Fantastic Lies: Special Ratf*cking Edition Part Two

Editor’s Note: this article is the second in what I believe will be a three part media criticism series focusing on early efforts to smear, block and otherwise annihilate a Bernie Sanders 2020 Democratic Party nomination run before it even gets started – you can find Part One here, and if you haven’t read it, I strongly advise you do so before continuing forward. Please accept my apologies in advance for how far back into the media muck-slinging machine we’re going but a recent back ailment has kept me from finishing this second portion of the article in a timely manner.

Ratfucking – “1. In politics, the use of “dirty tricks” to discredit one’s opponent(s). This often takes the form of false or semi-false accusations spread through underhanded means. The term was coined in the 1960s by Hunter S. Thompson and Bob Woodward. The art of ratfucking was brought into the public eye by Karl Rove. Among his ratfucking accomplishments are the 2000 GOP South Carolina primary and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” – more details here.

Smear One – “Bernie is practically a rapist & he hates women” continued…

Bernie Sanders’ Bungled Response To Sexual Harassment Claims Won’t Cut It In 2020 – before we start to unpack this January 3rd, HuffPo opinion piece I should in all due diligence mention that I have a small amount of history with the author, Sady Doyle; nothing too personal per se, I’ve just written about her a few times and she once spent several hours spam harassing me online for criticizing her integrity. I mention this now because before you read anything about left wing politics by Doyle, it’s important to note her proven history of working as a mouthpiece for the (still extremely influential, even in defeat) Clinton wing of the Democratic Party; with whom Sady’s relationship can be described as, well bizarre.

First, I’d like to note that the framing of Doyle’s argument in the headline at Huffington Post is objectively much better than I expected in light of Doyle’s writing history and the nature of the piece itself, as we will see shortly. Indeed, as a woman I myself had a problem with the very last line of Bernie Sander’s answer during the Anderson Cooper interview that Sady’s headline references. Once again however, the questions of proportion and contextual focus comes into play here; in totality, Sanders’ answer makes it very clear that his political organizations are concerned about sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination and establishing outside supervision of the complaints process. As Bernie himself tells us, these procedures were already in place for his successful 2018 Senate bid. Furthermore, Sanders not only apologizes to “any woman” (claims unseen) “who felt she was treated inappropriately” before adding that of course, “we will do better” next time. Unfortunately, the Senator then opens himself up to attack when responding to Cooper’s request for clarification about whether or not he knew about any of these allegations during the 2016 campaign, by saying “I was a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case.”

In this article however, Doyle focuses on only two small parts of Sanders’ statement; the use of the word “felt“ and that last, admittedly thoughtless throwaway confirmation response to Anderson. This in turn allows the author to admonish (with false regret) when she writes “If the Times report or the open letter had been handled graciously, it could have been interpreted as a sign that a 2020 Sanders campaign would be a Me Too vanguard. That is not how it was handled.” 

Yet as we can see from sources provided by the very same liberal media minions trying to ratfuck Sanders over these allegations, there is every reason to believe that a potential 2020 Sanders campaign would be a “Me Too vanguard.” Not only did Sanders already install a “gold standard“ (a term literally no one has challenged) harassment/gender discrimination policy for his next campaign, but additional reading reveals that the 2016 campaign immediately addressed the (seemingly accidental) gendered pay disparity and housing issues once they became aware of them. Furthermore, we know that the Senator, his former campaign manager, and his campaign committee have all expressed a willingness to meet with people who felt their complaints were not handled adequately and work with them to provide an even stronger set of rules and guidelines to fight harassment. Indeed, as even Doyle admits, the writers of the initial letter that kicked off this firestorm are looking forward to such a meeting, still believe in Sanders’s policies and are trying to strengthen the Senator’s potential 2020 campaign by having this discussion now. There is not one other 2020 Democratic Party candidate, or potential candidate who has offered anything more exemplary than this on the issue of fighting sexual harassment and gender discrimination in largely volunteer political campaigns; a fact that forces both Doyle and the New York Times to resort to perversely crying out (in essence) that “it’s a worse betrayal because Bernie is better on feminist policy than other candidates!”

Which brings us to Masha Mendieta (again), the word “felt” and former American University Students for Bernie president Zoey Jordan Salsbury. Thankfully, this piece is more sequentially consistent so we can use a screenshot, rather than typing out all the quotes:

Wow, that sounds pretty freaking horrible for Sanders, which of course means that Doyle (whose opinion writing literally “frames” the testimony from two volunteers in the above screenshot) is very good at her job; in this particular article, that job is “ratfucking Bernie Sanders.” Sticking with just Sady’s shall we say “creative” opinion writing at the top of this screenshot for the moment, we can see that Doyle starts off with a convenient exaggeration when she states “when CNN’s Anderson Cooper questioned Sanders about the sexual harassment allegations, the senator avoided addressing them for several minutes” – the entire clip (which Sady herself links to) from the time Cooper asks Sanders about the allegations, till the time Sanders starts to get up to leave, is one minute and forty-nine seconds long. This then allows Doyle to accuse Sanders of “prefacing his comments about the allegations with a monologue.” This in turn, then facilitates her ability to accuse Sanders of framing allegations of sexual harassment as “a distraction from his more important work” which she supports by quoting and thus placing the entire emphasis on, the last, admittedly careless, throwaway line in Sanders’ otherwise exemplary response to Anderson Cooper’s questions about sexual harassment. Throughout it all, Doyle maintains a simmering, self-righteous, and rather “matter of fact” tone as if to insinuate that there could be no other possible interpretation of Sanders’s comments; comments she either distorted, or completely ignored with the exception of one word and one line, when writing this piece. This is all despite the fact that the video Sady has provided as supporting evidence, doesn’t even remotely support her conclusions.

Don’t believe me? Okay, let’s get entirely way too “Zapruder film” on this Anderson Cooper 360 interview of Bernie Sanders. The footage Doyle links to comes from a seven minute and thirty-six second video in which Cooper asks the Senator a number of questions that have absolutely nothing to do with sexual harassment or complaints from his 2016 campaign. Having watched the interview, I can confirm that the clip Doyle provides does not come up until five minutes and forty-three seconds into the video and that at no point in time, before then, does Cooper mention the harassment allegations whatsoever. Now, I’m no math genius, but it would seem to me that seven minutes and thirty-six seconds, minus five minutes and forty-three seconds equals one minute and fifty-three seconds (which is rather close to the one minute and forty-nine second clip Sady has offered to support her argument.) This is important not only because it immediately invalidates Doyle’s claim that Sanders “avoided addressing” the comments for “several minutes” (which would be a little cruel) but it also confirms that we aren’t the victims of fancy video editing, there is no additional footage of Sanders dodging the issue except what Sady has provided.

So, let’s break the 1:49 clip down even further, shall we? The first 17 seconds of the clip feature Cooper asking two questions (more on this below), at which point Sanders does indeed open up his reply by stating that he was proud of his campaign and the progressive achievements it had accomplished. This lasts for precisely twenty-three seconds (including a time-delay pause between question and answer) before Sanders transitions, using the word “but”, to explaining how and why the campaign failed to properly address the harassment and gender-based discrimination entailed in these allegations. Literally no reasonable human being reading this should be prepared to accept that just under twenty-three seconds of prefacing a response to two related questions constitutes a “monologue” but even going by the most uncharitable of possible interpretations, it’s only another thirteen seconds before Sanders admits the campaign made human resource mistakes and acknowledges the specific problems of sexism and sexual harassment “which was not dealt with as effectively as possible.” That totals thirty-six seconds and ignores the fact that for thirteen of those seconds, Sanders was admitting they screwed up because the campaign got too big, too fast to properly manage human resource issues; issues like “workplace harassment” and “pay equity” for example. All of which leads to the open contradiction at the end of the screenshot above, in which Doyle accuses Sanders of not caring about his women supporters, because he spent roughly twenty-three seconds softening the blow for thousands of loyal volunteers and staffers (using the phrase “we”) before criticizing the campaign they helped to create and operate together, for not doing enough to fight gendered discrimination and harassment.

Frankly, this might not even be the most mindbogglingly obvious problem with Doyle’s thesis because if you were paying attention to the very beginning of this conversation, you’ll know that Cooper asked Sanders two very specific questions before leaving the Senator roughly one minute and thirty-two seconds to answer them. Specifically, Cooper asked Sanders “were you aware of those allegations during the campaign” and “how can you ensure something like that doesn’t happen again?” Cooper did not ask Sanders to address, or even confirm, the allegations, but he briefly addresses them. More importantly, Cooper did not ask Sanders to apologize, but once again Bernie found time to do so inside the extremely limited block of time CNN offered him to respond. In other words, Sanders wasn’t speaking to “survivors” when he began his response to Cooper, nor was he being offered a platform to provide a formal apology to women who worked on his campaign; he was answering the news anchor’s questions and thus Anderson Cooper is the person responsible for steering the conversation towards the Sanders campaign and Bernie’s confirmation that he did not know about the allegations until after the 2016 campaign was over. Yes, that’s right, Sady has written a whole article about Bernie Sanders’ “bungled response to sexual harassment claims” based entirely on a one minute and forty-nine second question and answer period with Anderson Cooper in which the Senator was not asked to, nor particularly provided with adequate time to, specifically respond to sexual harassment claims. Cooper simply ends the interview after confirming that Sanders is saying he had no knowledge of the claims during the campaign. No, really – I could not make this shit up if I tried folks.

In light of these obvious exaggerations and distortions, what then is a reasonable observer to make of Doyle’s assertion that Sanders considers incidents of harassment “a distraction from his more important work” or her declaration that the Senator didn’t pay attention to, or care about the women who worked on his campaign; claims that are at best, “highly-subjective” and at worst, strongly suggest that Doyle believes she’s developed psychic powers? If Sady can’t even keep her story straight for thirty-six seconds of video, what qualifies her as credible to speak for all women, or even just potential Democratic primary voters, about whether or not they believe Sanders takes sexual harassment and gendered discrimination “seriously?” Why should anyone trust Doyle when they can just watch the rest of the video clip for themselves and see Sanders acknowledging these issues, apologizing to any women who even “felt” harassed or disrespected and proving that he truly cares about the problem by listing the concrete steps he’s already taken to fight sexism and harassment in his extended campaign organization? Where Doyle sees “minimized the allegations to a matter of hurt “feelings,” why can’t a viewer who is less partisan see a politician moving beyond “he said, she said” to acknowledge that the very fact that any women felt disrespected, or harassed while working on his campaign is a grave problem in its own right that must be, and has been addressed? Doesn’t the fact that neither Sanders nor any senior members of his current political organization have denied any of these allegations and have repeatedly acknowledged them as “credible,” strongly suggest that the latter interpretation of the word “felt” is more accurate than Doyle’s? Hell, I’ll do you one better – doesn’t the fact that Doyle herself acknowledges Bernie’s strong feminist record as a politician in this very article force readers to question precisely why she interpreted Sanders’ apology so uncharitably, ostensibly based on a single word?

Setting aside the roaring dumpster fire of Sady Doyle rage-fiction we’ve just examined however, still leaves us with quoted tweets from two hurt and disappointed women who reported gendered-discrimination and harassment during the 2016 Sanders primary campaign. This is of course, unfortunate, but neither I, nor anyone else who believes in women’s rights has any legitimate right to tell Masha Mendieta or Zoey Jordan Salsbury that the disappointment and frustration they feel with how their experiences and testimony were handled as a whole, is not valid. With that having been noted however, since the entire purpose of this article is to question the adequacy of Bernie’s response to incidents of sexual harassment and gendered-discrimination, we are required to judge whether or not the response from Sanders and his political organization can reasonably be judged by outside observers, to be proportional and appropriate in light of the severity of the claims. No one is saying Salsbury or Mendieta are wrong to feel personally harmed, but it is certainly reasonable and indeed instrumental for testing the thesis presented in this article, to ask if Sanders could rationally believe his response, provided in the middle of answering tangentially-related questions, was sufficient for that moment. So let’s briefly, and delicately, look at what it is that Mendieta and Salsbury each reported:

Masha Mendieta – as we’ve already spent a significant portion of Part One discussing Mendieta’s allegations and experiences, I’ll just offer a brief summation. She witnessed a volunteer campaign surrogate sexually harassing a co-worker (Giulianna Di Lauro Velez) and experienced demeaning and sexist treatment at the hands of then Nevada Latino outreach manager Arturo Carmona; these allegations are extremely credible and it’s very easy to understand why Mendieta might be irritated that it’s taken this long to hear Bernie say that he’s sorry. Of course, these allegations aren’t the ones Doyle links you to; in a move that either demonstrates the carelessness of HuffPo editing, or the utter fearlessness of their legal department, Doyle links to Mendieta’s Dec 9, 2018 Medium post – which has, shall we say, some problems.

Zoey Jordan Salsbury – Salsbury spoke about her experience on the Sanders 2016 campaign for a November, 2017 HuffPo piece written by Eoin Higgins, a far more credible scribe than Sady Doyle in my extensive experience with each writer’s work. Higgins writes “in October 2015, Salsbury became president of American University Students for Bernie, a volunteer position. Her main point of contact in the Vermont senator’s campaign was an intern, another college student in Washington, D.C. When he made unwanted advances toward her, Salsbury said she didn’t know where to turn because the campaign had no internal infrastructure to deal with such issues ― at least involving volunteers.” Once again, there is no legitimate reason to doubt Salsbury’s allegations, Higgins also writes “her account was confirmed by her friend Colin Moir, a fellow member of the American University group. “He had been harassing her sexually,” said Moir, adding that Salsbury “was not able to speak to somebody higher up and report it.” Once again, nobody has a reasonable right to deny Salsbury her anger at how this whole situation played out, but the question remains – is there really any reasonable way Sanders could have responded to Cooper’s only tangentially related questions that would have been acceptable to Zoey? Let’s look at the language Higgins and Zoey Jordan Salsbury used to describe her experiences:

Even ignoring the fact that I’m fairly certain that Zoey Jordan Salsbury is not a civil trial attorney or any sort of particular expert on what “the kind of call you make when you’re trying to feel out if someone has the interest and/or standing to bring a lawsuit” sounds like, it seems to me that Salsbury’s testimony revolves a great deal around her (completely valid) feelings. It also sounds to me like her primary points of contention are that there was no training or process in place to report sexual harassment by volunteers and that she was contacted by a lawyer, instead of Sanders himself personally; one of these problems has already been addressed and the other one would again require a time machine to solve. There is once again no indication given that Senator Sanders was aware of these allegations during the campaign, nor is there any indication that Salsbury took legal action against either the unnamed intern who harassed her, or the Sanders campaign. This is important because when Zoey reports “I didn’t feel like I was not treated appropriately, I wasn’t. There is no subjectiveness to this” and then references coming forward a year ago, she is clearly implying that Bernie has failed in his duty to support her claims. Except, we can clearly see that Sanders used precisely the same language she used and, in the context of replying to Cooper’s questions, did just about the best he possibly could to address the allegations and apologize to not only Salsbury, but all of the women who’ve come forward; Sanders isn’t reducing the issue to “hurt feelings,” he’s saying women feeling abused on his campaign shows that there was a failure in his campaign.

At some point, one has to ask – do these folks know that Bernie Sanders can’t accuse individuals of sexual harassment on television, legally, based on the testimony available? That it’s seriously a question of liability? It seems to me that any honest reading of this situation, shows that Sanders is trying to create a campaign culture that respects the feelings of women about sexism and harassment as vitally important to providing a safe, equitable and supportive workplace environment. He’s not denying anything, he’s not demanding evidence or police reports. He’s firmly saying that he believes women, and that providing an environment where campaign workers feel respected, trusted and comfortable matters to him; which as a woman, is precisely how I’d want a future President of the United States to deal with this issue if I were working for him.

Literally no sane person is saying that Masha Mendieta and Zoey Jordan Salsbury don’t have a right to be angry, the question nevertheless remains “was Bernie’s response, during a question and answer period that was not framed as an opportunity to apologize to women who reported harassment and discrimination (that the Senator was not aware of) by people (not Sanders) who worked on the 2016 campaign, fair, appropriate and proportional?” Or, is it as Doyle said, a sign that Sanders is unable to convince voters (particularly women) that he takes “violence” against women in campaign culture or politics, seriously? I think in light of the available evidence, and the fact that Sanders has since not only released a specific apology but arranged to meet women who experienced harassment and sexism as part of his campaign, it’s more than reasonable to say that Sanders’s response has been adequate, appropriate and proportional by any fair standards – even while acknowledging that this doesn’t mean Medieta, Salsbury or even Sady Doyle has to agree.

A Cavalcade of Fuckery

As the rest of Doyle’s article pretty much consists of complaining about the way Bernie shakes his finger when he speaks and stumping for Elizabeth Warren, let’s take a shorter look at a couple more examples of the “Bernie is running a rape factory” ratfucking smear in our mainstream, corporate media, shall we?

I Was Sexually Harassed On Bernie Sanders’ Campaign. And No One Cared. – this January, 7th Opinion piece by Virginia Jeffries appears online at Forward magazine, an outlet that has had the courage to share some, shall we say “interesting” opinions on Democratic Party politics in the past. I’m posting it here simply to highlight the absolutely ridiculous lengths mainstream Democrat-friendly outlets have gone to, in an effort to create a public association between Bernie Sanders and sexual harassment. In it, Jeffries describes what she herself terms “a fairly average case of sexual harassment” (although, frankly, I find the encounter she details quite harrowing and unquestionably legally actionable) committed by “a local voter named Ray.” That is correct, the person who harassed Jeffries was literally not a member of the Sanders campaign organization in any way and no, I am not aware of any campaign in the history of US politics that vets individual voters. It is unclear from the story why Jeffries did not contact police (she certainly seems to have known her assailant) or why there was no one else in the South Bronx campaign headquarters at the time of the assault, or even (several days?) afterwards, that she could report to. Jeffries goes on to detail her (understandably frustrating) experience with trying to find out how to report this incident to the Sanders campaign and her impression that Jeff Weaver and Sanders Campaign COO John Robinson did not respond adequately to her complaint. Jeffries then notes that “while Sanders’ new Senate campaign sexual harassment policy looks like a step in the right direction, I worry that this debacle could happen again.”

Naturally, as an opinion columnist with experience volunteering for Sanders, whose report of sexual harassment was not adequately addressed, I respect Virginia’s right to question whether or not Sanders has done enough to prevent this unfortunate situation from reoccurring. By that same measure however, I’m certainly of the “opinion” that holding Bernie Sanders personally responsible for the actions of a random voter and a 23 year old staffer who had no idea what to say when Jefferies reported the incident to him days after the fact, isn’t particularly fair, or reasonable. As always, your mileage may vary.

– Nina Illingworth

Donate to keep ninaillingworth.com up and running via PayPal:

Paypal Account: us@hairyt.com – please include a note saying your donation is for ninaillingworth.com; thanks!

Donate to ninaillingworth.com via Patreon: