“The racist history of Chevy Chase, home to power players like Brett Kavanaugh,” read the headline on a story on the Washington Post on Sept. 29. The hint, of course, is that Kavanaugh helped make it racist, moved there because it was racist, or helped make it more racist once he was there.
“As late as 1976,” the Post said, “the New York Times noted that the Chevy Chase Club golf course and country club … whose members include Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. — allowed ‘black skinned members of the diplomatic corps’ but not black Americans, inside its doors.”
But in 1976, neither Roberts nor Kavanaugh belonged to the club or lived in Washington. Kavanaugh, then aged 11, lived with his parents in Maryland. Neither lived in Chevy Chase until it became a heavily liberal enclave.
Today’s Chevy Chase gave 90 percent of its vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, and shed bitter tears when she lost. You’d never learn this from the Post, which was happy enough with its snide little reference. And most of the paper was more of the same.
“HOW DARE YOU DO THIS TO BRETT KAVANAUGH?” columnist Alexandra Petri screeched in all caps elsewhere in the same paper. “The Founders did not break with Britain so a landed white gentleman accused of sexual misconduct could NOT be given FREE REIN over the lives of millions!”
If that take on Kavanaugh, defending his life against uncorroborated criminal charges, strikes you as witty, then you will love her column, AND NOT BE BOTHERED BY THE LOUDNESS, THE STRIDENCY, AND THE SILLINESS OF IT. NOT TO MENTION THE FACT THAT PRETENDING TO SPEAK IN THE VOICE OF YOUR VICTIM IS THE CHEAPEST OF WRITERLY TRICKS.
Never mind, again, that THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE, that the crime in question had occurred APPROXIMATELY 36 YEARS EARLIER, and that of the four people the alleged victim had suggested as witnesses, NOT ONE WOULD BACK UP HER TALE.
No heed was paid either to notions like “presumption of innocence” or “burden of proof,” which both the press and the Democrats in attendance (but we repeat ourselves) were eager to jettison in pursuit of their prey. Especially when, on the bench, he was likely to vote the wrong way on their issues. And especially since he belonged to a class of human being that they were eager to knock down a peg.
“Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why,” Shamus Khan, chairman of the sociology department of Columbia University, wrote in the Post the same weekend. Khan, apparently a mind-reader as well, claimed that Kavanaugh’s prep school experience gave him an attitude toward life that rules were for losers, and that he could walk over others at will. Just like, presumably, the racist white jocks on the Duke LaCrosse team, who raped the exotic dancer at their frat house. Just like the girl raped in the Phi Kappa Psi frat house at the University of Virginia, as Rolling Stone reported.
But then, those things never happened. The jocks told the truth; the women were lying; and a great deal of money ended up changing hands, even after all the lawyers had been paid.
You’d think they’d learn, but they don’t. The myth of the white preppy rapist is just irresistible.
And the media become less and less popular, and less and less believed, and the journalists still wonder why.
