The Other McCain

When an event last week hosted by College Republicans at the University of Massachusetts was disrupted by a Hampshire College student named Cora Segal (see “What #TrigglyPuff Means”), the point-and-laugh reaction by conservatives was predictable. For more than two years, I have been urging conservatives to begin Taking Feminism Seriously. When I was assigned to cover the DC SlutWalk protest for The America Spectator in August 2013, I saw first-hand and at close range the kind of delusional madness that has taken hold in the minds of young women under the influence of so-called Third Wave feminism. While it can be argued that Second Wave feminism (i.e., the radical Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and ’70s) was similarly insane, Third Wave feminism has taken this lunacy beyond every hitherto imaginable limit. Young feminists have sailed into uncharted waters of craziness in those regions of the ancient maps marked “Here Be Dragons.”

The effect of this insanity that has gained such frightening influence was illustrated by the recent activities of Jennie Chenkin, a student at Hampshire College and friend of Cora Segal who participated in the April 25 protests at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Hampshire College is part of the Five College Consortium, along with Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College and UMass Amherst:

Five Colleges, Incorporated is a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1965 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions, which include four private, liberal arts colleges and the Amherst campus of the state university. The consortium is an outgrowth of a highly successful collaboration in the 1950s among Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which resulted in the founding of a fifth institution, Hampshire College, in 1970. . . .
Their proximity to one another in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts favors Five College collaboration, as does their commitment to the liberal arts and to undergraduate education.

Let me point out something that should be obvious here:

• Smith College, all-female, 2,600 students, tuition $46,288
• Mount Holyoke, all-female, 2,200 students, tuition $43,886
• Amherst College, coed, 1,800 students, tuition $50,562
• Hampshire College, coed, 1,400 students, tuition $48,065
• UMass-Amherst, coed, 21,800 students, tuition $14,356

Taxpayer-supported UMass, you see, accounts for 73% of enrollment in this “consortium,” and rich kids at the high-tuition elite private schools benefit from a hidden state subsidy through this “collaboration.” UMass is the center of gravity among these Five Colleges, and you can bet that the spoiled brats spending Daddy’s money to attend Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Hampshire look down their snooty noses at the grubby proles who go to UMass. Whereas a poor-but-smart kid goes to UMass hoping to acquire an education that will enable him to get a good job and a middle-class income, the daughters of privilege like Jennie Chenkin spend $48,065 a year to attend Hampshire College.

"Cisheteropatriarchy"? No, ma'am.
You are living in Your Own Private Idaho. https://t.co/ZJw8Ny5cUr @Daddy_Warpig pic.twitter.com/YwqKSVz2Yw

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 2, 2016

Jennie Chenkin declares to the world that she is an oppressed victim living in a “white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal society.” This is what Daddy’s money paid for her to learn at Hampshire College, where spewing such pseudo-intellectual jargon is considered a valuable skill.

Thorsten Veblen would have spotted this immediately as an example of conspicuous consumption, the display of high socioeconomic status through ostentatious spending.
The reason you send your daughter to Hampshire College is to show that you can afford to send her there. Money is no object for the parents of these kids. The working-class Mom helping her teenager fill out her FAFSA paperwork and struggling to come up with $14,356 a year for tuition at UMass wants her kid to learn something useful, to become a nurse or a computer programmer or a business manager, to get the kind of education that will qualify them for a good job and allow them to have a higher standard of living. The parents of rich girls like Cora Segal and Jennie Chenkin, by contrast, cannot be bothered with such mundane concerns. Just write a check so their precious princess can go to an expensive private school where their professors teach them how oppressed they are by “cisheteropatriarchy” and they train to become activists for social justice. Whatever the precious princess wants, the precious princess must have, and how dare those hateful UMass College Republicans hurt her precious feelings?

My name is Jennie Chenkin. I am a Hampshire College junior on a pre-law track with a concentration in political theory, carceral studies, and conflict resolution. I am writing this email because I have been harassed mercilessly online following “The Triggering” event and I have reason to believe that UMass Republicans have endorsed this harassment and libel against me.
On Monday night, I attended the event “The Triggering” hosted by UMass Republicans in protest of the panelists they had chosen to bring in to speak on “social justice, feminism, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and more.” My friends and I held up a banner outside the venue that said “content warning: bigotry inside” and we passed out fliers which explained what we believe political correctness stands for. When the panelists came on stage, we booed and heckled and disrupted, because that was what we were there to do. We wanted to send a message that even if the majority of the room agreed with what was being said, there were people in the community who adamantly disagreed, and that we were also allowed to make our voices heard under free speech laws. . . .
On Tuesday morning, I awoke to a notification from Facebook, indicating someone had tagged me in a comment on the event page for “The Triggering.” Someone by the name of Clarence Emerson (who I later learned is actually Aidan Kearney, a UMass alum, sexual predator, and professional bully) had tagged me in his comment with this article attached, referring to me in the comment as “little boy.”
As you can see by reading the blog post, it contains libellous language against me and screenshots of comments I posted on the event page for “The Triggering”. I have been advised by my attorney that both the harassment and the use of my comments are illegal — the use of my comments being an infringement of copyright law as outlined by Facebook, where individuals hold copyright law over everything they post, even comments posted on public pages. Legalities aside, I have now been put in personal danger because Aidan Kearney has demonized me and posted my personal information on a public website which caters to anti-social justice people who hate me and people like me.

You can read the whole thing, but there are several problems here. First, Ms. Chenkin needs to get a better lawyer, because if posting screencaps of what people say on social media is a crime, the prison overcrowding crisis is going to get a whole lot worse very soon. Second, for someone to be complaining about “libel” in the same email where they call someone a “sexual predator” is highly ironic, to say the least. A quick Google search turned up accusations that Aidan Kearney acted quite crudely toward some female Buffalo Bills fans during a 2014 game between the Bills and the New England Patriots. Kearney is a Patriots fan, and if rudely taunting the fans of one’s NFL opponents is a crime, we’re going to need to have a serious discussion about prison overcrowding, OK? No matter how crude Kearney’s (alleged) behavior was, however, calling him a “sexual predator” takes it to a whole ’nother level. You’re going to have to show me an arrest report before I’d use such a term to describe somebody, and even then I’d make sure I included some sort of attribution like “according to the affidavit” and maybe I’d throw an “allegedly” or two into the story for good measure. (There is a reason why Brett Kimberlin lost that defamation suit against me, OK?)

Jennie Chenkin is reckless and irresponsible, which may have something to do with her being arrested last fall in Westfield, New Jersey, for shoplifting and possession of burglary tools. Guess what? Ms. Chenkin considers it harassment to mention her criminal record:

Aidan Kearney has taken it upon himself to publish two more articles about me, each getting progressively more aggressive in content. Most recently, he has made a post about me being arrested in my home state several months ago. Though I take full responsibility for engaging in the action which led to my arrest, this is something I have been very ashamed of and embarrassed about, and until this point I have kept it a very private matter for that reason. I no longer have that luxury and I am worried that this string of harassing and revealing blog posts about me may prevent me from getting a summer job, which I desperately need in order to be able to pay for the last year of my undergraduate education before I go to law school.

Now wait a doggone minute there, Ms. Chenkin! How is it that your Daddy, an eminent professional in Somerset County, N.J., could afford to send his precious princess off to a private school in Massachusetts, but now you’re getting arrested for shoplifting and complaining that you “desperately need” a summer job in order to pay for your senior year of college? And what’s this talk about “law school”? Is there a law school somewhere that has an affirmative action quota for thieves?

Jennie Chenkin stars in "Orange Is the New Social Justice." https://t.co/utR0URHzuT pic.twitter.com/N9u1d4xtkd

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 4, 2016

Since we’re asking questions here, Ms. Chenkin, can you explain to me how, on the one hand, you’re now so hard up for cash to pay your tuition at Hampshire College, and yet on the other hand you can afford the services of a lawyer (“my attorney”) to provide you with advice on copyright law, harassment, defamation and so forth? Also, why does your rambling 2,000-word email to officials at the University of Massachusetts include this irrelevant tangent?

[W]hen I first drafted this email, only the one article about me had been published on the turtleboysports website, which I again acknowledge has no affiliation with UMass and is not under UMass jurisdiction. A few hours later, another blog post had been made about me on the site. A few hours after that, a video featuring my friend — taken and published illegally by Mount Holyoke sophomore and Campus Reform representative Kassy Dillon, who is also being investigated for misconduct during and after the event — was published on Youtube and shared widely throughout the conservative web. This video has been viewed in the hundreds of thousands and has been shared on Twitter by the panelists themselves. It was featured on Fox News. The blog post about my arrest followed and then another blog post, revealing the identity of my friend in the video.

Exactly what do you expect UMass officials to do about this, Ms. Chenkin? You and your friend Cora Segal went to a public event at the University of Massachusetts where you “booed and heckled and disrupted . . . to make our voices heard under free speech laws.” And yet now you, a student at Hampshire College, write to UMass officials to blame the College Republicans (whose event you disrupted) for blog coverage of your activism and — oh, by the way — claiming that video of your protests was “illegally” recorded and uploaded to YouTube. Yet the person who recorded this video was not a UMass student, either, so why are you even bringing it up in your email to UMass officials?

The explanation for all this, I suspect, is that you are crazy, Ms. Chenkin.

Fortunately, Ms. Chenkin, I’ve located an eminent professional in your New Jersey hometown who might help you. He has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Rutgers University, as well as a master’s degree and, in fact, he has been visiting Lecturer at Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work as well as a faculty member at Rutgers University Center of Alcohol Studies. Call it a hunch, Ms. Chenkin, but I think you may already be . . . let’s say, familiar with this eminent professional.

Jennie Chenkin: "Daddy, remember when I said someday I'm going to be famous?"@TurtleBoySports @nero @Daddy_Warpig https://t.co/Dt4os9np95

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 4, 2016

Pardon me for saying this, ma’am, but when you keep spewing threats of legal action against anyone who mentions your name on a blog, I don’t think advice from a lawyer is the kind of professional help you need.

You are wacko, bonkers, deranged, demented, disturbed, off your rocker, a few fries short of a Happy Meal and cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Seek help, Ms. Chenkin.

Ah, yes! "Streisand Effect." Someone should explain this to Jennie Chenkin. @KassyDillon @instapundit @neopeitha https://t.co/qZJQ1Jj5hg

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 4, 2016

Have I mentioned recently that feminists are crazy? Because they are, you know. https://t.co/FPPr9N9LRv #TrigglyPuff pic.twitter.com/ylZ3uRBZIG

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 4, 2016

The phenomenon of #TrigglyPuff — Cora Segal, the angry feminist who disrupted an event at the University of Massachusetts this week — deserves extended analysis, and I’ve got a 4,000-word draft in queue, awaiting the final touches. Spending two days analyzing the social significance of this comedic phenomenon was perhaps too much, but that’s my job. You need someone to totally overthink it? I’m available.

Anyway, while working on that brain-straining endeavor, it dawned on me what a small world radical feminism actually is. Cora Segal became notorious in March 2014 for a “Fat Justice” event at Swarthmore College that I blogged about, and here she is two years later, notorious again.

Some people on Twitter were claiming that Cora Segal was being “doxed” simply because she had been correctly identified. This is a misuse of the term “doxing,” which properly means the publication of otherwise private information — home address, phone number, etc. — of a person in order to make them a target of direct harassment. Having been the target of criminal harassment (a crime that was the subject of federal prosecution), I understand how serious this issue is. “Doxing” is a tactic developed by certain hackers and trolls who, behind the screen of online anonymity, would deliberately violate someone’s privacy in an attempt to ruin their antagonists’ lives. Some people don’t seem to understand what “doxing” is and what it is not. Consider, for example, the case of Deb Fritsch, a former university professor who lost her job after she harassed blogger Jeff Goldstein in 2006. Was it “doxing” to identify Fritsch? No, she was engaged in seriously evil behavior online while employed at a taxpayer-supported public university and, as it subsequently turned out, was so completely crazy she was repeatedly arrested for stalking. (She has a Ph.D. in psychology, ironically enough.) Likewise, identifying Reddit troll “Violentacrez” as Michael Brutsch — “a vile sociopathic monster undeserving of sympathy,” as I called him — was not “doxing.”

Deb Frisch (left); Michael Brutsch (right).

In both of those cases, bad people were doing bad things online and, once they were “patched” (their online persona connected to their actual real-life identity) the negative consequences were predictable. This wasn’t about personal vendettas or political quarrels, and it wasn’t about putting someone’s home address into an IRC channel in a conspiracy to incite some troll to SWAT the targeted person.

Because no one has appointed me Internet Ethics Cop, I don’t waste much time worrying about the nuances of this stuff. It’s a dangerous world, and protecting myself and my friends is about all I can do. We find that feminists claim to be targeted by “harassment” online and everybody in the media rushes to publicize these claims, despite the fact that the media were willing to ignore or excuse very serious harassment when it was directed at Jeff Goldstein and others on the Right whom the media did not consider sympathetic victims. Because of political bias in the media, there is a blatant double standard about such things. Shall we talk about Deranged Cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt? Let’s not . . .

What does this have to do with Cora Segal? Like other trolls, her behavior had been problematic for a long time before she — unexpectedly! — had her Internet Famous (Not in a Good Way) Moment.

We know who Cora Segal is and we know what Cora Segal believes because Cora Segal has told us these things. Cora Segal is an activist, and when an activist goes to a public event and disrupts it by shouting obscenities — “F–k you! . . . Keep your hate speech off this campus!” — her public activism is newsworthy. Identifying her is not “doxing.”

Cora Segal is a feminist and her crusade against “fat phobia” is an expression of radical feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual agenda:

Hostility to “beauty ideology” has been a core theme of feminism since the emergence of the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1960s. Its first major protest occurred in September 1968, when about 100 feminists staged a demonstration at the Miss American pageant, condemning how the contestants “epitomize the roles we are all forced to play as women.” The protesters claimed “women in our society [are] forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously.”
Lesbianism also emerged early as a core theme of the Women’s Liberation movement. . . .
Radical lesbians played key roles in founding Women’s Studies programs at many universities. . . .
So-called “fat-positive feminism” is a movement that “addresses how misogyny and sexism intersect with sizism and anti-fat bias.” While feminists blame “anti-fat bias” on male supremacy, the health risks of obesity are serious, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC): “Obesity is a national epidemic and a major contributor to some of the leading causes of death in the U.S., including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer.”
Obesity is such a serious problem among lesbians that the National Institutes for Health funded a $3 million study to determine why “nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight or obese.”
When that study made headlines in September 2014, Mari Brighe wrote at the lesbian blog Autostraddle that lesbians “tend to be less critical of their bodies than straight women,” because they don’t “suffer the incessant, unreasonable pressure of the male gaze.”

You can read the whole thing. The claim that “sexism,” “misogyny” and “the male gaze” are to blame for “anti-fat bias” is feminism. Is there any feminist who says otherwise? Is there any feminist who does not denounce male preferences as “ludicrous ‘beauty’ standards”? Feminists have written a vast library of books attacking the idea of beauty as a “myth” which they blame on the “misogyny” of patriarchal culture. The feminist argument can be summarized succinctly: Men like beautiful women, and therefore beauty is bad because men are wrong.

FEMIINISM: All social norms and standards are wrong, because patriarchy. pic.twitter.com/bX7iOc0Y02

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) May 1, 2016

Feminism is an ideology of hatred, dishonestly masquerading as “social justice.” Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It. Because feminists cannot defend their hateful beliefs against intelligent criticism, they seek to silence their critics, which is why madness erupts whenever feminists are confronted by the truth.

Feminism Is a Synonym for ‘Shut Up’ https://t.co/dNLLvVzKTR

cc @TheRalphRetort @nero @scrowder #TrigglyPuff #tcot pic.twitter.com/BpJbxy0ALk

— FreeStacy (@Not_RSMcCain) April 29, 2016

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

Please consider buying my book Sex Trouble: Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature, or hit the tip jar, because patriarchy is really just a synonym for “paying the bills.”

UPDATE II: Linked by Gerard Vanderleun at American Digest — thanks! — and now a Memeorandum thread.