The Other McCain

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

A Brief Primer On Titles Due Her Majesty For You Peasant Scum #Hillary2016

Posted on | April 12, 2015 | 26 Comments

by Smitty

Feel free to be helpy helper-serfs in the comments.

Category: Hillary Clinton

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | April 12, 2015 | 15 Comments

In a comment on the Deb Frisch post, @GraceGabriel51 shared some of her own experience with trolls:

Many years ago there was an anonymous Usenet stalker who called herself Curio Jones. She conducted an on-line harassment against those she believed were involved in the conspiracy, posting information about the individuals.
Among those she targeted were Carol Hopkins, a school administrator who was part of a grand jury in San Diego, California that criticised social workers for removing children from their home without reason; Michael Aquino, an open member of the Temple of Set and a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserve against whom accusations of SRA were made but dropped as the accusations proved to be impossible; and Elizabeth Loftus, a professor who studied memory who believed coercive questioning techniques by poorly-trained investigators led to young children making false allegations of child sexual abuse.
She so terrorized Carol Hopkins that she left the country. A small group of us worked expose who she was. Turns out she was Diana Napolis MA, a child protection social worker for San Diego County. She was actively delusional she truly believed in ritual Satanic abuse and she was in charge of removing children from their families.
She got a lot of support on the Usenet from her fellow loons and true believers which was why she was so successful at terrorizing people. Ultimately she went over the deep end and tried to kill Jennifer Love-Hewitt who she accused of an satanic conspiracy and using mind controlling “cybertronic” technology to manipulate her body.
She was committed to Patton State Hospital for the criminally insane.

Diana Napolis is quite notorious, but because her career in Internet-enabled madness preceded the social media era, most people don’t recognize how her case connects to the Twitter troll phenomenon. If you are naive enough to believe what feminists tell you, online harassment is always targeted against women by misogynists. Yet I have been targeted for harassment by some of the worst trolls in Internet history, and I’m obviously not a woman. And, as with Deb Frisch, the case of Diana Napolis shows that some of the craziest Internet stalkers are women.

Progressives are easily deceived by any member of a designated “victim” group who claims to be doing battle against Those Dangerous Right-Wing Bullies. No matter how dishonest, selfish or deranged a person may be, they can always count on the support of progressives if they depict themselves as a victim of racism, sexism or homophobia. The Progressive Victimhood Complex tends to enable very dangerous people.

But why bring Hillary Clinton into this?

 

Category: Hillary Clinton, Liberals, Progressivism

Crazy People Are Dangerous

Posted on | April 12, 2015 | 81 Comments

Deborah E. Frisch, Ph.D., is due in court Monday:

The former University of ­Oregon professor released from jail [March 30] after pleading guilty to making a false report against a Eugene police officer is again behind bars on similar charges.
Deborah Ellen Frisch, 53, is facing a charge of initiating a false report and a probation ­violation in the previous case.
According to court records, Frisch returned to her home on Modesto Drive on Monday after being held in the Lane County Jail for 39 days and within two hours of her release called the Eugene Police Department’s nonemergency line.
During that call, court records show, Frisch accused two police officers who served a search warrant on her home of having sexual relations in her bed and leaving behind bodily fluids and sexually transmitted diseases.
Frisch said in the recorded phone conversation that she wanted to document the event because she was afraid she would get a venereal disease, the document states.
She insisted an officer come to her home or she would call 911, according to the report.
Police said 11 minutes later, Frisch called 911 to make a similar report, asking that “someone document a crime scene by the pigs at the Eugene Police Department,” the document states.
She was arraigned on Friday.
Frisch, who has a doctorate in psychology, was arrested in February for three counts of stalking after police accused her of repeatedly harassing a city police officer, another city of Eugene employee, and the director of a local nonprofit agency. Those charges were dismissed eventually, but not before Frisch accused a female officer of sexually assaulting her. She entered an Alford plea to a charge of false reporting Monday and was sentenced to two years of probation.
She is required to undergo a mental health evaluation.
For several years between 1988 and 2001, Frisch taught at the UO psychology department. She then taught at the University of Arizona but resigned in 2006 after writing inflammatory online comments to a conservative blogger.

Oh, that Deb Frish! You remember this notorious moonbat who thought she could use the anonymity of the Internet to make obscene and perverse suggestions against Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom:

Frisch, 44, said she quit her $32,861-a-year part time position not only because she fears for her safety, but because she regrets the [the University of Arizona] ended up in the middle of what was intended to be a “sick joke.” . . .
“These people think I should be incarcerated, that I’m mentally ill or that I should be shot,” Frisch said during a telephone interview from Eugene, Ore., where she is living now. “This whole thing has been crazy to me. People have spent their whole weekend on this.” . . .
At first, Frisch said she was enjoying herself.
“I like to play with fire. I’m a left-wing Rush Limbaugh. I’m a writer and I like to fight with words. I’m a word warrior.”
Suddenly though, Frisch said, the conversation degenerated into disparaging personal remarks, many of a sexual nature. . . .
“I wrote something that would make him as queasy as they were making me feel,” Frisch said.

So she told the Arizona Daily Star in July 2006. Notice that Frisch tries to depict herself as a victim, employs the typical “It Was Just a Joke” defense, and suggests that this was just an Internet argument that got out of hand. That is to say, she engaged in rationalizations that were an effort to shift blame away from herself and evade responsibility.

DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender:

DARVO refers to a reaction that perpetrators of wrong doing . . . 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. . . .

We have discussed DARVO syndrome before. It is most typical of sexual perverts, who make accusations of wrongdoing against others in an effort to discredit their accusers and elicit sympathy for themselves.

People engaged in DARVO are “abusive . . . indignant, self-righteous and manipulative,” they typically “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.” You can click here to read about one of Deb Frisch’s lawsuits, in which she referred to lawyers as “shyster-vermin” and called a federal judge a “frocked cowf–ker.”

Could I explain the psychological causes of such behavior? Sure, but that’s not the relevant point. The point is that this type of personality and this kind of behavior is not unusual among Internet trolls. Remember what Deb Frisch wrote about Jeff Goldstein’s son:

I’d like to hear more about your “tyke” by the way. Girl? Boy? Toddler? Teen? Are you still married to the woman you ephed to give birth to the tyke?
Tell all, bro!

I reiterate: If some nutcase kidnapped your child tomorrow and did to her what was done to your fellow Coloradan, Jon-Benet Ramsey, I wouldn’t give a damn.

Somehow, Jeffy boy, I think you get off on the possibility of Frenching your pathetic progeny, even if it is a boy. You seem like a VERY, VERY sick mofo to me, bro.

You know, Jeff, I just don’t get it. You say, and I believe you, that a human female chose to procreate with you and you have produced a 2 year old progeny. . . .
So the poor bitch is dirt poor and that’s why she pretended you were worthy of procreating with?

Deborah E. Frisch, Ph.D., a professor of psychology wrote that.

This morning, I was trying to explain #AreYouBlocked to my wife. Why is it relevant that a campaign to “blackball” people in the videogame industry has been led by a person under psychiatric care?

In explaining the gravity of this problem to my wife, I mentioned Deb Frisch as an example of where the crazy people come from and what kind of things they do. Then, out of idle curiosity, I decided to Google Deb Frisch to refresh my memory on the specifics and found the Deb Frisch Timeline blog that has been updating readers on her madness for years:

October 14-18, 2010 — Repeating the activity which cost her a job in 2006, Deborah Frisch sexually menaces two young girls in Eugene Oregon. Frisch tries to hide from her crime by sending threatening emails to the victims’ father under a false name; when Frisch’s flimsy subterfuge is blown, she goes on a 72 hour blog/Facebook/email/telephone harassment frenzy.

There is a pattern here, you see: Deb Frisch makes lurid sexual accusations against others, and becomes unhinged when her wrongdoing is exposed.

“God gave them up unto vile affections . . . God gave them over to a reprobate mind . . .”
— Romans 1:26-28 (KJV)

Beware of reprobate minds. Crazy people are dangerous.





 

Category: Education, Fear. Loathing., Feminism, Protein Wisdom

The #AreYouBlocked Test: Gamers, Lesbian Feminists, the Pope and Me

Posted on | April 10, 2015 | 136 Comments

If you’re wondering what the #AreYouBlocked hashtag is about, click here to see the League of Gamers “Blocklist Checker” site.

What has happened? It’s simple: Crazy people do crazy things.

One thing crazy people do is to accuse others of “harassment.”

Randi Harper (@Freebsdgirl) decided to make herself the Social Justice Warrior (SJW) queen by creating a “blockbot” so that Twitter users could automatically block #GamerGate activists. Other SJWs have created a blockbot “that identifies Twitter’s ‘anti-feminist obsessives’ (they’re nominated for inclusion by a group of trusted, preapproved users), sorts them into categories of offensiveness ranging ‘tedious and obnoxious’ to ‘abusive bigot,’ and allows users to pick the level of vitriol they’d like to excise from their Twitter feeds.” (That Slate article was written by @AmandaHess who, of course, has me blocked on Twitter.)

Like many other feminists, Randi Harper suffers from mental illness and has discussed her prescriptions for Ativan (Lorzepam) and Trazodone, powerful drugs used to treat depression and anxiety disorders. The fact that someone under psychiatric care has appointed herself an arbiter of Twitter “harassment” should be a flashing yellow caution light about her project, for which she is using Patreon.com to raise money.

“Let’s give money to a crazy woman! What could possibly go wrong?”

Keep in mind that I have been harassed by some of the worst trolls in Internet history, including Neal Rauhauser and Bill Schmalfeldt. Unlike feminists, however, I am not an emotionally fragile basket case and, also unlike feminists, I don’t qualify as “marginalized”:

[O]nline harassment is a social problem (one that disproportionately affects the same folks who are marginalized offline, like minority groups, LGBT people, and women), and making the Internet a safe and equitable place to communicate requires a social solution.

Again, I’m quoting Amanda Hess, who has me blocked on Twitter, because I’m such a dangerous menace, you know.

Ken White describes blockbots thus:

Various cultural and political conflicts online have led some users to develop blockbots, which are lists to which you can subscribe (to oversimplify the process) to mass-block everyone on the list. Some lists are created by methodology (like automatically blocking people who follow certain Twitter users affiliated with “GamerGate”) and some, like BlockBot, are curated by individuals who choose who goes on the list and why.
Some folks don’t like how they are characterized by these lists. BlockBot targets complain of being characterized by mostly anonymous and unaccountable strangers as “racists” or “transphobes” or “rape apologists.”

Ken White says blockbots are not defamation, and I agree. However, we must consider the original dispute that gave rise to #GamerGate, i.e., the suspicion that undisclosed conflicts of interest were influencing journalism about the videogame industry.

The #GamerGate controversy subsequently involved a lot of other things, but originally it was about concerns that this multibillion-dollar industry was being corrupted by unethical practices. As I understand it, the basic allegation was that some writers were engaged in the videogame equivalent of “insider trading,” which had the effect of providing favorable publicity for certain game developers while stigmatizing other game developers. Biased journalism about politics is one thing, but biased journalism about an extremely lucrative industry? That’s something else, and potentially an illegal something else.

So, hypothetically: What if shady practitioners were using blockbots to prevent exposure of their shady practices? Wouldn’t this amount to aiding and abetting a potentially illegal activity? One might argue that it would and, while I don’t want people to become afraid of tweeting whatever they want to tweet and blocking whomever they want to block, maybe you wouldn’t want to assist a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.)

So you have a controversy involving claims of corruption in a lucrative industry and — deus ex machina — here comes an emotionally disturbed person raising money for a project that aims to silence (as “online abuse”) the people who say they are trying to expose the aforesaid corruption. Am I the only person who sees a basic problem with this?

@adambaldwin is on the ggAutoblocker’s blocklist.

@adambaldwin is on The Block Bot’s blocklist (Level 2).

When actor Adam Baldwin called attention to the #GamerGate controversy, he became Public Enemy Number One for the SJW crowd, thus earning his spot on Randi Harper’s ggAutoblocker list.

@lizzyf620 is on the ggAutoblocker’s blocklist.

@lizzyf620 is on The Block Bot’s blocklist (Level 2).

Wait a minute: What has videogame journalist Lizzy Finnegan done to deserve her inclusion on these lists? What does this mean?

@rsmccain is on The Block Bot’s blocklist (Level 1).

Yeah, so what? This doesn’t bother me at all. It’s an honor.

@VABVOX is on The Block Bot’s blocklist (Level 1).

Wait a minute: They’re blocking lesbian feminist Victoria Brownworth? Can you imagine what a weird worldview must be involved here, for both Brownworth and I to qualify as “Level 1” offenders? At one point, I’m told, the SJWs blocked Pope Francis for his alleged “transphobia.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason magazine discusses the blockbot mentality. And, at Breitbart.com, Allum Bokhair explains:

The Block Bot . . . rose to prominence during the online trolling panic of 2013. It claims to be a one-stop shop for blocking trolls and abusers. In practice, the people added to its lists tended to be activists, academics, bloggers, and ordinary Twitter users who fell on the wrong side of political schisms within Atheism. Richard Dawkins, for example, was added to the list as a ‘rapeapologist’ and a ‘transphobe’, despite being neither of those things. Some have accused the Block Bot of engaging in defamation.
The GG Autoblocker is arguably even worse than the blockbot. Whereas the Block Bot decides who to block based on individual reports, GG Autoblocker uses guilt by association. The autoblocker maintains a list of several blacklisted users, including Breitbart London associate editor Milo Yiannopoulos, and at one point, the feminist academic Christina Hoff Sommers. If other Twitter users follow too many of these individuals, they will be automatically added to the autoblocker. You don’t have to do anything or even say anything to become a target. If you follow the wrong people, you’ll be blocked.
Twitter users targeted by the two blocklists have had enough, and are taking to the #AreYouBlocked hashtag in large numbers to demand that the company takes action. Urged on by academic Christina Hoff Sommers and game developer Mark Kern, both popular targets for autoblockers, users have caused the #AreYouBlocked hashtag to trend globally. Using the League for Gamers’ blockchecker as well as the Block Bot’s own search function, they have also uncovered an astonishing range of accounts targeted by the blocklists.

Whether or not this is illegal, we certainly see what feeble minds and cowardly souls must be behind this. SJWs are totalitarians who think they can “win” a debate by preventing debate.

Please thank @League4Gamers, and support freedom!





 

Category: Feminism

Friday Fiction: 100 Word Challenge

Posted on | April 10, 2015 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

King Korbill at Valley Myzods


Sky brooding: doom of the gods,
King Korbill surveys the field,
where destiny would soon drink.

“Ten-to-one odds. Perhaps yield?”
inquires Marshall Kornods,
indulging in common-think.

“A final trump we will wield,
ere River Myzods runs pink,”
the monarch he grimly nods.

Enemy horde on the brink,
and his kingdom’s doom well-sealed,
Korbill is freed from the odds.

Battle is joined and the stink
of death fills Valley Myzods.
Upriver: Wizard Zygiell’d

Loosens the barrier clods
holding Myzods at a kink;
watery wall was concealed.

The flood drowns marauding sods.
Korbill’s demise is revealed.
Remorseless sky gives a wink.

via Darleen at Protein Wisdom

UPDATE: s/broken link/Wizard Zygiell’d/ in the fifth stanza to keep the form correct. Writing fantasy makes this easy; just throw in some whacky name where a rhyme is hard to come by.

Category: Friday Fiction, Protein Wisdom

Rude E-Mail Is Rape or Something

Posted on | April 10, 2015 | 31 Comments

So, Tucker Carlson’s brother accidentally hit “reply all” on an e-mail in which he said rude things about Amy Spitalnick, a spokeswoman for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.This became THE MOST IMPORTANT STORY IN THE WORLD for Erik Wemple of the Washington Post, who seems determined to spend the rest of his career writing about this.

BREAKING: MISOGYNISTIC E-MAIL UPDATE!

Dear God, man, give it a rest.

If your point was to prove that Tucker Carlson’s brother is a sexist pig, congratulations — you’re a winner. But where is it written that all organizations must employ only sensitive people who adhere to your Erik Wemple Code of Polite E-Mail Decorum?

 

Category: Journalism

Why Is Feminism So Crazy?

Posted on | April 9, 2015 | 33 Comments

 

People sometimes need to be reminded that the modern feminist movement began in the late 1960s, arising from the New Left at a time when bizarre radical ideas were common among young anti-war activists. Weird sexual practices were widely promoted. Leaders of the Weather Underground adopted the slogan “Smash Monogamy” to describe their bisexual orgies and communal living arrangements.

The radical milieu included terrorist bombings, armed violence and assassination plots. And, as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of people were doing a lot of drugs at the time. So I was reading Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-75 by Alice Echols and on page 221, she quotes Marilyn Webb’s description of the “very intense shared experience” of a two-week feminist retreat in 1970:

“What we actually did on the retreat was talk theory and practice, eat, clean, cook, take one group mescaline trip, which had the effect of welding us together in an intense and inexplicable closeness. Lesbianism was not on the agenda, although in retrospect it should have been obvious that homosexuality would be a future result for some of us.”

In a note on page 347, Echols names the attendees at this retreat, in addition to Webb, as Marlene Wickes, Coletta Reid, Susan Gregory, Susan Hathaway, Tasha Peterson, Betty Garman, Charlotte Bunch and Judy Spellman. Both Gregory and Hathaway had been lovers of “Chicago Seven” conspirator Rennie Davis. Peterson was the daughter of another “Chicago Seven” conspirator, anti-war activist Dave Dellinger. Charlotte Bunch subsequently divorced her husband and in 1971 founded The Furies, a lesbian collective that originally included Peterson, Hathaway and Reid, who had participated in the earlier retreat.

As their first action, The Furies decided to push the issue of lesbianism at a retreat which had been called to determine the future of the foundering D.C. women’s center. . . . [Furies member Helaine] Harris . . . characterizes the group’s style at the retreat as disruptive and dogmatic:

The Furies went as a lesbian-feminist front. Someone from the group attended each workshop and tried to steer the discussion onto lesbianism. Basically we were telling women that we really believed that they should leave their husbands and boyfriends and become lesbian-feminists. [We contended] that was the only choice that they really had.

Echols quotes Furies founder Bunch: “The entire retreat was us ranting and raving in every corner.” Keep in mind that these were not “fringe” people within the feminist movement. Bunch’s 1972 manifesto “Lesbians in Revolt” is included in the curricula of many university Women’s Studies programs, and I again refer readers to Professor Bunch’s official biography at Rutgers University:

Charlotte Bunch, Founding Director and Senior Scholar, at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, Rutgers University, has been an activist, author and organizer in the women’s, civil, and human rights movements for four decades. A Board of Governor’s Distinguished Service Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Bunch was previously a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a founder of Washington D.C. Women’s Liberation and of Quest: A Feminist Quarterly. She is the author of numerous essays and has edited or co-edited nine anthologies including the Center’s reports on the UN Beijing Plus 5 Review and the World Conference Against Racism. Her books include two classics: Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action and Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights.
Bunch’s contributions to conceptualizing and organizing for women’s human rights have been recognized by many and include: her induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in October 1996; President Clinton’s selection of Bunch as a recipient of the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights in December 1999; her receipt of the “Women Who Make a Difference Award” from the National Council for Research on Women in 2000; and being honored as one of the “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” by Women’s Enews in 2002 and also received the “Board of Trustees Awards for Excellence in Research” in 2006 at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey . She has served on the boards of numerous organizations and is currently a member of the Advisory Committee for the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Division, and on the Boards of the Global Fund for Women and theInternational Council on Human Rights Policy. She has been a consultant to many United Nations bodies and recently served on the Advisory Committee for the Secretary General’s 2006 Report to the General Assembly on Violence against Women.

For some reason, this official biography neglects to mention the part about Professor Bunch tripping on mescaline and trying to convert the entire feminist movement to lesbianism.

Feminism began with radical weirdos — kooks and Communists and drug-addled lesbians — and the insanity of the movement today is a hereditary trait, a legacy of lunacy bequeathed by feminism’s foremothers.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, Democrat state Rep.Liz Bennett invited a pagan Wicca priestess, Deborah Maynard, to give the opening prayer at the state legislature. Have you been paying attention?





 

Category: Sex Trouble

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
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