Ten Years Since Roger Ailes Resigned From Fox News, I Think It's Past Time We Discussed Certain Things

 

Note: I know that writing this article and some of the subjects I have to discuss will end up getting me excoriated by quite a number of commenters and writers on this site. There was a time when that would have bothered me immensely. I'm long past it now.

I'm fully aware that the unfortunate fact I'm a white, cis male can only bring out the worst parts by trying having this conversation. But  I've seen female writers, African-American and members of the LGBTQ+ community try to have ones on similar problematic subjects and they are almost met with the same kind of verbal castigation from the virtual mobs. Combined with my own experiences, particularly in recent months, I realize that there are always going to be people who care more about being, to use an appropriate phrase for this article, the loudest voice in the room. That this seems to be their only goal has to be considered part of the problem our society is facing today.

Yet these conversations must be had, nevertheless. So for those of you who don't want to have them, considering this a 'trigger warning'. Go and find people who will completely agree with you no matter what. I've never been that kind of writer before and I'm not going to start now.

Okay. Here goes nothing.

 

I remember in the late spring and summer of 2016 how overjoyed so many people among the liberal elite were when Roger Ailes was forced to resign from Fox News. The fact that the reason was because he was guilty of a pattern of sexual harassment over a period of decades almost seemed incidental to so many of these 'good liberal people'. To them Ailes was the monster who had spent the last twenty years building up a conversative news network that had solely been responsible for dividing the nation, destroying the liberal consensus and brainwashing millions of otherwise intelligent Americans to vote Republican. That was the crime that the Stephen Colbert's and Rachel Maddow's of the world wanted him charged with. That he had sexually  abused and harassed countless women, including commentators such as Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly, didn't in my recollection really trouble them that much then – or as I'll write in a bit, perhaps even now.  Considering what has followed in the last decade I always got the feeling that all of the victims of Roger Ailes were never truly considered in the same strokes as so many of the women who have been victims before. I'm gotten the feeling both then and now that for all their so-called liberal principles, they truly believed that those women got what they deserved not only when they signed up for Fox News but when they became conservatives in the first place.

I remember there was this feeling of joy that was combined with the certainty of Donald Trump's electoral defeat in November, that the liberals were witnessing the death knell of all things conservative. Hilary Clinton would become President (though to be clear the left wasn't necessarily happy about that as much as Republicans losing) and then all that would remain would be to mop up the wreckage the right had done to the country.

Needless to say that didn't happen. Fox News still remains as prominent as it was, even if no longer controls the narrative of the right as it once did. Hilary's victory in 2016 did not come and Trump has never left the political scene since. In the aftermath of that upset there has been much action among the left for a 'reckoning' in many parts of our society, including sexual harassment – though to be clear they consider the #MeToo and Times Up movement completely separate from anything that happened involving Fox News.

But in the ten years since Ailes resigned – and not long after passed away –  from an objective level its very difficult for the impartial observer to see what has changed in our society in regard to this particular subject. Harvey Weinstein has gone to prison, as have a few prominent industry figures. Some executives have been forced to resign their position but they have not faced justice in the traditional sense. No real legislation has been passed at a national or a state level that has done anything to help the women who have been victims of sexual assault or abuse at any level. (Let's leave everything involving Epstein aside for the moment.)

What has seemed to happen forms a familiar pattern:

After a prominent individual dies, women who worked for him start coming forward with stories of years, if not decades, of abuse.

We learn how the power structure protected all of these powerful men from the criminal justice system. Many of these individuals who are still alive express remorse.

The event receives prominent media coverage for a while.

Nothing really changes for anybody.

I've seen this pattern play out countless times in the last few years. It's referred to usually as a 'reckoning' with the 'toxic culture of our society'.  

'Reckoning' is one of those words that the left has put into use more and more about every part of America and the rest of the world that doesn't fit today's norms of race, gender or sexual preference. Usually it's phrased as how "America has to come to terms with its complicated history." That's the polite version. Most of the time its used as a bludgeon to argue how horrible our society has been, how horrible its always been, and how it is incapable of changing.

This in itself is nothing new, even among scholars. As I keep writing it goes back practically to the days of the abolitionist movement.  It's not the same thing with so many of the powerful men who have gotten away with horrible crimes against the powerless for years.

Except it is.

Going back to the days of the Roman Empire and in every culture across the globe, the powerful and wealthy have always been able to get away with horrible and unthinkable crimes against the populace. For the record, this is not a sin that is regulate to America or the West; it can be found in the tribes of Meso-American society, most of the Asian cultures, societies in African and the Middle East. The powerful will always be surrounded by the rich and they will always allow them to get away with unthinkable crimes, many of them involving sexual deviancy at a horrific level. The fact that America is no different is upsetting but not surprising.

There are laws place, of course, but as I've written before the rich and powerful can find ways to overcome them and always have. That's one of the perks of being rich and powerful. The wealthy and powerful have always been able to have an easier time evading the criminal justice system. If you truly believe otherwise, you've been watching to many Law & Order reruns.

And the justice system has always been tilted in favor of the defendant. "Innocent until proven guilty' has been one of the hallmarks of the American justice system. I don't pretend it works perfectly by any means but it is far better than in say, Russia, China, the Middle East or any of the other dictatorships that populate the world.

Again yes the system is weighed against the poor and yes, that does include people of color. But let's not kid ourselves that it's always been about the poor. If you disagree with my statement, let me remind you of Bill Cosby. His wealth and position protected him, just like it did so many other wealthy and prominent white people.  That's not news either, it's one of the perks.

I don't pretend to understand anything that victims of sexual assault or abuse go through. I know that it must be dehumanizing and horrible. I truly emphasize with them and I grieve with them. But the statute of limitations is in place for a reason. The only crime that isn't subject to it is murder. So again the issue is with the laws.

Fine they were written by white men and yes they did much to protect themselves. Let's engage in some magical thinking. You really think if African-Americans or women or LGBTQ+ people had been present when it came to writing laws, they wouldn't have created loopholes to protect their genders or races from prosecution? They can do that if they want, if they ran for public office and became part of the process then makes laws better for people. But I don't expect this logic to apply to the activists who believe that it is more important to draw attention to an outrage then do the work makes sure they don't happen again.

And for the record I'm not convinced the current branch of leaders have realized that they aren't exactly helping. As I speak states like California are changing the name of the state holiday that honored Caesar Chavez based on the allegations that have been made against him. Setting aside everything else, how does that do anything to actually help the women who've spent years as victims? You've changed the name of a holiday that people like me had no idea existed. It's like thinking that making Juneteenth a federal holiday is going to make up for two hundreds years of slavery or renaming Columbus day Indigenous People's Day. Its cosmetic, its symbolic and in the case of the victims of Chavez, I think its insulting. Does Gavin Newsom truly believe by doing this it comes close to atoning for all the decades of trauma these victims say they've gone through?

And that actually brings me back to Gretchen Carlson and so many people at Fox News. After years of harassment they sued the network and Ailes and they received financial compensation and a public apology. They went through the law and they got the only recourse they could.

Yet ten years later none of the left-leaning websites or writers ever talk about Carlson or Kelly in the same breath that they do of Ashley Judd or Rose McGowan and all the victims of Harvey Weinstein. Nor do we hear them mentioned in all the names of all the victims of sexual harassment that have come out of the woodwork in the decade with admiration or even respect.

And we all know why. These women, then and now, are very much still conservative and Republicans. And I'm relatively certain all that 'blaming the victim' and 'believe women' that have been trundled about by all of those good liberal people for the last decade has never applied to any of the women who worked at Fox News during the 20 years Ailes was in charge. Like everything else, they are Republicans first and everything else second, even if one of those things is a victim of repeated sexual harassment.

To be clear I don't watch Fox News any more then I watch MSNBC or CNN or any of the many other news outlets these days. But I've read my share of articles abusing so many of these former journalists, particularly Kelly when she had her brief tenure at NBC a few years back. They were infuriated that NBC would dare let anyone who'd worked for Fox News be part of the mainstream media.

To be clear just a few years earlier film and TV had done there own retelling of the story with the limited series The Loudest Voice on Showtime and Bombshell in theaters. Both were critically acclaimed and the latter earned three Oscar nominations for Charlize Theron as Kelly. Yet even at the time I could really sense the left leaning Hollywood was reluctant to tell these stories, much less recognize them. Yes they fit the narrative Hollywood wanted to tell as part of speaking truth to power but it went against their sensibilities to see Kelly and Carlson as victims in the traditional sense.

More to the point all the defense that has been raised every time a woman who is the victim of a powerful man and why they might not come forward has never seemed to apply the same way to any of the countless victims of Ailes over his tenure as Fox News. I can just hear the conversations in Hollywood. "What did they expect when they chose to work for men like Murdoch and Ailes?" they no doubt said to themselves. "They had to know what they were signing up for when they became conservative."

And this certainly applied to Kelly when she ended up on at NBC. She was let go a few months after her tenure started. By this point I'm willing to bet none of the same people who talk about the outrages inflicted by so many powerful men over the decades are trying to find all of the women that Ailes supposedly harassed and assaulted over his tenure.

And for the record there is evidence he may have lost his job at NBC in the early 1990s because he was guilty of the same practices there: The Loudest Voice essentially confirms it. But ten years after his death no effort has been made to find those victims either. You'd think given how much the left loves to dance on the graves of those they hate they'd be turning over every rock to do so, particularly considering everything involving the makeup of the current administration.

Instead the loudest voices go out of their way to talk about a 'reckoning' for our society. By which they mean to relitigate the bad behavior of historical men decades after it is too late to do anything about it except the endless deconstruction among our society that the left brings. And I've seen this pattern play out for thirty years as well because Roger Ailes helped perfect it on Fox News. His anchors use it as another cudgel to argue that the left, which he has made clear is the entire Democratic Party, hates America and wants to complete tear it down. They will then go out of their way to imply that the only way to save America is to vote Republican.

The liberal establishment, the Colbert's and Jon Stewart's and everyone else, would always mock Fox News as beneath the intelligence of their viewers, while ignoring the effectiveness of it as a political technique. They clearly didn't learn their lesson after Ailes's death, if anything they've doubled down on being everything he claimed they were. For all the left's talk of 'reckoning' in the decade since Ailes's passing, they still refuse to reckon with their own blind spot when it came to the machine he built. Instead they increasingly vilify all those who are part of that world – including the women that were the victims of the same horrific behavior during his life. Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson are always going to be Republicans first and anything else second. That the left can't see this double standard, arguably the most horrific of any of the ones they've put up over their careers, is perhaps the biggest reason to reject their view of their world as much as the conservative one.