The immolation of Judge, now Justice, Brett Kavanagh didn’t keep him off the Supreme Court, but it did offer a road map to the left’s identity group politics.
The left has long been telling certain groups that they are victims. If those striving for victimhood can’t point to any specific instance of persecution, no matter. To be a victim, says the left, it’s enough that you’re a member of a group with other members or ancestors who were victims. If you are, then we’ll pretend you’re a victim too.
The left does this to get votes. They promise to champion these victims/voters for the recompense or maybe even the reparations to which they believe they’re entitled, if only they’ll vote Democrat.
This group victim idea was destructive enough, but now it’s evolved to something even worse. You see, for every individual who is a victim as part of a victim group, there must be an individual who’s guilty as part of a guilty group.
In the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her a third of a century ago and two-thirds of his life ago when he was 17. The witnesses she named — including her lifelong friend with political leanings similar to hers — had no recollection of it. Indeed, there was no corroborating evidence at all.
The left demanded you not require any, on penalty of being name-called or perhaps seeing threatening protestors outside your house or inside your elevator. Instead, you were instructed to simply “believe the woman” because women are one of those recognized victim groups.
Kavanaugh was left with proving a negative — that he didn’t commit a crime 36 years ago. In that near-impossible task, he was precluded from even offering an alibi because the woman was unable to remember the date or place of the alleged attack (though she did remember the exact amount and type of alcohol she had consumed — one beer).
The other accusers of Kavanaugh also were women. Therefore, they also were members of the women victim group, and we were supposed to blindly believe them just as we were supposed to blindly believe the first.
Once again, your failure to blindly believe would subject you to being name-called, at a minimum.
But the evidence offered by the later accusers was even thinner than the non-existent evidence offered by the first, if that’s possible. Later, they quietly backpedaled. Seems that when asked to tell their stories under oath to law enforcement officials, rather than to salivating Democrats masquerading as journalists, their memories got fuzzy.
Don’t get me started about the lawyer for one of them, who appeared 108 times on CNN and MSNBC over the summer.
My point is not that those attacks didn’t happen. Maybe they did.
My point is that until recently we would assume they didn’t until evidence showed they did. Talking heads, paid lawyers and political partisans on CNN do not constitute evidence.
In the America where I practiced law, we didn’t convict and condemn, without evidence, persons accused of a crime against an alleged victim simply because the victim was a member of a group that included other victims of other crimes committed by other persons.
The Kavanaugh hearing reminds us that there’s good reason for this rule of “innocent until proven guilty.” If our truth-finding process had ended with “believe the women” then Brett Kavanaugh could be in prison for the rest of his life with at least three convictions for sexual assaults decades ago for which there was zero corroborating evidence and on which all but one of his accusers withdrew their allegations once they were put under oath.
That’s exactly what the left would like, because Kavanaugh is part of a group some of whose members are guilty — a guilty group.
The syllogism goes like this: White men are a guilty group because some of them have been guilty of abuse. Kavanaugh is a white man, so he’s part of this guilty group.
Women are a victim group because some of them have been victims of abuse. Those who accused Kavanaugh of abuse are women, so they’re part of this victim group.
Ergo, Kavanaugh is guilty of abusing those women.
As a truth-finding exercise, this is breathtaking in its illogic and injustice. Judging individuals on the basis of malevolent traits assigned to the group to which they happen to belong is a working definition of something that most Americans rightly condemn — bigotry.
But as politics, it’s pure genius. It’s all about selling victimhood for votes.
So step right up. You, too, can be a member of a victim group that you like, and you, too, can make life miserable for some member of a guilty group that you don’t.
It doesn’t matter whether anything actually happened to you personally, and it doesn’t matter whether the person you accuse actually did anything. What matters is that you vote Democrat.
(Published Dec. 2, 2018 in the Aspen Times at https://www.aspentimes.com/opinion/glenn-k-beaton-group-victims-to-group-guilt-the-lefts-identity-politics/)
the Aspen beat 
Para phrasing Ronald Regan: ‘Witch Trials are never more than one generation away from resumption.’
I agreed with the legal aspect of the analysis given by Senator Susan Collins regarding the Kavanaugh confirmation — that different standards of evidence apply in criminal cases, in civil cases, and in proceedings regarding confirmations. If I were a juror, I would not have found Kavanaugh guilty of criminal conduct or civil liability after so many years and without more substantive evidence.
But I have had enough personal experience with the arrogant, abusive, and illegal conduct of fraternity boy/ jock types to find it entirely credible — based on evidence presented (however belatedly) — that Kavanaugh was like that in his younger years. That is in stark contrast to the “choir boy” image that his Republican sponsors were attempting to maintain.
I agree with Glenn that there are various groups whose interests are centered on “victimization” — largely by white males and largely in the past. In contrast to the sympathetic pandering of Democrat/Socialist politicians, these people’s prospects for the future would be greatly improved by taking advantage of the many opportunities that now exist for joining “middle American society” (particularly, by obtaining appropriate education, performing useful work, and deferring child-bearing) rather than attacking it based on its past abuses and, yes, even atrocities.
But the Kavanaugh case doesn’t fit the mold of indiscriminate opposition to successful white men by the “victimhood” lobby. Based on the Republicans’ hypocritical conspiracy of denial — and out of sympathy for the individual woman who I think probably (though not beyond reasonable doubt) was criminally assaulted by Kavanaugh — I opposed his nomination. While very few people are completely innocent of wrongdoing in their youth (or after, as in the case of Bill Clinton and various other politicians of all politcial stripes), to earn my support as a political independent they had better not try to cover it up as was apparently done in Kavanaugh’s case..