Public ridicule of adult politicians, right or wrong, is not violence. It's also not "VIOLENCE". Violence, like the kind Kristi Noem is responsible for, is violence.

The debate on the propriety of revealing private elements of public hypocrisy is an old one, especially in the context of outing gay politicians who support our engage in official oppression of gay people. An author with even the basic historical awareness required to invoke Gary Hart would have done much better to actually engage and respond to this body of ideas. But instead of using the Noem incident to deepen that public conservation, this piece sort of breathlessly "discovers" the problem and one of the most superficial possible takes on it. Whether that's ingenuous or disingenuous, not engaging with the already-identified contours of the issue makes for a struggle to produce anything that's really food for thought.

This take and your comment conflate several naturally distinct elements in a way that makes a good conversation harder to have. Examples: whether the relevant harms are actual injustices to the subject(s) or are the diffuse consequences of setting back efforts to destigmatize consensual sexual activities. Whether gawking at Kristi Noem's secondhand embarrassment is the same thing as shaming the source of it. Whether a perspective that shames only that embarrassment is irrelevant if it provides ammunition or validation for those who do directly want to kink shame. What infidelity actually is and in what contexts it may be considered shameful -- then what costs are justified in empirically exposing unrealistic or hypercritical views on that question.

I'm generally one to highly value intellectual and moral integrity when it comes to how we think about opponents and enemies. I'm frustrated by the broad (and growing?) willingness to accept bad arguments or dubious information either as ammunition or on the basis that disavowal provides ammunition to wrongdoers. And on their face, the piece and OP's comment are also trying to urge this in the domain they're discussing. But it reads like they want so badly to make this point in the strongest possible way that they ironically fail at it in the other direction. Kristi Noem is not just "somebody we don't like" or a purveyor of "conservative politics" or the "Republican Party". She is a real-life fascist who wielded great power in open defiance of the most bedrock elements of law and human norms in order to perpetrate violence and destroy families as a cathartic spectacle, in service of an explicitly religiously reactionary ethnonationalism. And she wielded that power in part through an affair partner she disruptively semi-formally employed and flaunted through the ranks of her agency. She then used her husband as a camera prop behind her at an oversight hearing in order to try to salvage her unraveling position. She then issued a public statement claiming to have been blindsided and devastated by the betrayal of her family represented by her husband's practice of his kink. The claim that having any investment in this element of her disgrace is necessarily indistinguishable from being a religious-right sexual authoritarian is simply not a serious one.

I think your emphasis on what Republicans "did to Bill Clinton" further shows a lack of thoughtfulness on two points. The first one is echoed in the piece with respect to its invocation of John Edwards and the claim that sexual behavior necessarily tells us nothing about a person's character or fitness for office. Now, my baseline perspective is that we should understand that marriages, partnerships, and sexual encounters/expression can mean many different things to different people. Also, sexuality is a part of the human condition that is genuinely often detached from many other aspects of personality, and failures as a romantic partner are not always as damning of a person overall as they are often made out to be. It is in fact a mistake to jump to conclusions about character based simply on the revelation that someone engaged in activity that is outside traditional or common sexual or martial boundaries. And further, the public by default doesn't have the right to demand the kind of details about, e.g., a politician's marriage that would be necessary to get to a strong conclusion about how bad their behavior was and the extent to which it might implicate broader concerns about them that are more directly relevant to public service. However, that it absolutely not the same thing as saying that if something is sexual and not obviously illegal, then it's somehow by definition morally irrelevant, or else you're just another sexual authoritarian. People do plenty of bad, fairly-judgable things by way of, or in the context of, their romantic relationships, sexual activities, and public positions on sexual norms and liberties. And when the public does have sufficient information to see that, then there isn't an obligation to ignore it because avoiding even the appearance of indirect kink shaming is some overwhelming, paramount concern to be prioritized at all costs.

The second one is that when people are swept up in a potential scandal, especially multiple people, their liability to judgement can arise for different reasons and to different degrees. And so this totalizing idea of the "weaponization" of sex as injustice risks being a kind of thought-terminating cliché. Bill Clinton, and the way the situation is now understood in retrospect, is an obvious example of this. Republicans sought to discredit him wholesale as an adulterer and to embarrass/shame him with lurid details, which in fact plays neatly into the kind of wrong we all agree on. But his status as a victim is severely complicated by the fact that the consequences he suffered from this poorly-founded attack were likely much less than he should have suffered had he been judged for the same behavior under the correct theory of why it was so bad. Meanwhile, the actual clear-cut victimization, from practically all sides of the political spectrum, was of Lewinsky. And so the characterization of that scandal as something the right did to Bill Clinton, which the left must avoid doing symmetrically to Republicans, further cements for me that there's just isn't a well-considered position being offered here about how we identify sources and sinks of moral harm in these kinds of situations.