Democrats were ready to hang embattled Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam out to dry after he initially acknowledged being one of two men in a college yearbook photo — either the one dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or the minstrel in blackface. Within hours, top 2020 front-runners, from Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., to former Vice President Joe Biden, called upon Northam to resign from office, leaving Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax all but guaranteed to take over.
But two remarkable things have secured Northam’s fate by a thread: one due to his stupidity, and the other due to sheer chance.
First, Northam walked back his acknowledgment, refusing to resign in the most cringe-inducing press conference of the century — complete with admitting to wearing blackface on a separate occasion and an appalling instinct to perform a moonwalk (his wife had to prevent him from doing it). More than four days after Democrats called for Northam’s resignation, he’s remained defiant, now reportedly hiring a private investigator to prove that he’s not either of the men in the decades-old photo.
But more incredibly, Fairfax has found himself in the crosshairs of a scandal of his own. The presumptive heir to the governor’s mansion issued a 3 a.m. statement on Monday denying a sexual assault allegation that had never been made public.
At the outset, Fairfax’s denial of the allegation — investigated but never published by the Washington Post — seemed like a nonstory, just another indictment of media inconsistency. But, within 24 hours the Post denied Fairfax’s claims that they had found “significant red flags and inconsistencies within the allegations,” and Fairfax conceded that he did have a sexual encounter with the accuser at the time and place that she alleged, albeit an encounter he maintains was a consensual one.
Now, the accuser has come forward and retained Katz Marshall & Banks, the same law firm that was employed by Christine Blasey Ford.
This invites comparisons to the case of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom Democrats decided was guilty as sin based on Ford’s testimony alone without any further evidence, even that the two had ever been in the same room prior to last September’s hearing.
Not a single witness listed by Ford could corroborate that there had been a party like the one at which she alleged Kavanaugh assaulted her. Despite this, Democrats decided that a single allegation was sufficient evidence, by itself, not only to block Kavanaugh’s nomination — which could have been done through a closed-door investigation — but also to ruin his good name permanently.
Unlike the case of Ford, who could not even be placed in the same room as Kavanaugh by any witness, Fairfax has already admitted to a sexual encounter with his accuser at the time and place when she says he raped her. And unlike Kavanaugh, who was accused of assault by someone across the political aisle, Fairfax’s accuser is Vanessa Tyson: a black, social justice-oriented professor of politics at the all-female Scripps College in the liberal oasis of Claremont, Calif.
It remains to be seen whether any exculpatory evidence emerges, but given that Tyson first alleged that Fairfax assaulted her in private, she has no political incentive to stonewall his career, and now that she is willing to come forward with a notorious legal team, things are looking worse and worse for Fairfax by the day.
The Virginia GOP has been in a shambles for some time now. If both Northam and Fairfax resigned, the third in line to take over as governor would be yet another Democrat, state Attorney General Mark Herring, who has already expressed his gubernatorial ambitions. So the condemnation of Fairfax, given the facts that the allegations already far surpass the standard established by Democrats during the Kavanaugh hearings, should be a no-brainer. Right?
Well, it seems as though the intersectional battle lines have been drawn in Virginia, and the Democratic elite have decided that Northam’s crimes outweigh Fairfax’s. Every 2020 Democrat ready to burn Kavanaugh at the stake, without a shred of evidence in the name of feminism, have refused to condemn Fairfax.
“I think we should be focusing on what’s right now happening with the governor. I know you guys are going to try to focus on a lot of things right now, but right now my focus is on again calling for the Gov. to step down,” said Sen. Cory “Spartacus” Booker, D-N.J., when asked about the Fairfax allegation.
When pressed by reporters to respond to the allegation, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., literally ran away, pretending to talk on his cell phone, which eagle-eyed viewers saw wasn’t actually on a call.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., refused even to call for as an investigation into Fairfax, claiming ignorance and then noting, “I think you need to look at the facts of each case,” — which one could only assume would involve some sort of investigation.
And from feminist warriors Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.? Radio silence. Not one word of solidarity with Tyson, or even a standard, “If true, these allegations are disqualifying, so they ought to be investigated,” declaration.
So what’s happening here? Just as in the case of calling for Northam’s resignation, calling for Fairfax’s would still keep the governor’s mansion safely in Democratic hands. The Virginia GOP is still so weak that two resignations from the top of the state’s Democratic Party would hardly be worse than one. And given the low political stakes, it would be the most sure-fire way for Democrats to demonstrate that their crusade against Kavanaugh was principled, rather than political.
But the problem is, it wasn’t. The woke warriors of the Democratic Party’s willingness to throw a black feminist professor under the bus to protect Fairfax demonstrates a fatal flaw of the philosophy known as intersectionality: depending on the outcome, racism may trump rape in their twisted hierarchy of oppression.
Consider that, whereas Northam was a bottom barrel, boring white Democrat, Fairfax is young and black. The narrative of ousting a racist governor to replace him with a promising young black one is too woke for Democrats to resist, even if it means potentially putting a rapist in the governor’s office. The Left, already hellbent on fairness of outcome rather than fairness of equality, needs to decide whose pain prevails, and whether women will always become collateral damage when political power is at stake.
