The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal

Posted on | December 9, 2014 | 99 Comments

@ChuckCJohnson reports that the young woman pictured above is named Jackie Coakley, and that she was the main source for Rolling Stone‘s sensational (and now discredited) story about an alleged 2012 gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity house.

Can I say for certain that Coakley has been correctly identified? I cannot, but (a) I have named my source, (b) so far as I know, neither Rolling Stone nor anyone else has denied this identification of Coakley as their source, and (c) you can check it out for yourself.

The Internet is a wonderful thing. Google is your friend.

“I think a crime of rape off campus or a crime of rape on campus ought to be treated the same way. And the sooner it’s treated the same way, the sooner the message is going to get out that you can’t get away with something on campus that you couldn’t get away with someplace else. . . . It’s high time to make sure that a crime is a crime wherever it is committed and treated the same way. And when it is treated universally the same way we will have less rape on campuses.”
— Sen. Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican

A woman with an agenda named Sabrina Rubin Erdely was hunting for a nice juicy campus rape story to “report” and Jackie Coakley was apparently willing to tell Erdely such a story. Some people are hashtagging this #UVAHoax, and I am not prepared to say that the Rolling Stone is a hoax, per se. It was certainly a shabby excuse for journalism. Rolling Stone raped its own credibility and, in doing so, exposed the fundamental problem with feminism’s “rape culture” narrative, as Robby Soave explains quite well at Reason magazine:

Suppose Jackie’s story was not so incredible. Suppose that premeditated, ritualistic gang rape was a plausible occurrence at the average college. Suppose that one in every five — or four, or three — female students found themselves in serious danger of assault the moment they set foot outside their dorm rooms. Suppose that America’s campuses really did rival Somalia in terms of the violence faced by young women. . . .
On the other hand, suppose the details of Jackie’s story were exaggerated, or in doubt. Suppose that premeditated, ritualistic gang rape was highly implausible. Suppose that cherry-picked statistics from a few unrepresentative studies were clearly masking an extraordinary decline in rape rates nationwide over the past few decades. Suppose the best available evidence suggested that campuses were, on the whole, safer for women than other environments. Suppose that campus sexual assaults were largely the work of a few sociopaths and nearly always the result of alcohol-induced incapacitation.
Wouldn’t the supposed solution to the campus rape crisis look markedly different?

Please read the whole thing, but you get the basic point: What we have here is a conflict between (a) known facts about rape on college and university campuses, and (b) controversial and tendentious claims about campus rape made by feminist ideologues.

“The problem is [Erdely] found a story that was embellished. It didn’t hold up.”
— Rolling Stone staffer, quoted in the New York Observer

“According to Got News, Jackie Coakley has misled several students at her high school and college about her sexual history, suggesting she may have completely fabricated rape stories and sexual abuse within her past relationships with men.”
— Benjamin Simon, Inquisitor

Here’s the thing: We don’t know what we don’t know.

That is to say, drunk college kids — and massive alcohol consumption is nearly always involved in these incidents — are unreliable narrators about what they did while they were drunk. The incessant demand of feminists that we must “believe the victims” requires us to be clairvoyant, to read the minds of two drunk teenagers and to witness (with our extra-sensory perception) the scene in a darkened dorm room where a sexual encounter occurred to which the only actual witnesses were the drunk teenagers themselves.

Indisputable evidence is generally lacking in these cases, and the testimony of the accused and accuser are all we have to evaluate. What happens is that we make what we call “common sense” judgments. Alas, many people’s version of “common sense” is heavily influenced by feminist rhetoric that depicts all males as sexual oppressors, which requires the rest of us to reply, “No, you’re crazy.”

Is Jackie Coakley the source for Rolling Stone‘s story? Did the incident described in that story actually happen? We don’t know.

It is not “rape culture” to say we don’t know what happened, and it is not ethical journalism to report as fact things you don’t know.

Chuck Johnson says that Jackie Coakley is Rolling Stone‘s source, and that she has been a feminist activist since high school. It is now the job of reporters to investigate and discover as many of the facts as can be discovered about this story, in an effort to determine how it was that Rolling Stone got suckered into this journalistic catastrophe.

Prediction: Within a week, we will see Rolling Stone‘s source being interviewed on a major network TV program.

 





 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism, Media Bias, Sex

Comments

99 Responses to “The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal”

  1. Fail Burton
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:04 pm

    “Thou shall not offend the sandwich-makers.”

    Is it possible Jackie saw 7 guys wearing shirts like that woman-hating comet-landing scientist and became startled, forgot how to breathe, fainted and fell though a plate glass window onto an exploding bomb 49 stories below and then bounced in front of a sandwich truck that ran her over in a fit of sandwich irony?

  2. Adobe_Walls
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:06 pm

    I sit corrected.

  3. Fail Burton
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:09 pm

    She should play the part of Jackie O when she was raped by the Japanese army when JFK was off attacking rape culture destroyers in Blackett Strait. Statistics prove that happened because 100 out of 100 First Ladies are raped like Nanking, now renamed Trigger Warning City.

  4. jrp
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:25 pm

    That description is very similar to the better documented Marquette basketball group sexual assault in October 2011. Erdely may have literally whitewashed this case to avoid a black on white campus rape epidemic narrative.

  5. Quartermaster
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:26 pm

    Funny. Not even God will send someone to hell for someone else’s sin. I don’t care if my great-great-grandpappy was Captain Kidd. I don’t hang for what Kidd did, but would hang if I did such things myself.
    It’s truly strange that Augustine’s view of original sin has been adopted by the left.

  6. Watcher’s Council Nominations – ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ Edition | Nice Deb
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:28 pm

    […] Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  7. Quartermaster
    December 10th, 2014 @ 1:31 pm

    You’re just making a virtue of necessity. You’re too old to go chasing tail anyway. 🙂

  8. Dana
    December 10th, 2014 @ 2:28 pm

    They’re white, even and straight. She might have needed braces when she was younger for all I know, or she might just have been lucky that way.

  9. K-Bob
    December 10th, 2014 @ 3:53 pm

    So I’ll have to denounce myself, I guess.

    Social Justice is hard!

  10. K-Bob
    December 10th, 2014 @ 4:13 pm

    Heh. Unless it’s a typical, FreeRepubic-style, copy-and-paste job. Some of those can really tax the old scroll bar.

  11. RKae
    December 10th, 2014 @ 5:29 pm

    Yeah, I had a whole massive thing planned, but it was past my bedtime and I also didn’t want to be accused of basically posting an editorial column.

    I should’ve put the rings in there, though! Damn it! You’re right.

  12. JeffWeimer
    December 10th, 2014 @ 5:32 pm

    Oh no worries. I’m just here to riff on your tune. 🙂

  13. koam
    December 10th, 2014 @ 6:01 pm

    Note To Robert: Trying to read this blog on my Android tablet (Google Nexus 7) in Chrome is not possible. The blog page appears for a few seconds before a new page of ads appears. If I close the ads, the blog disappears. I can read it on Chrome on my Android phone and on Chrome on Windows 7 PC. But something is making your blog unreadable from my tablet (which is a mainstream tablet with standard software, used by millions).

  14. Glenn
    December 10th, 2014 @ 6:03 pm

    Been there, done that. 50 years ago. Wouldn’t change a thing

  15. Art Deco
    December 10th, 2014 @ 6:47 pm

    You’ve forgotten Lillian Carter’s definition-by-example of the ‘white lie’ (“You remember when you came to the door and I said I was glad to see you?”). If it’s a true ‘white lie’, scarcely any deception is achieved or intended and scarcely any harm is done. That does not describe the repellant Miss Dunham’s activities.

  16. Watcher’s Council Nominations | www.independentsentinel.com
    December 10th, 2014 @ 6:58 pm

    […] Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  17. Poor Little White Boy
    December 10th, 2014 @ 6:59 pm

    And make Conservatives stop making me feel guilty for having an abortion rallys.

  18. trangbang68
    December 10th, 2014 @ 7:02 pm

    Weird story. You have a comely lass who could find a good dude, get married, have some babies, live a sane life.
    She instead let’s a gaggle of fat dykes turn her into a sociopathic liar for the “cause” Strange world we live in.

  19. Poor Little White Boy
    December 10th, 2014 @ 7:03 pm

    And her female black friends were too busy talking sass and getting their hair did to provide her with any assistance.

  20. koam
    December 10th, 2014 @ 10:05 pm

    Uh, Jackie not only wasn’t raped. She didn’t go to a frat house. She didn’t go on a date. There were no 9 guys or 7 or 5 or even 1. She invented the guy to make a boy jealous. Sick twist CATFISHED herself.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/u-va-students-challenge-rolling-stone-account-of-attack/2014/12/10/ef345e42-7fcb-11e4-81fd-8c4814dfa9d7_story.html?hpid=z1

  21. NCMountainGirl
    December 10th, 2014 @ 10:16 pm

    She’ less an activist than she is an over imaginative attention seeker. If something traumatized her it was someone catching on to her games as she catfished herself to try an make a male classmate she had a crush on jealous.

    Something tells me the self awareness in this one is such that being called a rude but entirely accurate name would cause her to go into hysteria. Might she then use that to make a further play for her classmate’s affections? Once the word rape was used and the story got out she had to keep spinning the lies.

  22. Casually Observant
    December 10th, 2014 @ 10:35 pm

    Important to note, Jackie told the same story to victim advocates before Erdely or Rolling Stone entered the picture…..looks like two storms looking to collide.

  23. theoldsargesays
    December 11th, 2014 @ 12:36 am

    Well actually that very thing might have happened a couple of times last night in South Central…just saying.
    But if someone wrote it up like that then no.

  24. theoldsargesays
    December 11th, 2014 @ 12:43 am

    Nexus 7 (2013)?

  25. Watcher of Weasels » Our Weasel Of The Week!!
    December 11th, 2014 @ 4:07 am

    […] Some ‘reporter’ goes victim shopping at different campuses until she gets her paws on just the right person to build a Rolling Stone story around, lil’ Jackie Coakley, a long time radical feminist […]

  26. Our Weasel Of The Week!! | Virginia Right!
    December 11th, 2014 @ 8:07 am

    […] Some ‘reporter’ goes victim shopping at different campuses until she gets her paws on just the right person to build a Rolling Stone story around, lil’ Jackie Coakley, a long time radical feminist […]

  27. koam
    December 11th, 2014 @ 9:55 am

    Nexus 7 2012 Android 4.4.4 updated Chrome updated

  28. Our Weasel of the Week!! – 12/11/14 | therightplanet.com
    December 11th, 2014 @ 10:03 am

    […] of stuff. Some ‘reporter’ goes victim shopping at different campuses until she gets her paws on just the right person to build a Rolling Stone story around, lil’ Jackie Coakley, a long time radical feminist wannabe […]

  29. ThomasD
    December 11th, 2014 @ 11:24 am

    Makes sense, given that the original “Kent State moment” was likewise an orchestrated escalation of violence intended to generate a violent response.

    i.e. Manufactured.

  30. PeterP
    December 11th, 2014 @ 11:54 am

    Lots of bad things “might have” happened. We need evidence because this is not Nazi Germany.

  31. Our Weasel Of The Week!! | Nice Deb
    December 11th, 2014 @ 1:08 pm

    […] Some ‘reporter’ goes victim shopping at different campuses until she gets her paws on just the right person to build a Rolling Stone story around, lil’ Jackie Coakley, a long time radical feminist […]

  32. Our Weasel Of The Week!! – 12/11/14 | NoisyRoom.net
    December 11th, 2014 @ 2:01 pm

    […] of stuff. Some ‘reporter’ goes victim shopping at different campuses until she gets her paws on just the right person to build a Rolling Stone story around, lil’ Jackie Coakley, a long time radical feminist wannabe […]

  33. bananaslugsrule
    December 12th, 2014 @ 3:41 am

    “Chuck Johnson says that Jackie Coakley is Rolling Stone‘s source, and that she has been a feminist activist since high school. ”

    If you had actually read the article claiming that she was a “feminist activist” in high school, you would’ve noticed that she simply helped to organize a campaign against DRUNK DRIVING back then. That’s the full extent of her high school activism as far as we know. You’re no better than Rolling Stone – you state things as facts without even bothering to check for accuracy. http://gotnews.com/jackie-coakley-center-uvahoax-student-activist-high-school/

  34. The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results | Virginia Right!
    December 12th, 2014 @ 9:00 am

    […] place *t* with 1 vote –The Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  35. The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 12/12/14 | NoisyRoom.net
    December 12th, 2014 @ 10:30 am

    […] place *t* with 1 vote – The Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  36. Trevor Loudon's New Zeal Blog » The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results – 12/12/14
    December 12th, 2014 @ 10:32 am

    […] place *t* with 1 vote – The Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  37. The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results | Nice Deb
    December 12th, 2014 @ 10:39 am

    […] place *t* with 1 vote –The Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  38. Abe Loxman
    December 12th, 2014 @ 7:29 pm

    Rubin-Erdely: militant jewess feminist doesn’t like WASPy fratty UVA culture

  39. The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results | therightplanet.com
    December 12th, 2014 @ 10:04 pm

    […] place *t* with 1 vote –The Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  40. Watcher’s Council Winners! | www.independentsentinel.com
    December 12th, 2014 @ 10:42 pm

    […] place *t* with 1 vote –The Other McCain – The Rape of Credibility: Feminism’s Agenda and the Jackie Coakley Scandal submitted by The […]

  41. John Narayan
    December 12th, 2014 @ 11:50 pm

    Gotta love that white female privilege.

  42. John Narayan
    December 12th, 2014 @ 11:52 pm

    This is from the Crystal Gail Magnum school of feminism.

  43. theoldsargesays
    December 13th, 2014 @ 12:48 am

    It’s the tablet.
    Mine is a 2013 and for the better part of two years I’ve dealt with random reboots while in Chrome(among other things).

    Try downloading the newest update…lollipop 5.0.1….and do a factory reset.
    I did and mine has been flawless for the first time ever.

  44. theoldsargesays
    December 13th, 2014 @ 12:54 am

    Zoom……….

  45. robertstacymccain
    December 13th, 2014 @ 9:32 am

    1. I do not like the reference to her as “jewess.”

    2. It nevertheless has been observed that some Jewish leftists seem to act on motives of resentment based in their perception of being excluded. The effects of this sense of alienation has been remarked by many Jewish writers, and we can see it most clearly in extreme examples such as Max Blumenthal, the anti-Zionist Jew.

    A healthy self-confidence, a sense of security about one’s own ethnic heritage, is important to young people’s identity formation. When this process of forming a sense of one’s self is disturbed or misdirected, the result is always bad.

    Rational men must always be willing to pause and examine our own beliefs, to compare our perceptions to known facts, to incorporate into our belief system new information previously unknown to us. An inability to do so will cause mental stultification or madness.

  46. Jonathan Mitchell
    December 13th, 2014 @ 6:05 pm

    One of the most nauseating aspects of this controversy is the comment-scrubbing that has now become routine at every site carrying a story about Jackie, from The Guardian to Politico. Say whatever you like about politics, health care, war or the environment, but if you so much as type “I’m not too sure about Jackie’s credibility”, either your comment will be awaiting moderation for the next ten years or–if you happen to express such a sentiment at a site like AlterNet–your account will simply be deleted. That’s the symptom of a sick culture that’s growing in on itself like an ugly yellow toenail.

  47. WoW!! - Citizens News
    December 14th, 2014 @ 5:48 pm

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  48. FMJRA 2.0: Temple Of Love : The Other McCain
    December 14th, 2014 @ 6:05 pm

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  49. Admiral General III
    December 15th, 2014 @ 1:39 am

    The victim is always… reasonable?