Senator Kirsten Gillibrand pronounced, “By refusing to treat her allegations properly”—her otherworldly description of an invitation to Ford to testify in an open or closed setting—“and by playing games to protect Kavanaugh’s nomination, they’re telling women across the country that they’re not to be believed. That they are worth less than a man’s promotion.”

No, that’s not what they’re telling women, or anyone else. The message is that they will try to find the truth before crediting an accusation. This once was a tenet of liberalism, back in the day when it celebrated the Arthur Miller play The Crucible and supported the old-school ACLU. Now, “liberal” means something different—braying for collective justice, regardless of the evidence, to right historic wrongs.

The ABC News commentator Matthew Dowd opined, “If this is ‘he said, she said,’ then let’s believe that ‘she’ in these scenarios. She has nothing to gain, and everything to lose. For 250 years we have believed the ‘he’ in these scenarios. Enough is enough.”

Putting aside the tendentious history, this is a call for people to subordinate their reason and their moral discernment to a social and political agenda.