Sunday reflection: When the argument can’t be answered, the person gets targeted

This week, a familiar pattern played out online. Instead of engaging with procedural questions, fairness, evidence, disclosure, and cross examination, attention shifted to personal attack.

On TikTok in particular, the trend has been to target Marsha from JIMS, not the principles she’s raising. That shift matters. It signals a mentality where the debate is no longer about truth, but about tribe.

Once a topic becomes tribal, certain statements become unsayable, regardless of whether they’re true. Some men are falsely accused. Not most. Not none. Some.

A society that claims to believe in justice should be able to say that without hysteria. The presumption of innocence is not a courtesy. It is the foundation of legitimacy. If we can’t acknowledge the existence of wrongful accusation, we quietly accept that innocence is secondary to narrative.

There’s another layer here, too. Marsha has been clear that she’s not speaking in abstractions. She’s fighting for a man close to her, and she maintains that the allegation against him is false. She has also said that some of the people now driving the pile-on are connected to that same situation. From her perspective, this isn’t content. It’s an attempt to drown out an inconvenient claim before it can be properly tested.

That is the deeper problem with the current online climate. If an allegation is true, it can survive scrutiny. If it’s false, scrutiny is exactly what protects the innocent. Either way, the answer to a claim is not a mob. It’s evidence. And the answer to disagreement is not character assassination. It’s argument. We should be able to hold two truths at once:

• Real victims deserve support and dignity.
• The accused deserve a fair process and a meaningful chance to challenge what’s said.

If we can’t hold both, we don’t have justice. We have a moral hierarchy where some people are protected from questions, and others are denied the right to defend themselves.

A final thought for Sunday. A culture that treats testing evidence as hostility will always drift towards injustice. Not because it hates justice in theory, but because it values certainty, status, and social punishment more than proof.

That isn’t progress. It’s regression, with better branding.