Stella Morabito uses a Federalist column to place the Roy Moore controversy in a larger context.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The Roy Moore case is not really about Roy Moore. At root, it was never really about whether he sexually harassed anybody 40 years ago. Ultimately, it isn’t even about the Senate seat that hangs in the balance. All of those are means to a much larger end.
The real story today is that emotional feeding frenzies in public discourse put us on a path that leads—unless something dramatic changes—to the end of due process. Due process and the rule of law are concepts fast becoming meaningless to Americans hypnotized by media.
As the mainstream media has told it for decades: there should be a presumption of guilt based on any accusation of sexual misconduct, whether a Moore character running for Senate or a hapless college kid accused of rape or anybody else. Oh, and the media has the prerogative of controlling the narrative, picking and choosing who’s guilty.
Has that changed? To be sure, many of the media’s heretofore immune darlings—folks like Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, and Charlie Rose—are now being hoisted on their own petards with multiple women coming forward to claim sexual abuse and harassment. Will we see a return to the ideal of due process as a result? I wouldn’t count on it. …
… Whatever today’s circus means, it should serve as an object lesson that due process first dies in the public square. It’s only going to get worse unless people learn to focus more on the causes of our lethal disease (e.g., political correctness, agitprop, power-mongering, the practice of ritual defamation, etc.) than on the symptoms of certain media- and politico-selected diseased people.