When Facebook hired Joel Kaplan to serve as Vice President for US Public Policy, who could have predicted that he would turn out to be a far-right partisan who would embarrass the company by throwing a victory bash for a serial rapist on the occasion of his being handed a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court?
After all, Kaplan's previous career -- serving as Deputy Chief of Staff in the George W Bush White House -- abetted an endless war (a war that's now older than some of the soldiers dying in it), cruel cuts to social services, funding religious cults to replace social programs, doubling down on mass incarceration, so much torture, even more mass surveillance, and innumerable other sins that can be loosely sorted into two piles, one labeled "war crimes" and the other, "crimes against humanity." But not appointing actual rapists to the Supreme Court, after all.
Kaplan was a vocal supporter of Kavanaugh throughout the confirmation process (they both served in the Bush White House and might have enjoyed a beer or two hundred during their joint tenure); he prominently situated himself behind the judge during the hearings, as if to ensure that Facebook's officials were publicly seen to be supporting the rapist's bid for the highest judicial office in the land. After all, as Kaplan told his reports at Facebook, "I have known Brett and Ashley Kavanaugh for 20 years. They are my and my wife Laura's closest friends in D.C. I was in their wedding; he was in ours. Read the rest
