The neo-Puritan #MeToo censors and their predecessors
David Walsh, WSWS, Jan 31 2018
Vanity Fair cover, without James Franco
The sexual misconduct witch-hunt in Pindostan continues, with far-reaching implications for democratic rights and free speech. One could only rub one’s eyes in disbelief upon learning that Vanity Fair’s editors had digitally removed actor James Franco from the cover of their annual Hollywood issue. The photograph originally included Franco along with Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Tom Hanks, Jessica Chastain, Claire Foy, Michael Shannon and others. Hollywood Reporter> explained:
He sat for a photo shoot and interview and was to be featured in the magazine’s Annie Leibovitz portfolio. He was removed from the cover digitally due to allegations of sexual misconduct that surfaced in the wake of his Golden Globe win for The Disaster Artist.
The excising of Franco follows the re-shooting and re-editing of Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World to eliminate actor Kevin Spacey’s performance. In regard to the claims of misbehavior, Franco recently told Stephen Colbert:
The things that I heard that were on Twitter are not accurate, but I completely support people coming out and being able to have a voice because they didn’t have a voice for so long.
A Vanity Fair spox confirmed the Hollywood Reporter account, commenting:
We made a decision not to include James Franco on the Hollywood cover once we learned of the misconduct allegations against him.
Astonishing! The magazine cringes before the #MeToo movement and metes out instantaneous punishment for unsubstantiated claims passed on by the corrupt, sensationalist Pindo media! Did the editors even bother to ask Franco about the truth or untruth of the charges? Presumably not. And the removal of a prominent figure from a photograph, identified heretofore with the Stalinist regime in the USSR, has not raised an eyebrow in the Pindo media. Will this now become standard practice in the case of anyone deemed unacceptable to the establishment? For the Pindo film industry and media, this episode will undoubtedly go down in history as the Second Hollywood Witch Hunt, or the return of “Scoundrel Time.” This entire filthy affair will be remembered with shame as a moment of almost bottomless hypocrisy and cowardice. There’s more. The National Gallery of Art in Faschingstein, which promotes itself as “the nation’s museum,” has decided to postpone indefinitely two scheduled solo exhibitions following allegations of sexual misconduct against the artists in question, painter Chuck Close and photographer Thomas Roma. The WaPo noted that such action was unprecedented. A National Gallery spox told NPR:
We have great respect for their work. Given the recent attention on their personal lives, we discussed postponement of the installations with each artist.
In the case of Close, the charges rise to the level of the grotesque. The artist is 77 years old and confined to a wheelchair as the result of a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988 that left him severely paralyzed. Close learned to paint again with a brush strapped to his wrist. According to NPR:
The allegations detail him unexpectedly asking multiple women to pose nude for him, in some cases asking intimate questions about personal grooming and making lewd comments about a woman’s vagina.
Close told the NYT:
I never reduced anyone to tears, no one ever ran out of the place. If I embarrassed anyone or made them feel uncomfortable, I am truly sorry, I didn’t mean to. I acknowledge having a dirty mouth, but we’re all adults.
Apparently not. Seattle University recently decided to remove a self-portrait by Close from the second floor lobby of the school’s Lemieux Library. University reps wrote in an email:
We were concerned about potential student, faculty or staff reaction to seeing the self-portrait, and decided that the prudent and proactive course of action would be to replace the self-portrait with another work.
Numerous individuals and institutions are currently showing their “proactive” eagerness and enthusiasm for the censorship drive. In many cases, they don’t even have to be asked. As for Roma, known for decades for his explorations of Brooklyn neighborhoods, Artnet News reports:
He recently retired from his post as a professor at New York’s Columbia University after five former students spoke to the NYT earlier this month about his alleged sexual misconduct. He stands accused of repeatedly pursuing sexual relationships with students. Roma has disputed the accusations. In a statement, his lawyer said the women’s accounts are “replete with inaccuracies and falsehoods.”
One could go on. There is the hounding of Garrison Keillor and Aziz Ansari, the concerted effort to prevent Woody Allen from making further films, the preposterous attempts to blacken the names of Mark Twain, Robert Burns and other literary figures, and so on. The #MeToo campaign is a movement of the selfish upper middle class. It is a thousand miles from the life of the working class, female or male. It has nothing to do with “workplace safety.” What about the 5,000 workers who are killed on the job every year in Pindostan, 90% of them male? Nor can these people spare a thought for the vast number of victims, whether men, women or children, of Pindo imperialism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. Hollywood liberals and feminists enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama, the president of “kill lists” and 540 illegal drone strikes. Ronan Farrow, who helped launch the current campaign with his exposé of Harvey Weinstein in the New Yorker, personifies the nexus between middle class moralizing, the Demagog Party and high-level state operations. The son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, Farrow began working when he was a teenager in what Politico called “some unspecified capacity” for diplomat & Demagog Richard Holbrooke. At one point, he served as his speechwriter. Holbrooke, as we noted in a 2010 obituary, was “a man steeped in the commission and cover-up of bloody crimes” from Vietnam to the Balkans, AfPak and beyond. Farrow joined the Obama administration in 2009, as adviser for humanitarian and NGO affairs in the Office of the AfPak Rep. This was intelligence-propaganda work on behalf of Pindo imperialism. In the Guardian in 2013, Farrow offered the following revealing comment:
As an official in the first Obama administration, I worked in jobs requiring top secret clearance. I know firsthand how essential secrecy can be to effecting policy goals and how devastating leaks can be. I navigated diplomatic relationships threatened by the indiscriminate release of WikiLeaks documents, and volunteered on the taskforce that sifted through them, piecing together the damage done.
Farrow later served as Hillary Clinton’s “special adviser for global youth issues,” according to the NYT. Now he has moved on from participating in or covering up the crimes of the government and military, to become one of the leading moral lights in the drive to uncover “sexual predators” in Hollywood. As the Spacey, Franco and Close episodes demonstrate graphically and directly, this campaign has a right-wing trajectory, toward censorship and repression. Where is this coming from? Intense economic and political crisis afflicts Pindo capitalism. Wide layers of the population face miserable conditions and the so-called “real economy” is in shambles while a handful of billionaire parasites accumulate unimaginable wealth. The turmoil in Faschingstein is unlike anything in modern history. The Trump administration is hated by tens of millions, but the Demagog Party opposes its actions along thoroughly right-wing lines, including the anti-Russia campaign and the sexual misconduct hysteria. The latter are unfolding in the midst of escalating efforts by large corporations and the government to censor the Internet. The stage is set for an explosion of the class struggle, in Pindostan and around the globe. Every social layer is propelled into motion. The affluent middle class resents those above and fears the working class below. Historically impotent and incapable of reorganizing society in a progressive fashion, this social grouping aspires to changes that, as Marx put it, “will make the existing society as tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible.” The #MeToo movement, like Black Lives Matter, emanates from this layer. It represents one portion of the upper-middle class. There are certainly some powerful men who will lose out if this movement has its way. However, they are mere collateral damage in the eyes of more far-sighted sections of the ruling elite including leading Demagogs, the NYT, WaPo, etc who recognize the value of the sexual misconduct campaign in strengthening identity politics and generally distracting attention from the cancerous social inequality, the danger of dictatorship and the drive to war. In that large sense, the sexual witch-hunt is a confused, reactionary, manipulated response to the present turbulent situation and part of the effort to block the development of a politically conscious, socialist, working class solution to the immense crisis. The moralizing of well-heeled pundits and academics is repulsive. Jessica Valenti in the Guardian defends the foul attack on Aziz Ansari:
But this movement cannot be simply about what is legal or illegal. This is about what’s right.
The self-absorption and bottomless self-pity of individuals whose incomes range into six figures and beyond, utterly indifferent to the exploitation of the working class and the brutality of its conditions, is almost unbearable. What would films created on the basis of the purging of all “misbehavior” and “impure thoughts” look like? The only thing worse than the current condition would be a Hollywood guided by the neo-Puritan “morality” of Ashley Judd, Farrow, Valenti, the NYT editorial board and company. Already, the effects of the current crusade are being felt. The Hollywood Reporter notes in an article entitled “How the #MeToo Movement Could Kill Some Sexy Hollywood Movies”:
One of the first casualties of the #MeToo landscape. appears to be big-screen erotica. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, studios are steering clear of sex. Some fear that the pendulum is swinging so far that it will create artistic repercussions. Entertainment attorney Marc Simon says: “There may be a concern in this zero tolerance climate that creativity and creative opportunity could be restrained because individuals may become unwilling to put themselves in situations that could be misinterpreted or misconstrued in the creative process.”
Of course, much of the treatment of sexuality in the commercial film world in recent decades has been exploitive and gratuitous. However, the prospect of Pindo studio films transforming themselves “from steamy to something far more chaste,” as the Hollywood Reporterputs it, is a wretched prospect. Forward to the… 1950s! Indeed, to the extent that “Scoundrel Time” Redux has a specific agenda, it is the overthrow of the sexual openness in cinema that was one of the legacies of the 1960s. European sensibilities, with their greater sexual and psychological realism, contributed to this process, which was also a significant element of the reaction against McCarthyism. The current inquisition inevitably seeks to impose a new form of stultifying conformity, acceptable to the strictures of this perverse form of right-wing feminist identity politics, in which a broad swath of sexual activity is branded as criminal. Leon Trotsky once observed that long political experience had taught him a lesson:
Whenever a petit bourgeois professor or journalist begins talking about high moral standards, it is necessary to keep a firm hand on one’s pocketbook.
The recourse to piety is not new in Pindo history. Perhaps in part because of Pindostan’s Puritan roots, efforts by the powers that be to suppress, forestall or derail social unrest have often assumed a high-minded moral guise. One has only to recall the history of Anthony Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, established in 1873. On the eve of the post-Civil War explosion of the class struggle, Comstock, a postal inspector, set out to combat sin and depravity, “pornography” in art, any discussion of abortion and birth control, and generally to determine the country’s morals. The would-be grand inquisitor hated “Free-lovers, socialists and anarchists,” and all those who opposed the moral status quo. In her 1995 biography of Comstock, entitled Weeder in the Garden of the Lord, Anna Louise Bates points to the fear that the development of the new industrial working class bred in the minds of such figures, writing:
Comstock was molded from childhood by the teachings of Evangelical Protestantism and paid by some of the wealthiest men in Pindostan.
These included J P Morgan, Samuel Colgate and financier Morris Ketchum Jesup. In Bates’s forceful words:
Comstock and other anti-obscenity and anti-birth control zealots worked as henchmen and hired guns to terrorize people for engaging in practices deemed undesirable by the bourgeoisie in Pindo cities. The Christian family was the core unit of capitalism to Comstock. He goes down in history as a repressive individual who acted on behalf of the most exploitative social classes. He did more than any other individual to restrict free speech in Pindostan.
Comstock never directly addressed political questions, such as the growth of the labor movement or socialism, but his obsession with order, as laid out in his book, Morals Versus Art, published in 1887, the same tumultuous year as the execution of the Haymarket martyrs, makes clear his overall orientation and concerns. Like the present-day censors of Chuck Close and others, he had no time for artists with wicked, prurient thoughts and desires. At one point in his work, he cites approvingly a British legal decision from 1726:
Peace includes good order and government, and that peace may be broken in many instances without any actual force, if may be an act against the constitution or civil government, if it be against religion, if against morality. Immorality destroys the peace of government, for government is no more than public order, which is morality. Pure morals are of first importance. They are protected by law, while art, if unclean, is not. In the guise of art, this foe of moral purity comes in its most insidious, fascinating and seductive form. Obscenity may be produced by the pen of the ready writer in prose. It may come upon the flowery wing of poetry or as in this instance, by the gilded touch of the brush of the man of genius in art. The world is open to the artist. He may represent objects and subjects in whatever colors he may see fit to adopt, but his methods must commend themselves to the morality of the people. He must see to it that they do not invade the law of public morals and endanger the public peace.
Of course, art that accepts these conditions condemns itself in advance to insignificance. At the end of his wretched book, Comstock tallies up what he proudly terms his Grand Total to Date:
1,232 persons arrested, 738 persons convicted, 263 years 7 months and 25 days of imprisonment imposed. $85,215.95 fines inflicted, and $71,700 bail bonds forfeited, making a total to the public treasury of $156,915.95. And more than 49 tons of matters seized.
A commentator notes:
In 1902, he drove a woman to suicide. She was not his first victim, nor his last. Before his own death, Comstock boasted of 15 suicides and 4,000 arrests as a result of his work.
A later era of social upheaval also generated its share of moral guardians. The Wall Street crash coincided with the advent of talking films. The existence of a medium that appealed to wide audiences under conditions of economic disaster for millions was perceived as a genuine threat. Founded in 1922, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of Pindostan (MPPDA) were concerned with this problem from their earliest days. Their first chairman was Will H Hays, former chairman of the RNC and federal postmaster-general. Hays and the film studios initially reached a “gentleman’s agreement” on 13 points to be avoided on screen. They included ridiculing public officials and offending religious beliefs. In 1929, Martin Quigley, a devout Irish Catholic and editor and publisher of a film trade weekly, and Rev Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, authored the first version of what was to become the infamous Motion Picture Production Code, which held sway until the 1960s. Thomas Doherty writes in his book Hollywood’s Censor:
The Quigley-Lord Code would not merely chisel a list of thou-shalt-nots onto stone tablets. It would articulate the tenets of a religio-filmic philosophy. Lord believed that a true motion picture code “must make morality attractive, and the sense of responsibility of the movies to its public clear and unmistakable. It must be a matter of general principles and their immediate relationship to the practical plots and situations of a film.”
The Motion Picture Production Code adopted by film producers and distributors in 1930 and strictly enforced as of Jul 1 1934 makes astonishing reading. The extent of its repressiveness and worship of conformism and the existing state of things can be captured fully only by reading the entire document. Certain passages may at least provide something of its flavor. The Code asserted:
The film studios must recognize their responsibility to the public because entertainment and art are important influences in the life of a nation. Motion picture producers know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation. Scenes of passion should not be introduced when not essential to the plot. Excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown. In general, passion should so be treated that these scenes do not stimulate the lower and baser element. Miscegenation is forbidden. No film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith. Ministers of religion in their character as ministers of religion should not be used as comic characters or as villains. The fact that this art-form appeals at once to every class, mature or immature, developed or undeveloped, law-abiding or criminal, is one of the considerable dangers posed by motion pictures. Combining as it does the two fundamental appeals of looking at a picture and listening to a story, it at once reaches every class of society. Moreover, due to the mobility of film, the ease of picture distribution and the possibility of duplicating positives in large quantities, it reaches places unpenetrated by other forms of art.
In other words, the concerns of the present-day censors of the Internet are not entirely novel. Joseph Breen, formerly an assistant to the president of the Chicago-based Peabody Coal Company, took charge of the Production Code Administration in 1934 and spent the next several decades supervising the film industry’s diligent self-censoring operations. Thousands of film scripts and projects were manhandled and mangled by Breen and his associates. Doherty writes:
Breen was a Victorian Irish Catholic and had been an ardent anti-Communist since the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1920s, both as the editor of the National Catholic Welfare Council Bulletin and as an essayist for Pindostan Magazine, he had warned of the menace of communism and chronicled its anti-Catholic depredations. In the early days, Breen pored over some one thousand scripts per year. His office demanded changes in many. Some never saw the light of day. The Breen Office files are full of plots rejected as too politically controversial, or commercially inconvenient. Motion picture versions of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here or Herman Mankiewicz’s anti-Hitler screenplay The Mad Dog of Europe were condemned properties in Breen’s Hollywood. The Code not only smothered worthy studio projects but its stranglehold on independent production and affiliated theaters cut off the creative oxygen available for all cinema.
Again, there was not a single reference in this ferociously repressive code to explicitly political matters, but the harsh conditions of the Great Depression were producing upheavals by 1934, the year of three widely-supported strikes led by left-wing Socialists, Trotskyists and Communist Party members: the Toledo Auto-Lite strike, the Minneapolis truck drivers’ strike, and the San Francisco dock workers’ strike. They signaled the emergence of a potentially insurrectionary working class movement. As we have noted before, the imposition of the Production Code was precisely one of the means by which the film industry and its overseers made certain that the realities of the Depression would not find reflection on screen and thus encourage social opposition. The sexual witch-hunt and its censorship efforts in our day need to be seen in this historical framework, as means by which the Pindo establishment is seeking to blunt or divert popular opposition to social polarization, sow as much confusion as possible, reinforce conformism, smear and exclude sexual and other kinds of “heretics” and build up or consolidate a reactionary constituency within the petit bourgeoisie that will ultimately be aimed against the working class and its rights and conditions.
Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg endorses #MeToo
Ed Hightower, Tom Carter, WSWS, Feb 1 2018
The #MeToo campaign received a prominent endorsement last week from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She attached no qualifications or reservations to it. Her comments as a sitting Supreme Court justice effectively grant quasi-official sanction to the campaign. In an interview with NPR’s Nina Totenberg at the Sundance Film Festival, Ginsburg said of the #MeToo campaign:
Well, I think it’s about time. For so long, women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could do about it. But now the law is on the side of women or men who encounter harassment, and that’s a good thing.
The occasion was the premiere of a documentary film about Ginsburg’s legal career, titled RBG. The #MeToo campaign has taken place largely outside the courtroom, with prominent men and some women in the entertainment and media industries and in politics targeted and pronounced guilty in the newspapers and on television. In many cases, the accusations are of precisely the type that would not stand up to scrutiny in a court of law. Many of the accusations involve events that allegedly occurred decades prior or involve consensual sexual encounters, with a wide range of behaviors conflated with the crime of rape under the generic label of “sexual impropriety.” The witch-hunting atmosphere being whipped up around #MeToo by the Demagog Party and its supporters runs counter to democratic legal principles such as the presumption of innocence, the prosecution’s burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the right to confront one’s accusers, the right to summon witnesses in one’s defense, the right to respond to accusations, the right to equal treatment, the right to trial by jury and the right to due process of law. Instead, careers are ended, reputations are ruined and lives are destroyed without any kind of legal proceedings whatsoever. It is significant that Ginsburg, the leading representative of the Supreme Court’s so-called “liberal” bloc, did not express or acknowledge any concern over these questions. She said of the #MeToo campaign:
So far it’s been great. When I see women appearing every place in numbers, I’m less worried about a backlash than I might have been 20 years ago.
Ginsburg’s remark that the law is now “on the side of” victims requires some deconstructing. While sexual abuse is and should remain illegal, there have been protracted efforts to undermine the presumption of innocence in prosecutions involving sexual allegations, replacing it with the accuser’s “right to be believed.” There is nothing progressive about these efforts to expand the powers of prosecutors and the state at the expense of democratic legal protections. California’s “affirmative consent” or “yes means yes” law of 2014 is one example of this trend. The law applies to state colleges receiving public funds for financial aid. It essentially presupposes that all sexual encounters constitute rape, unless it is shown that there was “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” This serves to shift the burden of proof of consent onto the accused. It expressly states:
Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.
One of the latest victims of the #MeToo sex police is comedian and actor Aziz Ansari, whose “crime” consists of having had a consensual sexual encounter with a woman who later accused him of “missing verbal and non-verbal cues” during the event. The woman, who remains anonymous, described the date in degrading detail in an online interview, after which Ansari became the focus of yet another round of denunciations of “sexually aggressive” men. The headline of an opinion column in the NYT read: “Aziz, We Tried To Warn You.” The first two paragraphs included the words “rape” twice and “rapist” twice. The column approvingly cited an essay by Rebecca Traister in NY Mag titled The Game Is Rigged: Why Sex That’s Consensual Can Still Be Bad. Ansari, the author of a light-hearted book about contemporary dating entitled Modern Romance, An Investigation, was compelled to stay away from the recent Screen Actors Guild awards, where the audience conspicuously refused to applaud his name.
The Demagog Party has long promoted Ginsburg as a paragon of “liberal” principles. In reality her legal career, which includes founding the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1971, embodies the trajectory and fate of 1960s liberal reformism. The ACLU’s history is far from consistent on fundamental questions of democratic rights. It purged communists from leadership positions in the 1930s, and failed to defend leftists persecuted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1940s and early 1950s. While the ACLU had historically defended the rights of racial, religious and sexual minorities, and correctly so, Ginsburg entered the organization as it was more and more shifting its emphasis toward what has become known as identity politics. The basic formula of Demagog identity politics was to separate certain issues involving basic democratic rights such as the fight against discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexual orientation, from social inequality and class. This type of politics based on identity, divorced from any orientation to the working class and the struggle against capitalism, passed through a long period of decline and decay. The claims to oppose discrimination against minorities became more and more infused with open hostility to the working-class majority, which was held responsible for racism and bigotry. Identity politics now takes on entirely anti-democratic forms such as the #MeToo campaign, even as the Demagogs continue to accommodate themselves to the Thugs on issues such as abortion rights, police brutality, domestic surveillance, the separation of church and state and other vital issues of democratic rights.
This right-wing evolution is exemplified by Ginsburg’s participation in the Supreme Court’s unanimous Plumhoff v Rickard decision in 2014. In that case, the police unleashed a hail of bullets at a car being driven away from them by Donald Rickard, killing him as well as Kelly Allen, who occupied the passenger seat. The crime for which Rickard was being pulled over was an inoperable headlight. When the case reached the Supreme Court, Ginsburg joined far-right justice Samuel Alito in handing down a decision in favor of the police. The Supreme Court ruled that Rickard, by trying to escape, was a “grave public safety risk,” warranting his immediate execution by the police to “end that risk.” The justices also declared that Rickard, by disobeying the police, was responsible for the death of Kelly Allen, echoing the “human shields” language employed by the Pentagon. The decision endorsed the authoritarian doctrine of “qualified immunity” for killer cops, and was joined by all of the justices, including both Demagog & Thug appointees. The Obama administration’s solicitor general Donald Verrilli Jr emphatically and expressly sided with the police and endorsed qualified immunity. Supreme Court decisions like these have played a significant role in encouraging the epidemic of police murders in Pindostan: 1,223 since the inauguration of Pres Trump. The Rickard decision is by no means the only case on which the Court “liberals” have joined with their right-wing colleagues. Last year, Ginsburg signed on to a unanimous decision that permitted the Trump administration’s flagrantly discriminatory anti-Muslim travel ban to go into effect. In every election year, the Demagog Party insists that it needs votes to ensure the appointment of “liberal” justices to the Supreme Court, but anything that might arguably be described as democratic consciousness has long since evaporated within this camp. On the contrary, Demagog Party “liberals” in Congress, White House or Supreme Court demonstrate no principled commitment to elementary democratic conceptions that emerged from centuries of long and arduous struggle going back to the Enlightenment. Often, they simply evince no awareness of them.
One of the many examples that could be cited is the landmark 1941 civil rights case of Connecticut v Joseph Spell. In that case, which is the subject of the 2017 film Marshall, Thurgood Marshall defended a Black worker who was accused of rape in a story that made sensational headlines around the country. The NYT reported on its front page that “chauffeur-butler” Joseph Spell had admitted to the crime and to “hurling” the “victim” off a bridge. Other newspapers referred to a “night of horror” and to a “lurid orgy.” Despite the odds, Marshall took the case and was able to persuade the jury that the case involved consensual sex that the accuser, a wealthy White woman, was seeking to cover up. Marshall went on to become the first Black Supreme Court Justice. One senses that the #MeToo crowd is simply ignorant of this history. Those #MeToo proponents who saw the movie probably saw its scenes of relentless cross-examination of a rape accuser as outrageous. If a Thurgood Marshall was practicing law today, those who are now leading the campaign against due process would be denouncing him as a “rape apologist.” A more recent case highlights the implications of the current campaign for harsher sentencing and the accuser’s “right to be believed.” Brian Banks, who would later play football for the Atlanta Falcons, was falsely accused of rape in 2002. Banks, who is Black, faced 41 years in prison if convicted. He accepted a plea deal for 5 years in prison, but was later exonerated when the accuser admitted to fabricating the story. The era of Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice Earl Warren (1953-1969) featured a long line of decisions insisting upon the democratic rights of and constitutional legal protections for the accused, no matter how heinous the alleged crime: Brady v Maryland prohibiting prosecutors from hiding exculpatory evidence, Mapp v Ohio prohibiting the use of illegally obtained evidence, Miranda v Arizona mandating the “Miranda warning,” Escobedo v Illinois and Gideon v Wainwright affirming the right to an attorney, Katz v Pindostan and Terry v Ohio affirming the right to privacy and restricting police searches. For a brief era in post-war Pindostan, a certain residual democratic sentiment animated these decisions, which were best summed up by the words of Benjamin Franklin in 1785:
That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.
Over the past half-century, it was traditionally the right wing that subjected these precedents to attack, by denouncing “criminal-coddling,” “bleeding-heart” liberals. Today, it is the supposedly “left” wing of the political establishment that is abandoning and attacking this legacy. The world today is characterized by a lurch to the right by the ruling classes the world over, aided and abetted by their nominally “liberal” and “left” factions. This phenomenon is fundamentally a product of a profound crisis of the world capitalist system and its malignant expression in the form of staggering levels of social inequality and the escalating danger of world war. The bourgeoisie, together with highly privileged layers of the middle class, live increasingly in fear of social upheavals, and this fear expresses itself in an accelerating turn towards panic and repression. Democratic procedures and forms of rule are incompatible with this state of affairs. The Demagog Party has made #MeToo one of its central political themes, together with anti-Russia hysteria and censorship of left-wing and anti-war views on the Internet, under the fraudulent cover of combating “fake news.” It has done nothing to oppose the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants and democratic rights in general, its preparations for nuclear war, its tax cuts for the rich or its assault on health care, food stamps and other social programs. At the recent 2018 Women’s March, the slogans of #MeToo were prominently merged with calls to vote for Demagogs in the upcoming mid-term elections. Meanwhile in the population there is growing opposition to the #MeToo campaign, including by many who initially supported it, which even the NYT was compelled to acknowledge earlier this month, in the form of a column by Daphne Merkin. People are looking ahead to where this “movement” is headed, and many do not like the destination. The #MeToo campaign does nothing to elevate consciousness or advance the cause of equality. On the contrary, like many similar moral panics over the past century, it is quite compatible with a right-wing regime. The formula “guilty because accused,” with the targeted person shamed and erased from public view without charges or trial, can and will be used to intimidate and discredit dissent, whistle-blowing and other non-conforming conduct.
Niqnaq 