Charles C.W. Cooke had David French pinned. The two journalists were debating politics on a podcast. Cooke, a senior writer at National Review, argued that Kamala Harris isn’t fit to be president. French, a peacocking and duplicitous liberal who falsely calls himself a conservative, disagrees. French had just announced in The New York Times that in order to “save conservatism,” he’s voting for Harris.
Cooke cornered French with this: In 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, the behavior of Sen. Kamala Harris “was reprehensible and disqualifying and showed us a great deal how she behaves towards people in politics when she is given power. Harris used her position in the Senate to publicly advance… claims that Brett Kavanaugh is a gang rapist.” Cooke, who isn’t voting for Trump, argued that Harris’ vile actions are as bad as anything Trump did: “Trump is not the only person who has done something disqualifying.”
Cooke’s stance boils down to this: You can have policy and constitutional disagreements with a politician, but these don’t always place them in the realm of disqualification—other things do. For Trump, it was his actions on January 6. For Harris, it was her making false and criminal accusations involving Brett Kavanaugh during Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearing in 2018.
French is a military veteran. Surely he understands the difference between disagreements over policy and falsely accosting a SCOTUS nominee of gang rape. He doesn’t. “I guess I’m having an interesting conundrum,” he said. Then French did what he always does—he diverted to a bogus whataboutism. “I hear you talking about Ron DeSantis. You voted for Ron DeSantis. DeSantis is extremely punitive against his opponents, even in a way that involves wielding state power against his opponents.”
French was referring to The Stop Woke Act, the DeSantis bill that would prevent the funding of public schools that teach critical race theory and ban private companies from using a racial framework in staff trainings. Supporters argued that Stop Woke was against illegal racism. Opponents said that it violated free speech. French thinks it’s as bad as anything Harris has ever done, including a criminal conspiracy working with convicted extortionist Michael Avenatti to destroy the life of a federal judge.
The Stope Woke Act is a policy argument. It’s not falsely accusing someone of gang rape. “I think we’re talking about different things here,” Cooke countered. “What we’re talking about here is not a policy disagreement… Reading into the Senate record obviously false rape accusations is not a disagreement about whether or not the state should be agnostic on the question vaccinations… It’s not the same as a disagreement about what extent civil rights laws can apply to private businesses and in which direction… I see Harris reaching that threshold of disqualification to the point that I would never vote of her…. Do you think she’s fit to be the President?”
“Yes, she’s a mainstream Democrat,” French said of Harris, who wants to enforce price controls, raise taxes, let boys into girls locker rooms and legalize abortion up to the moment of birth. French said that “policy disagreements” doesn’t mean that he couldn’t vote for her.
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Cooke shot back. He referred to something that I’ve written about extensively, both in recent articles and in my book The Devil’s Triangle, which describes how I, a high school classmate of Kavanaugh’s, was also falsely accused by Harris. Two days before the Sept. 27, 2018, hearing featuring Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, who accused him of committing sexual assault against her while they were both in high school, Harris’ staffers turned over to Senate investigators a letter from one “Jane Doe” of Oceanside, California.
From the Senate Judiciary Committee: “On September 25, 2018, staffers for Senator Harris, a Committee member, referred an undated handwritten letter to Committee investigators that her California office had received signed under the alias ‘Jane Doe’ from Oceanside, California. The letter contained highly graphic sexual-assault accusations against Judge Kavanaugh. The anonymous accuser alleged that Justice Kavanaugh and a friend had raped her ‘several times each’ in the backseat of a car. In addition to being from an anonymous accuser, the letter listed no return address, failed to provide any timeframe, and failed to provide any location—beyond an automobile—in which these alleged incidents took place. A woman named Judy Munro-Leighton then claimed to be this “Jane Doe.” She then recanted, admitting she did not know Kavanaugh and had pulled the stunt because she “just wanted to get attention.”
Kamala Harris partook in a criminal conspiracy. At one point in September 2018, Christine Blasey Ford’s own lawyers told her to drop her claims. “Christine, our final recommendation is that you don’t go forward,” they told her in September 2018, as Kavanaugh was about to be confirmed. “We can’t let you stand in front of an oncoming train.” According to Ford’s account of the incident in her book, she “hung up the phone, crying in tears of rage and frustration.” The late Sen. Feinstein sent Ford a letter telling her to stop advancing the false accusation. “The case is closed,” Feinstein wrote.
The attack failed and was supposed to be over, Ford wrote, “but other forces were at work that decided otherwise. I started getting calls and emails from journalists.” This was a criminal political hit that involved extortion, witness tampering and lies.
In 2018 Cooke wrote a piece about how bad this all was. “Our Illiberal Moment” argued that Americans are losing the virtues that are necessary to sustain a democratic republic. Those virtues are humility, tolerance and forbearance, and the modern totalitarian left has no regard for them. Cooke refers to the attack on Kavanaugh: “Sometime soon, the hideous standards that were crafted and reinforced by those attempting to bring down Kavanaugh will be used against someone with no power, money, name recognition, or institutional backing.”
In fact those “hideous standards” were already deployed against a person without power, money, name recognition or institutional standards. That was me. This wasn’t a policy dispute about Ukraine. Kamala Harris is an evil human being and a criminal who isn’t fit to be president.