A male classmate dared another one to loudly snap your bra strap in front of the whole social-studies class? Just a joke, calm down. A casual soccer game became a one-sided competition for boys to chase female players and pull down their shorts? Boys will be boys, so don’t take it personally. Rumors that are baroque in their sexual specificity about the new girl, or the fat girl, or the girl unlucky enough to develop breasts a year or two earlier than others? Is that really such a big deal?
So many of us either knew that girl or were that girl, which makes me consider that perhaps Kavanaugh is telling the truth when he professes not to recall these alleged incidents. In the rarefied milieu of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges that nurtured him, jokes like these wouldn’t have been shocking or even particularly remarkable. They were the unacknowledged collateral damage of male bonding, blithely enacted on young women who didn’t have the luxury to forget about it.
.. So while the tale of a 17-year-old boy chasing a 15-year-old girl into a bedroom, pinning her down and clamping his hand over her mouth as he inelegantly tugs at her clothes is bad enough, the real animating cause is the other boy in the room, egging him on and laughing.
.. For women who’ve experienced something like them, the stories of Ford, Deborah Ramirez, Renate Schroeder Dolphin and Julie Swetnick don’t sound like simple youthful indiscretions, but rather like sickening visceral reminders of a time when our fear and pain were compounded by the snickers and cheers of those who witnessed it as entertainment.
The smarmy references to “Renate Alumnius” on the yearbook pages of Kavanuagh and his friends; the laughter surrounding Ramirez, already an outsider among her Yale peers, as Kavanaugh allegedly wagged his penis in her face — these stories have been resonant for many women who have had their own bodies, fears and struggles to get away witnessed as entertainment.
.. the 1980s, it was entertainment. There were countless teen comedies, blurred together in an almost indistinguishable mass, about horny, unfulfilled boys whose journey to manhood inevitably included the sexualized humiliation of their female peers.
.. Kavanaugh even blamed the yearbook reference to Schroeder Dolphin on the movies
.. Georgetown Prep students “wanted the yearbook to be some combination of ‘Animal House,’ ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High,’ which were all recent movies at that time.
.. Another standard storyline in these movies was punishing beautiful, haughty girls for the crime of not being interested in our heroes
.. The prevalence of sexual assault and humiliation in spaces where masculine dominance is prized has been documented and tracked for decades. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday’s 1990 book, “Fraternity Gang Rape” documented the dynamics of privilege and dominance acted out in hazing and rape rituals in the Ivy League.
.. Brushing off the allegations against Kavanaugh as bogus political gamesmanship downplays the ubiquity of sexual humiliation — of women, but also of lower-status men or those perceived as insufficiently masculine — baked into the tribalistic cultures of athletics, fraternities, the military
.. What does it mean for a man who is accused not only of violating his female peers, but also of finding those violations hilarious, to fill a crucial vacancy on the Supreme Court?
.. Kavanaugh’s 2015 remark that “what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep ” nods to the protection afforded powerful men by institutions that prize their potential and hope to share in their successes: College football rape scandals bank on the silence of coaches and athletic directors.
Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why.Kavanaugh is lying. His upbringing explains why.
The elite learn early that they’re special — and that they won’t face consequences.
Brett Kavanaugh is not telling the whole truth. When President George W. Bush nominated him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2006, he told senators that he’d had nothing to do with the war on terror’s detention policies; that was not true.Kavanaugh also claimed under oath, that year and again this month, that he didn’t know that Democratic Party memos a GOP staffer showed him in 2003 were illegally obtained; his emails from that period reveal that these statements were probably false.And it cannot be possible that the Supreme Court nominee was both a well-behaved virgin who never lost control as a young man, as he toldFox News and the Senate Judiciary Committee this past week, and an often-drunk member of the “Keg City Club” and a “Renate Alumnius ,” as he seems to have bragged to many people and written into his high school yearbook. Then there are the sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he denies.
.. How could a man who appears to value honor and the integrity of the legal system explain this apparent mendacity? How could a man brought up in some of our nation’s most storied institutions — Georgetown Prep, Yale College, Yale Law School — dissemble with such ease? The answer lies in the privilege such institutions instill in their members, a privilege that suggests the rules that govern American society are for the common man, not the exceptional one.
.. What makes these schools elite is that so few can attend. In the mythologies they construct, only those who are truly exceptional are admitted — precisely because they are not like everyone else. Yale President Peter Salovey, for instance, has welcomed freshmen by telling them that they are “the very best students.” To attend these schools is to be told constantly: You’re special, you’re a member of the elect, you have been chosen because of your outstanding qualities and accomplishments.
.. Schools often quite openly affirm the idea that, because you are better, you are not governed by the same dynamics as everyone else. They celebrate their astonishingly low acceptance rates and broadcast lists of notable alumni who have earned their places within the nation’s highest institutions, such as the Supreme Court. Iheard these messages constantly when I attended St. Paul’s, one of the most exclusive New England boarding schools, where boys and girls broke rules with impunity, knowing that the school would protect them from the police and that their families would help ensure only the most trivial of consequences.
.. elites’ sense of their own exceptionalism helps instill within them a tendency to be less compassionate... Take drug use. While the poor are no more likely to use drugs (in fact, among young people, it’s the richer kids who are more likely to drink alcohol or smoke marijuana), they are far more likely to be imprisoned for it.. Kavanaugh’s privilege runs deep, and it shows. He grew up in a wealthy Washington suburb where his father spent three decades as CEO of a trade association. There has been a sense among his supporters that his place is deserved, which mirrors the climate of aristocratic inheritance he grew up around. His peers from the party of personal responsibility have largely rallied around him, seeking to protect his privilege... Ari Fleischer, put it: “How much in society should any of us be held liable today when we lived a good life, an upstanding life by all accounts, and then something that maybe is an arguable issue took place in high school? Should that deny us chances later in life?”American Conservative editor Rod Dreher wondered “why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge.”.. This collective agreement that accountability doesn’t apply to Kavanaugh (and, by extension, anybody in a similar position who was a youthful delinquent) may help explain why he seems to believe he can lie with impunity — a trend he continued Thursday, when he informed senators that he hadn’t seen the testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, even though a committee aide told the Wall Street Journal he’d been watching... servant leadership and privilege are often bedfellows. Both suggest not a commonality with the ordinary American, but instead a standing above Everyman. Both justify locating power within a small elite because this elite is better equipped to lead... Retired justice Anthony Kennedy, according to some reports, hand-picked Kavanaugh as his successor.. both allow space for lying in service of the greater good. Privilege means that things like perjury aren’t wrong under one’s own private law.
Details in Kavanaugh’s 1982 calendar entry could be scrutinized in FBI investigation
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) pressed Kavanaugh on whether the reference to “skis” on his calendar referred to “brewskis,” which the nominee did not dispute. Booker also asked him whether he drank on weekdays.
Brett Kavanaugh’s History-Changing Speech
If what Kavanaugh had to say sealed his confirmation (and I think it did), and if Kavanaugh serves as a resolute constitutionalist on the Supreme Court (and I think he will), his speech did what so many political speeches try to do but don’t come close to accomplishing: It changed the course of American history. By 3:20 it was apparent that he was on his way to pulling off the political equivalent of what the New England Patriots did to the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI.
.. Kavanaugh pounded the Senate process: “You have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’” He called out the gratuitousness of Democratic rhetoric: “A Democratic senator on this committee publicly referred to me as evil. Another Democratic senator on this committee said, ‘Judge Kavanaugh is your worst nightmare.’”
.. He lambasted the “calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump
.. revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.” When he presented his defiance it sounded like Margaret Thatcher telling us “the lady’s not for turning”:
I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. You have tried hard. You’ve given it your all. No one can question your efforts. Your coordinated and well-funded efforts to destroy my good name and destroy my family will not drag me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.
Never mind Thatcher, this was Churchillian stuff. And there were even more affecting moments to come: a moving description of how Kavanaugh’s ten-year-old daughter suggested to her sister that both should pray for their father’s accuser, how he bonded with his father by adopting the old man’s habit of keeping detailed calendar-diaries and retaining them forever: “Christmastime, we sat around and he would tell old stories. Old milestones, old weddings, old events from his calendars.”
.. he tapped into the anger that was simmering just beneath the surface among tens of millions of American men and women. He channeled both the widespread fear that the Me Too movement was becoming so careless that it could take down innocent men and the well-justified loathing of the shameless collusion in the elected Democrat-activist-media triangle.
.. even the legendarily fastidious New Yorker — had abandoned all normal journalistic practice to run highly suspect stories
.. Patently scurrilous accusations were diluting the power of Christine Blasey Ford’s story. To the average American, it might well have started to seem that every accusation against Kavanaugh was being dredged up from the same big pot of bogus stew.
.. Ford’s story was more credible than the Deborah Ramirez New Yorker story, and Ramirez’s story was more credible than the Michael Avenatti–promoted Julie Swetnick gang-rape story, and even Swetnick’s bizarre and completely unsubstantiated claim was more credible than the anonymous accusation sent to Gardner and the already-recanted story about the yacht.
.. But it turned out that two sides could play the guilt-by-association game. If Kavanaugh was to be considered under a cloud of suspicion for being part of the fratty, preppy culture of privileged party boys who make dumb jokes in yearbooks, then Ford could equally be tarnished by association with left-wing activist lawyers, their eager and hysteria-promoting allies in the media
.. With her girlish voice and her slightly unkempt hair, she seemed like the opposite of a hardened, professional political operative or even a dour, pedantic academic.
.. And of course all four people she had placed at the party, including a lifelong friend of hers, said they didn’t remember it. The friend said she had never been present at any party with Kavanaugh.
.. With an account that, however gripping, was nevertheless completely uncorroborated, indeed denied by all known witnesses. That, Kavanaugh made ringingly clear in his opening statement, would not be enough to achieve the goal of annihilating him. That speech was momentous. It was magnificent.