Animal House

The Democrats go for the Epstein Hail Mary.

Well, I guess that’s it. They’ve got him now. The walls are closing in. Finally. The end is nigh.

Fini.

I guess it was over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor.

On Wednesday, Democratic Representative Dan Goldman accused President Donald Trump of having been “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old minor, and alleged that the Justice Department is withholding related records from the public. The “credible accusation” in question involves an unverified allegation dating back to the 1980s that was investigated by the Biden DOJ. Goldman and Representative Ted Lieu called for a special prosecutor to further investigate.

It is remarkable to watch the left run this same playbook again, especially after it has come back to bite them in the ass time and time again.

According to the FBI documents, this is an uncorroborated accusation that surfaced in 2018 and 2019 regarding something that allegedly occurred in the 1980s. The accusation follows the same pattern as the E. Jean Carroll case, pick something that happened 30 years ago that has never been identified, then publicize sketchy accusations made by credibility challenged individuals that Trump, his sons, Ivanka (who was born in 1981 and would have been between 0 and 8 years old when this allegedly happened) and approximately 30 to 40 other individuals, including Alan Dershowitz and Elon Musk, attended what was essentially a sex-slave market featuring underage girls.

For those who haven’t seen it, one part of the accusation is that Trump “measured the children’s vulva and vaginas by entering a finger…”

That’s the level of salaciousness.

Yesterday’s breathless headlines from the left claimed that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times “confirmed” accusations initially reported by PBS. What those outlets confirmed was not that the events occurred, but simply that the accusations appeared in the documents. That is all.

The response from Democratic officials has been swift. This morning, I awoke to a video — sent to me by my personal AWFUL (the teacher I have written about with whom I have been attempting to reason — of Representative Yassimin Ansari grabbing a little TV time by making additional fact-free accusations. I responded with a clip from James King interviewing another young AWFUL, who said she had “deduced” Trump’s guilt. It was telling that my personal AWFUL used the exact same word. Neither of them deduced anything from an uncorroborated, evidence-free accusation. At best, they extrapolated a conclusion from their own emotional biases. There is nothing in evidence with sufficient weight to justify further investigation.

The broader reality is this: President Trump is the most investigated, most surveilled, and most accused president in American history. His life has been examined under a partisan microscope every day for the past decade. One might reasonably conclude that if Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Merrick Garland, Alvin Bragg, Reid Hoffman, or any other Democratic operative had proof to back any of these claims, it would have surfaced at some point over the past eight years when they would have been the most politically useful.

The left has also mastered a particular rhetorical trap: dismissing specific, verifiable details in favor of “the bigger idea.” The political right, by contrast, remains ensnared in a world where every sentence is parsed and negative intent is assigned to every word. This is a form of offensive emotional reasoning known as “Kafkatrapping,” defined as: your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of [some charge] simply confirms that you are guilty of it.

The burden of proof is applied unequally. Conservatives and Republicans are not afforded the same evidentiary standard in the court of public opinion as they are in a court of law. This dynamic was crystallized during the Clarence Thomas hearings, when NPR’s Nina Totenberg, commenting on Anita Hill’s unproven accusations, stated that truth was secondary because: “It’s the seriousness of the charge” that matters.

This became what might be called the Totenberg Rule, and it operates through four mechanisms: things said cannot be unsaid; things heard cannot be unheard; things seen cannot be unseen; and if something is repeated by enough people, it becomes acceptable to treat it as true. My personal AWFUL added a corollary of her own: that Trump was mentioned hundreds of times in the documents, and therefore it simply must be true.

That is precisely what Democrats are hoping to achieve — convincing the public that guilt or innocence should be judged not by evidence, but by the severity of the accusation.

I’m sure that not having a message in the run-up to a midterm election totally has nothing to do with it.