A recent New York Times report alleges that Cesar Chavez used and abused girls and women, and on today’s edition of The Editors, Charlie reminds listeners “that everyone who has views on sexual assault and the threshold beyond which one should believe accusations of sexual assault ought to remain consistent.”

“Yes, this looks bad,” says Charlie. “It is difficult in cases where the alleged action happened a long time ago to know definitively. . . . There is a reason that in the law we have statutes of limitation on such things. So I am inclined to think something bad happened here, but I’m going to be my usual small-l liberal self and be careful with it.”

Charlie says that those who generally approved of Chavez don’t often have this same view, however: “That hasn’t been their operating view for years now. In fact, we went through a period loosely described as Me Too, in which any accusation or suggestion or hint . . . was a professional death sentence.”

“If we’re going to have that standard,” Charlie says, “then it ought to be applied consistently. It’s the incoherence, the sense that some people get one treatment and others get another treatment that drives people crazy.”

“I am not here to pretend that progressives are uniquely bad at this. I am, though, going to insist that they hold themselves to their standard, and if they are here then, well, okay fair enough.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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