Believe Women
A person challenging my need to apply critical thinking to the recent rape accusations by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump (and others) asks if I would believe my own daughter if she claimed Trump raped her.
Of course I would believe my family members. I would be foolish, however, to expect the same from you. I have decades of intimate personal knowledge of them and their morals, and can read their facial expressions. I witnessed their silly childhood lies and taught them myself the value of truth.
The problem is that’s not how society works, and so we have courts and juries and standards of evidence when someone accuses another of a terrible crime. People lie. People exaggerate. People misremember. People tell the truth. Yet we are forced to judge strangers, and so we created a system of laws and rules to do that. Imperfect, of course, but the alternative is to simply allow emotions to control things: we hate Trump, so anything bad about him is true and anything good is not by default. That’s what #BelieveWomen translates to in this context.
Would you want your child judged THAT way, by emotion, if they were accused of something?
So instead of asking us all to simply believe or not believe things (which is what children do with Santa and the Tooth Fairy) a civil society asks for evidence. Witnesses, whose credibility is assessed. Physical things to examine. We ask why someone waited 26 years to report something, and know there can be both righteous and devious reasons why. We seem post-2016 naively unaware assuming true is as invalid as assuming false.
We should be doing this in 2019 because one time in American history we “believed women.” That was in the dark racist South, where a woman claiming she was raped by a black man was always believed, with often no collaboration or evidence required, and the black man’s protests he was innocent were seen as proof he must have done it (nothing to fear, nothing to hide!) The victim’s word alone hung men when emotion controlled and prejudiced judgement.
Those horrors occurred in a an environment when critical thinking was replaced by memes and generalizations, such as over-sexualized blacks living in anticipation of taking a white woman because we all “knew” that’s who they were, right? Today we point to Trump’s hyperbolic pussy grabbing remarks and middle school locker room bragging as much the same, the equivalent of the black rapist whistling at his victim on a street corner last week as proof he was the attacker. The sex was consensual? Of course he’d say that. They all lie, don’t they? Simply producing more accusers without adding any evidence is trying to manufacture credibility via the old trick of making the lie big enough that it must be true.
We should with that history be extra careful when accusations are timed and shaped to fit a specific political narrative, whether those accusations are for rape or treason. Christine Blasey Ford appeared exactly when the left needed her in the Kavanaugh hearings. After decades, E. Jean Carroll emerges as the 2020 campaign begins. Victimhood is often monetized in our present version of America, and motive always a factor in any human interaction. At some point a critical thinker should be compelled to consider the timing and motive more broadly and in a larger context than the application of a Twitter hashtag and an ideological catch-phrase.
This is not a new thing in an America that traces its origins to the Salem witch trials through the Jim Crow South to the McCarthy era, where the accusation someone was a Communist was enough to destroy a career or drive a good man to drink or suicide. In each instance not only was an accusation accepted in lieu of evidence, in many cases the accusation was accepted as sufficient even when evidence to the contrary was presented. There were plenty of people who profited, directly in Salem as the witches’ land was sold for pennies on auction, and during the McCarthy years by being a good stooge. Ronald Reagan advanced his own political career quite nicely by outing fellow actors as Commies to help populate the blacklists. A society that incentivises personal destruction via mere finger pointing creates dangerous opportunities for bad people directly, and for bad people willing to manipulate those with more good intentions than conscience.
The latter group sadly includes much of the media today. Desperate to take down Trump, they seize on any accusation however fanciful, disregarding information which doesn’t fit the narrative in favor of the goal, destroy him. That sentence could in fact sum up the last three years of Russiagate, where rumors became headlines and gossip became fact when laundered via the phrase “according to sources.” Truth? After sending Robert Mueller off with unlimited time and funds to discover the truth, when it did not fit the narrative it was simply discarded, and the media went about telling us all what Mueller <em>meant</em> to say.
Yeah, it’s different but it is at its core all part of the same. The Left is seeking not to beat Trump, but to end him, erase him, jail him, destroy him. In the end a mob demanding vengeance against powerful figures will seize on any excuse, however obviously politically framed and evidence-free, to get it.
