is Dr. Christine Ford in fact a liar?

I've been hesitant to call Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who testified against Brett Kavanaugh during his judicial-confirmation hearing, a liar. I've wanted to say that she had probably gone through some sort of trauma related to an actual incident of sexual harassment that occurred over thirty-five years ago, and that still affects her to this day. But because Dr. Ford never presented any substantive evidence, e.g., corroborating witnesses, I've found myself unable to believe that her claims against Judge Kavanaugh had/have any substance. Others around me, however, very early on took the major step of outright accusing Dr. Ford of perjury. I've been reluctant to join that chorus.

Then I rewatched, a few days ago, a TED Talk (TEDGlobal) video from 2011 with Pamela Meyer as the speaker. Meyer is the author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception. In the TED video, she goes over several "tells" common to most liars, and I was blown away—yet again—by what she said.

Here's a link to the video if you want to watch her TED Talk.

Some of the key points Meyer makes (her words in blue):

1. "Truth number one about lying: lying's a cooperative act."

Those of us who are lied to consciously or unconsciously abet the ones lying to us. There's something of a folie à deux dimension to lying: just as we're taken in by magic, we naturally want to believe the liar.

2. "Lying is an attempt to... connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like."

Lying thus preys upon human moral weakness.

3. "We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture; it's part of our history."

On the TV show "House," the line "Everybody lies" became a running joke.

4. [After showing a video clip of Bill Clinton denying having sex with Monica Lewinsky:] "Well, first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: 'that woman.' We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool."

In the Clinton clip, Clinton says, "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." He didn't say "didn't"—he said "did not." That's the "non-contract" part of "non-contracted denial." As for "distancing language": there were moments in Ford's testimony when she actively avoided saying Brett Kavanaugh's name. There's one red flag.

5. "With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit because we think liars fidget all the time. Well, guess what: they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well, guess what: they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained lie-spotter can spot a fake smile a mile away."

There was plenty of fake smiling from Dr. Ford, but there are other reasons for it, as we'll discuss below.

6. "An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, 'Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks.' They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview."

What Meyer says here applies to both Dr. Ford and to Judge Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh was indeed infuriated to be wrongly accused; Ford, meanwhile, was unforthcoming with things like her therapist's records. She was, overall, vague and decidedly uncooperative, despite the appallingly cutesy performance she gave with her "baby voice" (see this wonderful article for that reference) to try to sound innocent and defenseless. Ford was initially unwilling even to testify, and when she did decide to testify, she and her handlers slapped conditions on both how her testimony would be put forth and how she would be questioned. None of this bespeaks cooperativeness.

7. "Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places."

Does this not sound exactly like the performance we got from Dr. Ford? We heard all manner of details in irrelevant places, but none of the important details that would have actually mattered, e.g., exact month, exact house, exact method of transport to and from the party, reasons for leaving the party without begging her best friend to come along and get away from those rape-y guys, etc. And yet somehow the event was "seared" into Dr. Ford's memory. The attempted rape gets a hell of a lot of detail, but a fair-minded person has to acknowledge that the entire story could have been made up, especially since no other concrete evidence was ever presented throughout the entire hearing. And God knows women are good at shedding crocodile tears. I saw plenty of that as a high-school teacher.

8. "We all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say 'yes' [while] we shake our heads 'no.' We tell very convincing stories; we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now, that smile is known in the trade as duping delight."

This is key. And this is the kicker for me. Read on:

"But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers—one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like. This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video."

If you watch the TED video, you'll see the creepy video clip of Diane Downs, the mother who shot her kids, killing one and injuring two others. Meyer pauses the clip at the creepiest moment: the moment when Downs, having just affected a dead-eyed, neutral expression for several seconds, suddenly breaks into a malefic, hooded smile. This, according to Meyer, is the duping delight she talked about: the interviewee is taking pleasure in both having literally gotten away with murder and in having gotten away with lying on camera.

Now think back to Dr. Ford's testimony. For a woman supposedly traumatized by an event from three-and-a-half decades before, she seems awfully cheerful, doesn't she?

Rewatching this TED video, and arriving at the section about duping delight, I found myself thinking over Christine Blasey Ford's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee and concluding that the woman is an outright liar. I'm no longer even sure she had, in fact, suffered some sort of trauma all those years ago. Here's what the above-linked American Thinker article has to say on the topic:

Most of us are relatively naïve, ready to believe what our news outlets put forth. We have open minds and were ready and willing to listen to Ford's testimony and consider for ourselves if it was believable. It was not. Her testimony was obviously scripted, practiced, massaged, and fabricated out of whole cloth.

Ford may have seemed like a victim, not of Kavanaugh, but perhaps of her Democrat operatives. Over the past days, however, what is nearer to the truth is that she was and is part of a faction of anti-Trump activists bent upon destroying Kavanaugh in order to deny Trump another nominee to the Supreme Court.

[...]

At first, those of us paying attention were anxious to hear Ford's story. The bits of news that preceded her appearance before the Judiciary Committee were titillating. Was it possible that this man, Brett Kavanaugh, with a thirty-years-plus record of impeccable judicial service to his country, had a dark side? Then we heard Blasey Ford "testify." How anyone who listened to her practiced, phony childish act could believe that this was not calculated is a mystery. She was obviously scripted, coached, and performing.

[...]

Given the numerous falsehoods of the FBI and DOJ we now are aware of–the "two front doors" lie, the fear of flying lie, the claustrophobia lie, her polygraph lies–what seems credible now is that this was a manufactured, orchestrated setup at the outset. They used Mark Judge's book as a template and contrived a tall tale.

[...]

Schooled, allegedly, in psychology, hypnosis, and all the attending versions of mind manipulation, Ford probably felt confident she could pull off the charade; she would use her baby voice to appear fragile and vulnerable. But she did not pull it off. There is a mighty chorus of Americans who pay attention to these issues and events. They were not fooled.

The "narrative" of her alleged groping was vague enough to provoke doubt but wholly without corroboration. That the persons involved in this farce thought she would be convincing without a shred of evidence is comical. They really do think all of us outside their bubble of leftist groupthink are imbeciles. They actually thought we would all fall for Ford's absurd performance. Sure, the dupes on the left loved every moment of it. They don't need evidence or witnesses. They believe survivors. Survivors of what? Nothing.

Ford now looks like a liar and a fraud. There is most likely a real journalist out there right now who will dig deep and write the book about this travesty a few radical leftists perpetrated on all of us. It was all a lie.

I've come around to this point of view. Dr. Ford should, if anything, be arrested, charged with, and punished for perjury. She should be the subject of a very thorough investigation into both her own conduct and the conduct of the people closely associated with her, from her lawyers to Dianne Feinstein. She has dishonored those women who actually, provably have suffered the trauma of rape and sexual assault, and by engaging in this theater so publicly, she has made it exponentially more difficult for real female victims to make their voices heard without immediately being suspected of lying. But Ford won't face justice; not in this life.