The Guardianisation of British newspapers which once stood for common sense is nowhere more evident than in the Telegraph’s women’s section. Their recent behaviour over the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation was as appalling as anything the Guardian produced.
A case in point was an article headed ‘The smearing of Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers shows just how many men believe women are liars’. This article was written by Joan Smith, about whom no information is given in the article, but further research reveals that not only is she a former executive director of Hacked Off, but she was the co-chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls panel.
The article is notable for its effective use of ambiguity. Smith starts off by saying: ‘The smearing of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers shows how many men automatically assume that all women are liars.’ But what exactly does this mean? Does ‘All women are liars’ mean ‘All women lie all the time?’ Obviously no one believes that. Or does it mean that ‘All women lie some of the time?’ That’s obviously true, because everyone, men and women, lie sometimes. Or does it mean, ‘All women lie enough times that the word of a woman, any woman, cannot be trusted on important matters?’ No one believes that either; obviously there are many women whose word can be trusted.
So once we do a little undergraduate work in picking apart the ambiguity here, the absurdity of Smith’s claim becomes apparent.
Smith also says: ‘I’ve never understood the notion that women habitually lie about sex, randomly accusing men of rape, while men tell the truth at all times.’
This is written after numerous rape trials have fallen apart in the UK because it became clear that the women making the accusations were lying. Of course, no one is saying that ‘women habitually lie about sex’; that’s just a straw man. Nor is anyone saying that men tell the truth at all times. That some women lie about rape for personal reasons is well established, as attested to by the women who are currently in jail for doing this. And we know only too well that Leftists will gladly tell lies to advance the Leftist cause. So the idea that Leftist women will come forward to make false accusations – which are damning, but suitably vague enough to protect them against perjury – for an important political cause is all too predictable.
Another dreadful Telegraph article on the Kavanaugh case then appeared, this time from one of the editors of the women’s section, Claire Cohen, headed: ‘Brett Kavanaugh: Women are angry and here’s why’.
Cohen complained that the Kavanaugh case has resulted in men ‘being fed lies that any woman, anywhere, could ruin their life with a false allegation’. It’s frankly unbelievable that someone who works for a major British newspaper as an editor could write this in 2018 after several recent cases took place where clearly innocent young men had their lives ruined by false allegations.
Cohen also says, ‘There is no evidence at all that there are more false allegations in rape cases than in any other crime.’
This dubious claim was also made by Joan Smith in her article. It’s clearly not true: how many people are in jail because they falsely accused someone else of bank robbery? But we should also notice the implicit admission in this claim. If women don’t lie about rape more than any other crime, then they do sometimes lie about rape. That means that all the recent cries that we must automatically believe all rape claims made by women can’t be right. Women sometimes lie about rape, and we have to do more than just take their word for it. Evidence matters.
Following on from these two dismal articles, we had Allison Pearson, normally one of the Telegraph’s more grounded writers, writing her own Kavanaugh article in the Women’s section, entitled ‘Female rage is getting out of control – and it won’t end well’. In the article she said some ridiculous and worrying things. For instance:
‘Most sinister of all was the calendar he had kept from his teenage years.’
It’s hard to believe she really said this, but she did. The most sinister thing is that Kavanaugh kept an old calendar.
‘Who on earth knows exactly what they were doing on a Friday in 1982, and for what reason might they have kept that evidence?’
Allison Pearson apparently thinks that a teenage Brett Kavanaugh thought that to cover up a sexual assault he’d keep his calendar for that year for decades in case it ever came up in, say, 2018. Because then he’d be able to sway a jury by producing a calendar which doesn’t list the dates he raped people.
The complete lack of evidence or corroboration in the accusations didn’t worry any of these writers. Nor did the gaping holes in the stories. Smith was so ill-informed that she even took Julie Swetnick’s ludicrous claims of gang-rape seriously, when even the Democrats have tried to distance themselves from those.
In short, the Telegraph’s Women’s section has become a disgrace.
