Sorry, @AsheSchow: ‘Due Process’ IS a Left-Right Issue — and Here’s Why

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Ashe Schow is a brilliant young journalist, and one of the few reporters who have been steadily covering the attempt by feminists to criminalize heterosexuality on college campuses. The feminist agenda is so insane and extreme, that when I try to explain what is being taught in university Women’s Studies programs — the academic Feminist-Industrial Complex — most people quite literally cannot believe it. (See “Feminists Against Heterosexuality” and “Introduction to Feminist Theory” among other recent entries in the Sex Trouble series.) Yet each day brings further confirmation. There is a deliberate campaign to incentivize rape accusations at America’s colleges and universities by requiring mandatory “training” at orientation that will have the effect of terrorizing male students into avoiding all contact with females on campus.

University administrators are under intense pressure from federal authorities to punish male students, to produce statistical evidence that they are implementing the crackdown demanded by feminists. This will lead to a zero-tolerance approach in which every male-female encounter on campus is fraught with risk. Any male student who so much as speaks to a woman could be accused of harassment. Officials are actually bragging about their “success” in encouraging rape accusations, which increased 400 percent in a single year at the University of Wisconsin.

Ashe Schow explains how the rights of the accused are systematically violated under the policies mandated by federal bureaucrats:

When a student is accused of sexual assault on a college campus, they’re often given vague descriptions of the charge against them — which may have occurred years earlier. They’re forced to come up with a defense within days, told not to talk to anyone about the allegation (making mounting a defense nearly impossible) and not allowed to have an attorney speak on their behalf.
They face a system that has been shifted against them, where an accusation is all that’s needed to brand them a rapist for life and kick them out of school. There is no due process in campus hearings — no rules of evidence, cross-examination or right to be represented by an attorney. They’re not even told that anything said in the hearing can and will be used against them in a court of law.

Feminists demanded these policies, the Obama administration implemented these policies, and Hillary Clinton is planning a campaign for president in which any Republican who criticizes these policies will be accused of being “pro-rape.” This is a Feminist/Democrat/Media convergence we have seen before, during the Clarence Thomas hearings, again during the Lewinsky scandal (when feminists put on their “presidential knee pads” to defend Bill Clinton) and in 2012, when the “War on Women” meme helped Obama get re-elected with the largest “gender gap” in Gallup poll history. The non-existent “campus rape epidemic” — a vicious lie created with Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions — is a crucial element in a shameless partisan political operation intended to elect Hillary Clinton to the White House.

Yet for some reason, Ashe Schow wants to pretend otherwise:

Due process for campus sexual
assault is not a left/right issue
Sexual assault is a serious issue that should be dealt with seriously. But the proposed solution for this problem on college campuses creates an entirely new problem. It eviscerates due process for accused students in the name of helping accusers.
The fight over campus sexual assault and due process has somehow devolved into a Republican vs. Democrat issue. The most vocal supporters of draconian sexual assault policies are Democrats like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Claire McCaskill of Missouri. There are several prominent Republicans on a Senate bill to curb sexual assault, but none have made a name for themselves as a proponent.
Meanwhile, the print and online commentary voices defending due process rights for the accused have been mostly right-leaning. The only television voice on the issue of due process has been Fox News.
There have been exceptions to this, but unfortunately, the issue has become a way for political opponents to score points against each other. Those who favor due process are accused by liberals of being “rape apologists,” while those who favor the accusers are excoriated by right-leaning media.
That sentiment has muddied the issue. Due process used to be deeply important to liberals. Toughness on crime was more commonly associated with Republicans. Now the tables have turned and it makes no sense.
Due process should concern everyone. So should sexual assault. . . .
It shouldn’t be up to Republicans to stand up for due process or up to Democrats to stand up for victims. Both sides should be working toward the truth in each case.

You can read the whole thing. The problem is that to speak of what should be — to advocate an ideal — is a waste of time in the current environment where Democrats have manufactured a phony issue and are exploiting it for partisan gains. Democrats have created this issue and their allies in academia and the media are coordinating with Democrats to control the “rape culture” narrative in order to get more votes for Democrats. It is that simple, and anyone who supports Democrats is therefore supporting the policies that have stripped male students of due process rights. Ashe Schow writes:

In today’s climate, it is impossible to stand up for someone wrongly accused without being attacked. Once someone is labeled a “rapist” — even without evidence — he apparently forfeits his right to exist and must be expelled and have his life and future ruined.

Ruining the lives of male students is the primary goal of feminists, but the wrongly accused male students are just collateral damage to Democrats, for whom Hillary Clinton’s election is the larger objective.

To speak of “truth” to these people is both futile and misleading.

They don’t care about truth. They only care about power.

If you care about truth, if you care about the real lives of real human beings, you cannot be a feminist, nor can you be a Democrat, and it’s time we stop trying to sugar-coat that reality. We must stop pretending that such mythical creatures as “honest Democrats” and “moderate feminists” actually exist in the real world. Believing in “honest Democrats” is like believing in the Tooth Fairy and “moderate feminism” is either an oxymoron or a pointless nostalgia. Even if we were to stipulate that “moderate feminists” once existed (which I don’t), they were a phenomenon of a bygone era who have no relevance in the 21st century when, for example, the Feminist Majority Foundation employs a self-described “raging lesbian feminist” as its communications director and when Women’s Studies professors denounce Disney cartoons as being “heteronormative.” One could assemble a convention of every “honest Democrat” and “moderate feminist” in America and maybe they would fill a corner booth at Denny’s. Maybe.

Democrats have chosen the college campus as their battleground and have chosen “rape culture” as an issue because Democrats know that America’s institutions of higher education are staffed almost entirely by Democrats. Thus controlling the terrain on which they intend to fight this political battle, Democrats know they can rely on university officials to assist them, in the same way Democrats rely on the liberal media to promote their dishonest propaganda. (Need I remind you how Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Emily Renda and Catherine Lhamon collaborated in Rolling Stone‘s UVA rape hoax?) We cannot defeat these liars if we are afraid to tell the truth about who they are, what they do and why they do it. Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It, and Democrats are the Party of Evil Liars and Fools.

The truth is not always a pleasant thing to hear, nor should anyone expect to become popular by speaking the truth in an age where deceit, perversion and hypocrisy have become so prevalent. I would like to think there are at least some female college students who are honest and responsible adults, but no male college student can be safe in that assumption. Paul Nungesser thought Emma Sulkowicz was his friend, and she was only too willing to encourage him in that belief, so long as she harbored the illusion that she could make him fall in love with her. Once that illusion was dispelled — once Sulkowicz realized that her “friends-with-benefits” hookups with Nungesser were emotionally meaningless to him — her love turned to hate, and hate inspired a plan for revenge, a conspiracy in which other feminists at Columbia University were quite willing to participate. Nungesser was blindsided by Sulkowicz’s false accusation. “My mother raised me as a feminist,” he told the New York Times, a fact his mother verified in an interview with Cathy Young of the Daily Beast. Yet the kind of “equality” Nungesser believed in — where a young adult woman can have casual sex with a male friend and expect nothing more — proved to be a cruel deception. Promiscuous women are often emotionally unstable, their low self-esteem expressed in a desperate search for male approval. The same needy impulses that inspire this sexual depravity, however, can also be manifested as a generalized rage toward men (yes, all men) whom the psychologically damaged woman blames for her own feelings of worthlessness.

“In my clinical work, I find that a promiscuous individual suffers from low self-esteem and feels that sex is a way to get attention and to feel noticed.”
— Dr. Seth Myers

“A person with a borderline personality disorder often experiences a repetitive pattern of disorganization and instability in self-image, mood, behavior and close personal relationships. . . . The person may manipulate others and often has difficulty with trusting others. There is also emotional instability with marked and frequent shifts to an empty lonely depression or to irritability and anxiety.”
— Richard J. Corelli, M.D.

Why should a woman like Emma Sulkowicz be just another “pump-and-dump” — used and discarded — when by claiming to be a victim of rape, she can be celebrated as a heroic “survivor”? Feminists praise her “courage” and, in doing so, have made Emma Sulkowicz a role model whom they encourage others to emulate. We can therefore expect a proliferation of copycats, and any male student who thinks he can safely engage in heterosexual behavior on campus is at risk of a brutal shock when he finds himself accused of “harassment” or “sexual assault.” Even when the female student initiates a relationship and actively pursues sex with a male student — as was evidently the case with Emma Sulkowicz — she may subsequently decide that she has been a victim, and the male who is falsely accused of rape will discover he has no due process rights in the campus disciplinary procedures mandated by federal authorities.

Contrary to what anyone might say, this is a Left-Right issue, because this phony crisis was deliberately created by the Left in order to advance the feminist agenda and elect Democrats. We must tell the truth, no matter what penalty we pay for telling the truth. Whatever we may lose for the sake of truth, no good can be gained by cooperating with liars.

“Truth is great, and will prevail if left to herself. … [Truth] is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”
— Thomas Jefferson, “Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom,” 1786





 

59 comments

  2. “The ONLY way male college students can now be 100% safe from false rape accusations is to AVOID ALL CONTACT WITH FEMALE STUDENTS.”

    Even that may not be sufficient. As long as there is some period of time in which a male student and female student are both unaccounted for without indisputable proof of an alibi, the male student could conceivably be accused, even if he has never met the female student in question.

  3. I’ve got twin 22-year-old sons. Neither of them attends college. One is married to a college girl, the other is dating a college girl. In 2015, the only safe way a guy can be involved with college girls is DON’T GO TO COLLEGE.

  5. This is just one more fruit of coalition politics. The kingmakers in the Democrat Party are aware that their endorsement of this blatantly discriminatory and illegal policy will ultimately cost them. What they fear is that by denying this sop to the feminist component of their coalition, they will lose any hope of a majority in 2016.

    Coalitions formed of disparate elements with divergent objectives can only be held together by pandering. Principled politics doesn’t have that problem…so where are the principled politicians of our time. Where is the party that’s right for them?

  6. We already know feminism is intrinsically linked with lesbianism. Perhaps rape culture is yet another way to encourage male homosexuality. I know of plenty of homosexuals who have chosen that lifestyle as a consequence of their difficulty in dealing with women.

  7. There are many self-described “feminists” who have sons. The pendulum will swing back when their sons lives are ruined.

  8. You have decent people in the Democratic Party. They fall into two piles: people not very invested in civic life who have some dispositions and go vote every couple of years or so and that’s it; people who are very old, like Nat Hentoff. As far as I’ve been able to see in fora like this, Democratic primary voters are nearly uniform in their lack of objection to anything this administration has done and will trot out the most absurd talking points. They’ll even stick up for Lois Lerner.

    There are some public commentators identified with the Democratic Party who are not godawful, but they tend to be avocational dissidents (RM Kaus, KC Johnson), to be fairly old (Richard Cohen). There’s Harold Pollack, I guess, but Pollack’s just an amiable wonk. I doubt he would ever utter a criticism of the Administration other than to say they’d been too timid about implementing his preferred schemes.

    A history buff I’m acquainted with has said there are some troubling parallels between our current situation and the political culture of Spain ca. 1933. We’re facing ISIS and China, we cannot afford to be shooting each other.

  9. I know of plenty of homosexuals who have chosen that lifestyle as a consequence of their difficulty in dealing with women.

    I think problems with women are kind of a pre-requisite.

  10. I was born and raised a Democrat and remained so until I was in my mid-30s (the first two years of the Clinton administration) when a series of experiences — not a single “Road to Damascus” moment — awoke me to the fact that DEMOCRATS HAD BEEN LYING TO ME THE WHOLE TIME.

    The Democrat economic agenda is not about “helping the little guy.” The Democrat economic agenda is about electing more Democrats. Once you figure out they’re lying about economics, you realize they’re lying about everything else, too.

  11. It’ll be lied about or buried by the news media so will cost the Democratic Party very little.

  12. I turn on the News Hour the other night and Gwen Ifill has three people on to discuss urban problems. One is the incompetent mayor of Baltimore. One is some other Democratic Party inner-city mayor, and one is the director of some grant-money vent pipe which promotes the idea that ‘violence’ is a ‘public health problem’. What happened here? Back in the day, the signature of the MacNeill-Lehrer Report was teams of two or three opponents politely arguing with each other for a half-hour, moderated by one or the other. Is it:

    1. Ifill’s bookers are incompetent and she only found out too late in the preparation of the broadcast.

    2. Ifill herself is too dull to realize her selection of guests does not actually cover the waterfront.

    or

    3. It’s all fake.

  13. The most capable critics of feminism, ca. 1971 were Joan Didion (who had just one child, a daughter) and Midge Decter, who had 3 daughters and one son and whose son was unpromising material for the sort of trouble Paul Nungesser got into).

  14. “Ellen Sulkowicz says she was raped.
    Hillary Clinton says she was never subpoenaed.
    Women never lie.”

    KABOOM!!! Awesome!!

  15. As I’ve mentioned before, that actually happened to me 20ish years ago. I won’t rehash the details, but it definitely helped that she didn’t know that I was a party animal. She probably assumed that I would’ve been studying alone or asleep at the date and time that she picked out of the air, but I was actually in the living room of an apartment with one or two dozen of my dearest acquaintances.

    However, things are much worse now, post-Dear Colleague. I don’t know if even that would be enough any more.

  16. I agree that the big pusch in this is coming from the left, but disagree that the saviour is the conservative right.
    This garbage (demonising the male/maleness to shift power & money to women/left) has been going on on for decades & the conservative right has done very little to counter it. In fact they have colluded in it.
    Where were they when family courts began taking mens money & kids & handing it to women? Where have they been while the DV industry has used the exact same playbook to strip men of their due process rights in court? eg. Apprehended Violences Orders on a woman’s word, court proceedings without notifying the man.
    I agree that the truth is FINALLY being laid bare by conservative/right CITIZEN bloggers etc. But the traditional conservative/right (the ones in power) still have their heads where the sun don’t shine & in many, many cases still collude with the fems by giving money, resources & air-time to their BS causes.
    The answer isn’t withthe Rep Party or in my case the Australian Liberals because they are still throwing men to the lions to placate the fems.

  18. “I agree that the big pusch in this is coming from the left, but disagree that the saviour is the conservative right.”

    Here’s my point: You can’t beat something with nothing. Feminism is a movement of the Left, and anyone who opposes feminism will by necessity find their strongest allies on the Right. If you study polling, you discover that the Left in the modern era relies on female votes for its political power — the “gender gap” was decisively in Obama’s favor — and by ginning up feminist sentiment, the Left augments its power. Defeat the Left, and you diminish feminism’s power.

  19. We must stop pretending that such mythical creatures as “honest Democrats” and “moderate feminists” actually exist in the real world.

    Not true. Neither group gets the headlines or really wants the attention. That’s understandable since the radicals want to destroy all those who would dare dissent. But honest democrats and moderate feminists are out there. You could learn something from talking to them, I know I have.

    Just as I have learned things here on this site.

  20. Agreed, it will diminish the fems but won’t destroy them.
    The conservative/right base needs to wrest control from the corrupt, elite usurpers & return the movement to its base. That has much more chance of DESTROYING the fems & all the other left wing BS. eg. their absolute power in academia & media.

  21. But you are correct that the only hope we have ATM is the current conservative/right.
    There is light at the end though, because the newer conservative/right – Truth Revolt, Breitbart, yourself & many others are seeing the truth & broadcasting it.

  22. For years I was involved in/with the Democratic party–membership card and everything. Beginning in the late ’80s there was a coordinated effort to oust “moderate” members of the Democratic party. The pro-life, pro-2nd Amendment, pro-blue collar American worker types were purged. I’ve seen it happen. I’ve had Democrat politicians swear to defend the sanctity of life to my face, only to suddenly change when the national party told them they would be destroyed. I have too many stories over two decades of observation of the internal workings to think that there are any “honest” people in power within the Democratic Party.

    As for “moderate” feminists, they are those who simply refuse to acknowledge where Feminism is today and who is in charge. If such exist, they are irrelevant because they are neither attempting to rein in contemporary Feminism’s excesses or they are so marginalized as to be invisible.

  23. Pardon, but if I went by your logic, I would dismiss all the Republicans who do not follow the leadership’s dictates.

    I will certainly agree that the Republican leadership is a major part of the problem.

    But I haven’t given up on the average person yet. Whatever their sexuality or politics.

    In fact, I’m counting on them.

  25. Party? Animal? : )
    Wait, not a big enough grin. 😀

    I didn’t see that coming…I had just assumed you were the quiet, bookish type in your youth. I mean, you were a math major, after all!

    I was just going to make a joke about “quiet and bookish like me”, but I really couldn’t keep a straight face.

  26. …this blatantly discriminatory and illegal policy will ultimately cost them.

    That would be true if we didn’t live in Superman Bizarro World.

  28. It’s a helluva statement on American women that this sort of BS will get them to the polls to vote (d).

  29. Democrat=feminist. What they’re doing to campus has already been done in the military. Ask your Son Robert.

    The initial lie of 1 in 4 raped @campus came in the late 80’s from Gloria Steinem n Mary P Koss.

    21yrs of VAWA needs to be undone. Came out of Bidens office, signed by Clinton in 94.

    If Andrea Dworkin advocated for VAWA n was surprised by the support it was getting, you know this law needs to be repealed. It’s not about protecting women, it’s about destroying men.

  30. I’m a woman, and this is why women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. I’m sorry to say. I personally vote the closest thing to a Constitutional conservative that I can.

  31. I like Ashe, but yes, she’s naïve. The most frustrating part is when other conservatives don’t seem to “get” the left and what motivates them. It’s a failure of imagination, and it’s dangerous.

  32. There is a fundamental difference in character between the two bases. The Republican base is substantially up in arms about their leadership. That’s what the Tea Party is.
    There is no analogue on the left. Even the Occupy movement was a creature of the establishment left, not an opposition group. Occupy was probably a pseudo-astroturf group set up by Soros, et. al.
    The Democrat base is not about to throw out their leadership. The only ones they are dissatisfied with are the insufficiently socialist.

  33. She’s doing great work as a reporter, and she is correct that this shouldn’t be a political issue, but politics is the only reason the issue exists.

    RAPE IS NOT AN ‘EPIDEMIC’ on college campuses. No matter how many times feminists repeat that lie, it’s still a lie. Every indication is that rape has been a more or less continuous decline for more than 20 years. What feminists are trying to do is to change the definition of rape by changing the definition of consent, and this will only produce more confusion.

  34. Neo-neocon has written up her “change” story and brings to light others. Have you ever written how you changed?
    That’s a tale worth hearing.

  35. Ifill is a hack, and always has been. Her slobbering support of Obama is well-documented. I don’t know if Judy Woodruff went along with the show’s direction, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
    When Ifill and Woodruff took over, things took a sharp downturn. Now, I can barely stand to watch the News Hour.

  39. I believe that it is the conservatarians that will turn the tide by exposing the authoritarianism of the left establishment (socialists) and base (brownskirts). Even left-libertarians — real civil libertarians, not the civil rightists of today’s ACLU — are horrified by SJWs, and that’s where GamerGate came from.

  40. In that case, if me and Mr. DM ever make it out your way, I’ll pick up a bottle of expensive Scotch (which I HAVE to drink, by law, on account of my family immigrating from Scotland), and we can talk about everyone else here behind their backs. Or else complain about the government. Or reminisce about our mathematical glory days, which is likely to be a short conversation, lolz!

  42. Yes I agree with that DF. But true libertarians are small gov, free market & non nanny-state. The only hope of having a gov with these beliefs is Rep in US & Liberal here.
    But it needs to be a grass roots Rep gov, which would necessarily need true libertarians at its base. It would need to disassociate from the current Rep elite who are as much an enemy as the leftoids.

  44. You’re both right. Ashe is correct, but yes, she’s young and as a result, has much to learn. I totally give her props for critical thinking, which we don’t often see these days.

    Except here, lolz.

  45. Blogos.org is fixing to publish my latest article about rationalization. When they do, I’ll link you, because I think it totally applies. It’s my pissiest article yet, and I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to get your feedback! Or anybody’s feedback, because I think edgy = provocative!

    p.s. I have complained about writing “happy bunny” articles, and they have agreed to start publishing my “edgier” content, so I’m pretty excited – like, really excited – about that!

  46. Most people want to give the benefit of the doubt, as Ashe does. After 20 years of experience with the left though, you have seen all you need to and can just assume they’re lying (you will be correct 95% of the time). Those people without that benefit of experience then look at you as if you’re a kook.
    Teaching the next generation is always a frustrating task, like reinventing the wheel.

  47. I’ve heard the “something with nothing” statement for years, and it’s quite silly. The left offers less than nothing, yet they’ve been rolling this country for years.

  48. And maybe the honest Democrats and the moderate feminists aren’t playing the same “winner take all” game and the headline grabbers.

    Maybe they want “live and let live.”

    Maybe when “their side” can’t tolerate dissent officially, it’s time to find the people you can work with instead of the labels to attack.

  49. OMG! I can’t believe you had the male effrontery to quote Thomas Jefferson! I guess you don’t know or don’t care that he was a serial rapist (and slaveholder–we haven’t decided which is worse).

  50. You’re sure right about it being frustrating, because half the time they don’t listen and then have to learn the hard way.

    Then there’s always some who have to water down their point, in order to be peacemakers or appeasers. I work in a marketing department now, more’s the pity for me, and they do this all the time. They’re so concerned about fairness and people’s feelings.

    I admit I could be more compassionate, but they don’t know what to think when I say things like “You’re an idiot, and you’re not allowed to talk to me anymore.”

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