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Radicalized By Kavanaugh’s Fate

The unhinged left-wing mob is galvanizing alienated Republicans and conservatives
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Yale Law School professors canceled classes on Monday so students there could hold a protest against Yale Law graduate Brett Kavanaugh:

“Over the past few months, I’ve seen the name of my school associated with this awful human being and been disgusted by it,” said Matt Post, a freshman at Yale College. “I’ve seen faculty defend his character, even if they disagreed with his ideas. I think those two concepts are inseparable, and we’re seeing that today. You can’t devalue a woman’s right to choose and respect women.”

I started this Kavanaugh process with no particular feelings about him. A friend whose judgment I trust, and who knows Kavanaugh, told me before he was nominated that he’s a good man and a great judge. I accepted my friend’s judgment, but I wanted Amy Coney Barrett to be the nominee. When Kavanaugh was chosen instead, I was fine with it. He seemed like a standard Republican, same as Gorsuch. His hearings were dull, but that’s not a bad thing when it comes to a Supreme Court nominee.

And then came the campaign by elite media and others to destroy his character. I allowed myself to be persuaded that Christine Blasey Ford’s claims deserve a hearing, even though they came at the very last minute, despite the fact that Sen. Feinstein has been sitting on them all summer long. These alleged events happened over 30 years ago. She has no corroboration. He flatly denies them. I began as someone who didn’t understand what this allegation, if true, tells us about the character of a middle-aged man and his fitness for the Supreme Court, but by listening to some of you, I came to believe that I was probably wrong. We needed to have a hearing to see what the truth is.

She has been playing a game with the Senate Judiciary Committee, trying to dictate the terms of her testimony. Yesterday, when the Republicans on the committee designated a female veteran sex crimes prosecutor to conduct their questioning for them, she hollered foul. You would think that someone interested in getting to the truth of the matter would welcome that kind of questioner. But no, Blasey Ford’s reaction gave away the game. She wants to be interrogated by older Republican men, so the focus isn’t on what she says, but the identity of her questioners. It was never about a traumatized victim trying to bring the truth out. It was always about destroying Brett Kavanaugh by any means necessary.

Now, this morning, this news from the AP:

A lawyer for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh says the woman who is to testify Thursday about her claim he sexually assaulted her in high school has not turned over key information related to her accusation.

Beth Wilkinson said Wednesday on CBS “This Morning” that the results of Christine Blasey Ford’s polygraph test and her therapist’s notes are not among the materials turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee on the eve of her testimony.

Wilkinson said: “They announced that there were notes and that there had been a lie detector test” but that those materials were not turned over “even though they were requested.”

Again: this is not about getting at the truth. This Thursday event, from a left-wing perspective, is what we used to call a “show trial.” It is meant to illustrate a political verdict already reached. Yale Law school student Matt Post, above, explains what’s going on: this is about preserving Roe vs. Wade, by any means necessary. If Amy Coney Barrett had been the nominee, the Left would be painting her as a gibbering religious fanatic bent on imposing Catholic sharia on America. This is as clear as clear can be now. There is no lie they will not tell, no smear they will not employ, to destroy Brett Kavanaugh. He is no longer, in their eyes, a human being, but a symbol of all they hate.

I look at him, and what’s being done to him, and see my sons, and even my daughter. If they were nominated for a position like Kavanaugh’s, I would want them to have a fair hearing. I don’t think that’s possible any more in America, not for the kind of people identified by the cultural Left as the Enemy. And make no mistake, if my daughter grows up to be a believing Christian and a social conservative, she will be the Enemy, as sure as my sons will be. These cultural elites would eagerly destroy the character of my children, as well as myself and most of my friends, to pursue their political goals.

For me, this is not about getting Brett Kavanaugh on the Court. Maybe he doesn’t belong there. Maybe he is too flawed. But damn it, he deserves a fair hearing. We all do. That is what the Left wishes to deny to those it sees as a threat.

I want to draw your attention to this post I put on this blog on April 3, 2015: an interview with an elite law school teacher I called “Professor Kingsfield”. He is a believing Christian closeted in his law school, one of the handful of best in the country. He reached out to me after the Indiana RFRA debacle. Here’s what he said back then. Read these passages in light of what’s happening to Kavanaugh:

What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

More:

Kingsfield teaches at one of the top universities in the country, a gateway to elite advancement, but says he’s not sure he would want his kids attending there. It depends on God’s calling. He remains there because for now, he sees that he has a mission to mentor undergraduates who need a professor like him to help them deal with the things coming at them. The fact that he has his kids in a good school and a good parish makes this possible. But he recognizes that by the time his children become college age, the landscape may have shifted such that the elite universities are too hostile.

“I could still imagine having a kid who was really strong in his faith, and believing that God was calling him to going to a prestige college. I’m not ready to say ‘never’ for that, but I do think there are a lot of kids that we need to steer away from such hostile places, and into smaller, reliably Christian schools where they can be built up in their faith, and not have to deal with such hostility before they’re strong enough to combat it.”

It’s hard to say what kind of landscape Christians will be looking at twenty, thirty years from now. Kingsfield says he has gay colleagues in the university, people who are in their sixties and seventies now, who came of age in a time where a strong sense of individual liberty protected them. They still retain a devotion to liberty, seeing how much it matters to despised minorities.

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

If you read the whole thing, you’ll see that Kingsfield strongly encouraged me then to write The Benedict Option. This was before I began writing the book, and two years before it was published. The professor, who works inside a factory that produces America’s legal elites, said it was absolutely vital for believing Christians to start forming networks now, to support each other in the coming trials. He also exhorted Christians to build their own faith, and the faith of their families, up for the trials to come. He continued:

On the political side, Kingsfield said it’s important to “surrender political hope” — that is, that things can be solved through political power. Republicans can be counted on to block the worst of what the Democrats attempt – which is a pretty weak thing to rely on, but it’s not nothing. “But a lot of things can be done by administrative order,” he said. “I’m really worried about that.”

And on the cultural front? Cultural pressure is going to radically reduce orthodox Christian numbers in the years go come. The meaning of what it means to be a faithful Christian is going to come under intense fire, Kingsfield said, not only from outside the churches, but from within. There will be serious stigma attached to standing up for orthodox teaching on homosexuality.

“And if the bishops are like these Indiana bishops, where does that leave us?” he said. “We have a problem in the current generation, but what I really worry about is what it means to transmit the faith to the next generation.”

“A lot of us will be able to ‘pass’ if we keep our mouths shut, but it’s going to be hard to tell who believes what,” Kingsfield said. “In [my area], there’s a kind of secret handshake that traditional Christians use to identify ourselves to each other when we meet. Forming those subterranean, catacomb church networks is not easy, but it’s terribly vital right now.”

That was three years ago. I did not vote for Donald Trump because I recognize him to be a bad man, and an untrustworthy one. Nothing that has happened in the past two years has caused me to question that judgment of his character.

But this Kavanaugh thing has focused my mind sharply. Look at the Yale Law School professors and students. These people are the enemy. That is undeniable now. It’s not that they oppose Brett Kavanaugh. It’s that they are so ideologized that they will stop at nothing to destroy him, or anybody else who gets in their way. They have turned him from a human being into a symbol of something they want to destroy. This is what Prof. Kingsfield was warning about:

“That generation is superseded by Social Justice Warriors in their thirties who don’t believe that they should respect anybody who doesn’t respect them,” Kingsfield said. “Those people are going to be in power before long, and we may not be protected.”

The Kavanaugh fight has been primarily a bitter contest among American elites. Kavanaugh, recall, is a Yale Law graduate, and a favorite of the Federalist Society. The men and women now being trained at Yale Law (and Harvard Law, and similar elite institutions) are going to be running the country. They and their allies in the elite media. This is hardly a controversial observation to make. What is now very clear — very clear — is that when they are in power, they will use it to crush people like me.

Against abortion? Then you hate women! We can give no quarter to HATE. Extremism in the defense of diversity is no vice.

Look, Kavanaugh might be guilty of the thing Ford accuses him of. I can’t say that I believe he is innocent. I don’t know if he’s guilty or innocent of the allegation of attempting to rape Christine Blasey Ford. What I do believe is that given what we know right now, there is not enough evidence of his guilt to deny him confirmation. And the games that Ford has played with the committee indicate bad faith on her part.

The process doesn’t simply protect a conservative jurist. There will, in the future, be a liberal court nominee, and one or more people may come forward with stories that threaten to derail his or her nomination. As in this case — as in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill case — certainty about what happened may be impossible to establish. The best we can hope for is to follow a process that will draw out and discern the truth, as best as is humanly possible. And we should hope that a nominee gets the benefit of the doubt in cases where the evidence is thin, as in the Kavanaugh case. If we lose that, then anybody could be destroyed on the basis of accusation alone.

Is this really the world that progressives want? Is this the world that any of us want, or should want? For the entire country to be turned into a college campus? To paraphrase a line from A Man For All Seasons, if you are willing to cut down all the processes and standards of fairness to get to that devil, Brett Kavanaugh, what will you do when the devil turns on you?

The friend of mine who knows Kavanaugh personally has always been a Never Trump Republican. He too is the product of an Ivy League education, and is part of the American elite, broadly speaking. Based on our conversation last night, this process has changed him. It has radicalized him. It has red-pilled him. It’s doing the same thing to me. I have no more trust in or affection for Donald Trump or the Republican Party than I did before the Kavanaugh hearings. In fact, if I had to choose, I would rather have the Democrats running economic and foreign policy than the Republicans these days. But I have been driven by the liberal elites into believing that whatever their sins and failings, the Republicans are the only thing standing between me (and people like me) and the destruction that these highly ideologized left-wing elites would happily wreak on us, for the sake of their idea of Justice.

I have been a registered Independent since 2008, and do not like in any way, shape, or form Donald Trump and the GOP. But after what has happened, and continues to happen, to Kavanaugh, I genuinely fear the Democratic Party and the elites — especially the academic and media elites — who guide it. I am hearing from conservatives like me who have been alienated from the GOP because of its own fecklessness, and because of Donald Trump, who have been red-pilled by the Kavanaugh persecution, and who now intend to vote Republican purely out of self-protection, for as long as we can manage it.

UPDATE: Michael Avenatti has just released a sworn affidavit by his client Julie Swetnick. This is serious business. Avenatti is a scumbag, but it can’t be denied that Swetnick has put her name out there making specific accusations that are far worse than what Ford alleges. This bears investigation — and Mark Judge needs to be put under oath and questioned. If these allegations are substantiated, I don’t see how his nomination can proceed. Again, these Swetnick allegations are far more serious, and if true, ought to be confirmable in ways that Ford’s cannot be. They may not be true, and Swetnick doesn’t accuse Kavanaugh of assaulting her. But these are so serious, and not a matter of he-said-she-said:

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UPDATE.2: To be clear, the Swetnick affidavit does not change the views I expressed elsewhere in this post.

UPDATE.3: Reader Mike CLT:

I read this woman’s declaration and I have to believe that she is crazy. She is asking us to believe:

1. That there were regular parties in suburban Maryland where high school girls were repeatedly drugged and raped and no one never told a parent or reported it to the police or a teacher.
2. That she witnessed these rapes and never told anyone about them or tied to help the victims.
3. That other boys and girls witnessed these rapes never said anything about them.
4. That she herself was raped and never said anything about it.
5. That after being drugged and raped and witnessing other girls being drugged and gang raped she continued to go to these parties.

That is a pretty tall order.

I agree. Yet she is willing to sign a sworn affidavit saying it’s true. It’s very hard to dismiss these kinds of charges without an investigation, even if she is lying (and notice that she does not accuse Kavanaugh of abusing her). Why didn’t Swetnick come forward earlier? It’s highly suspicious … yet if the GOP senators proceed to a vote without investigating these allegations, they will be accused of a cover-up. And the Democrats get to delay the vote even longer, hoping to keep the seat open until after the election, when they might have won a Senate majority.

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Yep.

UPDATE.4: I’ve been warned by a reader that to affiliate myself with the term “red-pill” is to associate myself with the alt-right. Well, I’m not an alt-rightist. They would be embarrassed to have a Jesus person like me on their side, as many of them have said in the past.

UPDATE.5: The more I think about it, the more I think that these latest allegations are nonsense. The Senate should have the vote on Kavanaugh. If he goes down, let it be on the heads of those who voted against him. The Republicans should bring Amy Coney Barrett up at once, and confirm her without delay.

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