Framing Brett Kavanaugh: The Anita Hill Borking Playbook, Revised

By Al Perrotta Published on September 19, 2018

It seems that the question of Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court might come down, in the end, to a “he said/she said.” A bit like the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, so many years ago.

To this day, opinion is sharply divided on partisan lines as to who was telling the truth back then — Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill. Republicans (mostly) believe that Hill was recruited by liberal activists desperate to keep a toxic black conservative off the court. She was coached with a gruesome story (some of it lifted from past court cases), and sent out to slay Judge Thomas. At first her sexual harassment charges were anonymous, launched in the hope of making Thomas withdraw. (A point often forgotten now.)

Democrats (mostly) think Hill was telling the truth and got a raw deal before a sexist Senate. Feminists insist that she had “no reason to lie.” To that conservatives answer: “Well, it pulled her from obscurity and made her a leftist celebrity. And she was trying to wield an enormous amount of power, to veto a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. Those would be reasons to lie or at the very least exaggerate.”

Once again we have a liberal professor accusing a conservative judge. The difference this time is we’re not talking about relatively recent interactions between adult work place colleagues. We’re talking about alleged activities of two teenagers during the days of President Reagan and Porky’s.

We do not know what — if anything — happened 36 years ago. But I do want to pose a hypothetical on what may have happened these past two months. (And yes, it is just a hypothetical.)

How to Frame Brett Kavanaugh

Let’s say you’re a pro-choice donor with very deep pockets. (How deep? Soros deep.) You’re committed to keeping potentially pro-life nominees off the court. (Also pro-2nd Amendment nominees, and Constitutional nominees in general.) And you’re fairly ruthless.

How ruthless? At least as Machiavellian as the FBI officials who took the worthless, partisan Steele Dossier and deceived a FISA court to concoct the “Trump/Russia collusion” narrative. That’s how ruthless. Like Peter Strozk and Lisa Page, you think you’re saving America. And that means taking off the kid gloves at a time like this.

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The day Brett Kavanaugh’s name hits the shortlist, you start your research. Your team of crack, Ivy-grad researchers start scouring his life. Maybe some “friends” in the FBI or DOJ help you out. (Yesterday, James O’Keefe exposed a DOJ employee who does that very thing for “social justice.”) You go over Kavanaugh’s college and high school associations with a fine tooth comb. And what do you find?

The Narrative’s Already Written. Just Steal and Adapt It.

You find the talented conservative Catholic writer Mark Judge (now a Stream contributor). What do you find out about him? That he struggled with a severe drinking problem in high school — a school he attended along with Brett Kavanaugh. And they were friends. How do you know this? Judge wrote a memoir. As Yahoo News reported:

[Judge] wrote in his memoir two decades ago that he spent some of his high school years “completely annihilated” on alcohol and trying to “hook up” with girls.

Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at the all-male Georgetown Prep the time of the alleged assault, tells stories in his 1997 memoir, Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk, of getting drunk his first time at age 14, binge drinking at teen parties and a struggle with alcoholism.

His “immersion” into alcohol began the end of his sophomore year during a typical annual “beach week,” when Catholic high school students headed to the shore after school was out. “Now I had an opportunity to make some headway [with girls]. Most of the time everyone, including the girls, was drunk. If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up,” he wrote.

His drinking became so extreme that he had blackout episodes, and woke up on the floor of a restaurant bathroom with no memory of how he got there. Once “I had the first beer, I found it impossible to stop until I was completely annihilated,” he wrote.

Judge’s book changes the name of his high school to “Loyola Prep,” and makes a glancing reference at a character he calls “Bart O’Kavanaugh.”

A girl at a party, wrote Judge, asked him: “Do you know Bart O’Kavanaugh? I heard he puked in someone’s car the other night.” Judge responds: “Yeah he passed out on his way back from a party.”

Now you have the basics of your narrative. At Judge’s school (and Kavanaugh’s), boys went to parties where they got dead drunk along with girls. There the boys tried to “hook up.” Some of the boys had alcoholic blackouts and memory loss. Judge seems to admit that he was one of them.

You Have the Crime. Now Find the Victim.

So you’re going to find someone to accuse Kavanaugh of being one such boy. And you’re going to rope in Mark Judge as a witness/co-defendant. Of course Judge will deny it (since it didn’t happen). But you can prove that he’s an unreliable witness — since he admitted in print to (at least) drunken sexual intentions. Plus he cops to the fact that his memory is unreliable, since he was sometimes blind drunk.

So his denial will do Kavanaugh little good; it might even hurt him. No way Mark Judge will testify, and be torn apart by senators prepped with quotations from his book. Quotations like this one:

I’m guilty as well, at least of the bouts of dehumanizing lust that is part of the fallen world and being human … we all have that monster to some extent.

And of course, this is exactly what has happened. Judge has defended Kavanaugh, but he wisely refuses to testify. You can take Judge’s wrenching, penitent memoir and use it against him, and all those other white male, conservative Catholics whom you despise.

You can even weaponize his illness — severe teenage alcoholism — and use it to save America from Kavanaugh.

There’s just one last piece you need in your little chess game. You need to find a woman to make the complaint.

Finally, you have a competent anti-Kavanaugh lawyer in place, who has been taking money from radical left-wing globalists like you (and George Soros) for years.

The Qualifications for the Next Anita Hill

There’s just one last piece you need in your little chess game. You need to find a woman to make the complaint. But not just anyone. You learned from the Anita Hill debacle. This woman must meet a list of strict preconditions. All of the following must be true of her:

  1. She must have gone to school at one of the places that had social events with Georgetown Prep (a boys school), at the same time Judge and Kavanaugh were attending.
  2. And she must be strongly motivated, a zealous pro-choice liberal who’s just as keen as you to protect “women’s reproductive health care access.” (That is, abortion.) She’ll need to purge her social media, though, to hide her motives as much as possible.
  3. She must have been the victim of sexual assault at some point in high school. That way, if she ever testifies, the pain will be real. (Even if the assailant is wrong.) She must have some record of mentioning it to someone in the past. (If her first outcry about it was in 2012, and that named a different number of assailants, that’s not ideal, but it might just have to do.)

If all these things are true, you’re on your way. You don’t want to get too specific in your charges. No dates, or places, or even specific years. Such things can be checked. If you say, “Brett Kavanaugh assaulted me on this date at this house,” then witnesses could refute it. They could say he wasn’t present. He might have ticket stubs that show he was out of town.

You don’t want to get too specific in your charges. No dates, or places, or even specific years. Such things can be checked. If you say, “Brett Kavanaugh assaulted me on this date at this house,” then witnesses could rebuke it. They could say he wasn’t present. He might have tickets that show he was out of town.

Facts Are Stupid Things

No, best to keep things nice and vague. Don’t even reveal the name of the accuser unless you have to. Paint this as some trauma so appalling that the victim has repressed the specifics which might not hold up. But you do have some details you can use. You take them from Mark Judge’s memoir, and cast him as the fall-guy, along with Kavanaugh. You know that he can’t convince people otherwise, so roping him in does nothing but help your story. It gives it the ring of truth. And indeed some of it was true. There were boys drunkenly pursuing drunk girls at Brett Kavanaugh’s lax Catholic school. How big of a leap is it to believe that he was one of them?

You should wait until the very 11th hour, to launch this attack. That avoids undue scrutiny. Your victim should also set absurd conditions, to avoid testifying. No reason to let the man face his accuser. You want to let suspicion and bitterness do the work that the facts really can’t.

Anyway, to quote O.J. Simpson, that’s how I’d try to frame Brett Kavanaugh. If I did it.

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