The Further Vindication of the Duke Lacrosse Players

National Review Online

Tuesday, December 17, 2024

 

Slowly and quite reluctantly, Democratic political operatives are coming around to the notion that the misfortune that befell their party on November 5 is attributable to the excesses of identity politics in the age of “wokeness.” But it shouldn’t have taken an electoral shellacking to see the injustice encouraged by a movement that strips individuals of their agency and treats them as abstract avatars of a particular tribe. Indeed, Democrats could have learned that lesson nearly two decades ago.

 

In 2006, Duke University men’s lacrosse team members hired Crystal Mangum, an erotic dancer, to entertain a private party. Mangum later claimed that she was raped by several attendees, including university students. The allegation proved a sensation. It captured the attention of the national press and the political class alike, the members of which appeared to take Mangum’s accusations at face value.

 

The students were portrayed in the press as “privileged, racist brutes prone to binge drinking,” according to the Washington Post, who were as titillated by Mangum’s performance as they were by the opportunity to degrade a young black woman. “The history of white men and black women — the special fantasies and realities of exploitation — goes back to the nation’s beginning and the arrival of slaves from Africa,” Jesse Jackson wrote at the time. Duke president Richard Brodhead suspended the team even without any formal charges against its members. Local prosecutor Mike Nifong eventually charged some of the Duke lacrosse players, but the prosecution soon fell apart.

 

A forensic analysis of Mangum’s body and the scene of the alleged crime did not substantiate the accuser’s claims, and the discovery that Nifong had withheld exculpatory evidence (he would later resign and be disbarred) sealed the case’s fate. “Based on the significant inconsistencies between the evidence and the various accounts given by the accusing witness,” said then-attorney general and current North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, “we believe these three individuals are innocent of these charges.” Sixteen months after the infamous party, Duke University agreed to settle a dispute with the players it had disparaged.

 

That should have been the end of this saga. But rather than admit that their worldview had misled them so, those who are partial to a collectivist theory of justice insisted that the Duke lacrosse players took advantage of the inequities inherent to the American justice system. Those intrepid few who still clung to the belief that American perfidy shielded Duke’s players from true justice just had the rug pulled out from under them by Mangum herself.

 

“I testified falsely against them by saying that they raped me when they didn’t, and that was wrong,” Mangum recently confessed during an interview from the correctional facility where she’s serving a maximum 17-year sentence for the 2011 murder of her boyfriend. Mangum said she “made up a story that wasn’t true” in the pursuit of “validation” from those around her. “I want them to know that I love them, and they didn’t deserve that,” she said of those she falsely accused. “I hope that they can forgive me.”

 

Mangum led a troubled life prior to and after the lie that made her a celebrity. We can only hope her pursuit of penance is sincere. But the tragedy she engineered would not have been possible in the absence of the incentives for “validation” at large in the culture that Mangum correctly identified. She was a beneficiary of what Hillary Clinton later described as an article of faith among social justice activists. “I want to send a message to every survivor of sexual assault,” she wrote in 2015. “You have the right to be believed.” It was the perfect distillation of the conflict between social justice and actual justice — between a philosophy that believes virtue is conferred by the accidents of one’s birth and an outlook that ascribes responsibility for individual acts to the individual.

 

Mangum wasn’t the only fraudster who preyed on the Left’s uncharitable assumptions about young white men, in particular, but non-minorities broadly. Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely followed a similar path when she penned a (literally) unbelievable tale of gang rape as an initiation ceremony at a University of Virginia fraternity in 2014. The same assumptions were on display during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, in which a shockingly large number of credentialed and productive members of American society exposed the depths of their prejudice toward those who shared the justice’s demographic traits. “A lot of white men don’t know what it’s like to feel threatened, powerless, and frustrated,” said Hillary Clinton’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri, at the time. But there was no compassion in this observation. “As we go through the reckoning of this lopsided power balance,” she warned, “there’s going to be a lot more of this.”

 

Indeed, there have been too many examples of this kind of injustice. It was a product of unquestioned fealty to the notion that white men, in particular, were due a karmic reckoning. “If there’s ten people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all ten people,” said Jared Polis, currently the governor of Colorado, turning Sir William Blackstone’s ratio on its head. “I’ve seen this go down, and there really is no winning once the accusation is made,” he added. “Someone who is wrongfully accused needs to do their best to put it behind them and move on.”

 

Polis has a point there, sordid though it may be. The young men Mangum accused will never get back what her unfounded accusations and a credulous media landscape took from them. Their reputations were besmirched. The faces of the falsely accused were printed on “wanted” posters that were distributed broadly on Duke’s campus. Some found it difficult to secure and retain employment. One Duke lacrosse player felt compelled to change his name.

 

For true believers in the cult of social justice, even Mangum’s confession will not disabuse them of their belief that those who are born into the wrong identities are the illegitimate beneficiaries of generational theft. Fortunately, the American justice system is blind to emotional blackmail and ideologically motivated reasoning. May it ever be thus.

A Thing I Got Wrong

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, March 19, 2020

One of the things I have gotten wrong over the past few years, an error I have come to regret, is my criticism of the California teachers’ union and the state education authorities in the matter of teachers charged with sexual misconduct involving students. The unions insist on maintaining a procedure that makes it very difficult to terminate a teacher accused of a crime but not yet convicted of it. Teachers are, in fact, routinely kept on paid leave during criminal proceedings.

California’s public schools have seen a shocking amount of sexual abuse and misconduct by teachers. In one four-year period, some 600 teachers in the L.A. Unified School District alone were fired, resigned, or were facing sanctions because of “inappropriate conduct” with students. In response to one grotesque episode of abuse, the state took up the issue. As I wrote:

In 2012, the Assembly considered a bill making it easier to fire teachers who sexually abuse students. Consider for a second that word “easier” — should anything be easier than simply firing somebody who molests children? The bill was written in response to the case of a Los Angeles elementary-school teacher who was fired after being accused of sexually abusing his students, and who challenged his firing. Rather than act in accord with the horrifying details of the case, the school district paid the teacher $40,000 to drop his appeal. That’s small change compared with the $30 million settlement the district is paying to the teacher’s alleged victims as a result of the case, or, for that matter, compared with the $23 million bail requirement that is keeping teacher Mark Berndt behind bars as he awaits trial on 23 felony counts of gruesome sexual abuse. Against that background, making it easier to fire teachers facing credible accusations of sexual abuse seems like a pretty straightforward proposition.

I am, in retrospect, embarrassed to see those words — “credible accusations” — in my column. The California Teachers Association at the time stated that the proposed law “eliminated essential legal protections for teachers and that it believes the current system is an appropriate process.” The CTA had it right, and I had it wrong.

This old column came to mind while I was reading Sarah Viren’s horrifying essay in the New York Times about the smear campaign her family endured after cooked-up sexual-harassment allegations against her wife, a fellow academic. The essay should be read in its entirety, but the short version is this: When Viren was up for a plum academic posting at the University of Michigan, a man also in contention for the job — a man she knew — began filing anonymous sexual-harassment complaints against Viren’s wife, knowing that Viren would not be able to accept the job unless her wife could find a position at the university, too.

The accusations grew more lurid and outrageous, and — as in the UVA–Rolling Stone episode, Lena Dunham’s rape fabrications, and many of the accusations leveled against Brett Kavanaugh — many of the specifics were obviously false, but they still fell within the university’s elastic definition of “credible accusations.” And the university’s Title IX office could not close the investigation as long as fresh credible accusations were coming in, which they did until Viren spent thousands of dollars hiring lawyers and subpoenaing email records to get to the truth. (Note to fraud artists: When setting up a phony email account, do not use your own telephone number for verification.) In the end, Michigan declined to offer Viren’s wife a position, and Viren was forced to abandon the offer they made to her. Viren does not make this accusation in her New York Times piece, but it is all too easy to imagine risk-averse (and cowardly) university administrators taking a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” attitude toward a candidate.

In Slate, a woman tells her story of being “very brutally raped” (and nearly strangled to death) and taking her case straight to . . . the man’s boss. Not the police. The many variations on this story we have seen over the years do not require cataloguing here.

Mark Berndt, the California teacher, was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. (That’s a pretty good deal for him — he could have been sentenced to 345 years.) He is guilty. Sarah Viren’s wife is innocent. So is Brett Kavanaugh. So were those Duke lacrosse players and those Virginia fraternity members.

There are a few things at work here.

One is that the generations of people raised with the Internet — and especially those of the generation shaped by the norms of social media — have taken for granted that they may lob wild and false accusations against whomever they choose, for whatever reason they wish, without consequence, protected by anonymity. The same culture has produced an ethics tailor-made for precisely the kind of abuse we have seen: Lies are acceptable when they are used to counteract “privilege,” “patriarchy,” “white supremacy,” or any of the other convenient hobgoblins of the time. No doubt the man who made up those accusations in the Viren affair believed himself in the right and utterly entitled to do what he did. (He was, Viren reports, a gay man living unhappily in a conservative town.) That ethics naturally is accompanied by a rhetoric, which is used to disguise what actually is going on in any given interaction: “Credible accusation” means, in many cases, “accusation against somebody I do not like and wish to see hurt”; “hold accountable” means “inflict personal harm on a rival”; “privilege” means “something that makes it harder to hurt this person than I would like for it to be”; “justice” means “slander.”

Another is that the very real institutional failings of police departments and prosecutors interact with a conspiratorial account of culture and institutions (the “woke” worldview is, at heart, a conspiracy theory) in a way that makes some people much more eager to embrace social-media slander as an avenue of “justice” than such old-fashioned methods as filing a police complaint after being “very brutally raped.” This is in turn exacerbated by the fact that the acts for which many people go seeking “justice” are not crimes. As Megan McArdle has very persuasively argued, one of the problems with the libertine-libertarian criterion of “consent” in sexual relations is that it leaves people without a moral language to describe other aspects of sexual encounters that leave them unhappy or feeling hard done-by. That is how sexual encounters that do not have any of the hallmarks of what traditionally has been meant by the word “rape” end up being recast as rape. This is not to say that there are not other forms of sexual misconduct other than forcible rape — precisely the opposite, in fact. But it is difficult to balance that against the ethic of “Anything goes, as long as everybody signs on the dotted line.” And so we lurch from baroque new rules of etiquette to wild promiscuity, from the Marquess of Queensbury to the Marquis de Sade.

Yet another factor, which I describe at some length in The Smallest Minority, is the emergence of employment (and, to a lesser extent, access to educational institutions and public forums) as an instrument of political and social discipline. Justine Sacco (“Has Justine landed?”) is the Patient Zero in that particular epidemic, which now reaches everywhere, from academia to Silicon Valley to journalism to Wall Street to publishing: Woody Allen has seen the publication of his memoirs canceled by Hachette — which is, it bears noting, the publisher of Adolf Hitler. (A Hachette subsidiary brought out a new edition of Mein Kampf in 2017.) My own experience in that arena was a matter of public interest for a few days a couple of years back.

What to do? One thing to do is to acknowledge that California Teachers Association had it right: A criminal conviction is the gold standard when it comes to criminal wrongdoing. Deans of students, human-resources departments, and Caitlyn on Twitter have no business adjudicating rape cases, or any other criminal cases, because they have no competency in the matter. We might further note that while the corruption and criminality of organized labor in the United States is undeniable, it is not the case that labor unions have to be that way: Compare our United Autoworkers to Germany’s IG Metall. An organized countervailing force to balance the power employers hold over the lives of employees presents a host of obvious problems and potential dangers, but we should not ignore the soundness of the underlying principle even as we proceed clear-eyed about the practical realities and our historical experiences with labor unions.

We should also apply a very steep discount to accusations that are made anonymously and to those (again, the Kavanaugh affair, but also the Clarence Thomas affair and others) that surface decades after the facts in question as a purely punitive measure directed against some person who has become prominent. We might also make it easier to recover legal expenses in defamation cases and encourage people to pursue them as a matter of the public interest. These would represent reforms that are admittedly modest, but they may be the best we can do while maintaining an open society with free speech.

There is an extensive body of scholarship on the uses and potential of gossip as an instrument of social discipline. The general idea is that people value their reputations and their standings in their communities, and that gossip can be used as a sanction for transgressions that either do not rise to the level of criminal or civil action or are more effectively addressed through informal means. Many libertarian-leaning critics, myself included, have seen and still see great value in that as an alternative to litigating (or criminalizing) every source of social friction in a free, open, dynamic, and diverse society such as ours. But we should recognize that informal sanctions are at least as prone to abuse as formal ones, and give not one inch to the utopian temptation.

And, of course, remind ourselves of the things we have been wrong about when we start to feel like we have it all figured out.

It’s Jussie Smollett Day

By Kyle Smith

Wednesday, January 29, 2020

‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” This sound advice, handed down by generations of crusty newspaper editors with unkempt hair and mustard stains on their ties, used to serve reporters well. At the City News Bureau of Chicago, which for decades steered coverage for area reporters, the legend appeared on a huge sign posted on the wall.

The place closed in 1999. Too bad. A whole generation of reporters has grown up since then, and many of them seem not to understand the difference between journalism and activism. I say this on a kind of anti-holiday for the news media. It’s January 29: one year ago, Jussie Smollett went to the police with a dumb story about MAGA ruffians patrolling the pre-dawn streets of Chicago wielding nooses in case there were any gay black television actors on the streets after midnight on a frigid night. The New York Times, CNN, ABC News, the Washington Post, CBS News and NBC News all ran false assertions. These statements are in most cases still uncorrected on the respective Web sites.

CNN: “‘Empire’ star Jussie Smollett attacked in possible hate crime.” False. The underlying story asserts flatly, “‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett was attacked in the early morning hours on Tuesday.” Not true. In type so tiny it could easily be missed, CNN appended, “Editor’s note: Read an update here,” which links to a story three months later describing how Smollett’s version of events fell apart.

Good Morning America: “’Empire’ star Jussie Smollett brutally attacked, hospitalized in possible hate crime.” Hospitalized? Getting treated at a hospital you took yourself to is not the same thing as being admitted to one. False and false. The story remains uncorrected.

The New York Times: “Jussie Smollett, Star of ‘Empire,’ Attacked in What Police Call a Possible Hate Crime.” Wrong. The story remains uncorrected. The underlying article by Sopan Deb says, “Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the Fox television show ‘Empire,’ was attacked in Chicago early Tuesday morning by two people who yelled racial and homophobic slurs and wrapped a rope around his neck, according to the police . . .” But the police could not have known this. They were not present. They were simply relating what Smollett said. Reporters should understand such distinctions.

Police also noted on that first day that Smollett had not initially told them his attackers shouted, “This is MAGA country,” a detail that his camp instead gave to TMZ. When police heard about that, they contacted Smollett again, at which point he passed along that detail. Why would he have left out the seemingly crucial possible motive for this otherwise unexplained assault? “Sources directly connected to Jussie” also told TMZ his assailants “poured bleach on him” but Smollett told police the liquid poured on him was an unknown chemical substance. The same sources told TMZ his attackers were white men, but Smollett told police he could not identify the race of his supposed attackers. Aren’t reporters supposed to be skeptical when the subject of a story tells a more sensational story to the press than he does to police? This story had more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon.

Amusingly, the paper’s own readers had better bushwa detectors than their staff: The first comments beneath the Times’ initial story are full of skepticism. Did the attackers pause in mid-assault to make a noose in frigid weather? Or were they carrying a noose around with them? Why would they do either of those things? Why would they describe Chicago as “MAGA country”? Why didn’t Smollett call 911 right away? Why did he still have the rope around his neck later when he talked to police? All valid questions that occurred to Times readers but not Times editors.

Even more amusingly, the police tried, without being insensitive, to alert reporters to be skeptical right away. Deb and his editors completely missed it: “The police said in a statement that the area where Smollett said the attack occurred had ‘very high density of city and private surveillance cameras.’ Detectives had viewed hundreds of hours of video but ‘unfortunately, thus far we have not found any helpful information on a suspect or a suspect’s vehicle to be able to share.’” Experienced, cynical reporters (the Venn diagram here is a circle, or rather it used to be) read this and say, “Oh, come on.” What the police were delicately indicating is that Smollett had taken them to the spot where the assault supposedly took place and the cops noted that a security camera was right there — pointed the other way. How convenient! The cops must have told each other. Cops, like reporters, learn to be very aware of the human capacity for lying.

Here’s a headline that isn’t false, from the Chicago Tribune: “Chicago Police Investigating Report of Assault on ‘Empire’ Actor Jussie Smollett.” Not so hard, is it? Smollett made a claim. That claim was newsworthy. Relevant facts had yet to emerge. There was no need to state as fact things that had yet to be established. Yet the pile-on of false reports generated national hysteria and anguish. Nobody felt the need to await the whole story because virtually all major news outlets had baldly stated that Smollett had been attacked. Cory Booker tweeted, “The vicious attack on actor Jussie Smollett was an attempted modern-day lynching.” Wrong. Kamala Harris also called it a “modern-day lynching.” President Trump said, “That I can tell you is horrible. It doesn’t get worse.”

The Smollett story showed that a certain kind of reporter thinks he’s in the profession of advancing the progressive cause, which in turn is heavily dependent on stories of American villainy by suspect groups such as fraternity brothers (the U.VA. rape hoax), lacrosse players (the Duke rape hoax), and military youth (the Army-Navy circle-game panic). Instead of having a nose for bushwa, such reporters exhibit blindness for red flags. They urgently want to believe there’s a terrible story where there is only a ridiculous lie. Journalism comes to resemble a deranged performance of Peter Pan in which the professionals in the spotlight urge the audience to clap along with the make-believe. But instead of fairies, they beg the crowd to think that America is an irredeemable land of bigotry, a sexist, homophobic haven of rapists and racists who rampage with impunity through our most enduring institutions and our toniest neighborhoods. A never-ending credulousness with regard to hate crimes leads journalists to join in an assault upon the truth fueled by a loathing of their own culture; even the most prestigious journalistic institutions work to perpetuate hate slime.

Elizabeth Warren Is Jussie Smollett

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Elizabeth Warren has a moving story about being fired from a teaching job because she was pregnant, a story that perfectly complements her political narrative that she is the tribune and champion of those who have been treated unfairly by the powerful. Joe Biden has a moving — and horrifying — story about his wife and daughter being killed by a drunk driver, a story that similarly could not have been designed more perfectly to bolster his political image as a man who can be counted on to soldier on in the face of adversity.

Of course, neither story is true.

Are we still caring about that sort of thing?

Elizabeth Warren has long pretended to be a person of color — a “woman of color,” the Harvard law faculty called her. (That color is Pantone 11-0602.) What Senator Warren has in common with Jussie Smollett turns out to have nothing to do with skin tone. Smollett, you’ll recall, regaled the nation with the story of a couple of violent, Trump-loving, MAGA-hat-wearing white supremacists who just happened to be cruising a gay neighborhood in Chicago on the coldest night of the year, who also just happened to be fans of Empire, who also just happened to have some rope at hand. Who happened, as it turns out, to be a couple of Nigerian brothers and colleagues of Smollett’s.

Fiction, yes. Deployed, as we are always told when these lies are exposed as lies, in the service of a larger truth, a truth of which such habitual and irredeemable liars as Warren, Biden, Smollett — and Lena Dunham, and the so-called journalists of Rolling Stone, and the perpetrators of a thousand phony campus hate-crime hoaxes — are the appointed apostles.

“Does anybody seriously believe it was not as everyday as sunrise that employers made pregnant women leave their jobs 50 years ago?” CNBC’s John Harwood demanded in defense of Warren. Perhaps it has not occurred to Harwood, who purports to be a journalist of a kind, that the relevant question is not whether this sort of thing happened in the past to a great many women but whether this particular thing actually happened to this woman, which does not seem to be the case: The minutes of the local school-board meeting quite clearly document that Warren was offered a contract for further employment, which she declined. She was forthright in her account of the episode at earlier points in her life. She seems to have suddenly remembered the discrimination sometime between when she began advertising herself to the Ivy League as a Cherokee and the day when the Cherokee finally shamed her into knocking it off.

Similarly, people are killed by drunk drivers every day in this country. Joe Biden’s wife and daughter were not among them, in spite of his libelous claims that they lost their lives in an accident involving an irresponsible truck driver who, as Biden put it, “drank his lunch.” The man who oversaw that investigation, Delaware Superior Court judge Jerome O. Herlihy, repeatedly has confirmed that there is no evidence alcohol was involved. The survivors of the driver, who has since passed away, have publicly asked Biden to stop telling this lie and besmirching the memory of their father. Investigators at the time determined that the accident was not even the other driver’s fault — Mrs. Biden seems to have driven accidentally into the path of the truck.

But what’s a lie about some nobody in Delaware in the service of the “greater truth,” which is somehow allied to the political ambitions of Joe Biden?

After reporting here in National Review, actress and political gadfly Lena Dunham was forced to retract claims that she had been raped at Oberlin College by a College Republican named Barry. As it turns out, there was a prominent College Republican named Barry (it is not a very common name) attending Oberlin during Dunham’s time there, but the two by all accounts — including Dunham’s own account, now — never had anything to do with one another. Dunham’s publisher was obliged to amend her book and to pay the man a small settlement.

Of course it was a College Republican. Of course the white supremacist late-night gay-neighborhood frequenting eagle-eyed Empire fans who spotted Jussie Smollett on that frosty late-night sandwich run while in possession of a length of rope and the knowledge of how to tie a noose were wearing “Make America Great Again” hats. Of course that fictitious rape at the University of Virginia did not falsely implicate the chess team or the Sierra Club — and neither did the one at Duke.

A few weeks ago, the headlines were full of angst and alarum over the fact that a young black girl attending a school at which Karen Pence teaches suffered a racial assault at the hands of three smug white boys who cut her hair. Of course Karen Pence’s name appeared in the headlines: “SIXTH GRADERS HOLD DOWN CLASSMATE, CUT HER DREADLOCKS AT PRIVATE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL WHERE KAREN PENCE TEACHES,” in Newsweek’s all-caps account. Newsweek put Pence’s name in the lead, too — in fact, it made sure to put her front and center even before it described what was alleged to have happened. The smear was transparent, obvious even by the low standards of Newsweek.

Of course it was a lie. Here’s Newsweek now: “Amari Allen, who accused her classmates of hurling verbal abuse at her and forcibly cutting her hair has told reporters that she fabricated the event. The Allen family has formally apologized to both the school and the falsely accused boys.” Newsweek has not apologized to Karen Pence, who had no connection at all to the fictitious events save that they were purported to have happened at her place of employment. But the Democrats have invested a great deal in the storyline that Mike Pence must be some kind of crypto-racist, and it would follow that this tendency infests everyone and everything around him.

Warren’s fictions, and Biden’s, and Smollett’s, and Newsweek’s smear of Karen Pence, all have in common that they are lies that have been put into the service of the campaign against Donald Trump in 2020. (I assume, for the moment, that there will be such a campaign.) There is a supreme irony in that: Trump himself is not what one would call excessively scrupulous with the facts, but to resort to lies and inventions in the race against him is a confession of sorts.

Erica Thomas, Mythmaker

By John Hirschauer

Friday, July 26, 2019

The newest chapter in that expansive compendium of progressive myth and fable: The Verbal Assault of Representative Erica Thomas.

Once upon a time, Erica Thomas, a state legislator in Georgia, roamed the aisles of a local grocery store for a handful of canned goods and snack foods. Georgia, you’ll remember, is not exactly friendly to minorities — this is the same state (per another fable in the collection) that denied Stacey Abrams the governorship by unfairly suppressing the votes of foreign nationals and Westview Cemetery interrees. Thomas is not simply courageous; she is a trailblazer. A Ruby Bridges for our time.

Thomas is nine months pregnant; while her late-stage pregnancy would typically be irrelevant — clumps of cells do not, by the by, make compelling characters in this genre — it served to make her a more sympathetic hero. Thomas wheeled her 15-item cart to the express lane, meant explicitly for customers with ten items or fewer. But she’s nine months pregnant — how can she be expected to adhere to such onerous guidelines when she is saddled with a large mass of tissue in her womb?

Thomas was minding her own business when a redneck (probably from the loathsome foothills of Pickens County) was so blinded by privilege and intoxicated with a stuporous love for the president that he told the honorable representative to “go back where she came from.”

America is a racist country.

The end.

But in real life, Erica Thomas is not brave. She is not Ruby Bridges. She’s not even Angela Davis. She’s a liar. In the immediate aftermath of the purported episode, a teary-eyed Thomas rushed to social media. In a Facebook post captioned “I’m about to be very Transparent” — capital T, for good measure — “because this racism and hate is getting out of control! I feared for my life!” Thomas describes the everyday horrors of Donald Trump’s America:

I decided to go live because I’m very upset because people are getting really out of control with this, with this white privilege stuff. I’m at the grocery and I’m in … the aisle that says ’10 Items or Less.’ Yes, I have 15 items, but I’m nine months pregnant and I can’t stand up for long. And this white man comes up to me and says, ‘You lazy son of a b—h… You need to go back where you came from.’

Later in the video, Thomas invoked the plight of the Ilhan Omar, and the now-infamous “Send her back” chants, as she made several allegations that this anonymous white man in a Georgia grocery store insisted that Representative Thomas “Go back to where [she] came from.”

“I’m from America!” she relayed between bated breaths.

The honorable representative knows where this type of casual racism leads: “If you are silent — I don’t know the Martin Luther King quote, but if you are silent, you’re [part of the problem].” She’s crying, but she’s not fragile: “I’m tough,” she insists, but considering she was nine months pregnant, “I was helpless.”

Watch this surveillance video. Does the woman in that video — the one who is nine months pregnant and wearing the implausibly ironic “I Stand With Planned Parenthood” T-shirt, who approaches the man and waves her finger at him — look “helpless”?

There’s no audio in the surveillance footage. Perhaps the white man (Eric Sparkes, who, as fate would have it, has Cuban heritage and a documented record of progressive bona fides) did tell her to “go back” to her country. But the police report and eyewitness accounts tell a story that is at once shocking and predictable (and, per chance, shockingly predictable). From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, emphasis mine:

A Publix employee told a Cobb County officer that she witnessed part of the conversation and heard Thomas “continuously tell Eric Sparkes to ‘Go back where you came from!’” but did not hear Sparkes utter those words to Thomas.

Oh.

Okay, okay. While this particular instance of public bigotry didn’t actually happen, it highlights the larger truth that America is an awful, no-good, very-bad, racist country that we ought to despise, tear down, and remake in something approaching Sweden’s image. Racism is everywhere. Sexism is everywhere. And even if Brett Kavanaugh isn’t a gang rapist, Jussie Smollett wasn’t assaulted by the only two Trump supporters in Chicago, the Covington Catholic boys didn’t harangue an American Indian man who was minding his own business, the Duke lacrosse team didn’t sexually abuse a racial minority, and Tawana Brawley wasn’t shoved into a garbage bag filled with feces, the larger truth remains.

Unless it doesn’t.

It’s High Time Columbia’s Mattress Girl Was Discredited

By Mona Charen

Friday, August 04, 2017

If you haven’t heard of the “mattress girl,” it’s not for lack of trying among liberal opinion-shapers. Emma Sulkowicz, who dragged a blue mattress around Columbia University’s campus in 2014 to dramatize her plight as a rape victim, was profiled sympathetically in New York magazine, the New York Times, and other publications. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) invited her to attend one of President Obama’s State of the Union speeches. Artnet pronounced her mattress stunt (for which Columbia awarded her course credit as an art project) “one of the most important art works of the year,” and she was honored by the Feminist Majority Foundation and other groups.

Her story is this: A consensual sexual encounter with a male student named Paul Nungesser suddenly turned violent. Without warning, he choked her, struck her, and anally penetrated her while she cried out in pain.

Such things do happen. In the course of researching a book due out next year, I’ve spoken to dozens of college students. Every single one knows someone who has been raped. Some know more than one. And the list of colleges that have disciplined or expelled students for rape or sexual assault is long. Some college students have been criminally prosecuted, and rightly so.

We can debate why sexual misconduct and rape have become such pressing problems (spoiler alert: it has everything to do with the sexual revolution and hook-up culture), but facts are stubborn things, and it has become clear that in Sulkowicz’s case, Nungesser, not she, was almost certainly the victim.

Sulkowicz filed charges with the university and the New York police. (She later alleged that the New York police mistreated her.) Both investigated. Both declined to take action against him. It was then that Sulkowicz undertook her mattress performance as an attempt to brand Nungesser a rapist and drive him from Columbia. He was shunned and anathematized. As Cathy Young reported in Reason magazine, Sulkowicz launched a full-on harassment campaign.

                                            

In the summer of 2014, other students and a professor pressured Nungesser to drop out of a scholarship-paid class trip to Russia, Mongolia, and China. That October, on a “Day of Action’”against sexual assault, several mattress-toting activists showed up in one of his classes, where they stared at him and took his picture. Keyboard warriors in the social media urged making his life “a living hell” and sometimes called for violent retaliation.

Nungesser finished his degree, but he also supplied evidence to Young that undermines the case against him — evidence that was not even admitted to the tribunal that cleared him. Nungesser produced Facebook messages the two exchanged within 48 hours of the alleged rape. In one, Nungesser invited her to a “small shindig” in his room and asked her to “bring cool freshmen.” She replied “lol yussss. i’ll be over w da females soon. Also I feel like we need to have some real time where we can talk about life and thingz because we still haven’t really had a paul-emma chill sesh since summmmerrrr.” Ten days later, she texted him “whatever I want to see yoyououoyou. Respond — I’ll get the message on ma phone.” After he sent her an effusive message on her birthday, she responded, “I love you Paul. Where are you?!?!?!?!”

On July 17, Columbia settled a lawsuit Nungesser had filed. While the details are confidential, the university issued a statement acknowledging that “after the conclusion of the [sexual misconduct] investigation, Paul’s remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience. . . . Columbia will continue to review and update its policies toward ensuring that every student — accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible — is treated respectfully and as a full member of the Columbia community.” Nungesser’s parents told Newsweek that they felt vindicated after what they described as a “four-year effort” to clear his name.

It has become a feminist catechism that women must be “believed” when they make accusations of rape. As the University of Montana tells incoming freshmen, “almost no one lies.” But of course they do. The woman who spun the lurid tale to Rolling Stone about being gang-raped at the University of Virginia invented every detail. The Duke lacrosse players were falsely accused. So were the Scottsboro boys.

Again, this doesn’t mean all accusations are false or malicious, nor is every case of alleged sexual misconduct merely a matter of “regretted sex.” But Sulkowicz has dined out on dubious victimhood for years, and it’s high time she was discredited.

For Liberals, All’s Fair When Starting a ‘Conversation’

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, June 10, 2016

Conversations! Glorious conversations! What more can you ask for?

The other day, former CBS News darling Katie Couric was speaking at an event organized by something called “TheWrap.” Specifically, at its “Power Women Breakfast” in New York. (That is exactly the kind of event I’d expect Couric to be at, and I don’t even know what it is.)

She was asked about the scandal swirling around her anti-gun documentary — specifically, the fact that she deceptively edited a gun-rights group’s response to a question to make the members seem like dangerous idiots.

I wrote about all that in a recent column, so there’s no need to repeat myself beyond noting that Couric and her producer are guilty of outright deception. But I thought her response was amusingly revealing.

“I can understand the objection of people who did have an issue about it,” Couric said. (The “it” here is the deliberate falsifying of the truth). “Having said that, I think we have to focus on the big issue of gun violence. It was my hope that, when I approached this topic, that this would be a conversation-starter.”

Well, okay then.

After all, who denies that starting conversations — or, as they often call them in academia, “dialogues” — is the highest aspiration there is?

For instance, a Central Michigan University professor claimed last year that she was punched in the face at a Toby Keith concert for being a lesbian. She later admitted that she actually punched herself, but said it was worth it because she wanted to start a dialogue.

As the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow recently chronicled, this sort of thing is common on college campuses. Students and professors initiate or exacerbate a hate-crime hoax or a false rape accusation. The orchestrators are perfectly happy to pretend the fraud is real and demonize anyone who casts doubt on the claims.

Then, when the facts come to light, instead of apologies we’re saturated with a fog of pomposity and self-justification: We were just trying to start a conversation. Raising awareness of the larger issue is more important than the mere facts.

That was the excuse offered by a herd of academics on the tenth anniversary of the Duke University lacrosse rape hoax. Professors there had taken out ads suggesting the exonerated attackers were racists. In response to criticism, they insisted that they just wanted to get a good discussion going.

We’ve heard similar prattling about the University of Virginia rape hoax and many other fabricated events on college campuses (and off) going back decades. I started writing about such instances of “lying for justice” 20 years ago, and it has only gotten worse.

I don’t think people appreciate how pernicious and widespread this crowdsourced totalitarianism really is. Routine lies in the service of left-wing narratives are justified in the name of “larger truths,” while actual truth-telling in the other direction is denounced as hate speech or “triggering.”

Even when liberals call for an “honest conversation” about this, that, or the other thing, what they really mean is they want everyone who disagrees with the prevailing progressive view to fall in line.

Almost invariably, when I hear calls for “frank talk,” “honest dialogue,” or a new “national conversation,” I immediately translate it as, “Let the next chapter of indoctrination begin.” It’s a way of luring dissenters from political correctness out into the open so they can be smashed over the head with a rock.

Remember, behind every obvious double standard is a hidden single standard. For instance, earlier this year, The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer came out with a book attacking libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch called Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. When asked by NPR’s Steve Inskeep what the nefarious supervillains of her screed were really up to, she ominously explained, “What they’re aiming at is changing the conversation in the country.”

Well, so are left-wing billionaire George Soros and his minions. So is Mayer herself. So are all of these campus fraudsters and activists. And so is Katie Couric. But when someone on the other side of the ideological chasm questions the official narrative, they must be demonized or otherwise silenced. Why? Because the last thing progressives want is to start an honest conversation. They want to have their conversations — and only their conversations.