Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.

In the category of:  It’s an uncomfortable parade.

Julie Swetnick says she was “gang raped” at a party Kavanaugh attended.

Attorney Michael Avenatti has for days been claiming that he has a client with explosive information about Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh — and on Wednesday, he and his client finally went public.

On Twitter, Avenatti posted a sworn affidavit from Washington, DC, resident Julie Swetnick, who says she was present at numerous high school parties where Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge drank excessively and harassed women.

Swetnick alleges that Kavanaugh, Judge, and others targeted women with drugs and alcohol to cause them to “lose their inhibitions” so they could be “gang raped” — and she says she was a victim of one of these “train” rapes. (She says that Judge and Kavanaugh were “present” when she was raped but does not directly accuse them of participating.)

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In the category of: Racism gone even more terribly wrong.

Police: Accused Murderer Was Planning ‘The Purge’: White Supremacist Edition

The white supremacist accused of killing a homeless man in Manhattan last year told investigators that he wanted to start a national dialogue about race mixing that would awaken white people and lead them to wipe black people off the face of the earth.

Apparently, no one informed him that he could have just gotten a job in the Trump Administration. I’m sure there was a Cabinet-level position open in the Department of Racism, or Deputy Secretary of Hate.

According to the New York Post, Jackson revealed his motives for the alleged murder in a taped confession. The video, played in a pretrial hearing on Tuesday, showed Jackson telling police his main goal in traveling to New York to commit the alleged killing was to get as much media exposure as possible so he could start a global white network and and “get the ball rolling. Shake people out of their slumber.”

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In the category of: Yeah, we already knew this, but…

How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump

A meticulous analysis of online activity during the 2016 campaign makes a powerful case that targeted cyberattacks by hackers and trolls were decisive.

Politicians may be too timid to explore the subject, but a new book from, of all places, Oxford University Press promises to be incendiary. “Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President—What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know,” by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, dares to ask—and even attempts to answer—whether Russian meddling had a decisive impact in 2016. Jamieson offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.

The book, which is coming out less than two months before the midterm elections, at a moment when polls suggest that some sixty per cent of voters disapprove of Trump, may well reignite the question of Trump’s electoral legitimacy. The President’s supporters will likely characterize the study as an act of partisan warfare. But in person Jamieson, who wears her gray hair in a pixie cut and favors silk scarves and matronly tweeds, looks more likely to suspend a troublemaker than to be one. She is seventy-one, and has spent forty years studying political speeches, ads, and debates. Since 1993, she has directed the Annenberg Public Policy Center, at Penn, and in 2003 she co-founded FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan watchdog group. She is widely respected by political experts in both parties, though her predominantly male peers have occasionally mocked her scholarly intensity, calling her the Drill Sergeant. As Steven Livingston, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, puts it, “She is the epitome of a humorless, no-nonsense social scientist driven by the numbers. She doesn’t bullshit. She calls it straight.”

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