12/07/2014
[See, earlier by James Kirkpatrick, TFM — TOTAL FRAT MOVE Or Totally Frightened Men? College Fraternities’ Cowardly Defenders]
If the American Main Stream Media is enthusiastically promoting a story, it’s essentially a guarantee that the story is a lie. Unfortunately, Narrative Collapse at the University of Virginia isn’t going to change anything about how our Cultural Marxist occupation government operates. After all, the “root cause” of all this, as the Leftists would say, is a system in academia and the MSM where people derive their very employment from perpetuating PC fairy tales.
The story began with an article in Rolling Stone, an ostensible music magazine now indistinguishable from Salon. Author Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s contribution to American letters was everything that you might expect from something with a title seemingly based on a Fox TV movie from the mid-90’s [“A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA,” November 19, 2014].
Author Erdely gave us a horrific story of gang rape perpetuated in an atmosphere of what she called “old-money privilege” and “Southern aristocracy,” where girls are reluctant to pay the “social price” of reporting rape and UVA men are so enflamed with lust they gang rape women on top of broken glass. The story was uncritically repeated across the MSM for more than a week, inspiring predictable calls for sweeping policy changes to crack down on “rape culture.” MSM attacks and protests against UVA fraternities followed and the university administration seized the opportunity to suspend all Greek activity on campus. [UVA suspends fraternities after report on gang rape allegation, by Ralph Ellis, CNN, November 25, 2014]
This lurid tale obviously owed much to hate porn like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and journalistic frauds like Stephen Glass, whom Erdely said she “adored But, as with the Duke Lacrosse case, reporters wanted to believe a story about powerful, rich, white, cisgendered males raping a defenseless woman oppressed by the power structure.
Thus, even after journalists like Richard Bradley and our own Steve Sailer started pointing out the holes in the story, MSM outlets attacked critics for questioning the word of a supposed victim. These outlets are scrambling for cover now that Rolling Stone has “updated” Erdely’s article with an admission that there are “discrepancies” in the supposed victim’s account and that it should have actually investigated her claims.
The demand that people do not ask questions about a news story involving sexual assault may seem nonsensical. But it is a sign of campus culture bleeding into “adult” culture and journalism.
The first thing any white male student learns when he sets foot on campus is what he is and is not allowed to think, say, or even read, often in remarkably blunt programs of ideological reeducation. Much of this reeducation focuses on race, but sexuality and feminism are even more dangerous topics — and students are flatly told not to question supposed rape victims. To do so is to contribute to a “rape culture” that is supposedly sweeping the country.
How bad is this “rape culture?” Students around the country are informed that one out of four women is supposedly the victim of rape or attempted rape. As a result, “1 in 4” is both a feminist slogan and an activist group on many campuses.
It’s also not true. [One in Four? Rape myths do injustice too. By Carrie Lukas, IWF, April 27, 2006] Indeed, as Christina Sommmers points out, even “1 in 5” is a remarkable exaggeration. [Sexual assault in America: Do we know the true numbers, American Enterprise Institute, April 28, 2014] And the most recent data suggests that campus rapes specifically are on the decline. [New Data Refutes ‘Rape Culture’ Activists, by KC Johnson, Minding the Campus, July 3, 2014]
Yet in the name of fighting this non-existent wave of rape and sexual assault, college students accused of rape find themselves in a PC version of Kafka where they are punished, expelled, and publicly shamed even if they are ultimately cleared of all charges. [Men punished in sexual misconduct cases on colleges [sic] campuses are fighting back, by Nick Anderson, Washington Post, August 20, 2014]
If anything, progressives are actually becoming more hysterical, Ezra Klein of Vox supports more restrictive sexual consent laws precisely on the grounds that it will introduce a climate of “fear and confusion over what counts as consent,” and so make it easier to punish all those men who are sexually assaulting “one in five” women. [“Yes Means Yes” is a terrible law, and I completely support it, by Ezra Klein, Vox, October 13, 2014]
Thus, even though the Rolling Stone story has utterly collapsed, some reporters are still attempting to salvage the Narrative. Perhaps the most spectacular example is Zerlina Maxwell, who published a story at the Washington Post on December 6 No matter what Jackie said, we should automatically believe rape claims. (The word “automatically” was later changed to “generally” in the headline, but the original title lives on in the URL.)
How can she say this with a straight face even now? Because “Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.”
Men who have been kicked out of their colleges and had their lives and careers destroyed because “regret” transformed into “rape” may disagree. The Duke Lacrosse team would certainly have something to say about Maxwell’s comments. As would a certain “Barry” at Oberlin college, whom Lena Dunham of Girls fame casually accused of rape without any evidence.
The hated white male cisgenders may have “privilege” according to the MSM, but it isn’t going to do you much good before a campus judicial council where you aren’t allowed to have a lawyer. [Pro Due Process Does Not Equate to Pro Rape, by Duff McDonald, New York Observer, October 24, 2014]
No man, especially a fraternity member, who has attended college within the last decade can deny that “fake rape” threats aren’t just common, but almost passé. There is virtually no cost to making them, whereas a man’s life can be utterly destroyed.
This is not to say that college women are not at risk for violence. After all, University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham’s body was found not long ago. However, the murder suspect is another “Gentle Giant” of African descent, one Jesse Leroy Matthew. And in the actually occurring rape cases that Leftists are pointing to as evidence of “rape culture,” the defendants have considerably more melanin than can be stored in the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege.
Yet apparently the same boring truthful stories of young white women victimized by black males aren’t as sexy or profitable as recounting legends of a White Terror on college campuses imposed by rich, blond-haired frat boys.
And they don’t serve the purpose of agitating for more funding for feminist programs on campus and removing resources from the hated fraternity system.
As some reporters have told me, there appear to be links between “Jackie,” the ostensible victim in the UVA rape, and University of Virginia College President Teresa Sullivan. President Sullivan was noticeably eager to issue collective punishment on the Greek system — and even after the Narrative Collapse is still maintaining that the real issue is “sexual violence on college campuses. Today’s news must not alter this focus.” [Statement of University of Virginia President Teresa A. Sullivan, UVA Today, December 5, 2014] We’ll have to see if this develops over the course of the week.
But whatever happens, the real issue isn’t “sexual violence” — it’s the climate of progressive hysteria on campus and in the MSM. Crude agitation and hate propaganda has crossed a line. No person, young or old, can safely say they won’t be the next target. After this latest Narrative Collapse, it’s also clear that the MSM and its pet activists are incapable of stopping themselves. The only way this ends: when costs are imposed on the individual functionaries who are actually implementing the anti-white and anti-male agenda.
This has already started to occur with #Gamergate, where ordinary people fed up with PC progressives actually started pushing back against corrupt journalists in the gaming industry. This kind of activism needs to extend to pushing back against political journalists and progressive campus activists.
And the people who need to be the most active are fraternity members, who are the real targets of the feminist hysteria on campus and who will not survive unless they become active in their own defense.
The Rolling Stone story and its withdrawal is a milestone. It is confirmation of what we suspected all along –the media is a weapon, the truth is irrelevant, and the lives of innocent people are expendable to a chattering class eager to perpetuate a Narrative of white male oppression.
In response, the historic American nation needs to understand that it is under occupation and MSM reporters aren’t just ideological opponents, but enemy enforcers.
James Kirkpatrick is a Beltway veteran and a refugee from Conservatism Inc.
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