Jackie’s story began falling apart when others, exercising basic journalistic skills, discovered there was no party at the fraternity house on September 28, and the fraternity rushed in the spring, not the fall – two simple facts neither the author nor the magazine made any attempt to check. Rolling Stone issued a lame quasi-retraction, and Jackie’s own friends began backing away from her story. Now we learn that Jackie herself tried to withdraw from the story before it was published.
No doubt more will come out as the larger story unfolds, and it should. The innocents deserve exoneration, and the guilty deserve condemnation. All of them.
In the meantime, we can draw a few early lessons from Jackie’s story.
One, liberal-progressives lie, distort, exaggerate, and emotionally manipulate with complete abandon to achieve their nefarious objectives. The manufactured ‘war on women’ is one example. Others include Jonathan Gruber’s candid (even proud) admissions of the public lies told by liberal-progressives to win passage of Obamacare, and IRS officials’ lies surrounding abuse of conservative organizations and individuals. Lying worked in each case, but only for a time (a really short time in Jackie’s case). Truth eventually raises her beautiful head and overcomes.
Two, liberal lies cause real harm to the country and to innocent people. Obamacare is the most extreme example. A law now, the Affordable Care Act is a policy nightmare that has cost millions of people their health insurance and their health care providers, with more pain to come if implementation proceeds. With the truth of this disaster now obvious, a majority wants it repealed and replaced.
Jackie’s story has caused harm to innocents, too. The immediate damage is to the reputations of the men accused of such a reprehensible act and to their fraternity. The long-term damage will be felt by future rape victims who fear having their veracity doubted if they report the crime.
Three, liberal college administrators are justifiably reaping the bitter fruit they have sown. They have been complicit in hyper-sexualizing campuses with co-ed dorms and bathrooms, bowls of free condoms, sex shows and Vagina Monologues plays, and titillating sex courses of no academic value. Add a generous supply of alcohol, and the situation becomes combustible. A “sexual assault crisis” on campus? Whatever did they expect?
Four, feminists have completely lost their minds, along with any moral grounds on which to speak for women. After Jackie’s story was called into question, feminist Zerlina Maxwell argued in the Washington Post that the facts [read truth] didn’t really matter because the story “helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.” She’s wrong; facts and truth do matter above all else.
After decades of advocating that women play the non-committal hook-up sex game with men, feminists find women aren’t faring very well. So they’re petitioning the federal government for new Title IX regulations to tilt the campus sex-playing field in favor of women: to force colleges to adopt policies that presume the honesty of an accuser and the guilt of an accused.
“It’s no coincidence that the Rolling Stone article spent a great deal of time advocating for the expansion of federal involvement in higher education via Title IX of the Civil Rights Act,” Jonah Goldberg points out; “regulations that would erode the presumption of innocence in rape cases on campus.” God help the University of Virginia men if such regulations were already in place.
As we stand with and defend the innocents, whatever residual outrage we feel from reading Jackie’s story should be redirected to the guilty: liberals who try to avoid the consequences of their incessant dishonesty.
Update:
U-Va Students Challenge Rolling Stone, T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post
Rolling Stone and Random House Deserve Defamation Lawsuits, Leslie Loftis, thefederalist.com
Why the Media's Fact Problems are Way Bigger Than Rolling Stone, Mollie Hemingway
No comments:
Post a Comment