When I was in high school, one of my teachers was arrested and charged with multiple sex crimes. All of the charges were dropped a year later and he was publicly vindicated.
It was reported that the student who accused him had been seeing a self-proclaimed counsellor and exorcist who was (and apparently still is) a conspiracy theorist with a sodomy obsession. A troubled girl and her deranged therapist invented a story that almost destroyed an innocent man, and they did him significant harm—even though the truth eventually prevailed.[i]
Of course, others have had the opposite experience, of knowing of genuine sex crimes that went unpunished. These sorts of personal experiences prove little beyond the individual case. It would be nonsensical to suggest that because I witnessed a false allegation of sexual abuse, the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh are likely also false.
Thus, I do not doubt Kavanaugh’s accusers because of something that happened to someone else while I was in high school. I doubt them because their stories are uncorroborated and politically motivated. I doubt them because every eyewitness (named or unnamed) recalls nothing happening, and every accuser is (by his and her own admissions) relying on alcohol-soaked memories from three decades ago. I doubt them because a hit piece on a Republican nominee that is too flimsy for The New York Times should be doubted. Absent better evidence, I will continue to doubt.
The Key to the Uproar Is Behind the Allegations
My teacher’s ordeal did provide an indelible lesson about the importance of evidence, due process, the presumption of innocence, and the rights of the accused. These bedrocks of ordered liberty are relevant today, not only in criminal cases but as a cultural inheritance that we should embrace more generally. But the false accusations I observed also provide a reminder to look for the source of the insanity.
The lies about my teacher were drawn from a deep well of lunacy, and thus there was no way for him to avoid the false accusations. He was targeted for destruction because a family took their daughter to a nutcase therapist who saw evidence of satanic mind-control sodomy everywhere (really). Even if the account was flimsy and inconsistent, the key to the case was the crazy counsellor.
Likewise, to understand the current uproar, we need to look beyond the allegations. The Kavanaugh chaos is not politics as usual, even in the norm-shattering age of Trump. Rather, it is a convergence of the neuroses and contradictions in American culture. From the media to our sexual culture to politics, insanity from all aspects of life comes together over the Kavanaugh nomination.
Psychologically Project Much?
A critical part of the crazy is the combination of the national press’s partisan and cultural biases with a guilty conscience. The media—which are supposedly afflicters of the comfortable and comforters of the afflicted; committed to transparency and accountability; willing to follow the story wherever it leads; etc.—continuously covered for Democrats and major figures in media and the entertainment industry. To take the most prominent political example, the press protected Bill Clinton from the beginning of his career until the night his wife lost the presidency.
What everyone knew in Hollywood, New York, and DC somehow never got reported to the rest of us. Self-aware media figures know that their industry was (and undoubtedly still is) complicit in protecting and promoting moral monsters, so they seek atonement by zealously prosecuting Republicans. Trying to take down Kavanaugh is a perverse penance for all the allies they have let off the hook. The media responds to shame over hypocrisy and bias by doubling down on hypocrisy and bias.
The media has also constantly promoted the sexual culture that is producing much of our national insanity. In the name of liberty, equality, and feminism, girls were told to join the boys’ club and party, drink, and rut like men at their most bestial.
The results were predictable: men exploited women. There is now a reckoning with this immiseration of women, and Kavanaugh’s enemies are presenting him as representative of this wretched culture. He has been made a scapegoat, a stand-in for every entitled prep boy or frat bro who got away with treating women badly.
Yet recognition of how dreadful sexual liberation often was back then has not led to fundamentally questioning the sexual revolution now. There is an increased emphasis on consent, but while this might curb the worst abuses, it has not provided happiness or even much good sex. Whether the model is inebriated debauchery or consent-form hookups via app, the sexual revolution has failed to deliver on its promises of fulfillment, and a lot of women justly feel exploited and dehumanized.
Abortion Is Of Course a Linchpin
Speaking of dehumanizing, another cause of insanity is that Kavanaugh is expected to provide the vote that would overturn, or at least limit, Roe v. Wade and related decisions. The sexual revolution’s decaying pleasure dome is, as Joseph Bottom once put it, “kept bright and warm with the bodies of aborted babies burned in the basement furnace for fuel.”
It is built on subjugating children to adult sexual pleasure. Children in utero are killed because men and women want to have sex without the new people that sex is ordered toward creating. Many of the survivors are left fatherless or motherless because their parents wanted new romantic partners. No one is enjoying themselves as much as they thought, but the next thrill will change that—right?
Those thrills require abortion (just in case), and abortion required a judicial coup. Roe and subsequent cases invented a constitutional right to abortion that is untethered from the text and history of our Constitution. It gave supporters of legal abortion near-total victory, but it made that victory conditional on controlling the judiciary.
This illegitimate exercise of judicial power did not settle the issue, but instead poisoned our politics for decades. Abortion opponents need to overturn Roe to restrict abortion through normal democratic means; abortion supporters would prefer to keep their illegitimate triumph, rather than fighting over abortion policy in each state. Winning our most contentious political issue depends on securing a majority on the Supreme Court.
This is why Democrats have gone insane over Kavanaugh. Abortion is necessary to maintain the sexual culture they have helped create. So in addition to being seen as the scapegoat for what is wrong with libertinism, Kavanaugh is also hated for being the killjoy who will stop the party. The indefensible New Yorker article did not even bother to make this the subtext, it was just the text: Kavanaugh was part of an “Animal House” party scene, and he will rule that abortion restrictions are constitutional. He was the guy whose antics ruined the party then, and now he is going to shut it down.
These are the dynamics behind the frenzy over weak allegations from decades ago. There is no lunatic therapist as the villain here, just the insanities of American media, politics, and sex. Kavanaugh is in the way of crazy, and he is paying the price.
[i] Because he was the victim of false accusations, I have declined to include my teacher’s name or to link to more information. However, sources were provided to my editors for fact-checking before publication.
