Ritual Defamation

Stella Morabito writes in The Federalist,

In 1990, a Kansan civil liberties advocate named Laird Wilcox wrote an excellent and cogent essay entitled “The Practice of Ritual Defamation.” The essay provides a major public service. It clarifies the mechanics of ritual defamation and lists its eight primary features. It’s a short must-read for any citizen with a shred of goodwill.

...Wilcox’s definition of defamation is as follows: “Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication.

...Yes, abortion is a sacred cow to the Dems, but they know that even if Roe is reversed, abortion would remain legal in practically all of the states. (Footnote: Kavanaugh seems to have also violated their taboo on sexual abstinence, a highly punishable offense in their eyes.) But mostly they consider Kavanaugh guilty because he reveres the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land and the protections it guarantees to individuals.

...As a federalist, he would believe that unbridled centralized government power goes against the letter and spirit of the Constitution. That is the forbidden attitude that the Democrats seem to believe justifies their ritual defamation of Kavanaugh.

“The method of attack in a ritual defamation is to assail the character of the victim. . . Character assassination is its primary tool.”

Indeed. The character assassination has been non-stop. Kavanaugh went from Boy Scout to serial rapist literally overnight.

“An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it. .. . . The primary goal of a ritual defamation is censorship and repression.”

Yes, the last thing totalitarians are interested in is arriving at the truth. Lost in the muck is any reasoned debate about Kavanaugh’s views. Indeed, the purpose of assassinating his character is to associate these views with sexual perversion and hypocrisy, i.e., to censor and repress him and those with similar views.

So you don’t need to be a nominee to the Supreme Court to suffer from ritual defamation. At root, the treatment of Judge Kavanaugh is meant to be an example of how you—yes, you—will be crucified too if you ever express a taboo opinion.

Many will choose to lay low to avoid such treatment. But that’s the whole idea, because it means giving in to the bullying, and thereby allowing repression and censorship to grow. This enhances the trickle-down effect of ritual defamation, so that any unknown can get victimized for expressing an opinion considered taboo—i.e., politically incorrect—by bullies.

Any nay vote on Kavanaugh from Republicans would suffice here as involving them in the defamation. Weak Republican senators such as Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins were always ripe for the picking, and having the show trial, complete with the optics of a soft-spoken victim who needs no evidence, certainly helps to pull such Republicans into the defamation process.

And we all know that bully-like swarming is the order of the day, whether in person or on social media. By the way, doesn’t this September 26 photo taken in a basement corridor of the U.S. Capitol look like Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein applying pressure to Republican Murkowski, who was said to be wavering on voting for Kavanaugh?



...Let’s not forget this fact: Judge Kavanaugh is being defamed primarily because he really believes in the U.S. Constitution. If he was willing to kowtow to Dems and rewrite the Constitution consistent with leftist views, Democrats would have no problem whatsoever confirming him to the Supreme Court.

The previous ritual defamation of Justice Clarence Thomas involves another layer of taboo in the eyes of the Democrat elite: independent thought. Thomas provided the best description of the Democrats’ real reason for defaming him during his 1991 confirmation hearings: “It is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”

Of course, Kavanaugh also deigns to think for himself, and conservative so-called “white males” have been out of fashion for some time now.

Read more here.