Yes, both sides are guilty of a double standard for sexual misconduct, but the Left’s hypocrisy has been particularly egregious, and has likely allowed the problem to metastasize and fester.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi embarrassed herself last weekend by casting doubt on sexual assault allegations leveled against powerful Democratic Rep. John Conyers.

Conyers has been accused by at least five women of sexual harassment, and reports last week detail how the U.S. Congress’s Office of Compliance paid $27,000 in taxpayer money to a woman in 2015 after, she said, Conyers fired her for refusing his sexual advances. Over the last 20 years, this office has settled 264 employment complaints, including those of sexual misconduct, to the tune of $17.2 million.

Pelosi implied that the allegations leveled against Conyers were vague, and that since Conyers was “an icon” he should be afforded “due process.” In the same interview, she curtly said that Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore was a “child molester.” Many even on the Left found Pelosi’s response grossly inadequate, and Pelosi has since called Conyers to step down:

Democrats have lost the thread on sexual harassment. You can debate Franken as being a marginal case, I guess. But the Conyers claims represent a serious abuse of power—one that required a legal settlement—and Pelosi doesn't see them as a firing offense. https://t.co/10Km2FQisA — Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 26, 2017

But rather than being an isolated incident, Pelosi’s response is a trend on the Left. Yes, both sides are guilty of a double standard for sexual misconduct, but the Left’s hypocrisy has been particularly egregious, and has likely allowed the problem to metastasize and fester.

It’s Been Years of a Double Standard

Despite the maddening trend where allegations of sexual assault against Republicans seem to surface only weeks before the date of a general election—not during primaries—Moore’s accusers have been overwhelmingly believed right-of-the-aisle. This is as it should be. The accounts given have been heart-wrenching and credible, and Moore’s answers have been lacking (although he still insists on his total innocence).

Contrast this with what we’ve seen from the Left for decades. Assault accuser Anita Hill was meant to torpedo Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the Supreme Court, but ten years later liberals sought to destroy the women who accused Bill Clinton of sexual predation. In this endeavor, the mainstream media gladly lent a hand. NBC News covered up the rape allegations Juanita Broaddrick leveled against Clinton, just as it sat on the Harvey Weinstein story years later. Liberal pressure group MoveOn.org was named to indicate it was time for the country to “move on” from Clinton’s sexual misconduct. No kidding.

Yet for conservative Republicans, the Left has long held that the seriousness of any allegations qualify as prima facie evidence of the accused individual’s guilt. That wasn’t a particular problem for the Right given that most of the sexual misconduct came from the Democratic side, at least in the Oval Office—before family-man Barack Obama, the only Democrat president after Harry S. Truman who wasn’t a notorious womanizer was Bible-thumping Jimmy Carter.

That changed with the orange swan that is Donald Trump. The media spins its new heightened awareness of sexual assault as the result of the bad things Trump did in the past that came to light before the election. It isn’t that simple.

Weeks before the general election in 2016, NBC News released a tape it had been sitting on for years, which allowed CNN’s Anderson Cooper to ask a planted question just two days later during the second presidential debate, right before an orchestrated frenzy of allegations were directed at then-candidate Trump. When the obvious question of the allegations’ credibility came up, the Left, echoing the mood at college campuses, responded that the allegations should be believed as a matter of course.

But this time was different. Such an excrement storm was created that the Left’s terrible track record on mistreatment of women was teed up to be an issue in the future. Fast-forward to today, and the allegations against Moore, along with political expediency (control of the Senate is at stake, and the Clintons are no longer politically useful), caused the Left to feel the need to confront its glaring hypocrisy by ditching Bill Clinton—only in hindsight, of course.

Yet these newfound principles must be applied to current candidates and powerbrokers, must they not? It is possible that the Left will very much come to regret this course of action, and the double standard they have fostered for so many years, for two reasons.

1. The Hypocrisy Has Led to Increased Bad Behavior

Most men on both sides of the political spectrum treat women with respect, but there are deviants on both sides, and those on the Left are more likely to have operated with fewer consequences for some time. Simply put, some will flagrantly violate the law and others’ rights with gusto if they think they can get away with it. In other words, Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Glenn Thrush, Sen. Al Franken, and Conyers are likely just the beginning.

Lefty men have long been able to act like pigs and be excused or ignored because they are politically aligned with radical feminists. Sen. Ted Kennedy is a prime example of this. A more recent example is illustrious New York Times reporter Thrush, who on one occasion left a young girl in tears after his unwanted advances. Confronted by the girl’s friend, Thrush got to talk about his record of standing up for women, seemingly because of his politics.

Franken, whom multiple women have accused of groping, including one woman who said Franken grabbed her right in front of her husband at the Minnesota State Fair, has been explicitly defended by prominent feminists, including in the Washington Post, on the grounds that the Minnesota senator is a political ally, and if he goes other allies will have to go as well. In a recent interview, Franken said he wasn’t certain whether more accusations would come out.

Vox’s Matt Yglesias, who wrote an article titled “Bill Clinton should have resigned,” actually wrote that one of the reasons behind his conclusion included that Al Gore would have taken Bill Clinton’s place, so there would have been no change in political power.

Yes, but only because MN has a Dem governor. #YglesiasRule https://t.co/tLAnBoWAl0 — John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) November 16, 2017

In another example of the prevailing hypocrisy, ultra-lefty and “Girls” writer and creator Lena Dunham cast doubt on a woman’s allegations of rape against her “Girls” writing partner, Murray Miller. But Dunham has been a prominent advocate for the misguided view that all allegations of sexual assault should be believed, “period, end of story.”

Just-fired NBC host Lauer grilled former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly about the latter’s sexual misconduct. We now find out that Lauer was a serial sexual assaulter, and that NBC executives and employees likely knew of Lauer’s creepy, out-of-control behavior for years. Lauer even had a secret button installed under his desk so he could lock his office door, and had a bag of sex toys in his office.

This didn't age well. Matt Lauer grills Bill O'reilly over sexual harassment pic.twitter.com/jWMHt2LORe — The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) November 29, 2017

Especially laughable—if anything about these events is laughable—is prominent Democrats’ insistence that they and their compatriots be granted “due process.” These are the same people who whacked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for being “soft on sexual assault” after DeVos ended the Obama-era policy of kangaroo courts on college campuses.

These courts don’t allow the accused to cross examine the accuser, allow the accuser to appeal a “not-guilty” decision (a form of double-jeapordy), and will convict on the basis of only greater than 50 percent of the evidence, with the decision to convict often decided by the lone bureaucrat who also carried out the college’s investigation. Although sexual assault on college campuses is a problem, these “courts” can ruin the lives of innocent young men who have far less power or voice, and far less evidence stacked against them than is against Franken or Conyers.

Believe every victim pic.twitter.com/5ISoIihwEo — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) November 16, 2017

The other problem is that politicians don’t need due process in the strict legal sense of the word to resign from public office for behaving badly. There is no constitutional right to public office. And the “due process” Franken and Conyers seek involves a trip to the Senate or House Ethics Committee, respectively. If that doesn’t sound scary, that’s because it isn’t. A former Conyers staffer who has spoken out about his abuses called the committee a “black hole where allegations go to die.”

2. Leftwing Ideology Is Anti-Woman and Sexually Confused

Aside from hypocrisy over giving bad men a free reign, the second reason the Left likely has a huge problem of sexual assault stems from ideology. It must be absolutely stressed that this isn’t meant to refer to the ideology of everyday Democrat voters, although Democrats have become much more left-wing in the last decade. Rather, this refers to the prevailing ideology of the cultural and political liberal elite.

Leftists think they have the moral high ground, but they don’t. The intelligencia actually believes its own drabble about Christian patriarchal society oppressing women, and hopes for the good old days of pre-Christian paganism. (If you doubt the paganism of the new Left, watch this video).

The pro-pagan narrative says all was generally right and good in the world before Christianity came along, and all began to be right and good when the Enlightenment’s veneration of science, reason, and equality eroded Christianity. Aside from this twisted view grossly misstating the historical record, it is particularly wrong about the treatment of women. Women were treated terribly in pagan society. Nick Spencer, research director at the British think-tank Theos, puts it this way in the wonderful book “The Evolution of the West”:

Even those things, like sexual renunciation, which we modern liberals like to sneer at and are now seen as part of Christianity’s repressive side were, in [the context of pre-Christian pagan society], actually liberating. In a society where women were defined by their reproductive role, sexual renunciation was a manifest act of individual will and constituted a powerful statement of independent dignity. Indeed, it was a subtle assertion of control over man – that a woman’s body was her own to choose what she did with it rather than simply being a receptacle for a man’s desire to breed – an assertion that could only be legitimized by a higher authority.

Christianity gave women sexual agency, and its equal treatment of male and female adultery was groundbreaking in the non-Jewish pagan world. The idea that all are equal in Christ, and the individualism this implied, actually destroyed the crudest elements of the paterfamilias (the “patriarchy”). Thinking that we can separate ourselves from Christianity and not see women suffer accordingly is untested and dangerous.

Like many things, the Left’s ideology has consequences. If Christianity goes away, you see the world as it was before. There is no progression, but regression. Today’s Left is totally sex-obsessed, far preferring to talk about abortion on demand and forced sponsorship of birth control instead of opportunities for children or a higher standard of living. Power is everything. The Left is so sex-obsessed that you might almost think they see women as over-sexed and incapable of self-control, a view shared by regressive societies of old.

This oversexed woman, of course, needs cradle-to-grave government assistance. Remember the 2012 Obama campaign’s Life of Julia, which detailed how a woman would receive Democrat-sponsored government help at every step of her life? There was no mention of an extended family, or a man. Just Julia, the government, and ostensibly her many lovers.

Watch This Blow Up in the Left’s Face

Is this article just another yarn spun to make conservatives feel morally superior? Not at all. This article is about making war on the Left, and hitting it where it counts.

TownHall.com editor Guy Benson is totally right when he calls the money used to secretly pay off victims of sex abuse on Capital Hill a “self-protection racket.” He’s right when he says both party establishments have a hand in this, and have something big to lose if the details of these settlements are made public. This could rock the political order in America as we know it.

Benson is also right in saying that with enough pressure from the American people, the current system, and perhaps the details of settlements involving current members of Congress, can see the light of day. Who cares who gets damaged more here—the right thing is the right thing—but it is highly likely that the Left, and the D.C. establishment in general, has a lot more to lose.