It’s not every day you see a presumptive Supreme Court Justice screaming at the US public and blubbering crocodile tears for 45 minutes. But it is every day in the Trump era that the GOP cynically bolsters the white male persecution complex that helped give an unqualified, white supremacist-coddling sexual assaulter the nuclear codes. So, perhaps we should have expected judge Brett Kavanaugh’s tirade during Thursday’s confirmation hearing — his emotional rambling may have been less a meltdown than a cynical attempt to gin up the same disaffected male animus that plays extremely well to the GOP’s current base.
That was Sen. Lindsey Graham’s strategy when he opened his speech during Friday’s vote with this gem: “I’m a single white male from South Carolina, and I’m told I should shut up, but I will not shut up.” This false premise that white men, even powerful politicians, are the only truly oppressed group is a key tenet of anti-feminist backlash.
Stoking this backlash was a coordinated goal beneath the desperate, angry showboating of Republican judiciary members determined to ensure that multiple, credible sex crime allegations should not be enough to deny a “good man” a lifetime of power to affect countless areas of life for millions of Americans for the next 40 to 50 years. We’ll discuss these withering patriarchs’ efforts to stave off the glimmers of a new feminist world order in a bit. First, let’s consider the nominee’s off-kilter performance.
It should shock precisely no one that — like every bro dominating a meeting to drown out women’s voices — the judge took a disrespectfully excessive amount of time for his opening rant. He shouted and wept about beer, weightlifting and his “good name” for approximately 2.5 times as long as it took for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford to testify, her voice catching, that it was Kavanaugh who drunkenly pinned her to a bed when she was 15, groped her, and tried to remove her clothes. Details like…