It's obvious that whether a man is a a self-entitled sex pest or not has pretty much nothing to do with his professed political orientation, but the way the political left and the political right deal with accusations of sexual misconduct differ wildly.
The most obvious high profile examples to chose from are the different fates of the liberal film producer Harvey Weinstein who is being shunned and ostracised by the liberal-left after the torrent of allegations about his appalling behaviour towards women, and Donald Trump who was actually elected President with the support of right-wingers and even evangelical Christians, despite numerous allegations of sexual misconduct against him and an actual recording of him bragging about how he feels entitled to grope and molest women.
The contrast between the American liberal-left's rejection of Weinstein and the conservative right's continued embrace of Trump, even after his taped confession became public, couldn't be starker.
In Britain a very similar scenario has played out with two journalists who have been outed as creepy sex pests, one from the left and one from the right.
Admittedly Sam Kriss and Rupert Myers are hardly household names, but the very different reactions to their behaviour are very telling indeed.
Both men have been accused of sexual misconduct, both issued cringeworthy apologies for their completely inappropriate behaviour, and both have been dropped by at least one of their employers (Kriss was dropped by Vice and Myers by GQ magazine).
There is very little sympathy for Sam Kriss from the left, with several high profile members of the trendy lefty set condemning his behaviour and expressing solidarity with the victim of his inappropriate sexual conduct, but the reaction on the right towards Rupert Myers has been an absolutely bizarre propaganda effort to reinvent Myers as a lefty!
Make no mistake about it, Rupert Myers is a right-winger. Not only has he written for numerous intensely right-wing publications (Daily Mail, Telegraph, Spectator), he's also served as the Deputy Chairman of the Bermondsey & Old Southwark Conservative Association and written numerous blog posts for the Tory party website Conservative Home.
Yet now that he's been outed as a creepy sex pest the Internet is suddenly crawling with right-wingers attempting to pretend that Myers is some kind of extreme-left Corbynist social justice warrior!
Instead of accepting that the problem of sexual harassment isn't actually a left/right issue at all, many on the political right are determined to weaponise the issue as an attack on the political left, even if that means redefining an actual Tory party activist as some kind of hard-left militant in order to spew their partisan venom.
I'm not aware of anyone at all on the left who has tried to suddenly disown Sam Kriss and pretend that he was always some kind of raving hard-right Ukipper because his creepy behaviour has been made public, but a lot of people on the right have no such willingness to accept the fact that one of theirs is a sex pest too.
Just look at these ridiculous examples of right-wing revisionists (James Delingpole and Breitbart) suddenly trying to pretend that the active Tory party member Rupert Myers was on the far-left of the political spectrum just because he's been publicly accused of being a sex pest.
But to get an idea of how many right-wingers are actively spreading the ludicrous lie that Rupert Myers is some kind of spokesperson for the far-left, take a look at the comments beneath the execrable Spiked article about the pair entitled "The Twittermob just went from irritating to dangerous" by the victim-blaming Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill. Here's a selection:
So according to the kind of furious right-wing blowhard male who hangs about in Spiked comments threads, we're all supposed to believe that an active member of the Tory party and former Daily Mail columnist is actually a "puritainical left-wing", "social justice warrior", "middle-class lefty", "Corbynist blowhard" just because he got caught out being a sex pest!
I would never use the sexual misconduct of a creep like Myers to attack the political right because they give us plenty of real ammunition with stuff like their obsession with socially and economically ruinous austerity dogma, their systematic abuse of disabled people, and their zeal for flogging off public assets to their mega-rich mates.
However the reality-reversing propaganda that right-wingers are spewing all over the Internet about how Tory-boy Myers is some kind of extreme-left Corbynist just because he got outed as a creepy sex pest illustrates the frankly delusional lengths these right-wing revisionists will go to in order to maintain their childishly absolutist fantasy that absolutely everything nasty is by definition left-wing, even if the nasty thing is clearly, obviously and demonstrably one of their own.
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