How many times have I repeated that sentence in the past three years? And how many times has this simple statement been dismissed as a joke? Well, I guess you’re not laughing now, as the Kavanaugh confirmation process has been degraded into a circus by . . . what? Feminism.

Many people have become alarmed at the accusation-equals-guilt ethos adopted by Democrats and their media allies in the 12 days since Dianne Feinstein went public with Professor Christine Braley Ford’s accusation. Although the partisan political motive was obvious, and despite the fact that Professor Ford’s accusation was denied by all four of the people she named as attending the 1982 house party in suburban Maryland where she claimed she was assaulted, the media insisted this was a “credible” accusation, and Democrats declared it was sufficient to bring the confirmation process to a halt. The normal standards of justice were reversed, the presumption of innocence discarded, and the burden of proof shifted from the accuser to the accused. Practitioners of journalism degraded their craft, publishing unsubstantiated accusations which they themselves admitted lacked any corroboration, justifying their shoddy work with the suggestion that, because Senate Democrats were interested in this baseless claim, it was therefore newsworthy.

Rod Dreher recoils from the horror of it all:

The left will stop at nothing to destroy this man. Three years ago, a friend who defected in the 1960s from Hungary told me that he and his wife, also a defector, are observing that our public culture reminds them more and more of Hungary at the advent of communism. I asked him to explain what he meant. He told me that the ideologically-driven eagerness to destroy people that the Left identifies as its enemies is the essence of it. He said that they will say anything they need to say, even if it’s untrue, to professionally and personally destroy people.

I wondered in 2015, when he told me that, if he was exaggerating. I don’t doubt it at all now. Not after this.

Tonight I had a business call with someone who lives in one of the bluest parts of America. She mentioned that this Kavanaugh business terrifies her for her sons. The idea that a man could be destroyed because of these accusations infuriates her and makes her afraid. I think that many on the Left are not thinking about the fact that women have daughters, yes, but they also have sons, brothers, and husbands.

Indeed, there is a whiff of Stalin-era “show trials” about this, with the media publishing propaganda to demonize the targets of the purge. The New York Times has decided that jocular entries in the Georgetown Prep 1984 school yearbook are “evidence” of . . . wrongthink?

Do you see how Judge Kavanaugh’s accusers are playing the part of Pavlik Morozov in this Soviet-style liquidation of the kulaks? And what is the ideological justification behind it all? Feminism.

We are nearing a destination toward which our culture has been traveling for more than 50 years, when women aligned with the 1960s New Left (many of them so-called “Red Diaper” babies, children of Communist Party members) became dissatisfied with their treatment by the male leaders of the radical anti-Vietnam War movement. Feminism was (and still is) directly influenced by Marxism, and the movement’s totalitarian tendencies were evident from the first formation of feminist “collectives” in the late 1960s. These groups were unstable and short-lived, as the obsession with equality within the collectives produced a hostility toward anyone identified as a leader. It was not until the feminist movement burrowed into academia, via the creation of university Women’s Studies programs, that it developed any real institutional authority. After two decades of building a campus-based movement, feminism burst forth into national headlines with the 1991 “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas. When the next election brought the Clintons to Washington, it also brought about an institutionalization of feminism within the federal government. The Justice Department was led by Janet Reno and the Department of Health and Human Services was led by Donna Shalala. For eight years, these and other Clinton appointees worked to embed feminist ideology into federal policy. During the feminist movement’s “long march through the institutions,” conservatives developed the habit of treating feminism as a joke. Ridicule is a potent weapon in cultural warfare, but even as conservatives made derisive wisecracks about “feminazis,” this ideology was tightening its grip on politics, academia, entertainment and journalism. A pivotal moment came in 2005, when Harvard University President Larry Summers, a former Clinton administration official, made the mistake of suggesting that “innate differences” between men and women might explain the relative shortage of females in the top ranks of scientific researchers. Within a year, Summers had been driven from office and a woman became president of Harvard. That, my friends, is what ideological hegemony looks like.

We can look back over the past dozen years and see how feminist ideology has, with astonishing rapidity, emerged as the most powerful force in American culture, and this power is purely destructive. Feminism never creates anything, but rather its “success” involves destroying individual men, and depriving men generally of social, economic and political influence in a sort of zero-sum-game formula. Consider, for example, how the Democrats delivered their party’s nomination to Hillary Clinton in 2016, rigging the process in her favor, and insisted that anyone who opposed her was guilty of misogyny. When she was rejected by voters in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan, which hadn’t been won by Republican in a presidential election in more than 25 years, suddenly a radical “resistance” movement flared up, and the 63 million Americans who had voted for Donald Trump were branded “fascists.” Major social media companies, intimidated by (or sympathetic to) this “resistance,” rushed to silence or suppress the voices of those identified as enemies of “social justice.” Google fired James Damore for daring to dissent from the official corporate ideology of “diversity.”

Now here we are, in late September 2018, and the character assassination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh demonstrates what should have been apparent all along: No man is safe from the destructive force of feminism.

Certainly, no Republican man is safe in the #MeToo age. Megan McArdle observes that Judge Kavanaugh is being treated as a symbol, “a stand-in for every privileged white man who ever got away with something he shouldn’t have . . . the distilled essence of the patriarchy,” a target in “the ritual scapegoating of members of a despised class.” He is like the Duke lacrosse team, who were smeared in one of those “ritual scapegoating” exercises that feminists routinely organize. The choice of targets for these rituals is often rather random, where the demonized symbols of “privilege” just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Consider, for example, the fate of Jack Montague at Yale University. He was the popular star of the basketball team, but it was 2016 and the feminist fever that accompanied Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was nearing its boiling point. Yale had previously been accused of being too lenient on males accused of sexual misconduct, so when one of Montague’s ex-girlfriends decided she was a victim, Yale brought the hammer down on him. Montague is one of more than 100 male college students who have sued their schools, claiming they were falsely accused of sexual assault, then denied due process by administrators in the campus kangaroo courts where such claims are adjudicated.

Now we are seeing that the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology, which has wrecked the lives of so many college boys, is not limited to university campuses and, indeed, feminism recognizes no limits at all to its destructive power. A highly esteemed federal judge finds his reputation smeared because of uncorroborated claims dating back more than three decades, as Democrats and their media allies seek to deprive him of every protection of due process. What can be done?

The one thing we know about totalitarians is that it is folly to attempt to appease them, yet there is never any shortage of fools who have neglected to learn the lesson of Munich. David Solway has written an insightful examination of “feminism’s male enablers,” that Brotherhood of White Knights, the soi-disant “male feminists.” The three men Solway cites — Michael Kimmel, Steven Galloway and Jian Ghomeshi — were ultimately hoisted by their own petards, their careers blighted by accusations of sexual misconduct. Because feminist “success” is measured by how many men it destroys, there is no safety in being a “male ally” of the movement. On the contrary, such “allies” place themselves in peril by their proximity to feminists. A man is actually safer by declaring himself an enemy of feminists (and keeping his distance from them) than by attempting to befriend them. And it cannot be doubted that this is the lesson many men will learn from witnessing the attack on Brett Kavanaugh.

If nothing else, this confirmation fight has caused Republican leaders to discover their long-lost testicles. Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley sent Dianne Feinstein a blistering letter denouncing her smear tactics against Judge Kavanaugh, and Mitch McConnell told reporters today: “We’re going to be moving forward. I’m confident we’re going to win, confident that he’ll be confirmed in the very near future.”

The refusal of the GOP to retreat before this feminist onslaught may prove to be a turning point in the battle to save the American republic. Does that sound like hyperbole? Yes, I’m sure it does, in the same way it sounded crazy when I repeatedly said Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It.

Who’s crazy now, huh?







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