 After more than a month of media silence, Joe Biden was finally asked about Taro Reid's allegations in an interview on national television. As you all know, Mika Brzezinski asked him about this on MSNBC. And I think that, you know, judging by the response to this interview and the response of the general population now knowing about these allegations, now that they have more details and facts, it's evident that nothing is going to come of this because the Democratic Party's base, they don't really seem to care. Now, I didn't necessarily expect anything to come of this, but I mean, there will be no political consequences for Joe Biden at this time at all. Certainly, I think that Republicans are going to try to weaponize this against him in November. But in terms of the Democrats and their base seeking accountability for Joe Biden, they just don't seem to really care. They don't actually believe survivors contrary to what they said as little as two years ago, when they wanted all of us to believe Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and the allegations that she brought forward against Brett Kavanaugh. I believed her, and I believe Taro Reid, but not as many people are that consistent. Now, predictably, Joe Biden denied these allegations. And I will say that I do think Mika Brzezinski did an admirable job, but I'm not going to give her too much credit because when you wait more than a month to even mention it, there's an issue there. There's a media bias problem that we have to address as a society going forward. But with that being said, here's what he had to say about this allegation. But Mr. Vice President, as it pertained to Dr. Ford, everyone wanted, on high level Democrats said she should be believed, that they believed it happened. You said if someone like Dr. Ford were to come out, the essence of what she is saying has to be believed, has to be real. Why? Why is it real for Dr. Ford, but not for Taro Reid? Because the facts are to look, I'm not suggesting she had no right to come forward, and I'm not saying any woman should come forward. They should be heard. And then it should be investigated. It should be investigated. And if there's anything that is consistent with what's being said, and she makes the case, or the case is made, then it should be believed. But ultimately the truth matters. The truth matters. It's period. I thought my entire life to change, to change the whole notion of the law and the cultural sexual, around the cultural and sexual assault. When I fought the strength and to protect the process for survivors. I believe it would come a long way, and we have a long way to go in this system before we've in fact are in a position that there's a fair and unbiased view. But at the end of the day, it has to be looked at. These claims are not true. There's no cooperate. I mean, they're not true. Mr. Vice President, I can say to you, are you absolutely certain? Are you absolutely positive there is no record of any complaint by Taro Reid against you? I'm absolutely positive that no one that I'm aware of ever has been made aware of any complaint, a formal complaint made by or complaint by Taro Reid against me at the time this allegedly happened 27 years ago, or until the I announced for pre well, I guess it was in April or May of this year. I've known no one who's aware that any complaint was made. So predictably, he unequivocally denied this accusation. And if I were Joe Biden, if I'm innocent, and I know that this didn't happen, I would unseal the document that would lead to her complaint. Because if there's a complaint that's there, and she doesn't allege that she was sexually assaulted and only sexually harassed that she says the complaint says, you can kind of use that as evidence in your own favor to at least at a minimum downplay these allegations. Now, oftentimes sexual assault survivors, they change their story, they disclose a little bit of information, and then they reveal more as time goes on as they become more comfortable talking about this. But regardless, if you want people to know these details, if you want a proper investigation to be conducted, you unseal these documents, and you just allow a very narrow investigation into these records so people can see the complaint that she had filed, because she said she did file when it's going to be there. So the question is, why wouldn't he do this? Why won't he unseal this document so we can see it? And the answer is, well, he doesn't have an answer. I'm just talking about her name, not anybody else in those records, a search for that. Nothing classified with the president or anybody else. I'm just asking, why not do a search for Tara Reed's name in the University of Delaware records? Well, Mika, because I'm trying to pretend like she doesn't exist and that I never knew and I want to move on from this as quickly as possible. Yeah, see, he was speechless there because he doesn't have a good answer. There's no good answer for this. If you're innocent, you want the most thorough investigation imaginable to be conducted, because you know that more information is going to be better for you. It's going to strengthen the case. But he's not doing that. He's not doing that. Now, prior to him actually talking about this directly in an interview with Mika Brzezinski, Chris Hayes actually covered this in a really brief segment and the backlash to him even mentioning Tara Reed's allegations was huge. But before we talk about, you know, the aftermath, this is the segment that he put out just a day or two before Joe Biden actually addressed these allegations head on. There have been moments, I think for many of us, all of us, when we have heard about accusations against someone that we find ourselves desperately wanting not to believe, whether that is because we have some personal admiration for the individual or their work or political admiration, someone on our quote unquote side. The part of the difficult lesson of the Mitu era is not that every accusation is true and everything should be believed on its face, but that you do have to fight yourself when you feel that impulse. You have to do that in order to take seriously what is being alleged and what the evidence is and to evaluate it. And that is the case with the accusation by a woman named Tara Reed against Joe Biden. Now, at first, when I saw Chris Hayes do this segment, I was genuinely surprised. I was taken aback. I didn't expect this. And I thought, wow, credit words do. He's being responsible. He's trying to be objective and he's doing his job. But then I reminded myself, you know, how low the bar has gotten and that we shouldn't applaud a journalist for finally doing his job after more than a month of silence. I mean, if you go back the first time when we talked about this on the Humanist Report, it was at the end of March. So, you know, I can't give him too much credit for being this late on an issue and basically tap dancing around these allegations and adding 100 different caveats about how he doesn't really want to believe this because he supports Joe Biden and what have you. But still, even though he covered it a month too late, immediately after that segment aired, hashtag fire Chris Hayes immediately started trending on Twitter. And, you know, even though I didn't really see too many people directly calling for Chris Hayes to be fired, I saw mostly people saying that the prospect of him being fired for talking about this is stupid. Just the fact that anyone believes that a pundit should be fired for doing what should be their job, it really tells you a lot about the state of American politics and American political discourse. It is so toxic because here is, you know, an outlet who was, I think, rightfully holding Brett Kavanaugh accountable. And now the minute they try to hold someone on their own team accountable, you see the backlash from their audience, which consists mostly of Democratic Party loyalists. And you're seeing that this is basically a cult. This is a group of people who are not interested in ideology or policy. This is a team sport to them. And so long as they can get their team across the finish line, that is all that they care about. Now the backlash to this became so overwhelming that Chris Hayes actually had to address this in the following segment in the next episode that he did. And I think that he gets a little bit of credit for, you know, remaining courageous enough to not back down. But you can see here, he's kind of doing a little bit more lopsided coverage in this segment because he brings up the inconsistencies with Tau Reed's claim. But he doesn't actually talk about how we have new evidence that corroborates what she says, which is why we're all talking about it now, which is why, you know, the media is all of a sudden covering this because you can't not, given the new information that we have like the Larry King clip, right? Her neighbor's account. So this is the follow up segment that he did. When we covered this story earlier this week, a few days ago, Joe Biden had not addressed these allegations today. As you saw, he did. It was his first time directly responding to them on the record. A lot of people were unhappy with the fact that we even covered the story, which is why you may have seen the hashtag fire Chris Hayes trending on Twitter most of the day yesterday. You know, let's say I received a lot of feedback about the segment we did, which basically fell into three categories. The first category were people who basically said, I don't believe Tara Reed, Tara Reed, I believe Joe Biden, based on their assessment of the actual verifiable facts of the story, such that we have them. And they pointed out, as we did when we covered this the other day, that her story has changed quite considerably. A year ago, she told a California newspaper that in 1993, Joe Biden touched her several times, making her feel uncomfortable. And then back in March, she made a much more serious allegation, claiming that in 1993, then Senator Biden sexually assaulted her, penetrating her with his fingers under her skirt. Biden denies that accusation, as you saw, specifically responded today. Tara Reed also claims that she complained to three other people who worked in Biden's Senate office at the time when she was there about harassment, not assault. And then all three Biden staffers who've been contacted by reporters, they all say no such complaint was made. Biden's then executive assistant was vehement in her denial, quote, and everyone's witnessed or heard of or received any reports of inappropriate conduct, period, not from his read, not from anyone. I have absolutely no knowledge or memory of Ms. Reed's accounting of events, which would have left a searing impression on me as a woman professional and as a manager. So the people that fall into category one say that the weight of those three people, those three staffers, plus Joe Biden, long record public life, against what Tara Reed says about what happened at the time, leads them to conclude that she is not telling the truth. Now the second set of responses I got was from people who fall into the I don't care category. Some of that even used the phrase, we're in the midst of a national nightmare, the worst disaster in generations, and we just need to get rid of Donald Trump. Now that is not the way that I think about analyzing this particular story, but it's an honest expression of how some people view the trade-offs and the stakes here. And then the third category, which I got a lot of, was the one that was the most disquieting to me, which is a whole lot of people pointing to various aspects of Reed's character or her writings or her politics as a kind of proof that she's not credible, that she's making it up. Oh, she didn't report this sooner, or she said nice things about Joe Biden, her former voice boss at one point, so how could he have assaulted her? Or she supported candidate Bernie Sanders, so clearly this was just a political hit job, or she said things that people find strange on social media and on and on, much of it adding up to, you just can't trust this woman. Now these are the kinds of things that have been used forever against women making these types of allegations. To me, the lesson the Me Too movement is not that you believe every single allegation, of course not. No, the lesson is to take accusations seriously, to swiftly investigate the facts surrounding them as best as one can, while leaving aside the worst age-old instincts to drag the women who make those claims through the mud. So good on him, I have no problem with him bringing up the inconsistencies in the story with regard to Tara Reed, but you do have to be fair. If you truly are trying to be objective and get to the bottom of this, you mentioned the very King Clip, right? You bring up her neighbor's accounts and how she was told about this in the 1990s, and she believes Tara Reed, even if she supports Joe Biden, this is all relevant, it's important. And I think it's also important to acknowledge how experts say it is very common for sexual assault survivors to change their story because, again, it makes sense. Like, you're not going to share everything right away if you're not comfortable. This is why a lot of sexual assault survivors, they don't even speak out because this is not just painful to relive. It's embarrassing. Like, you don't want to disclose these details, right? Who wants to do that? You don't want to bring this onto yourself. But you know, I will give credit to Mika Brzezinski because she did actually do a really comprehensive segment. And I thought that she did a phenomenal job just laying out all of the detail. She gets into Tara's inconsistencies, but she also goes over how, you know, Tara's story is credible. And, you know, her claims have been corroborated by numerous individuals. The point is that everyone who's watching should have all of the details laid out. They should know everything that there is to know about this story. And ultimately, they can use that information and do what they want with it, right? If you want to demand that Joe Biden step down, I think that would be a smart move. I don't think that an alleged rapist should be the nominee because I believe Tara Reid. But I mean, the point is that they need the information. But what we're learning is that the information doesn't matter after all, like MSNBC's audience didn't just need to know about this. They don't care. They know now. We can't say that they're ignorant. They just don't care. Their minds have been made up from the get-go, right? This is a cult. They don't care about objective facts. They just want their team across the finish line, as I stated. All they want for MSNBC to do is to shut the fuck up, confirm their biases, and move on to how bad Donald Trump is and talk about Russia some more, I'm assuming. And, you know, I'm going to show you the response because it really confirms that they have no core principles. You know, I'm not being hyperbolic when I describe their reaction. You have actress Deborah Messing trying to smear the victim by sharing a blog post about how Tara Reid allegedly stole money from some non-profit organization. And look, even if this were true, it doesn't mean that she wasn't sexually assaulted. This does nothing to invalidate her claim. She also then thanked Lindsey Graham, who never believes women, but because he stood up for Joe Biden. Well, you know, she is thanking him here. You have Richard Comey, who wrote one of the dumbest tweets I have ever read in my entire life saying, judging by the position of the female vagina, it will not be easy for anyone to just put their finger into the vagina unless there is some cooperation from the female herself. Did you catch that? I mean, this is some next level stupidity, next level stupidity. But believe it or not, it gets worse because after, you know, liberals and MSNBC-brained shit libs, you know, spent time smearing Tara Reid trying to assassinate her character, which is common in these types of publicized cases that happened to Christine Blasey Ford, you know, then Biden supporters moved on to attacking journalists, which is something that they say you should never do because it's bad when Trump does it. But here is a bunch of Biden supporters now attacking journalists. You have Biden or Buster, Lindy Lee tweet out, now that Tara Reid's story has completely imploded, it hasn't. I hope the FBI investigates Nathan J. Robinson, Katie Halper and Ryan Grimm for their role in this fraud. Tara or whatever your actual name is, you have gravely harmed real me too survivors. Chris Jackson tweeted, who thinks Ryan Grimm should release any correspondence he has had with Reid considering she telegraphed her hit job to him in a tweet a month ago? And after writing a thoughtful piece for the New York Times about why Democrats should ditch Joe Biden, Elizabeth Brunig shared this letter that she received from a reader who writes, your recent column about the big fat tub of shit who was spouting lies about Biden and expecting ultra lib fem dyke bleeding hearts like you to believe her was as wrong-minded as anyone can get. Don't you see that you have already tried and convicted an innocent man over something that as he put so well never happened? Can't you see when you're being conned? I don't know where you came from, but the time should get rid of you and allow you to slink back into that hole. So in case you lost track, they first smeared Tara Reid or attempted to. After that, they went after journalists who helped to publicize this story, and then they called on some of them to be fired, called on any journalist who dared to ask for some accountability to be fired, send them nasty letters, and predictably all of this has culminated in Tara Reid receiving threats and non-stop harassment. The same exact thing happened with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. The same people who said that what happened to her was disgusting are now doing the same thing, albeit for a different victim. Zero consistency whatsoever, because they didn't care about the details. They don't care about believing survivors. This is about their team winning, and that's it. That's what this is about. They don't care about ideology. They don't care about policy. These people are not principled. They don't care. That's what's been made incredibly clear over the course of the last week. They're literally doing exactly what defenders of Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh did. They're smearing the victim and attacking journalists, because how dare anyone believe that a man who literally sniffs women's hair on camera and touches them inappropriately and invades their personal space openly flirts with women. I mean, how could anyone think that this person would possibly take things a little bit further when the cameras weren't on, considering how far he goes when he knows that they're filming him? How dare you even question this? So, I mean, all that stuff about believing women, there's a huge caveat. Only believe women when they accuse Republicans. And the same is probably true for Republicans. I mean, we've seen the hypocrisy. Trump Jr. is tweeting out stories about Tara Reid when his father has been accused of sexual assault when he defended Brett Kavanaugh. So nobody's hands are clean here, except for the left, everyone is a hypocrite. It's always, you know, we'll use these allegations if they're politically convenient. And that's the only time we're going to purport to care. And the person who had, I think, the most profound response to this is Jamie Peck, who, you know, on Majority Report in a recent episode, I think she said everything that we needed to hear right now and what we're all feeling. Take a look. I guess I should back up and say first that I believe her. There was a lot of concurrent reporting, which we're seeing come out. And the story rings very true to me, as I'm sure it does many survivors of sexual assaults and workplace sexual harassment. It's very normal for survivors to change their stories based on cues they're getting about how they're going to be received if they don't feel safe. Of course, they're not going to tell you the whole thing. I said like six months ago on this show that I wouldn't be surprised if Biden had a me too coming. And people thought that sounded a little farfetched, but this stuff exists on a continuum. And seeing the way that he touches women in public, it's not that surprising to me that he'd also do it in a worse way in private. If you listen to him on morning Joe today, he wouldn't even say that he remembers her, which makes me sick, but is also probably true because like he said, she was nothing to him. He did it incredibly casually and also he's fucking senile. So I believe that he probably doesn't remember it. And he's just used to having people cover up for his. I mean, this is like another side point about how, hmm, maybe people shouldn't be in positions of immense power for that long because it tends to both attract people who like having power over others and also it can corrupt people, right? Um, uh, so, so going forward, like the Democrats have bet on the fact that nobody's going to care about this and on a societal level, they're probably right, but we saw this during the Kavanaugh hearing, right? I was a hundred percent sure nothing was going to come of it because this society does not care about survivors of sexual assault. And at the time, a lot of Democrats were saying the right things. They were right about this. That guy should not be on the Supreme court. Now we have a bunch of people who said that stuff back then, deleting their old tweets about it and turning around and doing exactly what the Republicans were doing to Christine Blasey Ford attacking her character, attacking her as a Russian asset, saying she's got a screw loose. It really, it's disgusting. Um, and I know that I've argued for the Me Too movement in the past because although it itself is not a radical phenomenon, um, that has a limited analysis, but it can point in radical directions, right? If we turn it into a conversation about power and the wider problems of the things that suck about having to work for a boss who has absolute power over you, right? But I think Me Too itself has been largely corrupted and co-opted by the establishment. We see this with Anita Dunn's relationship with Times Up. This person should not be in charge of this kind of thing. It's entanglements with the NGO industrial complex, which basically exists to launder the reputations of wealthy liberals and their children. They do some good work, but it is essentially a bourgeois institution in that it upholds the existing power structures. So maybe we need a different kind of Me Too that has a more radical analysis, a more independent existence independently of these bourgeois institutions. I don't know. It's just, it's really depressing to me and it's depressing to see the Democratic Party going the same route that they went with Bill Clinton, right? Like we have two alleged rapists running for president and I really think a socialist feminist analysis is the only thing that can explain it right now. That was great. That was great. And I'll link you to the full video because she does say more, so I'll put that in the description box, but what she says here is profound. Look, it is really depressing. Like I never was under the assumption that Democrats believed in anything, but I at least thought that the Democratic Party's base was a little bit more ideological or principled than, you know, leadership in the party, but they genuinely don't care. And there's something inherently heartbreaking about that, right? This election is full mask off for liberals and centrists, full mask off. Nobody cares. They don't care. I don't know what else to say. This has revealed that. So it's certainly frustrating. You know, I felt hopeful that survivors of sexual assault were actually going to see a new culture in America because of the Me Too movement and all of the strides that we've made. But as you can see, you can only push so far until, you know, you accuse the wrong person. And then the movement's over. It's just, it's genuinely heartbreaking. And there's nothing left to say. Centrists just don't care. You can give them all the details. You could probably show them a video of Joe Biden committing a crime. And they are not going to abandon their support for him. It's like Donald Trump, you know, his supporters will never leave him. And the same is true for Democrats. They're going to support Democrats no matter what. Because, you know, that cult mentality, that team sport mentality, it's just too strong for us to break through. It doesn't matter how much facts and objectivity, you know, we try to bring to this conversation. They just don't care. They're not like you and I. They have no principles. They have no morals or they do only up to a certain point.