So we are to believe Al Franken is a serial groper who likes to grope while being photographed

[Igel]

14. We're told we have to believe that about other men.

And if we make excuses or even hesitant in condemnation, we're denigrating women kind everywhere in a manner most vile. That, of course, makes us accomplices and sexist ourselves, worthy of condemnation.

I had a mentor in grad school who pursued a line of academic research that was perfectly allowed. Then it was found by the Great Leader to be bourgeois. He had a choice. He could inform on his colleagues. Anonymously, of course. And they'd tell him the colleagues he'd inform on. And give him the denunciations, saving him time and effort. Or he could be punished.

Officially he was punished for his bourgeois research. In what was later termed computer science. But in reality, he was punished because he refused to condemn people who were suspected of being politically unreliable. And was himself, therefore, unreliable.

He spent a while in an outlying province before the Great Leader died and he could be rehabilitated.

McCarthy went native. He used "Communist" tactics, in part. He didn't use samokritika, "self-criticism" as a means of avoiding politically or ideologically or power-grubbing threats. This was, of course, at a time when the CP USA was firmly Stalinist and employed these ideas in the furtherance of being politicheskii pravil'nyi or, as they translated it, "politically correct" or "correct when it comes to policy".

I discount anonymity. Fine, I'm being asked to believe that a stranger, a reporter I don't know and who has his/her own personal politics, is telling the absolute truth based upon a dispassionate and thorough investigation in which the primary purpose wasn't proving the claim but disproving the claim (I like how science works).

They're reporters. Most people I know who went into reporting went in with self-imposed missions and agendas. Some just for power. Some to advance some Truth. But most couldn't discern their Truth from the truth. That "ir" makes a difference.