Ann Althouse: Dems Suppressed Weinstein Story To Protect Bill and Then Hillary Clinton But Are Not Doing So Now Because Hillary Lost

The 1990s began with a heightening of interest in sexual harassment as liberals tried to defeat the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. The refrain in the fall of 1991 was "You just don't get it," as Democrats lambasted anyone who resisted taking sexual harassment in the workplace seriously. But in 1998, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Democrats reversed the message. In the biggest sellout of feminism I've seen in my lifetime, sexual harassment turned into just sex, and those who wanted to take it seriously were derided as prigs.

Now, I'm reading the NYT article "Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Others Say Weinstein Harassed Them/'This way of treating women ends now,' Ms. Paltrow said as she and other actresses accused the producer of casting-couch abuses," and I'm wondering why only now? Why not earlier? What stood in your way?

My hypothesis is that liberals — including nearly everyone in the entertainment business — suppressed concern about sexual harassment to help Bill Clinton. Giving him cover gave cover to other powerful men, and the cause of women's equality in the workplace was set back 20 years. . .

I just want to put this hypothesis out there and encourage people to correlate allegations about Weinstein with the great knowing-and-forgetting process that happened in the 1990s — 1991 and 1998 were the key dates — as the issue of sexual harassment was crushed into whatever shape worked in the interest of Democratic Party power.

Are these allegations coming out now because Hillary Clinton lost the election and the time for covering for Bill Clinton is over at long last?

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