This goes very deep - all the way to epistemology. By far the most helpful article I've ever read on this is actually by the atheist Peter Boghossian:
Welcome to Culture War 2.0.
A lot of comments on this thread are pointing out the inconsistency between Kavanaugh's treatment and Biden's treatment. Yep. Highly inconsistent. However, the far left
doesn't care about consistency the same way Christians do. It's not in the least about logic.
Here's the Christian definition of truth. Truth is the set of all archetypes in the mind of God. So God defines truth; it is his character, since God is simple (meaning, without parts). A statement or proposition is true if it is one of those archetypes, and false if it is not. Because God is utterly consistent and logical in every way, true statements will always reflect the reality that he created; the correspondence theory of truth, that true statements are those which correspond to reality, is consistent with the definition above, but I prefer a revelation-based definition of truth. Correspondence then becomes a consequence. Also, I find the archetype definition less circular.
But the far left has abandoned even the correspondence theory of truth. For the far left, truth is dependent on how many oppressed groups to which you belong. I, of course, as a heterosexual white Christian male, partake of precisely 0 oppressed groups - all oppressor groups - and so, from the perspective of the far left,
I am not allowed to know any truth. This is why shutting down people like me is not only considered just fine, it's even considered virtuous. Why not, if I can't have anything to say?
But you can see one problem here: the oppressor/oppressed definition of truth shuts down the conversation from the get-go. It allows the far left to insulate themselves from ideas with which they disagree, whereas the archetype definition strongly encourages seeking out the truth, and exposing oneself to ideas with which you disagree. It's very difficult, if not a complete waste of time, to talk with anyone from the far left on anything less fundamental than epistemology. You have to destroy this dangerous epistemology of theirs before you can get anywhere on something less fundamental (but obviously still important) like abortion, COVID, Kavanaugh vs Biden, Trump, etc. One thing you can say: the far left approach is going to produce a see-saw effect: the oppressor/oppressed groups will merely oscillate over time - surely an argument from the Christian perspective as to why this epistemology is flat-out wrong: God doesn't change, so truth doesn't change. You can already see that Christians are going to be oppressed under these ideas; at what point does being a Christian get to be an oppressed group?
And here's another problem relating to this thread: the oppressor/oppressed definition of truth doesn't care 3 straws for consistency, as in logical consistency. In a twisted sort of way, the Biden vs Kavanaugh treatments are consistent according to the far left: Kavanaugh is considered to be of the oppressor groups since he does not hold to the far left ideals, so he must be wrong. Biden, even though he technically partakes of many oppressor groups, he identifies much more in the minds of the far left with oppressed groups; and so he must be believed. You see how it works?
Finally, you might ask yourself: where did all this come from? Well, for a long time, I thought Marx was the origin, as in: Marx -> Communism -> Postmodernism -> Critical Theory -> Intersectionality. However, Oz Guinness, at the latest L'Abri conference here in Rochester, put me onto a development further back that we should not count out: the French Revolution. Really, it is the Jacobins that started this line of thinking, along with Rousseau. As Oz Guinness said, there are five revolutions that have largely defined the modern world: the British (Cromwell), French, American, Russian (1917), and Chinese (1948 - 1952). Of those, the British and American were much more biblical in outlook, while the French, Russian, and Chinese were utterly godless and evil. There are the origins of these ideas: I strongly recommend that you study these ideas in order to understand better where they originated!
