For us college students, McCarthyism is a just phrase that’s thrown around politics, one that we have no actual experience of watching in real-time.
Unfortunately, we’ve been given a crash course on it with the recent Brett Kavanaugh debacle.
The treatment of Brett Kavanaugh throughout his Supreme Court nomination process has been atrocious. Kavanaugh, a milquetoast, mainstream “conservative” nominee, had a pristine reputation that had stood throughout not just his, but withstood the added scrutiny of his nomination to the highest court in the land for nearly the entirety of the process until September 14th. That is when the allegations of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, anonymous until two days later, first surfaced. Senate Democrats, who had been flailing about looking for any excuses to delay Kavanaugh’s nomination, pounced on the allegations, determined to make them stick with help from their allies in the media.
When Republicans attempted to get to the bottom of the allegations, Democrats tried to stonewall. They needed more time, they needed a full FBI investigation, Ford wanted to testify but Monday was too early, Ford was afraid of flying, with Republicans accommodating at almost every step, including offering to send staffers to Ford in California.
When Ford finally testified, she seemed authentic, and even many Republicans agree that this event probably happened to her in the past. But there is no evidence that indicates this Brett Kavanaugh was ever involved. None. Zero. All four witnesses that Ford herself identified as being at the alleged party said that they were never at any such event. No amount of hand-wringing, wailing, or grandstanding will change that. Ford’s testimony offered nothing that could corroborate her story. She was “100% certain” it was Kavanaugh who attempted to rape her, even though we still never received a date or place for this alleged event. Ford has also contradicted herself on the number of guests at the party more than one, and she did not turn over her therapist notes to the committee, which also contradicted the number of guests she alleged.
Many have clung to the polygraph test she took, but polygraphs have long been known to be junk science. We still sit here today with no date, no location, and no corroborating evidence whatsoever. And even then, Ford’s already weak case is still stronger than that of Deborah Ramirez, and there’s more evidence that Mitch McConnell moonlights as a Sith Lord than that Kavanaugh was running a rape gang like Julie Swetnick claims.
Kavanaugh came to his own defense during his testimony just after Ford’s, full of justifiable anger that he has been smeared as a rapist by every Democrat in the senate. Yet even then, we managed to hit an even lower point in this hellish ordeal. This was a man whose name had been smeared for weeks, dragged through the mud by a complicit media, and then many leftist pundits had the gall to mock his anger at being publicly destroyed with no evidence. After doing everything they could to shred his reputation, they mocked him for offering an impassioned defense of himself. Just days before, they also mocked his appearance on Fox News, giving a mild-mannered interview with Martha MacCallum. Kavanaugh’s calm demeanor in his interview proved he was guilty, you see, and so did his fiery testimony.
The truth is, to Democrats and other people and groups on the political left, it doesn’t matter that there is still no evidence that Kavanaugh did anything. The goal since the allegations came forward was never to get to the truth of them; rather, it was to try and push the open Supreme Court seat past the midterm elections, on the slim chance Democrats could retake the senate and block any nominee until a Democrat enters the Oval Office. If they can’t block the nomination, they want to smear Kavanaugh as a rapist so it would ruin the credibility of the Supreme Court if they do indeed go after the Left’s sacrament of abortion, enshrined in Roe V. Wade until the Supreme Court decides otherwise. Clarence Thomas has likewise been smeared as a sexual predator, even though his accuser Anita Hill had her testimony before the senate directly contradicted by the FBI agents who interviewed her.
For now, we are stuck as Republicans have once again appeased Democrats with an FBI investigation. Never mind the fact that this “investigation” is just the FBI collecting witness statements, which the Senate Judiciary Committee has already done. The punishment for lying to the committee and lying to the FBI are virtually the same, and Democrats will complain anyway that one week isn’t nearly enough time. The FBI finished their evaluation of Anita Hill’s claims in three days and, unlike Kavanaugh and Ford, Hill and Thomas were actual employees of the government, giving the FBI a reason to actually be involved.
There is no justification for the ghoulish treatment of Kavanaugh. There has not been one credible claim against him yet, with Ford’s claims being directly refuted by her own witnesses. Yet Democrats are willing to ruin a man’s life, branding him a rapist for the remainder of his life and likely long after, for the sin of being nominated to the Supreme Court.
Joseph McCarthy wouldn’t be proud. He’d be jealous that Democrats have taken his methods to a much higher level.
