SIO201: Did Al Franken Get Railroaded? with Jamie Lombardi

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:04 Clip: You're listening to Serious Inquiries Only.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hey everyone, well I have mentioned in the past few shows that I was looking to collaborate with someone and I am here to tell you here's that someone, it's Jamie Lombardi. Jamie, how are you doing?

0:00:39 Jamie: I am doing all right. Thank you so much for bringing me on to this.

0:00:44 Thomas: Thank you so much for coming on. I know it was, it was so random, but it was, we met over through Aaron on Philosophers in Space, and we had a great time, and I just thought you'd be somebody with a really informed and critical feminist voice that I just think would be so great for the show, and I'm really excited to give it a try here. And if, you know, if we hate it, we'll just quit. It's fine. No pressure.

0:01:09 Jamie: Well, I really hope to live up to expectations. So yeah, let's give this a go.

0:01:14 Thomas: Awesome. Could you give people just the briefest of bios so that they maybe know where you're coming from, what experience you're bringing and all that?

0:01:21 Jamie: Yeah, very briefly, I'm currently working as a professor of philosophy at Bergen Community College, where I mostly do intro classes and a variety of ethics courses. Before that, I went to graduate school at NYU studying bioethics. I did my undergraduate at Rutgers and in a different life I dabbled a little bit in some political campaigns. So that's been fun.

0:01:47 Thomas: Yeah. Lots of cool background there. I'm sure there are so many future topics we can get to. But you had mentioned you were going to give like a free speech in academia talk coming up. I am really curious to hear what that's about.

0:02:00 Jamie: Yeah, so in October I'm going to be at the University of Michigan for the Public Philosophy Network Conference, and I'm gonna be talking about how to make sense about the debate around free speech and academia. There are all of these claims being made about people being de-platformed and this being tantamount to censorship and infringement on free speech, and how to sort of untangle these competing claims about protecting people from harm and protecting the ability to say things that are necessary to be said.

0:02:36 Thomas: Yeah. And I don't know exactly where you're coming from. I mean, one of the cool things I think about getting on the show is just how different, like you're not a podcast person and that's totally okay, but it might even be good to have a diversity of kind of background and where we get our information and all that stuff. But I'm wondering, is this along the lines of talking about how the right has really just waged this kind of campaign? I don't know what to call it, but this campaign of constantly harping on free speech in colleges, free speech and colleges, and just blowing it out of proportion. Is this at all in response to that? Or is this kind of to the side of that? Is it related?

0:03:20 Jamie: So if successful, I would be thrilled if the argument that I'm making would be able to be applied to that and make sense of that. For this talk in October, I have a much narrower focus, and I'm going to be discussing specifically the issue about trans exclusion versus trans exclusion within feminism. Because right now, philosophy is having a bit of a debate with itself, to put it mildly, about whether or not academic philosophy and feminism in particular should be trans exclusive or trans inclusive. And those who are advocating for trans exclusiveness are making the claim that they are currently being silenced and de-platformed, and this is an infringement on their academic freedom.

0:04:08 Jamie: So that will be the access point that I'm focusing on in October at Michigan. But I do hope to be able to come up with a framework or an analysis that allows us to make sense of it in a broader context.

0:04:20 Thomas: That makes a lot of sense. So, but I was going to just bring up, I don't know if you've heard about this, but but I actually came across it somewhere on Twitter. I say that too much on this show. It's bad practice, but it's like I'll see a really interesting thread and then I see a million of them a day and then try to bring it up later. I'm like, oh, shoot, which one was that? But I came across a thread where somebody who was previously part of this free speech kind of battle on campuses was talking about the fact that there's a professor right here where I am in UC Davis. Davis, this is like minutes away from me, who is potentially getting fired over like anti-police remarks. And wouldn't you know it, it's no part of the right wing talking points on this. And I was just wondering if you had heard of that. If not, it is okay. I was just going to mention it. I have been meaning to mention on the show and just have not gotten the chance.

0:05:07 Jamie: Yeah, so I'm loosely familiar with this. Jason Stanley is actually a philosopher who who works at Yale, who has been tweeting about this more recently. And this is something that he pointed to, that when there is these sorts of violations, they disproportionately tend to impact people who are advocating left-wing views. And there just really isn't the evidence to suggest that conservative thinkers or libertarian thinkers or right-leaning thinkers in general are being silenced or deplatformed.

0:05:39 Thomas: Yeah, it really, my opinion on it is it really just, the right is so, I do not know, it has like, they are so much much better at marketing, you know, like they're so good at putting together this campaign where they're all on the same talking points, like, they're all in line, they are all talking to each other, and Tucker Carlson is up there pulling on every, you know, interviewer that, or interviewee, rather, who has had any problem in academia at all, and it's so tough to, like fight back against that, so, but that's interesting, I will be very curious to hear that talk once it comes out, you, any final thoughts on that topic before we move on to what we want to talk about today?

0:06:14 Jamie: Well, the only thing I would like to say in follow up to what you just said is I think the right has a real advantage here. They're defending the status quo. They are basically just saying, no, things are pretty good as it is. And so that's a pretty easy message to get on board with. But when your argument is actually, you know what, things aren't working, the message that you need to have is what's going to. And that's a lot harder to come up with then I things

0:06:23 Thomas: Right. Yeah. That is a frequent theme of the show, actually. Status quo warriors is the counter term that I've used sometimes. They label me as SJW, social justice warrior, but I think status quo warrior is a good term for the other side of that sometimes. But yeah, speaking of kind of related to that, I have really been wanting to to talk to you about this Al Franken article. This was in the New Yorker. And not to go too much into it, but I did a few episodes on the Al Franken situation, I believe with Christy Winters, I want to say. Sorry, I did it a few of them and I'm blanking. But one way or the other, we did a lot. And I think a huge Al Franken fan. I loved his book. I was really into how well he was doing at these hearings where he was asking the greatest questions.

0:06:44 Jamie: Personally

0:07:34 Thomas: And then as more and more stuff came out, it was kind of a coping process of recognizing like, okay, this is too far and this guy has to go. That is where I eventually got to after the second and third accuser. So just full disclosure on where I was on this show. But why don't you, do you want to bring us up to speed with what, so, yeah, Jamie, there was this New York article. It was by Jane Mayer, I believe. I'm not sure how to pronounce if it's Mayer or Mayer. But she was very vociferous in her defense of Al Franken. Do you want to give us kind of bring us up to speed on this article and what you thought of it?

0:08:10 Jamie: So I found this article really revolting. At times there were some sentences that I read where I actually had to sort of like put the phone down and just look away and say, okay, I'm going to breathe for a minute before I continue on reading this. Because it just goes to show how easy it is for even, you know, well-informed, well-educated, and I imagine to some extent self-identifying feminist women can internalize the sort of misogynistic scripts that dominate our behavior. And It was shocking to me how much of the behavior in question was attempted to be sort of hand-waved away or made okay because it wasn't as bad as raping children. And we don't really like the political views of the first person who accused him anyway? And isn't Al Franken cool? And I was really, really struck by that.

0:08:43 Thomas: Right.

0:09:08 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, I, I totally agree and I, so it, this is so hard, I don't know, what I can't get in the author's mind, you know, um, but it does, it does feel, especially with some of the follow-ups I've seen where people have tried to go back and forth with this author and be like, hey, uh, what about this, and she seems so defensive of Franken in a way that it doesn't strike me as objective journalism. It really seems like a personal case to me. That's just my opinion. It seems like this person really wants to clear Al Franken. I worry that liberals are going to want to take this as an easy way out to feel better about what happened. Do you worry about that at all? This is something that they're just going to kind of swallow and be like, ah, see, he got railroaded.

0:09:54 Jamie: Yeah, I, you know, I think it's a really difficult time, just well, in general. But, you know, it's it's weird sort of identity questioning sort of time to be a liberal. And I think in a lot of ways, Franken checked all the right boxes. And Franken had that ability to sort of fight back in a way that was, he managed to be simultaneously intellectual and aggressive that people are really looking for in the age of Trump. And that's understandable to an extent, you know, Trump is terrible. But there seems to be a lot of motivated reasoning in a lot of the defenses about Franken and about him being railroaded. Because at the end of the day, Minnesota still has a Democratic senator. They are not worse off.

0:09:59 Thomas: Yeah, right.

0:10:46 Jamie: His legislation is not unable to pass through the halls of Congress. And his estimated net worth is still between $5 and $10 million. Like, the dude is fine. So

0:10:58 Thomas: Say. Part of me does worry though. So I've made that same argument a lot and I still believe it. We talk about men facing some of these consequences sometimes as though it's like their death and there's a lot of dramatics about that.

At the same time, One thing that occurred to me, I can't remember if it was Franken or who knows, God knows how many others, uh, that, that happened where I was thinking to myself, wait a minute, if I had to choose between five to $10 million of net worth and this reputation versus just being like being me, you know, like I would not take that deal, you know?

And so sometimes, like sometimes I worry, I think there are reputational costs that are are very severe and they probably should be, um, you know, because oftentimes this is very gross misbehavior, but sometimes I do worry that we minimize what that is, you know, like, cause that does, people do really value their reputations. And like, if it were the case, hypothetically that like all this was just BS and like he didn't do anything wrong, it, it would be pretty egregious. Like it would me pretty horrible for him, you know?

0:12:08 Jamie: And no, so let's, you know, if all of these allegations are, you know, completely false, and he has lost his job in the Senate, right? And none of this that has been said to him is true. That's obviously an injustice, right? And that's obviously unfortunate. And I don't want to mince words about that. If somebody loses their career over a false allegation, that is horrible.

0:12:18 Thomas: Right. Right.

0:12:32 Jamie: But the idea that men's reputations and men's careers are in more danger than the women accusing them is just not borne out by reality. We saw this when, oh God, what was his name? He sent the pictures of his penis from New York. He was married to an advisor to Hillary Clinton. I can't, we, right?

0:12:40 Thomas: Right. Right. Oh, how could you not remember Wiener? Yeah.

0:12:59 Jamie: Like he was able to be rehabilitated in the public consciousness so much more so than the women he had sexually harassed. Again, with Bill Clinton and Monica We see. We are all too ready to fall on our swords to continue to hold up the men that we love, like Bill Clinton, while the women they've sexually assaulted or harassed have to go through their lives being treated like pariahs. Imagine how hard it had to be to be Monica Lewinsky in her early 20s, navigating her early career after what happened with Bill Clinton. And yet here's this man, the most powerful man in the entire world, who is received like a hero because of his ability to communicate complex ideas to regular people.

0:13:04 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah.

0:13:45 Thomas: I'm gonna Kate Manne... is it? Sorry. Wait. Yeah, did she coin empathy, or am I getting that wrong?

0:13:53 Jamie: Yes, yes. I was going to bring that up before. Yeah.

0:13:53 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yeah yeah it's well go ahead. Yeah feel free.

0:13:58 Jamie: Yeah, so I think the Franken case is a perfect example of empathy. Empathy is the idea that we give so much more sympathy to the male perpetrators of sexual violence than we do to their victims. And it's our willingness to identify or sympathize primarily with male aggressors than their victims, right?

0:14:03 Thomas: Yeah Yeah.

0:14:20 Thomas: Yeah. And it's interesting because it seems to me like it applies to so many things like, yes, empathy, but it's also there's... there's also I've seen ever since reading that book, I've seen like a racial version of that, too, you know, where it's like, if anything, you know, if if a single black protester does something wrong, it's the end of the world. Whereas, you know, white people do all this kinds of crap after a sporting event, you know, like after a championship, you know, all kinds of white people, right? No one gives a shit kind of thing. It's like, it's this biasing of like, what matters more, you know? What's going to be a big deal? The loss of a certain person's career or like some other costs that we kind of hide from society. Like all the costs of like all the Weinstein victims, you Know, like we don't really see it until somebody does this news story about it.

0:15:12 Thomas: You know, it's hard for us to see, you know, and a lot of it is our fault as a society and who we value, but it's also like just by default going to be much harder for us to know the hypothetical cost, you know? Like how many careers didn't happen and all that versus this guy who got taken down that we can see very visibly.

0:15:32 Jamie: And that's always the conversation that we never have when we talk about the loss of this man's career is the loss of how many women's careers when they just bowed out of the profession, when they felt too humiliated or too dehumanized to return to that particular line of work, given what had happened to them. And there was one line in this article that stuck out to me in particular about this. The author is quoting, I believe it's Angus King from Maine, who describes what happened to Franken as the political equivalent of capital punishment.

And it just struck me, this language, in the way that it encouraged us to think of a man losing his, you know, very powerful position in the Senate, but yet still being a multimillionaire, keep in mind, to being, you know, on a par with death, and that this was worse than any of the various sorts of sexual assault that happened to women. And it's just mind-blowing to me the subtle ways that semantically we encourage this idea that men, and most often white men, are to be the center of all our stories. They are the protagonists, they are the people we are supposed to care about, and everybody else is just sort of a plot device to their narrative.

0:16:02 Thomas: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

0:16:52 Thomas: Yeah, so like, I think there are still some tough tough questions in here that I would love to to get your thoughts on. One thing that I hear from even, you know, people who I think would self-identify as feminists and liberals and all that is why not the let it let the due process take its course? You know, like that's I think a lot of the people quoted in this article, some were like like you just said, you know, this was this is a railroading. This was capital punishment. But there are others that that were like, you know, we should have at least let the investigation happen. You know, the ethics investigation. Do you have thoughts on that? Like that, that, that might be a more difficult, nuanced question possibly, or maybe you'll tell me it's not, I don't know.

0:17:35 Jamie: I have so many thoughts about this. First and foremost, I think it's really bad. It's really bad idea to set how we treat a very well-liked senator and former celebrity in these scenarios, compared to how we treat regular sorts of people when these things happen. It's going to be really hard, I think, to draw useful corollaries when you're talking about how regular people who make $50,000, $60,000 $70,000 a year are treated compared to a sitting United States Senator with $10 million in the bank. There's just real world implications that are different in ways that I think matter. So that's one. Two, the problem with due process is it assumes a just system. And my apologies to any of the listeners who are not yet aware, but ours is not. Ours is very much broken. I believe RAINN estimated that out of a thousand sexual assaults, four assailants will go on to be prosecuted.

0:17:58 Thomas: Right.

0:18:48 Jamie: The experience of trying to prosecute someone for sexual harassment very often for the victims feels like a re-traumatization. Their credibility is put on trial. Their sexual history is dredged up. It's a humiliating and painful process to say nothing of the thousands of of untested rape kits that states across the United States still have. So that's the other thing. And then Al Franken continues to say things like, oh, well, we should have done the ethics hearing. Well, that sounds great. And if your political understanding is limited to the sorts of things that can fit on bumper stickers, that's going to be very persuasive. But then you realize, I think it was in 2017, there were 138 violations that the Ethics Committee looked into and zero disciplinary actions.

0:19:41 Thomas: Yeah.

0:19:42 Jamie: It's completely useless.

0:19:43 Thomas: I think so. There's a lot of separate issues. I take, take all your points. I want to quit for for now, maybe just focus in on the case of Franken. And I think it's a way bigger, different topic talking about the justice and injustice of this system through all the way down to people who are maybe not even documented, who can just get absolutely railroaded all the way up to wealthier people and all that. But let's talk about the specific question of Al Franken, because I do hear you and track record there that you referenced, I remember at the time talking about that as well. There's no guarantee that that's going to bring us any more answers. But it seems to me that, and this borders on maybe another of the tough issues that I wanted to get your thoughts on, is the fact that we, the wake of of Me Too, it's almost like we're two different jurisdictions.

0:20:40 Thomas: You know, if you commit sexual assault and you're in the Democratic jurisdiction, well, stuff will happen. If you're in the jurisdiction of Republicans, eh, doesn't matter. And while I am totally all for Democrats holding Democrats accountable for that kind of thing, absolutely don't get me wrong. Is there any part that the tough question I want to ask you is, what if Minnesota hadn't been democratically controlled and losing his seat would have gone to a Republican? Does that change what we need to do at all? Or is it just the case that... And furthermore, what if that could have been a critical vote on an abortion bill or something? Those are questions that I found really difficult and I was glad we didn't really have to answer. But what if that happens?

0:21:26 Jamie: So, thankfully this wasn't a Democratic Senator in Florida, then again, we have that don't vote very democratically very often who tend to be in these sorts of positions in the first place. And so, you know, I want to say that sexually assaulting women is bad, no matter your political affiliation, and I'm pretty adamant about abortion rights among many other things, but even in the instance of a key vote, I, I want to be, I just want to say that you just, you shouldn't rape women.

0:22:09 Jamie: And I, I don't know, I guess I'm just an extremist about that. And if the Democrats can't get key legislation passed, if the Democrats can't keep a woman's right to her bodily autonomy autonomy intact, absent a raping senator, well, then the Democratic Party deserves to go up in flames. That's sort of where I'm at. I should be able to have both my bodily autonomy and Democratic senators who don't sexually assault women. And I shouldn't be made to feel as though I'm doing something morally problematic by insisting that my Democratic representatives both secure my fundamental human rights and don't rape women. Yeah,

0:21:51 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah, well Put. I, it's hard, though, because I think this this will branch out to a broader political discussion that we should definitely have, but maybe not now. But I think the structure of the Senate favors Republicans so much that I personally don't blame, like, I have a hard time being as mad at Democrats for not having the votes because the system gives, you, to senators and, you know, whatever, like these stupid states have the same amount of senators that you and I have that I have in California, you know, like with all these millions and millions of people. So it's it's tough. I think that structurally, I wouldn't maybe put as much blame on the Democrats as perhaps you would, but that may be for another time. I don't know. But I wonder if, I wish we could do this.

0:23:41 Thomas: In a time where there's no bipartisanship, I think there's No Chance. Chance, but I was thinking like, I wish there would be some law in place because it's almost like you want a ceasefire. Like you want like a truce, like, okay, Democrats and Republicans, hypothetically, the good people, if there are any left on any side, you know, like should want it to be that if you discover that who, you Know, Lindsey Graham, whatever Republican Senator turns out they have, you Now, just horrible, whatever criminal thing that gets uncovered. Um, I feel like we should, if there's one bipartisan thing we should agree on, we should be like, okay, let's agree that in those instances, you just get to replace the person with someone within your party and like, we'll cancel it out. And that'll just allow both parties to like, get rid of these awful people and not feel like it's this hostage situation where you don't want to give up abortion rights for the whole country for the sake of this one person. You know, like I wish that were possible.

0:24:40 Jamie: That seems totally reasonable to me. And I would be willing to support that if only, you know, reasonable people capable of putting the best interests of the country first were in charge and we could do that. It would be great.

0:24:54 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Did you, I found it really difficult during this time and I want to get your thoughts on it. Did you find it difficult when it's like, yes, you know, and we should get back to the Franken article maybe and discuss some of the, some of this stuff in this new article and some of the original accusations, I think, because it's, people might want to, want to know about it. For one, and sorry, maybe I'll just briefly do that. So the, the original accuser was Leanne Tweeden, the conservative talk radio host. And if you haven't read this article, I think it may. I mean, it's probably worth knowing some of the information that Jane Mayer uncovered, you know, like it does seem as though Leanne Tweeden was dishonest about some stuff, but like, is there, how do we approach that?

0:25:43 Thomas: You know, how should someone who wants to be a feminist and wants to be, you know, a good ally, maybe how should we think about that? Like, what's the balance between, okay, I don't want to take apart a victim, you know, like, I don't want to be trying to take someone down or whatever, but like if there's these, you know, things that seem to be pretty documented that she made some false claims. How do you, how do you do that tightrope walk, I guess?

0:26:07 Jamie: So this is a really tough case because you're right. There are claims that she makes that this article points to that seem to be at the most charitable, not entirely consistent, right?

0:26:25 Jamie: Tempered by the fact that she's also his political adversary. So step one, I really want to still believe women when they make these sorts of accusations, even when I don't like their politics. And I think that's a good starting point. The second point is when people have looked into how survivors of sexual assault have informed the authorities about what's happened to them or their friends or family, the nature of trauma is such that your memory isn't always, always veridical. You are going to get things wrong. And so there's this sense that, you know, if someone doesn't remember things exactly correctly, they're definitionally lying, right? They're intending to mislead. That's not always true. And so one of the things that makes this case really worrying is that there does seem to be some things that are at least not consistent. And it's hard to get clear about what of that is the result of political motivations, because the author does bring up that in 2007, Sean Hannity wanted to go after Franken for this on purpose, to sort of derail his campaign for senator.

0:26:42 Thomas: Yeah,

0:27:42 Jamie: And what is just the sort of limitations of human memory that we should expect when there's these kinds of things that happen? In. So

0:27:52 Thomas: Let me know if you agree with this or feel free to disagree. This would have been a very valid article if it was only Leanne Tweeden. Like if that was the only accusation and that's what took down Al Franken, sure. Sure. Like, fine. Write an article of maybe looking into that and the fact that she's conservative talk radio host. She has ties to Sean Hannity, all this stuff. Fine. But like it's almost like they just choose to forget or pretend like the what was a seven or nine other, you know, accusers of inappropriate touching. Like they just pretend like that didn't exist. And to me, that was what was so shocking about this article is like, Like, how can you just dismiss all of the other accusers who are like, yeah, he did.

0:28:38 Thomas: Some of which, by the way, or many of which were like Democrat women who are like, I voted for this guy and I took a picture with him and it was gross, and he groped me like that. That to me was pretty inexcusable. What do you think about that? Like if it was just Leanne Tweeden, maybe they would have a point.

0:28:55 Jamie: I completely agree with you. I think what also stands out to me is even within the context of this Leanne Tweeden accusation, every single joke and skit that they're referencing is predicated on the idea that kissing women when they don't want to be kissed is hilarious instead of a violation of human rights. And what this really gets at is the idea, again, that men are the center of our stories and only their encounter of this is what matters. As

0:29:31 Thomas: Any tension with putting that in context, you know, of like USO tour and saying, yes, this is absolutely inappropriate. However, within the context of what he was doing in 2003 on this USO, USO Tour, that's a body kind of comedy thing. Like it's perhaps unfair to Al Franken to like single him out for that. And again, this is ignoring the other things, which we very much shouldn't do, but as a hypothetical, you know, like, is that the kind of thing where with a good enough apology that acknowledged that now that that's very wrong and he wouldn't do it again, would that have been something that you would have been able to forgive for Al Franken if you had to decide?

0:30:16 Jamie: As someone who's not one of Al Franken's victims, I don't think it's my place to say I would or would not forgive him. I think that's fundamentally between Al Franken and the people who have been on the receiving end of his unwanted attention.

0:30:29 Jamie: What I think this does get to, though, is the way so much of the way that men and women interact with each other functions on these sort of gendered scripts that we sort of unconsciously and uncritically endorse by our participation in them but never really think much about them. And I think that's what makes this Franken case such a lightning rod, because Franken is doing what he's, you know, come to understand throughout his, the entirety of his life experience, is how guys behave, how it is right for a guy to behave, right? The idea that these USO themselves sort of raunchy in this particular way is contingent upon there being a certain way of relating of men to women that is acceptable and normal.

0:31:23 Jamie: And now we're sort of starting to say like, actually, you know what? Women don't actually like this and women have never actually liked this. And it's time you start paying attention to this because the fact that women don't like it, spoiler, matters. And I think we're in this sort of liminal moment where the culture is shifting. So there is a sense in which, yes, it is unfair to single out Al Franken in saying that, oh, you are continuing to behave in ways that were acceptable 10 years ago, but are not. But that is also not holding men accountable for thinking meaningfully about how they behave. Much

0:32:04 Thomas: Fair enough. You know, I also realized I started another question. I think I didn't finish it. I want to know from your perspective, like, how did you deal with just the sheer frustration, because it was maddening to me, of having to deal with like and see, you know, Donald Trump going after Al Franken and just the shear hypocrisy and disgustingness of it? It. Like, I totally hear you that we want to hold Democrats to account for what they do. And I totally agree. But is it, how did we take it out of this frame when Donald Trump, the rapist in chief, you don't like the guy, the guy who's been accused by what, 14 women? I think it is. It may be more.

0:32:47 Thomas: It maybe more, you now, is hopping on to sound off about Al Franken. How do we not dive into that and be like, okay, well, you know what? If you're going to try to take advantage of this politically, it just feels powerless, I guess. How do you deal with that?

0:32:47 Jamie: Higher than that. I Understand that, right? And that's been something that a lot of Democrats or democratically inclined people have said, like, "Oh, I can't believe we're going after Al Franken for just a kiss when the president of the United States is talking about grabbing women by the, and endorsing people for Senate who has molested children." Like, we have to get some proportion here, and like, in the narrowest sense, like, yeah, absolutely, that's true, right? Like raping strangers in an alleyway is obviously worse than having to be be French kissed when you don't want to be. But one of the things that really stands out to me is that when we frame it that way, it has the real world result of suggesting that these milder forms of sexual assault are somehow okay, right?

0:33:55 Jamie: And that we should just be grateful it isn't worse. Like, oh, well, don't complain that he stuck his tongue down your throat. Like, it's not like he raped you, as though not being raped is a thing you should be grateful for instead of, like, baseline standards of decency.

0:34:12 Thomas: Yeah. And I also want to point out that, as you said, we do have a Democratic senator named Tina Smith, who I think doesn't get her due in this conversation. It's like people pretend she either doesn't exist or whatever, you know, it's like, no, she's in there. She's successful. She does a good job. Like, you Know, fortunately, it wasn't the case that this seat would go to a Republican because that's for me, I find that that ethical issue like a little bit harder just because of how how evil Republicans are that I did, in my opinion, like it's it's a tough, tough trolley problem of, you You know, on one hand, it's punishing very justifiably Al Franken for sexual misconduct versus the other railroad track is like, you know, reproductive rights for all of women in the country or something like that, you know, and I'm glad we weren't put in that situation.

0:35:09 Thomas: And I think that Tina Smith doesn't get her due for being a fantastic replacement for that seat. So is there anything else that you'd want to talk about on this article?

0:35:21 Jamie: Yeah, there's one thing that really stood out to me that we haven't addressed yet. And I think this is tied to all of it, and about who gets to count as the center of our stories and who gets the most it. Moral attention. When Al Franken is interviewed for this piece, he talks about people who have been Me Too'd.

0:35:41 Jamie: And this is perhaps one of the grossest lines in this entire piece to me, because he turns the Me Too movement when he says people who haven't been Me To'd, he makes the assailants themselves the victims, and he completely turns this entire movement upside down on his head, and then he goes on to say that he was on the losing side of this, and I'm just struck by how tone deaf this is and how inconsistent this is with a real, meaningful apology that Al Franken, again, sitting on between five to $10 million, considers himself the real victim and on the losing side of the Me Too movement, as opposed to all of the women who have been raped and sexually harassed out of their chosen professions. I

0:36:32 Thomas: Yeah, and I just, I also remembered something I was going to mention on the, on the ethics review, or whatever you call it, the ethics, ethics investigation question going forward. Like, again, just, I guess, planning for the future, when let's say maybe it was just one accusation and we don't have all the information we might want as a public to make this kind of decision, I mean, would it have made sense to say, okay, let's do the investigation. That way we can hear what Al Franken has to say. We can hear what any of his victims have to say, say and then at the result of that we can still say we don't care what the verdict of, like, the you know, subcommittee is, or whatever it is, we, we still want you to resign, or not, you know, like, would that have been a, like, perhaps a third way, like a middle kind of road between these two, uh, things? What do you think, right?

0:37:31 Jamie: Mean, I guess that's possible. I think the thing that I worry about is how much this would be used to set an example for future cases, and not just for well-positioned senators, but everyday regular people. And Leigh-Anne Tweedon, irrespective of her politics or her intentions, seems to be, at least at this point in her career, relatively well situated, right? In a way that's not going to have significant financial or career impacts for her. So if Al Franken was subjected to a Senate hearing and got a slap on the wrist and there was no big, big deal, Leanne Tweeden can go about her normal life pretty much indistinguishably from how she had done so before. I don't know that that's true in our more sort of general cases of sexual assault.

0:38:19 Jamie: And so I worry about saying that we should have done that instead, because I think it sort of ignores the very real way that the trials for things like sexual assault and rape have of re-traumatizing victims.

0:38:34 Thomas: Yeah, no, I definitely hear that, um, it's something on, on Opening Arguments we've talked about, the fact that like, up until a certain year, you know, you were allowed to bring into evidence all this, you know, what's her sexual history, what's her whatever? Like, it's only pretty recently that legally people are like, wait, we shouldn't be doing this, like, we should be putting the victim on trial. And I think it still happens.

I can't remember if that's a federal thing or if it's only certain states that have eliminated that, off the top of my head, I don't remember. But one way or the other, it is depressing, and depressingly recent, like how, how recently it was that they were like, you're not allowed to ask what she was wearing and what her sexual history is, you know, like in, in a trial.

It's, um, been such an interesting time to try to make sense of where, where the average person, you know, just, just the average, like, I don't know, citizen, who is seeing whether it's Al Franken, or whether it's another example that I kind of want to talk to you about on another episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson, to who do we put our trust in? You know, because oftentimes if we say, OK, if the police say he's guilty, he's guilty. If not, he's not, that's just not going to cut it for so much of this stuff.

You know, like, it's not the, what's going to convince a jury, you know, like isn't necessarily, in my opinion, you know, I think some conservatives will argue the other way, but like, in my opinion, that's not what we want the standard to be for, like, who should be in a prestigious position.

And I think the real problems come into where you get, guess, lower and lower in the reputational, I don't know, totem pole or whatever, when it gets to the point where it's somebody who has influence but is, is not important enough for, I don't know, BuzzFeed to do an investigation, like, you know, do some journalism on, like, it seems as though those people, for the most part, still have free reign.

0:40:24 Thomas: You know, it's almost like we've needed these journalistic investigations from different, you know, whether it's the York Times, whether it's BuzzFed, whoever it is, we've needed them to, like, bring to light some really bad behavior in a way that the police don't do, in a ways that the companies don't do. Do. And it's almost like if you're not at that level of notoriety or fame where someone would even bother to do that, then you just get off with it still, it seems to me.

0:40:50 Jamie: I think that's absolutely right. And I think that's one of the dangers of the way this New Yorker piece is framed. This idea that men are harmed by these accusations is just not borne out by any reality that I recognize. And we're so concerned that, you know, our men might be harmed, that we're losing the opportunity to address the way that they're actually causing harm. And we don't have a good framework for making sense of these sorts of cases and how to hold people accountable in ways that acknowledge that we're in this sort of liminal stage where the culture is shifting and people have not always been aware of these things, even though maybe they should have been. But it fundamentally centers the wrong person in the story, I think. I

0:41:30 Thomas: Yeah, Totally. So I guess in terms of this New Yorker piece, I mean, in terms of Al Franken, because this is probably at least the third episode I've done for, me, like, for my opinion, and feel free to give of your, your closing thoughts or remarks, I just think that this was an attempt to get out of jail free, you know, for like, this was, this article to me really struck me as like, here's a way that a bunch of people who were fans of Al Franken can feel better. And frankly, we just shouldn't. Like, I was a huge fan. I still have his book on my shelf because it was so good. I loved his book. I'm so sad that he turned out to be shitty. Um, but that's, that's how it is. We have to realize that there are people who do bad things and we have to accept it and we have to deal with it and not find ways like this, in my opinion, to pretend that they got railroaded or there wasn't justice.

0:42:38 Thomas: There were a lot of accusers who weren't conservative talk show hosts, who were actually supportive of him politically and had no reason to be like making up a story, who said that he did gross stuff, like groped them, kissed them, like stuff that, in my opinion, disqualifies you from being a representative for for Democrats, I think. So that's that's kind of my closing thoughts. Anything to close from from you?

0:43:08 Jamie: Completely agree. I think that gets it right. There's a line in the New York piece where Leanne Tweeden is characterized as hating Al Franken, as though that's her motivation for doing this. And it forces us to answer a couple of questions. I think most importantly, how should someone feel after they've related in this particular way? If Al Franken actually did this to her, should we reasonably expect Leanne Tweeden to not hate him?

0:43:41 Thomas: Hmm.

0:43:42 Jamie: I mean, that seems like not right to me. And I think that gets to the more important question, question, which is, how do we understand, how do we relate to potential sexual partners? I think our sexual ethics are really outdated. I think most of us have sort of accepted them kind of unquestionably through the implications of friends and TV shows and movies and haven't really critically thought about what it means to flirt or be be interested or the different dynamics involved, and that now we may actually have to do that if we want to get clear about the right and wrongness of these sorts of situations.

0:44:25 Thomas: I think that's a that's a great note to go out on. I think it also probably previews a lot of great episodes to come. So, yeah. Jamie, thank you so much for ... For jumping on. I ... This is a great conversation. I'm really looking forward to speaking with you more. Um ... There's so much. I've been reading articles and just thinking like, oh, this would make a great topic. So I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for coming on.

0:44:50 Jamie: Thank you so much, looking forward to the next time.

0:44:53 Thomas: All right. Well, that does it for us. I can say that thank you for listening. Please share the show if you found this interesting. And if you'd like to support the show, go to patreon.com/seriouspod. That's where you can make sure that it keeps happening. And with that said, we will see you whenever next we see you. I don't know. It's exciting. Exciting. I don't know. We're going to have to talk offline and figure out what we want to do next. But this was a lot of fun. We'll see everybody. We will see you on the podcast feed. Just refresh that thing and see when we're there.