My wife is a preschool teacher, and next week she gets to go through her second round of active-shooter training. Her first session was last year, and it featured two burly ex-law-enforcement dudes visiting her school to show her and the other teachers basic self-defense. They put her through drills. They had her practice disarming one of her colleagues, an elderly woman, then had them trade roles.

Through it all, her instructors were firm about being active in the event of a potential mass slaughter. They cried out at her, in raised voices, “DON’T BE A VICTIM.” Victims were passive. Victims waited to die rather than doing something about it. Victims, if you take the implication all the way forward, were not really victims at all. Being a victim was, at heart, a choice.

On a certain level, it doesn’t matter what Brett Kavanaugh did. He could have assaulted Christine Blasey Ford even more viciously than what she has already alleged. He could have assaulted even more people. Regardless, this was always going to end with him as the victim in the eyes of his supporters. This was always going to end with him sitting down in front of the Senate and having some 9,000-year-old Republican apologize for putting Kavanaugh through the emotional turmoil of being accused of putting someone else through emotional turmoil. Kavanaugh was always going to have a comically large infrastructure in place to support him, to defend him from this VICIOUS attack on his supposedly pristine reputation. He was always going to get a seemingly endless parade of trial balloon excuses: He was young, he was drunk, he didn’t assault Ford, he can’t be mean because he plays basketball, “rough horseplay,” and on and on.

The scope of Kavanaugh’s pre-martyrdom is already ridiculously vast. Sixty-five women who knew him from high school came forward to support him, even though he went to a boys’ school. Yesterday, a National Review toad named Ed Whelan sent out a conspiracy theory that Ford picked the wrong preppy asshole out of a lineup: a classed-up Pizzagate take that was privately beta tested with Kavanaugh supporters and then publicly buttressed by supposedly “reasonable” big-paper conservative nimrods Ross Douthat and Kathleen Parker (the theory was quickly debunked and Whelan apologized, but not before fingering the other man and making his life miserable as a result). Just this morning, the President inevitably Did A Tweet which implied that Ford was either stupid, a coward, or a liar for not coming forward sooner (take your pick!). For Republicans, and for the millions that support them, the accusations against Kavanaugh are a far worse crime than anything he himself might have perpetrated.

And so he gets to be a victim. He’s not alone. The cop who broke into Botham Jean’s house and then killed him? She also gets to be a victim. You remember Ted Cruz describing Jean as having “found himself murdered,” as if your own murder is something you happen upon while searching for loose change. Cruz also noted that, “It may well be that two lives were destroyed that night.” Botham Jean’s death was a tragedy, but what about the “nightmare” that Dallas officer Amber Guyger has to live through? Talk about having it rough!

There’s more. Accused sexual predator Jian Ghomeshi? He gets to portray himself as a victim in the New York Review of Books. And the dude who edited him? He also gets to be a victim, because he got shitcanned for granting column space to an alleged monster. Shoddy conservative Kevin Williamson? He gets to be a victim because his abortion hot-takes got him fired from a prestige magazine job. Zero-calorie television host Chris Hardwick gets to be a victim after he was accused of being a manipulative, abusive boyfriend, and then he somehow manages to get EXTRA work out of the deal. Sean Penn, himself an alleged wifebeater, gets to be an advocate for the innocent men possibly tarred by the #MeToo movement. The cluelessness of all these guys is both deliberate and effective, and yet they always get a platform. Their words are always given far more weight than the words of those they abuse.

These men are powerful not merely in wealth and in stature, but they also get to be arbiters—judges, often literally—of which victims deserve their fates and which do not.

Ford saw the endgame of her going public from a mile away. She knew her victimhood would be no match for the industrial complex fueling Kavanaugh’s. This is because the history of America is a history of victims being denied their victimhood. Slaves were portrayed as “happy.” Anita Hill was branded a liar. Teachers slaughtered in school shootings should have been armed so they could fight back. You do not get to be a victim in America unless you fall into a very specific niche, one that, unsurprisingly, tends to be filled with very powerful men. And these men are powerful not merely in wealth and in stature, but they also get to be arbiters—judges, often literally—of which victims deserve their fates and which do not.