What’s Behind the Centrists’ Resistance to the “Resistance Liberals”?

The point of stressing Epstein
isn’t merely the immediate harms to his victims (though these are not
trivial). Many who feared the worst about Trump pointed to the fact that he was
an abuser because, to them, it showed how he thought about power. This was the
correct inference. It is not incidental to Trump’s political project how many
of its key figures—including the president
himself, Elon
Musk, Secretary of Defense Pete
Hegseth, and Robert
F Kennedy Jr.—have had serious assault allegations made against them. It
informs how they behave and how they justify themselves. Of course, in the eyes
of “rationalist” commentators, that analysis becomes an emotional and unfocused
overreaction. 

I’m increasingly noticing how
little that is written about resistance liberals cites one of us
directly. This
“libs were right” piece by Anne Lultz Fernandez is infinitely better than
anything thus far surveyed, because it was written by a liberal who has held
these views all along—it discusses the gendered aspect of how fears were
dismissed and links this to the logic of abuse, and the fact that this is an
administration staffed by abusers. With some honorable exceptions like Jamelle
Bouie, such voices are absent from the most significant national publications.
Perhaps those publications should be more interested in them. 

Or, for that matter, perhaps the
press could engage with the ordinary voters they so casually dismiss with
unpleasant stereotypes. They were, after all, right. Those who feared the worst
from the start are a minority, to be sure, but not a vanishingly small one. As
far as I’m aware, this
feature by me is the first piece of reporting attempting to profile such
voters—Cassandras, as I called them. The resistance to listening to them seems
basically pathological.