The Pulitzer prizes this year showed a lot of topical themes among their finalists, as they always do — mass shootings, cherry-picked migrant sob stories, Trump's finances, Stormy Daniels, very obscure wars in fourth-world countries, plus the chestnuts — bad medicine, bad mortgages, bad justice, etc.

Prominent among the themes in the journalism division was #MeToo, with nominations galore about sex harassment and women as victims.  One of the nominees, the Los Angeles Times, with its investigative series on a pervert doctor at University of Southern California groping and assaulting female athletes, even won a prize.  Two brilliant nominees reporting on the non-politically useful Paradise fires in California, with memorable stories of heroism from the flames, didn't stand a chance.

Looking over the roster of nominees and winners, it's obvious that #MeToo is what's big.  I looked over the list here, and I can see there's one from Minnesota on unprosecuted rape cases, a similar one about another incident in, naturally, Texas; there Kavanaugh case commentary about 'believing women' (here, too, more than one nomination on that), Ruth Bader Ginsburg and all that sexism she overcame, the dreadfulness of sexism in general...  Yes, the #MeToo grievance machine was on overdrive.

This raises questions about just why an accused sex-harasser like Junot Diaz was one of the judges for the letters, drama, and music division.  This guy has a load of sex harassment allegations following him around like Pigpen's dust.

Here are some headlines from stories that...coincidences! never got the nomination for the Pulitzer prize in the #MeToo category in 2019:

• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz accused of sexual misconduct, misogynistic behavior -Washington Post
• The Writer Zinzi Clemmons Accuses Junot Díaz of Forcibly Kissing Her- New York Times
• Author Alisa Valdes on Junot Díaz: 'He Mistreated Me, and I Was Severely Punished for It' -The Cut

The Pulitzer board, likely thinking Junot was too valuable as a 'representative' of color, opted to let him stay on, 'welcoming him back' as The Cut put it in its report.  Another writer's group, not wanting the sex harasser to be there for the sex harassment reporting, had thrown him off.  But the Pulitzer board wanted him to stay.  So much for 'believing women.'

This rather makes the flood of columns in the winners and finalists' lineups about "believing women" just a little rich.  This guy was a judge for a contest loaded with #MeToo themes this year?  A shining symbol of a lack of consequences?  Even if none of the accusations is true, and I don't think that's the case, given the detail of the accusations, it's kind of astonishing that they picked him to be one of the judges this year.  Is wanting him to be a judge the reason why they dismissed the women's accusations and let the man stay on?

So now we have a #MeToo miscreant on the same team of judges for all the virtue-signaling columnists and writers who are following the #MeToo narrative to win their prizes?  What a picture!  So much for making a difference.  That, if nothing else, shows that MeToo is pretty much a posture taken, not something that has any real-world consequences for the elites — and sure enough, it's the Pulitzer board itself showing it.

Hypocrisy can be a pretty amazing thing.

Image credit: Vladimir Babenko, via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 4.0