President Donald J. Trump looks on as Anthony M. Kennedy, retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, swears in Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to be the Supreme Court’s 114th justice Monday, Oct. 8, 2018, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, D.C. Justice Kavanaugh is joined by his wife Ashley, holding the Bible, and their daughters Liza and Margaret. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
The recent “McCarthyesque excesses” witnessed during the Kavanaugh hearing are undoing a great deal of good that #MeToo had once done, explains Victor Davis Hanson in NRO.
A Nightmarish World
A republic cannot survive any revolutionary movement that insists that its moral claims are so exalted that 2,500 years of Western jurisprudence must be jettisoned, as if “sincerity” established “believability” and believability in turn “credibility” – all without evidence, witnesses, or substantiated testimonies. The result of such ideas would be the nightmarish world of either a regimented Ninety Eighty-Four or the chaos of Lord of the Flies.
A Logical Continuation of Duke Lacrosse and the Rolling Stone Travesties
The Kavanaugh hearing was the ultimate but logical continuation of the Duke Lacrosse and Rolling Stone travesties. The #MeToo excess was even likely to have pleased the ogre Harvey Weinstein — a sexual predator who for decades was exempted by liberal Hollywood enablers and appeasers either on the theory of “Well, he may be a predator, but he’s our predator” or “He’s bad, but not always bad for me.” Weinstein may now claim that what happened to the hated conservative Kavanaugh earlier had happened to him, the once beloved liberal, or he may say something like “See what happens when you lose liberal warriors like me.”
#MeToo Now A Partisan Political Movement
So #MeToo has transmogrified into a partisan political movement. Once it took down one too many liberal journalists and politicians, it was steered back onto a progressive course. The police report about Keith Ellison and recent testimony from his former girlfriends did not constitute “substantiation” and therefore were not “credible” in a way the incoherent writ against a 17-year-old Bret Kavanaugh, 36 years ago, most certainly was. Once #MeToo became an arm of the progressive political movement, as witnessed by the Kavanaugh debacle, it lost credence as a movement of righteous indignation whose targets were mostly contrite predators. Today, increasingly, the alleged predators targeted by #MeToo are conservative.
Much more from VDH here.
