Brett Kavanaugh — Blog

How “he said, she said” always benefits “him:” What does it mean to “believe women”

I have very little faith in the mainstream media. However, I have to say that after watching the recent interview between Mika Brzezinski and Joe Biden, Mika comes off quite well and Joe quite poorly. I’d encourage you all to watch it.

If you do watch it, I think it's clear why Mika comes off so well: she basically hammers Biden for 20 minutes about Tara Reade. Biden offers what seems to be definitive denials time and again, but Mika doesn't accept them, and she continually reformulates her questions in order to keep the pressure on Biden. She only relents when the interview time us up.

The brunt of Mika's questions revolve around two points, and the reason she is so unrelenting is because Biden is evasive about both of them. In the case of the first set of questions, his evasiveness is quite obvious, and he comes off poorly. However, in the case of the second set of questions, the evasiveness is less obvious, but I think they help reveal a larger and unfortunate truth.

The Emperor Is Fully Clothed

I've been thinking a little about the Kavanaugh nomination, and about Kavanaugh's decision to let loose at the hearing. Everyone was quick to jump to the conclusion that Trump was the audience, and that Kavanaugh was worried about the possibility that Trump might pull the nomination. But this always seemed odd. At that point in time, you would think that the "swing" senators were the audience, and Kavanaugh's display didn't seem well calibrated to win over "moderates." But then it came out that the White House itself counselled Kavanaugh's approach, which superficially seemed to confirm that Trump was the audience. But I don't think that this is the case. Instead, I think we're getting a peak behind the curtain. Trump wasn't the audience, his deplorables were. And Trump knows this.

Jamie AroosiOctober 9, 2018Brett Kavanaugh, Donald J. Trump, United Nations, DeplorablesComment

The Last Working-Class Professor

A colleague recently posted about the role that student debt plays in perpetuating class inequalities in education, which essentially creates an insurmountable obstacle preventing almost all people from attending the type of elite institutions from which our ruling class emerges. In other words, student debt is a mechanism for preserving elite rule. Brett Kavanaugh isn't the sharpest tool in the box (not to mention that other Yale alum, George W. Bush), but the high cost and prohibitive debt load ensure that they can continue to monopolize the resources and benefits of these institutions, while claiming them to be meritocratic. As Kavanaugh mentioned, he "earned" his seat on the Supreme Court, even though the fact that there will soon be two Supreme Court justices from his prep school seems to indicate a different story.

But this point aside, it prompted me to respond that we're now seeing the last generation of working-class faculty members die off.