Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: that gang rape at a Cornell fraternity party: Katha Pollitt argues it could have been stopped, if someone – some man — had bothered to intervene. But no one did. “Where were the good guys?” she asks. But first: nothing Trump is doing to win the midterms is working. Harold Meyerson will explain – in a minute.
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First up today: this week’s political update. For that, we turn to Harold Meyerson. He’s editor at large of The American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.
Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.
JW: The Democrats’ chances of winning both the House and the Senate get stronger every week. I’m now a subscriber to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, which predicts every day the chances of each party in each House of Congress. Nate Silver now predicts Democrats’ chances of winning the House at 95%, the highest ever. He predicts a 25-seat Democratic margin in the new Congress. Their chances of winning the Senate he puts at 77%. He predicts 52 Democratic senators will be elected. How does that sound to you?
HM: It sounds great. It’s quite possible that the Democrats will actually get more than 25 new House seats and five new Senate seats, which is what Nate Silver’s totals amount to. But I would gladly accept what he has. And 52 senators is actually quite important because since you can’t count on John Fetterman, 51 senators would mean that Fetterman votes the other way. Then we have a tie that JD Vance could break. So, 52 is really sort of the working minimum requirement for the Democrats in the Senate.
JW: So, these large margins in the House and the Senate, we find, despite Republican spending more than $1 billion on their campaigns. It seems Trump’s only chance of avoiding this kind of a blue wave is to mess with the voting. But the fact here is that nothing he’s tried so far has succeeded. Here’s my list of the things he’s tried that failed: Gerrymandering was approved by the Supreme Court, but that’s not going to give him a majority in the House. The scheme to enlist the Post office in screwing with mail ballots was rejected by the Supreme Court. The Senate wouldn’t pass his SAVE Act, which would have restricted voting. His demand that states hand over their voter rolls has been rejected by 26 courts and accepted by none. His mid-term convention was a flop. His current campaigning in red states has been pretty pathetic. And then there’s his promise to give every American a $5,000 check if voters keep Republicans in power. I doubt people really believe that. And through all of this, his approval ratings have gone slowly but steadily downhill. He looks weaker every day. Republican candidates see that. Judges see that. Voters see that. Am I missing something here?
HM: I think the short answer is ‘No.’ He has been thwarted at every turn. And while there’s no doubt that he’s going to contest some election results, the sheer scope of those results is outlined in Nate Silver’s predictions. His probabilities are such that it’s going to be not merely implausible, as they were in terms of the 2000 election, but also kind of just a relative drop in the bucket compared to what we’re seeing shaping up as a wave election. This is like King Canute discovering that he couldn’t stop the tide coming in. It’s sort of reaching that level of desperation for Trump. And if that’s a remotely apt analogy, he really can’t stop a tide or a wave.
JW: And now we have Trump’s attack on California voting. The Department of Justice announced in the last couple of days it is bringing charges against 28 people, it said, were non-citizens who had registered and voted. They were arrested and mostly in Los Angeles. Los Angeles County 28 cases out of how many registered voters in California?
HM: I think it’s 28 million. So even if all of them are borne out, and so far, when Trump has made these kinds of allegations, the vast majority of them have not been borne out. They’ve proved to be erroneous. But even if all of them turn out to be correct, that is literally 1 in 1,000,000, which doesn’t suggest that not only any mass illegal voting going on, but barely any infinitesimal illegal voting going on.
JW: And I would just add one more thing to that: Trump’s argument has been that the Democrats are bringing illegal aliens into the country to vote. All of these 28 people are legal, permanent residents.
HM: Plus, he claims to have stopped people coming in illegally over the past two years. So, if we’re to believe him on that, that diminishes his claim, even on his own terms.
JW: 28 arrests follow a lawsuit against the state of California from the Justice Department to force the state not to count the votes of 20,000 people whose names appear on a list the feds say, is a list of likely non-citizens who are on the voter rolls. 20,000. That’s less than in July, when Trump said there were 190,000 non-citizens on state voter rolls. So, you know, is it 190,000? Is it 20,000? or is it 28?
HM: Yeah. Well, these are figures all pulled out of a hat. It’s not much of a hat to begin with. So, you know he’s balancing what the textbooks say you have to do in terms of making a lie credible. You should go for the big lie, if that seems implausible, let’s pick another figure. That seems to be the operating method behind Trump’s claims.
JW: I don’t know how much you’ve read about the list of 20,000 names. These were on the thumb drive and the lawsuit that is now been filed in defense of mostly L.A. County, but some not in L.A. County, argued not only that the president has no authority to do this, but also that there’s no explanation of the methodology that led them to pick these 20,000 names.
HM: Well, I think that gives kind of an unfairly negative portrayal of the eenie-meenie-miny-moe methodology which the Trump administration, I think, is following. So, I mean, it’s the same bunch of critics assailing him yet again.
JW: I’m still thinking about the No Kings Vote Early day on Saturday. They say there were 3,000 events in all 50 states, and that makes No Kings Vote Early the largest single early vote activation in American history. The events I saw here in LA were both fun and had a kind of defiant feel to them. What is your assessment of the change in the strategy of the No Kings Coalition? From organizing mass protests against authoritarianism to now mass organizing for voting?
HM: Well, it’s a logical progression. And following the title of the famous Bayard Rustin paper, “From Protest to Politics” — it’s literally that. And if you know the leaders of Indivisible and the American Federation of Teachers who cooked all of this up, that was always their intention. They understood that you had to literally go from protest to politics, and that’s what they have done. And I think the signal achievement of No Kings was the original protest, because that was really the first major fight back activity early on in Trump’s second term.
As far as early voting goes, we’ve seen a lot of Democratic early voting independent of the No Kings rally record set. For instance, in Harris County, which is Houston, Texas, which certainly is a welcome development for James Talarico and other Democrats on the Texas ballot. And we know every poll has shown Democrats to be more motivated to go out and vote than Republicans are. And each successive poll of Trump’s approval rating, I think, reinforces that gap and probably indicates that gap, if anything, is growing a little wider.
JW: But there was one shadow over No Kings Vote Early. and it’s a pretty dark one. On Saturday at 1:30 in the afternoon eastern time, the peak of No Kings Vote Early activity, the main Instagram account for the No Kings coalition was frozen and taken offline by Meta. Meta is what used to be Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg’s – what should we call it? Media monster that includes Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads. The No Kings Instagram account is where we get photos and videos and updates of what’s happening at the 3,000 different places. After two hours of protest calls, Meta reactivated the account but did not restore access to the No Kings administrators, who are the authorized people who run this account? And the Instagram account of No Kings was ultimately useless on this historic day that so many thousands of people worked on.
Mark Zuckerberg: let’s remember that Mark Zuckerberg is one of these people who switched sides. After January 6th, he banned Trump from social media posts that defended the effort to overthrow the elections. But then, when Trump won the 2024 election, Meta made a $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration, paid Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit over the post-January 6th shutdown, and they also contributed $5 million to his ballroom. And you may remember, Mark Zuckerberg was on stage at the inauguration, next to the other oligarchs.
HM: What we know about Trump’s base is that it’s effectively been winnowed down to a bunch of billionaires who are really doing the only thing which could boost Republican voting in the midterms, which is spending a gazillion dollars on it–in the case of Elon Musk, nearly 400 million that we know about. But these guys are all over that. They are the core constituency. They are also the constituency for whom Trump has delivered. All of them have gotten more fabulously wealthy since Trump reoccupied the White House, which is not the case for about 90% of their fellow Americans who’ve seen their incomes not just stagnate, but begin to fall beneath the cost increases that Trump has essentially caused.
JW: So now we have a kind of new and more vivid appreciation of the power of private ownership of so much of social media. If Zuckerberg can shut down the No Kings Instagram account, you know what else could he do? And really, right now, there isn’t much of an alternative for our side. We are dependent on these kinds of privately owned media.
HM: It’s not a good situation. And of course, in terms of legacy media, you also have the Ellison’s purchase of CBS and CNN news, not to mention all the cultural institutions they’ve bought. You have Murdoch at Fox. And so, we have to both cling to what we still have and hopefully work on developing communication media of our own.
JW: The other thing that seems to be in the works now is that the liberals in Congress are going to, first of all, investigate Meta’s shutdown of the No Kings Instagram account. Senators Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen, Bernie Sanders and the House Judiciary Committee. Democrats led by Jamie Raskin and Pramila Jayapal, have said that they will hold investigations, and the next step would be some kind of federal oversight and maybe even legislation controlling what they can do and what they can’t do. That may not happen right away, but it certainly should be on the Democrats agenda.
HM: I don’t doubt that it’ll be on the Democrats agenda, the ability to enact legislation that has so much support it can override a Trump veto is very limited, however, because you need two thirds in both Houses. And so really setting up the kind of safeguards that we need requires trifecta government control. And that also means a Supreme Court that isn’t at the beck and call of, if not Trump himself, at least the Republican Party, which it has become – the most effective branch of government defending Republican interests. So, they need that. But look, they can summon Zuckerberg. They can hold them in contempt if he doesn’t show up, they can do a lot to expose the oligarchs who are not exactly at this juncture, a trusted group of folks by the American public. And they’re becoming, I think, less so with each passing day.
JW: And it’s even possible that these people who have knelt to power will see Trump’s waning power and the Democrats’ growing power and become a little less enthusiastic about doing Trump’s work for him.
HM: Yeah. Having flipped already several times, we know they’re constitutionally pliable and able to flip yet again. So, we shall see.
JW: And Trump himself did one especially ominous thing last week. That Homeland Security raid on the home of Ilhan Omar, who, of course, represents Minneapolis in Congress and of course, is a Muslim and an immigrant from Somalia. Now Trump is attempting to strip her of her citizenship so he can deport her. This actually has never happened before in American history. Even at the height of the Red Scare and the Palmer Raids, when they were deporting radicals and activists, they never deported a socialist member of Congress. So, Trump is really, dare I say, making history with this effort.
HM: Yeah. He is. I mean, Lord knows if his father could have been deported to Nazi Germany, but in any event, I mean, this is sort of the logical consequence of the coming together of the anti-immigrant, the anti-Muslim, the anti-Squad, you name it. I mean, it’s sort of a logical consequence of that. On the flip side of that, however, I think we’re about to have an election where you’re going to see a massive turn among Latino voters who supported Trump, well over 40% in the 2024 presidential election. You are going to see massive flight from that. And that sort of bolsters my contention, which I’ve written, that Stephen Miller has been really kind of a pro bono boon for the Democrats. His rage at immigrants and at non-whites has really one of the major factors given that he’s behind the deployment of ICE and the Border Patrol and their most aggressive policies, that’s been a major factor in the massive reduction in Trump’s support. So as a political strategist, he’s actually been inadvertently great for the Democrats as a human being. He is still Trump’s version of Himmler or Beria. But be that as it may he is not the kind of person you want forming government policy when Latinos represent upwards of 15% of the electorate.
JW: So, this week, we can see that Trump is going down and we can see that makes him more desperate. But his desperation doesn’t necessarily make him more dangerous. Swinging and missing does not make Trump more powerful. It convinces his congressional allies to take a step back. It convinces more judges to rebuke him forcefully. It convinces many of his former supporters to turn the page, and he’s actually been retreating a lot in the last week halting public financing for those ads that promoted himself, calling off the live streaming of the Fort Hood murderer’s execution, resuming Starlink connections to Ukraine, firing his press spokeswoman. All this suggests his string of defeats is maybe eroding his resolve. And so, as his power drains away, we are seeing the beginning of the political death spiral of the regime. My question is, where does this leave the Democrats? We need to think not just about beating him, but about what comes next. The Democratic leadership has been talking about restoring what we have lost, restoring Obamacare subsidies, Medicaid funding, vaccine research, taxing the rich, but restoring what we have lost. I don’t think is going to be enough.
HM: Well, and I don’t think the Democratic base thinks it’s going to be enough. I think we need to be talking about a vastly more progressive form of taxation that addresses the major causes of unaffordability. So universal childcare, certainly universal pre-K, universal public college, tuition-free. The revival of an even greater support for alternative sources of energy beyond fossil fuels, because we’ve seen that when the flow of fossil fuels is blocked, that leaves Americans stranded up the creek without a paddle. And so, a host of goals of policies that go beyond what Trump directly revoked is absolutely necessary. Because it’s not just Trump revulsion. What the data centers have come to represent is also a revolt against the oligarchic control of the economy. We didn’t authorize the data centers. We didn’t vote to have our power bills double or triple. You know all of this is part and parcel of Trumpism. But even apart from Trump it’s clear that the super-rich are exploiting Americans. I won’t say as never before, because they certainly did it during the late 19th and early 20th century, but at kindred levels. And that has to be addressed beyond and above, restoring specific cuts that Trump has made.
JW: Harold Meyerson – read him at prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.
HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about the gang rape at that fraternity house at Cornell. For that, we turn to Katha Pollitt, poet, essayist and award-winning columnist for The Nation. We reached her today in Berlin. Katha, welcome back.
Katha Pollitt: Hi, Jon. Thanks for having me on the show.
JW: A brief reminder of what happened with that Cornell gang rape at the Chi Phi frat house in October 2024, two years ago: the woman we know as Jane Doe was a sophomore at Cornell. She went to a party at the Chi Phi fraternity house. She says she was pressured into snorting ketamine, smoking pot and drinking alcohol until she passed out and could not consent to sex. She reported that she had been raped to the Cornell University police a couple of weeks later. And what did she say had happened at that fraternity party?
KP: She said she went to the frat. She was already kind of drunk. I have to say, Jon, to me, an underplayed element in this story is the drinking and drugs aspect. She had had I think it was ten, nine or ten units of alcohol before she arrived there. Now I will tell you, and all the millions listening out there, I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I mean, that is a lot. I would have thrown up all over you and the 10 million if I had done that. I don’t think a person who drinks that much – it was three hours – that she is really in a state to consent to sex. But maybe this is a minority opinion. But that’s what I think.
And then she had a whole lot of ketamine with these guys. And I barely know what ketamine is. But it’s illegal. And that’s another aspect. I have to say that both of these things are illegal. I mean, what is this? What? What are colleges doing? If you’re under 21, it’s illegal to drink. And yet these places are awash with alcohol. And ketamine is a prescription drug. And if you don’t have a prescription for it, it’s illegal. So, to me, there’s a very unexplored aspect of campus culture here.
So anyway, she goes to the frat to see her friend, and her friend, who is not such a friend, says, “oh, well, let’s drink some more and have some ketamine. And why don’t we have a threesome with my friend who you’ve never met?” Okay, she apparently may have said, and things went on from there. Yeah.
JW: What I heard about the threesome was that she was intrigued by the idea that she would get to see these two guys having sex with each other, and that was part of her interest in being in a threesome.
KP: Well, I feel terribly sorry for her. Clearly this was not what she had expected to happen. But anyway, they do whatever they did for a while. And then one of these young men, Jonathan Newell, Snapchats the 57 plus members of his fraternity saying, “free sex up here. Come on and get it.” That is the most shocking part, because nobody – these were people who, with no risk to themselves, could have just called the campus police or gone up there and said, ‘what the hell is going on here?’ Nobody did that. And that just tells you so much about this so-called bro brotherhood culture of fraternities. Then things started seriously to go south, and she was disassociating. She was hiding under the blankets. And people just kept, showing up and doing whatever they did. I just find this so horrible.
JW: And then for a week or so, she didn’t talk about this very much. And finally, she was convinced that she had been assaulted and went to the campus police and told them, “I can say with 100% confidence I was raped.” And that statement did not make it into the six-page summary that the police gave to the district attorney. So, the district attorney said there was no evidence and didn’t bring any charges against the men involved.
KP: Right. In journalism, we learn to ask the follow up question, don’t we? And this district attorney could have said, ‘wait a minute. So why did she go to the police? What is she charging?’ He could have interviewed people. He could have done all kinds of things. No. He said, “oh, this is all fine. This is, never mind.” And I think that around this story is the implication that there was – I don’t want to call it a cover-up, but there was a massaging of the whole situation to exempt the school.
JW: Yeah. And let’s talk about the school here for a minute. So, she also filed a complaint. The same complaint, of course, went to the school’s Title IX office. And they are very defensive now. They say they held a number of hearings. They took evidence, they interviewed people, and they did punish some people. What were the punishments?
KP: Oh yeah. This is great. So, the two men who organized this, they were expelled and one of them fled to Dubai, where his parents live and work. Then some of the others were suspended and can come back. And I think they have come back. And then some of the others had to get this, write reflective essays. I would give anything to see these essays. I wonder if they put that through an AI program. They even wrote them themselves. I mean, give me a break. Reflective essays. ‘I will not rape. Rape is bad.’ I mean, really, what? ‘I now realize rape is bad. I thought I had some doubts before, but now I’m pretty sure rape is bad.’ It’s this sickening. And apparently this reflective essay business is a common practice. And now we have her filing a civil complaint because people are saying, ‘oh, this will never fly in in court.’ And that’s probably true. I mean, that may well be true. I should say not being a lawyer, it may well be true because among whatever other reasons there are in New York state, as in many other states, apparently, if you drink voluntarily, if you’re not being secretly given a Mickey Finn or whatever, if you get intoxicated voluntarily, you cannot say “I didn’t consent.” It’s like that drink means ‘I consent.’ Now I wonder which sex thought of that. And there have been the most shocking cases in New York state, which we all think is so blue and progressive, where I wrote about one a few years ago, where a woman was so drunk she could hardly stand up, and two policemen take her up to her room and have their way with her. And they said, “oh, it’s all consensual. We were counseling her.” We were counseling her. I wonder what they said. And this went to court, and the cops were found not guilty because there is this rule. And that is why people are saying she could not have prevailed in a criminal case. But in a civil case, the rules are very different.
JW: So, she sued seven men, accusing them of sexual assault. And lawyers for at least three of them have denied criminal wrongdoing. The others have not made public statements. She’s also suing the school and she’s suing her sorority. This is pretty interesting. As a sophomore, she had a big sister in the sorority who was kind of her mentor and advisor on what sorority girls are supposed to do. The big sister said to her a few days after the events, that there were rumors circulating that she was “a slut,” and she told investigators at the school that Jane Doe, the victim, responded with a laugh and said, “unfortunately, the rumors are true.” So, what do you make of the role of the sorority and of her state of mind at this point?
KP: The sororities are all involved in the whole drinking culture, drinking and pleasing men culture that the fraternities are in. And she was taken by, I think it was her house, mother or whatever they call that person, to a bar after she had the ten drinks. Or maybe it was by that point, only 8, or 7 or 8. And she said, “oh, I’ll drive you to the bar.” And so, she drives her to the bar. And there at the bar, they give you some kind of a stamp on your hand that says, don’t serve this underage drunken person liquor. But they did. So, she’s suing the bar also. And, I mean, I can see how it looks. It might look like, oh, you’re looking around for someone to blame for decisions that you made. Well, these are underage kids. I’ll stop there. These are underage kids and they’re drunk. I can promise you, if this was men, the fact that they were drunk would be completely exculpatory. But it doesn’t work that way for women.
JW: And your big point is that the rationale for traditional gender roles is that men’s responsibility is to protect women, that women need protection and that they need men to protect them. And you point out that’s not really what happened at the Chi Phi fraternity.
KP: Yeah. I just want to read you a little bit from Chi Phi Statement of Mission or whatever they call it. So. Okay. It’s Building Better Men” all in caps “through lifelong friendships, leadership opportunities, and character development” And then, I say, “if gang-raping a drunk girl high on ketamine counts as ‘building better men through lifelong friendships,’ I guess our future is in good hands.” I mean, these places are disgusting. And not only that, I will say, too, that Cornell has a whole history that – people have actually died being hazed and so drunk they fall into the gorge and all that, all associated with fraternities.
JW: And I have the statistics from – these are from USA Today – at Cornell from 2018 to 2024. The Title IX office received over 1200 complaints of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence and stalking. This is a six-year period at one school, Cornell, 1200 cases. That’s 200 a year. Let’s do a little math. If the school year is eight months, that’s 25 cases every month. It’s almost one every day at Cornell. Now, of the 1200 complaints over this six-year period, Cornell filed charges in 162 cases and found against the accused in 51 of the cases. And almost all of these led to what the school calls minor sanctions. What do you think the minor sanctions are?
KP: Writing some essays, I think.
JW: Reflective essays.
KP: Reflective. Reflective essays. The English department has a lot of work to do. In only 4% of the cases reported were the accusations upheld. So that’s pretty shocking. That sort of means well, in 96% of the cases reported to us, we think the woman was lying or, nothing happened or this is beyond our jurisdiction, whatever, I don’t know. But that’s astonishing that that’s like nothing. So, it really is like, you can rape somebody, and you have a very, very good chance of getting away with it.
JW: So, all this so far that we’ve been talking about has been about Cornell. Then there’s another part of the story, which The New York Times did a great job reporting and put on page one, which is the story of the online campaign to unmask Jane Doe. It started with one guy writing on X, formerly Twitter. “Please help me discover the Cornell girl.” This guy turns out to be a young neo-Nazi who posts about a lot of interesting topics. And in the end, 11,000 accounts made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her! That is frightening.
KP: It is frightening. And in fact, one of the worst things that happened there was that her parents were swatted. Do you know what that is?
JW: Swatting. For those who don’t know:
KP: Swatting takes place when a person calls in a false report of something very serious going down, to a police department, and then the police department has to show up, guns drawn. And that’s what happened. And there have been cases actually where people have been seriously injured and terrible things have happened because of this nonsensical swatting. And you just really wonder what is happening in this country, where it’s just people are so eager to use the internet to use the online resources to cause terrible, terrible, destructive things to happen to other people. But this was in this case, it was all about, ‘yeah, let’s find out who this Jane Doe is and make her life really miserable.’
JW: So, the university, in an effort to make up for its previous failures in this, it’s bringing in Sally Yates to investigate for the university. And the governor is appointing Tish James, the heroic attorney general of New York, to investigate whether there’s any criminal issues that can be brought to criminal court. Is this a good thing?
KP: Well, I think it is. I think we have to have something outside the internal bureaucracy of Cornell taking action here since they’ve been proven to be so ineffective and self-protective. I want to say another thing, which is I got an email from an old classmate of mine, Cheney. Ryan Cheney. Ryan is a professor of philosophy at Oxford. And he said to me, he wrote to me that the purpose of the Title IX office on campus is not to enforce Title IX, as Cornell claims. It’s to protect the University from charges of negligence. And since he says to me, “most universities are negligent in some way, in these cases, they’re very afraid of being held legally liable.” So then, if that’s true, the aim of the Title IX director is to downplay or ignore the incidents so as to shield the administration from legal action, and that will be their main goal. And then, “this is why” he writes, “when students came to me who’d been assaulted, I took them immediately to a local attorney who specialized in these matters and didn’t bother with the university’s procedures.” So, I don’t know if that’s a solution, but something really has to change. And I think the thing that has to change is taking women seriously? That not just saying, “oh, fraternities? Well, yeah, that’s the way they are,” but really cracking down. But I’m a carceral feminist, so there it is.
JW: What do you mean you’re “carceral feminist”?
KP: I mean, I think that I think that punishing men or people in general for the bad things they do is okay. I think that’s good. I don’t think writing a reflective essay or a meeting with a victim and saying how sorry you are and how all this, I think that’s all nonsense. I don’t think those people are sorry. We can see that in the way that after the event, the first guy she was with, he calls her, “I just wanted to see how you are because there are rumors going around and I try to shut them down when I hear them” – but that’s not true. He started them. He was the person who placed the Snapchat “come and get it” post. So, he was in there from the very beginning. And now he’s saying, “oh, I’m trying to protect you.”
And then she – and this is so tragic because she is like so many women protective of men. And what is it called, man tending, where you figure out what the man needs and try to give it to him. And she says, “oh, if you’re feeling bad, you please call me. And we can talk about it.” What’s really sad is that, yes, it took her a great big three weeks for the penny to drop and for her to realize what had happened. And now people are saying, “oh, she waited forever.” I don’t think three weeks is very long to put it all together and go to the police.
JW: Katha Pollitt. You can read her column on the Cornell gang rapes at thenation.com, and you can subscribe to her new Substack. It’s called “Letters from Katha.” Katha, thanks for talking with us today.
KP: Thanks so much for having me, Jon. It’s always wonderful to talk to you.