The Other McCain

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

A Coven of Liars: Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Emily Renda and Catherine Lhamon

Posted on | April 9, 2015 | 57 Comments

Left to right: Sabrina Rubin Erdley, Emily Renda, Catherine Lhamon

One of the first journalists to raise serious questions about Rolling Stone‘s rape hoax story, Richard Bradley makes this point:

Sabrina Rubin Erdely started with a thesis and went in search of someone—and some place—that fit her thesis. She found Jackie and the University of Virginia. But, she admits, if she had discovered that Jackie was a liar, it wouldn’t have caused her to question her thesis.

Erdely’s article began with her belief — i.e., rape is commonplace on American campuses, and university officials are indifferent to the plight of victims — and all her “reporting” was intended to confirm this belief. Rather than following the facts wherever they might lead, Erdely instead ignored facts that did not fit her pre-existing belief, and therefore accepted Jackie’s gang-rape lies without investigating them properly.

Erdely’s article was not only a baseless smear of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, but a vicious libel against University of Virginia officials who were presented as heartless enablers of an out-of-control culture of sexual violence. The crucial link in Erdely’s dishonest work — the person whose assistance made it possible for her to produce this cruel fabrication — was a young UVA activist named Emily Renda.

K.C. Johnson at National Review highlights Renda’s role:

“Last July 8, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, a writer for Rolling Stone, telephoned Emily Renda, a rape survivor working on sexual-assault issues as a staff member at the University of Virginia.” So opens the Columbia Journalism School’s review of Rolling Stone’s retracted story about the University of Virginia. The piece confirms that it was Renda who informed Erdely about Jackie, the fabulist whose tale became the spine of the Rolling Stone article. Though the CJR labels Renda a “rape survivor,” she appears never to have filed a complaint with the university, much less with the police.

What did he say? Johnson links to Renda’s June 2014 testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, which begins with this three-sentence paragraph:

Like many others who work on the issue of campus sexual assault, my connection to this cause is a personal one. Nearly four years ago, six weeks into my first year, I was raped by a fellow student on my campus after a night out with friends. In the time following the assault, I became active in peer sexual assault education, worked for the University of Virginia’s Women’s Center, interned with the Commonwealth Attorney’s Victim Witness Program, worked with U.Va. administration to improve prevention and response efforts, and chaired Take Back The Night, a national campaign to raise awareness about sexual violence.

Nowhere in her testimony does Renda say that she reported to police or to university officials that she was raped, nor if anyone was prosecuted or disciplined as a result. This omission is curious. If her “connection to this cause is a personal one,” wouldn’t Renda want to tell the committee how officials dealt with her personal trauma? However, I think Johnson may be going too far by asserting that it “appears” Renda never filed a complaint. Maybe she just didn’t think these details relevant to her Senate testimony, as compared to this part of her testimony:

One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame — that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing.” These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.

This story about “Jenna” is actually about Jackie, whose lurid (and evidently fictitious) rape saga Erdely told in Rolling Stone. Renda testified to the Senate how the case of “Jenna”/Jackie came to the attention of university officials:

Survivors who receive disaffirming responses to initial disclosures are more likely to experience negative mental health consequences as well. These negative and victim-blaming responses from her peers reinforced Jenna’s sense of fault, and prevented her from coming forward to the University’s administration or the Police. When she finally sought assistance from the Dean of Students’ office, after struggling and nearly failing out of her classes for two semesters, it was difficult for the university to conduct a meaningful investigation because much of the evidence had been lost, and witnesses were more difficult to locate.

Whoa. Full stop. Do you see the significance here? Jackie was having an academic problem and “sought assistance” by offering the excuse that her poor performance in the classroom was a traumatic symptom of her gang-rape. We now know that, despite the urging of university officials, Jackie refused to file a criminal complaint or to identity her alleged attackers, and also refused to cooperate with the more recent police investigation of the claims made in the the Rolling Stone story.

Phi Kappa Psi has been exonerated, and the disclosures about her “Haven Monahan” catfishing scheme have destroyed Jackie’s credibility. It therefore appears that everything Jackie told Emily Renda was a lie, and Renda then repeated these lies in her own Senate testimony. Now, back to K.C. Johnson at National Review:

As for Jackie with Rolling Stone, for the CJR, Renda’s word about her status as a victim of crime is enough.
Renda appeared in the Monday New York Times’ summary of the Columbia exposé, described not only as a “rape survivor” but “the expert at the university on sexual assault issues.” Now, however, Renda was a critic of Erdely’s work and the decision to highlight Jackie’s story. “Ms. Renda,” reporter Ravi Somaiya wrote, “offered another reason that she felt the Rolling Stone article was flawed: The magazine was drawn toward the most extreme story of a campus rape it could find. The more nuanced accounts, she suggested, seemed somehow ‘not real enough to stand for rape culture. And that is part of the problem.’”
Nowhere in his article did Somaiya reveal that Rolling Stone never would have learned about Jackie but for Renda. Indeed, as Columbia uncovered, the UVA employee had even vouched for the fabulist’s credibility: “Obviously, maybe her memory of [the rape] isn’t perfect,” she said, defending Jackie in advance against worries Erdely might have. Informing Times readers of Renda’s critical connection to the Rolling Stone fiasco might have undermined the Times’ desire to portray her as an expert on the topic of campus sexual assault.

What Johnson is pointing out here is the circular logic of self-validating authority that the “rape survivor” Emily Renda presents as the crucial credential of her own expertise. Neither Rolling Stone nor the New York Times would dare question Renda’s authority, so that when Renda vouched for Jackie, this was like the Certified Rape Survivor Seal of Approval as far as Erdely and Rolling Stone were concerned. When it turned out Jackie was a liar, however, the New York Times cited Renda to criticize Erdely’s reporting. Yet it seems quite likely that Erdely never would have thought to make the University of Virginia the focus of her story, had it not been for Emily Renda’s Senate testimony about “Jenna”/Jackie getting gang-raped at a frat house.

The feminist mantra about rape — “We must believe the survivors!” — conveys an unquestionable authority to any woman who says she has been raped. K.C. Johnson, however, points out that we know nothing at all about the circumstances surrounding Emily Renda’s own status as a “rape survivor.” While we cannot draw any inference from this omission, it is nevertheless indicative of a journalistic failure. Has any reporter even bothered to ask Emily Renda if she reported her own rape to police or university officials? Is the basis of her “rape survivor” authority not even worth asking a few simple questions?

Excuse me if this seems impertinent or disrespectful, but this goes back to something that happened last summer. George Will wrote a column about the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria in which he said that university officials are learning “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” His suggestion that being a victim of rape is a “coveted status” on campus made Will a target of vilification, although anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that what he said (or, at least, what he intended to say) is quite true. Emily Renda’s status as a “rape survivor” has become the basis of her career as an activist, and Jackie’s tale of being raped at the Phi Kappa Psi house made her a source so authoritative that she was cited in Renda’s testimony to the U.S. Senate and was pursued by a reporter for Rolling Stone. So, yes, at some level, victimhood is a status sufficiently “coveted” on campus that Jackie was willing to lie to obtain that status. We have certainly seen how “victims proliferate” in this manner, and even several clear cases of rape hoaxes.

It is reportedly estimated that between 2% and 8% of rape accusations are false. Whether it’s 1-in-50 or 1-in-12, false accusations are not an insignificant danger, even if the vast majority of such accusations are true. What we have to ask — as George Will meant to suggest — is whether false accusations are incentivized by an environment where university officials “make victimhood a coveted status.”

In other words, are false rape claims more common on campus than elsewhere in society? Furthermore, isn’t it likely that the recent feminist “rape epidemic” hysteria would inspire an increase in such false claims? And if a reporter like Erdely set out to confirm this feminist narrative, wouldn’t her sources necessarily be activist types who care more about advancing the narrative than telling the truth?

Erdely’s journalistic catastrophe was predictable, and Richard Bradley calls attention to a letter that UVA Dean of Students Allen Groves sent to the authors of the Columbia Journalism Review’s investigation of the Rolling Stone hoax. Groves describes how his presentation to the UVA Board of Visitors in September 2014 was misrepresented by Erdely, who wrote that Groves “downplayed the significance of a Title IX compliance review” with a “smooth answer.”

Erdely’s description is contrary to fact, as established by video of the board meeting. Erdely also quotes a federal official describing Groves as “irresponsible.” That federal official is Catherine Lhamon, Assistant Secretary in the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Lhamon’s appearance in Erdely’s story is hardly a coincidence. The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports that Lhamon and Emilly Renda are part of the same federal apparatus:

[Lhamon] has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.
Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.”
Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions. One, held on Feb. 21, 2014, was conducted by Lynn Rosenthal, then the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. Twenty-one people, mostly activists, were invited to that meeting. Lhamon and Renda were invited to two other larger gatherings — one on April 29 and the other on Sept. 19.
It is unclear if both attended the three meetings. Renda did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Renda and Lhamon also testified at a June 26, 2014, Senate hearing on campus sexual assault. It was at that hearing that Renda cited Jackie’s story that she was brutally gang-raped by five fraternity members — a statement that was inconsistent with Jackie’s claim to Erdely that she was raped by seven men. According to the Columbia report, Renda first told Erdely about Jackie’s allegation on July 8, nearly two weeks after her Senate testimony.
During her testimony, Lhamon claimed that “The best available research suggests that 20% of college women, and roughly 6% of college men, are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault.” That “one-in-five” claim about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus has been heavily disputed.

Now, read the second page of Chuck Ross’s report:

In his letter, Groves wrote that he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking correspondence between Lhamon and Erdely. Likewise, The Daily Caller filed a FOIA request but expanded the inquiry to include emails Lhamon and her assistant sent to Renda.
In his letter to Coll and Coronel, Groves wrote that he was “one of the professionals vilified by name” in Erdely’s article.
He claimed that Erdely completely mischaracterized remarks he made at a Sept. 2014 meeting with university trustees about sexual assault and that Lhamon disparaged him with comments she made to Erdely. . . .
Despite the context provided by Groves, the Department of Education is not backing off of Lhamon’s comments to Erdely.
“We stand by the statement Catherine made during her interview with Rolling Stone,” Dorie Turner Nolt, the agency’s press secretary, told TheDC.

This is serious. Here you have Erdely misrepresenting a UVA dean’s words and a federal official disparaging the dean on the basis of that misrepresentation, and the Department of Education declares that it will “stand by” this smear? More than that, however, Lhamon and Renda appear to have a very close connection through the White House task force, and both were sources for Erdely’s now-discredited article.

Lhamon, Renda and Erdely are part of a coven of liars who have conspired to fabricate a crime that never happened in order to justify this ongoing “rape epidemic” hysteria. This dishonest campaign of purposeful falsehood is being orchestrated directly from the White House as part of a systematic effort to create regulations that deprive college students of their due-process rights. Congress must investigate!

P.S.: I emailed the University of Virginia Communications Office to ask if they could provide information about Emily Renda’s rape.





 

Category: Crime, Education, Sex Trouble

The Liberal Bubble: ‘They Can’t Fathom That Somebody Disagrees With Them’

Posted on | April 9, 2015 | 133 Comments

So says a Silicon Valley CEO, describing the liberal echo chamber inside the tech industry that frigthens Republicans into silence:

One startup CEO who has worked in Silicon Valley for more than a decade says that while it’s popular to talk politics in the workplace, the underlying assumption is that everyone has similar views.
The CEO, who generally votes Republican and donates to GOP candidates—he spoke on background to conceal his right-leaning views—said that in 2012, “you wouldn’t want to say you’re voting for Romney in the election.” At the same time, openly expressing one’s support for Obama was “incredibly common.”
His opposition to raising the minimum wage is just one area where he diverges with most of his colleagues. “If you say something like, ‘We need a higher minimum wage,’ you don’t get critiqued,” he said. But he would never reveal his more conservative outlook on the matter.
“They can’t fathom that somebody disagrees with them,” he said. “And I disagree with them. So I’m not going to open up that box.” . . .

You can read the whole thing. How do these bubbles develop? It’s the universities, stupid. Go back and read William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. In 1951, Buckley described the way liberalism had become an unquestioned belief system inside elite academia. Once liberalism had attained hegemonic authority on university campuses, its intellectual prestige was assured. If it is “smart” to believe in, say, Keynesian economics, then impressionable young people who want to seem smart will parrot the Keynesian orthodoxies. Bad ideas that become fashionable in academia are thus diffused into the larger society, as all the smart young people are herded off to college and indoctrinated in these ideas, before entering careers with other college-educated people.

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

What happens is that people who never encounter doubt develop a fanatical certainty in their beliefs, and confuse these mere opinions with moral virtue. Consider again the question of Keynesian economics. I am not a government official and thus have neither influence over nor responsibility for our national economic policy. So my opinions about economics — I happen to be a devotee of the Austrian School — are nothing more than opinions. While I can urge others to read Mises and Hayek, and support politicians whose positions are more consonant with these views, it’s not as if doing this makes me better that other people. One sometimes encounters people who strike a “More Libertarian Than Thou” posture, but advocates of economic freedom tend to be tolerant people generally. By contrast, the advocates of interventionism (Keynesians, Marxists and Welfare State socialists) are invariably bullies possessed by a fanatical certainty in their own moral superiority. They expect to be admired and praised for their liberal zealotry, and are insulted if you fail to genuflect in their presence.

Liberalism is to academia what Islam is to Iran. If your worldview is decisively formed within the insular climate of an elite university, the equation “liberal = smart” is a formula you can never permit yourself to doubt, unless you are willing to admit that you have been hustled, scammed and bamboozled. A fellow with a diploma from Harvard or Stanford cannot confront the possibility that he has been swindled like an ignorant hick playing a carnival game at the country fair. This would inflict an irreparable injury to his self-esteem. He therefore seeks to avoid encounters with people who do not share his child-like faith in the Gospel of Liberalism. Thus, in any environment where liberals obtain power, they use that power to exclude and silence dissent. This is how liberals gained hegemony in our colleges and universities, in journalism and the entertainment industry, and how in the Obama Age they seek to institutionalize a Permanent Liberal Regime in government.

 

Category: Education, Intellectuals, Liberals

Rand Paul Is Not Stupid

Posted on | April 8, 2015 | 32 Comments

“Turn the camera around,” as Andrew Breitbart said. Make the media’s bias the subject of discussion. Rand Paul did it right today:

Rand Paul says he doesn’t want to be grilled about abortion until Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz answers similarly tough questions. . . .
Paul, the Kentucky Republican senator who launched his 2016 presidential campaign this week, bristled at a question about abortion while talking with reporters in New Hampshire on Wednesday.
“Why don’t you ask the DNC, ‘Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?'” Paul said.
His comment came after The Associated Press published a report that said Paul had ducked questions about his views on what exceptions — if any — he’d support if abortion were to be banned.

The media routinely ask Republicans these “gotcha” questions — in effect, acting as propaganda agents for the Democrat Party — while giving Democrats a free pass. Allahpundit:

The great majority of Americans oppose late-term abortion; the vast majority, maybe a unanimous majority at this point, of Democratic leaders support it without restriction. They are, without exaggeration, absolute fanatics on this subject.

Matt Vespa reports a poll: 52% of Americans say life begins at conception. This means 48% of Americans are wrong.

 

Category: Abortion, Media Bias, Rand Paul

Why Facts Matter

Posted on | April 8, 2015 | 30 Comments

“Bad causes attract bad people,” I observed in 2013, when explaining why deranged, dishonest and deviant personalities had been attracted to the “Free Kate” banner, supporting teenage sex offender Kaitlyn Hunt.

 

Honest, sane, normal people would never associate themselves with such a bad cause, and so bad behavior by Kaitlyn Hunt’s supporters — including death threats against the parents of Hunt’s victim — was not really surprising. When the Hunt case first made national headlines, however, some well-meaning people were deceived into believing that this criminal was in fact a victim. By misrepresenting a few key facts (especially the ages of Hunt and her victim), Kaitlyn Hunt’s family promoted the idea that she had been unfairly targeted for prosecution because of homophobic prejudice. Once the true facts of the case became known, however, much of the original “Free Kate” support disappeared. Decent people were offended at the deliberate deceptions involved in this campaign, and realized that real victims don’t need to lie. What this left behind as the rotten core of the “Free Kate” gang was a comparative handful of immoral or emotionally disturbed people who simply don’t give a damn about truth. Such people are dangerous.

“Whatever chance that Hunt might avoid punishment seemed to evaporate in August [2013], when prosecutors filed a petition notifying Judge Robert Pegg that Hunt had violated the court’s order for her not to contact the victim in the case. Prosecutors said that before Hunt was expelled from high school in March, she gave the younger girl an iPod, which enabled her to receive messages Hunt sent her. Over the course of the next five months, prosecutors said, Hunt sent the girl some 20,000 text messages, about 25 ‘lewd’ photographs, and an ‘explicit’ video in which Hunt recorded herself masturbating and moaning. This led to a new felony charge of ‘transmitting harmful materials to a minor’ against Hunt. The content of several text messages indicated that Hunt and her mother encouraged the younger girl to conceal this illicit breach of the no-contact order, and also tried to convince the girl to lie about the original charges in the case.”
— “Kaitlyn Hunt Takes Plea Deal in Florida Teen Sex Crime Case,” Oct. 3, 2013

Facts matter. If someone who claims to be a victim has a proven habit of dishonesty, we can infer that their claim of victimhood is likely a lie.

Dysfunctional personalities do not want to admit they are the cause of their own problems. Bad people do not want to accept responsibility for their wrongdoing. Liars do not want to admit they have lied. And phony claims of victimhood are one way that such people try to avoid blame for the harm they cause others. What I call the “Accuse the Accuser” strategy (the liar’s attempt to discredit truth-tellers) is often part of this pattern of behavior. A psychologist has named this strategy DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender:

DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrong doing, particularly sexual offenders, may display in response to being held accountable for their behavior. The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim into an alleged offender. . . .
It is important to distinguish types of denial, for an innocent person will probably deny a false accusation. Thus denial is not evidence of guilt. However, I propose that a certain kind of indignant self-righteousness, and overly stated denial, may in fact relate to guilt.
I hypothesize that if an accusation is true, and the accused person is abusive, the denial is more indignant, self-righteous and manipulative, as compared with denial in other cases. Similarly, I have observed that actual abusers threaten, bully and make a nightmare for anyone who holds them accountable or asks them to change their abusive behavior. This attack, intended to chill and terrify, typically includes threats of lawsuits, overt and covert attacks, on the whistle-blower’s credibility and so on.
The attack will often take the form of focusing on ridiculing the person who attempts to hold the offender accountable. The attack will also likely focus on ad hominem instead of intellectual/evidential issues.

You can read the whole thing. (Hat-tip: GraceGabriel51 on Twitter.)

Facts matter. Because wrongdoers may dishonestly attempt to portray themselves as victims, when we encounter this type of conflict — people pointing accusatory fingers at each other — we must closely examine the facts. What do we actually know about this dispute? How did it begin? Who is telling the truth? Why would either party have a motive to lie?

What very often happens in online political conflicts of this type is that the person engaged in DARVO (or “Accuse the Accuser”) will try to depict their accuser as guilty of ideological error. A liberal accused of wrongdoing can discredit his antagonist (at least in the eyes of his liberal allies) by claiming to be the victim of a “right-wing smear” perpetrated by “racists,” etc. Anyone familiar with Soviet history knows how, during the purges of the 1930s, the victims of Stalin’s paranoia were always accused of “Trotskyism” or some such phony political deviation.

Facts matter. If you think you cannot be deceived by these kinds of tactics, your confidence in your judgment — the fanatical certainty with which you cling to your political ideology — is a weapon the liar can use to manipulate you.

When feminists create a false narrative about a campus “rape epidemic” that does not actually exist, they seek to make belief in this narrative a test of political commitment. Loyalty to the cause requires that every feminist support this campaign, and any feminist who expresses skepticism will be accused of betraying the movement, giving aid and comfort to the male enemy. This feminist narrative is about “systems of oppression,” as Elizabeth Bruenig said, so that admitting that the narrative is false would require you to ask if women’s “oppression” under male supremacy is as real and systematic as feminist ideology claims.

Facts matter. The exposure of the rape hoax Rolling Stone perpetrated at the University of Virginia is an important fact.

Do not be deceived. People who are willing to lie about rape will lie about anything. Bad causes attract bad people.





 

Category: Crime, Feminism, Sex Trouble, Uncategorized

Fertility Delayed Is Fertility Denied

Posted on | April 8, 2015 | 125 Comments

 

The Census Bureau issued a new report yesterday about the increase of childlessness among American women and, although they provide only a press release and XLS data (rather than a full report), the highlights of the data are perhaps ominous:

The percentage of U.S. women in their 30s and 40s who are childless is rising, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau show.
Some 15.3% of U.S. women aged 40 to 44 were childless in June 2014, up from 15.1% in 2012. . . .
For women in their late 30s, the rise in childlessness is sharper. Around 18.5% of women 35 to 39 were childless last June, up from 17.2% in 2012.
All told, 47.6% of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 were without children last year, up from 46.5% in 2012.
The data are the latest to show that childlessness is on the rise in the U.S. as more women (and their partners) delay marriage and childbearing.
Because fertility declines significantly for women in their 40s — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define a woman’s child-bearing years as 15 to 44 — demographers carefully watch these women to get a sense of how many children Americans are having, or not. . . .
With more women having their first child in their mid 30s, late 30s and early 40s, American families may be shrinking: The number of women aged 40 to 44 who had only one child roughly doubled between 1976 and 2014, Census said.

 

A more in-depth Census report on the 2012 numbers shows that, in 1976, 10% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1932-36) were childless, whereas in 2012, 15% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1968-72) were childless. An ethnic breakdown of the 2012 numbers shows important differences:

White (non-Hispanic)
0 …………………. 16.4
1 …………………. 19.2
2 …………………. 36.6
3 or more ……. 27.8

Hispanic
0 …………………. 10.0
1 …………………. 15.5
2 …………………. 28.7
3 or more ……. 44.9

Non-Hispanic white women were 64% more likely to be childless than Hispanic women, whereas Hispanic women were 61% more likely to have at least three children. Notice when you break it down this way:

White (non-Hispanic)
0 or 1 ………….. 35.6
2 or more ……. 64.4

Hispanic
0 or 1 ………….. 25.5
2 or more ……. 73.6

Considering so-called “replacement level” fertility (2 children per woman), we see that Hispanic women are 14% more likely to be at or above this level, whereas non-Hispanic white women are 40% more likely to be below replacement level. And if we look at the Census report’s data comparing U.S.-born women to immigrants, we find these numbers:

U.S.-born women, ages 40-50
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.93
Childless ………………………….. 17.2%

Immigrant women, ages 40-50
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.24
Childless ………………………….. 11.4%

So, immigrant women on average had 16% more children, and U.S-born women were 51% more likely to be childless. Now let’s break down the numbers by educational achievement:

Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%

Bachelor’s degree
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.8
Childless ………………………….. 19.9%

High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts.

If you’ve studied population demographics, you realize that trends like these generally take decades to develop, and that finding cause-and-effect correlations is difficult. That is to say, people’s beliefs developed in childhood, their behavior as teenagers and the prevailing cultural trends in their young adult years will have an effect on whether they eventually have children. Today’s 40-year-old woman was born in 1975 and turned 18 in 1993, so if she is childless now, this necessarily implicates her choices and behaviors in the 1990s, as well as the belief system with which she was raised in the 1970s and ’80s.

Women’s behaviors are necessarily affected by men’s behaviors. If men are avoiding marriage and fatherhood — as Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike documents — it will be more difficult for women to become wives and mothers. It may also be the case that men who might want to be husbands and fathers lack either the social skills or the financial resources needed to attract wives. Alternately, we may theorize that a general social climate of distrust and hostility between men and women make marriage and parenthood more problematic.

Studying demographic trends involves the complex interaction of multiple variables over time. However, it is important to note this: People make trends and not the other way around. That is to say, the individual is always free to act independently of the larger social trend, to swim against the demographic stream. You can make your own high-fertility subculture within a low-fertility society. My being a father of six is the result of beliefs and choices in the same way that other people become childless as the result of their own beliefs and choices.

People want to “fit in,” to have the approval of their peers and of the societ around them, and so being “conformed to this world” is the usual way of life. There is a prejudice I call “middle-classness,” which encourages young people to believe that they must have the credentials and accoutrements of middle-class life — college education, professional career, new cars, home ownership — or else be considered failures. This kind of concern for social status is perfectly understandable, yet in our striving for status (and encouraging our children to do the same) we can easily succumb to the kind of mentality that has produced the trend toward childlessness manifested in the latest Census Bureau report.

Did all these women decide to be childless? No.

If you could go back to 1993 to interview the 18-year-old who today is a childless 40-year-old, she likely would say she wanted to be a mother “someday,” under certain circumstances. However, those circumstances did not arise and thus “someday” never arrived.

The Contraceptive Culture encourages women (and men) to believe that fertility is entirely a matter of personal choice, but any fertility specialist will tell you this is a myth. The woman who has not become a mother by age 30 will have a significantly higher risk of experiencing infertility if and when she does try to become pregnant. And even if she has no medical problems with her reproductive health, the woman who delays motherhood past 30 will on average have fewer children in comparison to women who have their first child before they are 30.

Fertility delayed is fertility denied. Demographics is ultimately a matter of arithmetic, although the numbers involved represent human lives and the choices we make based on our own beliefs.

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

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Category: Census, Contraceptive Culture, Family, Immigration, Marriage

John Nolte’s Right

Posted on | April 7, 2015 | 13 Comments

At Breitbart, John Nolte calls attention to how BuzzFeed “poured hate-fuel all over these powerless, innocent people” — the owners of Memories Pizza — “repeatedly lied about them, and then changed our libelous headline without making an editor’s note.”

And their editor Ben Smith wants to pretend they did nothing wrong.

I’ve never hated Ben Smith the way some other people hate Ben Smith, who is an arrogant son of a bitch, but arrogant sons of bitches are very common in the world of journalism, and I’m not necessarily a modest son of a bitch. Also, from time to time, Ben Smith has done a favor or two for certain friends of mine, so there’s that. Still, this Memories Pizza thing was bad mojo, and BuzzFeed needs to own up to it.

Anyway, “sadistic sociopath” was maybe verbal overkill, but it’s late, it’s been a long day and sometimes I’m a son of bitch, too.

 

Category: Journalism

Joyce Trebilcot Award Nominee

Posted on | April 7, 2015 | 30 Comments

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig (@ebruenig) “grew up in Dallas in a predictably right-wing household, and as a high school kid, had some pretty right-wing ‘opinions’ of my own that I parroted from my folks”:

Then, I volunteered to teach Sunday school to kindergarteners at my church. I became very troubled by the notion that I might unintentionally mislead them about the Bible due to my lack of firsthand knowledge (I’d only read the bits and pieces most people have) and so I committed myself to reading it on my own. I’ve heard this process turns some people into atheists; it turned me into a hardcore leftist.

Tip: Beware of young people who speak disrespectfully of their parents.

Yet who am I to judge Elizabeth Bruenig? My adolescence was spent in a noisy haze of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and whatever drugs I could get my hands on which, considering that my best friend was a dealer, was quite a lot. There was no Internet back then, however, so you’ll find no Facebook photos of my youthful antics, nor was it possible, circa 1976, for a long-haired teenage rock-and-roll hoodlum to “log on” and spew his precocious opinions out there for the entire world to share.

One suspects that the “right-wing” Stoker family of Arlington, Texas, is rather affluent, so that their daughter had the financial resources to attend Brandeis University (annual tuition $47,833) where she graduated in 2013 and was awarded a Marshall Scholarship. She went from conservative Methodism to dabbling in Quakerism to “social justice” Catholicism in a few short years and married Matt Bruenig, who writes for the progressive think tank Demos. Mr. Bruenig graduated summa cum laude from the University of Oklahoma and then went to Boston University Law School. He describes himself thus:

My writing is informed by a leftist political perspective that draws upon a diverse set of historical and contemporary leftist intellectuals. In particular, the various theories of egalitarian distributive justice that began with John Rawls have had the most influence on me.

Matt Bruenig probably never read Friedrich Hayek’s The Mirage of Social Justice, a thorough refutation of Rawlsian egalitarianism, but then again, when did any liberal ever read Hayek?

All of that, however, is just background I came across while trying to figure out, “Who the hell is this idiot Elizabeth Bruenig?” Her take on the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax raises this question:

Yes, there were an absurd number of mistakes in Rolling Stone’s journalistic method, but like most events ostensibly about ethics in journalism, the kernel of the controversy is about politics, not journalism.
The politics, of course, inform the journalism. For better or worse (almost certainly worse), rape is a contested political property, and campus rape is its pinnacle. During last year’s ballyhoo over California’s campus affirmative consent law, the contingencies for and against split down the aisle: The left and center-left supported it, while the right and far-right opposed it.

(We pause to note that, in Mrs. Bruenig’s political universe “the left” is a Guardian column by Jessica Valenti, “the center-left” is a Vox column by Ezra Klein, “the right” is a Reason column by Robert Carle and the “far right” is a Federalist column by . . . Robert Carle. So I guess Robert Carle is a spectrum all to himself. But never mind that . . .)

More importantly, similar political groupings tend to form around controversial cases. When Cathy Young reported skeptically on the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia undergraduate whose mattress-hefting protest made national news, Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan called her out, and anti-feminist finger-waggers at the misleadingly titled American Thinker feted her insight. What accounts for the political polarization in rape journalism, which is presumably odious to everyone, regardless of political orientation?

(Here I’m going to intrude the simple answer to her question. What accounts for this “political polarization” is that feminists and their allies in the Democrat-Media Complex decided that pushing the “campus rape epidemic” hysteria would be a winning issue and, when it turned out that the actual facts about rape contradicted their narrative, they simply refused to quit. The Left’s stubborn insistence on “winning” this issue, despite having neither evidence nor logic on their side, accounts 100% for the aforesaid “polarization.” But now brace yourself for Mrs. Bruenig’s coup-de-main of feminist irrationality . . .)

The left tends to view oppression as something that operates within systems, sometimes in clearly identifiable structural biases, and other times in subtle but persistent ways. . . . Making sense of oppression, therefore, requires looking at entire systems of oppression, not just specific instances or behaviors.
The right, on the other hand, tends to understand politics on the individual level, which fits in neatly with a general obsession with the capital-i Individual. Thus, the right tends to pore over the specific details of high-profile cases like those of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, concluding that if those particular situations were embattled by complications or mitigating factors, then the phenomena they’re meant to represent must not be real either. And if a few highly publicized rapes turn out to be murkier than first represented, then rape itself is not a crisis, just a regrettable and rare anomaly. . . . It isn’t great reasoning, but it is very appealing on a sub-intellectual level.

Read the whole thing. This astounding claim — that an insistence on facts in journalism “isn’t great reasoning,” compounded with the insulting epithet “sub-intellectual” — has made this hitherto obscure young woman suddenly semi-notorious. Mrs. Bruenig has now made herself such an infamous fool as to deserve her own Twitchy article and even Instapundit felt the need to mock her. While it is not necessary to do a point-by-point rebuttal of her absurdity, let’s ask whether Mrs. Bruenig believes that female students at the University of Virginia (or at any other U.S. campus) are victims of a “system of oppression”? Is it not rather the case that university students in the United States are among the most fortunate and affluent people in the entire world?

As for whether the incidence of rape on college campuses is a “crisis,” I’ll quote my own American Spectator column from Monday:

Rolling Stone was grossly negligent, but this has been true of the entire profession of mainstream journalism in dealing with the claims made by feminists about the “rape epidemic” on America’s college and university campuses. These claims are as fictional as Jackie’s imaginary boyfriend “Haven Monahan.”
According to the Department of Justice, the incidence of sexual assault in the United States has declined significantly in the past two decades, down 64 percent from 1995 to 2010 and remaining stable at that lower rate. Feminists and their political allies, including both President Obama and Vice President Biden, have repeatedly claimed that 1-in-5 female college students are victims of sexual assault. However, according to DOJ statistics, “the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5).” And, in fact, female college students are less likely to be raped than are females of the same age who don’t attend college. Feminists have fomented a fictitious crisis because, as Wendy McElroy has explained, “Political careers, administrative jobs, government grants, book and lecture contracts are just some of vast financial benefits that rest upon continuing the ‘rape culture’ crusade on campus.”

Every rape is a tragedy, but no one is arguing otherwise. What happened — the original cause of “the political polarization in rape journalism” that Mrs. Bruenig decries — is that feminists who craved money and power enlisted the assistance of Democrat politicians and liberal journalists to advance a deliberate deceit. They falsely asserted that there was an “epidemic” of sexual assault on U.S. campuses and employed “Statistical Voodoo and Elastic Definitions” (i.e., the bogus 1-in-5 statistic) as “evidence” of this non-existent epidemic. When the falsehood of these statistical claims were exposed, feminists doubled down, calling their critics “rape apologists.” Meanwhile, a number of cases came to light where male students were being denied their due process rights in campus disciplinary tribunals that found these students “responsible” for alleged sexual assault under circumstances where no criminal charge was ever made. Even a courtroom acquittal — a not-guilty verdict — was insufficient to protect male students from being expelled or suspended simply because they had been accused. In any “he-said/she-said” dispute, it seemed that the only thing that mattered was what she said. Despite what appeared to be a set of campus policies heavily tilted against any male student accused of sexual assault, however, feminists were claiming that the system wasn’t tilted far enough against males.

America’s university campuses were in the grip of a “rape culture,” we were told, and administrators were turning a blind eye to this horrific rampage of sexual violence. Anyone who expressed doubt about these extraordinary assertions was denounced as a “misogynist” and, at a time when this feminist campaign was being waged in increasingly strident language, Rolling Stone published Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s lurid tale of Jackie being brutally gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi house.

JACKIE LIED. THE STORY WAS FALSE.

THERE IS NO ‘RAPE EPIDEMIC,’ PERIOD.

These two things are related, you see. If you are a journalist trying to prove the existence of an “epidemic” that does not actually exist, it is not really an accident when the anecdote by which you “prove” your case turns out to be a hoax. Thus, I am nominating Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig for the inaugural Joyce Trebilcot Award for Bad Feminist Arguments.

This award is named in honor the late (and indisputably crazy) lesbian feminist, Professor Joyce Trebilcot. In addition to authoring the 1994 book Dyke Ideas and co-founding the department of Women’s Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Professor Trebilcot wrote the influential 1974 treatise “Sex Roles: The Argument From Nature,” a landmark work of lunatic feminism. Presuming to address the question of whether male/female sex roles are justified by “natural psychological differences between the sexes,” Professor Trebilcot in effect answered, “So what?” The question to be asked was not “what women and men naturally are, but what kind of society is morally justifiable,” Professor Trebilcot argued. “In order to answer this question, we must appeal to the notions of justice, equality, and liberty. It is these moral concepts, not the empirical issue of sex differences, which should have pride of place in the philosophical discussion of sex roles.”

To translate this into the simplest possible terms: “Facts be damned.”

A deliberate indifference to facts in service to a devotion to egalitarian theory is the philosophical foundation of feminist insanity.

Although I’m sure there will be many other deserving competitors for this year’s Joyce Trebilcot Award, Elizabeth Bruenig has made a strong early bid to capture this prestigious honor.





 

Category: Journalism, Joyce Trebilcot Award, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

News Flash: Liberals Hate Christianity

Posted on | April 7, 2015 | 120 Comments

“And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.”
— I Corinthians 2:1-2 (KJV)

Jesse Lee Peterson’s WorldNetDaily column:

LGBT groups have been effective in linking their immoral cause to the noble civil rights movement. In reality, gays never wanted equality. They wanted society to accept their sinful lifestyle, or else. LGBT groups — to be blunt — act like fascists. Just like militant Islam demands Shariah law, homosexual pressure groups demand “sodomy law.”
So what’s so bad about discrimination anyway? Discrimination has always been a hallmark of freedom. The ability to discriminate is given to us by God so that we can make right choices.

Brian Tashman of Right Wing Watch expects his liberal readers to be outraged by this. But all Jesse Lee Peterson is saying is that he, as a Christian, views homosexuality as a “sinful lifestyle” and considers the gay-rights movement an “immoral cause.”

What is Brian Tashman trying to say? He doesn’t make an argument, he just gives it the shock headline (“Right-Wing Pundit: America Under ‘Sodomy Law’”) with the evident expectation that Jesse Lee Peterson’s use of the word “sodomy” to describe homosexuality is sufficient to cause liberal outrage: “How dare he?”

Whence this certainty? Why is Brian Tashman so confident in the force of liberal indignation? Christians aren’t allowed to write opinion columns anymore? Nobody is allowed to criticize or oppose the gay-rights movement? Dissent is impermissible? Because if this is what Tashman is trying to say, isn’t he just proving Peterson right?

The recent controversy over Memories Pizza — “Try our new Supreme Homophobia Special!” — and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in Indiana has helped bring into focus the inherent problems with mandatory “equality.” If you read Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas decision, it was apparent at the time that the majority’s “Emerging Awareness” Doctrine would have far-reaching effects in law, society and culture. These effects were not entirely predictable, because Lawrence amounted to a repudiation of many centuries of Anglo-American common law precedent. With this decision, America was setting sail into uncharted waters, voyaging toward that part of the ancient map marked “Here Be Dragons.”

What we are finding here is something like the “Sexual Anarchy” described by Matt Barber, a world without any moral truth beyond a fanatical certainty in the wrongness of “hate.” Yet if mere disapproval is “hate,” and thus subject to legal sanction, haven’t we instituted a regime of Compulsory Approval? Ideas Have Consequences, as we were warned long ago by Richard Weaver and, by making the idea of “equality” the first premise of our syllogism, we find ourselves unable to refute an argument leading us to the conclusion that the owners of Memories Pizza have no right to run their own business as they see fit, and Jesse Lee Peterson’s criticism of sodomy must be silenced.

What is at stake is liberty. Ace of Spades understands this:

I do not exist to appease your OCD need for Hierarchy, Structure, Order, Regularity, and Standard Procedures in all facets of life.
Some people continue to be wigged out at the idea that I can buy alcohol in one county but the next county over — get this! — it’s illegal to sell booze.
They just seem to have this baseline devotion to the ideal that we should all be the same. That each county should follow the same rules. That a traveler, moving from one county to the next, should not be surprised or bothered to discover there are Different Rules in effect, or a Different Culture.
That we should, in short, all have the Same Rules, and the Same Culture, with all Proud Nails pounded flat to the wood, so that there is no danger of snagging anyone’s clothing or giving anyone a cut.
Some find that comforting.
I find it creepy. . . .
It bothers Bill Quick that one bakery could have one set of policies, and yet a bakery down the street could, get this, have an entirely different set of policies.
That’s just wrong, he apparently thinks. . . .

You can read the whole thing, which is both powerful and hilarious (obligatory Strong Language Warning). Understand that Ace and his antagonist Bill Quick are both atheists and libertarian-leaning conservatives. Their argument is therefore instructive of how, once we step off the Solid Rock of biblical truth, we step into the shifting sands of doubt and confusion. The Christian knows what he believes and why he believes it — do I need to cite chapter and verse here? — and need not justify himself or prove his own case, because he does not offer his mere personal opinion. Rather the Christian relies on an eternal and transcendent Truth that exists beyond himself.

‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word;
Just to rest upon His promise,
And to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”

Our elite intelligentsia are offended by the Christian’s child-like faith, because a simple Truth that can be known by all — “Jesus Christ, and him crucified” — puts the Ph.D. and the high-school dropout on the same moral plain. The university professor is no better in God’s eyes than the janitor mopping the hallway outside the professor’s classroom. Both of them will be judged by the same standard of righteousness and both are equally condemned by that standard. We are but “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” as Jonathan Edwards long ago warned, and it is only by God’s mercy and by the atonement of Christ that we have hope of anything other than the fiery destruction we deserve.

To which the liberal’s only answer is: “SHUT UP!”

How dare we question their right as Our Moral Superiors™ to tell us what to think? The Christian’s simple faith is tantamount to insulting liberals. To reject their Gospel of Secular Salvation is to call into question the Heaven-on-Earth promises that liberals have been making for at least the past hundred years. The Left is determined to immanentize the eschaton, and when Jesse Lee Peterson speaks disapprovingly of “sodomy,” he must be denounced and ridiculed, lest anyone else get the idea that dissent is permissible or socially acceptable. Why, if people are allowed to disagree with liberals, next thing you know, they might start questioning whether “Haven Monahan” and his frat buddies gang-raped a girl in Charlottesville. They may begin doubting the Gospel of Climate Change, or even lose faith in Keynesian economics!

If these Christians are allowed to call sin by its right name, you see, the entire fabric of liberal belief may begin to unravel, and the system of prestige by which Our Moral Superiors™ claim the right to tell us what to think could crumble into the ash-heap of history as suddenly as the Soviet Union collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And so liberals keep shrieking: “SHUT UP!”

Are we obligated to obey their totalitarian command? I think not.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she 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 for Religious Freedom, 1786



 

Category: Gays, Intellectuals, Liberals, Religion
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