The Kavanaugh Circus Should Be the #MeToo Movement’s Tipping Point; These Vengeful Harpies Must Be Stopped!
by Alexander Zubatov
Last week, I wrote about how even deigning to take seriously and getting into a credibility debate about allegations against Brett Kavanaugh going back to his alleged conduct in high school was entirely beside the point when the allegations were … about his alleged conduct going back to high school:
By being willing to entertain this #MeToo melodrama and treating the conduct of a teenage boy as relevant to who he is at 53 years old (with scores of women from his adult life testifying to his character and model treatment of women throughout his long career), Congressional Republicans had already given up the game. The only correct first move for Republicans in that game would have been to say, we’re not going to go there, period! This, as I argued in the prior article I linked to above, is because being willing to hear from an accuser about what may or may not have happened back in 1982 — and having thereby at least implicitly conceded that the whole outcome here hinges on her and Kavanaugh’s credibility — is a major mistake that invites more and more of these ritual #MeToo exorcisms.
Predictably, more vengeful, opportunistic witches have now emerged (or been dragged) out of their ancient cauldrons. The conduct they allege, all pertaining to Kavanaugh’s conduct either in high school or in his first year of college, is, again, in no conceivable way relevant to who he is as a mature adult and an accomplished jurist. All of us — every single one of us, male and female — would not want some of the things we did or said when we were 17 or 18 to be played back for us and made the subject for a Congressional investigation or employer’s inquiry into our background almost 40 years later. This is because, as I argued before, kids at that age are dumb and do dumb things. If those things happen to be criminal and are sufficiently serious, we sometimes care and sometimes even treat them as adults within the criminal justice system. The rationale for this is that we see the particular kid, either because he (and it’s almost always he, of course) is a repeat offender or because he has done something especially heinous and horrible, as a grave-enough threat to society that he needs to be stopped in his tracks. That rationale simply no longer applies when that kid, for whatever reason, was never charged with anything back at age 17 or 18 and has now grown up to be an accomplished 53-year-old man with a spotless record as one of the nation’s top judges.
The escalating circus surrounding Brett Kavanaugh, with more and more shrieking harpies coming out to join the bacchanalia, was naturally predictable. Once that door has been opened, more spotlight-seeking women who knew Kavanaugh back when he was just out of diapers are going to go searching through their inherently hazy childhood memories to see what they can dig up or concoct. And more Democratic Party operatives, puritanical #MeToo mullahs and unscrupulous, bottom-feeding gossip-mongers masquerading as journalists (I’m talking here about people like The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, both of whom should be fired and referred for employment to the National Enquirer for publishing a shameful, uncorroborated story about what is, even if true, a totally trivial incident) are going to do everything in their power to reincarnate and draw out ancient demons from Kavanaugh’s past. Indeed, the accusations now coming from the likes of a woman connected to the ever-opportunistic political hack lawyer Michael Avenatti are still more tenuous and irrelevant than anything we have seen to date.
This is the key point to understand: whatever happens with Kavanaugh is going to be the tip of a far, far larger iceberg. If his nomination is derailed by this nonsense, all bets are off. The hysterical #MeToo movement will have gone into full-on Joe McCarthy mode, and it’s going to do untold damage (even more than it has already done) to gender relations and the fraying fabric of American society.
Congressional Republicans cannot capitulate any more than they already have by allowing this drama to go forward. They should not feel any obligation to be anything other than skeptical and stern with Christine Blasey Ford on Thursday. She is not a victim. She is a political operative and a dangerous aggressor working as part of an organized campaign to thwart a judicial nomination, and that is exactly how she should be treated.
If they want to live in a sane society, it is now in the interests of all Americans (even those who are too short-sighted to realize it) to confirm Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court, but even more important than doing that is making a big, bold, unqualified statement in the process. This has to stop! Now!
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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).
