It’s been a long week since the Washington Post first reported allegations that Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore had molested a 14-year-old girl. The allegations have since grown, and the Post reported last night that two more women have said Moore pursued them at the mall when they were teenagers. In a particularly telling anecdote, one of the women describes being taken out of class to take a call from Moore:
I said ‘Hello?’ And the male on the other line said, ‘Gena, this is Roy Moore.’ I was like, ‘What?!’ He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m in trig class.’
Moore’s habit of attempting to pick up teenage girls has been a regular news item since the Post’s report that he had pursued four 14 to 18-year-old teens when he was in his early 30s. A fifth woman alleged he sexually assaulted her when she was 16, and the New Yorker reported that his behavior led him to be banned from the mall, which apparently is a place where grown men prey on girls, just like your mother warned you when you were a kid. Thanks, Mom!
Despite calls for him to drop out of the race, Moore has made it clear he intends to ride this out, and yesterday, his attorney held a press conference that involved lying in an effort to discredit one of his client’s accusers.
Meanwhile, Moore seems to have maintained support from the far right. I wrote yesterday about Fox News and other sites picking up an item from People that put a sex offender in a positive light, suggesting bizarre shifts in some Americans’ attitudes on sex crimes against minors.
Speaking of Fox News: This long read from Newsweek gets into the history of the network, the role it has played in the election of President Donald Trump and his administration, as well as Fox’s culture of sexual harassment and misconduct.
One memorable quote in the piece comes from Republican strategist Rick Wilson: “As the country has devolved into increasingly hermetic ideological silos, Fox has constantly reassured the GOP base that their support of Trump still makes them conservatives, even though he’s an authoritarian statist with poor impulse control and lacks a conservative bone in his body. It’s made them billions and cost the GOP its soul.”
Now, some important elephant news: The Trump administration aims to nix an Obama administration ban on bringing elephant trophies into the U.S. from Zimbabwe and Zambia. The Fish and Wildlife Service issued a statement that hunting can help the conservation of animals, a concept that would probably make some sense if the animal being hunted in this case wasn’t an endangered species. Just between 2007 and 2014, the number of elephants in 18 African countries dropped by about a third.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
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