Liberals of principle — a dying breed — once decried anonymous smear campaigns, often citing the infamous McCarthy melodrama of the 1950s in which various Hollywood figures were accused of undermining American society at the behest of the Soviet Union.
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” is the rhetorical question that echoes throughout history.
People have a legal right to due process in the justice system and a moral right to due process in the court of public opinion. Baseless smears, whispered in the dark, which are then circulated and repeated until they have saturated the public consciousness, are antithetical to the concept of due process. This was once taken at face value by liberals.
But, in fact, as anyone who witnessed the #MeToo and Russiagate purges of the last few years knows, liberals love smear campaigns when it’s their ideological comrades who are doing the smearing.
Now, modern-day McCarthyite of #MeToo fame Moira Donegan — once lauded as a feminist icon by the highest echelons of corporate media — is finally being made to pay the price for her transgressions.
Via the New York Post:
A writer put on the “Sh—ty Media Men” list settled his defamation suit with the catalogue’s creator Friday, new court papers show.
New Orleans-based writer Stephen Elliot was listed on the crowdsourced spreadsheet of sexual misconduct allegations against men working in the media.
Elliot sued list creator Moira Donegan for $1.5 million in Brooklyn federal court in 2019, accusing her of defaming him and seeking the names of other women who contributed to the list.
Elliot and Donegan settled the suit but terms were not released, according to a filing in the case.
The heinousness of the “Shitty Media Men Project” is difficult to exaggerate. It was, in Donegan’s own characterization, a “whisper network” that republished anonymous accusations as fact with absolutely no evidence required at all.
Related: National Media Ignores Gruesome Missouri University Murder Allegedly Committed by a Woman
In Donegan’s own words, via The Cut:
Fundamentally, a whisper network consists of private conversations, and the document that I created was meant to be private as well. It was active for only a few hours, during which it spread much further and much faster than I ever anticipated, and in the end, the once-private document was made public — first when its existence was revealed in a BuzzFeed article by Doree Shafrir, then when the document itself was posted on Reddit.
This is the stuff of the Cultural Revolution in China, in which the state encouraged children to snitch on their parents, and neighbors to sell each other out for the sake of eliminating undesirable cultural elements. In both instances — #MeToo and the Cultural Revolution — scores of innocent lives were effectively ruined for the sake of terrorizing the population to achieve greater social control.
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