A Fresh Air interview with a Pro Publica journalist that told me a whole lot of things I didn’t know, all of them bad.

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. In an era of mass incarceration, why was only one top banker convicted after the financial collapse of 2008? My guest Jesse Eisinger tries to answer that question in his new book.

It’s titled The Chickenshit Club, which Gross couldn’t say on the air because while we fail to prosecute bankers who ruin the lives of millions of people, we’re very strict about saying “shit” on the radio.

The source is, oddly enough, Jim Comey.

But it actually comes from a speech. Now, you may know and your listeners may know Jim Comey from being recently fired by Donald Trump as FBI director. Before that, back in 2002, he became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a role later held by Preet Bharara…

GROSS: Also fired by President Trump.

EISINGER: Also fired – the twofer there. And Comey comes in, and he’s replacing a legend in the office, Mary Jo White, who served as Obama’s SEC head. And he gathered all the hotshots from the Southern District. And the Southern District is the premier office of the Department of Justice. They are 94 offices around the country, U.S. attorneys from all over in every state. And the Department of Justice and – main justice is one of the prestigious units and then the prestige unit for corporate investigations and Wall Street and financial investigations is the Southern District.

And these guys really are the hottest shots, the best of the best of the best. And you know, if you have any doubts about them, you just have to ask them, and they will tell you how good they are. And they think of themselves as the best trial lawyers. And Comey gathers them all together and asks them, how many of you have never lost a case, never had an acquittal or a hung jury? And a bunch of hands shoot up. They’re very proud of their undefeated records. And he says, well, me and my buddies have a name for you guys. You guys are the chicken-[shit] club. And the hands go back down very fast.

And what was he trying to say there? Well, he was trying to say – and he goes on to explain that the prosecutor’s job – federal prosecutor’s job is not to win – like, win at all costs and preserve an undefeated record. What they’re doing is something more important. They are seeking justice. And to seek justice and ensure justice in this country, you have to take on ambitious cases. You have to raise your sights and look at the most significant wrongdoers in society and focus on them. And you can’t be afraid of losing and avoid those difficult cases if justice calls for taking on the powerful interests.

How’s that for depressing? If Comey’s right they were avoiding the important cases because they were more interested in never losing. Oy.

GROSS: You write about how the Enron case was a turning point in how the Justice Department prosecutes these kinds of financial crimes, corporate crimes. So the Enron case seems to have been very successful. I mean executives of Enron went to jail. The accounting company that handled Enron was found guilty of crimes as well. Arthur Andersen is the name of the company. It was one of the big five accounting companies. So sum up for us some of the prosecutorial successes in the Enron case without getting too deep into the details of the case itself.

EISINGER: Sure. Well, the Enron case is the high watermark. And what I argue is that, you know, there’s never been a golden age where the rich and powerful who did something wrong really had to fear for their safety and were guaranteed to go to prison, but there have been silver ages. And the last high watermark was in the post-Nasdaq bubble-bursting era where we – the government prosecuted a number of companies and the individuals at all these companies, including Adelphia and WorldCom and Global Crossing and Tyco and Enron. Enron was the marquee fraud of that era 15 years ago.

And what the government did was something very different from what it did in the financial crisis. They assigned a task force. They brought individual prosecutors from around the country and FBI agents and assigned them just to the task force to prosecute this company. And if you remember, Enron was very close to the Bush administration, and yet the – his Department of Justice, to its credit, prosecuted without fear or favor. And they worked for years.

They – so one thing they did was they dedicated the resources. Two, they were very patient. Three, they worked up the chain. So they flipped low-level individuals. And that’s the way you have to prosecute complex corporate crime. Treat it something like a mob investigation where you flip the soldiers to get to the capos to get to the capo di tutt’i capi. And here you have to work painstakingly by turning lower-level individuals so that you can put them on the stand and they can say, I did something wrong, and so did my boss, and he’s sitting right there. And that’s the way they prosecuted the top two executives, Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, successfully. They won at trial.

But now, he thinks, they’ve lost the will to do that kind of thing.

GROSS: And that backlash was also aimed at the victory the Justice Department won against the accounting company Arthur Andersen, which was Enron’s accounting company and was in on the fraud. So what were the convictions like…

EISINGER: Exactly.

GROSS: …At Arthur Andersen?

EISINGER: Yes. So this is – the undoing of the Department of Justice starts with the backlash against Arthur Andersen. Arthur Andersen was, as you say, Enron’s accounting firm and literally destroyed tons and tons of documents related to the Enron audit right before it was subpoenaed. But Enron had been subpoenaed. And the government was rightly outraged by this and started to investigate.

And Andersen’s activities were obvious. It looked very much like obstruction of justice. And they refuse to admit that they’d done anything wrong in the Enron case. And the government debated it and tried to settle with them and couldn’t because they demanded, quite rightly in my view, an admission of wrongdoing. And so the government felt like it had no choice but to bring Andersen, the firm, to trial. One executive pleaded guilty, and the government won.

But in the ensuing years, something remarkable happened – that it turned – the debate changed from a debate about accounting fraud and a recidivist and corrupt organization – which I think Arthur Andersen was – to a debate about the collateral consequences of indicting a large company.

In this case, many tens of thousands of workers were put out of work, which is clearly a tragedy and unfortunate. Unfortunately, my argument is sometimes companies need to go out of business if they are corrupt. But what happens is the Department of Justice learns the lesson that this was a bad prosecution, an overly aggressive prosecution, a cowboy prosecution. And they internalized the notion that they should never prosecute a large company again, which really ends up undermining their powers when it comes to corporate legal enforcement.

Esinger argues there’s been a shift to an unofficial de facto policy of  backing away from trying to indict a corporation.

EISINGER: And if you’re doing that, you only have settlement options. And what happens gradually is that settling becomes so attractive and so easy for prosecutors. They do over 400 of these kind of settlements called deferred prosecution agreements, DPAs, over the most recent decade compared to an insignificant number in the previous 10 years. And that becomes so attractive that they – two things happen. One is they don’t really want to indict companies. And two, they lose the focus on prosecuting individual executives. And they end up losing, I argue, the skill set to do it.

Gross asks for an example.

EISINGER: Well, prosecutors used to be able to say to companies, if you want to claim that you’re cooperating with our investigations, then you have to waive your privilege and let us see all the evidence of wrongdoing at the company. And today, after the…

GROSS: Waive the attorney-client privilege.

EISINGER: Waive attorney-client privilege, exactly. They said they sort of enveloped the – themselves and protected themselves with attorney-client privilege. And companies used to have to waive that if they wanted to say that they were cooperating with government investigations. And after a big lobbying effort from the white-collar bar and corporations that fought – was fought over years behind the scenes in Washington, now the Department of Justice prosecutors can’t do that anymore. And that really deprived them of a very useful tool.

GROSS: Give us an example of the kind of information the Justice Department could get when it required a company or a bank to waive its attorney-client privilege.

EISINGER: They could get the full interviews that the company was having with executives about whether – when they were investigating wrongdoing. Now the lawyers can give summaries of them, little notes here and there. And it turns out that they’re going to inevitably kind of elide key details that might be very useful. And it gets even worse than that. Sometimes they don’t even tell the prosecutors who the names are of the people who are involved in the potential wrongdoing. It’s all sorts of information that’s vital to really understanding what really happened in one of these investigations.

Gross asks, but isn’t attorney-client privilege kind of sacred?

EISINGER: Well, it’s not in the Constitution. It is a common law practice that has grown up over hundreds of years – predates the United States. It is very important. And it’s a protection that each individual should have, and even corporations should have it in some point. But the Department of Justice needs to be less dependent on companies’ own law firms for these investigations so that if they’re not going to get access to privilege material from the companies cooperating, then they have to decide, well, we’re not going to be dependent on companies’ cooperation to conduct these investigations; we have to do it some other way.

GROSS: So you’re referring to instances where the corporation has hired a law firm to investigate itself when the corporation says, wrongdoing happened here; we’re going to get to the bottom of it. And they hire a law firm, and the law firm investigates. Is that what you’re talking about?

EISINGER: Yes. The dirty secret of American corporate law enforcement is that we have outsourced and privatized corporate investigations to the corporations themselves. We let the cartels investigate themselves about whether they’ve dealt drugs. And that of course is a deeply pernicious development and, I think, is a corrupting one.

Thunk. That’s one of the things I didn’t know. It certainly is a dirty secret. It seems right up there with Citizens United as a symptom of corporations seizing power from the rest of us.

GROSS: So when you’re talking about waiving attorney-client privilege, you’re referring to when a corporation has hired a law firm to investigate itself and then won’t tell the Justice Department what that law firm found.

EISINGER: Yeah. Often this is what happens – is that there’s some kind of scandal or some kind of investigation into a company like GM or Volkswagen or Uber or the major banks – JP Morgan, Chase. They’ll hire a major law firm like Debevoise and Plimpton or WilmerHale, these powerful law firms in New York and D.C. And those law firms assign dozens and dozens of associates and partners to comb through the company to figure out whether there was any wrongdoing. And then they deliver those results to the prosecutors. And the prosecutors flip through it and try to see if there’s any wrongdoing there.

Now, what happens is those investigations are studiously incurious about wrongdoing perpetrated by the CEO or chairman, as you can imagine. They – these law firms – sometimes they do very tough jobs investigating, but often they don’t because they’re not only worried about annoying their client, but they’re worried about their future revenue streams. If they do a tough job this once, other companies won’t hire them.

And that’s the important thing – law firms making lots of money, not corporations kept from robbing us blind or destroying the Gulf of Mexico or anything like that.

GROSS: So you think that having, say, investment banks settle for large fines is not an adequate punishment. Why not?

EISINGER: I don’t think it deters crime. And I think it undermines the sense of equity and justice in this country. I think people see companies paying big checks and the individuals getting away with it. And I think it stokes an enormous amount of anger with the system and undermines the legitimacy of our justice system, especially because we have a justice system which excessively punishes the poor and people of color while allowing top corporate executives, powerful people, off. We talk about inequality in this country, but I argue that the greatest perquisite of being powerful and wealthy in this country is the ability to commit crimes with impunity.

Just a tad.

Sports journalist Christine Brennan asks officials at the U.S. Golf Association, assembled to speak at the opening news conference before the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open at Trump National, if the USGA has a position on sexual assault. You’d think it would be a softball question, wouldn’t you…but no.

But when you’re in business with Donald Trump, the man who appeared on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape bragging that he could sexually assault women without having to worry about the ramifications, your values start to fade.

Your principles waver. Your admirable efforts to try to attract women and girls to a game with a long history of discriminatory and exclusionary practices run head-long into your need to prostrate yourself at Trump’s feet.

And so, in what was a truly remarkable moment in sports news conference lore, three supposed leaders of the USGA sat dumbfounded, unable to utter even one word against sexual assault, while the fourth, a spokeswoman, said the foursome was there to talk about “the golf competition,” but would be happy to discuss the “important question …afterwards.”

Hours later there was an email response saying the necessary things…now that no one was watching any more.

This at a time when golf in the US is not doing as well as you’d think with all these billionaires around.

The game isn’t going away, but it’s certainly not growing. In fact, with the Tiger and Phil era now just about over, TV ratings are falling — as participation has for the better part of a decade.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to former LPGA Commissioner Charlie Mechem, a beloved steward of the game, who said this in an April LPGA news release:

“Although the game of golf is enjoying expansion and growth in other parts of the world such as Asia, there are disturbing signs that golf and the golf business are in a rather precipitous decline in the United States. We must do everything we can to proactively grow the game of golf and restore this game to its rightful place as the greatest sport in the world.”

The largest untapped market for golf is girls and women, especially the daughters of Title IX, millions upon millions of them, who will remain athletic for their entire lives, presumably with a fair share of disposable income.

The USGA desperately needs at least some of them.

On Tuesday, it did everything in its power to turn them all away.

Oh well. There’s always croquet.

Adrian Chen at the New Yorker looks at what HanAssholeSolo and his apology tell us about the harassment culture on Twitter.

The apology is a fascinating document, in part because it is addressed to his fellow Internet trolls. “My fellow redditors,” he wrote. “First of all, I would like to apologize to the members of the reddit community for getting this site and this sub embroiled in a controversy that should never have happened.” The_Donald is a community of more than forty thousand users that has become the beating heart of Trump’s online grassroots army, producing a steady stream of bite-sized pro-Trump propaganda tuned perfectly to go viral. Within this community, the Internet is treated as a venue for bombastic Trumpian fantasy, completely detached from the real world. Users see themselves as engaged in a great “meme war” and call Trump their “God Emperor.” The derision and scorn heaped on them by outsiders—Quartz has described The_Donald as “a cesspool for unabashed racism”—only seems to make them stronger. Provoking strong reactions is seen as an end unto itself. HanAssholeSolo apparently subscribed to that philosophy until the moment that he felt public scrutiny coming down on him.

“I would also like to apologize for the posts made that were racist, bigoted, and anti-semitic,” he wrote. “I am not the person that the media portrays me to be in real life, I was trolling and posting things to get a reaction from the subs on reddit and never meant any of the hateful things I said in those posts.” As he told it, he had lost himself in the thrill of virtual provocation: “As time went on it became an addiction as to how far it could go with the posts that were made.”

It was tempting to write these words off as a lazy shirking of responsibility. Surely, only a psychopath would think that using the N-word or posting a photo of a burning Quran were harmless acts. Every few months, it seems, there’s a new psychological study that shows a connection between doing terrible things online and doing terrible things in real life. (The Times’ Anna North recently wrote about a study linking online trolling with psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.)

Trolls often justify their offensive behavior by insisting that they are simply doing it for “the lulz”—the laughs—and that they use offensive language as sticks to jab into the soft spots in our culture. I used to believe that such a detached approach was possible. The adherents of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which emerged from the same message boards that would later feed into The_Donald, were fond of homophobic and sexist language even as they supported political goals generally in line with liberal values of equality and social justice.

But what “soft spots in our culture” is it possible to jab by calling women cunts and whores? Surely the only relevant “soft spots” are the ones that see it as a bad thing to bully subordinated people – and why would we need to poke those particular soft spots? Why not keep our jabbing of soft spots for soft spots that we actually don’t want, like rot in an apple? What work of de-rotting or firming up or disinfection is performed by targeting women or brown people or foreigners on Twitter? I just don’t see any point in that form of poking at soft spots.

These days, though, when I think of the lulz, I think of the notorious troll Andrew (Weev) Auernheimer. In the early twenty-tens, Aurenheimer was hailed as a geek hero for embarrassing technology companies such as A.T. & T. and LiveJournal by exposing security vulnerabilities with a trollish bravado. He also said a lot of racist and anti-Semitic things, but his many liberal supporters wrote these off. He was just trolling, they thought. Over time, however, his statements became more extreme. Today, he is a very sincere neo-Nazi and a frequent contributor to the white-supremacist blogosphere. After CNN announced that it had discovered HanAssholeSolo’s identity (the network chose not to publish his name), Auernnheimer called for a harassment campaign against CNN employees and staffers. “We are going to track down your spouses,” he said. “We are going to track down your children.”

Yet some libertarians were saying look out, look out, CNN is a powerful corporation, look out. Yes, CNN is a powerful corporation, but individual CNN reporters are not. They’re not the right kind of soft spot to jab, especially when the president of the US is so busy jabbing them himself.

Over the past few years, this kind of troll radicalization has become commonplace. In 2015, Joseph Bernstein, a writer for BuzzFeed, noticed a burgeoning online political movement that wove together two strands of the Internet’s message-board subculture. One strand comprised “threatened white men”—racists and anti-feminists who spread their extremist ideology online because it wasn’t acceptable anywhere else. The other strand was made up of nihilistic Internet trolls, like Auernheimer, who said that they were in it for the lulz. These individuals were prodigious creators of memes and online culture that often succeeded in crossing over into the mainstream. The new hybrid movement, which Bernstein called the Chanterculture, after the notorious message board 4chan, redirected this anarchic collective creativity toward political ends. It combined “age-old racist and sexist rhetoric with bleeding-edge meme culture and technology,” Bernstein wrote. Eventually, Chanterculture helped create the conditions for the rise of the alt-right.

And so we got Donald Trump. It’s all been a bit of a disaster, hasn’t it.

I have little doubt that, on some level, HanAssholeSolo genuinely viewed his online actions as detached from reality. The use of pseudonyms is an important feature of the Chanterculture, and while the users themselves often make appeals to safety or privacy, the effect of all these pseudonyms is to create the illusion of the Internet as a place where we can be something other than ourselves. On the wide-open plains of the Internet, the Chanterculture argues, offensive speech is not a problem, because one can simply turn off the computer or visit another Web site.

Ah but no, you see, because many people who use the Internet use it as themselves, with their names attached, often because that’s part of their work. Just visiting another Web site does nothing for people in that situation.

This idea feeds directly into the ideology of the alt-right, whose adherents see online outrage sparked by words, which they believe are little more than characters on a screen, as proof that the real goal of “social-justice warriors” is to silence them.

For HanAssholeSolo, though, his gif episode showed him what most of us instinctively know—that our online lives are intricately woven into our real ones, and that freedom of speech is not an excuse for a lack of empathy, even “behind a keyboard.” This was “an extreme wake up call,” he wrote in his apology. “To people who troll on the Internet for fun, consider your words and actions conveyed in your message and who it might upset or anger. Put yourself in their shoes before you post it.”

Not long after it was posted, HanAssholeSolo’s apology was erased from Reddit, along with the rest of his posts, but it lives on preserved as a screenshot on the Internet-culture database Know Your Meme. One would like to imagine that other trolls might read it and quit their idiotic hobby. Of course, this is hopelessly naïve. The trolls have gone pro.

Yep.

I learned a new fact about Steve Bannon this morning. It’s a rather exhilarating fact.

Bannon became a vital figure in Trump’s orbit during the early days of his political rise. The two met late in 2010, when David Bossie, the veteran conservative activist, brought Bannon along on a trip to Trump Tower to offer advice about how Trump might prepare for a presidential run. Like Trump, Bannon was a businessman and born deal-maker. With experience on Wall Street and in Hollywood, he was nothing if not high energy, a mile-a-minute talker with a volcanic temper who rarely slept and possessed a media metabolism to rival Trump’s own. And Bannon, too, had a healthy self-regard. On his office wall hung an oil painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, done in the style of Jacques-Louis David’s famous neoclassical painting — a gift from Nigel Farage.

No. Really?

I don’t suppose we’ll ever get the chance to see the original, if it exists, but pending that glory the Daily Beast has given us a version:

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY KELLY CAMINERO

Their attitudes toward Russia differ slightly though.

Speaking of grumpy dudes tweeting their quarrels with lefty ideas…

Should modern members of a PAST-wronged GROUP claim redress from modern members of same GROUP as the wrongers? #Vendetta #AffirmativeAction

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 8, 2017

That’s no good, because it misstates the whole issue. The group isn’t merely PAST-wronged i.e. wronged by something that happened far in the past and is long over. The group has been held back and slowed down by ongoing wrongs many of which continue to this day. The group has been systematically prevented from accruing wealth for generations by deliberate government actions. The wrongs have not ended, and the damage they’ve done continues.

The rest of us have profited from the wrongs whether we wanted to or not, and whether we were aware of it or not. We’re richer because they’re poorer.

So yes, members of the group have every right to ask to be paid what was deliberately kept from them. It’s nothing to do with a “Vendetta” and that’s an ugly and uninformed thing to say.

Peter Boghossian has been needling people lately. Or maybe no more than usual, but he’s been doing it effectively enough that I hear about it even though I normally ignore him.

One reason I normally ignore him is his enthusiasm for pseudo-epigrammatic little quips that are actually just shallow and usually inaccurate oversimplifications. Yawn.

Like this one.

Why is it that nearly every male who’s a 3rd wave intersectional feminist is physically feeble & has terrible body habitus?

1. It isn’t.

2. Why do you ask?

3. What are you, six? Is this the playground? Is it Trump’s dining room? What are you doing jeering at people for not being Big n Strong enough?

4. The constant attacks on feminism get really tiresome, not to mention ugly.

And there was this.

If the left forgoes equality of outcome & the right agrees to steeper graduated income taxes then we can move toward equality of opportunity.

He’s so glib. He obviously fancies himself as a big thinker, but that’s what he comes up with.

The left doesn’t need to “forgo” equality of outcome because the left doesn’t demand or expect it in the first place. That label is bogus; it’s what the right says when it wants to pour scorn on progressive concerns about radically unequal outcomes and what is causing them. It’s entirely possible to think radically unequal outcomes have causes other than or in addition to a flawlessly pure relationship between outcomes and abilities, without therefore expecting all outcomes to be “equal.”

It’s not a matter of saying “fire all these white people right now and replace them with people of color.” It’s not a matter of saying all jobs must be 50/50 women and men. It’s a matter of looking into large disparities to find out what’s causing them and if it would be a good idea to try to reduce them.

Yet for some reason Peter Boghossian has a lot of admirers.

The BBC reports on Hungary’s (or Orban’s) disgusting campaign against George Soros:

Giant posters vilifying the financier George Soros have gone up all over Hungary – the crudest step in the latest campaign by the rightwing Fidesz government against the 86-year-old Hungarian-born philanthropist.

Many Hungarian Jews fear that open or concealed anti-Semitism lies behind the campaign. The government strenuously denies this.

The posters show a grinning Mr Soros beside the words, “Don’t let Soros have the last laugh”.

In smaller letters at the top of the poster is the message, “99% reject illegal immigration.”

AKOS STILLER

That scrawl on his forehead says “Dirty Jew.”

Last year, Hungary granted protection to just 550 people, one of the lowest rates in Europe, and has refused to accept a single person from the 1,294 quota allocated by the European Commission in September 2015. With Slovakia, the Fidesz government has also taken the Commission to the European Court of Justice over the quota allocations.

The Fidesz government is also trying to close the Central European University, founded by Mr Soros in Budapest in 1992, and has passed legislation forcing non-governmental organisations to declare themselves “foreign-funded” – and therefore suspect, in the increasingly xenophobic atmosphere in Hungary.

That legislation targets Soros-funded NGOs in particular.

A few days ago George Szirtes, no doubt in response to this kind of thing, wrote a post about Soros’s “foreign funding” on Facebook:

SO WHO IS SOROS AND WHAT HAS HE EVER DONE FOR US?

Nine facts about Hungary and the ‘evil’ George Soros’s Open Society Foundation:

1. 
Between 1985 and 1996 the Hungarian Soros Foundation gifted more than 4 million dollars worth of photocopiers to libraries, hospitals, and other public institutions so that, despite state control. there should be free access to ideas and information

2
Between 1991-1996 the Foundation gave over 5 million dollars so that over ten thousand schoolchildren should have free breakfasts at a time when countless families were suffering the problems of the transitional period after communism.

3
In the 1990s the Foundation supported the large-scale modernisation of health services whereby ultrasound scanners and other important diagnostic equipment was provided for many Hungarian hospitals.

4
Between 1997 and 2004 when the incidence of TB leapt among the homeless the Foundation, together with Hungarian Maltese Cross charity ensured that 40,000 people could be given proper medical checks.

5
Thanks to the Open Society Foundation over 3200 Hungarians – Viktor Orbán among them – were given the opportunity to study abroad.

Again a woman says hey maybe it would be a good idea to stop harassing women every time a woman utters a thought; again the response is (of course) to harass her.

Labour needs to be a “broad-based party” and its supporters must stop engaging in “vitriolic abuse” online, Yvette Cooper said as she set out the steps needed to put Jeremy Corbyn in 10 Downing Street.

The senior Labour MP warned that the Donald Trump approach to politics was “normalising hatred” and the problem was not confined to the right wing.

She highlighted the “unacceptable” and “utterly shameful” abuse directed at Labour MP Luciana Berger, who has been targeted by supporters of Mr Corbyn over her past criticism of the leader.

And she also defended BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, who has been subjected to vitriol from all sides.

But if women don’t want to be abused, they shouldn’t say things.

Ms Cooper, speaking at the Fabian Society conference in London just hours after Theresa May met Donald Trump in the margins of the G20 summit, lashed out at the US president and condemned the Prime Minister’s failure to speak out against him.

Referring to Mr Trump‘s use of Twitter, she said: “These aren’t just harmless rants from a sad man in his bedroom.

“This is the bully pulpit of the most powerful man on the planet, broadcast direct to millions of people, echoed and amplified by the Breitbarts, the cheerleaders, the echo chambers.”

Ms Cooper, who set up the Reclaim The Internet campaign to challenge online abuse, said she was “sick to death of the vitriol poured out from all sides towards Laura Kuenssberg”.

“It is her job to ask difficult questions. It is her job to be sceptical about everything we say. Nothing justifies the personal vitriol, or the misogyny.”

Condemning the abuse aimed at Liverpool Wavertree MP Ms Berger, Ms Cooper said: “Frankly Labour Party members should be united in supporting Luciana, not targeting her or trying to intimidate her. Unacceptable always in the Labour party. Utterly shameful against someone who has stood up to fascists, someone who is on maternity leave.

“Nor is there any excuse for vitriolic abuse against our opponents. During this general election campaign some Tory women MPs and candidates were targeted with unacceptable personal abuse from the left.”

So…naturally:

Made a speech today condemning abuse online & in politics. With some predictable consequences…. 1/2 pic.twitter.com/DH0XunGNAc

— Yvette Cooper (@YvetteCooperMP) July 8, 2017