We Are Living Nineteen Eighty-Four By Victor Davis Hanson
Truth, due process, evidence, rights of the accused: All are swept aside in pursuit of the progressive agenda.
George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is no longer fiction. We are living it right now.
Google techies planned to massage Internet searches to emphasize correct thinking. A member of the so-called deep state, in an anonymous op-ed, brags that its “resistance” is undermining an elected president. The FBI, CIA, DOJ, and NSC were all weaponized in 2016 to ensure that the proper president would be elected — the choice adjudicated by properly progressive ideology. Wearing a wire is now redefined as simply flipping on an iPhone and recording your boss, boy- or girlfriend, or co-workers.
But never has the reality that we are living in a surreal age been clearer than during the strange cycles of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
In Orwell’s world of 1984 Oceania, there is no longer a sense of due process, free inquiry, rules of evidence and cross examination, much less a presumption of innocence until proven guilty. Instead, regimented ideology — the supremacy of state power to control all aspects of one’s life to enforce a fossilized idea of mandated quality — warps everything from the use of language to private life.
Oceania’s Rules
Senator Diane Feinstein and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee had long sought to destroy the Brett Kavanaugh nomination. Much of their paradoxical furor over his nomination arises from the boomeranging of their own past political blunders, such as when Democrats ended the filibuster on judicial nominations, in 2013. They also canonized the so-called 1992 Biden Rule, which holds that the Senate should not consider confirming the Supreme Court nomination of a lame-duck president (e.g., George H. W. Bush) in an election year.
Rejecting Kavanaugh proved a hard task given that he had a long record of judicial opinions and writings — and there was nothing much in them that would indicate anything but a sharp mind, much less any ideological, racial, or sexual intolerance. His personal life was impeccable, his family admirable.
Kavanaugh was no combative Robert Bork, but congenial, and he patiently answered all the questions asked of him, despite constant demonstrations and pre-planned street-theater interruptions from the Senate gallery and often obnoxious grandstanding by “I am Spartacus” Democratic senators.
So Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed unless a bombshell revelation derailed the vote. And so we got a bombshell.
Weeks earlier, Senator Diane Feinstein had received a written allegation against Kavanaugh of sexual battery by an accuser who wished to remain anonymous. Feinstein sat on it for nearly two months, probably because she thought the charges were either spurious or unprovable. Until a few days ago, she mysteriously refused to release the full text of the redacted complaint, and she has said she does not know whether the very accusations that she purveyed are believable. Was she reluctant to memorialize the accusations by formally submitting them to the Senate Judiciary Committee, because doing so makes Ford subject to possible criminal liability if the charges prove demonstrably untrue?
The gambit was clearly to use the charges as a last-chance effort to stop the nomination — but only if Kavanaugh survived the cross examinations during the confirmation hearing. Then, in extremis, Feinstein finally referenced the charge, hoping to keep it anonymous, but, at the same time, to hint of its serious nature and thereby to force a delay in the confirmation. Think something McCarthesque, like “I have here in my hand the name . . .”
Delay would mean that the confirmation vote could be put off until after the midterm election, and a few jeopardized Democratic senators in Trump states would not have to go on record voting no on Kavanaugh. Or the insidious innuendos, rumor, and gossip about Kavanaugh would help to bleed him to death by a thousand leaks and, by association, tank Republican chances at retaining the House. (Republicans may or may not lose the House over the confirmation circus, but they most surely will lose their base and, with it, the Congress if they do not confirm Kavanaugh.)
Feinstein’s anonymous trick did not work. So pressure mounted to reveal or leak Ford’s identity and thereby force an Anita-Hill–like inquest that might at least show old white men Republican senators as insensitive to a vulnerable and victimized woman.
The problem, of course, was that, under traditional notions of jurisprudence, Ford’s allegations simply were not provable. But America soon discovered that civic and government norms no longer follow the Western legal tradition. In Orwellian terms, Kavanaugh was now at the mercy of the state. He was tagged with sexual battery at first by an anonymous accuser, and then upon revelation of her identity, by a left-wing, political activist psychology professor and her more left-wing, more politically active lawyer.
Newspeak and Doublethink
Statue of limitations? It does not exist. An incident 36 years ago apparently is as fresh today as it was when Kavanaugh was 17 and Ford 15.
Presumption of Innocence? Not at all. Kavanaugh is accused and thereby guilty. The accuser faces no doubt. In Orwellian America, the accused must first present his defense, even though he does not quite know what he is being charged with. Then the accuser and her legal team pour over his testimony to prepare her accusation.
Evidence? That too is a fossilized concept. Ford could name neither the location of the alleged assault nor the date or time. She had no idea how she arrived or left the scene of the alleged crime. There is no physical evidence of an attack. And such lacunae in her memory mattered no longer at all.
Details? Again, such notions are counterrevolutionary. Ford said to her therapist 6 years ago (30 years after the alleged incident) that there were four would-be attackers, at least as recorded in the therapist’s notes.
But now she has claimed that there were only two assaulters: Kavanaugh and a friend. In truth, all four people — now including a female — named in her accusations as either assaulters or witnesses have insisted that they have no knowledge of the event, much less of wrongdoing wherever and whenever Ford claims the act took place. That they deny knowledge is at times used as proof by Ford’s lawyers that the event 36 years was traumatic.
An incident at 15 is so seared into her lifelong memory that at 52 Ford has no memory of any of the events or details surrounding that unnamed day, except that she is positive that 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, along with four? three? two? others, was harassing her. She has no idea where or when she was assaulted but still assures that Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were drunk, but that she and the others (?) merely had only the proverbial teenage “one beer.” Most people are more likely to know where they were at a party than the exact number of alcoholic beverages they consumed — but not so much about either after 36 years.
Testimony? No longer relevant. It doesn’t matter that Kavanaugh and the other alleged suspect both deny the allegations and have no memory of being in the same locale with Ford 36 years ago. In sum, all the supposed partiers, both male and female, now swear, under penalty of felony, that they have no memory of any of the incidents that Ford claims occurred so long ago. That Ford cannot produce a single witness to confirm her narrative or refute theirs is likewise of no concern. So far, she has singularly not submitted a formal affidavit or given a deposition that would be subject to legal exposure if untrue.
Again, the ideological trumps the empirical. “All women must be believed” is the testament, and individuals bow to the collective. Except, as in Orwell’s Animal Farm, there are ideological exceptions — such as Bill Clinton, Keith Ellison, Sherrod Brown, and Joe Biden. The slogan of Ford’s psychodrama is “All women must be believed, but some women are more believable than others.” That an assertion becomes fact due to the prevailing ideology and gender of the accuser marks the destruction of our entire system of justice.
Rights of the accused? They too do not exist. In the American version of 1984, the accuser, a.k.a. the more ideologically correct party, dictates to authorities the circumstances under which she will be investigated and cross-examined: She will demand all sorts of special considerations of privacy and exemptions; Kavanaugh will be forced to return and face cameras and the public to prove that he was not then, and has never been since, a sexual assaulter.
In our 1984 world, the accused is considered guilty if merely charged, and the accuser is a victim who can ruin a life but must not under any circumstance be made uncomfortable in proving her charges.
Doublespeak abounds. “Victim” solely refers to the accuser, not the accused, who one day was Brett Kavanaugh, a brilliant jurist and model citizen, and the next morning woke up transformed into some sort of Kafkaesque cockroach. The media and political operatives went in a nanosecond from charging that she was groped and “assaulted” to the claim that she was “raped.”
In our 1984, the phrase “must be believed” is doublespeak for “must never face cross-examination.”
Ford should be believed or not believed on the basis of evidence, not her position, gender, or politics. I certainly did not believe Joe Biden, simply because he was a U.S. senator, when, as Neal Kinnock’s doppelganger, he claimed that he came from a long line of coal miners — any more than I believed that Senator Corey Booker really had a gang-banger Socratic confidant named “T-Bone,” or that would-be senator Richard Blumenthal was an anguished Vietnam combat vet or that Senator Elizabeth Warren was a Native American. (Do we need a 25th Amendment for unhinged senators?) Wanting to believe something from someone who is ideologically correct does not translate into confirmation of truth.
Ford supposedly in her originally anonymous accusation had insisted that she had sought “medical treatment” for her assault. The natural assumption is that such a term would mean that, soon after the attack, the victim sought a doctor’s or emergency room’s help to address either her physical or mental injuries — records might therefore be a powerful refutation of Kavanaugh’s denials.
But “medical treatment” now means that 30 years after the alleged assault, Ford sought counseling for some sort of “relationship” or “companion” therapy, or what might legitimately be termed “marriage counseling.” And in the course of her discussions with her therapist about her marriage, she first spoke of her alleged assault three decades earlier. She did not then name Kavanaugh to her therapist, whose notes are at odds with Ford’s current version.
Memory Holes
Then we come to Orwell’s idea of “memory holes,” or mechanisms to wipe clean inconvenient facts that disrupt official ideological narratives. Shortly after Ford was named, suddenly her prior well-publicized and self-referential social-media revelations vanished, as if she’d never held her minor-league but confident pro-Sanders, anti-Trump opinions. And much of her media and social-media accounts were erased as well.
Similarly, one moment the New York Times — just coming off an embarrassing lie in reporting that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had ordered new $50,000 office drapes on the government dime — reported that Kavanaugh’s alleged accomplice, Mark Judge, had confirmed Ford’s allegation. Indeed, in a sensational scoop, according to the Times, Judge told the Judiciary Committee that he does remember the episode and has nothing more to say. In fact, Judge told the committee the very opposite: that he does not remember the episode. Forty minutes later, the Times embarrassing narrative vanished down the memory hole.
The online versions of some of the yearbooks of Ford’s high school from the early 1980s vanished as well. At times, they had seemed to take a perverse pride in the reputation of the all-girls school for underage drinking, carousing, and, on rarer occasions, “passing out” at parties. Such activities were supposed to be the monopoly and condemnatory landscape of the “frat boy” and spoiled-white-kid Kavanaugh — and certainly not the environment in which the noble Ford navigated. Seventeen-year-old Kavanaugh was to play the role of a falling-down drunk; Ford, with impressive powers of memory of an event 36 years past, assures us that as a circumspect 15-year-old, she had only “one beer.”
A former teenage friend of Ford’s sent out a flurry of social-media postings, allegedly confirming that Ford’s ordeal was well known to her friends in 1982 and so her assault narrative must therefore be confirmed. Then, when challenged on some of her incoherent details (schools are not in session during summertime, and Ford is on record as not telling anyone of the incident for 30 years), she mysteriously claimed that she no longer could stand by her earlier assertions, which likewise soon vanished from her social-media account. Apparently, she had assumed that in 2018 Oceania ideologically correct citizens merely needed to lodge an accusation and it would be believed, without any obligation on her part to substantiate her charges.
When a second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, followed Ford seven days later to allege another sexual incident with the teenage Kavanaugh, at Yale 35 years ago, it was no surprise that she followed the now normal Orwellian boilerplate: None of those whom she named as witnesses could either confirm her charges or even remember the alleged event. She had altered her narrative after consultations with lawyers and handlers. She too confesses to underage drinking during the alleged event. She too is currently a social and progressive political activist. The only difference from Ford’s narrative is that Ramirez’s accusation was deemed not credible enough to be reported even by the New York Times, which recently retracted false stories about witness Mark Judge in the Ford case, and which falsely reported that U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley had charged the government for $50,000 office drapes.
As in 1984, “truths” in these sorts of allegations do not exist unless they align with the larger “Truth” of the progressive project. In our case, the overarching Truth mandates that, in a supposedly misogynist society, women must always be believed in all their accusations and should be exempt from all counter-examinations.
Little “truths” — such as the right of the accused, the need to produce evidence, insistence on cross-examination, and due process — are counterrevolutionary constructs and the refuge of reactionary hold-outs who are enemies of the people. Or in the words of Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono:
Guess who’s perpetuating all of these kinds of actions? It’s the men in this country. And I just want to say to the men in this country, “Just shut up and step up. Do the right thing, for a change.”
The View’s Joy Behar was more honest about the larger Truth: “These white men, old by the way, are not protecting women,” Behar exclaimed. “They’re protecting a man who is probably guilty.” We thank Behar for the concession “probably.”
According to some polls, about half the country believes that Brett Kavanaugh is now guilty of a crime committed 36 years ago at the age of 17. And that reality reminds us that we are no longer in America. We are already living well into the socialist totalitarian Hell that Orwell warned us about long ago.
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