The Senate allowed Anita Hill, a woman who had previously worked for Thomas at two other government agencies, to accuse him of sexual harassment during the nationally televised hearings.
Much like Justice Kavanaugh, it was Thomas’s passionate response to the horrific and unsubstantiated allegations against him that shocked Americans out of their media-induced stunned trance. His remarks brought viewers of his confirmation hearing back to the stark reality of what was unfolding in front of them. After unequivocally denying every lurid and absurd accusation, Thomas said in part:
I am here for my name, my family, my life, and my integrity. I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country, when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this. This is not a closed room. There was an FBI investigation. This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I am concerned, 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 US Senate rather than hung from a tree.6
Yes, it was about race, but that was secondary to what I contend was the main point to be signaled and understood by just about everyone, which Thomas also notes in his statement. This was about how the system would treat any threat posed by those who challenge the liberal and bureaucratic status quo. It was a message by the establishment to blacks, women, gays, and everyone else that they had better behave and comply with the left’s fast-talking snake oil salesmen. No identity would keep you from being sent into the coliseum to be mauled to death by wild animals.
Thomas has lived with the smears now for over thirty years. In an excellent 2022 essay in the Federalist, cultural and media critic Tom Elliott describes the experiences in Thomas’s life that have helped to craft this American hero. In discussing the continuing media assault on a black man who dares to be independent, in “Why the Racist Left Smears Clarence Thomas as an ‘Angry Black Man,’” Elliott writes:
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is “a person of grievance” harboring “resentment, [and] anger,” reported no less an authority than Hillary Clinton during an appearance last week on CBS [in 2022]. In ignoring Thomas’s ideas to smear his temperament, Clinton pulled from the same playbook leftists have been using against Thomas since even before his 1991 confirmation hearings.7
For Marxists, we are all an attraction to highlight the suffering brought about by noncompliance, which they use to threaten and control society at large. But one voice can break the spell and reveal the fraud of the left. The bureaucratic elite knows this, and Thomas knows this. And while in his case it was about race, it was also about conforming and complying.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh
The Democrats’ template of destruction was fanatically utilized against now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. The anti-Thomas and -Kavanaugh displays were designed for the progressive media to inflict the kind of pain and destruction that can only come from repeated and widespread calumny. It also serves as a warning to everyone watching—if we can do this to them, we can do it to anyone. The kind of sexual allegations made against these two men are designed to be impossible to refute (how do you prove a negative?) as the smears move at the speed of light courtesy of the Democrat-Media Axis.
Defending yourself against the woke zealots who design your cancellation requires being able to prove your innocence, turning due process on its head. Proving your innocence now is just as impossible as it was in 1692 and 1693 for the roughly two hundred women and men accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts—or for the tens of thousands of people (mostly women) executed as witches in Europe from the 1300s through the 1600s.8
The vile and shocking Democrat-Media Axis smear campaign against Kavanaugh during his 2018 Senate confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court was a pure contrivance; propaganda at its most desperate and howling. It began, as so many do, as a last-minute accusation leaked to the media. An additional Senate hearing was staged to investigate the lurid and unproven allegations against Kavanaugh, and accusers were produced, making outrageously absurd accusations, all without evidence, against him. Just before a confirmation vote was to be taken.
The left had deployed one accuser against Thomas, but he was confirmed anyway. So progressives escalated and found three people to scream “Witch!” at Kavanaugh in hopes they would succeed in sinking his nomination. It was a show of shows.
In fact, Kavanaugh didn’t have to just prove his innocence. According to the media, he bore the guilt of every human being who has ever been sexually assaulted. According to legacy media, we lived in a time of pervasive sexual trauma that only the government could heal. As Time magazine put it, “Most of all, the hopes and fears of women and men who have lived with the trauma of sexual violence were riding on the credibility of Ford’s testimony. Her treatment in the halls of power and her reception by an expectant public would send a signal to countless survivors wrestling with whether they should speak up.”9
Courtesy of that legacy media, the inferno that followed the accusations leveled against Kavanaugh was worthy of Dante. Americans and the world were exposed to a choreographed and irrational display of the Democrat Party’s alliance with liberal media as they worked in concert to destroy an innocent man simply because his politics did not match theirs.
Through unabating news coverage, those watching the disgraceful spectacle were to be, consciously and subconsciously, instilled with enough fear for everyone. For those supportive of Kavanaugh and suspicious of the power of government in general, it was a fear that can only come when an out-of-control leftist government shows you its goal is to destroy whoever does not comply.
For liberals, feminists, and the cadre of woke Democrats and leftists, they were being gaslit by the bizarre and conspiratorial nonsense that a drug-dealer gang-rapist was going to be on the Supreme Court. It was the Democrats’ veritable fearapalooza, and they couldn’t stop themselves despite what it would do to the country, to the Court, and to the American people.
The virtual assassination was planned and produced with, as historian and author Daniel Boorstin would likely tell us, the “purpose of being reported or reproduced.” It was obscene propaganda and emotional-torture porn, meant to completely destroy Kavanaugh, his family, those who supported him, and even strangers who were incredulous about the outlandish allegations. It was a fear-fest packaged for a greedy and obedient media to spread libel about a decent man who committed the crime of being a conservative and a man of faith.
Media reports of the outlandish claims against Kavanaugh included sanctimonious assertions by journalists and liberal senators that we must “believe the women,” regardless of the absurdity of their claims, as if being female makes it absolutely impossible for someone to tell a lie.
The “politically correct” message was clear: anyone (including millions of women) who even doubted Blasey Ford’s preposterous claims must be an incorrigible sexist who hates women. This is so nonsensical it would be funny if the harm done to Kavanaugh and our nation was not so serious.
Incredibly, we were lectured about how Kavanaugh was not even worthy of the presumption of innocence, because of his “ideological agenda,” with one Democrat senator saying, “I put his denial [of being a rapist] in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.”10 Moreover, at least one senator actually declared publicly that the burden was on Kavanaugh to prove his innocence.11
This is how people accused of wrongdoing are treated in dictatorships. It is the opposite of justice, socially and culturally destructive, and completely un-American. The Democrats know this and embraced it with gusto.
Women: The Left’s Favorite Targets
Not to be missed is how horrifically the Democrats—the supposed “champions of women”—have been using us like dirty dishrags for generations. We have been the left’s most successful grifting target. They only see our issues as opportunities with which to manipulate and profit. The Kavanaugh hearing put that fact in stark perspective.
The generational effort to help victims of sexual violence access justice was shockingly damaged by the slow-motion train wreck the world witnessed during the Kavanaugh hearings. As a feminist advocate for women most of my adult life, I can tell you ours was not a demand to destroy due process for the accused or an insistence that accusers be automatically believed simply because they were women. Quite the opposite, in fact. If you need to ask people to ignore the principles of real justice, then you are telling people the accuser can’t be trusted. Ours was advocacy asking society and the justice system to simply take women seriously and treat them fairly when they came forward with an accusation.
The Democrats’ position condemning due process, saying the accused must prove his innocence, and the accuser’s veracity was not to be questioned, are exactly the positions you take when you know your allegation is false and can’t survive scrutiny. It reinforced the scurrilous belief that women used victimhood as a weapon against men. It had taken generations of advocacy to persuade Americans about the truth—that domestic violence, sexual violence, and sexual harassment were serious issues, and that women did not use these experiences as a pretext for attention, personal benefit, or their own malign intentions. The Democrats and media politically weaponized sexual harassment and sexual violence claims in an attempt to keep a brilliant jurist off our nation’s highest court, simply because liberals didn’t like his views, illustrating just how shallow and repugnant they really are.
Turning Supreme Court hearings into a political spectacle was infuriating and loathsome. This circus did monumental damage to efforts to curtail the serious problem of sexual misconduct and was an insult to women who have genuinely suffered from such abuse. It also damaged those decades of work convincing people of the truth that women wanted only justice, not contrived revenge.
In the end, the Kavanaugh hearing was nothing more than a televised witch trial produced by our own government.
It was supposed to be the cancellation of Kavanaugh not only because he was deemed the enemy of the American left, but because every man and woman who is like him is deemed the enemy. The attempted public destruction of this man—and, by proxy, his entire family—was also a warning to every American who admires and aspires to be like him, and admires his professional and personal accomplishments. “Be afraid!” it screamed at everyone who might dare to not genuflect to leftist orthodoxy.
A cloud of envy envelops everyone engaged in this carnage. Kavanaugh’s accomplishments alone made him suspect to the left, before ideology even comes into it.
This travesty was only possible because of a triad of collusion: a major American political party, its representatives in the Senate, and the legacy media. In the end, Christine Blasey Ford had her allegations against Kavanaugh disputed by the one woman she said was her witness and present at the alleged assault. As of this writing, Blasey Ford is a professor of psychology, and had a memoir released in 2024 focusing on—you guessed it—her testimony against Justice Kavanaugh.
Another accuser recanted allegations that Kavanaugh had raped her in a car, admitting that she fabricated the story to “get attention.”12 The lawyer for another accuser alleging Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at Yale, stated publicly his client wasn’t even sure it was Kavanaugh.13 A third accuser, brought forth by the now-infamous attorney (and currently incarcerated on fraud convictions on other matters)14 Michael Avenatti, alleged Kavanaugh orchestrated a gang rape during a high school party. In 2018, both Avenatti and his client were referred to the Department of Justice by the Senate Judiciary Committee for criminal investigation.15 The Committee alleged the “individuals made materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements to Committee investigators.” In 2019 and 2023,16 Senator Chuck Grassley sent letters to the DOJ and FBI asking for updates on the status of the referrals. As of this writing, the senator has yet to receive a response.
But the damage was done to Kavanaugh and the country, courtesy of a liberal media deciding to be the American Pravda for the Democratic Party, and a justice system that is increasingly weaponized against what it perceives as political opponents of the ever-growing liberal, bureaucratic state.
The Compulsion to Confess17
Confirming the political agenda at the heart of the accusations was Blasey Ford’s attorney, whose remarks Mollie Hemingway* reported on for the Federalist:
The attorney for a woman who made unsupported allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted that she and her client Christine Blasey Ford were motivated by their support for abortion. . . . Tarnishing the reputation of a justice who would have the power to overturn abortion law Roe v. Wade “is part of what motivated Christine,” her attorney Debra Katz said. “Elections have consequences, but he will always have an asterisk next to his name,” she said of Kavanaugh [emphasis mine].18
It was much more than an asterisk next to his name. It was a target. In June 2022, one month after a leaked draft opinion indicating the court was preparing to overturn Roe v. Wade was published by Politico, an armed man was arrested near Kavanaugh’s home. Fox News reported:
Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, California, was carrying a gun, ammunition, a knife, pepper spray, a screwdriver, zip ties, and other gear when he was arrested by Montgomery County Police Department officers in the early morning hours Wednesday, according to a criminal complaint. Roske, who is charged with attempted murder of a federal judge, told police that he was upset about Kavanaugh’s positions on Roe v. Wade and the Second Amendment, the complaint said.19
A catastrophe was averted when Roske called 911 and told the operator he was “having thoughts,” and wanted to kill Kavanaugh and himself. He also had texted his sister confessing to the plan. Authorities credit her with getting him to abandon the plot.20 After his arrest in June 2022, he was indicted by a grand jury for attempted murder and has pled not guilty.21
The impact of smears like the ones conducted on Thomas and Kavanaugh go far beyond the original time frame of the pseudo-event itself. Part of the role of the liberal media is to continue, ad infinitum, the condemnation of the enemy with an asterisk. Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson reminds us the attempt on Kavanaugh’s life “did not take place in a political vacuum. Democrats have a years-long effort to delegitimize and demonize the Supreme Court, through vile obstruction of nominations, as happened with Justice Kavanaugh, and threats to pack the court. . . . That an unhinged activist would act violently against this backdrop was not surprising.”22
President Donald Trump
