The era of Me Too is dead and gone. The age of ignoring women who are politically inconvenient to the Left has come. Or maybe it never went away.
That’s the obvious take from a series of new, disturbing stories about Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff.
It’s already been confirmed that Emhoff acted like a cad when he cheated on his first wife and knocked up his daughter’s nanny in 2009.
But now there are new allegations, first reported by the Daily Mail, that Emhoff publicly slapped his then-girlfriend during a 2012 trip to the Cannes Film Festival. The Daily Mail relied on the testimony of three anonymous witnesses who were described as friends of Emhoff’s girlfriend at the time, whom the newspaper also didn’t name.
An unnamed representative for Harris, who married Emhoff in 2014, told Semfor that “this report is untrue.”
“Any suggestion that he would or has ever hit a woman is false,” the representative said.
The Daily Mail on Tuesday reported additional allegations against Emhoff, writing that he acted inappropriately toward women at the Los Angeles law firm he ran.
Some of his former employees even called the second gentleman a “misogynist.” Uh-oh.
While these allegations have piled up, the legacy media has shown a general lack of interest in these stories, even though Emhoff’s wife is the Democrats’ nominee for president. Gee, I wonder why?
Most of this reporting comes after the media eagerly concocted an image of Emhoff as the wonderful, loving, supportive husband who was redefining masculinity.
In late September, former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host Jen Psaki had a sit-down interview with Emhoff. There were no questions about the nanny. It was all softballs, not too unlike the interviews his wife has mostly struggled her way through.
Psaki framed the interview by asking Emhoff about how he has “reshaped the perception of masculinity.”
This clearly isn’t just a line Psaki came up with in the moment. It’s a narrative Democrats and the media have consistently spun in the past few months: Emhoff as the affable, supportive husband willing to take a back seat to all his wife’s endeavors. Completely nonthreatening. Perfectly nice.
These new accounts could cloud that image if they turn out to be true.
And that’s why this story matters. We are seeing in real time how media narratives are spun, and how stories shift based on the priorities of the Democrat Party.
In 2018, the media was eager to dig up decades-old, hazy accounts from women who accused now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of rape despite extremely thin evidence.
Left-wing journalists frothed about how “rapists have no place on the Supreme Court.” That was an actual headline. They demanded a national conversation about toxic masculinity.
One would think these same commentators who were ready to convict Kavanaugh on such scant evidence would have some concern about an alleged domestic abuser in the White House.
Nope. There’s no interest in this story at all. They just want it to go away. And that’s because it undermines the idea that Harris and Democrats are somehow on the side of women as opposed to those brute, neanderthal right-wingers.
You see, the Democrat Party now relies disproportionately on single women for votes.
The party has leaned into enshrining abortion as a top issue. And it clearly is pushing prominent male Democrats into the subordinate “bumbling TV dad” role. Hence the message about Emhoff’s redefined masculinity and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s relegation to being the comic-relief veep “knucklehead.”
The Democrat Party even branded male Harris supporters as “dudes for Harris” rather than “men” for Harris to subtly message the nonthreatening nature of the men in the party.
It’s interesting that what the Democrat Party touts as the new masculinity appears to just be manchild-ism.
The message to men is that little will be expected of you. You’ll still have your petty amusements, your pornography, your unattached lifestyle where your actions have no consequences just as long as you don’t interfere with the ambitions of those strong, independent women.
Just try not to be too embarrassing and it’s all good.
But the allegations against Emhoff are clearly crossing into the crisis management phase.
Instead of redefined masculinity, it looks more like Emhoff is a man who is out of control and can’t contain his vices or his temper. So now the party of “believe all women” just wants women to stay on message.
The media, which became downright fanatical and often farcical during the era of Me Too, suddenly has lost all interest in uncovering an explosive story about a man who soon may become the “first dude.”
So, was the Me Too movement really about protecting women?
As my colleague Tyler O’Neil reported, various national domestic violence groups have said nothing about Emhoff and have even generally praised him.
What began with fanaticism morphed into cynicism, and ended up as nihilism. Don’t expect any digging or curiosity about the Emhoff allegations from the legacy media.
They’re too busy making sure we all know that the future is female.
