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Re: Irony Alert: Whore Kamala Harris Profited from an Affair with Willie Brown, Yet She Wages War on Sex Work
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black skanks
May 8, 2023, 9:25:03 PM5/8/23
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On 11 Feb 2022, Kurt Nicklas <nambla...@gop.org> posted some
news:su73rn$17br9$2...@news.freedyn.de:
> davej wrote
>
>> She'll fuck anybody for money and a desk.
Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris's affair with ex-San
Francisco Mayor Willie Brown gave her career a boost back in the day. So
what has she got against sex work?
It’s the hypocrisy, stupid. That’s what pundits from The Nation to the
Washington Post fail to grasp about the onetime romance between former San
Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and California Senator and Democratic
presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.
Harris’s apologists would have people believe that discussion of the
relationship, which occurred two decades ago when Brown held the powerful
post of Speaker of the California Assembly and Harris was a lowly deputy
district attorney in California’s Alameda County, is sexist, racist, or
both. Viewed in light of Harris’s ongoing war on sex workers, however, her
advantageous liaison with Brown indicates that she has no problem applying
different rules to herself than she does to others.
Harris’s announcement that she will seek the Democratic Party’s nomination
for the presidency has sparked interest in her career climb from line
prosecutor to San Francisco district attorney to California attorney
general to U.S. senator from the Golden State. Brown played a role in that
ascent, as the irrepressible 84-year-old recently took pains to remind the
world in a column he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle entitled,
“Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So What?”
Claiming that he’d been “peppered” with calls from the national media
about the affair, Brown wrote that he “may have influenced [Harris’s]
career” by appointing her to two plum positions on state commissions, and
that he “certainly helped her first race for district attorney in San
Francisco.” But he helped many high-profile California politicians rise
to prominence, he argued. And besides, Harris was the only one who
threatened to indict him if he “so much as jaywalked” while she was DA.
As Peter Byrne detailed in a 2003 profile of Harris for SF Weekly, Harris
was a 29-year-old nobody in 1994 when she met the powerful, flashy Brown,
who was 60 and separated from his wife. The May-December fling “was the
talk of the town during the year before Brown’s successful 1995 bid to
become [San Francisco’s] mayor,” Byrne wrote. But she dumped Brown before
he took office.
Along with entrée to California’s elite social and political circles,
Brown gave Harris a brand-new BMW and seats on the Unemployment Insurance
Appeals Board and, later, the California Medical Assistance Commission.
Byrne reported that the two gigs paid her a total of “more than $400,000
over five years.” The latter appointment involved “attending two meetings
a month for a $99,000 annual salary.”
“I have absolutely nothing against the fact that she used her sexuality to
get by in the world. What I do have a problem with is that having gained
that power, she used it to attack other women for doing the same thing.”
–sex worker and indefatigable blogger Maggie McNeill
Brown also was of assistance to Harris as she ran for DA for the first
time in 2003, donating $500 to her campaign and enlisting a fundraising
guru to shill for a pro-Harris independent expenditure committee. Brown
was ending his eight-year reign as mayor at the time and was under
investigation by the FBI for pay-to-play allegations. (Brown was never
indicted.) He was notorious for cronyism and political patronage, from
which Harris profited.
Harris admitted to Byrne that she’d benefited from Brown’s influence but
expressed annoyance that it had become an issue in the DA race, calling it
“an albatross around my neck.” Despite the ostensible handicap, Harris
engineered a come-from-behind win on election day.
As liberal scribblers pooh-pooh the rehashing of the Brown-Harris
dalliance, conservative commentators lambaste the would-be POTUS as a two-
faced supporter of the #MeToo movement.
Both are off base.
The relationship was consensual and Harris has never expressed the
slightest misgiving about it, so the #MeToo criticism is out. But while
the affair wasn’t transactional in the technical sense of the term, both
sides got something. An older man earned the company of a much younger
woman, and an ambitious prosecutor got a leg up on her political career.
That is why Harris’s contempt for sex workers lies at the heart of her
hypocrisy.
As a prosecutor, Harris has been a fierce opponent of efforts to
decriminalize prostitution. While DA, she campaigned against a citywide
proposition to that effect in San Francisco, arguing that the measure
would “give a pass to predators of young women” — a red herring, in that
the ballot question would have affected consensual commercial sex among
adults, not sex trafficking. (The ballot measure was unsuccessful, though
it did garner more than 40 percent of the vote.)
More recently, while attorney general, Harris vigorously fought an attempt
to overthrow California’s 19th-century anti-prostitution law. The Erotic
Service Provider Legal, Education and Research Project, a nonprofit group
that fights for sex workers’ rights, filed a challenge to the statute in
federal court, and Harris successfully petitioned to have the case
dismissed arguing that California has “a legitimate interest simply in
deterring the commodification of sex.”
As the Daily Beast and other outlets have observed, sex workers revile
Harris, not only for her opposition to decriminalization, but also for her
advocacy on behalf of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which
effectively outlawed online adult ads in the United States with a stroke
of President Donald Trump’s pen in April of 2018.
Congress’ passage of FOSTA, coupled with the federal government’s takedown
of the online listings giant Backpage.com, have had a devastating effect
on sex workers — endangering their lives, robbing them of their ability to
screen clients, and pushing them into riskier encounters. The Associated
Press reported that the new law has led to a rise in street-level
prostitution in several U.S. cities and made it more difficult for law
enforcement to identify and locate victims of sex trafficking.
Even as Harris was campaigning for the U.S. Senate in 2016, she was going
after Backpage from her post as California attorney general, rounding up
three of the website’s current and former principals, parading them into a
courtroom cell, and indicting them on numerous counts of money laundering
and pimping. Harris took action even though she knew her office lacked the
authority under federal law to pursue such a prosecution. When a state
court judge threw out the pimping charges, Harris, who by then was on her
way to Washington, filed them again.
(Full disclosure: Two of the defendants in California’s Backpage case,
veteran newspapermen Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, co-founded Front Page
Confidential in 2017 to report on issues related to free speech and the
First Amendment issues. Lacey and Larkin, who had sold their interests in
the company in 2015, now face federal charges related to the operation of
the company they once owned.)
Maggie McNeill, a self-described unretired call girl who writes the
incisive Honest Courtesan blog, sees the hypocrisy in Harris’s antipathy
to sex workers.
“I have absolutely nothing against the fact that she used her sexuality to
get by in the world,” McNeill told Front Page Confidential during a recent
phone conversation. “What I do have a problem with, is that having gained
that power, she used it to attack other women for doing the same thing.”
McNeill, whose documentary The War on Whores will have its premiere in
Seattle next month, noted the recent viral video of Harris laughing as the
then-DA explained her policy of prosecuting the parents of truant
schoolchildren. McNeill observed that Harris had prosecutorial discretion
while DA, and could have directed her prosecutors to focus on violent and
white-collar crimes. Instead, says McNeill, Harris “did the opposite [and
went after] poor people and sex workers.”
Dubbing Harris “the handmaiden of the patriarchy,” McNeill characterized
the ambitious politician’s actions as a manifestation of what she calls
“The McNeill Rule”:
“The more a man crusades against a particular sexual act, the more likely
he is to be a practitioner.”
<https://frontpageconfidential.com/kamala-harris-irony-willie-brown-sex-
work/>
news:su73rn$17br9$2...@news.freedyn.de:
> davej wrote
>
>> She'll fuck anybody for money and a desk.
Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris's affair with ex-San
Francisco Mayor Willie Brown gave her career a boost back in the day. So
what has she got against sex work?
It’s the hypocrisy, stupid. That’s what pundits from The Nation to the
Washington Post fail to grasp about the onetime romance between former San
Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and California Senator and Democratic
presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.
Harris’s apologists would have people believe that discussion of the
relationship, which occurred two decades ago when Brown held the powerful
post of Speaker of the California Assembly and Harris was a lowly deputy
district attorney in California’s Alameda County, is sexist, racist, or
both. Viewed in light of Harris’s ongoing war on sex workers, however, her
advantageous liaison with Brown indicates that she has no problem applying
different rules to herself than she does to others.
Harris’s announcement that she will seek the Democratic Party’s nomination
for the presidency has sparked interest in her career climb from line
prosecutor to San Francisco district attorney to California attorney
general to U.S. senator from the Golden State. Brown played a role in that
ascent, as the irrepressible 84-year-old recently took pains to remind the
world in a column he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle entitled,
“Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So What?”
Claiming that he’d been “peppered” with calls from the national media
about the affair, Brown wrote that he “may have influenced [Harris’s]
career” by appointing her to two plum positions on state commissions, and
that he “certainly helped her first race for district attorney in San
Francisco.” But he helped many high-profile California politicians rise
to prominence, he argued. And besides, Harris was the only one who
threatened to indict him if he “so much as jaywalked” while she was DA.
As Peter Byrne detailed in a 2003 profile of Harris for SF Weekly, Harris
was a 29-year-old nobody in 1994 when she met the powerful, flashy Brown,
who was 60 and separated from his wife. The May-December fling “was the
talk of the town during the year before Brown’s successful 1995 bid to
become [San Francisco’s] mayor,” Byrne wrote. But she dumped Brown before
he took office.
Along with entrée to California’s elite social and political circles,
Brown gave Harris a brand-new BMW and seats on the Unemployment Insurance
Appeals Board and, later, the California Medical Assistance Commission.
Byrne reported that the two gigs paid her a total of “more than $400,000
over five years.” The latter appointment involved “attending two meetings
a month for a $99,000 annual salary.”
“I have absolutely nothing against the fact that she used her sexuality to
get by in the world. What I do have a problem with is that having gained
that power, she used it to attack other women for doing the same thing.”
–sex worker and indefatigable blogger Maggie McNeill
Brown also was of assistance to Harris as she ran for DA for the first
time in 2003, donating $500 to her campaign and enlisting a fundraising
guru to shill for a pro-Harris independent expenditure committee. Brown
was ending his eight-year reign as mayor at the time and was under
investigation by the FBI for pay-to-play allegations. (Brown was never
indicted.) He was notorious for cronyism and political patronage, from
which Harris profited.
Harris admitted to Byrne that she’d benefited from Brown’s influence but
expressed annoyance that it had become an issue in the DA race, calling it
“an albatross around my neck.” Despite the ostensible handicap, Harris
engineered a come-from-behind win on election day.
As liberal scribblers pooh-pooh the rehashing of the Brown-Harris
dalliance, conservative commentators lambaste the would-be POTUS as a two-
faced supporter of the #MeToo movement.
Both are off base.
The relationship was consensual and Harris has never expressed the
slightest misgiving about it, so the #MeToo criticism is out. But while
the affair wasn’t transactional in the technical sense of the term, both
sides got something. An older man earned the company of a much younger
woman, and an ambitious prosecutor got a leg up on her political career.
That is why Harris’s contempt for sex workers lies at the heart of her
hypocrisy.
As a prosecutor, Harris has been a fierce opponent of efforts to
decriminalize prostitution. While DA, she campaigned against a citywide
proposition to that effect in San Francisco, arguing that the measure
would “give a pass to predators of young women” — a red herring, in that
the ballot question would have affected consensual commercial sex among
adults, not sex trafficking. (The ballot measure was unsuccessful, though
it did garner more than 40 percent of the vote.)
More recently, while attorney general, Harris vigorously fought an attempt
to overthrow California’s 19th-century anti-prostitution law. The Erotic
Service Provider Legal, Education and Research Project, a nonprofit group
that fights for sex workers’ rights, filed a challenge to the statute in
federal court, and Harris successfully petitioned to have the case
dismissed arguing that California has “a legitimate interest simply in
deterring the commodification of sex.”
As the Daily Beast and other outlets have observed, sex workers revile
Harris, not only for her opposition to decriminalization, but also for her
advocacy on behalf of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which
effectively outlawed online adult ads in the United States with a stroke
of President Donald Trump’s pen in April of 2018.
Congress’ passage of FOSTA, coupled with the federal government’s takedown
of the online listings giant Backpage.com, have had a devastating effect
on sex workers — endangering their lives, robbing them of their ability to
screen clients, and pushing them into riskier encounters. The Associated
Press reported that the new law has led to a rise in street-level
prostitution in several U.S. cities and made it more difficult for law
enforcement to identify and locate victims of sex trafficking.
Even as Harris was campaigning for the U.S. Senate in 2016, she was going
after Backpage from her post as California attorney general, rounding up
three of the website’s current and former principals, parading them into a
courtroom cell, and indicting them on numerous counts of money laundering
and pimping. Harris took action even though she knew her office lacked the
authority under federal law to pursue such a prosecution. When a state
court judge threw out the pimping charges, Harris, who by then was on her
way to Washington, filed them again.
(Full disclosure: Two of the defendants in California’s Backpage case,
veteran newspapermen Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, co-founded Front Page
Confidential in 2017 to report on issues related to free speech and the
First Amendment issues. Lacey and Larkin, who had sold their interests in
the company in 2015, now face federal charges related to the operation of
the company they once owned.)
Maggie McNeill, a self-described unretired call girl who writes the
incisive Honest Courtesan blog, sees the hypocrisy in Harris’s antipathy
to sex workers.
“I have absolutely nothing against the fact that she used her sexuality to
get by in the world,” McNeill told Front Page Confidential during a recent
phone conversation. “What I do have a problem with, is that having gained
that power, she used it to attack other women for doing the same thing.”
McNeill, whose documentary The War on Whores will have its premiere in
Seattle next month, noted the recent viral video of Harris laughing as the
then-DA explained her policy of prosecuting the parents of truant
schoolchildren. McNeill observed that Harris had prosecutorial discretion
while DA, and could have directed her prosecutors to focus on violent and
white-collar crimes. Instead, says McNeill, Harris “did the opposite [and
went after] poor people and sex workers.”
Dubbing Harris “the handmaiden of the patriarchy,” McNeill characterized
the ambitious politician’s actions as a manifestation of what she calls
“The McNeill Rule”:
“The more a man crusades against a particular sexual act, the more likely
he is to be a practitioner.”
<https://frontpageconfidential.com/kamala-harris-irony-willie-brown-sex-
work/>
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