California Progressives Protect California Progressive Predators
The Democrats finally confided their secret to America.
The Washington Post titled an article, “How Eric Swalwell rose to the top of Democratic politics as rumors followed him.” Politico headlined another, “The whisper network that caught up to Eric Swalwell.”
Swalwell may get his day in court or some other forum to prove himself merely creep and not predator. Before his “gradually, then suddenly” downfall hit the suddenly phase, once numerous women advanced stories depicting the now-former Congressman Swalwell as both creep and a predator, Americans knew of his relationship with a Chinese spy. But some Democrats apparently knew more. (RELATED: The Democrats’ Swalwell Follies)
Yes, Democrats permitted Eric Swalwell to run for president and the following year to manage the impeachment of the president without divulging the truth. Only when Swalwell’s open secret threatened to derail the Democrats’ chances of holding onto the governorship of California did his fellow progressives tell the public what they knew.
Sex scandals remain a lone shred of bipartisanship in politics. The ability of California progressives to bottle up sex scandals stems from a very different force. In a one-party state, where Democrats dominate government and media, investigations into sexual predators with a “D” next to their name tend not to go very far.
Just last month, women accused Cesar Chavez, for whom California celebrated a state holiday until this year, of raping and molesting them during the 1960s and 1970s. Dorothy Huerta, Chavez’s chief lieutenant, broke her silence at 96 by noting rapes that resulted in children whom she put up for adoption. We learned of this 33 years after Chavez’s death. (READ MORE: Cesar Chavez, Rapist, Pedophile, Progressive Icon)
Why did Huerta remain silent for so long? She said in a statement that she “kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”
Total-politics people committed to an ideology or cause protect it at all costs — including costs inflicted upon human beings.
That, in a nutshell, helps explain why so many in politics get away with atrocious behavior. Total-politics people committed to an ideology or cause protect it at all costs — including costs inflicted upon human beings. Aside from issues of shame and privacy that compel many victims to keep quiet, the added dimension of not wanting to harm the cause colors such cases within the realm of politics. And this added dimension applies not merely to victims but enablers.
This happened with Jim Jones, a contemporary of Chavez who led the Peoples Temple, a left-wing movement masquerading as a church in Northern California. Jones forced children to eat their vomit, vegetarians to eat chicken, and a white man with perceived racist inclinations to, well, perform oral sex on a menstruating black woman. Jones forced himself upon both young women and men within his flock.
The San Francisco Examiner spiked much of Lester Kinsolving’s exposé on Jones in 1972, and New West magazine initially spiked another investigative piece on him later in the decade before the floodgates finally broke in 1977.
Why?
As I detail in Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, Jones provided volunteers, voters, and much else to the city’s left-wing political class. Mayor George Moscone appointed him in 1975 to the city’s Housing Authority Commission, of which he became chairman shortly thereafter. The powerful Glide Memorial Church bestowed its Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award upon him. Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, Harvey Milk, and others promoted and defended him.
After Jones murdered more than 900 people in the South American jungle, San Francisco did not undertake a reckoning. Instead, the city elected two of his boosters — Willie Brown and Art Agnos — as mayor, celebrated a day in media ally Herb Caen’s honor and named a promenade after him, and renamed the street that gives city hall its address Carleton B. Goodlett Place after a man who continued to defend Jim Jones after he orchestrated mass murder.
From Harvey Milk to Harvey Weinstein, California covers up for its progressives guilty of sexual predation. Progressive creeps get away with it because progressive creeps investigate — or, more precisely, don’t — progressive creeps.
Eric Swalwell is neither the first nor last. He is only the latest.
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