Back in October, I warned you all in Politico Magazine that “the Kavanaugh hearings are hurting #MeToo”:
Half a year later, I regret to inform you that I was correct.
In November 2017, public opinion research firm PerryUndem found that a whopping 80% of Republican men felt more inclined to believe women who claimed to be the victim of sexual assault as a result of the #MeToo movement. After the travesty of the evidence-free, politically charged, and eleventh-hour hearings to litigate the culpability of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that figure has plummeted by 21 percentage points.
Prior to the Kavanaugh hearings, PerryUndem found that fewer than one in five Republican men were more inclined to believe a man accused of assault than the woman accusing him. Today that figure has spiked to more than one in three.
The origins of the #MeToo movement were vital and wholly justified. The watershed moment of Harvey Weinstein accusers coming forward led to rape reports to the police nearly doubling. A necessary cultural conversation emerged, and it brought down hundreds of men, from Roy Moore to Kevin Spacey, who faced credible, contemporaneously corroborated allegations of sexual assault.
But then the Left decided to weaponize it against Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh doesn’t share my preferred jurisprudence. I waited with bated breath in the hopes that President Trump would nominate a stalwart of civil liberties to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy, only to be sorely disappointed that he selected someone so deferential to the executive. But there was no evidence that Kavanaugh lived his life with anything but the utmost integrity and honor. Still he fell victim to the most malicious smear campaign in modern politics.
The duty to defend Kavanaugh wasn’t just about protecting a good man from an evidence-free character assassination, but even more importantly, as I wrote at the time, for the sake of future victims of sexual assault everywhere. If the line of attack on Kavanaugh stuck, barring no emergence of actual evidence, it would absolutely lead men to believe that women regularly wield false allegations as an opportunistic weapon. The Left doubled down, and here we are.
The damage, for now, is done, but not all hope is lost. Consistent evidentiary standards still matter, and the more partisans who can abide by them in public evaluations of misconduct accusations on both sides, the more quickly the political taint of the Kavanaugh hearings can be quashed from the public arena.
