So Bernie press secretary Briahna Joy Gray official jumps on the Tara Reade train ...

[nolawarlock]

19. Ask Bernie??!

His press secretary is pushing this vile crap. She's basically the mouth of Sauron.

I am so beyond enraged about this and I see that yet another post addressing this Reade issue is ignored by the Bernie supporters here. For shame!

Frankly, I partly blame Alyssa Milano and #MeToo for this. They had to know on some level that they were creating a McCarythite-style situation where even innocence is not a defense. What should have been a way to help victims of abuse and assault has become just another way to take out one's political and economic enemies.

Read Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed. It'd dry as hell but it explains the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 in terms of these social conflicts. It wasn't rye bread that made those girls lie. The allegedly afflicted Abigail Williams herself said, "We do it for sport." The people in power took advantage of what these girls probably saw as their one chance at a meaningful life in a Puritan society where Children barely had any childhood at all.

When someone says, "why would so and so lie about ______," well, look to the trials. When every other motive is offf the table, good-old-fashioned attention is always on the menu and some just don't care how negative that attention is because they're martyrs to their own fantasies.

And the people that these crazy liars and those who seek to exploit them hurt the most are actual victims of sexual assault. And that is, perhaps, the most egregious facet of this.