Originally a comment by Lady Mondegreen on Spiked says solidarity is the work of the devil.

That is, equality was won by was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves one at a time and separately and without conferring or joining forces in any way whatsoever. Yeah! No need for solidarity, no need to organize, no need for campaigns, just each woman square her shoulders and be as great as she can be.

This is the story conservative America tells itself over and over again about how equal rights were fought for.

I grew up hearing that Rosa Parks was really tired one day after a hard day’s work, so she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person.

–Wait, Rosa Parks was secretary of the Montgomery NAACP? She had marched for civil rights and workers’ rights? She’d attended activist training? She wasn’t the first black person to be arrested for resisting bus segregation, but her case was chosen for the lawsuit challenging it?

What a disappointment. Rights are supposed to be won by individualistic individual heroes who are so strong and brave and good they vanquish the meanies and win over the public by virtue of their individual awesomeness. Anything else would be people organizing and fighting together against the powerful, and we can’t have that. That’s communism, and collectivism, and being contemptible helpless creatures.

Funny how libertarian/conservative types run down Hollywood while clinging to the most hackneyed and unrealistic star-vehicle narratives. It isn’t superheroes who win equal rights, Whelan.

David Brooks being even more willfully wrong and middleminded than usual.

Let me start with three inconvenient observations, based on dozens of conversations around Washington over the past year:

That is, let him start with congratulating himself for Going Against the Tide, for Thinking For Himself, for Not Following the Herd.

First, people who go into the White House to have a meeting with President Trump usually leave pleasantly surprised. They find that Trump is not the raving madman they expected from his tweetstorms or the media coverage. They generally say that he is affable, if repetitive. He runs a normal, good meeting and seems well-informed enough to get by.

Are.you.fucking.kidding.

If they’re going there to have a meeting with him they’re at least somewhat on his side and thus predisposed to think he’s ok.

The issue is not whether or not he’s a “raving madman.”

Who cares if he’s affable to people predisposed to be on his side?

Whoaaaaa with that “if repetitive” throwaway – that is not a trivial matter. That’s a symptom of dementia. He’s the president; it’s very bad if he has dementia.

He seems well-informed enough to get by??? We’re supposed to think that’s good enough? This isn’t an after-school job at which getting by is all that’s expected; this is the presidency. Also “getting by” at a meeting of people on the same side is really saying almost nothing. He’s not there to be a stuffed dummy who is good enough if he doesn’t vomit on the table.

And that is one of Brooks’s “inconvenient observations.”

He is such a dullard. It never stops amazing me that he’s a prominent talking head.

Second, people who work in the Trump administration have wildly divergent views about their boss. Some think he is a deranged child, as Michael Wolff reported. But some think he is merely a distraction they can work around. Some think he is strange, but not impossible. Some genuinely admire Trump. Many filter out his crazy stuff and pretend it doesn’t exist.

That’s the inconvenient part? That’s some kind of dissent from the view that Trump is incompetent and dangerous in his job? They filter him, they work around him, they think he’s a deranged child, some of them actually admire him – this is different from the conventional wisdom how exactly?

My impression is that the Trump administration is an unhappy place to work, because there is a lot of infighting and often no direction from the top. But this is not an administration full of people itching to invoke the 25th Amendment.

Because it includes a lot of people who are pissing themselves with excitement at their chance to trash the environment and take away health insurance and slash taxes on the rich. We know.

Third, the White House is getting more professional. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet. The craziness of the past weeks would be out of the way, and we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals: the shift in our Pakistan policy, the shift in our offshore drilling policy, the fruition of our ISIS policy, the nomination for judgeships and the formation of policies on infrastructure, DACA, North Korea and trade.

If Trump didn’t tweet – that’s like saying if Hitler didn’t hate the Jews. Trump does tweet, and that’s not a sideshow.

Plus we would see a White House that is briskly pursuing its horrendous goals that we don’t want it to pursue. We don’t want a “shift in our offshore drilling policy,” just as we don’t want another Deepwater Horizon.

Then he lectures us on being too much in a bubble, then he laments how lowbrow the opposition is.

Why does the Times pay him a large salary for this?

However. A ruling just now:

A panel of federal judges struck down North Carolina’s congressional map on Tuesday, declaring it unconstitutionally gerrymandered and demanding that the Republican-controlled General Assembly redraw district lines before this year’s midterm elections.

The ruling was the first time that a federal court had blocked a congressional map because the judges believed it to be a partisan gerrymander, and it deepened the political chaos that has enveloped North Carolina in recent years.

“We agree with plaintiffs that a wealth of evidence proves the General Assembly’s intent to ‘subordinate’ the interests of non-Republican voters and ‘entrench’ Republican domination of the state’s congressional delegation,” Judge James A. Wynn Jr. wrote in a 191-page opinion that another judge joined in full.

The state has a couple of weeks to offer a better map, but if they can’t do it the court will.

Again the Times pretends shit is a bowl of rose petals. Joe Arpaio is “fiery” and now Breitbart has a “defiant editorial spirit.” Defiant of what, though? Oh, truth, civility, fairness, proportion, humanity – that kind of bourgeois frippery.

They’re reporting that Breitbart has thrown Bannon out.

Mr. Bannon’s departure, which was forced by a onetime financial patron, Rebekah Mercer, comes as Mr. Bannon remained unable to quell the furor over remarks attributed to him in a new book in which he questions President Trump’s mental fitness and disparages his elder son, Donald Trump Jr.

Mr. Bannon and Breitbart will work together on a smooth transition, a statement from the company’s chief executive, Larry Solov, said.

In the statement, Mr. Bannon added that he was “proud of what the Breitbart team has accomplished in so short a period of time in building out a world-class news platform.”

The popularity of Breitbart, like the “genius” of Trump in getting elected, shows there are a lot of mean people in the world. It doesn’t show that Trump is a genius or that Breitbart is a world-class anything, it just shows that being a mean shit is way too popular.

No one has been more closely identified with the Breitbart website or had more to do with emboldening its defiant editorial spirit than Mr. Bannon did after its namesake, Andrew Breitbart, died of a heart attack in 2012. In Washington, Mr. Bannon works and lives part time in a townhouse nicknamed the Breitbart Embassy.

Can this be the last we ever hear of him? Because that would be greeeeeaaaaaat.

Spiked has another “contrarian” what’s all this fuss about sexual harassment piece, this one by Ella Whelan. The target this time is Time’s Up, which turns out to be rich women condescending to poor women, I guess by not ignoring them.

No one should have to put up with injustice. But this patronising campaign assumes working-class women are incapable of sticking up for themselves. How did women ever win equality in the workplace in the first place? Was it through Hollywood-run schemes to stop bad male behaviour with lawsuits? Of course not. Equality was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves and demanding their freedom. This is what #MeToo types can’t understand – that women aren’t all helpless creatures, simply waiting to be freed by a hashtag or a handout.

That is, equality was won by was won by ordinary women standing up for themselves one at a time and separately and without conferring or joining forces in any way whatsoever. Yeah! No need for solidarity, no need to organize, no need for campaigns, just each woman square her shoulders and be as great as she can be. If women dare to band together then by god they’re all treating each other as helpless creatures.

No.

No no no no no.

No.

No.

No.

Oprah Winfrey is thinking about running for president.

What she lacks is political experience.

In an interview with Winfrey on Bloomberg last March, interviewer David Rubenstein broached the possibility, saying “It’s clear you don’t need government experience to be elected president of the United States.”

You don’t need it to be elected, tragically, but you do need it, or a relevant education, to do it well. You can’t just walk into it because you’re famous. Have we not learned that?

It’s true that she would be vastly better than Trump. If the choice were more Trump and Oprah Winfrey I would choose her in a shot. But the choice is not that, and this idea that just anyone can be president is one that needs to die.

An equalities watchdog has stepped in on the BBC-Carrie Gracie confrontation.

The Equalities and Human Rights Commission has written to the BBC to seek answers about allegations of pay discrimination following the resignation of Carrie Gracie as its China editor over its “secretive and illegal” pay culture.

The BBC is also facing the prospect of lawsuits from female employees who believe they have been paid less than men for doing the same jobs.

It’s all very disappointing, not to say infuriating.

The journalist, who has worked for the BBC for 30 years, said the corporation had offered to increased her pay from £135,000 a year to £180,000 but she refused because it did not guarantee her equality with its other international editors. Jon Sopel, the BBC’s North America editor, collects between £200,000 to £249,999.

Wow.

It really is backward and in high heels, because Gracie’s gig involves a foreign language, while Sopel gets to talk to sources in his own.

Jennifer Millins, employment partner at Mishcon de Reya, is advising more than 10 senior women at the BBC. She said: “They don’t feel their complaints are being dealt with in a meaningful way. The process has taken a very long time. If the BBC does not resolve this internally, then individuals will be forced to sue.”

Asked what the chances were of the BBC resolving the issue internally, Millins said: “Low.”

Up to 200 women at the BBC have made a formal complaint about pay. This includes a collective grievance lodged on behalf of 121 women by the National Union of Journalists.

Get a grip, Beeb. Do the right thing.

Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s China editor, wrote an open letter:

Dear BBC audience

My name is Carrie Gracie and I have been a BBC journalist for three decades. With great regret, I have left my post as China editor to speak out publicly on a crisis of trust at the BBC.

The BBC belongs to you, the licence fee payer. I believe you have a right to know that it is breaking equality law and resisting pressure for a fair and transparent pay structure.

In thirty years at the BBC, I have never sought to make myself the story and never publicly criticised the organisation I love. I am not asking for more money. I believe I am very well paid already – especially as someone working for a publicly funded organisation. I simply want the BBC to abide by the law and value men and women equally.

On pay, the BBC is not living up to its stated values of trust, honesty and accountability. Salary disclosures the BBC was forced to make six months ago revealed not only unacceptably high pay for top presenters and managers but also an indefensible pay gap between men and women doing equal work. These revelations damaged the trust of BBC staff. For the first time, women saw hard evidence of what they’d long suspected, that they are not being valued equally.

Many have since sought pay equality through internal negotiation but managers still deny there is a problem. This bunker mentality is likely to end in a disastrous legal defeat for the BBC and an exodus of female talent at every level.

Mine is just one story of inequality among many, but I hope it will help you understand why I feel obliged to speak out.

I am a China specialist, fluent in Mandarin and with nearly three decades of reporting the story. Four years ago, the BBC urged me to take the newly created post of China editor.

I knew the job would demand sacrifices and resilience. I would have to work 5,000 miles from my teenage children, and in a heavily censored one-party state I would face surveillance, police harassment and official intimidation.

I accepted the challenges while stressing to my bosses that I must be paid equally with my male peers. Like many other BBC women, I had long suspected that I was routinely paid less, and at this point in my career, I was determined not to let it happen again. Believing that I had secured pay parity with men in equivalent roles, I set off for Beijing.

In the past four years, the BBC has had four international editors – two men and two women. The Equality Act 2010 states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay. But last July I learned that in the previous financial year, the two men earned at least 50% more than the two women.

Despite the BBC’s public insistence that my appointment demonstrated its commitment to gender equality, and despite my own insistence that equality was a condition of taking up the post, my managers had yet again judged that women’s work was worth much less than men’s.

My bewilderment turned to dismay when I heard the BBC complain of being forced to make these pay disclosures. Without them, I and many other BBC women would never have learned the truth.

I told my bosses the only acceptable resolution would be for all the international editors to be paid the same amount. The right amount would be for them to decide, and I made clear I wasn’t seeking a pay rise, just equal pay. Instead the BBC offered me a big pay rise which remained far short of equality. It said there were differences between roles which justified the pay gap, but it has refused to explain these differences. Since turning down an unequal pay rise, I have been subjected to a dismayingly incompetent and undermining grievance process which still has no outcome.

Enough is enough. The rise of China is one of the biggest stories of our time and one of the hardest to tell. I cannot do it justice while battling my bosses and a byzantine complaints process. Last week I left my role as China editor and will now return to my former post in the TV newsroom where I expect to be paid equally.

For BBC women this is not just a matter of one year’s salary or two. Taking into account disadvantageous contracts and pension entitlements, it is a gulf that will last a lifetime. Many of the women affected are not highly paid “stars” but hard-working producers on modest salaries. Often women from ethnic minorities suffer wider pay gaps than the rest.

This is not the gender pay gap that the BBC admits to. It is not men earning more because they do more of the jobs which pay better. It is men earning more in the same jobs or jobs of equal value. It is pay discrimination and it is illegal.

On learning the shocking scale of inequality last July, BBC women began to come together to tackle the culture of secrecy that helps perpetuate it. We shared our pay details and asked male colleagues to do the same.

Meanwhile the BBC conducted various reviews. The outgoing director of news said last month, “We did a full equal pay audit which showed there is equal pay across the BBC.” But this was not a full audit. It excluded the women with the biggest pay gaps. The BBC has now begun a ‘talent review’ but the women affected have no confidence in it. Up to two hundred BBC women have made pay complaints only to be told repeatedly there is no pay discrimination at the BBC. Can we all be wrong? I no longer trust our management to give an honest answer.

Read the rest.

Holy shit. The case against the Bundys for that time they drew guns on the Feds has been thrown out.

A federal judge in Las Vegas dismissed charges against Cliven Bundy and his sons, Ammon and Ryan, on Monday.

Judge Gloria M. Navarro of Federal District Court, in a ruling from the bench, said that the government’s missteps in withholding evidence against the three Bundy family members and a supporter, Ryan W. Payne, were so grave that the indictment against them would be dismissed.

…

The 2014 standoff, the focus of Monday’s hearing, was set off when the Bureau of Land Management seized cattle from Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, Nev., in an attempt to force him to pay decades of back fees for grazing his cattle on federal land. Mr. Bundy insisted he did not have to pay the charges because, he said, he had inherited water rights on the land. At the height of the standoff, hundreds of antigovernment activists, many of them carrying guns, rallied to the Bundys cause, until the confrontation ended with the withdrawal of federal agents.

So then, emboldened, they went and stole Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon and occupied it for several weeks. What will they take over next?

Ari Berman covers the voting rights beat. Today he explains the National Voter Registration Act. In 1988 barely half of eligible voters voted in the presidential election, which was the lowest rate since the 1920s – decades before the Civil Rights movement and the Voting Rights Act.

In an effort to increase participation, Democrats in Congress—backed by a few Republicans— drafted the National Voter Registration Act, a bill that would require states to allow voters to register at Department of Motor Vehicle offices and other public agencies.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, led the opposition to the legislation. “This bill wants to turn every agency, bureau, and office of state government into a vast voter registration machine,” McConnell said in 1991. “Motor voter registration, hunting permit voter registration, marriage license voter registration, welfare voter registration—even drug rehab voter registration.” That same year, McConnell, who is now the Senate majority leader, wrote that “low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy.”

Oh, certainly, just as it was in Mississippi in 1964, for instance.

The act passed Congress but Bush 1 vetoed it, the swine.

Congress passed it again a year later, and this time President Bill Clinton signed it into law, calling it “a sign of a new vibrancy in our democracy.” The “motor voter” law, as it became known, was an immediate success. In its first year in effect, more than 30 million people registered or updated their registrations through the NVRA. Roughly 16 million people per year have used it to register ever since.

Why are Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed? Because easy registration makes it easier for the riffraff to vote – people without cars, people who work long hours without domestic help and can’t find the time to get to a distant registration place, people who don’t have much money…people who have good reasons not to vote Republican.

[I]n recent years, Republicans have sought to gut the law. In 2013, the Supreme Court weakened a key part of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that states with long histories of voting discrimination no longer needed to clear their election changes with the federal government. After winning that fight, Republicans are now going after the NVRA in what voting rights advocates say is a thinly veiled effort to make it more difficult for Democratic-leaning constituencies to register to vote—and far easier for state officials to remove them from the voter rolls…

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the newest challenge to the law, concerning whether Ohio can remove voters from the rolls who don’t vote over a six-year period. If a voter in Ohio misses an election, doesn’t respond to a subsequent mailing from the state, and then sits out two more elections, he or she is removed from the registration list, even if this person would otherwise be eligible to vote. Critics of this process say it turns voting into a “use it or lose it” right and will open the door to wider voter purges.

Ohio had huge success with the law between 2011 and 2016, getting 2 million voters purged, with 840,000 dumped for not voting often enough.

At least 144,000 voters in Ohio’s three largest counties, home to Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati, have been purged since the 2012 election, with voters in Democratic-leaning neighborhoods twice as likely to be removed as those in Republican-leaning ones, according to a  Reuters analysis.

The Republicans want fewer but classier voters, and of course Trump is down with that.

For its part, the Trump administration has come out squarely in support of voter purges. The Obama Justice Department opposed the Ohio purge program, but Trump’s DOJ abruptly switched sides in the case. “After this Court’s grant of review and the change in Administrations, the Department reconsidered the question,” the DOJ informed the Supreme Court in August. “It has now concluded that the NVRA does not prohibit a State from using nonvoting as the basis for sending a [removal] notice.”

In June 2017, the DOJ also sent a letter to 44 states informing them that it was reviewing their voter list maintenance procedures and asking how they planned to “remove the names of ineligible voters.” If Ohio wins at the Supreme Court, it will “certainly embolden” the department and GOP-controlled states to undertake aggressive voter purges, says Vanita Gupta, who headed the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under Obama.

And that would open the door to broader challenges to the NVRA. “It’s a hugely significant case,” Gupta says. “If the court comes out with a broad ruling that says inactivity in voting is sufficient proof to kick a voter off of the rolls, that could have broad implications across the country for how voters are purged off the rolls per the National Voter Registration Act.”

That’s one way to do a fascist takeover.

Dana Goodyear at the New Yorker takes a look at “the purge” so far.

I’m calling it the Purge,” a friend who works in Hollywood told me, a few days into the post-Weinstein era. Off the top of his head, he listed half a dozen men in the entertainment business whose behavior, he hoped, would no longer be condoned. In the weeks to come, they started toppling, joined by others, in a seemingly never-ending cascade, the world’s longest domino trick. The morning-news anchor, the worldly talk-show host, the animation genius with the awful shirts, “feminist” men, liberals, tortured artists, moguls, icons, “bad boys,” funny guys, even the folksy curmudgeon from public radio: they are being fired; stepping down; awkwardly apologizing, engendering ridicule and pique; or defending themselves and inviting rage.

The self-important literary editor is another worth mentioning.

Goodyear tells a very interesting story about a writers’ assistant on “Friends,” Amaani Lyle.

The daughter of a touring jazz musician, she had grown up in a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles and attended progressive private schools, before studying film at Emerson College, in Boston. She was used to being the only woman of color in the room. “Friends,” then in its sixth season on NBC, was one of the most watched shows on television; being in the writers’ room meant a potential credit that would propel her career.

Lyle’s job was to write down what the writers talked about. According to testimony she gave later, several of them talked about anal sex, oral sex, “fucking,” “pussies,” “schlongs,” what color hair they preferred women to have, what size breasts, and how one of the writers had missed his chance with one of the show’s stars. They referred to a lead actress as “having dried branches in her vagina”; one writer “frequently brought up his fantasy about an episode of the show in which one of the male characters enters the bathroom while a female character is showering and rapes her.” They doodled offensive anatomical drawings, vocalized pleasure while pretending to masturbate, altered a calendar in the writers’ room so that it read “pert tits” instead of “persistence” and “penis” instead of “happiness.”

“I can’t even say I was offended,” Lyle told me recently. “That’s how steeped in the culture I was. It was such a ubiquitous thing that it would’ve seemed off to have them not do that stuff.” She didn’t want to change the dynamic of the writers’ room; she wanted to diversify the show’s all-white cast. At the time, NBC was openly referred to as “No Black Characters.” Lyle, whose previous job had been at “Kenan & Kel,” on Nickelodeon, pitched a story line involving an African-American love interest for Joey, the character played by Matt LeBlanc.

After four months, Lyle was fired, ostensibly for typing too slowly.

She sued for wrongful termination and racial discrimination and lost, but her lawyer went on pursuing a sexual harassment claim.

The writers didn’t generally dispute the behavior Lyle had described; instead, they made a novel argument, on First Amendment grounds, that their behavior was a “creative necessity,” indispensable to the making of a show about a group of unmarried adult friends. The raunchy patter, so long as it wasn’t directed at Lyle, was part of their job. An amicus brief, signed by Steven Bochco, David Milch, Norman Lear, Diane English, and a hundred and twenty-seven other writers, argued that “the process creators go through to capture the necessary magic is inexact, counterintuitive, nonlinear, often painful—and above all, delicate.” Self-censorship could damage their productivity.

That’s an interesting idea. But is it true? Is it credible? Is it really the case that one can’t write a good screenplay without musing about rape scenes for the female characters? Does that apply to everything? Do writers also need to talk without inhibition about fantasies of torture, genocide, lynching, enslavement, in order to write a good screenplay? How do we know they wouldn’t have been better writers if they had inhibited themselves that way?

A dissenting amicus brief, filed by a group of legal scholars, argued that the habits of the writers’ room “effectively maintained an exclusionary culture that systematically, if unintentionally, marginalizes female writers and writers’ assistants.” A First Amendment exception to sexual-harassment rules would “essentially sanction this form of exclusion in the entire television writing sector.” In 2006, the California Supreme Court sided with the writers. After that, the female television writer told me, Warner Bros. began triumphantly including Lyle’s affidavit in mandatory sexual-harassment training sessions: “It was used as proof that anything goes in a writers’ room, and there’s not really such a thing as sexual harassment in that context, because to be creative you have to be able to say whatever comes to mind.”

Some women do what it takes to avoid being fired, but they’re not all happy about doing it.

One female television writer in her thirties, who has worked in a number of mostly male writers’ rooms, said, “I’ve been told I’m very staffable because I’m fun. I can take a lot of abuse and still crack a joke.” When she started out, her representatives told her that, as a woman, she would need to climb the ladder rung by rung; she understood that, if she ever wanted her own series, she could not get fired along the way. On a show where the female creator had been fired for being “crazy” and “difficult,” she developed methods of self-preservation, inuring herself to the indignities—such as an executive saying, as he listened to her pitch a sex scene, that he was “getting hard already,” and her male colleagues telling her to take it as a compliment. She regrets passing her methods down, teaching other women how not to ruffle the men in charge. “I had a friend who was interviewing for a staff writing job,” she told me. “I gave her the advice to have thick skin and a light heart. I felt like such a betrayer of my feminist values. What I was saying was, You have to seem fun while being abused. Everyone wants to have a good time while at work.”

Other women just get out. That of course is one reason there are so few women making movies so it’s one reason movies are so male-centric.

Kim Masters is an investigative journalist at the Hollywood Reporter.

Hollywood, Masters says, has long operated like a men-only club. “This town is shot through with a culture of intimidation, boys having fun, going to Las Vegas, hiring hookers. They don’t want female colleagues anywhere near them. Women are not invited and not promoted. I remember Dawn Steel saying, ‘If only I could go whoring with these guys my life would be so much easier.’ ”

Still, Masters has been shocked to see how pervasive sexual harassment is, particularly at certain studios and agencies. “It’s not just one or two people,” she said. “It’s woven into the fucking fabric.”

Many of the perps still have no clue.

“My experience of coaching these people is that they really don’t see why what they did was wrong,” she said. “It’s a failure of empathy or of introspection. Or they’re just sociopaths, or they’re really stupid. There’s a range. I sit down with these guys one on one. I start by saying, ‘Why are we here?’ Some say things like ‘I was set up.’ ‘It was a witch hunt.’ ‘You should have seen what the other guys did.’ ‘She participated.’ ‘I’m a Christian.’ All these deflective things people say. They just don’t get it. The workplace is a sandbox where they play out their social stuff and their family stuff.”

Change is slow.

Wary of appearing unenlightened, companies are scrambling to put women in leadership roles. Amazon is reportedly looking at a number of female candidates to replace Roy Price. But, while it’s one thing to celebrate women moving into a few positions vacated by disgraced men, actual progress will require a change in policy at the studios and at the networks. Katherine Pope, a television executive in her forties, who insists on interviewing women and people of color when she hires directors, said that the situation is dire. Even at companies where women hold impressive titles, there are layers of white men with veto power above them.

White men who didn’t have to put up with years of bullying to get there.

Uh oh – emergency emergency – a woman appears to have ambition. DANGER.

In recent months, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand seems to have begun positioning herself for a presidential run in 2020. She’s been a vocal supporter of the #MeToo movement, pushed for Al Franken’s resignation, and endured a gross Twitter feud with the president. But despite her rising celebrity, a new op-ed in the Daily Beast suggests Gillibrand is too “too transparently opportunistic to be a viable candidate.”

Yeah. She’s supposed to be flirtatious about it, not just walk right up and say she wants it. Directness is great in a man but in a woman it’s gross and scary and emasculating.

In an essay published on Friday, writer and editor Ciro Scotti compares Gillibrand to “another New York politician criticized for basing her positions on supposedly canny calculations rather than on from-the-gut convictions,” and says she doesn’t appear “genuine” enough to run against Trump.

Ah what a funny coincidence that they both happen to be women. What are the odds, eh? Especially when female politicians are so outnumbered by the male kind?

All politicians are opportunistic; it’s practically a job requirement. But Scotti falls back on the same old, tired, lizard-brained and misogynistic argument that people used against Hillary Clinton: That ambitious women are off-putting. Not only that, he seems to say, Gillibrand is especially unappealing, because she seized political opportunities at the expense of men. The horror!

There are valid criticisms to be made about Gillibrand as a candidate, and I’m sure they will be over the course of the next three years. As Scotti’s op-ed confirms though, the road to 2020 will be long, tiresome, and full of sexist garbage — not that you’d thought otherwise.

Backward and in high heels, I tell you.