There Is No Moral High Ground

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Graham Platner suspended his campaign yesterday. He will not be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine. Good. He’s a tremendous scumbag, and I believe the credible accusations of sexual assault against him.

I’ve spent the last week in New York doing what feels like every cable news show in existence talking about this, and I don’t want to relitigate the story itself. It’s been talked to death, plenty of it by me. What I want to talk about is wha t happens around stories like this — the thing that’s actually broken.

Because every time one of these scandals breaks, everybody sprints to claim the moral high ground. Republicans jumped in immediately: Democrats backed the guy with the Nazi tattoo, and now he’s a rapist. The Democratic Party is evil. And Democrats sprinted right back: Donald Trump has been credibly accused of abuse by dozens of women. He’s in the Epstein files. Back and forth, forever, like a tennis match nobody wins.

I played my part in it this week. I had a clip go extremely viral from Fox News where I pointed out that Max Miller — a sitting Republican member of Congress from Ohio — has been accused of beating his wife and throwing a pot of boiling water on her chest in front of their kids. Fox had no answer to that. None.

And look, I’ll say it plainly: I’m not going to be lectured by the Republican Party. That party is filled with these people, and they know it.

But here’s the thing I need to be honest about, and I need you to sit with it too: the moral high ground doesn’t exist. Neither party has it. Not on this.

Too many Democrats looked away from who Graham Platner was and what Graham Platner had done — because he was saying the right things on the economy, and because people thought he was going to win. That’s just true. It’s exactly the same reason too many Republicans look away from Trump, or Max Miller, or Ken Paxton, an absolute scumbag who’s their Senate candidate in Texas. They look away because they think these men can win. Let’s stop pretending otherwise. Winning became the ethic, and everything else became negotiable.

It’s wrong when they do it. It was wrong when we did it.

And it’s not like Platner is some one-off. I was one of the first people to call for Eric Swalwell to resign from Congress, and I believed he had to get out of the governor’s race the moment those accusations became clear. But these things should have been handled forever ago. There are predators inside the Democratic Party. Inside the Republican Party. In Congress, in lobbying firms, in consulting firms. They are everywhere. And they have all got to fucking go.

This is why I keep saying — especially about the Epstein files — that none of this is a partisan issue for me. I don’t want to score points. I want the creeps out of our government and out of our politics. Release all the files. Prosecute every single person who trafficked and abused kids — Democrat, Republican, or otherwise. If there are Democrats in those files, and we know there are, prosecute the shit out of them. I do not care what letter is next to their name.

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I don’t believe women because it’s politically advantageous. I believe women because it’s the right fucking thing to do. When women put their lives, their bodies, and their finances on the line to tell the truth about the men who abused them, I want to hear those stories. I want to weigh them seriously. And I want the abusers gone. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christine Blasey Ford telling her truth about Brett Kavanaugh, who sits on the Supreme Court today. It doesn’t matter if it’s the women who bravely came forward about Eric Swalwell, or the women who called out Graham Platner. All of these creeps have to go.

So here’s my ask — of everybody in politics, in the media, and honestly of myself:

Stop pretending there’s moral superiority to claim. There isn’t. Everybody, at some point, has failed to live up to our highest ideals on this. Every party, every institution, and plenty of us as individuals. The reductive back-and-forth — the your guy’s worse than my guy game, the shouting about Trump on cable news as if that settles anything — it’s a way of avoiding the tough conversation, not having it.

What we should be doing instead is simple, and hard. Have the tough conversations, including about our own side, especially about our own side. Create the conditions for women to come forward knowing they’ll be safe, protected, and believed — not weaponized in somebody’s news cycle and then discarded. And commit, actually commit, to exposing and removing the abusers inside our parties, our politics, and our government, whether their name is Graham Platner or Max Miller or anybody else.

Because at the end of the day, this isn’t a game. There are women all over this country who are too afraid to step forward, who don’t have platforms, who will never get justice against the men who hurt them — and who relive that trauma every single time we turn one of these stories into a partisan scoreboard.

I’m ashamed of the part I’ve played in that game. We’ve all got to do better. Let’s start now.