the Stalinist mantra “to accuse is to be believed”

Victor DAvis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

In the end, the Christine Blasey Ford accusations collapsed. With them went the last effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court.

After thousands of hours of internal Senate and FBI investigations of Kavanaugh, as well as public discussions, open questioning, and media sensationalism, Ford remained unable to identify a single witness who might substantiate any of her narratives of an alleged sexual assault of nearly four decades past.

To substantiate her claim, the country was asked to jettison the idea of innocent until proven guilty, the need for corroborating testimony, witnesses, and physical evidence, the inadmissibility of hearsay, the need for reasonable statutes of limitations, considerations of motive, and the right of the accused to conduct vigorous cross-examination. That leap proved too much, especially when located in a larger progressive landscape of street theater antics, including Senate disruptions, walkouts, and sandbagging senators in hallways and elevators.

...Thus far the consensus has been that Ford was sincere and empathetic, but not credible. But more and more, it appears that she was all at once not credible, quite insincere, and perhaps completely unfeeling, at least in saying so many things that were not only unprovable, but demonstrably false and sometimes quite hurtful to her friends—and all apparently for the progressive end of stopping a qualified right-leaning jurist by destroying his character and reputation.

...Finally, the new progressive Democratic Party was especially dense in all this. Senate Democrats kept clamoring for more testimonials to buttress Ford’s charges, but at each juncture of a new witness offering relevant knowledge, the very opposite effect followed of further eroding her veracity. And in a brave new world without evidence, in which “sincerity” and “empathy” mutate into “believability,” and “her truth” is synonymous with “the truth,” why would the counter-testimonies of a boyfriend or best friend be any less believable than Ford’s, much less required evidence of their own? Why call for a supplemental, one-week FBI investigation (months after Feinstein had prevented just that) when all knew that after a week a once-praised FBI would summarily be damned for not finding Kavanaugh guilty of something?

In the end, we were left only with the Stalinist mantra “to accuse is to be believed”—but, of course, not even the current accusers in the future would be exempt from the very nightmare they now would create for others.

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