by Meshawn Maddock
It should be no surprise that The New York Times has decided to revive the most outrageous character assassination campaign in modern American history: the effort to smear Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with unsubstantiated, decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct. The effort to destroy Kavanaugh isn’t an isolated instance; it’s a deliberate strategy that the left routinely employs against conservatives in the Trump era.
The Times printed — as though it were Gospel truth — the 35-year-old recollection of a Clinton family lawyer who claims that he heard someone say an 18- or 19-year-old Brett Kavanaugh took part in a lewd act during a “drunken dorm party.” Of course, The New York Times left out a key detail: the alleged “victim” refused to go along with their smear, and her friends insist she has no recollection of the incident.
It’s a strategy we’ve seen over and over again from the left throughout the Trump administration. Instead of attacking the policies that they oppose, liberals attack the individuals who implement those policies.
The Democrats’ dirty tactics during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings — trotting out uncorroborated, unfalsifiable allegations of drunken horseplay from high school to denigrate one of the best-qualified nominees in Supreme Court history — was only the most galling example of many.
Some of the most vicious attacks, for example, have been levied at Michigan’s own Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education. The smears against her reveal a basic truth about this strategy: how low the left is willing to go to demean a Trump nominee is directly proportional to how effective that person is.
DeVos has been extraordinarily effective, reining in an out-of-control bureaucracy, enhancing school choice, and putting a stop to the kangaroo courts that her Democratic predecessors demanded colleges and universities adopt for sexual assault cases — which have put thousands of young men through the same impossible-to-defend sexual assault farce that Senate Democrats tried to inflict on Brett Kavanaugh.
That indefensibility is the whole point. None of these massive public controversies have anything to do with actual concerns about unfitness for public office. Rather, they stem almost entirely from fears that these nominees will be effective in delivering the change the American people voted for when they elected President Trump.
Kavanaugh’s case is particularly telling. Just weeks before The New York Times decided to take another stab at assassinating Kavanaugh’s character, the main activist behind the original smears admitted they were not about justice, but about tainting his reputation because she disagrees with his views on abortion. That shocking confession did nothing to dampen the Democrats’ enthusiasm over the prospect of taking another swing at the Supreme Court Justice, though.
On cue, leading Democrat politicians, including most of the 2020 presidential candidates, jumped on the bandwagon, demanding that Justice Kavanaugh be impeached over something that even the supposed “victim” doesn’t remember happening.
They’ve played the same game with Secretary DeVos. During her confirmation hearings, for example, they accused her of plagiarism for using the same generic language used by Obama nominees — such as asserting that “Every child deserves to attend school in a safe, supportive environment where they can learn, thrive, and grow” — in a 1,400-item Senate questionnaire. The left has even tried to turn DeVos’s family into a liability, assembling an elaborate conspiracy theory about how the DeVos clan is behind virtually every conservative policy they don’t like.
The reason for this shabby treatment was plain as day from the very beginning: liberals don’t like the policies Betsy DeVos has spent her life fighting for. Therefore, protesters are going to crash her public appearances and subject her to vulgar, personal attacks — not because she is unqualified, but because she is effective.
Are you starting to see a pattern?
The attacks on Brett Kavanaugh were not an aberration. They are the blueprint for how the contemporary left addresses its ideological foes.
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Meshawn Maddock was a Michigan delegate for Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. She is also the Co-founder of Michigan Trump Republicans and the wife of Michigan State Representative Matt Maddock.
Photo “Betsy Devos” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
