The Kavanaugh Delusion and the Hillary Democrat

As the elitist enclave in Park City Utah, otherwise known as the Sundance Film Festival gets underway, two stories have made news.

First, according to the Wall Street Journal, participants had to sign a loyalty pledge to ensure they followed the strict new code of the new Left. Second, a secret Bret Kavanaugh documentary was screening there with what promised to be “explosive new allegations.”

A loyalty pledge? How about an apology instead.

That they’re posturing moral superiority and high-minded principles is astonishing, considering how they treated filmmaker Meg Smaker just last year, with her documentary being shunned by the film festival and disowned by Abigail Disney. It’s so shameful. This story should trail them forever like toilet paper stuck to the bottom of their shoes.

As documentary filmmaker and journalist Sebastian Younger put it, “Essentially, this was unbelievably unfair, and there was so much cowardice on the part of powerful people. I was just, wow, what a coming together of ghastly things, vengeful, petty malicious people who don’t really have a case, and fearful powerful people looking to protect themselves. It’s grotesque.”

Smaker’s crime was apparently being a white woman making a film about Muslim men. But, you might think, she’s a woman. Isn’t she offered some protection as a member of a marginalized group? The answer to that is not anymore. Those days are gone.

In just a few short years mostly white women who made up the women’s movement went from knitting their pink hats, gathering by the millions to protest Trump’s win to shrinking back into the shadows, ashamed of their whiteness and their privilege. Now, the Hillary Democrats must be good allies, “antiracists” and totally down with the fast-moving rules of gender ideology.

But the Hillary Democrats weren’t only white women, and in fact, even women of color now can’t get protection or victim status just by being female. They have to be a part of an even more marginalized group. Just being a woman isn’t enough.

What happened to the Hillary Democrat?

The Rise

2016 was meant to be the crowning achievement for the Hillary Democrat. Those who stuck by her in her in 2008, during the Benghazi hearings, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the non-stop criticisms of her during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and the early feminists who followed her leadership out of college and into politics that would eventually make the impossible possible: The first woman President of the United States.

I was one of them. The more research I did on the life and career of Hillary Rodham Clinton the more I came to respect and admire her. I made videos, I fought hard on Twitter with Trump supporters and “Bernie bros.” I wrote essay after essay on Medium to boost enthusiasm.

Videos like this:

We saw Hillary Clinton become a Senator. Her fate was no longer tied to being the First Lady. She was readying herself for a presidential run. We all expected it, and eventually, we would demand it.

As we headed toward 2008, with 9/11 a distant memory, the Hillary Democrat had been tinkering with their self-esteem cocktails to become empowered, responsible citizens. We were good people doing good things, trying to make the world a better place.

It was supposed to be Hillary’s clear shot at the presidency until a young, charismatic Senator named Barack Obama entered the race and split the Democratic Party in two. The Hillary Democrat stayed loyal, fighting viciously to stop Obama and ensure Hillary’s rise. But Hillary Clinton lacked charisma, and Obama was about to forever change America in ways she could never have.

The Hillary Democrat had to suck it up and get on board with the Obama coalition. He helped by making her part of his administration - the Secretary of State.

By the end of Obama’s second term, he had chosen a clear successor. No, it wasn’t going to be Uncle Joe. Too white, too male. It was time to follow up the first Black President with the first female President, and it was Hillary’s turn at last. The Hillary Democrat readied for battle. By all accounts, she couldn’t lose.

Bernie Sanders decided to run against Hillary, which all but assured the Democrats would lose in 2016. He was a populist in the right place at the right time, but the Hillary Democrat saw him as a clear and present threat to be eliminated. It wasn’t easy, but eventually, Bernie was forced to drop out and try in vain to convince his supporters to vote for her. But the damage was done. Most of them now saw her as a corporate shill, and there was no coming back from that, especially with Trump representing what was left of populism.

When it looked like Trump had the nomination in the bag, a Teflon candidate who wasn’t afraid to say what he really thought about the establishment, the Hillary Democrat began to have deja-vu. Charisma, again. She might have had a shot against Jeb Bush’s milquetoast demeanor but Trump?

Nothing could prepare the Hillary Democrat for the loss in 2016. It wasn’t just traumatic. It was the beginning of the end. None of us knew that, of course. We had come so far, and it was snatched away by a guy who, according to the Left, “bragged about sexual assault on tape.”

But really, so much of what we believed was true was a delusion. We went along with these exaggerations because they served our political ends, but how much of it was really true, and how willing were we to abandon reality to win an election?

We knew that Trump, like Bill Clinton, was an attractive playboy, and women lined up outside the door. That was a narrative that would have to be eliminated. But we sacrificed much of our credibility in pushing something that wasn’t entirely true.

ME TOO

I was in the eye of the hurricane the #metoo movement hit. Trump had written off the Access Hollywood tape as locker room talk but the New York Times wrote a piece collecting confessions by professional women of sexual assault in the story, “For Many Women, Trump’s ‘Locker Room Talk’ Brings Memories of Abuse.”

Mine was one of them:

Sasha Stone, an entertainment journalist, told of being forced to perform oral sex on a man “after he offered me a ride home and then threatened me. I was 14.”

Now I could define myself as a “survivor of assault,” and for a time that offered me protection online. I was seen as a victim, even though I was never all that comfortable in that role, which meant I got a lot of attention and soothing words. And online, that’s the primary motivator for having victim status. You are treated better, special even.

Those of us who had told our stories were characters in a fairy tale gifted with magic powers to change the past, to destroy lives in an instant because there was a strict code to “believe women.”

I was required to be a good soldier for the righteous cause. We marched by the millions. We shouted ME TOO after the Weinstein allegations went public.

I was already at war within. I could feel the truth pushing its way through the delusion. I wanted to see things the way my friends and family did. I forced myself to go along with it thinking it was better in the long run to stop Trump.

But deep down, I knew Trump’s conversation with Billy Bush was meant to be funny. I could hear it in his tone, that it was not to be taken as gospel. But that is how it was interpreted. But to go against the tide on this or anything else where Trump was concerned was social suicide.

The Access Hollywood tape was meant to be an October surprise. It hit just before the election and was meant to sway voters and help Hillary win. But it had the opposite effect. It seemed to give Trump more, not less, support. It was probably because any sane person could see that so much of it wasn’t true or at least exaggerated.

When Trump won, however, the hammer came down. There was to be no more negotiating. The Hillary Democrat had had enough. Our hearts were broken. Our hopes and dreams crushed. Now, there would be hell to pay.

Nothing better illustrates where we came from and where we landed than the rise and fall of Louis CK. One of the strongest advocates for Hillary Clinton and one of the best reasons to support her was his description that she was a mom and she was tough:

Once accused, Louis CK, like so many others, was banished to the outer regions, and must offer his comedy as contraband to any consumers still willing to pay money to an exile. It didn’t matter that he was a good ally and a Hillary supporter. It didn’t matter that he had his own version of what happened. It only mattered that he was accused, and thus, guilty.

Although much of it is a blur now, we can’t forget just how much our country changed in the wake of Me Too, how lives were destroyed with no due process, and how most of us went along with it thinking it was a “much-needed reckoning,” and maybe it was. At first.

Eventually, the Me Too movement became nothing more than a witch hunt. We all became a virtual pitchfork mob pressuring those in power to enact justice by subverting due process and following the dictates of our collective hysteria. I know I’m not supposed to use that word. It was a catch-all to describe any complaints or laments by women centuries ago. But in this sense, there is no better word.

How can we describe what happened to Al Franken any other way when Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and other members of the Senate pushed him out without giving him the due process he asked for? How can it be anything other than hysteria when stories of bad dates wrecked the careers of people like Ansel Elgort and Aziz Ansari?

Hysteria via social media is like a game of telephone. The stories intensify as they passed from person to person.

But probably no one got hit harder than Justice Bret Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh was cast as an evil rapist in our ongoing melodrama. For the Hillary Democrats, it felt like one last gasp, an “insurrection” of sorts to stop the inevitable overturning of Roe v. Wade. We were willing to abandon the truth to serve what we believed was a higher purpose - doing whatever it took to stop time.

But in replacing a delusion for reality, we ultimately paid an even higher cost. Nothing we did stopped Trump from appointing Kavanaugh and Roe v. Wade was overturned. It’s left us all with a shameful legacy of a hysterical mob that banged on the doors of the Supreme Court and carried out an ongoing dehumanization campaign against not just Kavanaugh but Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett. There doesn’t seem to be a bottom to any of it. Take away our power, and we will destroy your life.

As if to illustrate just how dystopian our country has become at the hands of the left, Youtube’s “fact check” on a simple search for “Kavanaugh protests”:

Nothing that happened with Bret Kavanaugh was based on any kind of reality. It was all delusion, all imagined events we wanted - needed to be true. But even if Bret Kavanaugh did what he was accused of doing - held down a woman for sex because it was funny, or got too drunk and pulled out his wanker as a gross joke - are we really a society that says because he did these things in his youth, he is not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court?

God help us if that’s what we become. I once dropped acid and pushed my best friend in high school around in a shopping cart, singing “hey hey, we’re the Nazis, people say we Nazi around…” we thought it was hilarious, but to bring it up now as a reason my career should be destroyed is the stuff of madness.

We must be a society that believes in redemption, in forgiveness, in leaving the past behind, and allowing the justice system to do the rest. Times change. People change. The idea that Bret Kavanaugh should be persecuted until the end of his life as a rapist because activists decided he was guilty is not only absurd, it reaches the level of the kind of mass hysteria that drove the Salem Witch trials.

Did they really believe they could convince all of America to go along with this? Is Kavanaugh’s entire life and legacy going to follow in Clarence Thomas’ footsteps, where our Supreme Court Justices have their legacies destroyed because people lost their minds of accused them of things they may or may not have done?

The Kavanaugh protests might have felt right at the time but already a few years later they haven’t aged well. For the Hillary Democrat, they look more and more like the last gasp of collective power before the world changed.

Now, there is no such thing as women’s rights. Women alone aren’t a protected group anymore. In fact, if they dare define themselves that way they will be viciously attacked as TERFs.

The Johnny Depp trial mostly put at end to the Me Too movement as the first time where a large portion of the public could say out loud a woman was lying about rape.

Hillary doesn’t seem willing to go away just yet. No doubt there will be a final act for her and maybe for those who are still with her. But for now, the Hillary Democrat is just somebody I used to know.