Startups that launched today at Y Combinator’s S18 Demo Day 2

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney, told a federal court in Manhattan on Tuesday that he broke the law at Trump’s behest during the 2016 campaign, paying off two women with whom the president had extramarital affairs so that they wouldn’t damage his electoral prospects. And it only got worse for Trump from there.

Cohen’s admission, which came as part of a plea agreement struck with federal prosecutors, places the president within arm’s reach of criminal activity during the election. Cohen pleaded guilty to eight charges, including five counts of tax evasion, one count of making a false statement to a bank, and two counts related to violating campaign-finance laws. He was released on $500,000 bail and will be sentenced at a later date.

In a coincidence that would have been too blunt for Hollywood screenwriters, Cohen’s guilty plea came within minutes of a Virginia jury’s verdict in the trial of Paul Manafort. The jurors found the former Trump campaign chairman guilty on eight of the eighteen charges against him: five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failing to register a foreign account. While the jury failed to reach a verdict on the other ten charges, Manafort’s conviction marks a significant victory for Robert Mueller, the special counsel in the Russia investigation.

Tuesday’s news cycle only underscored the legal peril faced by members of Trump’s inner circle. Rick Gates, his former deputy campaign chairman, testified against Manafort at that trial as part of a plea deal he struck with Mueller’s office this spring. George Papadopoulos, Trump’s former foreign-policy aide, is facing six months in prison after the special counsel told a federal judge last week that he hindered the Russia investigation. And Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security advisor, filed a joint report with Mueller’s office on Tuesday afternoon to delay sentencing for lying to the FBI because his cooperation was still ongoing.

The whirlwind of legal proceedings is now closer to the president than ever before. The risk now is that he delivers a proportionate counterattack. For more than a year, Trump has sought to undermine the investigations into himself and his allies at every turn. He has repeatedly condemned the inquiries as a partisan “witch hunt.” He has accused prosecutors of trying to overturn the 2016 election. He has conducted a slow-rolling purge of the FBI’s upper ranks, and threatened to fire both Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

As Trump arrived in West Virginia late on Tuesday afternoon, he again described the investigation as a “witch hunt,” saying of the Manafort verdict, “This has nothing to do with Russian collusion.” He had no comment on the Cohen case.

"Nothing to do with Russian collusion, continue with the witch hunt." Trump briefly talks Manafort; mum on Cohen. pic.twitter.com/8x8YswReFQ

Lanny Davis, Cohen’s attorney, said of his client in a statement on Twitter, “Today he stood up and testified under oath that Donald Trump directed him to commit a crime by making payments to two women for the principal purpose of influencing an election. If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

Cohen’s legal woes began in April when federal investigators raided his office, home, and hotel room and seized a vast amount of evidence, including thousands of pages of business and tax records. The raid was an extraordinary move by any standard. Justice Department rules impose significant hurdles on federal prosecutors who seek to search lawyers’ offices, no matter the reason. A search warrant application targeting the president’s personal attorney apparently drew even greater scrutiny from the department: The New York Times later reported that Rosenstein personally approved the search.

Trump responded to news of the raid with fury. “It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense,” he told reporters during a meeting with his national-security advisers. “It’s an attack on what we all stand for.” At the time, Cohen’s lawyer told reporters that the investigation had spun out of a referral from Mueller’s office. The referral suggested that Mueller’s team discovered potential evidence of criminal behavior that went beyond the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

The charges against Cohen cover two aspects of his professional life. In addition to his work for the Trump Organization, Cohen also managed an eclectic, shadowy portfolio of investments and side businesses. Federal prosecutors zeroed in on his investments in taxi medallions in New York City. In court filings on Tuesday, prosecutors said that Cohen underreported more than $4 million of income derived from leasing the medallions to taxi operators.

At the same time, Cohen used his medallions as collateral to obtain a $20 million line of credit from a bank. He then sought loans from two other banks, one in 2013 and the other in 2015, by misleading them about the scope of his medallion-related debts. In one instance, he told a bank that he had closed out the original line of credit when he had actually overdrawn it.

“Michael Cohen is a lawyer who, rather than setting an example of respect for the law, instead chose to break the law, repeatedly over many years and in a variety of ways,” Robert Khuzami, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said on Tuesday. “His day of reckoning serves as a reminder that we are a nation of laws, with one set of rules that applies equally to everyone.”

The other aspect of Cohen’s case hits closer to home for the president. In addition to his work as the Trump Organization’s general counsel, Cohen worked for more than a decade as the president’s legal fixer. In that capacity, he negotiated multiple hush-money agreements with women who had sexual relationships with Trump.

The first one was struck through American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer tabloid, and its chairman David Pecker. The company, with Cohen’s help and payment, offered Karen McDougal $150,000 in the summer of 2016 to not go public about her affair a decade earlier with Trump, who was then the Republican presidential nominee. The arrangement counted as an in-kind campaign contribution because it was made to further Trump’s chance of being elected president.

Cohen then struck a similar arrangement with Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels. Cohen said that at Trump’s direction, he paid Clifford $130,000 in October 2016 in exchange for her signature on a non-disclosure agreement that covered her sexual relationship with Trump in 2006. Federal prosecutors told the court that Cohen “made the payments described herein in order to influence the 2016 presidential election.” The payments worked—neither woman went public about their sexual relationships with Trump until after the election—but they also exceeded federal campaign contribution limits.

The plea deal did not include a provision requiring Cohen to cooperate with investigators in other cases. That may come as something of a relief to the Trump White House. As the full scale of Cohen’s legal situation became apparent earlier this year, the president and his aides reportedly thought that it could pose a greater political and legal threat to the president than Mueller’s inquiry into Russian election interference.

Whether Cohen’s lack of cooperation with prosecutors will provide any comfort to the president himself remains to be seen. By pleading guilty to the campaign-finance violation, Cohen effectively admits that he participated in an illegal effort to evade federal election laws in the hopes of bolstering Trump’s campaign. It’s unclear whether Trump himself faces greater legal exposure as a result—either now or years from now. There’s an unsettled debate over whether the Justice Department can indict a sitting president, as unlikely as it would be, but there would be no constitutional obstacle to charging Trump after he leaves office.

For more than a year, President Donald Trump has railed against the Russia investigation as a partisan “witch hunt” organized by his political enemies to bring down his administration. Twelve jurors in Alexandria, Virginia, sent a message of their own on Tuesday by finding Paul Manafort guilty on eight counts: Here be witches.

Trump’s former campaign chairman was found guilty on five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failing to register a foreign account. Judge T.S. Ellis III announced a mistrial on 10 other counts.

Tuesday’s conviction marks a significant milestone in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. His office has secured several guilty pleas so far, pacing it ahead of other major investigations like Watergate and Whitewater. But Tuesday’s verdict marks the first time that a trial jury—twelve American citizens—sat in judgment of Mueller’s prosecution. Though they failed to reach a consensus on ten charges, for which Mueller can seek a new trial, securing convictions on eight charges marks a significant victory for his team.

Manafort’s trial didn’t directly touch upon Russian election interference, and the acts for which he was convicted all took place before his tenure as Trump’s campaign chairman in 2016. Nonetheless, the verdict is a blow to Trump. The president has worked tirelessly to discredit the Russia investigation and everyone involved in it. He fired FBI Director James Comey last year, reportedly tried to fire Mueller himself twice, has urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself and shut down the inquiry, and has effectively purged the FBI of its senior leadership from when the probe began. By finding Manafort guilty on some counts but not others, the jury effectively refuted Trump’s claims that the system is rigged against him and his allies.

What’s more, an eerily simultaneous series of events in New York City on Tuesday compounded the political damage for the president. Michael Cohen, the president’s former personal attorney, struck a plea agreement with federal prosecutors and pleaded guilty to eight counts of fraud-related charges—including the violation of campaign-finance laws by organizing a hush-money payment for Stephanie Clifford, the adult film actress known as Stormy Daniels, during the election. That plea effectively places the president within arm’s reach of criminal activity during his own election.

For Manafort himself, the conviction caps a spectacular fall from political grace for the 69-year-old political operative, who led the Republican presidential nominee’s campaign only two summers ago. Before joining Trump’s team, Manafort cut his teeth in Washington, D.C., as a political lobbyist before turning his attention to consulting for political campaigns overseas. Trump turned to him in the spring of 2016 as the Republican National Convention neared.

At the heart of the government’s case were Manafort’s finances and how he acquired them. The vast sum of his wealth flowed from his work as a consultant for pro-Moscow political parties in Ukraine. Prosecutors said Manafort earned more than $60 million for his labors in the eastern European country, which he then channeled through foreign bank accounts to evade taxes and other regulatory scrutiny. “Mr. Manafort lied when he had money and lied to get more money when he didn’t,” Greg Andres, the lead prosecutor in the Manafort trial, told the jury in his closing arguments. “This is a case about lies.”

By hiding the scope of his wealth from the government, prosecutors said, Manafort was able to furnish a lavish lifestyle for himself and his family. Jurors received details on all manner of luxurious purchases: a $2 million home in northern Virginia, one of the nation’s wealthiest regions, as well as clothes and accessories that ranged from the indulgent (a $21,000 watch) to the eccentric (a $15,000 ostrich jacket). Manafort seemed to have a fondness for expensive rugs in particular: Prosecutors said he spent more than $930,000 at an antique rug store in Alexandria.

The special counsel’s office spent the bulk of the trial walking jurors through the tangled financial world in which Manafort dwelt. Cindy Laporta, a former accountant, testified how she helped Manafort evade millions of dollars in tax penalties by classifying some of his income as loans. Heather Washkuhn, his former bookkeeper, told the court how Manafort’s lifestyle proved unsustainable by 2015 as his consulting firm’s revenue began to dry up. To make ends meet, she testified, he and his deputy Rick Gates began to misrepresent the firm’s finances to secure loans.

Gates’s involvement in Manafort’s finances played a central role in arguments made by both the prosecution and the defense. As Manafort’s longtime right-hand man, he was well placed to witness every aspect of his patron’s fiscal legerdemain. Gates, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and making false statements earlier this year, spent two days testifying before the court that he and Manafort had “committed crimes” together.

Manafort’s defense attorneys, led by veteran tax litigator Kevin Downing, painted Gates as a self-serving underling who may have actually been responsible for the crimes alleged by prosecutors. They also flensed his personal life to discredit him and his testimony. On the witness stand, Gates admitted to stealing from Manafort himself during their decade-long business relationship. The defense also pressed him to admit to multiple extramarital affairs to damage his credibility even further. Gates, for his part, adopted a mien of repentance and regret.

Tuesday’s verdict is not the end of Manafort’s legal troubles. Mueller may retry him on the 10 charges in which the jury failed to reach a verdict. In September, Manafort is also scheduled to go on trial in D.C. federal court for alleged crimes committed in that jurisdiction. Mueller’s office originally charged Manafort with money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent, both related to his consulting work in Ukraine. In June, prosecutors also added charges of witness tampering, after accusing Manafort of trying to “suborn perjury” by contacting former colleagues who may be called to testify against him.

Earlier this month, 40 Yemeni schoolchildren and 11 adults were killed by a bomb—one that has a legible genealogy. As CNN reported, it was a 500-pound laser-guided MK 82 bomb. And while Saudi Arabia was responsible for dropping it on a school bus, the United States was responsible for providing it: Lockheed Martin built the MK 82, which the U.S. sold to Saudi Arabia as part of an arms deal. America began assisting Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen in 2015, a policy approved by President Barack Obama, and there have been several mass atrocities since then. CNN said the bomb used on August 9 was “very similar” to one dropped on a funeral in October 2016, killing 155 people. (According to Human Rights Watch, pieces of a U.S.-made bomb were found at the site.) In March 2016, a Saudi attack on a Yemeni market killed 97 people. That bomb came from the U.S., too.

Saudi Arabia’s rationale for intervention is straightforward: The Sunni royal family backs the Yemeni government against the Shiite Houthi rebels, who allegedly are backed by Iran. The rationale holding a supportive coalition of Western nations together isn’t quite so clear. Nevertheless, both major political parties in America maintain an overall commitment to the policy, though their justifications for doing so differ. “The only reason that I can guess why the United States continues to arm, train, and provide essential logistical support for the air campaign in Yemen, is that this support has occurred during both Democratic and Republican administrations,” Micah Zenko recently wrote for Foreign Policy. “As we learned in Vietnam previously and Afghanistan every day, where poor strategic decisions are made and sustained by administrations of both major political parties, there is no political advantage for the party out of power to critique current policy.”

According to Zenko, based on off-the-record comments to him, Trump officials justified the policy as a means to check Iranian might. In likewise off-the-record remarks during the Obama administration, officials had cited a need to shore up international support for the Iran deal. If Zenko’s characterization is accurate, the latter excuse helps explain the politically difficult position Democrats are in today. Whatever Obama’s reasons, his failure to end America’s multi-pronged forever war led to this point—to “a litany of war crimes,” as Zenko put it. Trump took the broad strokes of Obama’s foreign policy—the Saudi military alliance in the Middle East, the continued presence of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, drone strikes in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere—and expanded them, further committing the U.S. to a policy that shows few signs of success. And he’s done so without consistent opposition from Democrats.

The Democratic Party has never been an anti-war party, and it seems unlikely to unite today around an alternative to interventionism. Ending assistance to Saudi Arabia’s campaign in Yemen would be an implicit rejection of part of Obama’s legacy, and it could demand a substantive reordering of the party’s foreign policy priorities. There’s no way to to pull out of the coalition without jeopardizing American relations with Saudi Arabia, and despite plenty of evidence that Saudi Arabia isn’t a reliable ally, the prospect of a fractious relationship with the wealthy petrostate might be enough to dissuade Democrats from changing course. Perhaps that’s why ten Senate Democrats blocked a bipartisan resolution, introduced in March by senators Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy, and Mike Lee, to pull the U.S. out of the Saudi-led coalition.

Not that Democrats are united in a commitment to Saudi Arabia. In fact, some 2020 frontrunners are taking steps to establish themselves as critics of America’s role in the coalition. The Intercept reported last week that Senator Elizabeth Warren has demanded clarification from General Joseph Votel of U.S. Central Command about his congressional testimony in March, when he told Warren that the U.S. did not track the actions of Saudi planes after the U.S. refuels them and that he did not know if Saudi forces used American-made munitions. (Further reporting by The Intercept undermined both of Votel’s claims.) Warren and Senator Kamala Harris supported the Sanders/Murphy/Lee resolution. There are signs, too, that the two senators are at least skeptical not just of American intervention in Yemen, but of the U.S. government’s military spending; all three, plus Sanders, joined seven other senators to vote against the most recent National Defense Authorization Act.

But if the Democratic Party internalizes the lessons of Yemen, it will have to do more than end munitions sales to Saudi Arabia. It will have to rethink its entire foreign policy. The war crimes in Yemen are just recent entries in an older series of interventionist failures, and previous Democratic presidents bear responsibility for the consequences. Rather than pull troops out of the war in Afghanistan, Obama kept them locked in a protracted conflict that turned 17 this year. Children born after the September 11 attacks will soon be old enough to fight in a conflict that began before they were born. Iraq, meanwhile, is a state on life support.

“Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001,” C.J. Chivers wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine. “They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.” Trump could well make the situation worse, just as he’s done in Yemen: NBC News reported on Friday that Trump has shown “renewed interest in a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to privatize the war” in Afghanistan, though the White House denied this in comments to the news channel.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is contemplating future conflicts. In its latest National Defense Strategy, the Defense Department declared that Russia and China are America’s “principal priorities”—despite Trump’s reluctance to criticize the former for its interference in U.S. elections. “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security,” the document reads. The forever war may thus expand. If it does, the Democratic Party will be complicit, unless it’s willing to reject not only the foreign policy of its last president, but also its own closely held doctrines.

It has been a banner year for corporate apologies. June’s NBA Finals, for example, featured advertisements from Wells Fargo, Facebook, and Uber that all asked their customers for forgiveness. The CEO apology tour, in which an embattled chief executive goes on a quest for absolution, has become routine, with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Starbucks’s Kevin Johnson recently marching from network to network to win back lost trust.

Twitter’s Jack Dorsey is the latest executive to embark on an apology tour. Dorsey has much to apologize for, including Twitter’s reluctance to kick hucksters, Nazis, and harassers off its platform; the ease with which Russian agents gamed the platform during the 2016 election; and the often inexplicable changes it frequently makes to its service. But in seeking to placate several different audiences at once—including conservatives who claim that Twitter is biased against their views—Dorsey is the rare case where the apologies have only made the situation worse.

The idea that Twitter and Facebook are censoring conservatives has been repeatedly pushed by right-wing media. In April, the campaign gained new legitimacy when Senator Ted Cruz questioned Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s treatment of the fast food restaurant Chick-fil-A and the Donald Trump cheerleaders Diamond & Silk. Then Trump himself suggested that Twitter was covertly preventing the tweets of right-leaning users, including RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel, from being seen by a mass audience.

Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.

In fact, McDaniel’s tweets were affected by a glitch. Twitter isn’t “shadow banning” anyone, regardless of its alleged political orientation. But the idea has nevertheless persisted, elevated by a right-wing echo chamber that has long pushed the notion that its views are being suppressed by powerful liberal elites.

Because these arguments are made in bad faith, Dorsey is in a tricky position. As the CEO of a public company whose success is dictated by engagement and growth, alienating conservatives is not a good strategy. But Dorsey has taken a bad hand and made things worse. Far from rebutting the incoherent and unsubstantiated accusations being leveled at Twitter, Dorsey has bolstered and legitimized them.

Dorsey spoke to three distinct audiences during his media tour. He sought to reassure investors concerned about the company’s overall health. He also tried to placate critics who have complained about the abundance of fake news and hate speech on Twitter. (Twitter was notably the only major tech company that did not ban InfoWars’s Alex Jones earlier this month, though it did ultimately put him on a time out for imploring his listeners to take up arms against the media.) And he spent a lot of time speaking directly to the bogus free speech concerns of conservatives.  

Dorsey tried a “kill them with kindness” strategy. Appearing on Sean Hannity’s show earlier this month, it mostly worked. Hannity is, for all his bluster, a tame and obsequious interviewer, and with Dorsey he was the proverbial dog who caught the car. “I really appreciate you coming on, because I’m sure this is probably the last thing you want to do,” he told Dorsey. Then, over the course of the interview, Dorsey argued that moderating Twitter is complicated and Hannity largely agreed with him.

Dorsey also conceded to Hannity that Twitter hasn’t “done a great job at communicating our principles, the guidelines that help us make the decisions in the first place.” As he told CNN’s Brian Stelter on Sunday: “I think people see a faceless corporation that has … they don’t assume that humans are in it, or that they’re genuine or authentic. They just assume based on what the output is.”

The problem is that no one, very much including Dorsey, seems to know what those principles are. “Being open about our own personal views and what we think about what’s happening is important,” he told Stetler, adding, “I’ll fully admit that I haven’t done enough of that.” But then Dorsey copped to a right-wing critique: “I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning,” Dorsey said. “We need to remove all bias from how we act and our policies and our enforcement and our tools.”

This is more or less what conservatives are asking him to do, all without providing any tangible evidence that Twitter’s left-leaning bias has resulted in discrimination. By acknowledging it in this way, Dorsey gave it unearned credibility—and sites like Breitbart ran with it, suggesting that Dorsey all but admitted his left-wing bias. As Vanity Fair’s Maya Kosoff argued on Monday, this only ended up “perpetuating the cycle that forces him to continually tiptoe around the right.”

Dorsey is in a tight bind. Going to bat against conservative critics would provoke a massive political backlash that his company is not prepared to handle. Meanwhile, doing nothing to combat hate speech and fake news would make Twitter even worse, provoking a different backlash. So Dorsey is trying to split the difference. The cost is that he has emboldened the right wing and only made it more difficult to clean up Twitter.

Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one in the western Pennsylvania district where Lisa Boeving-Learned, a veteran and retired police sergeant with a wife and deep family ties in the region, is running for the state legislature. In western Wisconsin, networks of local grassroots activists are supporting a female, Native American former Marine running for state assembly in a region that swung hard for Donald Trump. And in Catawba County, North Carolina—which Trump won by 38 points—three Democratic women, including the area’s first candidate from the local Hmong community, are running for slots on a five-person county commission that has been Republican since the mid-1980s.

There has been much media coverage of the women running for office in 2018. Most of it centers on their personal motivations, presuming, for instance, that these women were inspired by the #MeToo moment or threats to abortion access. But these readings oversimplify the wide range of concerns energizing women candidates and activists. Most fundamentally, they overlook the key role of new groups and grassroots networks in making campaigns viable where political professionals thought they couldn’t be. Women (and some men), activated by the current moment and aided by civic groups of their own making, are heading out—into neighborhoods, church halls, and county party committees—working to oust unresponsive incumbents and rebuild participatory democracy.

Not since the Tea Party wave in 2009 has this country seen such a sharp uptick in the creation of local groups, activists, and candidates. And for the first time in a generation, this sustained political engagement is happening on the left, not the right. Our research (conducted in part with doctoral student Leah Gose) draws on in-depth observations and surveys of grassroots organizations in eight pro-Trump counties in North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, as well as participant observation and interviews with three dozen grassroots groups in the Pittsburgh suburbs and small cities of southwest Pennsylvania. Local groups like the ones we study have revitalized existing local Democratic structures but also made it possible to cut around traditional gatekeepers, getting new candidates onto ballots and new supporters knocking on doors. This is the biggest story of the 2018 midterms—not the primary challenges from the left nor the surging poll numbers for blue candidates in red districts but the shared trend underlying both: The Democratic Party, long in retreat, is being rebuilt from below across a geographic spectrum that would have seemed impossible two years ago.

The Tea Party ultimately pulled the Republicans further toward the far right and away from the possibility of compromise. Will the new Democratic activists provoke the same result? Almost certainly not. They are, on the whole, more liberal-minded than the current, mostly Republican officeholders in their districts—but that doesn’t make them radicals. In rural areas, many are gun owners. In suburbs, they run their local Parent Teacher Organization. They are active in their churches and religious groups. And they organize vigils to protest family separation at the border, support youth who #marchforourlives against gun violence, and cheer candidates who demand health care for all. Their ideological and cultural range makes a mockery of the strategists and pundits who claim to know who Democrats’ “energized base” really is. Viewed up close, they offer little support for narratives of civil war or disarray. They’re too busy planning the next canvass.

On the eve of the 2016 election, barely half of the local Democratic committeeperson seats across the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania were filled. That’s an estimate: Party leaders were not even attentive enough to the structures of local participation to keep systematic track of whether or not they had been filled.

This was the result of a generation-long decay within the party, driven not just by broad social trends (the collapse of union membership; the decline of civic “joining,” especially in working-class communities) but by crucial, divergent national choices. In 2008, a campaign-orchestrated mass movement drove Barack Obama into the White House. But that infrastructure was left to rot. “Organizing for Obama” went through various iterations, but none kept the citizen momentum going or channeled the hands-on participation of 2008 into a newly active, widely present Democratic Party.

Since the 1970s, Republicans have done a much better job of organizing their grassroots. The GOP relies on conservative church networks, National Rifle Association affiliates, and local business groups, along with powerful networks such as the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, to give their organizing efforts shape (and cash). After Obama’s election, close to 1,000 volunteer-led Tea Party groups popped up, in all 50 states. Republican donors and activists invested heavily and reaped the electoral rewards. The Democratic failure to match their efforts produced massive state house losses (some 900 seats between 2009 and 2016) that left them unable to fight to expand Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act or fend off right-wing attacks on labor union rights, reproductive health access, education spending, and more.

Today, with the federal bench and Supreme Court remade by conservative appointments, these same state legislative bodies, which Democrats have left virtually uncontested in GOP hands, will be the policymaking frontlines for the foreseeable future. Some national groups have rushed belatedly to fill this gap, eager to talk PAC structures and campaign tech, which do matter. But bylaws and monthly meetings matter, too. From coal-country capitals like Washington, Pennsylvania, to well-heeled Westchester, New York, grassroots leaders are winning seats on county and state Democratic Party committees and calling for more transparency, more outreach, more action. This is not unlike the Tea Party eight years ago, when local groups self-organized in order to sidestep moribund local parties and then rapidly moved in to inhabit and reanimate the old local party structures themselves.

The women recruiting candidates, fund-raising, and knocking on doors this fall are not pushing the Democratic Party to its ideological extremes, as the Tea Party did to the Republicans a decade ago. But the ways in which their priorities converge do have the potential to redraw the boundaries of America’s two political parties. Bringing more women into political action does not, as one might expect, significantly shift the politics of abortion, one of the few issues on which men and women mostly think alike. Yet women do tend to prefer a stronger public safety net and higher public investment in education, health care, and support for individuals with disabilities.

The oft-repeated estimate that 53 percent of white women voted for Donald Trump reflects a stark internal divide within a demographic category that encompasses about 40 percent of American voters. Increasingly, white women are rejecting Trump’s political vision, even as their husbands and brothers are not. While a Public Religion Research Institute poll in January found that 48 percent of young white men aged 15–24 “believe diversity efforts will harm white people,” only 28 percent of young white women agree.

This gender split is one of the most important political developments today. For a generation, GOP support has been largely confined to white voters. Now the GOP is increasingly a party of white men, alongside a shrinking and aging cohort of white women. The female-led grassroots surge across purple and red America is pulling in some women who previously voted Republican. Even among the women who still identify as Republicans, a divide has opened up. Only 31 percent “strongly approve” of the president, according to a Washington Post–Schar School poll this summer, compared to 68 percent of Republican men. This leaves an even harder-edged Trumpism at the core of GOP activism, cementing a brand of male authority that can only drive moderate women further away.

By contrast, the Democratic revival underway is both ideologically diverse and harmonious. On the ground at least, there is no civil war between center and left, as some pundits have warned. There aren’t even lines for battle. The new organizers don’t fit the cultural templates presumed to divide potential Democrats into categories, like liberal metropolitan elites and blue-collar populists worried about change. Lisa Boeving-Learned’s conversations with voters, for example, link universal health care to her pro-veteran and pro-union stands; she is passionate about voting rights and redistricting, and isn’t afraid to speak up for commonsense gun laws in places where other politicians duck the question. Campaigns like hers—and the local groups making them possible—are expanding the party’s ranks beyond what had become a narrow urban and bicoastal core, which should help Democrats win state legislature seats in 2018 and navigate the electoral college in 2020. Most of all, they are creating new spaces for the urgent, long-delayed conversations our incomplete democracy needs.

In the past week two prominent women have been accused of sexual abuse, resulting in questions about the #MeToo movement’s integrity. The first was Avital Ronell, a professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, who was suspended for allegedly harassing an advisee, Nimrod Reitman. The second was Asia Argento, who, according to a report in The New York Times, paid off a younger actor named Jimmy Bennett so that he would not go public with his allegation that she sexually abused him when he was a minor.

In the case of Ronell, a renowned intellectual who is not a #MeToo spokesperson, her allies in academia—including feminist luminaries like Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, Chris Kraus, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—have closed ranks around her and sought to discredit her accuser. The controversy surrounding Argento’s scandal is different: She was one of the first Hollywood stars to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of abuse, and was an early leader in the #MeToo movement.* She deplored the way Weinstein and his enablers covered up abuse through secretive deals and legal maneuvers.

Yet the implications of Ronell and Argento’s cases were similar: As The Los Angeles Times asked, “Do the claims against Asia Argento invalidate the #MeToo movement?” Did they not expose the hypocrisies of feminists who themselves have been accused of being too quick to condemn and of succumbing to a mob mentality?

Weinstein’s lawyer pounced, saying the Argento story “reveals a stunning level of hypocrisy.” Her “sheer duplicity,” he said, “should demonstrate to everyone how poorly the allegations against Mr. Weinstein were actually vetted and accordingly, cause all of us to pause and allow due process to prevail, not condemnation by fundamental dishonesty.” In its write-up of the Ronell case, The New York Times said the complaint against her “raised a challenge for feminists—how to respond when one of their own behaved badly.”

In fact, the way feminists have reacted to these allegations has been deeply clarifying. Argento’s allies in #MeToo have taken her victim’s accusations seriously, while acknowledging that women are perfectly capable of committing the kinds of crimes that are also committed against them. If all the allegations are true, then there can be little doubt that Argento behaved irresponsibly in speaking out so publicly against the very things she was doing in secret.

In contrast, Ronell’s supporters have swarmed to defend her. But rather than expose a hypocrisy or invalidate the #MeToo movement, this has only underscored the point that #MeToo feminists have been making along—about the nature of power and the way it fosters abuse.

In its crudest form, the #MeToo movement has been presented as an alliance of women against men. This is a mistake, but one easily made. The vast preponderance of people publicly identified as abusers under the #MeToo rubric have been men. Often, they have been famous men, or men in positions of power in workplaces.

But #MeToo, which is after all a loose alliance between thousands of individuals, is about holding people who commit sexual offenses to account, especially when they have been protected from the consequences of their actions by systemic bias. Because inequality between men and women is a well-documented phenomenon in many workplaces and other social contexts, systemic bias has often erred in the direction of protecting abusive men. In the Hollywood system, for example, Harvey Weinstein’s criminal tendencies were amplified into an industry-wide pattern that drew many other professionals into complicity with him.

There’s an old question in criminology and gender studies about whether rape is a crime about power, or about sex. The consensus is that it’s a bit of both, in varying quantities according to the case. And power comes in many forms. A male perpetrator might, for example, have more power because of broader sexist social structures. But abuse can also come from a simple difference in power between two people.

Avital Ronell and Asia Argento are both women who held a great deal of power over their accusers. Ronell was Nimrod Reitman’s academic adviser, which means she was not only his mentor but a gatekepeer to his professional advancement. In a lawsuit Reitman has filed (subsequent to NYU’s finding of a Title IX violation), he alleges that his adviser “created a false romantic relationship” between them, and that he was “subjected to sexual harassment, sexual assault, and stalking.” Ronell “asserted complete domination and control over his life,” and threatened to put the advancement of his PhD in danger. Argento cast Bennett in a number of movies, beginning when he was 6 years old and appeared in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2004), a movie she directed, co-wrote, and starred in. She is alleged to have given him alcohol and pressured him into sex when he was 17, which is below the age of consent in California, where the incident reportedly took place.

Contrary to claims from #MeToo’s critics, women are capable of believing male accusers, too. Many feminists understand that Argento may have done a terrible thing and can no longer be a public face of the movement. Rose McGowan, her ally in activism, has expressed sympathy for Bennett. Argento’s actions, then, do not compromise the activism of those she previously called allies.

The response from Ronell’s supporters could not be more different. The Times located a draft of a letter written by a group of scholars in support of Ronell, which praised her “grace,” “keen wit,” and “intellectual commitment.” The first signatory to the letter was Judith Butler, the famous feminist scholar. Other celebrity signatories included Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Slavoj Žižek.

The letter’s authors admitted that they have had no access to the dossier of claims against Ronell. But they called Reitman’s allegations “malicious,” while emphasizing Ronell’s seniority and prestige—precisely what the allegations accuse her of exploiting. The signatories said they have “collectively years of experience to support our view of her capacity as teacher and a scholar, but also as someone who has served as Chair of both the Departments of German and Comparative Literature at New York University.” Later in the letter the group noted, “As you know, [Ronell] is the Jacques Derrida Chair of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and she was recently given the award of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French government.”

In the last few days, further defenses of Ronell have appeared online from well-known figures in cultural studies and literature like Chris Kraus, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam. Duggan, a professor in New York University’s social and cultural analysis department (where, full disclosure, my own PhD supervisor is also a professor), dressed up harassment in the guise of sophisticated theory. The language of Ronell’s emails must have baffled the investigators, she asserted, because they could not understand the sexualized language that passes between queers (Ronell and Reitman are both gay). “The nature of the email exchange resonates with many queer academics, whose practices of queer intimacy are often baffling to outsiders,” she wrote. This reasoning echoed the philosopher Colin McGinn’s denial that he sent sexual overtures to one of his graduate students, saying he referred to masturbation in an email only to teach her the difference between “logical implication and conversational implicature.”

Kraus, Duggan, and Halberstam all blamed the victim in the Ronell case. But after investigating, NYU concluded that Ronell’s harassment—including kissing, touching, constant calling, and refusing to work with him when her demands were unreciprocated—was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.” (You can read the lawsuit lodged by Reitman against Ronell here.)

Furthermore, other former students have accused Ronell of abusive behavior, with one anonymous student accusing her of a variety of unethical practices on Facebook, including breaking her students’ self-esteem, humiliating them in front of others, then using the newly malleable student to do menial tasks for her, like folding her laundry. Andrea Long Chu, who was at one time Ronell’s teaching assistant, wrote on Twitter that the accusations track “100%” with Ronell’s “behavior and personality.”

Despite the different responses to Ronell and to Argento’s cases, they serve to clarify, not muddle, the nature of #MeToo. It is an open movement, formed across social media by people in constant conversation with one another. It is not centralized in any form, led loosely by activists like Tarana Burke. By contrast, the reaction of the academic establishment to Ronell’s infractions has been an attempt to consolidate the establishment’s power. If her supporters actually had no idea about Ronell’s behavior—if they have real reason to believe in her innocence—then that divide speaks to the segmentation of academia according to rank, to the power dynamics that plague the academy and make its institutions ripe for abuse. Graduate students are strongly incentivized not to speak up, since their entire future is in the hands of their advisers.

These two affairs illustrate, with depressing succinctness, just how badly power corrupts. Asia Argento may be famous, but she was not protected by tenure. Her allies in what has been a horizontal, democratic movement have no institutional reasons to support her. The Ronell cheerleaders, on the other hand, are almost universally intellectuals who once upon a time considered themselves cultural outsiders—queer theorists, postcolonial scholars, feminist thinkers. They act as if they are a politicized coalition defending a vulnerable person, without the awareness that they are now the tenured, the published, the well-off, the powerful: precisely the demographic that #MeToo proposes to investigate.

*A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Asia Argento had been a leader of #MeToo since the movement’s inception. She was at the forefront of #MeToo when it gained widespread recognition in 2017, years after Tarana Burke founded the movement. We regret the error.