Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
The first sentence of Bret Stephens’ New York Times column this morning is a lie. “For the first time since Donald Trump entered the political fray, I find myself grateful that he’s in it,” Stephens wrote, explaining that he is “grateful because Trump has not backed down in the face of the slipperiness, hypocrisy and dangerous standard-setting deployed by opponents of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.”
The idea here is that Stephens, ostensibly an implacable and principled #NeverTrump conservative, has been forced by the liberal response to credible allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh to do the unthinkable and rally behind Donald Trump. This is the “first time” this has happened, Stephens writes, which is supposed to give you an idea of just how perfidious the left’s conduct has been.
This is a lie, and it’s an important lie because it exposes the dishonesty at the core of the tiny yet bafflingly influential cadre of #NeverTrump pundits. Back in May, after Trump announced the United States’ precipitous withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, Stephens praised the president for standing up to Iran “apologists” and lauded his “courageous decision.” After Trump fired missiles into Syria as retribution for chemical attacks on civilians, Stephens saluted Trump and pressed the president (who he believes is mentally compromised) to unleash a full-scale war on the Assad regime.
Stephens, like most #NeverTrump conservatives, makes a grand show of opposition to the president but the split second he sees Trump pursuing his preferred policies, the hand-wringing and monocle-dropping outrage are quickly supplanted by cheerleading.
In today’s column, Stephens argues the left has forced him to support a president who mocks survivors of sexual assault, even though that mockery was “ugly and gratuitous.” Stephens is grateful for Trump’s response to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about Kavanaugh’s alleged assault because he’s “a big fat hammer fending off a razor-sharp dagger” of false sexual assault allegations.
The first moment was a remark by a friend. “I’d rather be accused of murder,” he said, “than of sexual assault.” I feel the same way. One can think of excuses for killing a man; none for assaulting a woman. But if that’s true, so is this: Falsely accusing a person of sexual assault is nearly as despicable as sexual assault itself. It inflicts psychic, familial, reputational and professional harms that can last a lifetime. This is nothing to sneer at.
The second moment, connected to the first: “Boo hoo hoo. Brett Kavanaugh is not a victim.” That’s the title of a column in the Los Angeles Times, which suggests that the possibility of Kavanaugh’s innocence is “infinitesimal.” Yet false allegations of rape, while relatively rare, are at least five times as common as false accusations of other types of crime, according to academic literature.
This is some artless statistics-mangling on Stephens’ part. Saying false accusations of rape are “at least five times as common” as false accusations of other types of crimes deliberately elides the findings of the same study that the rate of false rape accusations is 5 percent. Calling this “relatively rare,” as Stephens does, vastly undersells the rarity. On top of that, the National Sexual Violence Resource Center cautions that “research shows that rates of false reporting are frequently inflated, in part because of inconsistent definitions and protocols, or a weak understanding of sexual assault.”
Stephens’ statistical gymnastics isn’t responsive to Ford’s testimony anyway, nor does it justify the president’s dark and vicious mockery of Ford. The whole column makes clear that Stephens cares far less about Ford’s words than he does the behavior of Democrats. All Stephens has to say about Ford’s testimony is that it was “not preposterous but is also largely uncorroborated.”
Largely! Stephens betrays no interest in the 40-plus people claiming information about the allegations against Kavanaugh who’ve been rebuffed by the FBI. And he’s not at all concerned about the many former classmates and friends of Kavanaugh who’ve come forward to say the judge has been lying about his conduct in high school and college. Stephens wants to believe Kavanaugh, and he wants Kavanaugh confirmed. The main purpose of citing false rape statistics is to help him feel better about throwing his support behind Trump’s abominable conduct.
And I’m guessing that Stephens needs that psychological coddling because what he’s doing now is precisely what he acidly critiqued other conservatives for doing prior to the 2016 election. “Mr. Trump’s unrelenting and apparently irrepressible bigotry, misogyny, bullying and conspiracy-mongering won’t keep Republican leaders from supporting him,” Stephens wrote in The Wall Street Journal the day before Trump’s election, “provided he mouth pieties about appointing more Scalias to the court or cutting corporate tax rates.” Stephens has come around to Trump’s irrepressible bullying and misogyny just as he is on the cusp of appointing another Scalia to the court.
He’s still a good #NeverTrump conservative, though, because the liberals made him do that.