The Politics of Personal Destruction

Politics makes strange bedfellows, as the saying goes. And, as we often note in this blog, one good sign in today’s expanding culture war is the number of serious leftist thinkers who have denounced the tactics being employed by the American left.

Canceling people, destroying their reputations, on the basis of unproven allegations is surely one of the worst perversions of civil order. In principle, people have recourse to the civil courts when they are unjustly defamed. Unfortunately, thanks to the Sullivan decision, media outlets are immune from liability if they are not purposefully lying to destroy an individual maliciously-- as long as the individual is a public figure. As you know, Justices Thomas and Alito have recently called for a reconsideration of Sullivan. Not a minute too soon.

Intrepid leftist Glenn Greenwald notes in his most recent Substack column that today’s media is happy to embrace any unproven allegation directed against anyone who appears to be on the political right, but will happily defend anyone on the left who has been accused of anything whatever. They consider Christine Blasey Ford a truth teller but reject the testimony of a Tara Reade.

So, the American left is practicing, and has been practicing the politics of public vilification. Greenwald is appalled:

That is because in left-wing political culture, evidence is not needed for accusations to be deemed true and to be used to destroy a person’s reputation built over decades. Just like free speech, they do not believe in due process when it comes to vilifying someone publicly — at all — nor do they recognize the importance of not assuming someone guilty without evidence. They are tyrannical cowards who, sheep-like, jump into line the minute they hear an allegation of this type and repudiate the person accused without the slightest regard for whether he actually did anything wrong. They are too afraid of the recriminations from suggesting that evidence should be required.

American culture is being corrupted by this practice. Greenwald concludes:

But the far more important point is that any culture that is willing to destroy reputations and lives based on totally unproven accusations is one that is inherently corrupt and unjust. The ability to destroy someone’s life with nothing more than an uncorroborated claim voiced more than eighteen years after the alleged incident is a power with which nobody should be trusted.