One of many cringe-making moments in Christine Blasey Ford’s protracted complaint before the Senate Judiciary Committee—and the country—was an affectation-dripping reference to her hippocampus.

“Indelible in the hippocampus” was the memory of supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her, some 36 years back, asserted Ford in that scratchy, valley-girl voice of hers.

With that, the good “doctor” was making a false appeal to scientific authority. Ford had just planted a falsity in the nation’s collective consciousness. The accuser was demanding that the country believe her and her hippocampus.

All nonsense on stilts.

We want to believe that our minds record the events of our lives meticulously, and that buried in the permafrost of our brain, perfectly preserved, is the key to our woes.

Unfortunately, scientific research negates the notion that forgotten memories exist somewhere in the brain and can be accessed in pristine form.

Granted, we don’t know whether She Who Must Never Be Questioned recovered the Judge-Kavanaugh memory in therapy. That’s because, well, she must never be questioned.

Questioning the left’s latest sacred cow is forbidden. Bovine Republicans blindly obey.

I happened to have covered and thoroughly researched the “recovered memory ruse,” in 1999. Bucking the trend, one of my own heroes is not Christine Blah-Blah Ford, but a leading world authority on memory, Elizabeth Loftus.

Professor Loftus, who straddles two professorships—one in law, the other in psychology—had come to Vancouver, British Columbia, to testify on behalf of a dedicated Richmond educator, a good man, who had endured three trials, the loss of a career and financial ruin because of the Crown’s attempts to convict him of sexual assault based on memories recovered in therapy.

I attended. I was awed.

Over decades of research, Loftus has planted many a false memory in the minds of her research subjects, sometimes with the aid of nothing more than a conversation peppered with some suggestions.

“A tone of voice, a phrasing of a question, subtle non-verbal signals, and expressions of boredom, impatience or fascination”—these are often all it takes to plant suggestions in the malleable human mind.

Loftus does not question the prevalence of the sexual abuse of children or the existence of traumatic memories. What she questions are memories commonly referred to as repressed: “Memories that did not exist until someone went looking for them.”

Suffice it to say, that the memory recovery process is a therapeutic confidence trick that has wreaked havoc in thousands of lives.

Moreover, repression, the sagging concept that props up the recovered memory theory, is without any cogent scientific support. The 30-odd studies the recovery movement uses as proof for repression do not make the grade. These studies are retrospective memory studies which rely on self-reports with no independent, factual corroboration of information.

Sound familiar? Dr. Ford (and her hippocampus), anyone?

Even in the absence of outside influence, memory deteriorates rapidly. “As time goes by,” writes Loftus in her seminal book, “The Myth of Repressed Memories,” “the weakened memories are increasingly vulnerable to post-event information.”

What we see on TV, read and hear about events is incorporated into memory to create an unreliable amalgam of fact and fiction.

After an extensive investigation, the British Royal College of Psychiatrists issued a ban prohibiting its members from using any method to recover memories of child abuse. Memory retrieval techniques, say the British guidelines, are dangerous methods of persuasion.

“Recovered memories,” inveighed Alan Gold, then president of the Canadian Criminal Lawyers Association, “are joining electroshock, lobotomies and other psychiatric malpractice in the historical dustbin.”

Not that you’d know it from the current climate of sexual hysteria, but the courts in the U.S. had responded as well by ruling to suppress the admission of all evidence remembered under therapy.

Altogether it seems as clear in 2018, as it was in 1999: Memories that have been excavated during therapy have no place in a court of law. Or, for that matter, in a Senate Committee that shapes the very same justice system.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
Townhall.com, Constitution.com, American Greatness
& Reckonin‘
October 4

The post Christine Blah-Blah Ford & Her Hippocampus appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

By the time this column goes to press, Christine Blah-Blah Ford would’ve appeared before the coven once considered the greatest deliberative body in the world: The United States Senate.

At the time of writing, however—on the eve of a hearing conducted by the Senate Judiciary Committee to ascertain the veracity of Blasey Ford’s sexual assault claim against Judge Brett Kavanaugh—I hazard that voter distrust in the Republicans will prove justified.

True to type, Republicans will deliver a disaster to their supporters—to those banking on the confirmation of another conservative to the Supreme Court bench.

To question the two adversaries, the psychology professor versus the Supreme Court nominee, the Republicans chose an unknown, unremarkable quantity—a Phoenix-based prosecutor named Rachel Mitchell. Mitchell heads the Special Victims Division of Maricopa County, which consists of “sex-crimes and family-violence bureaus.”

This slipshod selection seemed forensically tailored to Judge Kavanaugh’s alleged crime. It almost suggested Republicans believe such a crime had occurred. Or, worse: These slithering opportunistic reptiles (with apologies to the reptile community) must feel politically compelled to conduct themselves as if Kavanaugh were indeed culpable.

Days before the hearing, this writer had warned that the Republicans did not have the male bits to defend Kavanaugh themselves: “With their choice of sex-crimes prosecutor Mitchell to quiz Brett Kavanaugh and his nemesis, what are Republicans saying? That they think a sex crime occurred?”

A better choice would have been Olivia Benson, leading lady on TV’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” Actress Mariska Hargitay would’ve put on a better show than Mitchell and consulted with sharper legal minds for her script. Hargitay is a liberal, but she’s a pro.

Mitchell, a humdrum, minor state functionary, was unlikely to effect a cross examination for the ages—which is what was required if Brett Kavanaugh was to have a fair shake.

For his part, Kavanaugh is oddly obtuse for one who is said to be such a great jurist. Meek, mild and emotional, he does not seem up to the task of defending himself.

Had the Republicans, also the laggards who dominate the Judiciary Committee, chosen to meaningfully fight for their candidate; they might have opted for one of two dazzling legal scholars. (Please, gentle reader, do not, in the same breath, mention TV judge Andrew Napolitano. Napolitano is a left-libertarian mediocrity who, predictably, has taken the Left’s position on the violence-against-women sub-science.)

Jonathan Turley, for one. Now there’s a fine choice for the cross examination that never was.

Another is Alan Dershowitz. A civil libertarian, Dershowitz is now emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, having taught there for 50 years.

Both Turley and Dershowitz are liberal. Both are brilliant. Both would have probably done the cross pro bono.

A fixture on television, Turley, professor at George Washington University professor, had suggested politely that Kavanaugh was not an intellect of Neil Gorsuch’s order.

As exemplars of the “big fierce minds” Americans are unlikely to see on the Court, Turley has cited Richard Posner and Robert Bork, while candidly pointing out that Kavanaugh was not of the same caliber.

As a rule, “Supreme Court nominees … are not especially remarkable in their prior rulings or writings,” wrote Turley. “They are selected largely for their ease of confirmation and other political criteria. Big fierce minds take too much time and energy to confirm, so White House teams look for jurists who ideally have never had an interesting thought or written an interesting thing.”

Consider: Republicans can’t even get a middle-of-the-road mind like Kavanaugh confirmed!

As far as unremarkable goes: Accuser Blasey Ford has certainly distinguished herself in this department.

Other than that she writes as poorly as is expected from an American university professor, and that she speaks like a valley girl (but, alas, doesn’t look like one)— Ford is unremarkable.

But then bad people are often banal.

Since the Senate extravaganza featuring the judge and his accuser were not criminal in nature, Democrats and their pussy-hat harridans have made the case that judge Kavanaugh was not entitled to due process of the law—to be presumed innocent, to be informed of the charges against him, to confront witnesses against him, and enjoy legal representation.

“Look, we’re not in a court of law,” shrieked that monster of a woman, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii.

Likewise, to justify their philosophical contempt for American constitutional legal protections, hordes of TV harpies, all baying for Judge Kavanaugh’s blood, relied on the same sub-par “reasoning”:

They were not seeking to convict—the offensive against Kavanaugh was not criminal in nature—therefore, claimed the conga-line of cretins presiding over the lynching, they have the right to sully the man in every way possible.

Not that one expects argument from asses, but there is more than a procedural difference or two at stake here.

Just law, as instantiated in the Bill or Rights, constitutes a declaration of the values shared in a society. We afford a man the presumption of innocence partly because the law instructs us to so do, but mainly because it is the right thing to do.

Underpinning the legal protections afforded to an accused in our adversarial legal system are vital ethical imperatives in which our society is meant to share.

In her initial list of demands “to be heard” (that cliché coming from a cadre of women that never shuts up), Ford evinced utter contempt for Kavanaugh’s natural, Sixth-Amendment confrontation rights.

Blasey Ford had initially demanded of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that “Brett Kavanaugh be questioned first, before he has the opportunity to hear [her] testimony.”

Among other rights, Sixth Amendment constitutional protections afford defendants the right to confront their accusers and the accusations against them.

Like the sizeable mob that supports her—Blasey Ford doesn’t share a fidelity to and a respect for due process of law.

That many Americans no longer believe all are entitled to equality under the law reveals a great deal about the fault lines that mar and scar our country.

©2018 ILANA MERCER
WND.com, The Unz Review, Quarterly Review,
Constitution.com & Reckonin‘
September 27

The post GOP Betrayal: The Cross Examination That Never Was appeared first on ILANA MERCER.