My 82-year-old buddy plays handball twice a week with three other octogenarians. Their YMCA has two handball courts, one of which is preferred because the lighting is better.

The other day, the senior athletes arrived at the Y only to discover four black women doing their stretching workout on the good handball court. The men, all of whom are white, politely asked the women if they wouldn’t mind doing their exercises on the other court so the men could play ball on the court with decent lighting.

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The women said OK and moved to the other court.

Five minutes later, a member of the YMCA staff informed the handball players that they would have to relinquish their court to the women. Then the staff member lowered the boom. The women claimed the men had used the N-word.

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Horror of horrors! Send in the Marines.

The men categorically denied the charge. It didn’t matter. The staff member refused to accept the men’s denial. The mere accusation by four lying women was sufficient to establish that the dreaded N-word had been used.

The women were not challenged because calling someone a racist without proof is part of the liberal playbook. Welcome to the Left’s new rule for establishing culpability: A mere allegation of wrongdoing is sufficient to convict.

Say goodbye to the bulwark of our legal system. You are guilty until proven innocent.

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The same rule — the poison of unsubstantiated allegations — was invoked recently in another racially charged situation.

The president of the United States was accused by Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of suggesting that the U.S. should stop accepting immigrants from “s***hole countries.”

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According to Durbin, Trump advocated that the U.S. should be taking more immigrants from “countries such as Norway” instead of “s***hole” countries like Haiti, El Salvador, and several nations in Africa. His comments allegedly occurred off the record in a meeting between the president and a group of senators. Sen. Durbin called the comments “hate-filled, vile, and racist.” Durbin, by the way, has a history of making up statements from private White House meetings.

The president issued a denial. “This was not the language used,” Trump said in one of his famous tweets. Sens. David Perdue and Tom Cotton, who attended the meeting, backed up Trump’s denial by issuing this statement: “In regards to Senator Durbin’s accusation, we do not recall the president saying these comments.” Despite the president’s denial and the concurrence of two senators, the accusation was enough to establish guilt. The mainstream media went absolutely bat crazy with an avalanche of stories accusing Trump of racism because of his “highly incendiary comments.”

CNN mouthpieces Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Jim Acosta, and Jeffrey Toobin agreed that the alleged outburst proved Trump is a racist. Cooper said on his evening program that the president “is tired of so many black people coming into this country.” Trump “seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color, from other parts of the world,” said Acosta. “It just shows that, you know, the president has racist views,” Toobin said. “I mean, you know, how long do we have to dance around that issue?”

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How long do we have to dance around the fake media? The multitude of attacks on the president emanated from an unsubstantiated claim from a single dubious source. Even former Democratic President Jimmy Carter expressed his disgust with the media’s eagerness to accept unproven allegations.

“I think the media have been harder on Trump than any other president certainly that I’ve known about,” Carter said. “I think they feel free to claim that Trump is mentally deranged and everything else without hesitation.”

Carter was referring to more unsubstantiated allegations, in this case involving charges that Trump is mentally unfit to be president. Those charges were clearly debunked by the results of Trump’s latest physical, which included a positive assessment of his cognitive abilities.

The most virulent example of “guilty until proven innocent” has raised its ugly head in the current #MeToo hysteria. Although many of the accusations of sexual misconduct against high-profile men are provable, many are derived from unsubstantiated claims. The reputations and careers of successful men are being destroyed without a shred of evidence. A noteworthy example is the case against Fox News star Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly was fired last year from his $25 million job after a series of accusations of sexual harassment. None of the allegations against O’Reilly has been proven. He has denied the truth of all charges.

We have reached a place in our social history where witch hunts are a regular feature, and public figures can be brought down by malicious rumors.

One accusation was from an angry black woman who said O’Reilly called her “hot chocolate.” This presumably was a reference to her race. As in the case of the octogenarian handball players, introducing the race card only makes O’Reilly look worse in the eyes of a public that has been trained to respond emotionally to specific cues relating to “social justice.”

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Should a respected man’s career be destroyed because he called a woman “hot chocolate”? It really seems ridiculous — and yet we have reached a place in our social history where witch hunts are a regular feature, and public figures can be brought down by malicious rumors.

What are we supposed to do to safeguard the legal protection afforded by “innocent until proven guilty”? So long as the Left and its media collaborators refuse to defend this principle, we are in big trouble.

Ed Brodow is a political commentator, negotiation expert, and author of “Tyranny of the Minority: How the Left is Destroying America,” and is based in Monterrey, California.

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