Four years after warriors like Rose McGowan and reporters like Ronan Farrow fought to expose Harvey Weinstein and the Hollywood network that protected the convicted rapist, the #MeToo movement has proven an utter and heartbreaking failure — and horrendously hypocritical too, as I just saw firsthand.
The activist class quickly discarded its disdain for sexual predators in favor of the woke pizzazz of Black Lives Matter and defund the police. And by 2020, concerns about sexual misconduct allegations levied against then-candidate Joe Biden (and obviously Donald Trump for that matter) were largely silenced and accused wife rapist Jacob Blake was lionized as a martyr of police brutality akin to George Floyd.
Naturally, women are ticked off, as well they should be. During a panel discussion on PBS’s To The Contrary about a precipitous drop among women’s satisfaction with their societal treatment in the last four years, I noted that between COVIDians choosing to sacrifice women’s careers in favor of allowing teachers to keep schools closed and the activist class abandoning the #MeToo movement, women have every right to feel robbed by progressives. I also mentioned the horrific rape of a teenage girl by a biological male student wearing a dress in a Loudoun County public school restroom. My central contention was that rather than demanding justice for the victim, the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia seemed to back the accused assailant, tweeting in all caps, “TRANS KIDS ARE NOT A THREAT.”
For this, Hilary Rosen, the co-founder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, called me “transphobic.”
As far as conservatives go, I’m about as much of a squishy cuck on trans issues as one can be. I have zero problem with Caitlyn Jenner using my bathroom and using her preferred pronouns, and quite frankly, I think existing laws criminalizing lewd and lascivious conduct in front of children are perfectly capable of handling whatever “Drag Queen Story Hours” actually occur outside the paranoia of moral panics.
But just as we conservatives warned that biological men would be able to beat women in the Olympics, those of us terrified that bad actors would take advantage of allowing transgender girls in the girls’ restroom were proven prescient. That’s exactly what happened in Loudoun County, and instead of the school board keeping the alleged rapist out of school during ongoing criminal proceedings, they moved him to another school, where he allegedly raped again.
Fearing that we’re giving in to the most excessive demands of transgender activists at the cost of putting girls in physical danger isn’t transphobic. It’s the very core of feminism — trying to protect the rights of girls to receive an equal education as boys without the threat of physical violence and discrimination.
And for that, Hilary Rosen called me “transphobic.”
Her comment perfectly elucidates just why Time’s Up only took three years to publicly blow up in humiliating and hypocritical fashion. It’s because the organization was never about advancing the #MeToo movement — instead, like all the Boomer fauxminists who granted Bill Clinton multiple free gropes so long as he protected abortion, Time’s Up simply wanted to hijack #MeToo.
Just as Rosen — who famously claimed that Ann Romney, a mother of five who survived breast cancer and multiple sclerosis, had “never worked a day in her life” — considers it “transphobic” to care about a rape when it fails to fit the preferred narrative, Time’s Up was largely a political organization and a cash-gathering grift for its owners.
Of the $3.7 million raised by the organization in its inaugural year, nearly half of the funds went to salaries. Less than a tenth went to Rosen’s legal defense fund, the very (supposed) raison d’etre of the group. And as far as performative virtue signaling, Time’s Up couldn’t even get that right. The group’s lobbying arm, Time’s Up Now, refused to sign a letter supporting the multiple accusers of record producer Russell Simmons, and co-founder Tina Tchen, who helped hate crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett escape criminal prosecution in Chicago, tried to smear the makers of a groundbreaking documentary about Simmons after Oprah Winfrey, herself a prominent Time’s Up donor, pulled out of the film. Time’s Up then publicly “supported” Oprah for pulling out of the film, a concession the billionaire rewarded the group with in the payment of half a million dollars. But outside of the hashtag and some black dresses, the organization faded from public consciousness.
That is, until its real purpose, political machinations, came into public view. In 2020, the group came under fire from the Left after Rosen of all people was accused of clandestinely trying to discredit Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who accused Biden of sexually assaulting her in 1993. The group as a whole remained silent on the Reade allegation until complimenting Biden for his belated denial. Then, this August, fellow co-founder Roberta Kaplan had to resign from the group after New York Attorney General Letitia James revealed that Kaplan — and to a lesser extent, Tchen — had helped then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo try to discredit accuser Lindsey Boylan. By the end of the month, Tchen had also resigned. A little more than a week later, the entire board had dissolved.
And so it comes as no surprise that Rosen doesn’t give a damn about the underage girl anally raped in her school bathroom because Rosen doesn’t give a damn about sexual assault or #MeToo in general unless cases can push her preferred political narrative. It’s the same reason why Rosen called Hillary Clinton “a real role model” for staying with Bill even after he was credibly accused by multiple women of sexual assault, and it’s the reason Rosen claimed “the country let out a collective groan” when Monica Lewinsky wrote her groundbreaking Vanity Fair essay in 2014. “Nobody is really interested in it other than for sort of salacious reasons, but certainly not from a voting perspective,” Rosen said on CNN at the time.
Being an advocate for survivors means being an advocate for all survivors with credibly proven claims, regardless of the narrative’s political expediency. The very rank partisanship that turned Time’s Up into little more than a front for the powerful explains exactly why Rosen sees a horrific rape in a bathroom not as a completely preventable tragedy but rather as a “transphobic” gotcha created by conservatives.
To the activist class, it doesn’t matter if you respect preferred pronouns or support the rights for adults to live their gender identity. If you choose to prioritize the physical safety of girls over the feelings of transgender activists, they call you transphobic. In the words of Dave Chappelle, I guess that makes me “Team TERF.” That’s a hell of a lot better than whatever team Rosen and her ilk are on, because they certainly don’t stand for sexual assault survivors.
(If you want to see the intersectional catfight in question, tune in to To The Contrary on your local PBS station this weekend. You might as well — You’re the ones paying for it.)
