Despite Appearances, BOTH Kavanaugh and Ford Were Lying Under Oath. Why Is No Media Organization Telling You this Obvious Fact?

by Alexander Zubatov

The political polarization of media has reached such a high point that we are getting, on the part of the left-leaning mainstream media, an organized propaganda campaign against Judge Brett Kavanaugh and in favor of Christine Blasey Ford and, on the part of the conservative sliver of media, a full-throated defense of Kavanaugh and an attack on the credibility of Ford’s accusations. Blinded by such ideological agendas, no one, it seems, can say the obvious: it appears clear enough at this point that, their apparent credibility notwithstanding, both Kavanaugh and Ford were lying.

When it comes to Kavanaugh, the evidence of lying is clear because it has been covered in spades by the mainstream media. A parade of old college drinking buddies has now come forward to attest to the fact that he was an aggressive, sloppy drunk whose testimony about not ever blacking out when drinking is quite likely totally false. Common sense and another classmate also tell us that Kavanaugh’s story that the “Renate Alumnius” reference in his yearbook was to a friendship with the woman at issue (Renate Shroeder) rather than to a claimed sexual conquest of her is also overwhelmingly likely to be false.

When it comes to Ford, the evidence of lying is clear because, countering her Congressional testimony that she “never” had “any discussions with anyone … on how to take a polygraph,” a former ex-boyfriend has come forward to provide a detailed account of how she not only had such discussions but actively helped prepare a lifelong best friend for a polygraph test. He also attested to the fact that in the six years they were dating, she never expressed or displayed any fear of flying, in marked contrast to her statements to Congress. (She also apparently had never mentioned anything resembling the alleged incident with Kavanaugh to the ex-boyfriend, but that I would find less surprising.) CNN never covered Ford’s ex-boyfriend’s explosive and significant statement at all (except to offer an unconvincing rebuttal to it later by Ford’s lifelong best friend who had a clear interest in denying she’d ever been prepped for a polygraph test for jobs with government agencies, including the FBI), while The New York Times re-framed and buried the story by presenting it as an “attack” against Ford by Senate Republicans:

It also appears that Ford may have lied about the reason a second front door was installed in her home. She claimed to Congress that the installation of the door was brought on by claustrophobia occasioned by the alleged Kavanaugh attack and led to her marriage counseling in which she first revealed the incident, but an independent investigation now shows the door may have been “installed years before as part of an addition, and has been used by renters and even a marriage counseling business.”

So what do we know now? Here are my takeaway points:

• Despite our own confidence in our assessments, we are very poor judges of credibility. When Ford and Kavanaugh testified, the big story by most media organizations and observers was that they both seemed credible. Well, turns out everyone was wrong. Really, we should have known that based on research, which suggests that we correctly judge a person’s credibility only about half the time (meaning, that a coin flip would be just as accurate as our intuitions):

Studies suggest that people are about 45 to 60 per cent accurate in spotting lies — in fact, very close to chance, which would be 50 per cent. One study comparing the ability of different professional groups to detect lies found that the police were no better than ordinary people in identifying who was lying, although they were confident that their judgments were better. In another US study involving secret service agents, psychiatrists, judges, robbery investigators, FBI polygraphers and college students, the only group to score significantly above chance in detecting lies were the secret service agents. In all groups, the subjects’ self-assessment of their skill at lie detection bore no relation to their actual score. This all suggests that although we are not very good at detecting deceit, we think that we are.

• Despite Sen. (and former prosecutor) Richard Blumenthal’s invocation of the trial lawyer’s maxim “falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus” (meaning that if you’re lying about one thing, we can assume you’re lying about everything), the fact that Kavanaugh and Ford were very likely lying about some of their testimony doesn’t mean they were lying about all of it. Kavanaugh, for instance, may honestly not recall any incident of the sort Ford described, but he also knows that if he admits that his drinking was a lot worse than he let on and included blackouts, that opens the door for some to conclude that though he might not remember the incident with Ford, it still could’ve happened. Kavanaugh may also have been loathe to admit the truth about the “Renate Alumnius” reference because it would paint him, at least back in high school, as a crude boor who looked at women in a certain unflattering way. Ford, for her part, may honestly believe she was assaulted by Kavanaugh but may not have wanted to reveal that she’d previously had significant experience with polygraph tests and, as such, expose the fact that her passing a polygraph test about the allegation means virtually nothing other than that she wanted to manipulate people into taking her allegations more credibly than they otherwise might have done. As for her alleged fear of flying (which was the reason she offered for not being able to hop on a plane to testify to Congress sooner rather than later), this could’ve been a lie manufactured to delay her Congressional testimony and give her time to prepare. If Ford’s testimony about the reasons her second front door was installed and how it occasioned her going to therapy is false, this would be more troubling because it’s such a central part of her story, but it still doesn’t necessarily mean Ford’s principal allegation about Kavanaugh is untrue. So I’m not just automatically assuming that because these people were caught in lies, they’re both lying about their core stories. (I’ve made clear elsewhere how I feel about the core issue, which, in summary, is that I don’t think all that much of Kavanaugh either as a person or as a judge but also don’t think anyone should be taken down as a result of accusations, whether true or false, about what they did or didn’t do back when they were dumb, drunk teens back in high school.)
• The media absolutely cannot be trusted! This is my most significant takeaway. I repeatedly went both to CNN/New York Times/WaPo and to Fox News/National Review/Daily Signal to get my Kavanaugh news (which is why I was able to reach the conclusions I reached in this article), and I would also repeatedly see dramatically different stories or spins on stories being covered by the left vs. right media organizations. The fact that none of these sources, however, have been able to make plain the simple fact that both Kavanaugh and Ford were very likely lying in parts of their testimony is a sad reflection of the state of our polarized media landscape. This means that you are doing yourself a disservice if you are looking only at a source on one side of the political spectrum for your news. Despite what the big media organizations want you to believe, there is no longer any “mainstream” and no longer any “fair and balanced” news source. They are all hopelessly biased, all political spin machines, all an inextricable mix of real and fake news. Except in mundane, non-political matters, you cannot believe anything they tell you unless you take steps to verify the story elsewhere. So do your homework. Don’t believe the fact-checkers. Be your own fact-checker. Play the role of a juror pitting left and right media’s stories against one another like you would the stories a plaintiff’s attorney and a defendant’s attorney are trying to push on you in a courtroom. Let the adversarial process be the crucible through which, hopefully, in the best case scenario, the unvarnished truth can emerge.

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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, Quillette, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, Republic Standard, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.

He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).