By: Benjamin Weingarten

Power corrupts, as Lord Acton’s saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. History teaches us that the desire to bring down the powerful can also corrupt, and the absolute desire to bring down the powerful can corrupt absolutely.

This reality was brought into stark relief during the gripping confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The cynical political desires of those who sought to scuttle his nomination to the Supreme Court on the basis of wholly uncorroborated allegations (almost assuredly as a cover for their disdain for his jurisprudence, judicial philosophy and the president who nominated him) did not, as was quickly exposed, actually have a case; they seemed, rather, to be trying to ride convenient cultural reckonings. Their manifestations in law, and American life more broadly, are the subject of Alan Dershowitz’s new book, Guilt by Accusation, on which more momentarily.

Justice Kavanaugh saw his character assassinated on the basis of (apparently false) claims of his having engaged in sexual assault. He was cast as the embodiment of white male privilege — that is, of power. His purported victims were cast as the embodiment of the powerless. To large swathes of society, Kavanaugh was inherently guilty, by reason of being white and powerful, and his accusers beyond reproach.

This case fit the paradigm of the #MeToo movement. To the extent that the movement’s aim was to bring to justice those who had abused their position by coercing the innocent to tolerate unwanted sexual assaults, judgments of guilt were laudable and overdue. Those who commit such crimes ought to be exposed and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

The movement’s excesses, however, became illuminated during the Kavanaugh “trial,” in the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chambers, and in the court of public opinion. In these realms, both the political class and the media violated all standards of justice and journalistic integrity. Blinded by emotion, the anti-Kavanaugh forces inverted the pillar of our legal system of the presumption of innocence, and refused to subject all manner of outlandish claims to even basic levels of scrutiny. Many members of the U.S. Senate and media alike proved irresponsible and vindictive.

Readers will recall that Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) said men — that is, an entire sex — should “shut up and step up” when it came to the allegations raised against Justice Kavanaugh, and that those like Kavanaugh accuser Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford “need[ed] to be believed.” Of course, would not someone striving for fairness and true equality have demanded that the claims of both sides be heard — that is that men and women be treated the same? Media members gleefully printed all manner of unfounded allegations, and continued to do so even months after Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court.

The narrative trumped truth.

In the end, Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed, but not without his reputation having been tarnished possibly beyond repair.

The Kavanaugh proceedings paralleled other notorious episodes of fabricated — or at a minimum, uncorroborated but scarring — accusations that implicated relations between the sexes, power, privilege and politics, such as the Rolling Stone rape hoax at the University of Virginia, the Duke lacrosse scandal and of course Justice Clarence Thomas’s confirmation battle.

Kavanaugh’s case in particular illustrated that when swept up in a movement, truth-seeking inquiries in pursuit of justice can easily morph into inquisitions that subvert the very justice they claim to seek.

According to Dershowitz, the #MeToo movement, of which the Kavanaugh saga was a part, has fundamentally changed something in our society — or perhaps reflects a society fundamentally changed — manifesting itself in the weaponization of the legal system that has swung the scales of justice out of balance.

Now Dershowitz, the former longtime Harvard Law professor, and defender of many high- profile clients, makes this case in the context of defending himself against charges an accuser first leveled at him in 2014.

He has been accused of sexual improprieties in a court filing, stemming from litigation against Jeffrey Epstein, whom Dershowitz had previously represented as defense counsel. Dershowitz has unequivocally denied the allegations against him in the media and in court, bolstered by his volunteering substantial evidence in his defense as well as citing an independent investigation that was undertaken by a former FBI director and that exonerated him. Consequently, the judge struck the accusation from the record. Professor Dershowitz argues that his life had returned to normal at that point, but:

“Then along came the #MeToo movement and everything changed. Although the evidence of my innocence only increased during this period—and the evidence of my accuser’s mendacity also became more evident—the atmosphere changed dramatically. Evidence was no longer important. It was the accusation that mattered, as well as the identities of the accuser and accused. The presumption shifted from innocence to guilt. For a man to call a false accuser a liar became a political sin, even if the accused had hard evidence of the accuser’s lies, as I did. Much of the media, especially but not exclusively the social media, bought into the narrative of guilty by accusation instead of by proof. They refused to report on evidence of innocence that contradicted the narrative of guilt.

For some an accusation of sexual guilt is so horrible that it must be true, regardless of the evidence.”

Professor Dershowitz lays out a compelling defense refuting the charges against him. Readers can judge that for themselves. What is indisputable are the broader implications his book raises about injustices in our justice system. For example, as Dershowitz encountered in his own case:

“Currently, lawyers, clients, and witnesses can make defamatory statements in public court filings and depositions without fear of a civil suit or a perjury prosecution. As [U.S. Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit] Judge [Jose] Cabranes put it in a recent decision: ‘It is in fact exceedingly rare for anyone to be prosecuted for perjury in a civil proceeding.’ It is these realities that incentivized [Dershowitz accuser Virginia Roberts] Giuffre and her lawyers to falsely accuse me of a crime with complete immunity: they believed that I could not sue them, because their allegations were contained in a court filing, and were thus immune from a defamation suit. Even more absurdly, by denying Giuffre’s allegations and saying they were lies, I subjected myself to a defamation suit.”

Professor Dershowitz notes that accusers can effectively “launder” defamatory accusations through the media while protecting themselves from being hit with defamation suits by planting such allegations in court filings, and leaking them to the press. Dershowitz suggests there is evidence he was accused by name in this fashion as part of a shakedown scheme. The idea was to leverage the fear engendered by seeing Dershowitz’s name dragged through the mud into eliciting a large cash settlement from an unnamed accused person of far greater means.

Regardless, as Professor Dershowitz notes — as with stories that initially draw millions of views, only to have later retractions ignored — once the claim in the filing was publicized, it was nearly impossible for Dershowitz to get his name and reputation back. Social media mobs formed and mercilessly attacked him. He was savaged on college campuses, and some publicly called for Harvard to strip his emeritus status. Finally, he claims to have received evidence that a lawyer for his accuser was seeking out another woman to raise additional related allegations against him — a ploy that ultimately unfolded.

As Professor Dershowitz argues, if he, with ample resources, a first-rate legal mind and impeccable liberal credentials — until he started defending President Donald Trump on the merits — finds himself unable to clear his name today and under continued attack, what does that imply for those lacking such advantages?

Independent of, and more broadly than, Professor Dershowitz’s own case — in which he asserts that the accused often has little recourse — Dershowitz highlights major deficiencies in our legal system. Namely, as Dershowitz quotes from a Wall Street Journal op-ed he previously published, there are no “consequences for those who file accusations with no offer to prove them and no legal responsibility if they are categorically—and disprovably—false.”

In Guilt by Accusation, Professor Dershowitz details some reforms of the legal system that will protect individuals from false accusation, as well as standards media professionals can follow to bring balance to their reporting.

The erosion of fundamental principles of justice — principles developed over many centuries that represent some of the crown jewels of our Judeo-Christian Western civilization — as well as a lack of any semblance of fairness in journalism, reflects an erosion of our culture.

These principles are evidently not being passed from one generation to the next. Absent a culture that values and fully appreciates the blessings it has, as well as the sacrifices required to ensure liberty and justice for all, there can be no liberty and justice for all.

For victim and victimizer alike, the American justice system, and those who report on it, needs to be fair and equal. A case must be judged on its merits, treating parties involved as unique individuals with agency rather than accumulations of identities whose every motive, belief and action can be assumed. The consequence otherwise is not only the ruined reputations, and possibly lives, of people eventually proven innocent, as well as discounting the claims of accusers who are credible, but also the acrimony between the sexes that has resulted. For example 60% of male managers indicate that “they are uncomfortable mentoring, socializing with or even working alone with women in the workplace,” according to a LeanIn.org poll.

Professor Dershowitz’s book is a plea for reforms in our justice system to treat both the accused and the accuser fairly, and for the court of public opinion to do the same. Recognizing that societies are often swayed by their passions, it is an argument that needs to be made.

            (Gatestone Institute)

Ben Weingarten is a fellow at the Claremont Institute and Senior Contributor to The Federalist. He was selected as a 2019 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow of The Fund for American Studies, under which he is currently working on a book on U.S.-China policy

(Mosaica Press, 2019), by Shmuel Phillips
Reviewed by: Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein

In this outstanding book, Shmuel Phillips examines various facets of Torah and Judaism from the so-called “rationalist” viewpoint. He puts that approach to Judaism in perspective by offering an uncensored presentation of Maimonides’ views without cherry-picking passages to match a certain preconceived notion of what Jewish rationalism ought to be. In doing so, Phillips offers a fair and open-minded analysis of Maimonidean thought.

Many critics of mainstream contemporary Judaism have misappropriated rationalism to support their own whims. As Rabbi Micha Berger so eloquently put it, “The mind is a wonderful organ for justifying decisions the heart already reached.” In his work, Shmuel Phillips shows that rationalism does not necessarily entail rejecting traditional Judaism and actually dovetails nicely with it. He demonstrates how even Maimonides—the hero of so-called “Rational Judaism”—did not endorse free-standing rationalism, but rather a rationalism grounded in certain immutable truths, which the mature scholar can only absorb through rigorous character development and the study of both the Written and Oral Torah.

This heavy book (both in terms of its physical weight and the weighty nature of its discussions) calmly provides the reader with a rationalist view of the Torah’s attitude to such sensitive topics as homosexuality, polygamy, rape, eshet yefat toar (“comfort women” in war zones), and gender roles.. He tackles raging controversial topics like slavery and genocide (i.e. wiping out Amalek) in the Torah, and the ubiquitous questions of objective morality and how to reconcile Torah and Science. Phillips also gives logical and rational justifications for such occurrences as halachic loopholes, ritual law, anti-Semitism, miracles, and prophecy.

Phillips takes on Biblical criticism by citing such scholars as Prof. Joshua Berman who explain away linguistic—and even thematic—similarities between the Bible and other ancient writings by invoking the notion that the Torah writes in the way that people spoke and could be most easily understood and internalized by its original audience. While following this approach, Phillips convincingly argues that this approach is entirely in line with Maimonidean thought. In doing so, Phillips’ tone remains authoritative and non-apologetic, and his arguments are conservative, yet cogent. Phillips invokes Rav Hirsch to quell the concerns of Bible Critics by characterizing the Written Torah as written in a sort of code that can only be deciphered through the Oral Torah. This, of course, accounts for all sorts of stylistic and thematic inconsistencies and redundancies.

Phillips also expounds on the Torah’s Universalist message by following Rav Hirsch in characterizing the struggle between Noah’s three sons as an allusion to the fight between unbridled violence (Ham), the culture of aesthetics (Japheth), and spiritual enlightenment through Godliness and morality (Shem). The ramifications of this three-way conflict continue to reverberate throughout the world as it stands as the basis for the contemporary clash of cultures.

This book also broaches the topic of how to view Aggadic Midrashim. More Kabbalistically-inclined authorities tend to take these aggadot at face value and understand them as the intended meaning of the texts which they interpret. However, rationalists in the mold of Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and—to some extent—Radak beg to differ. They maintain that the tradition of aggadot ought to be treated separately from the texts upon which they nominally expound, and said texts should only be understood in their simplest, literal sense. While some have understood that the rationalists reject aggadot, Phillips demonstrates that they simply compartmentalize aggadot and create a clear barrier between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, without rejecting the latter. Moreover, Phillips demonstrates that even some of the Kabbalists, like Maharal and possibly Rashi, maintain that while all exegeses are connected to the Torah’s text (which must contain the totality of all truths), they can sometimes be interpreted as referring to the spiritual dynamics which underpin the plain meaning.

Each chapter takes the reader on a masterfully-written journey through the rationalistic perspective on a different topic. Truth is, you can probably write an entire book for each chapter, but given the framework, this exceptional work does an excellent job at concisely treating each issue with much erudition.

Phillips has a knack for “turning a phrase” in a way that clarifies complex ideas in just a few words. His skilled use of subtle humor and witty alliteration make the subtitles in each chapter almost as fun as reading the content itself. He is clearly a talented writer who has the ability to write up complicated philosophical/theological arguments in an easy-to-read English, without sacrificing accuracy or complexity.

This reviewer respectfully disagrees with Rabbi Dr. Lord Jonathan Sacks’ approbation which characterizes Philips’ book as providing “a remarkable new philosophical approach to Torah and Jewish faith…” In this reviewer’s opinion, Phillips has offered the reader nothing new other than an unbiased presentation of the theosophies of Rambam, R. Yehuda HaLevi, Rav Hirsch, and R. Meir Simcha of Dvinsk—essentially allowing the timeless words of these great luminaries to speak for themselves. Phillip does update the presentation of those philosophies in order to express them in more contemporary terms, but he is certainly not offering anything radically new. He essentially presents the ideas behind the rationalist stream of traditional Judaism in a sophisticated and contemporary way, and for this alone he deserves to be commended.

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein is the author of the book God versus Gods: Judaism in the Age of Idolatry and of the book Lashon HaKodesh: History, Holiness, & Hebrew. He is a member of the RCA, and currently serves as an editor for the Veromemanu Foundation’s new edition of Machberes Menachem. He resides in Beitar Illit, Israel and can be reached via email at [email protected].

By: Phyllis Chesler

I finally saw Bombshell and it was far better than I’d expected it to be. Brilliantly acted (Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow), it was also fast-paced, and amazingly dramatic given that most viewers already know what happened in real life. Bombshell was also unexpectedly painful for me since it reminded me of my own experiences of being sexually harassed and assaulted—something that was pandemic for most women of my generation but for which we had no name.

The women who worked at FOX were almost all interchangeable blonde Barbie dolls with extraordinary figures and high fashion tight-fitting clothing—“dolls”— who were also very smart, ambitious, beautiful, but who were subjected to the most profound shame and guilt by Roger Ailes. Gretchen Carlson, who blew the whistle first, kept waiting for other female anchors to come forward. More than twenty five FOX female employees of long ago did so—but not those who were still anchoring programs. And then Megyn Kelly came forward, and blew the whistle and it was Game Over for the serial assaulter Roger Ailes who, to the very end, did not think that he had done anything wrong. On the contrary, as he insisted, he’d mentored and promoted these women and gave them powerful roles… everyone has to pay some kind of price for success, right?

As I sat there I got angrier and angrier. In 1980 (yes, that long ago), I had been sexually harassed and raped by my employer at the United Nations and I finally wrote about it at length in 2018 in A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

I had waited for my two close feminist leader friends to join me in confronting my rapist privately, only privately. He had diplomatic immunity and I could not sue him or have him arrested for a crime he committed in New York City. My two well-known feminist friends, leaders both, absolutely refused to do so. Perhaps at first, they conveniently chose to assume that we’d had an affair that had gone south. I tried very hard to clarify that this was not the case. Finally, three years later, they agreed to a private meeting and promised to reach out to him so this man could not “go to his grave thinking he could divide the likes of us.”

He went to his grave. He did divide the likes of us. Or rather, the feminist failure, the failure of women to refuse to collaborate with harassers and rapists; the failure of women, including feminist leaders, to believe what women say and to stand by them—is what has divided us. Unbeknownst to me, one of them had been working with my rapist on the Proceedings of the conference that I had organized and on an anthology about international feminism. Such a small gain. The other one merely covered for her.

But, they also both claimed they could not support me because my harasser and rapist was an African man, a black man, a man of color. Years later, these same feminist leaders stood by African-American Anita Hill against an African-American judicial applicant—because he, Clarence Thomas, was a conservative judge; and they stood by Bill Clinton, not by the women who accused him of rape and harassment. They had no feminist principles. It was always about partisan politics.

And, I’m the one who’s been taken to task for daring to write about this, for having exposed it, and for having named names. I was viewed as the traitor to feminism, not those two.

Oddly, as the #MeToo sex crime trials make endless headlines, few feminists, other than myself, have dared to note the circumstances in which women, like men, enable the predators: the wealthy women who funded the pedophile, Keith Raniere of Nxivm, and his many female followers who seduced other girls and women into his sex slavery and branding cult.

I’ve yet to read a feminist analysis in the mainstream media about the role Ghislaine Maxwell played as Epstein’s alleged pimp.

A movie, a simple movie, right outta Hollywood, reminded me of how a combination of female ambition and female vulnerability, female attractiveness and the ability to shame it, spoil it, works in this world. I guess I really was traumatized by what happened, but not so much by the rape; much more so by the female, and feminist complicity with a serial rapist. None of the accused sexual harassers and rapists could not have done it alone without the collaboration, coverups, denials, and cowardice of both women and men, nor could Harvey Weinstein, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Bill Cosby, or Matt Lauer.

The history of black slavery in America, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, white racial discrimination and white police brutality against black men, fatherless black families, male black-on-black violence, etc. is what has fatefully claimed the imagination of progressives and anti-racists, including that of white feminists.

The sexual violence that afflicts women of all colors, has been forced to take a seat at the very back of the bus.

(This article was originally published on the New English Review web site)

By: Charles Fain Lehman

If there is one word to describe The Manipulators, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Big Tech’s War on Conservatives, the excellent new book from Daily Caller editor Peter J. Hasson, it must be “outrageous.” That is not to say that Hasson’s work—staid and thoroughly researched—is outrageous, but that the story he tells should leave any sensible reader, conservative or otherwise, outraged.

The Manipulators represents one of the first major journalistic investigations of the world of big tech written from the right. Using his own beat reporting and others’ work, Hasson takes us inside the Silicon Valley firms that have come to dominate our lives. His research reveals a disturbing pattern of hostility to and silencing of conservative voices, which he links to an all-encompassing, far-left corporate monoculture. The resultant work should leave any reader, conservative or otherwise, concerned.

The first half of the book focuses on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Google subsidiary YouTube, with each chapter following the same basic schema. Hasson outlines the enormous power these companies have—7 in 10 Americans use Facebook, three in four use YouTube, etc. He then presents the evidence that their corporate cultures are overwhelmingly left-leaning—the infamous post-2016 “all hands” meeting at Google, e.g., or the hate directed at Facebook VP Joel Kaplan after he publicly supported Brett Kavanaugh. Lastly, he shows how these companies’ implementation of ostensibly neutral speech restrictions have reliably resulted in bans for and silencing of conservatives while hard-left speech skates inexplicably by.

The book’s second act zooms out to look at the way that other organizations cooperate with big tech’s censorship project. Hasson savages supposedly neutral groups like Media Matters and the SPLC that have become “trusted flaggers” for social media sites in spite of their clear left-wing bias. He also looks at the way social media have worked to boost left-wing news sources, like Huffington Post and the now-defunct ThinkProgress, while tipping the scales against openly conservative ones.

The whole picture is, in a word, damning. Can we say for certain that Facebook, Twitter, and Google do not allow their overwhelmingly left-wing employee-base to affect their decisions? Certainly, correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively.

Against charges of anti-conservative bias—of which there have been many—social media firms have more or less pleaded incompetence. When conservatives identify patterns of bias against themselves, they argue, what they are really doing is stitching together discrete, unrelated failures of the sort that any person who understands content moderation would expect.

Hasson’s book is subject to this argument, and critics will no doubt make use of it. But, even while The Manipulators does make a compelling case that there is something fishy about big tech, it does not actually need to prove that social media platforms are waging a deliberate war on conservatives. To borrow a phrase from the law, Hasson does not really need to prove overt discrimination, even if he goes a long way toward doing so. Rather, at most The Manipulators needs to prove disparate treatment—that even if Facebook and Twitter and Google are merely incompetent rather than malicious, the net effect is still the silencing of conservatives. Maybe all of the bans are discrete failures, but that leaves unaddressed the question of whether or not the failure rate is too high, or the costs of failure too great.

Hasson’s goal—to document how big tech silences conservatives—is a narrow one, and he fulfills it well. What The Manipulators largely lacks (although not really to its detriment) is an account of what we should do about this. To the extent that Hasson does offer a proscription, it is a personal one, charging readers not to rely on government to control big tech, but to keep fighting the good fight online (and, of course, to report further abuses to him).

Such individual-level approaches are certainly admirable, but they may not be up to snuff. A whole debate currently rages in Washington, as figures on both left and right call for a crackdown on tech firms that they see as examples of monopolistic concentration. Distaste for Facebook is one of the few issues that can even galvanize libertarian conservatives like Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) to suggest that, perhaps, government ought to do something.

The political solutions put forward by these voices—usually the renewed application of antitrust law to Facebook or Google—would make for a bigger hammer, but it is unclear if it is the hammer we need. When it comes to social media in particular, The Manipulators suggests that the problem is not so much economic concentration, but the concentration of speech, and the concurrent power to police it. Over the past decade, much of our democratic life has moved online—but are we better off for it?

Before social media, political conversations were comparatively much harder to have, certainly at the scale that the internet now permits. This meant that they were also much harder to police—the concentration of speech in one place means that it is easier to manage. For much of its early history, the internet was used largely by skilled users with niche interests, able to navigate a more decentralized web. These users tended to prefer a sort of free speech absolutism, which was readily enforced by the ease of “exit” from one chat board to another.

As normal people came online through the late 2000s and 2010s, however, they demanded easy-to-use systems that provided all of their services in one place. They also demanded services that their friends already used—which means that for every user a service got, its probability of getting additional users increased. Firms like Facebook and Google are market dominant in large part because they did such a good job of meeting those demands. At the same time, however, that concentration both created a demand for a more heavily moderated internet—the median user became less interested in radical speech—and made the median user less competent, less willing, and less able to “exit” a platform they did not like.

There are enormous discursive, even pro-democratic, benefits to modern concentration. Twitter disintermediates relationships between politicians and constituents, Facebook permits debate and discussion at a mass scale, and Google collects more information than any republic reliant on literate citizenship has ever had access to.

At the same time, as The Manipulators makes clear, concentration permits the exercise of power by private firms over these same channels of information. Even if the resultant abuses are entirely accidental (and some of them are surely not), the effect is the same. Some voices are silenced not because they are wrong, but because they fail the tests of the algorithmic powers-that-be.

The question then with which The Manipulators should leave citizens and policymakers alike is: Are we better off with this kind of power in the hands of so few? Is American democracy healthier because a handful of firms let us talk to each other, while simultaneously silencing certain voices? Or were we better before, when we perhaps had less conversation, but it was also less readily controllable? On this matter, Hasson is largely silent. From the story he tells, however, the answer seems loud and clear.

(Washington Free Beacon)

Charles Fain Lehman is a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon. He writes about policy, covering crime, law, drugs, immigration, and social issues. Reach him on twitter (@CharlesFLehman) or by email at [email protected].