Next time believe 'em.
April 27, 2023
Time and again, we've seen knowledgeable women calmly point out the disqualifying faults and failings of powerful men seeking important positions, only for them be doubted, dissed and dismissed. Then, later on, we find out they were right all along. Why don't we listen to intelligent women when they caution us about unworthy men?
Very few in the nation's media paid sufficient attention to Hillary Clinton's many impassioned warnings about the danger Donald Trump represented to the nation. "Making Donald Trump our commander in chief would be a historic mistake," she said in a 2016 speech on national security in San Diego, adding that Trump was "temperamentally unfit" to be president.
Even after he was (just barely) elected president, the former Secretary of State continued to alert us about Trump.
When leaders deny things we can see with our own eyes, like the size of a crowd at the inauguration, when they refuse to accept settled science when it comes to urgent challenges like climate change, it is the beginning of the end of freedom.
We now know Mrs. Clinton was correct on all counts about the incompetent, criminal president. Just as we now know that Brandeis University law professor Anita Hill was accurate in her assessment of the disreputable Clarence Thomas. When President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas for a seat on the Supreme Court in 1991, Hill came forward to relate how he sexually harassed her when they worked together in government.
But, as NPR points out, at the time "there were no women on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and only two women in the US Senate." Hill was consequently vilified and turned into an object of distrust and scorn. While Thomas was elevated to the high court.
A scant 27 years later, California psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford accused another SCOTUS nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, of groping and assaulting her when they were both attending high school in the early 1980s. A letter signed by more than 200 alumnae of Ford's all-girls school called for an investigation into the allegation. Naturally, that probe never took place, and today Kavanaugh is called Mr. Justice.
We've seen this movie over and over. Stacey Abrams describes how Brian Kemp stole the Georgia governorship through voter suppression, only to be denounced in the national press. Journalist E. Jean Carroll charges Trump with raping her in a department store and is ignored. When we should be trusting what women in cases like these say, all too often their testimony simply ends up being discounted and disregarded.
