A Story Too Useful to Verify?

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Rolling Stone has published an incredible story about a rape at the University of Virginia, sending shock waves around the country.

But when I say the story is incredible, I mean that in the literal, largely abandoned sense of the word. It is not credible — I don’t believe it.

I’m not saying that the author of the story, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, deliberately fabricated facts. Nor do I believe that all of her reporting was flawed. There may be an outrageously callous attitude toward sexual assaults at UVA. Rape, particularly date rape, may be a major problem there. I’ve talked to enough people with connections to the campus to think that part is credible enough.

But the central story isn’t about a spontaneous alcohol-fueled case of some creep refusing to take no for an answer (an inexcusable offense in my opinion). It’s an account of a well-planned gang rape by seven fraternity pledges at the direction of two members. If true, lots of people need to go to jail for decades — if.

The basic story is this: Jackie is asked out on a date her freshman year by a junior named “Drew” (not his real name). After dinner, they go to a party at Phi Kappa Psi. Quickly, Drew asks Jackie, “Want to go upstairs, where it’s quieter?”

Jackie is led to a “pitch-black” bedroom. She’s knocked to the floor. A heavy person jumps on top of her. A hand covers her mouth. When she bites it, she’s punched in the face. And for the next three hours she’s brutally raped, with Drew and another upperclassman shouting out instructions to the pledges, referring to Jackie as “it.”

Many alleged details (though Erdely never uses the word “alleged”) aren’t suitable for a family paper. Others are simply hard to believe. The pitch-black darkness doesn’t prevent Jackie from recognizing an attacker or seeing them drink beer. The assault takes place amidst the wreckage of a broken glass table, but the rapists are undeterred by shards of glass.

The most unbelievable dialogue comes later. Sometime after 3 a.m., Jackie leaves the still-raging party, “her face beaten, dress spattered with blood,” without anyone seeing her. Distraught, she calls three friends, Andy, Randall, and Cindy (not their real names) for help. They arrive in “minutes.” One of the male friends says they have to take her to the hospital. Cindy replies, “Is that such a good idea?” adding, “Her reputation will be shot for the next four years.”

Erdely expounds: “Andy seconded the opinion, adding that since he and Randall both planned to rush fraternities, they ought to think this through. The three friends launched into a heated discussion about the social price of reporting Jackie’s rape . . . ”

Really? Neither boy put Jackie’s medical needs above their pledge prospects? What a convenient conversation for an exposé of rape culture — it reads like a script written for a feminist avant-garde theater troupe. Similarly, when Jackie reports what happened to school authorities — again, a brutal, premeditated gang rape by nearly half the pledge class of a prominent fraternity — the dean is described as responding with all of the emotion you’d expect if Jackie requested to change majors. Meanwhile, it was all kept hush-hush until Erdely reported it.

Erdely admits she set out to find a sexual-assault story at an elite school like UVA. She looked at lots of other colleges first, but “none of those schools felt quite right” in the words of a Washington Post profile of Erdely. But UVA, which Erdely describes in Rolling Stone as a school without a thriving “radical feminist culture seeking to upend the patriarchy,” was just right. As Worth magazine editor Richard Bradley noted last week, the whole thing seems like an adventure in confirmation bias.

Initially, Erdely wouldn’t say whether she even knew the names of the alleged rapists. Late Monday, according to the Washington Post, Erdely’s editor said Rolling Stone “verified their existence” by talking to Jackie’s friends, but the magazine couldn’t reach them. Uh huh.

Erdely’s story was reported uncritically for days as a powerful example of the “rape epidemic” that is somehow taking place amidst a 20-year decline in reported rapes. News outlets repeated the claim that one in five college women are sexually assaulted. This bogus statistic comes from “The Campus Sexual Assault Study,” a shoddy online survey of just two universities that counted attempted (forced) kissing and the like as “sexual assault” — and never even asked female respondents about rape.

Erdely’s story may be proven true after a needed investigation, but I suspect it will turn out to have been one of those stories too useful to verify.

Liberalism in Ruins

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Barack Obama will end his tenure with the ruin of Hope and Change. The implosion was brought about not by the marginalization of Hope and Change, but by the power of the U.S. government to reify the slogan in a way we have not seen since the 1930s.

Survey the wreckage.

The hope-and-change therapeutic approach to foreign relations ended logically with historic cuts in defense, lectures about American culpability, pink lines and the end of Syria, farcical Iranian talks, in Libya the short trip from “leading from behind” to Benghazi, the self-induced suicide of Iraq, the empowerment of Putin, a pivot to Asia that invited ridicule, and the charade of a war against ISIS.

There were only two saving graces to Obama’s misadventures abroad. One, as was also true of the alphabet stew of domestic scandals, each ensuing disaster seemed to divert attention from the prior calamity. Two, Obama was not able to halt new energy exploration on private lands as he had done with federal leasing. So followed a gas and oil renaissance that he opposed but can now claim as a great boon to American global leverage. Otherwise, what Barack Obama has accomplished, in the fashion of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin in the Twenties and Thirties, will be to avoid minor confrontations on his watch — if he is lucky — while ensuring catastrophic ones for his successors.

Obama’s immigration legacy will be the juxtaposition of his serial insistence that he was not a king or an emperor, and could not contravene the Constitution by granting a blanket amnesty, with his efforts to do just that when it was no longer politically inexpedient. I don’t think a president has ever quite so habitually warned the country of the dangers that would soon emanate from himself.

Illegal immigration is praised only by those who benefit directly from it, whether in the familial sense of inexpensive nannies, cooks, or gardeners; or in the corporate interest of cheap labor in the hospitality industries, agriculture, and construction; or in the political sense of new liberal constituents; or in the tribal sense of expanding the so-called La Raza base. But the vast majority of Americans accept that when federal law is ignored, chaos ensues.

The burdens of the attempt to grant federal exemption to millions of foreign nationals who have never followed U.S. immigration law inevitably fall on the middle-class taxpayer and the entry-level worker. We will also soon learn that over 11 million illegal aliens are not all Dream Actors. Rather, there is a huge minority of millions of illegal residents who have broken all sorts of U.S. laws, have not worked and are on public assistance, and have no record of sustained residence in the United States. When a guest chooses to break the laws of his host by entering his home illegally, that is usually the beginning, not the end, of illegality — a mindset and pattern of behavior that in many cases is not ended by simply erasing federal immigration law. The demand for immediate action for those who would qualify for Obama’s amnesties begs the question of whether there would be commensurately quick deportations of those who do not.

Take also global warming — for Secretary of State John Kerry, the world’s greatest challenge.Once the planet did not heat up in the last 18 years, and once the ice of the polar caps did not melt away, global warming begat climate change. The new nomenclature was a clever effort to link all occasional weather extremities to some underlying and fundamental climate disruption. Brilliant though the strategy was — the opposites of cold/hot, drought/deluges, and calm/storms could now all be used as proof of permanent climate change — global warming finally was hoist on its own petard: If it caused everything, then it caused nothing.

So, in the end, what was global warming? It seems to have grown up largely as a late-20th-century critique of global market capitalism by elites who had done so well by it that they had won the luxury of caricaturing the very source of their privilege. Global warming proved a near secular religion that filled a deep psychological longing for some sort of transcendent meaning among mostly secular Western grandees. In reality, the global-warming creed had scant effect on the lifestyles of the high priests who promulgated it. Al Gore did not cut back on his jet-fueled and lucrative proselytizing. Obama did not become the first president who, on principle, traveled with a reduced and green entourage. Solyndra did not run a model transparent company as proof of the nobility of the cause. As in the case of illegal immigration, the losers from the global-warming fad are the working and middle classes, who do not have the capital to be unharmed by the restrictions on cheap, carbon-based fuels.

The natural outcome of the reactionary approach to race relations — identity politics, the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot, the effusions of trillions of dollars over the last half-century into Great Society dependencies — is Ferguson. We are left with the movement’s slogan, “Hands up; don’t shoot!” which now joins a growing historical corpus of racial mythography — “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Ferguson illustrated many of the problems of postmodern liberalism: the anti-empirical insistence that the facts of the shooting of Michael Brown did not matter much; critical legal theory, which ignored the time-honored role of a disinterested grand jury; the tolerance of illegality as some sort of acceptable protest against the system; and the liberal media’s hyping a crisis on the understanding that the ramifications of the violence were safely distant from their own schools, neighborhoods, and restaurants.

The bitter truth is that Barack Obama himself is a figure who has always trafficked — albeit far more brilliantly and subtly than the buffoonish Sharpton and Jackson — in racial divisiveness, from his candid admissions in his memoir and his acknowledged dutiful discipleship at the feet of the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright to “typical white person,” the clingers speech, “punish our enemies,” and the racially charged spin on the ongoing Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown cases. A sign of his brilliant racial contortionism is the current canard that losing 6 percent of the black vote is proof of diversity while winning only 40 percent of the white vote is an ominous sign of a new racism.

The more the liberal media outlets of shrinking audiences warned of “increasing racial tensions” as they sought to spike animosities, the more they were oddly deaf to the real story of Ferguson: a growing majority of Americans that has grown tired of racial demagoguery and profiteering. Last month’s election illustrated that the drumbeat of a supposedly old, shrinking, white, and selfish electorate juxtaposed to a new dynamic, idealistic, electorate of color only served to lose Democrats the former voters while not winning enough of the latter voters to make up the difference. After the disastrous Obama tenure, the U.S. will either return to the melting pot and the idea that race and tribe are incidental, not essential, to our characters, or it will eventually go the way of all dysfunctional societies for which that was not true — Austria-Hungary, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq.

Obamacare was, in the end, little more than a clumsy effort to take over the health-care system by redistributing resources from the supposedly too-well-off to the more noble less-well-off, with billions of dollars siphoned off to expand government bureaucracies and enrich crony capitalists. The architects of the Affordable Care Act were not affected by the ramifications of their own advocacy, which largely fell on the middle class in terms of higher deductibles, premiums, and taxes.

The point of the program was not to provide coverage to millions of uninsured Americans — that could have been done far more cheaply through existing programs — but to create a vast new federal bureaucracy to redistribute health-care resources. The legacy of the ACA will not be the diversion of the indigent from the emergency rooms and state and federal public clinics (which, after all, are largely still free in the sense of no premiums or deductibles), but the spiking of health-care costs through bureaucratic bloat and the rising deductible. The latter should be redefined as a premium, given that middle-class families will now be assessed, in addition to their premiums, hundreds of dollars in health-care costs each month until their much higher yearly deductibles are met.

Finally, and most importantly, Obamism did not even deliver on its extravagant promises of a new ethos of ending crony capitalism, the revolving door, lobbyists in government, and government corruption. Indeed, Obama will go down in history as presiding over the most corrupt administration of the last half-century, when historians finally collate the IRS, VA, GSA, and Secret Service scandals; the erosion of constitutional jurisprudence; the serial untruths about Benghazi, amnesty, and Obamacare; the harassment of journalists; the record shakedown of Wall Street lucre in 2008 and 2012;and the flood of lobbyists into and out of the Obama administration. Eric Holder – with his jet-setting to sporting events on the public dime, spouting inflammatory racialist rhetoric, politicizing the Justice Department, selectively enforcing settled law, and being held in contempt of Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents — managed what one might have thought impossible: He has made Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell seem a minor rogue in comparison.

Six years after the summer of hope and change, no one in the Democratic party is showcasing American foreign policy, pushing for cap-and-trade legislation, singing the praises of Obamacare, bragging about the way amnesty was handled, or pointing to a new cleaner and more transparent federal bureaucracy. What started out with “hope and change” and “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” ended up with a president who habitually misleads his countrymen, a baffling array of scandals, the discrediting of the obsequious media, and policies that not only did not work but by any historical model could never really have worked.

As proof, watch as Democrats regroup for 2016. Their unspoken commandment will be that most of what Obama did, they must either ignore or deny.

Black Lives Matter

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 01, 2014

David McKenna, the screenwriter who penned Tony Kaye’s American History X, committed one of the great acts of intellectual cowardice in the history of modern American cinema. Telling the story of Derek Vinyard, a violent neo-Nazi who reexamines his squandered life while being tormented in prison, McKenna explores the origins of the angry young skinhead’s predispositions by revisiting Vinyard’s high-school days: In flashback, we see a breakfast-table conversation between the young man and his father (played by the excellent Edward Norton and William Russ, respectively). Vinyard and his father get into a discussion of affirmative action. His father, a fireman, makes a reasoned and principled case, if not an entirely eloquent one, that by promoting two black candidates over two better-qualified white candidates, affirmative action has put his life in danger. He resents that he must entrust his life to two men who are less qualified for their positions but who were hired nonetheless because of their race. “Is that what America’s about?” he demands. “No! America’s about the best man for the job.” But before the point can quite settle in, the father starts speculating about the “hidden agenda” and, finally, leans in and whispers conspiratorially to his son: “It’s n****r bulls***.”

Dramatically, that makes no sense. American History X would be an even more powerful story if the transformative moment in young Derek’s life — his father’s murder at the hands of black criminals during a firefighting call — had sparked a different and more radical sort of transformation in the Vinyard family, from the well-intentioned, best-man-for-the-job philosophy of the resentful but reasonable working-class father to the violent extremism of the son. Instead, the story is simply one of explicit, banal racism that deepens between generations, at a time when American society was overwhelmingly on the opposite course. But the father’s principled criticism of affirmative action cannot be allowed to stand; it must be thoroughly hosed down with racism, conspiracy-theory talk, and the totemic deployment of that infamous racial epithet.

In the view of America’s race-hustling professionals, there is no principled disagreement with them — there is only gross racism, either hidden or open.

It is possible — barely possible — that this is in fact how the Left sees the world: That behind every criticism of affirmative action, behind every anti-crime measure, behind every proposal for welfare reform, behind every expression of capitalism, behind every measure taken against voter fraud, behind every criticism of the Ferguson lynch mob — and even behind every fraction — a burning cross looms, men in white hoods await, and the lynching noose is being prepared. That view is borderline insane and contrary to the overwhelming evidence of contemporary American life as lived, but people hold all sorts of loopy views, so it is just within the boundaries of plausibility that people on the Left, so-called progressives, genuinely hold this view.

More likely, the spectral evidence of white supremacy in our modern Salem race trials is simply a rhetorical tool, a way for well-fed progressives to beat their critics into submission if one of them should happen to point out that progressive policies seem to produce reliably horrific results for people who are poor and, especially, poor and black. That Thomas Edsall sincerely believes that welfare reform is shaped in part by ugly stereotypes about blacks malingering on the dole is, despite the man’s intellectual dishonesty, more plausible than Jamelle Bouie’s daft and hallucinatory suggestion that my description of a thin black kid with long braids as resembling a scale-model of Snoop Dogg is a coded racist dog-whistle referring to the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise. Students of history will recall that Mr. Madison’s ugly political expedient did not refer to three-fifths of a Snoop Dogg.

It is a seldom-appreciated irony that irresponsible allegations of racism are politically effective in the American context precisely because American society takes racism so seriously; in a society with more cavalier attitudes toward racism, such dishonest opportunism would bear less fruit. Politicians in Spain and the Republic of Korea, for example, worry a good deal less about insinuations that they might harbor insensitive racial attitudes. But in the context of the United States, one can effectively win a political argument not by demonstrating to any reasonable standard of evidence that one’s opponent is a racist but simply by maneuvering him into explaining that he isn’t a racist. It’s the “Have you stopped beating your wife yet” gambit on a grand and nasty scale.

So when former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani takes seriously the operative slogan of the Ferguson protests — “Black Lives Matter!” — and asks the obvious question — “Don’t they matter in the 93 percent of cases when the lives of black murder victims are taken violently by black criminals?” — the Left’s reflexive response is to denounce him as a racist. The Washington Post’s hilariously Orwellian fact-check column labeled Giuliani a liar even as it confirmed that his observation is, as a matter of fact, entirely true. If David McKenna had been writing the scene, Giuliani would have leaned across a table and whispered to Sean Hannity that this is all “n****r bulls***.”

But real life doesn’t go according to script. That’s why we have the New York Times et al. — to write the script according to the Left’s dramatic imperatives, regardless of what actually happens. The media may not control the stage entirely, but they do control the lighting and the sound.

The reality is this: Black men, especially young black men, die violent deaths at appalling rates in these United States. But they do not die very often at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, thugs reminiscent of characters from American History X, police officers of any race or motivation, lynch mobs, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Walmart, the Tea Party, Goldman Sachs, carbon dioxide, or any other bogeyman currently in vogue among so-called progressives. As Giuliani noted, blacks die violent deaths almost exclusively at the hands of black criminals. But attempting to accommodate that reality in any serious way does not pay any political dividends for the Left. It does not put any money in Jesse Jackson’s pockets or create any full-time jobs for graduates of grievance-studies programs.

And thus we have the very peculiar situation in which “Black Lives Matter!” but black perpetrators don’t. Only white perpetrators matter. And if, as in the case of George Zimmerman, they are not exactly white, then they can be declared white by the New York Times. Only white perpetrators matter to the people behind the Ferguson protests because only white perpetrators are politically useful.

The overwhelming majority of violent deaths suffered by black Americans are the result of simple crime, and crime is, as an issue, of no use to the Left. But when a black man dies at the hands of a white man — especially a white police officer — then that breathes life into the ghost of “white supremacy,” the infinitely malleable, endlessly useful set of imperial robes detectable only by the finest sensibilities on MSNBC. Actual white supremacists represent a dwindling and (metaphorically and, more often than you might expect, literally) toothless tendency restricted mostly to hillbilly precincts and anonymous Internet cowards. But if one already wants to boycott Walmart, and a white cop shoots a young black man, then — abracadabra! — the Left is boycotting Walmart because of . . . white supremacy, or something. Agitating for a $40 minimum wage? “Justice for Mike Brown!” Looking for even more generous solar-power subsidies? “Justice for Mike Brown!” Anointing AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka president-for-life? “Mike Brown would have wanted it that way!”

If you believe that black lives matter, then you should be working for school reform, economic growth, and — yes — more effective law-enforcement and crime-prevention measures to protect black communities, which suffer an enormously disproportionate share of crime and violence. Never mind the stagecraft: That’s what you actually do if you think black lives matter.

And the drama that’s going on in Ferguson right now? That’s what you do if you think black lives are merely useful to you — and, in the end, expendable.

The Left’s War on Business Comes to Ferguson

By Henry Payne

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Ferguson, Mo. — After a grand jury here failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson, Louis Head (stepfather of shooting victim Michael Brown) repeatedly screamed to a crowd of protestors: “Burn this b***h down!”

And so they did. But why?

The dozens of white and minority-owned businesses that were smashed along Ferguson’s two main commercial streets — South Florissant and West Florissant — employed hundreds of people from every ethnic background in this leafy, mixed-race, working-class suburb. Community leaders here bemoan the lack of jobs, yet now Ferguson will have fewer of them. After the sad death of a black teenager, why deprive his peers of opportunity?

Activists claim that the Ferguson protests are about legal and economic justice, but its furies targeted businesses, the very economic engines that can overcome poverty. These places have endured the most anti-business national economic climate in memory as a Democratic president has harassed them — “You didn’t build that!” — with everything from Obamacare to a campaign for a higher minimum wage.

As a resident of Metro Detroit, I arrived in Ferguson expecting a gritty urban landscape. But what is striking about the city is that it is a quiet, bedroom community far removed from central St. Louis. Eleven miles from downtown, West Florissant is a typical suburban-America shopping street populated by barber shops, mobile-phone stores, and national chains such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Advance Auto Parts, and Mobil. It is sandwiched between St. Louis airport, the middle-class suburb of Florissant, and the global headquarters of Emerson Electric. These aren’t the graffiti-scarred urban streets of Detroit’s Gratiot corridor — they’re more like the safe, ethnically mixed byways of suburban Dearborn, Mich.

Yet Ferguson has been poisoned by the traveling race circus of Al Sharpton, who is best known for his false accusation of rape against law-enforcement officer Steven Pagones in New York’s Tawana Brawley case and for his incitement to riot and arson at Freddy’s Fashion Mart on 125th St. Now using his MSNBC show and a willing media, Sharpton spun a tale of a white Ferguson cop who killed an innocent black youth. As the grand-jury testimony of numerous African Americans proved, this was a false account.

That falsehood persists here in Ferguson as boarded-up storefronts have been papered over with posters showing two black hands raised in surrender. Having borne the brunt of activists’ wrath, these broken businesses now serve as billboards for their propaganda.

Since the rioting, businesses continue to be protestors’ primary targets. Activists disrupted the busiest commercial weekend of the year by staging sit-ins at shopping centers in nearby suburbs such as Brentwood. “No justice, no wings!” shouted a protestor staging a “die-in” in front of a Buffalo Wild Wings.

The protests shut down two area malls on Black Friday. Back in Ferguson, destroyed businesses, of course, didn’t get to participate at all in the year’s biggest shopping weekend. Police opened West Florissant for the first time since the rioting, but the street was empty of activity. Only a few small stores opened, with open painted across their boarded windows. Autotire tire-repair employees cleared smashed glass from their windows, then boarded up the store completely.

“This is St. Louis’s race war,” crowed Missouri state senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal after businesses burned. “We did not have a race war like other cities throughout the country. This is our race war.” Few in St. Louis would join her celebration.

Indeed, the small number of protestors enlisted in this “war” — from 100 to 300 — reflects the lack of support in a metro area that is fed up with the lies and senseless violence. Some local activists complain that the movement is overrun by belligerent outsiders. Only the media remain loyal: Dozens of TV cameras and print reporters continue to broadcast the protestors every move.

On Thanksgiving, the St. Louis Post Dispatch ran a cartoon of blacks with their arms raised in surrender; it simultaneously published a wave of columns suggesting the grand jury was rigged. The New York Times stories, like those in other major media, continue to insist the “white police officer” committed a “fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager.”

In truth, if Michael Brown — a marijuana-smoking hoodlum who pummeled Wilson in his car while on the run from robbing a convenience store — had surrendered, he would in all likelihood still be alive today.

Ferguson has exposed as hollow Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign promise of a new kind of black leadership. After Brown was shot in August, Obama used Ferguson as a political wedge in the 2014 campaign, allying himself with Sharpton’s mob. If the president had used his bully pulpit to marginalize Sharpton and call for respect for the law, Ferguson might not have burned.

Even before Brown’s shooting, the McDonald’s on West Florissant — smashed in the rioting this week — had been picketed by a $15-minimum-wage movement supported by the president. Now this business has paid the ultimate price: physical destruction.

A former McDonald’s employee, 20-year-old Shermale Humphrey, helped organize strikes against the store, demanding a $15-an-hour minimum wage. Yet, since the Pelosi Congress passed a 40 percent hike in the minimum wage — to $7.25 in 2007 (in Missouri the state law is $7.35) — the unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-old blacks in cities such as St. Louis has jumped from 29 percent to 42 percent today.

“It’s a shortage of everything,” Humphrey told a Los Angeles Times reporter. “It’s a shortage of jobs. Of African Americans on the police force and in government. Of people not being able to get a good education.”

In the torched, terrorized streets of Ferguson, the greatest shortage is a lack of leadership — and foresight.