Normal Americans watched with disgust as the Democrats levied malicious smear tactics against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Power-hungry Democrats outdid even themselves in showing contempt for American citizens, American values, the Constitution, and the rule of law.

As the Democrats move ever leftward, their behavior and tactics have become more unhinged, more vile, more putrid, more contemptible. And, need I say, unlikable.

Wisdom tells us that every cloud has a silver lining. In the thick, darkness of the liberal base, lady wisdom proves true. While leftist words and deeds attest to desperate grabs for power and control, a quite pleasant phenomenon is happening across the aisle. We could call it “The American Re-Dream.” That is, redemption.

Redemption

On a daily basis, talk-radio callers, Gabbers, tweeters, Facebook users, Reddit users, YouTube vloggers, bloggers, and all kinds of social media consumers convey their personal messages of redemption. An awakening, then a conversion, and finally a resurrection from the darkness that plagues U.S. politics.

Roads to redemption are singular and unique for each of the redeemed. However, each testimony begins and ends with the same words:

“I used to be a Democrat… [insert person’s awakening] …and that is why I am now a voting Republican.”

Redemption delights in meeting people at rock bottom—less distractions there. In the bedrock of a person’s conscience, gross violations of decency create situations in which it is impossible to remain unchanged. These situations cross over into the dark and scary abyss that lies dormant in all people with the exception of sociopaths, psychopaths, and/or, as NR writer Jim Geraghty explains, those dealing with psychological issues that are indistinguishable from their worldview.

Which makes me wonder… What effect will this particular Democrat violation of human decency—the smear and character assassination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and the effects on his wife, two young daughters, parents—have on future and current American voters?

• How will if affect middle school boys?
• How will it affect the mothers of middle school boys? Mothers of elementary boys?
• How will it affect high school boys?
• How will it affect college guys?
• How will it affect young men starting out in their career?
• How will if affect middle-aged men? Elderly men?
• How will it affect the sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters, sons, friends, etc. of all these men and boys?

You may remember the Democrats running the same, exact play against now Justice Clarence Thomas. It was 4^th down, with 2 months to the midterms…

• The Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings were closed.
• At the 11^th hour, an FBI interview with Anita Hill was leaked to the press.
• Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment or at least “behavior that is unbefitting to an individual who will be a member of the Court.”
• Mainstream mynah birds echoed the allegations against Thomas.
• No corroboration. No evidence. No witnesses. But the media didn’t tell that part.
• The Senate Judiciary confirmation hearings were reopened.
• Hours upon hours of televised coverage.
• Democrat senators asked the same questions over and over biting at each tiny word.
• Anita Hill was treated like a weak, wall flower liable to break at any minute.
• Clarence Thomas, a good, decent, exceptionally intelligent, hard-working man, was treated worst than a criminal—GUILTY until proven innocent.

When Thomas finally made his statement to the committee, he let the Democrat committee members have it. What makes this statement particularly juicy is that Democrats had smeared the prior Republican SC nominee, Robert Bork, by falsely insisting that he was a racist.

This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It’s a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I’m concerned it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree. -Clarence Thomas to the Senate Judiciary Committee, 1991

Thomas was confirmed on October 18, 1991 and remains a justice to this day.

Like Watching A Future Serial Killer Torture An Animal

As a teenager, I could not have cared less about politics. Yet there was something about the Thomas hearings that were captivating. They were riveting—for the entire country. But not in the sense that you might think. It was more like watching a bully kill an innocent dog, or a future serial killer torturing a cat. Even if Hill’s testimony was truthful (and it did not appear credible at all) the allegations were a big “So what?” And the audacity of Democrat smear merchants—elected senators—to participate in this farce beguiled everyone.

Did this leave any lingering effects? Or was it all heat of the moment emotion? We will never know everyone who was changed whether conservative or democrat. But we do know of one Democrat Liberal who “got woke.” And in turn, sounded the alarm to other sleepers.

Andrew Breitbart’s Road To Redemption

Democrat Liberal Andrew Breitbart—yes, of Breitbart News—took notice of the grave injustice called the Senate Judiciary committee questioning of Clarence Thomas. In his own words, “my eyes were opened for the first time…”. The vile and foul Democrat smear tactics aimed at Clarence Thomas awakened a sleeping liberal. Breitbart would go on to found Breitbart News and to become an outspoken and effective advocate against the Democrat Party. In less than 10 years, Breitbart.com became one of the top 15 political websites worldwide, placing 13^th in 2017.

Here is the first step on Andrew’s road to redemption, in his own words, from the “must read” book Righteous Indignation:

Even as I was discovering the fulfillment I could derive from hard work, I was still a default liberal. Around this time, I watched the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings with the alacrity of a boxing fan at the Ali-Frazier fight. It was a major media event and a political heavyweight match. The way that the media had billed it, the Rocky Balboa was Anita Hill. She was the protagonist. The only people in Clarence Thomas’s corner were members of the Republican Party. And to me, they were the scolds, the hypocrites, the town elders in Footloose, the people who represented the people who would give over their hard-earned money to Jim and Tammy Bakker in exchange for eternal salvation. My perspective on the political process was an inch deep. But my desire to see Clarence Thomas’s blood was immense.

So when the opening bell rang, I was expecting Hill to deliver a relentless barrage of accusations and evidence about a man whose behavior around women was professionally unacceptable. I expected lurid details of intimidation, coercion, and harassment. But Hill and her allies described a workplace and a boss-employee relationship that seemed utterly unremarkable. To listen to the media commentators affirm the outrage of Democratic female harpies, parroting the overwrought cries of Anita as channeled by this driven core of Democratic officials, was infuriating—it was so obviously unjust. (Leading the questioning, by the way: Senators Howard Metzenbaum, Pat Leahy, Joe Biden, and Teddy Kennedy.)

Now I may have been a Democrat. I may have been a liberal. But I was not stupid. Something was very wrong here. The melodrama did not come close to matching the lack of evidence that was being presented. They were accusing Thomas of spotting a pubic hair on a soda can, of asking Hill on a date. There was no “there” there. It was ridiculous.

I was perfectly aware at the time that the Democrats were motivated by the abortion issue. And at the time, I was pro-choice. So when Thomas’s inquisitors pierced the sanctity of the “right to privacy” that is the hallmark of left-wing constitutional rights, flaunting that they had discovered through illicit means that Thomas had rented pornography, my mental anguish turned physical. I writhed in agony and actually threw a shoe at the television set.

At the same time, it was impossible for me to not recognize that Clarence Thomas’s being black was part of the story. How in hell could white Americans Leahy, Biden, and Metzenbaum, let alone form KKK grand pooh-bah Robert Byrd and Chappaquiddick’s very own Ted Kennedy, so arrogantly excoriate this man whose personal narrative from sharecropper’s grandson to Supreme Court nominee embodied the American dream? A narrative that would send a clear signal to African-Americans that anything is possible in this country? Why were so many white Democrats in the media and in the political class working in concert to assassinate this man’s character and to stop that dream in its tracks?

During this media feeding frenzy my eyes were open, perhaps for the first time, to the fact that something was awry in American political and media life. What secret bit did Kennedy and Biden know about the NAACP, ABC, NBC, and CBS that they could grill a black man on such weak charges and know that those politically correct entities would not savage them? If the tables were turned and Clarence Thomas were a liberal Democrat, the NAACP wouldn’t have waited a second. Somehow, these white male senators of privilege knew that they could get away with it.

My sympathy for Thomas was utter and complete. I wanted to stop the hearings. I wanted him to be issued public, formal apologies. I naively expected that the press would do the job of forcing those apologies. I could understand how the mainstream media could accept Anita Hill and Congresswoman Pat Schroeder at their word. But even if the accusations were true, they amounted to nothing. Certainly a hell of a lot less than what Senator Kennedy likely did to his female staff on any given Washington workday. This was, as Clarence Thomas perfectly stated, an electronic lynching.

And the media aided and abetted it.

Please note that I did not leave the Clarence Thomas hearings a Republican. I did not leave the hearings an originalist. But I did leave the hearings deeply cynical of media that I had thought were neutral and a Democratic Party that I’d believed was guided by principle. This was the beginning of the end of the self-deception that I was like everyone else around me. It would take a few more years to get there—to discover that I was a conservative—but this was the exact point where I realized that it was not just that I disagreed with the Democratic Party but, more important, that the media were its dominant partner in crime. The national disgrace that was the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, for me, changed everything.

Any Future Breitbarts Out There?

Only the future will reveal what sleeping giants have been awakened by the Democrat Party’s unhinged attempt to ultimately ruin Brett Kavanaugh. The Party of Crime attempted to destroy a human in order to preserve a seat on the Supreme Court. Let that sink in.

As never before the disgrace of Democrat Party smear tactics, the left-wing media, Soros-funded paid protesters, and Hollywood has-beens has shocked and outraged the silent majority. Normal, everyday, American citizens—regardless of race, gender, sexual identity, age, political identity—are experiencing their own redemption stories.

“I used to be a Democrat… [insert reaction to Brett Kavanaugh smear] …but now I am a voting conservative.”

For further reading:

Here’s a portion of an Andrew Breitbart interview where he is asked about the influence of the Clarence Thomas hearings on his personal politics. The entire interview can be found here. It’s classic!

ARONOFF: First, let’s talk a little about your political journey.  You talk about how the Clarence Thomas hearings had a major impact, and, later, you were driving around Los Angeles, listening to AM talk radio after your future father-in-law had Rush Limbaugh’s book, and you saw it and asked him about it and he urged you to listen again.  So tell us about your journey.  Did you have an epiphany, or an evolution?  How did you go from being a liberal to a conservative?

BREITBART: I describe myself as a “default liberal,” having grown up in West Los Angeles, around the Hollywood studios, which are borderline monolithically left-of-center, so I was basically on the factory setting.  It’s not as if, when you’re in a prep school in West Los Angeles, with the sons and daughters of studio executives, you’re reading Hayek and Edmund Burke and the canon of conservative writing and thinking.  It wasn’t until I graduated college with that default liberal point of view, which included a heavy dose of cynicism and nihilism, that my father said, “Andrew, no more!  We’re cutting you off!,” and so I think that the first seed of doubt was planted when I got cut off of the entitlement program called “My Parents,” and I had to actually start buying my own shoes.  That sounds weird to most people—or maybe it doesn’t—but, for me, I didn’t realize how much dignity I would get from the process of actually working and paying for my shoes and my own rent, and that was the very beginning.  I remember walking home from a wait job that I’d taken—I’d graduated into a terrible economy with an even worse attitude about working, so I was waiting tables—and watching the Clarence Thomas hearings with my default position of wanting Clarence Thomas to go down because, well, I don’t know.  Tom Brokaw- and Katie Couric-type people told me that Clarence Thomas was bad and Anita Hill was good, I saw that the National Organization for Women said that Clarence Thomas was bad and Anita Hill was good, so I was rooting for it.  And I sat down and I watched the hearings, waiting for evidence that would prove the thesis—because he was ultimately on trial.  By the end of the week, I thought to myself, When are they going to provide the evidence?  I believe Anita, fine.  Let’s posit that she’s telling the truth—I don’t think she was, but I went, Let’s posit that she’s telling the truth: So what? So what?  In six years of going job to job to job, getting a raise everywhere, getting promoted everywhere, to hear that there’s a pubic hair on a Coke can—if that’s the worst thing that happened in six years, and she couldn’t have handled that outside of a Senate Supreme Court hearing, I saw that something was wrong here.  That was my first epiphany.  I didn’t understand how the NAACP could sit back as these white, privileged men like Ted Kennedy—Ted Kennedy, the Ted Kennedy!—sat in judgment of another man as relates to his behavior around women.  It just outraged me.  But I didn’t know what I was seeing.

It was a moment, and that moment needed perspective so that I could start putting the pieces together, figure out what was wrong here.  I didn’t have to wait very long, because, within a year, the same group of people who said that Clarence Thomas was bad and Anita Hill was good anointed Bill Clinton to be the standard-bearer of the Left and of the women’s movement, and of the National Organization for Women.  The juxtaposition could not have been greater: That the ends justified the means in destroying Clarence Thomas because he had that position, an anti-abortion position, so they were willing to destroy him personally, using Saul Alinsky tactics, yet they were willing to use the same collective power of the media and liberal interest groups and the Democratic Party to help anoint and uplift a man for whom sexual harassment was a daily part of his diet.