A PROCLAMATION

Every day, women, men, and children across America suffer the pain and trauma of sexual assault. From verbal harassment and intimidation to molestation and rape, this crime occurs far too frequently, goes unreported far too often, and leaves long-lasting physical and emotional scars. During National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, we recommit ourselves not only to lifting the veil of secrecy and shame surrounding sexual violence, but also to raising awareness, expanding support for victims, and strengthening our response.

Sexual violence is an affront to our national conscience, one which we cannot ignore. It disproportionately affects women — an estimated one in six American women will experience an attempted or completed rape at some point in her life. Too many men and boys are also affected.

These facts are deeply troubling, and yet, sexual violence affects Americans of all ages, backgrounds, and circumstances. Alarming rates of sexual violence occur among young women attending college, and frequently, alcohol or drugs are used to incapacitate the victim. Among people with disabilities, isolation may lead to repeated assaults and an inability to seek and locate help. Native American women are more than twice as likely to be sexually assaulted compared with the general population. As a Nation, we share the responsibility for protecting each other from sexual assault, supporting victims when it does occur, and bringing perpetrators to justice.

At the Federal, State, local, and tribal level, we must work to provide necessary resources to victims of every circumstance, including medical attention, mental health services, relocation and housing assistance, and advocacy during legal proceedings. Under Vice President Biden’s leadership, the 2005 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act included the Sexual Assault Services Program, the first-ever funding stream dedicated solely to providing direct services to victims of sexual assault. To further combat sexual violence, my 2011 Budget doubles funding for this program. Through the Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control, we are funding prevention and awareness campaigns as well as grants for campus services to address sexual assault on college campuses. The Justice Department has also increased funding and resources to combat violence against Native American women.

As we continue to confront this crime, let us reaffirm this month our dedication to take action in our communities and stop abuse before it starts. Together, we can increase awareness about sexual violence, decrease its frequency, punish offenders, help victims, and heal lives.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2010 as National Sexual Assault Awareness Month. I urge all Americans to reach out to victims, learn more about this crime, and speak out against it.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of April, in the year of our Lord two thousand ten, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-fourth.

BARACK OBAMA

Trump: I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.

Unknown: Whoa.

Trump: I did try and fuck her. She was married.

Unknown: That’s huge news.

Trump: No, no, Nancy. No, this was [unintelligible] — and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping.

She wanted to get some furniture. I said, “I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.” I took her out furniture —

I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.

Billy Bush: Sheesh, your girl’s hot as shit. In the purple.

Trump: Whoa! Whoa!

Bush: Yes! The Donald has scored. Whoa, my man!

[Crosstalk]

Trump: Look at you, you are a pussy.

[Crosstalk]

Trump: All right, you and I will walk out.

[Silence]

Trump: Maybe it’s a different one.

Bush: It better not be the publicist. No, it’s, it’s her, it’s —

Trump: Yeah, that’s her. With the gold. I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.

Bush: Whatever you want.

Trump: Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Bush: Uh, yeah, those legs, all I can see is the legs.

Trump: Oh, it looks good.

Bush: Come on shorty.

Trump: Ooh, nice legs, huh?

Bush: Oof, get out of the way, honey. Oh, that’s good legs. Go ahead.

Trump: It’s always good if you don’t fall out of the bus. Like Ford, Gerald Ford, remember?

From the abstract:

…this study investigates both the prevalence of sexual assault and its associated factors for straight, bisexual, and gay individuals. Our analyses use data from the Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS), which is a cross-sectional survey of 21,000 students. As has been widely reported from previous studies, we find that around one in every four heterosexual women experience sexual assault after four years in college. We also find that gay and bisexual men report sexual assault at frequencies similar to those reported by heterosexual women. Bisexual women were the most vulnerable to sexual assault in college, as nearly two out of every five bisexual female college students had experienced sexual assault after four years in college. Greek life (e.g., membership in fraternities or sororities) proved to be strongly associated with higher prevalence of sexual assault for most groups of students. Sexual assault survivors also reported having participated in their college hookup culture at higher levels. We hope that these findings will help university administrators and counseling centers more adequately address and reduce sexual assault for all groups of students on college campuses.

The main result is clearly seen in these two graphics (pay attention to the Y-axes):

The maximum rate of assault among straight college students in this study is 25%, which is alarmingly high, but that number for females is much larger than the rate for straight males. Meanwhile, the rates for the non-straight groups ranges up to over 35%, and is generally higher than for straight students.

The study concludes,

…we believe that, given the potential wide variability of college sexual assault from college to college, colleges experiencing high rates of sexual assault complaints should try to conduct their own campus-wide survey to better estimate its overall incidence on campus, as more than two dozen universities from Harvard to the University of Southern California have already done …

…we believe that colleges with active Greek systems must establish effective intervention trainings and proper oversight with fraternities and sororities on their campuses. As we have found, it was not only women in sororities who were at risk of sexual assault, but heterosexual and gay male fraternity members as well. It seems that all members of the Greek system could benefit from increased prevention efforts focused on this group. Our findings also present evidence that sexual assault is embedded within the college party and hookup scene. Hence, prevention efforts that target students who frequently attend parties and hook up may be more effective.

…we strongly endorse a multifaceted intervention strategy that specifically targets LGB students, because these students showed markedly high rates of sexual assault in our study. Campus policy measures and interventions will likely be more successful if they acknowledge the diversity of college students who experience sexual assault, as well as the ways college social and romantic life may function to increase the risk of assault.

Ultimately, we hope that a better understanding of the percentage of reported sexual assault on campus and characteristics associated with victimization will help university administrators and counseling centers adequately continue to address and eventually reverse the increasing trend of sexual assault on college campuses across the country.

There may be a few broken links here that I’ll just deaden, but otherwise, I’m not changing the essay at this time.

I want to mention three separate instances of men acting inappropriately towards a woman that occurred to people I know over the last couple of months.

[Trigger warning: Sexual harassment and rape]

In once case, a man drove up to a woman who was just getting out of her car, in a relatively secluded parking lot, to ask her what kind of mileage she got on that model and make. There was nothing exceptional about the car that would cause special interest in this issue. In the second instance, a man skated (on in-line skates) up next to a woman who was skating on a long trail a mile or two into the woods where no one was around, and insisted on “teaching her” how to “draft” which involved him skating to a few inches behind her and holding his hand on the small of her back while he explained how great that felt. In the third instance, a stranger cornered a women in an enclosed space, tried to rape her, and in so doing hit her several times in the head while pulling off her clothing.

It isn’t possible to comfortably place all three of these instances into one category. They are not all three “creepy behavior, guys just don’t do that,” they are not all three “unwanted sexual attention” and they are not all three “violent attempted rape.” I’m saying this, the stuff I just said here in this paragraph you are reading, in a tone that you can not read (because I’m not bothering to write it that way) but that you could hear if you were here right now and I read it out loud, in a tone of dripping cynicism, the kind of tone you use when speaking to someone who is beneath contempt because of their attitude towards humanity and who you know will willfully misunderstand and scream and yell about whatever you say regarding the topic at hand. Phrasing this a slightly different way, if you are already mad at me for referring to those three events in one paragraph, then you are hopeless and I don’t want to talk to you. Stop. Reading. Now. You will not be allowed to comment on this post in any event, so just go away.

It is possible, however, that you understand why one might speak of these three things in one paragraph. In one case, the worst thing that could happen did not happen, but the guy in the story certainly was trying to make it so. In the seemingly least severe case, in the parking lot (or so I judge) it may well be that the guy asking about mileage was just asking about mileage. However, I don’t think he was. You don’t find out the mileage of a widely driven model of car by asking a person who happens to be driving one. People do not really know the mileage of the car they are driving. More importantly, if you are a guy, you should know better than to drive up to some woman who is all alone in a lonely parking lot, stop your car and come over to her to ask her a random question. And, when she looks at you, says nothing, gets back into her car and drives to a new parking spot far from you because you creeped her out, you should not be surprised. Regarding the second incident, again, the 45-52 year old (estimated) man could have grown up in a world where approaching a woman who does not know you on a lonely path in the woods and touching her without her even seeing that coming is normal. But I think not. I think that guy was either deluded into thinking that a certain percentage of strange woman he randomly touched would suddenly want to blow him right then and there, or he had nefarious goals in mind and did not expect the burst of speed he encountered. In this case, I happen to think the former is more likely than the latter for various reasons I won’t go into.

So, maybe I’m a little more suspicious than I need to be. In case II, the woman involved was less suspicious than I was, until she and I chatted about the event, after which she seemed to think this was actually a semi-bad thing that happened. So maybe I ruined it for all the perfectly innocent guys who wander around in the woods touching women they don’t know perfectly innocently. Whatever. In the case of the parking lot, the woman involved told me that she had no idea if the guy was up to something, but reasoned that the consequences of an unlikely event (an attack or whatever) were severe enough that the small effort of driving across the lot was worth it. In the event that he followed her she would then know to dial 911, or run his ass over, or whatever. Otherwise, no big deal either way.

In other words, everyone involved seems to be a little more cautious than they probably need to be, but the goal is not to hit some optimal median of reaction, because that would mean that half the time one under-reacts. That’s fine in Poker, in Horse Betting, in all sorts of activity. But, over a period of 20 or 30 years, the correct number of times to be molested or raped is not half the number of times it could have happened. No. It is zero. Just zero. And, in at least one of the cases to which I refer, the woman had prior nasty experiences already, thank you very much.

So yes, there is a point to all of this: In the first two instances I mention, but not the third, it is very possible that the man involved was either totally innocent of any sort of nefarious planning or even (immature and sophomoric) unrealistically hopeful sexual thinking. But he was still doing something wrong even if that is the case. This is because from the point of view of the woman, he could easily have been a rapist or something like a rapist, and there is no way at all for the woman to know this. Imagine the not too unlikely case where either of those women was previously assaulted in a similar setting (park path in the woods or a lonely parking lot), and an “innocent” question or an “innocent” light touch on the small of the back was a trigger? Trigger or no, both of these men did something they should not have done.

And this is why I wrote, over a year a go, a blog post about how under certain circumstances certain men should cross certain streets at certain times to avoid freaking out certain women that they are encountering while out walking. When I wrote that post, it fueled a just started and ongoing reaction to Rebecca Watson’s comment “Guys, just don’t do that” in reference to a guy doing something thoughtless, and that fueled-up reaction became the First Great Sorting among the skeptics and atheist communities, with the MRAs on one side and the Feminists on the other. With these three occurrences happening in one short period of time, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit that post, so I’ve placed a shortened and revised version of it below. Before we get to that, let me provide a short list of things guys should not do:

<ul>

<li>Don't skate up to a woman on a lonely forest path and touch her even if you have what you think of as a good excuse lined up. </li>

<li>Don't drive over to a woman who is all by herself in a lonely parking lot to ask her a question that you really don't need to ask her.  If you have a valid question and it's an emergency, go ahead.  But not just some random question that you made up so some girl would have to talk to you.</li>

<li>And in the middle of the night, there are times (not all) and places (not all) that you should somehow diffuse the sense of threat a woman might feel when your giant manly hulking form lurches towards her on some lonely street.  </li></ul>

And now….the updated original post:

I am not afraid of dogs, and most women are probably not “afraid of men.”

Except I’m actually afraid of dogs and most women are justifiably afraid of men in a certain way. Your job as a man is to understand what that means. If this puzzles you, especially about the idea of women being afraid of men at all, then you need to reconsider your position.

I admit that I see “pit bulls” as potentially dangerous. When I was a kid, it was German Shepherds (or similar dogs) that were routinely trained as “one-man” guard dogs or attack dogs, and if you saw one either it was on a chain (not a rope, a chain) or on your leg (in a bad way). Seriously. These days, Shepherds are kept because they are good with kids. Go figure. The point is, I’m fully aware that almost 100% of the danger level of a dog is based on its training and treatment and not on its breed. So, when I see a “pit bull” I know intellectually that this could be the most gentle beast I’ll ever meet in my life.

Or not.

So the other day, I walked outside and found myself utterly alone. Surrounded by garage doors and closed windows in a sort of cul-du-sac, I knew that you could probably pop someone with a small caliber handgun and no one would hear it or see it. I wasn’t thinking that exactly at the time, but I could sense the loneliness and remoteness as I closed my garage door behind me, heading for the mail box, with the medium-term intent of hopping in my car (which was not in the garage) to head off and pick up my son from daycare.

That’s when the dog showed up. It was a pit-bull like dog, though I have no idea what the actual breeding history of this animal was. It was tall, almost as tall as a Dane, but had the pit-bull head and a boxer-like body. Some sort of Frankendogish mastiff derivative, perhaps.

The dog was un-chained and frenetic. The first thing it did was to run at me and bump its head into my leg. Then it ran around in the cul-de-sac, running up to doorways and then turning instantly away each time. When I say running I mean mainly walking very fast. The dog was only bounding into the air now and then. It came towards me a couple of times but almost as though I wasn’t there, it would just pass me. Instinctively, I employed the usual voice and hand gestures one employs to bring a dog to a spot and have it sit, so I could look for ID on its collar, but it would have none of that. This dog was not receiving any of my signals.

That, and the fact that it was foaming at the mouth a little, gave me pause.

Different instincts suddenly kicked in. I’ve had encounters with dangerous dogs, and if you’ve read the Lost Congo Memoirs you’ll know that I’ve had dealings with rabid dogs as well. After the fourth or fifth time that the frenetic zombie-like (but fast-style zombie, not slow-style zombie) frothing beast passed by, having made my way to the car, I quickly unlocked the door, hopped in, and slammed it shut.

That is when I noticed that my heart was racing and my adrenalin was pumping. I had just encountered a rabid dog that, once it freed itself from whatever trance state the brain-eating disease hat put it in, was going to turn on me and bite me in the face (last place you want to get bit by a rabid dog).

Or not. Probably not. The foam was surely just drool. It was hot out. Its frenetic behavior was probably just because it was lost. Its failure to understand my commands was probably … whatever. The dog was probably just confused. I suppose. Maybe.

So, I usually keep what happens in my house private, or at least if I write about it check first with the involved parties, but I think I will be forgiven for spontaneously telling you about a conversation I had with Amanda last night.

For the course of much of Rebeccapocalypse (the maneno with Elevator Guy, Rebecca Watson, and so on) Amanda was out of town while a friend of mine visiting from out of town and I huddled over our computers down in the blog cave, or visited SkepchiCON where, coincidentally, the Actual Rebecca Watson and other Skepchicks were hanging out, where the two of us fussed over the problem. So, Amanda missed all of the run-up, hadn’t read any of the blog posts, and had gotten only the briefest overview of events from me after her return. The story of Rebecca and Elevator Guy was low priority for her at the moment and the story thus went to the back of her head (well, probably, actually the front, but that’s not how we refer to it) for processing. Then, last night, the whole thing rushed forward and Amanda ran down to the blog cave to tell me something. I should say, this is a rare event. She was kinda freaked out.

“Do people get it?” she asked me, kinda freaked out (as noted).

“Get what?” I was distracted and unclear on the point she was making.

“Do people get what it is like for a woman to have a man join her on an elevator in the middle of the night? Do they understand that this is ALWAYS something that raises one’s stress level, even if just a little?”

“Huh?”

“Sometimes more, sometimes less, it depends on your state of mind, the time of day, all sorts of other factors, but if I’m in a hotel somewhere in the middle of the night and some guy I don’t know gets on the elevator, my stress level goes up and stays there until one of us gets off. If he says something to me other than ‘nice weather we’re having’ I get much more stressed. That’s true to some degree for all women.”

“Elevator? What?” She was going fast, almost upset.

“If the guy did what that guy did, asking me to his room, I’d totally Freak.”

Ah. She was talking about Elevator Guy. “Yeah. Desiree said would punch him in the face.”

“Me too.”

“That guy’s gonna have a bloody nose. Hey, did I tell you about this dog the other day?”

“Huh?”

Anyway, in life I was not as clueless as the above dialog suggests. Amanda hadn’t really been thinking about the issue at all, and the moment she gave it any thought she immediately concluded that Elevator Guy did the wrong thing and that Rebecca Watson, in pointing this out to the clueless, was doing all women in the West, where there are elevators and a chance of some equality, a service. And every other woman that I’ve spoken to about this has said the same thing, more or less.

Guys (and some gals) who are not getting this are making two mistakes. First, they consider the event post hoc and say that no one was attacked or raped, therefore there was no threat of rape or anything else serious. If it didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened. (I will assume you get why that is stupid.) Second, they think of this sort of thing generally and figure that the chances that Elevator Guy was a real threat was low. Why or how they assess this is beyond me, since they weren’t there, but I suppose statistically it is a reasonably valid guess … chances are the foam is just drool, chances are the frenetic behavior is just confusion, chances are the zombie-like state of the 160 pound dog is just … oh, wait, sorry, I was talking about Elevator Guy. Right. Chances are that Elevator Guy was just a socially ignorant slightly drunk dweeb of no consequence.

Or not. And it is the “or not” part that a woman MUST pay attention to in order to live her life as long as she can before her first sexual assault, or to increase the amount of time spent between her most recent sexual assault and her next one, or to make the next sexual assault hopefully non-fatal or something that she can get out of quickly or minimize in some way. Because very few women get away without something happening in their lifetime.

It occurred to me some time ago that my knowledge of a woman having been sexually assaulted in the past is correlated with how much I know about that woman generally. I quickly add that correlation is not causation. The point is that if you know a woman and don’t have knowledge of her prior sexual assault, that may not be because it didn’t happen. It just may be because you don’t know.

In fact, if you are in your 30s or older and you don’t know of any women who have had a sexual assault or something in their history, that means that there are certain conversations you are not having and that you exist in a state of cluelessness. Almost certainly.

When I was about 14 through 17, hanging around in an inner-city crime ridden urban environment, with no car, and spending a lot of time at night on foot going places, I learned to do this trick. Say I’m walking down State Street and it’s 1:00 AM and there’s a woman walking in front of me in the same direction. With very few exceptions, I’ll overtake her, and there will then be this long, maybe one-third of a city block long period when I’m right behind her, then right next to her, then just in front of her.

From any of those three vantage points, I could grab her. From behind, or from next to her, or by turning around and grabbing her from the front. Then I could push her to the ground and drag her into an alley or whatever.

But I would not do that. Therefore, the woman walking alone at 1:00 AM in the morning downtown has nothing to worry about, right? Well, actually, since she does not know me she has a great deal to worry about because the chances that some guy walking (fast) alone down State Street in the middle of the night is some sort of sexual assaulter or mugger is hard to assess, and not zero.

So I learned this trick. Cross the street about a block back and “pass” the lady that way. Same with a potential head-on encounter. If you see a woman walking towards you in the middle of the night on a lonely urban street bla bla bla, my practice in those days was to cross the street to not stress her out.

Interestingly I stopped doing that second move when I moved to South Minneapolis a number of years back because because the social context there was very different. It would have been considered very bad form. Instead, you make eye contact and say hello. To everybody. That’s how we roll in that neighborhood. Context is important (a fact that many of those who have been harassing me on the Internet ever since I first wrote this post a year ago do not, and never will, understand.)

All men. ALL men who have given sufficient consideration to women’s position in our society do something like this walking trick (maybe not even about walking, but about something) in the right context (for some that will be common, for others, rare). If you are a man and you do not know about this then there is a problem with you.

Here’s the thing. A woman normally possesses a certain sense of caution related specifically to things that mainly happen to women, which does cause stress. A man should respect that and act accordingly, by doing certain things and not doing certain things. Every single person I’ve spoken to about Rebeccapocalypse has had a view of this roughly in the same range: Rebecca displayed normative behavior in being put off by Elevator Guy and it was up to her to decide to speak about it, and generally a good thing to do so. People do disagree on the modus operendus of speaking out, but not dramatically. Everyone understands that a woman should have a certain sense of caution … as should a man but in different ways, for different things, to different degrees … and that a man should respect this and act accordingly. By doing certain things and not doing certain things.

But then there are these people, mostly guys, and also Richard Dawkins, shockingly, who don’t get it at all. I’m thinking that the fame factor has caused Dawkins to live a life in which certain conversations have been avoided, and he is just socially retarded because of this, though in most ways he is a fine example of an English Gentleman. Or maybe being socially retarded and being an English Gentleman are the same thing in certain areas. Oh, right, this might apply to privilege, might-en it? And privilege might be what makes men tend to be stupid about certain things. Get out of my way, Bitch, I’m walking down the street and I don’t care that trammeling past you is going to freak you out. Your problem. What are you doing out in the middle of the night by yourself anyway? Oh, if I was asked over for coffee at 4AM in the morning in Ireland on an elevators, I’d see it as a complement! Yes, yes, I suspect Richard Dawkins has been asked over for coffee and servicing at the wee hours of the morning many times, because he’s a star and that is what happens. So from his point of view, I suppose he was giving Rebecca the highest complement when he figured that she had no brief: “Rebecca, you are one of us stars! You have a groupie! Good show, Old Girl!”

Oh, but sorry, my cynicism is getting the better of me. All that shit that was in my head came out rather suddenly. Sorry about that. Anyway, I want to close by restating my point so it can’t be missed. Though, if you are an MRA you’ll miss it anyway, but hopefully you’ve gone away by now.

I was freakin’ afraid of that dog, even though I know how to handle big dogs. I was afraid of that dog even though I’ve smelled the breath of more than a few wild super-carnivores who were busy contemplating me as a meal or a rival, so a dog should be nothing to me. I was afraid of that dog even though I’m not afraid of dogs. I could not help myself from being afraid, and I have chosen to do the very unmanly thing of not lying to you about that. My heart was beating when I got into the car, into safety.

And here’s the thing, the point you need to get: I can only tell you about the dog. I can’t tell you a story about a sexual assault. I don’t have one. I only have the dog story for you because I’m a 50-something year old man, not a 50-something year old woman. If I was a 50-something year old woman, I’d be able to tell you stories on point for the current discussion, stories about men who cornered me, who touched me when I didn’t want that, who verbally threatened me, who woke me up in the middle of the night or tracked me down on some dark street or who freaked me out in an elevator. If I was typical, that is.

But I only have the dog story to help you empathize with Rebecca because I’m a man.

Oh by the way, that assault I mentioned in the beginning? Yeah, it was in an elevator. The woman was not able to get away by pressing “door open” and walking out the door as Richard Dawkins recommended. Oh, she pounded on that button as she screamed for help but it didn’t work. What did work was fighting the guy off, and that only worked because she was big and strong enough, and only then, barely. So Richard, do you have any further advice for women about how to not be raped? Thanks, please keep it to yourself. Nobody wants to hear it.

One way to convey your willingness to stand up against bullies is to were some kind of button or pin or label or something that says something like “safety” on it. And when you think about it for a second, why not just wear a safety pin???

Most of the safety pins we had around the house are tiny and nobody would see them if I wore won. So I found some larger ones on line.

The really big ones start to look a bit less like regular safety pins. May be it is a good idea to wear two. I don’t know.

Anyway, here is what I found:

This is a 3 inch steel safety pin, shiny, pretty obvious, large, and comes in a package of 122.

It is listed as: 12pcs Silvery Extra-large 3″ Steel Safety Pins – Blankets, Skirts, Kilts, Crafts

Something that big might have the downside of damaging the clothes it is attached to. On the other hand, it is so large you can probably sew it onto something, like a hat. Or attach it to your car. Let me know if you have ideas.

Here are some even larger ones, but they look even less like safety pins.

Then there are these, which look like normal safety pins, but they are not as large. Listed as: Set of 100 Extra-Large 1-3/4″ Safety Pins.

This might be ideal for a teacher, who might wear it as a lapel pin or small broach. It won’t be noticed from across the room at any particular instant, but the teacher’s students will by and by see it and know that this teacher is on their side in case of any bullying, regardless of what the nature of that bullying might happen to be.

By the way, the wearing of safety pins to signal opposition to racist abuses started in the UK after Brexit, according to this.

You have turned a very bad situation into something ten times worse.

As background, this comes from a meeting of national level evangelical leaders who got together to decide what to do about Donald Trump. They decided to fully support Trump, and the woman in the video shown here is giving their arguments. I am not making this up.

See also:

Two Women Say Donald Trump Touched Them Inappropriately

Palm Beach Post exclusive: Local woman says Trump groped her

A Timeline of Donald Trump’s Creepiness While He Owned Miss Universe

“I’ll be dating [that eleven year old girl] in ten years” – Trump

Physically Attacked by Donald Trump – a PEOPLE Writer’s Own Harrowing Story

Michele Bachmann: Elect Donald Trump Or There Will Be ‘Even More Sexual Assaults’

How Trump’s Going Ballistic Over Sexual Assault Allegations Against Him

Here are all the times Donald Trump has been accused of rape or attempted rape

Gohmert: Trump Said ‘Vile Things,’ But He’s a Christian Now

A Running List Of The Women Who’ve Accused Donald Trump Of Sexual Assault

The Many Scandals of Donald Trump: A Cheat Sheet

Trump Faces a Slew of New Allegations of Sexual Assault

You know two news outlets have produced confirming evidence of actual sexual assault by Donald Trump. So, naturally, Trump intends to sue.

But, this from Media Matters:

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s threats to The New York Times for reporting allegations that he committed sexual assault are legally far-fetched and provide a troubling portrait of how a Trump administration would handle the press, according to experts interviewed by Media Matters.

…

Several experts tell Media Matters his latest threats of legal action against the Times are further evidence of what would likely be a problematic relationship between the press and Trump if he were to be elected president.

“It just confirms how difficult he would be with the press and how he would view the press as an enemy,” George Freeman, Media Law Resource Center executive director and former New York Times assistant legal counsel, said about the latest attack. “It would be a very contentious relationship in all probability, particularly in that his whole character is built on beating up anyone who attacks him.”

…

Freeman of the Media Law Resource Center called the legal claim “a pure loser.”

“I think it’s all bluster,” he said. “But it’s not surprising given that he is always threatening litigation. As a presidential candidate, he would have to prove actual malice. … It seems to me it would be virtually impossible for Trump to even come close to showing the Times had serious doubts about the claims of groping when the women seem so credible and it was confirmed and substantiated by many other people they had spoken to.”

Read more about that here.

As you know, I’m the last person to write off Donald Trump. From the very beginning, without fail, I’ve been warning you that he’ll do well, that he’ll win the GOP debates, that he’ll win various primaries, that he’ll win the nomination, etc. All of it. I have never once been wrong about this.

The reason I’m never wrong is because I know something that you also know but that you refuse to admit because it is too painful. Most Americans, perhaps way more than a majority, share one or more opinions with the core Republican political and social philosophy. A smaller number, a minority but not fewer than about 40%, agree with most or all of those points of policy. Added to this Republicans tend to work better in lockstep than Democrats.

And this, dear reader, is why Republicans have been mostly in charge for most of the time since the Republican party became what it is today (staring in the 1970s).

Donald Trump, meanwhile perfectly represents most of that ~40% of Americans, and that is why he is their candidate.

However, more than one thing must be in place to win an election. One of these things is having a large and loyal base, and Trump has that. Another is money, from multiple big donors. Trump had that (including himself) but it is gone (except himself). Another is the support of the party elite and all those great surrogates that go out and stump for you. Trump lost whatever he had along those lines a while back, and as of a couple of weeks ago has had absolutely nothing in the way of surrogate support. It has been just Trump and Pence. And now, Pence seems to have stopped campaigning, so it is just Trump over the last few days, today, and tomorrow, at least.

There remained for a while the Basket of Hypocrites, such as Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and the others. These are mostly evangelical conservatives who were willing to throw every one in the country under the bus just to defeat Hillary Clinton, regardless of the cost. But with the culmination of sufficient evidence to regard Donald Trump as a supporter and likely doer of sexual assault on arbitrary females as a given part of his privilege, even the Hypocrites can not survive being associated with him.

And for this reason, over the weekend, these rats left the ship.

As of some time over the last 48 hours or so, the Trump Campaign is over, and this is true regardless of any debate.

Then, there was the debate.

One could argue that Trump did better than expected, and Clinton could have done better, but everyone who is not extremely partisan thinks Clinton pretty much won.

So, what do the polls show? A new poll by NBC and the Wall Street Journal, that does not include the debate (because it was conducted on Saturday and Sunday, before the debate) puts Clinton at 46% to Trump’s 35% in a four way match. Head to head, the spit is 52% to 38%, so if some of those third party snowflakes get with the program and actually vote in the election, the spread widens from 11% to 14%.

Those are double digit numbers. We’ve not seen double digit numbers from a major and legit poll since, I think, the start of the national campaign.

I’m pretty sure the debate did not push the polls back the other way. I’m pretty sure this weekend poll reflects the current situation, more or less. Of course, it is only one poll.

Looking at phone polls by major pollsters and/or major news agencies, excluding one outlier because its numbers are so far different (FOX), from September 1 to the present (including the poll mentioned above) we get this from HuffPo Pollster:

OK, now, pretend I’m wearing a Steve Kornacki mask and I’ve got a sharpie.

I could do more, but I think you get the point.

I expect more scandalous news.

Last week there were indications that the NYT had more about taxes that would eventually come out. I’ve heard rumors of a tape with Trump saying the “N-word.” Right now there is strong evidence that Trump is on board with the whole idea of sexual assault, and there is already some information out there about this, but with the Access Hollywood tapes out, may be we will start seeing actual victims, if any, come to the fore. And, there are known to be tapes from The Apprentice said to be similar to, maybe worse than, the Access Hollywood tapes.

These things will not come out today, because today, the news cycle is still finishing with Friday’s information, and still working on the Debate, so any editor or producer with something to say will wait until tomorrow. So, if something is out there, may be we’ll hear of it then. a few days ago I suggested that we’d be seeing approximately one Trump news dump about every four days until the election. The time span between Monday’s revelations (already forgotten) and Friday’s was about four days, right? Then there was friday ..let’s see … (counting on fingers) … friday, saturday, sunday monday, … TUESDAY! So, Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. Stay tuned.

A roughly written Facebook comment by me, reacting to much of the reaction I’m seeing:

To everyone who is saying that Trump is out of the race because of his admitted preference for sexual assault as a way of getting women to like him: Sorry, you are wrong, and you may be living in a bubble.

Do a transect across humanity, in the US. You will find that a double digit percentage of both women and men (though I’ll allow you the possibly true but possibly not true idea that more men than women) view intersexual relationships exactly as Trump views them. Not only that, but they probably view this as both normal and, suddenly, politically preferred.

(While you are doing your transect of society, take notes on decals and bumper stickers on pick up trucks. You will see the correlation between “Trump for President” stickers and “Get her drunk and get her done” stickers.)

Putting this a slightly different way, now that sexual assault is part of the known Trump behavioral repertoire (it already was, but for some reason these remarks are being taken seriously while earlier indications were not), it is now a feature of Republican philosophy (yes, my dear friends and family who are Republicans, you are now part of the Sexual Assault is OK Party, so let’s see how long you can live with that!)

This revelation may affect the distribution of support for Trump at close to the level that a bad debate performance will. Not much, but a little.

Second point: All the talk about replacing trump, or how would that work, etc. etc. is pretty much information free yammering.
On one hand, it is virtually impossible to change a ticket.

No, you can’t replace the Presidential candidate with the VP candidate. It simply does not work that way.That is not what the VP candidate is or does. Even if a ticket was elected and the president elect died, the VP would not take over that position (this doe not apply after the electors have chosen, thanks to Steve for noting my ambiguity here). The VP has no role in party or national politics or governance other than to replace the president on the event of the president’s death, or in certain other situations.
On the other hand, the electors are not legally bound at the federal level to do anything in particular. They are bound at the state level. I’m pretty sure that faithless electors, say, the electors from a state that are supposed to vote for Trump vote for someone else instead, were charged by their state’s attorney, that would be thrown out of court at the federal level like moldy cottage cheese.

Of course, what electors would do this, and for whom would they vote? They’d be from that population of inexperienced but energized by Sanders or Trump to join up, who somehow got to be electors. There are probably no more than a handful of such individuals, most electors are experienced in the process. But in a close election it would only take a few electors voting for a third party to send the entire process to the House of Representatives. This is highly unlikely, but it would give us a non-elected Republican president for four years. Cruz? Romney? Gingrich? the fight would be epic.

It is possible that this process gets ruined so far down the line that this does not work either, and we get to the part in the Constitution that says something like, “Hand the problem over to The Congress and they will figure out, in a manner they deem appropriate, who the next president is”

(The process for the VP is parallel and different. Senate not house, etc.)

So, to summarize:

1) No, this revelation has no real meaning, no real new information, and will have no effect. Trump really is the candidate because he represents the party that nominated him, nothing has changed.

2) Most of the yammering about what might happen or what might be done is based on zero understanding or information about anything.

I made a big ugly graphic to summarize two possible effects: small vs. large. Unfortunately, the Monday debate will be conflated with this effect. Let’s check back on Friday and see.

Of course, according to my four day theory (there will be a major October surprise every four days until the election) there will be yet another big news story on Tuesday (plus or minus one day) so it may be impossible to test this hypothesis.