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.

Liberal journalists lie about rape. They also lie about murder, racism, economics, foreign policy, "global warming" and everything else.

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 6, 2015

<br />

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!

Hey, @briantashman, what's your point here? Is @JLPtalk not allowed to voice his opinion? http://t.co/leYNEdyn2W cc @BlacksFund @jmattbarber

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 7, 2015

Liberals always demand "tolerance" until they get enough power to silence their opposition. Then dissent is banned as "hate speech."

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 2, 2015

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

Lunch With Noah Rothman

Posted on | April 7, 2015 | 83 Comments

by Smitty

You may have seen this a few years back:

That ad comes to mind reading Noah Rothman over at Hot Air as he surveys a few recent URLs concerning the Convention of States notion. Rothman makes a fair point: there is no risk-free way to revisit our founding document:

For conservatives who ostensibly venerate the Constitution, it is odd to see so many of them fail to acknowledge that proposing it’s[sic] complete revision undermines their political position dramatically. Displaying respect for the Founders’ ideals and creating the conditions whereby their work might be entirely demolished are mutually exclusive.

Do you mean the way Wilson planted the IED in the form of Amendments 16 & 17, plus the Federal Reserve Act back in 1913? Or do you mean the way the size of the House froze in 1910, making our government substantially less representative?

Many on the right have contended that a Convention of States is distinct from a constitutional convention. What’s more, they might say, that process could be the only way to rein in the unelected elements of the federal government, like the judiciary or the nation’s unwieldy and proliferating regulatory agencies. Some on the right contend that the Constitution has been so perverted that it is already essentially defunct. But these same conservatives, who often lament the fact that Republican lawmakers are so regularly rolled by left-wing organizations and liberal politicians, would be foolish to vest in these GOP officeholders the authority to remake the system entirely. They would quickly find that conservative politicians who regularly fail to outmaneuver liberals in Congress don’t find their luck has improved on the convention floor.

OK, so: do the homework. Got it.

From a conservative perspective, the ideals and priorities of those who came of age in the Enlightenment are vastly superior to the self-obsession that masquerades as political principle today. The document that emerges from a modern convention would not look anything like the 18th Century accord that harnessed human imperfection and utilized one man’s basest impulses to check another’s. That divinely inspired document, while perhaps flawed and frequently misinterpreted, remains preferable to the technocratic, anti-federalist charter that would emerge from a 2015 convention (presuming that anything at all could possibly pass such a body).

Perhaps I’m putting too fine a point on it, but I wouldn’t go further than “divinely informed”, and even that’s a stretch. The Constitution is a secular product. Full stop.
“preferable to the technocratic, anti-federalist charter that would emerge”
Again, that’s precisely where Wilson’s Folly has taken us. The guy at the table is choking. Technology is seeing progressively oppressive use. Technology should liberate, instead.

When liberals like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gush over national charters like South Africa’s 19-year-old constitution, they are often only fetishizing the new and the foreign. That’s a nagging and unattractive trait that conservatives laudably fail to entertain. The right’s frustration with the current state of affairs cannot be satisfied by attempting to change the rules of the game. To convene a Convention of States is to open a Pandora’s Box.

And you, young apprentice, are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis.

It’s time for some bold, Tea Party-driven Heimlich action to dislodge the Progressive projectile currently choking our politics. Lead, follow, or get the focaccia out of the way, Noah.

Category: Constitution, Hot Air

Feminists Against Heterosexuality

Posted on | April 6, 2015 | 70 Comments

Jenika McCrayer (@JenikaMc) has “a BA in Women and Gender Studies from The College of William and Mary” and is currently working on her master’s degree in the same field. This means she understands feminist theory, e.g., the “social construction” of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix. To translate this to plain English, if you are a normal (feminine) woman who feels normal (heterosexual) attraction toward normal (masculine) men, this means that you have been brainwashed by society into accepting your own oppression under the system of male supremacy. Feminists believe that heterosexuality is imposed on women by the patriarchy — women are “coerced into heterosexuality,” as Professor Marilyn Frye explained — and feminine behavior is simply the performance of inferiority. Gender “glamorizes the subordinate status of females” and creates an artificial appearance of male-female difference in order “to clearly mark the subordinate class [i.e., females] from the privileged class [i.e., males].”

Thus, there are no natural differences between male and female, according to feminist theory, only the oppressive hierarchy of “gender” by which society enforces male supremacy.

“The threat of violence alone affords
all men dominance over all women.”

Thus saith the feminists. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So, Jenika McCrayer wrote an article for Everyday Feminism, which was called to my attention by Aurelius Pundit:

@rdbrewer4 Feminist Mag: Like Breasts? Then You're a Sexist http://t.co/cKdVCAxo3N

— Aurelius (@AureliusPundit) April 6, 2015

Indeed, it’s a special slice of crazy:

Jenika McCrayer explains why men who are sexually attracted to women with breasts are misogynists.
McCrayer explains that “under a patriarchal system… we’re taught to believe that the female body exists solely for a man’s sexual pleasure and entertainment.” She then explains several reasons why liking breasts is a bad thing.
First, “It Dangerously Conflates Attraction and Fetishization.” She explains, “breasts are not solely for aesthetic or sexual purposes. They have a function. And there are painful consequences to fetishizing body parts associated with womanhood.”
More than that, “it’s cisnormative to equate breasts with femininity and womanhood. Not everyone who has breasts is a woman, and not all women have breasts.”
Second, “Fetishization Leads to Objectification and Dehumanization.” McCrayer writes, “Reducing people to their anatomy creates this space that some if not most of us exist outside of because we don’t fit into the male gaze’s narrow categories of what it means to be attractive or a woman.” . . .
McCrayer wrote this article because she received a letter from “a reader” whose husband wants equal rights for her, but also finds her breasts attractive, which she found “problematic.”

Normal men like normal women in a normal way. Normal women take this for granted, but feminists aren’t normal women.

Feminists want to abolish gender, because gender oppresses women. Therefore, normal male attraction to normal females is “objectifying,” “cisnormative,” “fetishizing,” etc. Male sexuality is phallocentric and heterosexual intercourse is male violence against women, according to feminist theory. Thus, the only reason any man could ever want to have sex with a woman is because he hates her.

Feminists believe normal sexual desire is dehumanizing to women.

Shorter @JenikaMc: "Male Heterosexuality Is Misogyny, Because Men Who 'Like' Women Actually Hate Women or Something." http://t.co/sN058Djlua

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 6, 2015

Gosh, somebody should write a book about this or something. http://t.co/VzMNGhyLZ1 @JenikaMc @AureliusPundit #tcot pic.twitter.com/tSJpXcqXcH

— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 6, 2015

Category: Sex Trouble

The Standards of Liberal Journalism Are Every Bit as Real as ‘Haven Monahan’

Posted on | April 6, 2015 | 25 Comments

How about we start speaking some blunt truths?

Rolling Stone magazine perpetrated a hoax against the University of Virginia, doing “journalism” about an alleged gang rape that evidently never happened. The source of the dramatic tale Rolling Stone published last November, “A Rape on Campus,” was a UVA student named Jackie who has been proven to be a liar. Her freshman year at UVA, Jackie invented a make-believe boyfriend she called “Haven Monahan” as part of an unsuccessful attempt to inspire the jealousy of her friend Ryan Duffin, on whom she had a romantic crush. This deceptive scheme apparently led to Jackie’s subsequent claim that she was gang-raped at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house during a date with this non-existent boyfriend on the night of Sept. 28, 2012.
We didn’t learn the truth behind Jackie’s lies, however, until after Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s sensational article in Rolling Stone described in lurid detail how Jackie was allegedly raped by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi house her freshman year. One of the first journalists to raise questions about the article, Richard Bradley wrote, “Something about this story doesn’t feel right,” and cited the obvious problems that any veteran editor would have noticed about the story. To believe the Rolling Stone story, Bradley argued, “requires a lot of leaps of faith. It requires you to indulge your pre-existing biases.” Yet these biases — a willingness to believe the worst about fraternity members, and about men in general — were precisely what led Erdely and her editors to publish the 9,000-word article that, they believed, would expose once and for all the reality of what feminists have claimed is a “rape epidemic” on college campuses.
Rolling Stone’s story was a lie and there is no such “epidemic.”
A lengthy examination of Erdely’s article by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has exposed the inexcusable lapses in editorial judgment that resulted in Rolling Stone’s gross libel of UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter. It is a near-certainty that the fraternity will sue for defamation, and it is difficult to imagine how Rolling Stone could successfully defend itself against such a suit. The magazine’s founder, Jann Wenner, told the New York Times that his staff was taken in by ”a really expert fabulist storyteller.” Yet as the Columbia review makes clear, Erdely and her editors did not take the most basic steps needed to verify (or debunk) Jackie’s tale.
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.”. . .

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

<br />

Category: American Spectator, Crime, Education, Journalism, Media Bias, Sex Trouble

Rule 5 Monday: Easter Weekend Double-Dip Edition

Posted on | April 6, 2015 | 22 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

After a fifteen-day delay imposed by a visit to family and friends in Minnesota (the weather was actually better than it was in DC) and illness contracted on the return flight, here’s your double scoop of Rule 5 for Easter Monday. To introduce our lineup of links, here’s the appropriately endowed Miss Gemma Atkinson.

As usual, some of the following links feature women in a state of (un)dress normally considered NSFW. Exercise discretion in your clicking, dear readers.

(Not So) Average Bubba leads off this week with Linette Beaumont, followed by Goodstuff with Hayley Atwell, Randy’s Roundtable with Valerie dos Santos, and Ninety Miles from Tyranny with Hot Pick of the Late Night, Girls With Guns, and Morning Mistress. We also heard from Animal Magnetism with Rule Five Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon, to say nothing of First Street Journal and Basic Training. Second helpings were served by Goodstuff with the new SPECTRE chicks, Average Bubba with Tessa Fowler, Ninety Miles from Tyranny (Hot Pick, Morning Mistress, Girls with Guns), Animal Magnetism (Rule 5 Friday, Saturday Gingermageddon), and First Street Journal with military blondes.

EBL’s thundering herd included Christina Hendricks, March Madness Tears, Beau and Blaze Berdahl, Thunder Thighs, Sand Snakes of Dorne, Dagmar, and Melissa Benoist. Also, vintage Hollywood Easter Rule 5, Panda Sex, The Searchers, Alyssa Marino, Sinatra and Shirley, and On, Wisconsin!

A View from the Beach checked in with Bai-Lingual Rule 5, Killer Mermaids, Iceland Celebrates “Set Them Puppies Free” Day, “Georgia on My Mind”, Dreamer Charged in “Top Model” Killing, Live Action Review of “50 Shades of Gray”, The Perfect Guacamole Recipe, French Propose to Ban Thin . . ., A New Must See Movie Series?, and Did an Italian Eruption Kill Off Neandertal Man?. Easter additions included Brooke Shields, Drained!, “Maybeline”, The Best Thing About St. Barts?, Bring Back the State Sponsored Pirates to Fight ISIS?, Operator, Could You Help Me Place This Call?, “Gimme Shelter”, Move Over Hillary,, and Midnite Music – Featuring Heather Maloney.

Soylent Siberia’s single serving is a big one: your morning coffee creamer, Monday Motivationer Masterpiece, Overnighty Awesome Diffused Fur, Tuesday Titillation Trophy Taker, Evening Awesome Linky-Love Contender, Humpday Hawtness Rockin’, Evening Awesome Busy, Fursday Fantastic, Corset Cataract, T-GIF Friday – Or, How I Lost My Teeth, Overnighty Awesome Vanda, Weekender in Heels, and Bath Night Turbulence.

Proof Positive celebrated his 7th blogiversary with some vintage Marilyn, and also posted Friday Night Babe Bregje Heinen, vintage babe Alice White, Sex in Advertising with Blush, and Women of PETA XLII. For seconds, it was Khloe Kardashian, Doris Merrick, and Victoria’s Secret. Dustbury offered Nena, Carly Simon, and Cindy Crawford, and Loose Endz remarked on criticism of Gal Gadot’s boobs. Also, Lucy Lawless, Avril Lavigne, and Big Fashion.

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox for inclusion in next week’s Rule 5 post is midnight on Saturday, April 11.

Visit Amazon’s Intimate Apparel Shop

Category: Rule 5