JoAnn Loulan’s additions in italics
Eric Swalwell got away with what he was doing for almost twenty years.
And was ahead in the race for Gov of California
A congressman, a prosecutor before that, a man who spent two decades in public life, with a staff, with donors, with reporters on his beat, with colleagues who saw him at every fundraiser and floor vote. For two decades, according to reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle, CNN and NBC, he was allegedly sexually harassing, assaulting, and in at least one case raping the women around him. How does a person (man) –do this for that long?
Everyone clucks because Katie Porter is “mean to her staff”–not that I think that’s ok, but seriously? Everyone talks about that, and Swalwell gets away with sexual assault for 20 years.
Not: how do they get away with it once. Not: how do they hide one bad night. How do they build a twenty-year career on top of it, rise through the ranks, chair committees, run for president, run for governor… with women in their twenties rotating through the office every cycle, each one a potential witness, each one a potential story, and none of it touching him until April of 2026? When brave women came forward and risked their careers…which are probably over in DC.
The reason women don’t come forward isn’t fear of being disbelieved, exactly. It’s the math. The system is not designed to weigh the evidence; it is designed to weigh the people, and you are not the heavier one.
I call this status-based reasoning
The high-status person is right because they are the high-status person. Arguments are window dressing. Evidence is decoration. The conclusion is fixed before anyone opens their mouth, and everything that follows is the retroactive assembly of a justification.
It’s why “believe women” became such a flashpoint. The slogan was never asking for women to be believed without evidence. It was asking for women’s evidence to be weighted the same as men’s.
The crazy-making quality of living inside this system, on the wrong side of the line, is that the argument is never actually about the argument.
In the 2024 race Donald Trump tells the crowd that Kamala Harris “would get us into a World War III guaranteed because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.” He is the high-status figure. She was the low-status one. He is right because he is the one who gets to be right. And everything he said she would do he has done (and she probably wouldn’t have )
This is what the Swalwell staffers lived inside. This is what Harris lived inside for the entirety of the 2024 campaign. This is what women, people of color and poor people live inside. This is what every woman who ever kept furniture between herself and a powerful man has lived inside her whole working life.
This is why electing a woman president of the United States will be very difficult….(19 million people voted for Biden in 2020 and DID NOT VOTE in 2024 ….and Harris lost by 6 million votes). You can say it’s her personality, Biden didn’t step down…on and on….the major cause was because our culture continues to see women (and a black and Asian woman to boot) as lower status than men…even wealthy women….it seems impossible to get retribution for the Epstein victims (one area I agree with Bondi–no Democratic DOJ supported Epstein victims either or released the Epstein files). 13 states have made abortion illegal, 8 have restricted birth control, 10% of Fortune 500 companies are run by women…and I can go on as to how sexism is a scourge in this country. Yet we worry about the psyche of young men.
Sexism, racism, classism and white nationalism need to be confronted–and all the “people who live inside this paradigm” need to be supported in fighting STATUS-BASED REASONING.
This is the ONLY way a Supreme Court Justice (Kavanaugh) could write in 2025 an agreement giving ICE unlimited power to detain people against their will because of: their accents, color of their skin and working low-status jobs. Think about that….and 81% of people arrested by ICE where courts have intervened have been released..because someone (a Judge) of higher status ruled they be released.
