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A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
On Friday, conservatives addressed the explosive allegations surrounding Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl and dating girls as young as 16. The editors of National Review called for Moore to withdraw from the race:
The statute of limitations on Moore’s alleged sexual misconduct long ago expired, but there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on standards. Roy Moore is not a worthy standard-bearer for the Republican party, and his vulnerabilities are now endangering what should be a completely safe Senate seat.
We, nonetheless, have little doubt that he will soldier on, and he might well still win in December. The better option would be to spare his party the exertions of defending him against these latest allegations (some of his colleagues have already disgraced themselves with absurd rationalizations), and back a new write-in candidate for the seat. That this would be the reasonable thing to do is one reason we assume Moore will do the opposite.
In another post at National Review, David French condemned evangelicals willing to overlook Roy Moore and Donald Trump’s personal conduct. “They said that moral character matters in politicians,” he wrote. “They said they were building a movement based around ideas and principles, not power and party. They said those things right up until the moment when holding firm to their convictions risked handing Hillary Clinton the presidency, and at that point the dam broke. Now, they’re willing to sell out for a lousy Alabama Senate seat.”
At RedState, Jon Street argued that Moore’s defenders are worse than those who have enabled Bill Clinton. “On the one hand, Hillary Clinton and her family’s supporters, to the best of my knowledge, have never straight up said that they would vote for a man known to have committed sexual assault,” he wrote. “They’ve come close. But denying allegations against a politician you support and voicing your support for them no matter the legitimacy of such claims are two very different scenarios. Frankly, what some GOP officials have said about their unwavering support for Moore is, in my opinion, far more disturbing than any Clinton supporter denying accusers’ claims while stating their loyalty to the former president.”
The RedState writer known as streiff wrote that Moore is still worth supporting:
There is really no reason that we are obliged to believe this story. Indeed, there are lots of reasons why we should look askance at it. It dates from 1979. Roy Moore has been on the ballot in Alabama several times and involved in all manner of controversies and the fact that it hasn’t come out before now leads me to say that a person’s word today is simply not good enough.
Anyone who tries to tie this to Bill Clinton is simply being disingenuous. None of Clinton’s accusers waited 40 years. None of the cases against Clinton were ambiguous. We actually had the DNA sample for crying out loud. Clinton actually paid a cash settlement to Paula Jones and was disbarred. If there is a takeaway from Bill Clinton’s escapades here it is that it is that we were told, mainly by the same people on their high horse over Roy Moore, that it is morally illegitimate to criticize a politician over his private morality.
The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson wrote that he could understand the reluctance of Moore’s supporters to abandon him, arguing that they’re right to believe he’s the only candidate willing to stand up for their values:
Y’all, I think the facts of the case as presented by the Washington Post are pretty damning. If I were a voter in Alabama, I would probably have to sit it out. But there are a lot of voters who are really damn tired of the culture war and they just want to be left alone. But the left won’t leave them alone. They’re coming for their churches’ tax exempt status. They are coming to force them to either get on board the secular progressive agenda or go into hiding. They are coming for their kids and their guns as well.
So now you are telling them they are really awful, bad people if they stick with Roy Moore instead of allowing into office a man who will side with the people who are out to get them?
The Daily Caller’s David Benkof called conspiracy theories alleging the Washington Post fabricated the Moore story implausible. “If the Post story were fabricated by liberal media schemers to frame Moore and undermine his candidacy, the number of people implicated would be immense,” he wrote. “The newspaper would have to trust each of them never to expose the sham, even though doing so would garner immense favorable publicity.”
The Gateway Pundit ran a post about a tweet claiming that a woman had been offered $1,000 to accuse Moore. “A Navy veteran who served 22 years for his country and then served in the Secret Service claims a family friend who lives in Alabama told his wife that a Washington Post reporter “named Beth” approached her and offered her THOUSANDS to accuse Judge Roy Moore of inappropriate sexual advances!” the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft wrote. “Of course this is HUGE news if true.” An update at the bottom of the page says that the Gateway Pundit has been unable to confirm the claim. The Gateway Pundit also ran a post about one accuser’s work as a sign language interpreter for Hillary Clinton, which had been pointed out on Twitter by Newsmax columnist James Hirsen. Fox News also published a post about the accuser.
Breitbart’s Steve Bannon told Bloomberg reporter Joshua Green in an interview that the allegations are part of a concerted effort to “destroy a man’s life.” “This is nothing less than the politics of personal destruction,” he said. “And they need to destroy him by any means necessary.”
At the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro wrote a post examining the culture of silence around sexual abuse. “We hide behind various rationales,” he wrote. “Sometimes we tell ourselves that particular allegations aren’t credible — even though if someone made the exact same allegations about opponents of our agenda, we’d rush to the barricades demanding justice. Sometimes we go silent about those on our side of the aisle — after all, the other side is even worse! Sometimes we get wishy-washy about our standards — was it really so bad? Whatever our rationale, it stinks. It stinks to high heaven. It’s immoral, unbiblical, indecent.”
The Blaze’s Leon Wolf wrote about his changing perspective on believing female accusers:
I guess to some extent you could say that I’ve been primed to skepticism when it comes to stories involving sexual assault. Certainly, I have believed, it does not occur as often as the modern-day feminists would have you believe.
Then the #MeToo movement happened this year. Sure, some of the people I saw participating were trying to catch on to the fad and talked about #MeToo experiences that could best be described as micro-aggressions. But then I put aside my sarcastic smile for a minute and noticed something else.
I noticed a lot of very credible women, who had no reason to lie (and weren’t even naming their accusers or hoping to get anything in a lawsuit) who told horrible, believable stories of behavior they had quietly endured over the years. I saw close family members of mine — women who I’ve known closely for literally my entire life — telling stories I had never before heard. Many times these stories were decades old. Many times they came with shameful apologies that sounded the same refrain: I didn’t speak because I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I did not think I would be believed. I thought I was alone and that I was the only one I knew who had ever experienced something like this.
“[W]e ought to be willing to at least provisionally accept that women who come forward with allegations of sexual assault are telling the truth, especially where there is not an obvious factual reason to disbelieve them,” he concluded.
