Attacks on due process are coming from both sides of the political spectrum: Jonathan Kay

Many of the growing threats to classic liberalism are closely associated with one side or another of the political spectrum. The culture war over free speech, trade, immigration and religious expression often is shrill and unedifying. But at least the two warring camps act as checks and balances against one another.  

But in the case of due process, the assault on classic liberalism is coming from both sides. That's worrying, because once you deprive accused individuals of the presumption of innocence, of fair notice of the claims made against them and of the right to present evidence in their own defence, then every one of us becomes vulnerable to mob justice.

First consider a recent American story, which didn't get much ink in Canada, but generated something approaching mass hysteria in the United States.  

An assault in Rockville

In March, a 14-year-old girl from Rockville, Md., told police that she'd been raped and sodomized by two of her classmates: 18-year-old Henry Sanchez Milian and 17-year-old Jose Montano.

The allegations were out of a nightmare: the accused had pushed the ninth-grade girl into a bathroom and taken turns assaulting her while she screamed for help.  

Another detail made the case even more sensational: the accused rapists were undocumented immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador. In the lurid accounts circulated on FOX News, the reporters were careful to note that the alleged attackers "spoke to each other in Spanish" as they deflowered the girl. The whole scenario was like a racist Donald Trump rant come to life.

There had been no trial, let alone a guilty verdict. But conservative pundits were only too happy to "believe the victim."

Tucker Carlson of FOX News ran with the story on a daily basis at one point. And "rape" became his favourite syllable. "We only knew that [the accused] were violent criminals after they had raped a ninth-grader," he declared in one episode. "Wouldn't it have been better to get him out of that school and out of this country before he raped this girl?" Then a few minutes later: "The Rockville rape atrocity may have been a rude awakening."

Except there was no "rape atrocity." The sex-assault charges fell apart after police discovered video footage and text messages suggesting the whole episode was consensual.

Yet no one at FOX ever apologized. Nor did anyone at the White House, despite the fact then-press secretary Sean Spicer had cited the case as "shocking, disturbing, horrific," and "another example" of why "President [Trump] has made illegal immigration and crackdown such a big deal." To this day, many American conservatives still seem to be in denial over the case. When NPR invited Ann Coulter to comment on the case following the charges being dropped, she still insisted that "a girl has been raped."

It isn't just that Coulter and Carlson are cynically peddling "fake news." It goes deeper than that. To a certain kind of mindset, it doesn't even matter if Montano and Milian actually raped anyone. The two teenagers act as moral stand-ins for all the other marauding illegals who, to their mind, are metaphorically raping the whole country.

That's how it always works when people cast aside due process. The identity of the accused as a human being is minimized. Instead, he is presented as representative specimen of some despised class of individuals, with the prosecution presented as a righteous struggle to roll back the forces of evil.

In Canada, we've seen glimmers of this recently, but from the other side of the political spectrum. On July 26, posts on the Twitter account of Ontario Liberal MPP Nathalie Des Rosiers decried the "murder" of Abdirahman Abdi by a "careless" Ottawa police officer.

The death of Abdi, a 37-year-old Somali-Canadian man who died as he was being taken into custody, was indeed a tragedy. But the trial of the officer accused of homicide hasn't even begun.

Des Rosiers later claimed that the tweets were made by a staffer (whom she refuses to name), and did not reflect her views. She eventually deleted them and apologized.

But it is notable than on the morning of July 27, even after numerous journalists and police officials had called Des Rosiers out, she was still doing verbal contortions, trying to contextualize the "murder" claim without either apologizing, deleting her offending tweets, or retracting the content. Amazingly, Des Rosiers is a former law school dean and Canadian Civil Liberties Association general counsel.

If Des Rosiers originally thought she could simply ride out the controversy, it's easy to understand why. For many activists on the left, the word "police" serves the same moral signalling function that "illegal immigrant" performs for American conservatives: it's a byword for evil.

Until recently, there has been a firewall between the casual libelling of all police officers as inveterate sadists that you see on Twitter, and the more grounded discussion about policing that takes place on the level of real-world politics. What happened on Des Rosiers' Twitter account makes me worry that this barrier is beginning to break down.   

Steven Galloway case

Then there are the attacks on Canadian writer Steven Galloway, who was summarily fired from his leadership post at the University of British Columbia creative program following lurid — but completely unsubstantiated — accusations of sexual assault.

When a slew of Canadian writers came forward to protest the rather obvious due-process shortcomings in UBC's treatment of Galloway, they were denounced by a legion of their (mostly) younger peers, who complained that insisting on due process in this context was somehow tantamount to an attack on rape victims and a denial of "the realities of rape culture."

In a sign of the times, several of the authors who'd expressed support for due process then renounced their original positions, sometimes, as in the case of novelist Camilla Gibb, in tones that evoked ageing Soviet revolutionaries confessing their thoughtcrimes to younger, more radical party apparatchiks: "I am guilty of showing my age…I am so sorry, heartbroken for the pain this has caused. I am also guilty of being insecure and susceptible to flattery and the desire for inclusion."

The attacks on Galloway read very much like a sort of bizzaro-world inversion of Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter's social panic over the non-rape in Rockville. In both cases, the mob has identified what they believe to be the locus of evil in our society — illegal aliens and unchecked masculinity, respectively — and is perfectly happy to run roughshod over the due-process rights of individuals in furtherance of their cause. In the witch hunt that ensues, the names of the accusers remain anonymous, while the accused have their reputations destroyed.

What's most worrying is that this messaging is coming from the top. Perhaps it's no surprise that the Trump White House would be so ignorant of the due process rights of anyone with a Hispanic last name. But our own prime minister also seemed perfectly willing to name, shame and excommunicate two Liberals accused of sexual predation against a pair of NDP MPs — based on their accusations, and then a post-facto report that the public isn't allowed to see.

This de facto unity of cause between the populist right and the intellectual left should be appalling to everyone, no matter what your politics. Every reasonable person wants to keep society safe from sexual predators (no matter what their immigration status). But ultimately, due process is the only thing that stands between individuals and the mob fired up by social panic — no matter whether that mob is coming for your freedom, your citizenship or your livelihood.

This column is part of CBC's Opinion section. For more information about this section, please read this editor's blog and our FAQ.