Jack Smith's behavior, and they cleared him of wrongdoing.
But a lot of people say, so what?
He didn't do anything wrong while he worked for Mike.com.
It doesn't mean what he did to this woman is okay.
And I have to say, I was not surprised at all to see the Mike Union actually came out kind of against Jack Smith after these allegations were made.
They said, We are aware of the allegations against our colleague Jack Smith IV.
We have been appalled by the accounts given in an article.
We stand in solidarity with the victims of sexual assault and harassment.
We are meeting as a union to decide on a further response.
Believe survivors.
What's really interesting here is that they said we stand in solidarity with the victims of sexual assault and harassment.
But the goal of a union, the job of a union, is to stand in solidarity with those who work for the company, not people from outside the company who have made accusations without evidence.
It's also important to note that Jack Smith was a contractor.
He was not an employee, so I don't believe he was a member of the Mike.com union, so perhaps they have no obligation to defend him.
But in my experience, typically unions will try to defend contractors too, at least to some extent, because they want to be there for the workers.
Unions want to support workers, whether they're an employee or a contractor, and if that contractor ever becomes full-time staff, then they will probably join the union.
So the union has to prove its worth to these people.
If the union's going to come out against the employees, even if it's just a contractor, that sends an alarming message.
Why support a union if they're not going to support you?
If they're going to believe people who don't even work for the company?
I'd have to imagine that whether or not they were obligated to defend him, the union would side with those who work for Mike, as opposed to those who are just outside personalities who are making accusations against somebody.
Well, yesterday, Katie Herzog for The Stranger wrote this story.
A progressive writer was a bad boyfriend, and then he was fired for it.
The story essentially talks about what we've already discussed, and frames it in such a way that says, Jack Smith's only fault was that he was a bad boyfriend.
He was mean to women, and the women were mad about it.
According to the story, the most serious allegation from a woman Jezebel calls Jenny is that he non-consensually choked her during sex.
Smith disputes this.
In an interview with me, he said that he did not want to expound on the allegations at length, but that he would never choke someone without being explicitly asked, and that he did not attempt to choke Jenny during that encounter.
And in response to this, David Cleone on Twitter said, Now I'm not familiar with who David Cleone is, but there's
a reason why what he says is important.
For one, he is a verified Twitter user who is speaking in defense of the accusers.
What's important here is that he's saying you shouldn't take the denial at face value.
And he actually goes on to say that, technically, Jack is guilty until proven innocent, and that journalists shouldn't report on what he says unless they can verify his defense.
He said the stranger, of course, did zero additional investigating into the claims Jezebel spent months on.
Other than to contact Jack, which Jezebel also repeatedly attempted to do.
Publishing an accused rapist's unverified defense of himself is not journalism.
In fact, it is journalism.
We are not dealing with a legal case here, and even if we were, you would get a statement from the individual who has been accused.
We're trying to figure out what's going on.
If one person says the other person did something, you ask the other person if that's true.
But here we are.
The regressive left showing that you shouldn't allow those who are accused to speak in their defense unless you can prove what they're saying is true.
Essentially, within the regressive left, you are guilty until proven innocent.
Unfortunately, the accusations are considered to be proof against you.
So if you have five people speaking out claiming you did something, no matter what you say, you are guilty.
And this means that people who even attempt to stay within the goodwill of the regressive left end up in a position where their lives are totally destroyed because you cannot recover from this.
Possibly one of the other great examples is male feminist Jamie Kilstein.
He was booted from a podcast after abuse allegations.
And it's important to point out, this is not allegations of sexual abuse, but emotional abuse.
This is a story from the Daily Dot from February of last year.
It says, Comedian and lauded male feminist Jamie Kilstein has departed the podcast he co-hosts amid allegations of manipulation and abuse from multiple women.
On Monday morning, liberal independent podcast Citizen Radio and its co-host Allison Kilkenny announced that Kilstein would be leaving the program.
Later that day, however, Kilkenny clarified that Kilstein's departure from the podcast was a result of allegations of him preying upon, manipulating, and emotionally abusing women.
Now, I don't know what any of this means.
They say he was emotionally abusing women, but what does preying upon or manipulating really mean?
Are people just accusing him of being a bad person?
Is that why he lost his job and lost his show?
And I also want to point out, I'm really not a fan of when people try to label everything on the left as liberal, because this behavior is regressive, illiberal, and reactionary.
This is not liberal behavior.
The story included a statement from Claire Yee, who said, Didn't think I would ever speak publicly about this, but I was a victim of Jamie Kilstein's predatory behavior.
He didn't respect the boundaries I had set and wanted me to keep secrets from my boyfriend.
I didn't.
And made me feel guilty for creating new boundaries, and made me feel unsafe and manipulated.
He said completely disrespectful things to me.
I thought that since he was a feminist, I didn't have anything to worry about.
To people everywhere, trust your gut, speak out if you can.
You know when your boundaries are being disrespected and S on.
Just because they say they're a feminist doesn't mean they are.
Actions over words.
Hashtag BelieveWomen.
Former fans of Kilstein's have responded to the allegations by posting negative messages on his Facebook fan page and dragging him on Twitter.
Many expressing disappointment in the musician for not publicly responding to the allegations.
He was removed from his label, he was removed from his podcast, because someone said he disrespected her.
I'm not kidding, that was it.
I can't find any more details on exactly what the accusations are, but it sounds like they weren't sexual in nature, he was just kind of a bad dude apparently.
And that was enough for them to basically destroy his life and his career.
Because, as I mentioned, if you want to align with the regressive left, at any point, if someone doesn't like you, the mob will seek you out to destroy you.
Because you're the easiest target.
They know you can't defend yourself.
And these people don't care about the presumption of innocence, and they don't care about facts.
As the saying goes, facts don't care about your feelings, but here, we have a situation where feelings don't care about your facts.
People said he was manipulative, end of story.
His career is over.
And there's the problem for the allies of the regressive left, for the male feminists.
There's nothing you can do.
You put yourself at the good graces of the mob.
At any point, those who support your work will turn on you and attack you, even if they don't have proof.
Why would anybody want to put themselves in a situation like this?
I can think about something similar that happened in the real world.
When I was in Hamburg for the G20, and so was Luke Rutkowski, who has the YouTube channel WeAreChange, he was walking down the street with this other local German reporter, and someone yelled that he was a Nazi.
Immediately, random people got up on the side of the street and started punching him in the head.
They didn't know who he was, they didn't know anything about him, they just heard someone call him a Nazi, and that was enough for them to start hitting him.
People lie about me on the internet all the time, and some really absurd and ridiculous lies.
And it's really funny.
Whenever stories come out about YouTubers and people who make political videos, I tend to get omitted for one simple reason.
I do not talk about overly strong opinions.
I do not insult people for the most part, like 99% of the time.
I'm very respectful.
And so it's hard to pull quotes from me that could be used against me.
When someone like Ben Shapiro goes and speaks at a university and protesters show up, they pull quotes where they said, look, Ben Shapiro said these horrible things.
I don't really have a lot of quotes like that because even when I speak about an issue, I speak rather defensively of many people.
And I'll say, I'll end by saying this, for Jack Smith, to the people who are gloating and laughing about him being fired and being a victim of this, you know, mob attack against him, look, Whether or not the accusations are true, I don't know, but the point is, he deserves to be treated like he's innocent until he's proven guilty.
And to those of you who would rub it in his face, you are making a huge mistake.
Because this is about principle, not about your personal emotions or politics.
If you think Jack Smith lies about you, if you think he's a bad journalist, that's irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is, he should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.
He shouldn't be removed from his job because he was a bad boyfriend to some people, Or because some people made claims against him.
Mike did an investigation and found that there was no wrongdoing at the workplace, so why should he lose his job because of personal issues?
It's a tough balance.
Maybe the world is merging private and personal, and because of social media, there will never be an external, you know, a private life.
That everything you do will be public.
And admittedly, Jack Smith is kind of a public figure.
He's got a large amount of followers on Twitter, relatively.
So maybe Mike said, look, it doesn't matter if it's true or not.
It's bad PR.
And in the world of PR, yes, you will get removed if there's no proof.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
We'll keep the conversation going.
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