No one looks forward to the commute in Washington, D.C. — but for Brett Kavanaugh, yesterday morning’s drive to the Supreme Court was almost certainly something to savor. After the most personally challenging month of his life, pulling up to his new office had to have taken some of the sting out of the last several weeks. Despite everything the Left hurled at him, he survived. Now the only question that remains is whether the party responsible for his persecution can do the same.

“This isn’t over!” screamed protestors on the sides of First Street, N.E yesterday morning. And they’re right. Reminders of what Senate Democrats did to Kavanaugh over the last month are everywhere — in local jails, where nearly 400 arrests have been processed, in the headlines of national newspapers, the nail marks on Court’s bronze doors, even the war cries that hang uneasily in the air over the Capitol. For now, the president’s pick is safe. But the real showdown on Kavanaugh will be in November, when the American people decide how much it trusts a party who knowingly tried to destroy an innocent man.

At Monday night’s White House ceremony, I sat in the audience as the president looked at his newest justice and apologized for the “terrible pain and suffering” he’d been through. “The way they really tortured him and his family, I thought it was a disgrace. A brilliant jurist, a man that did nothing wrong, a man that was caught up in a hoax that was set up by the Democrats using the Democrats’ lawyers, and now they want to impeach him.” Already, the far-Left is hunkering down for its next move — either to forcibly remove Kavanaugh from the court after November or to pack it with who-knows-how-many justices. Where does it stop? Are liberals angry enough and unreasonable enough to destroy an entire institution? Based on what we’ve seen in the last four weeks and over the summer, yes.

After all, this is the movement that didn’t just call for violence and harassment — but excused it. On Sunday, one of Kavanaugh’s biggest opponents, liberal Senator Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) defended the intimidation tactics of her base, saying that Democrats are “just very motivated” by what’s going on. Even CNN’s Dana Bash was taken aback. “It’s one thing to protest at the Supreme Court,” she told Hirono. “It’s another thing to run senators out of restaurants, go to their homes. Is that going too far?” Hirono basically shrugged. “Well,” she said unconcerned, “this is what happens.”

But “this” is no longer polite disagreement. It’s a Google executive tweeting, “You are finished, @GOP. You polished the final nail for your own coffins. F— you all to h—.” It’s a Minnesota teacher asking, “So whose [sic] gonna take one for the team and kill Kavanaugh?” Regardless of what the media says, this kind of aggression doesn’t just happen. It’s inspired by leaders as far back as Barack Obama telling voters to “argue with them and get in their face” — and funded by radicals like George Soros.

But the “House of Soros” may be collapsing. By and large, Americans see through the paid protestors and pre-fab signs. Even Democrats may not have wanted Kavanaugh confirmed, but plenty of them didn’t like how he was treated either. Only 36 percent approved of the party’s smear campaign, and 56 percent disapproved – which, amazingly, is almost identical to the Republicans’ response. More importantly for both parties, independents – by a 28-point margin — overwhelmingly disapprove of how Democrats handled the confirmation. And they didn’t believe how the media was covering it either. Forty-five percent of Americans thought the news was biased against Kavanaugh to the 35 percent who believed it was neutral.

Despite it all, the court’s newest justice insists he will take “this office with gratitude and no bitterness.” It was a powerful amount of graciousness from a man who had been shown none. Brett, like us, understands that this isn’t about him. It’s about a profound difference in ideology — and temperament. As conservatives, we can’t afford to take our eyes off the long game — which is to restore the Constitution to its rightful place in our Republic and turn us back into a nation ruled by laws, not passions or preferences.

These midterm elections are more competitive — and more important — than ever. Voters have a choice: they can stay home and witness the end of the restoration of the Republic, or they can keep the progress alive by electing men and women who share the president’s vision. Congress frustrates a lot of people, I know, but it’s the greatest firewall between the administration and the people desperate to put an end to this return to American greatness. My prayer is that people will see the big picture — the broadest brush stroke of which was Brett Kavanaugh firmly seated on the court where he belongs.

Originally published here.

Liberal Profs Hit a Grand Sham in Journal Hoax

You’ve heard of fake news — but what about fake academia? According to three gutsy professors, it’s alive and well and being featured in plenty of peer-reviewed journals. Together, the trio set out to prove it in a scholarly hoax that’s taken the entire education world by surprise.

Medieval religious scholar Helen Pluckrose, author and mathematician James Lindsay, and philosopher Peter Boghossian aren’t conservative (as a matter of fact, they call themselves “Left-leaning liberals), but they certainly share a lot of conservatives’ concerns about the bias of higher education. Fed up with the "grievance studies” that they think have taken over academia, they set out to prove what a joke the field of gender and identity studies has become.

Starting in August of 2017, the professors started cranking out fake papers and submitting them to scholarly journals under different names. The more absurd the topic, the more likely it seemed to get published. Among other things, the trio wrote entire sham essays on subjects like: dog parks becoming “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture,’” what motivates heterosexual men to eat at Hooters, the fat-exclusionary culture of bodybuilding. They even argued for replacing “western astronomy” with “feminist astronomy.”

Their experiment worked. Seven of the 20 papers were accepted, all having undergone so-called “rigorous” peer review. “Their submissions were outlandish,” the Wall Street Journal points out, “but no more so, they insist, than others written in earnest and published by these journals.” When the three professors revealed what they’d done, the academic community exploded. They were outraged that anyone would pull back the curtain on what the trio calls “absurd and horrific scholarship.”

Obviously, they wanted to get the country’s attention about a community that’s fixated on politically-correct outcomes. As Ben Shapiro pointed out in Newsweek, “Education,” he says, “has become about underscoring the preferred power politics of those who control the flow of information. Ironically, those who insist that reality is mere social construction insist that their alternative social construction be made reality. That means that politics become paramount, and truth becomes completely superfluous.”

So much so that three liberal professors were willing to risk their careers to shine a light on the problem. As WSJ tells it, “Mr. Boghossian doesn’t have tenure and expects the university will fire or otherwise punish him. Ms. Pluckrose predicts she’ll have a hard time getting accepted to a doctoral program. Mr. Lindsay said he expects to become ‘an academic pariah,’ barred from professorships or publications.” Regardless, they say, it was all worth it. “For us, the risk of letting biased research continue to influence education, media, policy, and culture is far greater than anything that will happen to us for having done this.”

Whether educators will be embarrassed enough to do something about it remains to be seen. What we do know is that it takes a lot of courage to expose a problem most liberals are too afraid to admit — let alone combat. Our hats go off to the professors for giving America a real study in academic bias!

Originally published here.

This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.