Matt Gaetz is a 38 year old Florida Republican Congressman that could best be described as possibly the Trumpiest person in Congress. He bucks his dumb party on issues of endless wars in the middle east, the drug war at home, restrictions on free speech and civil liberties, and dunks on the Left with the same snarky “merry prankster” jovial tone that has strong Andrew Breitbart vibes. That makes him a threat to the establishment of both parties, and with the OrangeOne out of politics, Gaetz is one of the top targets for those Cathedral types who don’t want him to be a part of the national dialogue.
At the end of March 2021, the New York Times reported anonymous leaks accusing him of having had sex with a minor, maybe having paid for it, and doing drugs. Gaetz immediately denied it all and revealed some cuckoo-bananas details surrounding the investigation, asking the Department of Justice to reveal even further details that he says exonerates him.
So what is really going on here? The reality is that nobody really cares. His haters are blindly claiming everything alleged (plus a lot of tangential claims not even alleged) are obviously true and his supporters are blindly calling it a Deep State coup against him. I don’t have any special report on whether any of the claims about him are true, but what I find interesting are the uncontested details of how the corporate media and social media bias swarms are using it as a textbook smear operation. Whether or not there is something legitimate to smear, I don’t know, and find endlessly less interesting than the known facts of how this report continues to be used (a week and a half after the story broke, at the time of this writing) to take Gaetz down and you don’t have to like Gaetz to find it interesting as well.
Using the appearance of impropriety to defame or criminally prosecute people you don’t like is the oldest Statist tactic in the system, but usually it’s over something completely stupid like “Donald Trump isn’t releasing his tax returns to the public” or when they successfully took down the Republican Governor of Virginia with bribery accusations (that the Supreme Court later threw out as total bullcrap, after the damage had been done) who was a rising-star until his Democrat enemies were able to use interpretations of the law that made a credible possibility that he’d serve jail time over a nothingburger. When you can make the accusations sound actually repugnant, however (read: something sexual that implies a layer of abuse as well), then that’s when you’ve got a quality smear on your hands.
The allegations against Gaetz, explained
As stated, last month The New York Times reported on a possible DOJ probe into Gaetz and citations of that report got an unusually high volume of traction on social media for how vague and unsubstantiated the details of the investigation are, raising more red flags than the allegations themselves if viewed through a media analysis lens and not just a “can I find an excuse to defame someone I hate?” lens.
The saucy part here was that Gaetz was “under investigation over possible sex trafficking” of a minor – a claim that the Times‘ own reporting failed to ever substantiate or support in any way, then later downplayed in a follow-up report. The investigation, per the Times reporting, was actually over an alleged consensual relationship with an anonymous 17-year-old girl who was not alleged to have been under any duress or threat or any other detail of having been sex trafficked in any way. The Times reported that the FBI stopped questioning the unidentified women involved back in January and acknowledged that “no charges have been brought against Mr. Gaetz”, but they use the term “sex trafficking” despite any evidence of coercion. Super weird.
The use of this horrible term, that typically describes a horrible legal and moral crime, set his many critics and haters ablaze in hopes that they are either true or just glee in the ability to act like they are in the meantime. The actual facts of the case however, started as murky, and then just kept getting reframed to lesser and more convoluted offenses.
Another guy whom Gaetz knows is alleged to be shadier and have a history of facilitating “sugar baby” relationships or something, but “knowing a shady/creepy dude” is a guilt by association fallacy so that too raises questions on the use of these suggestions in service to defame rather than to inform.
Anatomy of a Smear
As the initial salacious claims about “sex trafficking” actually being “not that at all” and the 17 year old part having no evidence other than an anonymous source, the narrative began to crumble a little bit but the common response on social media was a “yea, but still…” argument that just because The NY Times appears to have used a fake claim as the central point of their report, doesn’t mean that the rest of it (potentially paying for someones travel so they will have sex with you – plus still keeping alive the “and maybe she was 17, if this actually happened – we don’t know” part) is okay.
These critics shouldn’t be let off the hook so easy. The original claim, and phrase that was all over Twitter in particular, was “sex trafficking” and there is zero evidence of any such thing ever even being alleged. It was just included in the original Times report through a convoluted loophole that i’ll show you their explanation for in a minute. But “sex trafficking” is a term with a legal definition that is not supported by the Times piece. The claim the anonymous sources made is that Gaetz is accused of having a consensual sexual relationship with a 17 year old in a state where that’s a legal thing to do – but it’s “sex trafficking” because he allegedly paid for her travel. Not advisable and maybe a really bad thing to do, but not exactly kids in a Wayfair cabinet. Also just not what sex trafficking is, even loosely defined. The Times sort of acknowledges this, but justifies their lie through a strange loophole of a claim that even when sex trafficking doesn’t take place, it can be accused if something different takes place. Kindov like saying “We are reporting that Mr Smith is under investigation for robbery. He is not accused of taking anything that wasn’t his, but if prosecutors think they can prove that he arrived at the store by taking a ride sharing service in a county where those are banned from use, then they could accuse Mr Smith of robbing the store”.
Sounds really stupid, right? Sounds like something I would absolutely have to be grossly misinterpreting or just making up to make the Times look bad, no? Read the admission for yourself. From the Times:
It is not illegal to provide adults with free hotel stays, meals and other gifts, but if prosecutors think they can prove that the payments to the women were for sex, they could accuse Mr. Gaetz of trafficking the women under “force, fraud or coercion.” For example, prosecutors have filed trafficking charges against people suspected of providing drugs in exchange for sex because feeding another person’s drug habit could be seen as a form of coercion.
Some of Gaetz’s haters refused to go along with the re-defining of what “sex trafficking” means in order to score points on someone they hate:
To recap, Gaetz was accused of: Knowing a shady guy; having a sexual relationship with a 17 year old; paying for her travel (which was sneakily called “sex trafficking”); and maybe taking MDMA.
Gaetz’s Response, Denial, & Defense:
Gaetz says he’s never had a relationship with anyone who was 17 and that such a person doesn’t exist and they’re just smearing and then attempted to extort him, demanding $25 million from his dad “in exchange for making horrible sex trafficking allegations against me go away”, as he told Tucker Carlson.
On April 1st, Gaetz linked to an article with details of the alleged extortion plot in his denial of the claims made against him:
At the time of this writing, the details are still unfolding about what is verifiably true regarding either sides accusations of the other, but we do know that the extortion thing was real for a few reasons: One being that there is a paper trail of Gaetz reporting the extortion attempt:
The congressman further said about the matter the day prior (as reports of the allegations were still unfolding):
Further: the extortion plot against Gaetz was confirmed the same day as the allegations against him.
A week later, more confirmations that Gaetz was being extorted, including from the person alleged to be extorting him.
In a follow-up Times article on the Department of Justice probe, the allegations against Gaetz were reduced from having been with a 17-year-old – who again, Gaetz denies and says no such person even exists for which to make such a claim – to a much lesser and much more speculative claim and tone. And just like the initial Times story, their follow up report is delivered entirely through anonymous “people close to the investigation” with no sources named, official statements, or documents related.
So, while it’s not my job to attack or defend the Congressman, and I won’t venture to try out either direction – the smear attempt is clear as the Times would and should have framed all these details in far different journalistic language and notation of its speculative nature if the intended thesis was not to defame Gaetz with the charges.
Why they’re going after Gaetz
With the smear so evident, you might ask why. Is there any doubt that this is only a frenzy because he is an effective voice for the right?
I lead this piece describing Gaetz as “the Trumpiest person in Congress” – Which means he’s also a threat to the establishment of both parties, like Trump since he is an upbeat sort of merry prankster in his delivery and is always making snarky comments that get peoples attention and the things he gets their attention to are the red pill type issues the establishment doesn’t want talked about (endless wars in the Middle East, how the government colluding with big banks is totally stealing everyones time and labor, how the drug war is bullshit, etc).
If that analysis is wrong, then why have none of his critics been able to substantiate these claims despite using the worst-imaginable terms to describe them, that then keep getting leveled down in severity as details are revealed? Journalism that sloppy is virtually always intentional. It puts out fragments of the truth for the purpose of muddying the waters around a person or issue and gives that person or issues critics the ammunition to extrapolate into whatever their imagination can conjure.
When sex acts or their allegations are attack-worthy or not (according to Democrats)
#MattGaetzisapervert was trending on Twitter for a day, and hundreds of tweets invented details and conclusions not reported by the Times or any other source. To a degree, that is understandable since, for the people who hate Gaetz – why give him any benefit of any doubt? But since the details keep showing nothing heinous they can pin him with, his Progressive critics have to resort to 1950s style Conservative notions of sex to smear him with.
The Lefts unabashed defense of Bill Clintons several admitted affairs, dismissals of the rape and assault claims against him, and of course the most famous sexual misconduct by a man in power in the past 200 years – the White House Intern “sexual relations” he had in the White House, lied to the public about, perjured himself under oath about, had his administration publicly attack/pressure/&smear an intern over, and then admitted when his seaman was found on one of her dresses.
While the Right, with their adorable and antiquated sense of honor and goal of consistency always thinks they’re being so righteous and clever by pointing out the hypocrisy of the Left – the Left openly flaunts it. In this case, they never made a secret of the fact that they selectively use sexual misconduct as a smear while giving zero fkks about it when their power players are caught dirty-handed.
Nina Burleigh, the former White House correspondent for Time Magazine who covered the Clinton White House once famously said that she would be “happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”
It may not be an effective tactic to point out, but it’s still noteworthy here with Gaetz. Raheem Kassam pointed exactly this hypocrisy out by pulling a repeat of that same laughable Clinton defense, this time in a recent context from former Times editorial board member Gail Collins who “suggested ex President Bill Clinton was entitled to a defense over his sexual exploits because he grew the U.S. economy”…
Writing in The New York Times, Collins’s article literally states:
“Nancy Pelosi once defended President Bill Clinton after he got an intern to fellate him in the Oval Office,” Gaetz argued in an opinion piece in The Washington Examiner. This is true, and we would hope the congressman gets the same kind of loyal support the very second he presides over one of the longest economic expansions in American history.
In other words: as soon as we like you, *then* and only then, are you entitled to a defense over accusations you may have not even done. As if Nancy Pelosi’s defense of Bill Clinton’s abuse of power for sex on the job in the White House was because he “presided over” (a way to make “was president during” sound more kingly in a context when talking about him doing the nasties) a time when the Republican House controlled economic bills and .com boom led to a good economy. lol.
Again – none of the allegations against Gaetz are, at the time of this writing, officially public, and again – Gaetz claims that no under-18 person he’s had any relationship with exists to be able to make such a claim about him (and no one has shown any evidence otherwise).
One needn’t go back to the late 90s to find a Democrat accused of sexual impropriety that Democrats don’t treat seriously, however. Even ignoring the credible accusations against sitting Democratic President Joe Biden, the current Democratic Governor of New York is in the same position. Some pointed it out –
Developing…