But evidence and logic are not what we heard about in most of the reactions to the hearings. What we heard about is how the testimony made people feel.Judge Kavanaugh was in a no-win situation on Thursday. If his accuser choked up it was said to be because she was reliving her trauma. If he choked up it was said to be "scripted." If he got angry it showed he lacks a calm judicial temperament or that his anger showed him to be just the sort of person who would've assaulted a girl when he was 17.
The attack on logic began before the hearings, with commenters pointing to quotes saying the case against Kavanaugh is “plausible” and “believable”—but providing no actual evidence that it actually did happen—then describing this as “compelling.” But “plausible” is the opposite of compelling.
Direct evidence compels belief, logically speaking. Someone’s speculations about what might have happened have no logical standing and compel nothing.
Or consider the phrase you probably heard a thousand times today: that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed because he is “credibly accused.” What does that mean? What makes the accusation “credible,” and what evidentiary status does that give it?
A vague accusation with no independent corroboration from the very people the accuser herself described as witnesses doesn’t sound all that credible to me.
But you will look in vain for any clear standard of what is “credible.” It is not an evidentiary term but an emotional one. All it means is “this is something I feel like believing.”
People are not judging credibility based on evidence. They are judging based on how the two witnesses made them feel, which is to say that they base it on a purely emotional reaction—a reaction heavily influenced by partisan loyalties that prejudice you for or against the two witnesses.
So we get pure appeals to emotion like this one: “I can’t imagine how many thousands of women, around the world, are in tears as they listen to Christine Blasey Ford’s voice cracking.” Kavanaugh’s voice cracked, too. Does that mean we should also embrace his side of the story?
No matter what Judge Kavanaugh said or did the minds of many people were made up apriori, based upon nothing more than his and his accuser's respective genders. The whole affair is reminiscent of the 2006 Duke lacrosse team case (see here and here) in which several white lacrosse players were accused by a black "exotic dancer", who offered no corroborating evidence, of having assaulted her at a party.
The boys' lives were ruined until it turned out that they were innocent after all. They were privileged white males accused by a relatively poor, black female, and that was enough to establish the boys' guilt in the mind of the prosecutor, the Duke administration and much of the liberal faculty, as well as leftist progressives everywhere.
For those who wish to block Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court evidence doesn't matter. His accuser presented no evidence to corroborate her allegations, but she doesn't need to. In our postmodern, post-fact environment the accusation itself is all the evidence one needs.
Some women were citing their own personal experience with sexual assault as proof that Kavanaugh was guilty. Their reasoning seems to be that they were assaulted by a man, Kavanaugh is a man, therefore Kavanaugh is guilty of assault.
There's more from Tracinski about the irrational nature of these proceedings at the link, but the most a reasonable person can conclude is that in the absence of evidence he is entitled to the presumption of innocence and that it's an execrable act of moral depravity to destroy him and his family the way the Democrats are seeking to do.
When the mere allegation, unsupported by any evidence, is enough to destroy a man's reputation and career and devastate his family, then we're no longer the America most of us grew up in. We are the Soviet Union of the 1920s to the 1980s. We are the France of 1793-1794.
We are every tyranny which has ever blighted the face of the earth.