Yes there were red flags, but the mission was to unseat Collins, so we were all willing to look the other way on some of them and were hoping that we were going to vote for the man he is now, to make this happen. Everyone who was supporting him did say that if something came out that was truly disqualifying, we’d drop him like a hot rock, and this clearly the case.
We are never gonna unseat Collins. This bitch has more lives than a cat! FML (flips a table)
we were willing to believe the narrative that such people could be redeemed. He seemed genuinely to find distaste in his past actions and was openly repentant. That’s what makes this mildly infuriating because this is the bridge too far. He’s spot on on the issues, seemed humble and well spoken. To put a pin in the r4pe allegations for a second, the larger issue is that he CAN get blackout drunk and then do things he can’t even remember. Drunk posting on reddit before the modpocalypse is one thing, but if those things include SA? Yeah, we have to make the hard pass now. There’s a line, man.
Personally, I never got the vibe that he was repentant. Every time something came up, he would do his best to deny it and then downplay it, followed by his swearing that this was the last thing. It absolutely sounded like a cheater getting caught and then trying to keep the relationship going. He never actually put in the work for any of it.
I think a lot of people wanted to believe in him, so much so that they put their blinders on to what were very clear issues. And then sunk cost fallacy set in and people started to really dig in about protecting ‘their guy.’ I said it months ago, but I really do see a similarity to him with Trump, in that people hear what they want to hear but also that as more things come out about him, it actually becomes harder to ditch than easier. People stuck with him after the first thing, then the second thing, and so on until there is just a litany of reasons to bail but it’s ever harder to finally get that breaking point.
Even now, look how many people are still trying to frame this as a hit job by some woman instead of a credible story of sexual assault. Far too many people out there have not responded to this latest accusation as you have. Ken Klippenstein is out there trolling people over this, which side note, that dude is absolutely going to be writing articles for the right in five years.
the issue was that he had all the right policies. That’s what stings. As I said, most of us were willing to look the other way for a few transgressions so long as he asserted that he was a different person than he was before. This accusation was just a different beast entirely and couldn’t be downplayed or ignored. Also it really was the last straw.