The Great Gaslighting of America

Your conservative friends and family are owed no victory lap.

I endorsed Graham Platner. My reasons for endorsing him stand. I believe we need more people who speak like him in our politics, and none who act like this. He needs to drop out of the race for the United States Senate, and he needs to do it today.

Jenny Racicot’s account, published yesterday by CNN and Politico, is credible. CNN reviewed a 2019 email she sent to her therapist about the relationship. They reviewed a 2023 text thread with a then-boyfriend who wrote, unprompted, “I know you were assaulted.” They confirmed she disclosed the assault to two friends contemporaneously — friends who referred to Platner as “the oysterman” long before his name meant anything to anyone. She took a photograph of him. She kept the records. She warned other women on a Facebook page in 2024. She spoke to the New York Times off-record in June about a man she described as “reckless and unsettling.” And then, when Lyndsey Fifield’s account came out — the physical marks, the wrist pulled from the taxi, the arm twisted behind her back — Racicot decided she could not, in conscience, remain silent while another woman stood alone.

This is what a credible accusation looks like. Contemporaneous disclosure. Documentary corroboration. Multiple witnesses. A pattern of behavior described independently by women who do not know each other. Reporting that took months of verification by professional journalists.

It is also exactly the pattern the American right has spent a decade teaching this country to disbelieve.

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Last night, a friend texted me to crow. He is a person who believes, sincerely and with the whole of his political identity, that most sexual abuse allegations against Republican men are Democratic operations. He believes E. Jean Carroll is a liar. He believes Christine Blasey Ford was coached. He believes the Access Hollywood tape was locker room talk and the twenty-six other women were opportunists. He has told me this.

And last night, when Jenny Racicot’s account went public, he texted me to say he had been right all along.

Right about what, exactly? Right that a Democrat can be a sexual predator? Yes. Obviously. Democrats are men, and some men are predators, and no political tribe has ever been exempt from that fact. But that is not what he meant. What he meant was: see, this proves your side is the same as ours. What he meant was: this vindicates a decade of denial. What he meant was: the pattern I have spent ten years insisting is a hoax when it appears against Republicans is real when it appears against a Democrat.

The scorekeeping is the operation. The scorekeeping has always been the operation.

The American right did not, upon reading Racicot’s account, reflect on the possibility that they had been wrong about Christine Blasey Ford. They did not reconsider Leigh Corfman. They did not revisit the twenty-seven women who accused Donald Trump — a man a jury found, as a matter of law, sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. They did not pause. They did not doubt. They did not perform the exercise of asking whether the epistemic standard they were suddenly applying to Platner — believe the therapist emails, believe the contemporaneous disclosures, believe the corroborating friends — was the same standard they had refused, for a decade, to apply to their own.

They celebrated. They crowed. They said the quiet part into their phones and posted it to their timelines. They did what my friend did.

This is the great gaslighting of America. Not the individual denials. Not the individual defenses. The whole epistemic machine — the decade-long project of teaching a country that believing women is a partisan operation, that credible allegations against Republican men are fake and credible allegations against Democratic men are real, that the very pattern of evidence which corroborates one accusation invalidates another. The lie was never about any particular accuser. The lie was about the structure of truth itself.

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In November or December of 2021, according to Racicot, Graham Platner entered her unlocked home after she had texted him not to come over. She was, in her words, “too exhausted.” He was, in her words, heavily intoxicated — a “blank stare” she says she still sees when she closes her eyes. She told him to stop. She batted his arms away when he grabbed her chest. She told him she was not on birth control. She told him repeatedly that she did not want to have sex. He did not stop. A sewing cabinet was knocked over in the struggle. A needle from the cabinet lodged in her leg.

The next morning, she says, he acted as if nothing had happened. When she confronted him, he said he did not remember.

Asked by CNN whether she considers what happened rape, she said: “By definition yes, absolutely yes.”

Asked why she is speaking now, she said: “There are a lot of men in this world relying on the silence of women to be where they are, and I don’t want to contribute to that.”

She agrees, for the record, with Platner’s politics. She has no incentive to want him gone from the race. She is a private citizen in a small Maine town who chose, at real cost to herself, to tell the truth about a man who is running for the United States Senate — a man whose supporters, including me, gave money to his campaign and endorsed him in public. She is doing what the moral imagination requires. She is refusing to disappear so that a political project can survive.

Platner denies it. His campaign calls the allegations “categorically false” and blames “out of state establishment operatives.” He has posted a video promising to “reflect on the best path forward.”

There is nothing to reflect on. The reporting is corroborated. The pattern is established. Lyndsey Fifield’s account of physical abuse, published by Lisa Lerer in the New York Times last month, described a man who grabbed her hard enough to leave marks, who pulled her out of a taxi by her wrist, who twisted her arm behind her back and locked her in a room. Fifield said Platner referred to his SS Totenkopf tattoo — a Nazi death’s-head insignia — as “my Totenkopf,” and knew what it meant. The Reddit posts, surfaced in October, contained victim-blaming language about sexual assault. The sexting reporting from May documented a pattern of behavior toward multiple women during his marriage. The accounts do not contradict each other. They accumulate.

Graham Platner is not a man who made one mistake. He is a man against whom a coherent pattern has been established, corroborated by contemporaneous records, on-record testimony, and documentary evidence. He must withdraw. If he will not withdraw, Maine Democrats must replace him at the ballot. If they cannot replace him, they must lose the seat rather than send this man to the United States Senate. The Susan Collins seat is not worth this. The Senate majority is not worth this. Nothing is worth this.

I will say the thing I do not think we say often enough in politics: some prices are too high. Some victories are not worth having. A party that would send an accused rapist to the Senate to keep a majority has traded its moral floor for a scoreboard.

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Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic Leader, called for Platner to withdraw. Kirsten Gillibrand, chair of the DSCC, issued a joint statement demanding withdrawal and announcing the committee will spend zero dollars if he remains the nominee. Ken Martin of the DNC called for withdrawal. Ro Khanna said: “Sexual assault or violence against women is a red line for me... These allegations are very serious and credible.” Elizabeth Warren said there was “too much at stake.” Ruben Gallego joined. Maine’s state party leadership joined. John Fetterman went on Fox News — of all places — to call on Bernie Sanders specifically to apologize for endorsing Platner. Even Our Revolution, the organization Sanders himself founded, called for withdrawal.

Jon Favreau, on Pod Save America, said Platner needs to drop out immediately. Hasan Piker, who had defended Platner through the earlier reporting, reversed on air: “That is curtains. That is the trifecta of a reliable allegation. I believe this allegation.”

Cheyenne Hunt, the attorney who founded Reckoning Action in May and who had endorsed Platner in October, withdrew her endorsement after Fifield’s account and is now providing pro bono legal counsel and press support to the women who came forward. She has said: “We have the responsibility to do what is right even when it’s politically inconvenient. Women cannot be an acceptable sacrifice for the next election.”

A political party heard a credible allegation against a man in a seat it desperately needs, and within twenty-four hours, its leadership — its full leadership, from the majority leader to the DSCC chair to the DNC chair to the progressive flank — said the same thing. He must go. The seat does not matter more than this. We will lose the majority before we will keep this man.

That is what a party with a moral floor looks like. That is what accountability infrastructure looks like when it works. Not perfectly. Not without lag. Bernie Sanders has still not made a statement on the rape allegation as of this writing, and his earlier defenses — the “nobody is perfect,” the “focus on working families,” the pattern of dismissing every prior revelation as a distraction from the material stakes — deserve their own reckoning. Fetterman is right to demand it. But even Sanders’ own organization moved. The infrastructure did what infrastructure is supposed to do.

Now hold that image in your mind. And now think about the Republican Party.

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In 2017, Roy Moore was accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls, including one who was fourteen at the time of the alleged assault. Nine women came forward. The reporting was extensive and documented. The Republican Party of Alabama endorsed him anyway. The President of the United States endorsed him. He lost by less than two points, and half the party spent the following years insisting the allegations were fabricated.

In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when she was fifteen. She had disclosed the assault to a therapist years before Kavanaugh’s nomination — the same evidentiary pattern that now, in the case of Jenny Racicot, is being cited by the very same right-wing media as proof of credibility. She was smeared. She was called a Democratic operative. Her therapist notes were dismissed. She was forced from her home by death threats. Kavanaugh sits on the Supreme Court today.

In 2023, a Manhattan jury found, as a matter of civil law, that Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. He was ordered to pay her $83.3 million in damages after a second jury found he defamed her by continuing to call her a liar. The Republican Party nominated him for President twice after this adjudication. He won. He is currently the President of the United States. He continues to call Carroll a liar. His supporters — my friend among them — continue to insist the whole thing was a hoax.

In 2025, the Senate confirmed Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense over credible sexual assault allegations, a pattern of misconduct in his prior workplaces, and a settlement he paid to a woman who accused him. I wrote about this at the time. The Republican senators who voted to confirm him did not do so because they believed him. They did so because the confirmation was the price of maintaining coalition. Sexual assault, in that vote, was priced into the deal.

That is the ledger. Trump. Kavanaugh. Moore. Hegseth. And around each of them, the same machine — the same denial, the same “she is lying,” the same “this is a political hit,” the same “the timing is suspicious,” the same “why did she wait so long,” the same accusation that the accuser is a Democratic operative, the same treatment of therapist notes and contemporaneous disclosure as evidence of nothing.

And now, on July 6, 2026, that same machine reads the account of Jenny Racicot — a woman who disclosed to her therapist in 2019, whose friends corroborate contemporaneously, whose then-boyfriend wrote “I know you were assaulted” without prompting, who has the photograph and the messages and the pattern — and treats her as credible.

She is credible. That is not the problem. The problem is that the machine that is calling her credible has spent a decade insisting the exact same evidentiary pattern is fake. The problem is that the standard is not a standard. It is a weapon. It is deployed against Democrats and withdrawn from Republicans and the difference is not evidence. The difference is jersey.

That is the gaslighting. And it is not accidental. It is a project. It has been a project for a decade, and the goal of the project has always been the same: to teach America that believing women is a partisan act. To make the epistemic ground itself into a battleground. To ensure that no matter what any woman ever says about any Republican man, half the country will already have been trained to disbelieve her.

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The great gaslighting works because it operates on the meta level. It does not, primarily, argue that any particular accuser is lying. It argues that the category of accusation is suspect. It teaches you to hear the phrase “sexual assault allegation” and immediately supply the modifiers: unverified, uncorroborated, timed-for-political-effect, coached, funded, coordinated. It trains the reflex. And then, when the reflex is trained, the specific denial does not have to be persuasive — the reflex does the work.

This is how E. Jean Carroll’s account, adjudicated by a jury and affirmed on appeal, still lives in half the country’s mind as a hoax. It is not that the evidence is contested. It is that the category is contaminated. The mind has been taught, over years, that this kind of claim is not to be trusted, and by the time the specific claim arrives with the specific evidence, the verdict has already been rendered.

The machinery has names. The professional operatives who spent 2018 destroying Christine Blasey Ford. The talk radio infrastructure that has been running the “false accusation” narrative since Anita Hill. The cable news anchors who greeted every Trump accuser with the same skepticism they have never applied to any Democrat. The billion-dollar apparatus of legal aggression, funded by the same donor network I wrote about last week — the Federalist Society pipeline, the Bradley and Olin and Scaife money that built not only the theory of the unitary executive but the epistemic infrastructure that protects the unitary executive from the consequences of his own behavior. The gaslighting and the constitutional revolution are the same project. Both depend on the same operation: teach America that the standards are not standards, that the norms are not norms, that everything is politics all the way down. If everything is politics, then Kavanaugh’s assault is politics, Trump’s rape is politics, Hegseth’s settlement is politics, and Platner’s alleged rape is also politics, because in the world the machinery has built, nothing is ever anything else.

But it is not politics all the way down. It is not. Jenny Racicot is not politics. Christine Blasey Ford was not politics. E. Jean Carroll was not politics. Leigh Corfman was not politics. Twenty-seven women who accused the President of the United States are not politics. They are people. They are witnesses to specific acts done by specific men in specific rooms, and the rooms were real and the acts were real and the harm was real and the pretense that it was all a political operation is the greatest lie the American right has ever asked the country to swallow.

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Graham Platner must withdraw. If he will not withdraw, he must be replaced. If he cannot be replaced, Maine Democrats must accept the loss of the seat rather than send him to Washington. This is not complicated. This is the moral floor.

Bernie Sanders needs to make a statement. Not a hedge. Not a “nobody is perfect” deflection. Not a pivot to housing policy. A statement. He endorsed this man. He defended this man through the Reddit posts and the Nazi tattoo and the sexting revelations. He was wrong. He needs to say so. John Fetterman is right to demand it. Silence is not neutrality. Silence is a choice, and the choice tells us what he thinks the pattern is worth.

The Democratic Party needs to keep doing what it is doing. It needs to understand that what it is doing right now — the unanimity, the speed, the willingness to lose the seat before it will send this man to the Senate — is not a weakness. It is the source of every remaining claim it has to moral authority. The instinct to defend the tribe at the expense of the truth is the instinct that has destroyed the other party. Do not become them. Do not.

Cheyenne Hunt and Reckoning Action need our support. What they built — the pro bono legal infrastructure, the press navigation, the safe harbor for women who come forward, the network that connected Racicot to a place where her account could be verified and published — is the counter-machinery. It is what accountability looks like when it is actually built rather than performed. If you have money, give it. If you have platform, use it. If you know women who have been silent because they had nowhere to go, tell them there is now, at last, a place.

And the rest of us — the ones who endorsed him, the ones who gave money, the ones who spent an evening arguing with our friends that his politics were worth defending — we owe an apology. Not to Platner. To Jenny Racicot. To Lyndsey Fifield. To every woman we told, in effect and by implication, that the material stakes of this election were higher than her account.

I endorsed Graham Platner. I was not wrong about what the country needs from its candidates. I was wrong about him. I am sorry for that. And to the women he harmed, and to the readers I asked to trust my judgment about him: I owe you better than I gave you.

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The party that is doing the right thing this week is capable of learning the wrong lesson from it. The reason Graham Platner was the nominee is that the Democratic establishment tried to hand-pick Janet Mills. Mills is seventy-eight years old. She is the governor of Maine, competent by the standards of institutional competence, and completely uninteresting to voters who understand that the country is not in a moment that rewards institutional competence. When Mills declined and Platner ran, he won the primary with seventy-two percent. One hundred and fifty thousand Maine Democrats did not vote for him because they had been fooled about his character. They voted for him because he was not Janet Mills. They voted for him because he was an oysterman and a Marine veteran and someone who did not talk like a man who had spent forty years in state government. They voted for change. They voted for it so overwhelmingly that the margin itself is a message, and the message is one the establishment has, so far, refused to hear.

The DSCC and the Maine Democratic Party must not read the Platner collapse as evidence that they should have gotten Mills across the line. They must not respond to this disaster by engineering another geriatric institutionalist into the slot. The names being floated — Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Nirav Shah, Jordan Wood — are not, on their faces, all bad. Some of them are, in fact, exactly the kind of candidates who might understand what those one hundred and fifty thousand voters were saying. But the temptation, in the wake of a scandal of this magnitude, will be to reach for the safest and most establishment-credentialed option available. That instinct must be resisted.

The voters were not wrong about the appetite for change. They were wrong about the man. Those are different mistakes, and the correction is not the same. The correction is not to override the appetite. The correction is to find a candidate who satisfies it without being a monster. That is not an impossible standard. There are candidates, in Maine and elsewhere, who represent a break from the institutional past without also representing a break from the moral floor. The party’s job is to find them. The party’s job is not to use this moment as an excuse to reassert the establishment’s preferred candidate against the demonstrated preference of its own primary electorate.

To the operatives and the consultants and the committee chairs who are, at this hour, on group texts trying to figure out what to do: do not learn the wrong lesson. Do not let the establishment’s relief at being able to purge Platner become the establishment’s excuse to purge the impulse that produced him. That impulse — the demand for candidates who are not sixty-year veterans of the process, who did not come up through the consultant class, who talk like Americans and not like memoranda — that impulse is right. The country is telling you it is right. The seventy-two percent primary margin was telling you it was right. What you got wrong was the man, not the mandate. Correct the man. Do not correct the mandate.

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The thing my friend does not understand — the thing the machinery of doubt has taught him not to see — is that the asymmetry between what happened yesterday in the Democratic Party and what happens whenever a Republican is accused is itself the argument.

He thinks Platner proves the parties are the same. He thinks the fact that a Democrat can be a monster proves the moral equivalence. But that is not what it proves. Both parties contain monsters, because both parties contain men, and men, given enough power and enough darkness, produce monsters. That is not the question.

The question is what happens next. And what happens next is where the parties stop being the same.

One party heard the allegation and, within twenty-four hours, from the majority leader on down, said: he must go, we will lose the seat before we will keep him, this is the line. The other party has, for a decade, heard identical allegations against its own men and responded by circling the wagons, attacking the accusers, elevating the accused to the Supreme Court, to the Cabinet, to the Presidency itself.

That is the difference between a party that has a floor and a party that has replaced the floor with a scoreboard. And no amount of gloating, no amount of see, your side does it too, no amount of texting me at eleven at night to say you were right all along, will make that difference disappear.

I do not know what will become of this republic. I do not know if the machinery of doubt can be dismantled, if the ledger can ever be settled, if the country can ever again share a common ground of fact about who did what to whom. I do not know if Christine Blasey Ford will ever be believed by the people who called her a liar, or if E. Jean Carroll will ever be understood by the half of America that still calls her one.

But I know what I saw yesterday. I saw a party do the right thing. Fast. Without hedging. Without waiting to see how the polls broke. And I saw the other party — the party of my friend, the party of the text message at eleven at night — celebrate the fact that the other side had, at last, produced a monster of its own. As if their monsters were a defense. As if their monsters were an argument. As if their monsters were anything other than the reason the ledger will not close.

The great gaslighting of America is that they told us for ten years that believing women was a partisan project. That the pattern of evidence was fake. That the accusers were paid. That the timing was suspicious. That the therapy notes were a plant.

And now, on the day a woman came forward with therapy notes from 2019, contemporaneous disclosures to friends, a text from a former boyfriend saying I know you were assaulted, and the willingness to speak on the record at real personal cost — now, on that day, they are telling us they always believed the pattern.

They did not.

We know they did not.

And what my friend calls vindication is the last, cruelest expression of the operation itself — the belief that the truth is only true when it wounds the other side.

The truth is true. It was true when Christine Blasey Ford spoke it. It was true when E. Jean Carroll spoke it. It is true when Jenny Racicot speaks it. And the difference between the parties, in this hour, is that one of them is willing to hear it whoever it wounds — and the other, still, will only hear it when the wound serves the scoreboard.

That is the great gaslighting of America. And it has to end.

Graham Platner must withdraw. And the men who spent a decade teaching this country to disbelieve women must, at long last, be seen for what they were doing all along.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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