Campuses Creating their Own Reality: The Triumph of the False Narrative

People like to repeat what mistakenly is called Einstein’s definition of insanity: repeating something over and over again and expecting different results. While I don’t know who actually made that statement, I believe it make sense no matter who said it and would like to add something to the insanity definition: Insanity also can be described as an attempt to impose an alternative reality into a real-world setting.

The great Austrian economists Murray Rothbard wrote that egalitarianism is a “revolt against nature,” and I would like to put a lot of modern college campus policies regarding sex and alleged sexual assault in that category, too. As I pointed out in a recent article about the latest campus rape hoax, this time at the University of Virginia, colleges and universities both promote sex as recreational activity for their students, yet are trying to criminalize that behavior once it occurs. Progressivism: A Prime... James Ostrowski Best Price: $8.99 Buy New $10.95 (as of 08:30 UTC - Details)

To someone that is not an activist or a Progressive, it would seem that campus policies are at war with themselves and really make no sense, and if someone were to point out such inconsistencies to higher education administrators, faculty, and students, the policy makers could “fix” the problem and end the nonsense. The problem, however, is not a lack of consistency; indeed, I am sure that all of the parties that are responsible for the madness of higher education “sexual assault” policies are fully aware of the internal contradictions, but don’t care, or even find those discrepancies to be useful.

When supposedly intelligent people eagerly buy into untrue stories, as what happened at UVA and Duke University in the infamous lacrosse case eight years ago, we need to ask why such hoaxes repeat themselves. I once likened the ubiquitous campus hoaxes as a modern higher education rendition of the Reichstag Fire and now have come to understand that these hoaxes serve a very useful purpose administrators, radical faculty members, and student activists. There is a mentality at work that most people do not understand, yet to make sense out of what seems to be Wonderland behavior, we have to examine the structures of incentives that government and higher education officials have created, incentives that encourage these hoaxes.

First, however, we need to examine the assumptions we have about the activists and their causes. Rothbard provides a good roadmap to understanding not only the behavior of those that promote and sustain false narratives, but also the rewards they receive for engaging in promoting falsehoods. Dealing with egalitarians, Rothbard pointed out that many free-market advocates readily cede the “moral high ground” to those that promote absolute equality:

In no area has the Left been granted justice and morality as extensively and almost universally as in its espousal of massive equality. It is rare indeed in the United States to find anyone, especially any intellectual, challenging the beauty and goodness of the egalitarian ideal. So committed is everyone to this ideal that “impracticality” — that is, the Against the State: An ... Rockwell Jr., Llewelly... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details) weakening of economic incentives — has been virtually the only criticism against even the most bizarre egalitarian programs. The inexorable march of egalitarianism is indication enough of the impossibility of avoiding ethical commitments; the fiercely “practical” Americans, in attempting to avoid ethical doctrines, cannot help setting forth such doctrines, but they can now only do so in unconscious, ad hoc, and unsystematic fashion. Keynes’s famous insight that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist” — is true all the more of ethical judgments and ethical theory.

Likewise, no one questions the “ideals” of people who campaign against rape and sexual assault. I mean, who would support rape? The normal mind repels an action in which of someone is being sexually assaulted. One does not have to be a moral giant to be against such violation of another human being.

However, like the egalitarians that see egalitarianism itself as a worthy goal, the sexual assault activists and their allies are not trying to prevent actual rapes or to protect women from being raped and assaulted. That’s right, I’m saying that they are not interested in their professed goal – more college campus safety for women – but rather see their tactics as being useful for remaking all of higher education into something akin to a re-education camp that was part of Mao Zedong’s communist China landscape.

Lest anyone think that the activists are only interested in the “truth,” think again. Zerlina Maxwell, an attorney and sexual assault activist, recently declared in a Washington Post column that people should believe every rape claim, including those that are not true. She writes:

In last month’s deep and damning Rolling Stone report about sexual assault at the University of Virginia, a reporter told the story of “Jackie,” who said she was gang raped at a fraternity party and then essentially ignored by the Suicide Pact: The Radi... Napolitano, Andrew P. Best Price: $0.25 Buy New $2.84 (as of 04:15 UTC - Details) administration. It helped dramatize what happens when the claims of victims are not taken seriously.

Now the narrative appears to be falling apart: Her rapist wasn’t in the frat that she says he was a member of; the house held no party on the night of the assault; and other details are wobbly. Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist. Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it during the period while they endeavored to prove or disprove the accusation. This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.

Unfortunately, Maxwell just is getting started. However, while her words are outrageous, at least I am glad to see that the campus feminists are “coming clean” on how they view false accusations – the kinds of allegations that can be devastating to an innocent person on so many fronts – claiming that they are no big deal. She declares:

The accused would have a rough period. He might be suspended from his job; friends might defriend him on Facebook. In the case of Bill Cosby, we might have to stop watching his shows, consuming his books or buying tickets to his traveling stand-up routine. But false accusations are exceedingly rare, and errors can be undone by an investigation that clears the accused, especially if it is done quickly. Real Dissent: A Libert... Thomas E. Woods Jr. Best Price: $8.48 Buy New $7.93 (as of 03:10 UTC - Details)

The cost of disbelieving women, on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that women don’t matter and that they are disposable — not only to frat boys and Bill Cosby, but to us.

No, people who are falsely accused are not merely inconvenienced. I have been involved with a few cases in which individuals were falsely accused. Tonya Craft did not see her daughter for more than two years after being wrongfully-accused by a Northwest Georgia prosecutor who believed he could ride a conviction to the governorship of his state. She was fired from her teaching job, forced to stay away from children, and she and her family were forced to spend more than a million dollars (most of it borrowed or scraped from an inheritance) to fight charges that were transparently false.

(When I talked to a representative of the Georgia State Bar about the prosecutorial misconduct in that case, the official flippantly replied, “Hey, she was acquitted, wasn’t she?” When I told her that the family was forced to spend everything it had – and her parents and others also did things like remortgage their homes and the like to raise funds – she was not moved. And when I told her about things the prosecutors had done that were illegal under the Georgia statutes, she laughed and spat out, “They were just doing their jobs.” When I asked her if “doing their jobs” included subornation of perjury, lying to jurors and the public, and violating other laws and rules she was supposed to be enforcing, she hung up. So much for the “gatekeepers” in Georgia – and probably every other state of the union.)

The Duke Lacrosse Case was even worse. The defense legal fees for a year of representation and investigation were more than five million dollars, and the personal costs were staggering. Stress alone put Kathy Seligmann, a mother of one of the three defendants, in the hospital, as her health failed. The grandfather of David Evans, another defendant, was heartbroken over the false indictments and he died prematurely in the summer of 2006. David Evans, Sr., was diagnosed with a type of diabetes that is brought on by stress. Please Stop Helping Us... Jason L. Riley Best Price: $1.39 Buy New $10.68 (as of 11:40 UTC - Details)

Other families tell me of the death threats, the media vans parked outside their houses, and the constant harassment that all of the lacrosse players faced as the Duke campus exploded with rent-a-protesters and the typical faculty and student activists that were eager to demonstrate their “outrage” and self-righteousness. Duke faculty members engaged in grade retaliation and personal attacks against lacrosse players who were their students.

This is more than just a couple of people “defriending” someone on Facebook or someone getting suspended temporarily from a job. In fact, falsely-accused people lose their jobs; they go to prison, sometimes for decades although they are innocent; they lose custody of their children; they lose their homes and all of their possessions, and they lose their reputations permanently, as some people never forget and constantly repeat the mantra that “children and women don’t tell lies.” Yes, they do.

The U.S. Department of Education already has told colleges and university administration that they are to believe accusations, no matter how ridiculous, and that they are supposed to impose Alice-in-Wonderland legal standards that ensure that almost every allegation will result in a “conviction” against an accused male. And institutions of higher education did not “cave” to the government’s dictum; they gladly rewrote their rules, with some states like Maryland rushing to make the DOE’s “standards” their own for state colleges and universities. That is the Maxwell Standard, and it is wrong.

For all of the talk of rape and sexual assault on campus, we should keep in mind that much of what the government designates as such does not fall into the historical legal categories. For example, at one southern university, a male and female student fell in love and lived together for a couple of years. The male later broke off the relationship, and about a year later, the girl claimed that the male had “raped” her during the time they lived together. (However, the breakup of the relationship occurred much later than the “rape,” which means that the two of them continued to have sexual relations.) Amazon.com $50 Gift Ca... Buy New $50.00 (as of 11:05 UTC - Details)

The local district attorney examined the “evidence” and declared the charges to be ridiculous, but the university took a different path. Citing the DOE’s requirement that “preponderance of the evidence” be the legal standard, it declared the male to be a “rapist” and kicked him out of school and off campus permanently. That the local DA recommended that the student sue the university had no bearing on how the administration acted, as it embraced the “government in the bedroom” approach and cited the DOE requirements.

I will tell you about another rape, this one happening to a woman to whom I am very close. When she was in college and living in an apartment, a man with whom she had conversed before approached her in the hall. They spoke for a while, and then he asked her if they could speak inside her apartment. She reluctantly let him in, and after she did, he shut the door, held a knife to her throat, ordered her to remove her clothes, and then he raped her. That is a rape.

Most of the “rapes” that Maxwell and the activists decry are much different. Often they occur after or during parties when males and females are drinking and lose some of their inhibitions. The couple has sex, and if that happens, the DOE and its acolyte universities always will declare that to be “rape” because a female with even a drop of alcohol in her body is incapable of giving consent to a male. Other “rapes” are in the category of what I described earlier, with a female declaring long after the fact that she had changed her mind that the sex was not consensual, after all.

Please understand that the feminists and Progressives do not want to stop with just college campuses. People like Maxwell would love for the campus standards to become enshrined not only in civil law and college regulations, but in the criminal arena as well. We already are at the point in criminal law in which an accusation and only an accusation is cause not only for indictment but for conviction as well. The federal government in its infamous Mondale Act and in the Violence Against Women Act told states that if they wished to receive federal money they needed to drop all requirements for corroborating evidence in the prosecution of rape, sexual assault, and child molestation.

Let me present a scenario that demonstrates the absurdity of the government’s standards. Assume that I went to the local police and told them that “Bob” recently robbed me at gunpoint and took $1,000. When they asked where it happened, I told them I did not know, nor could I tell them the date or time when it occurred, or what kind of gun he had. (In fact, I gave them a description of a revolver and a Luger and a Colt .45.) Furthermore, I had no record of having withdrawn the money from a bank or had any proof at all that I had possessed $1,000 in cash.

No prosecutor would take on a case like that, yet the following actually happened in Rhode Island in 2007:

A 48-year-old Narragansett man has been charged with raping someone 32 years ago when both he and the alleged victim were 16 years old, the attorney general’s office said this week.

Harold Allen, of 30 Riverview Rd., was indicted last month on a charge of first-degree sexual assault, and he pleaded not guilty, court records show. Allen is accused of raping the girl in North Kingstown between April 1 and Oct. 31, 1975, the records show.

“The traumatized victim decided back then not to tell anybody what happened and repressed the memory of it until recently,” said Michael J. Healey, a spokesman for Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch’s office. “The victim came forward and made a complaint to the North Kingstown Police Department on June 15, 2006.”

Lynch dropped the charges a week later, but he actually got an indictment even though the “victim” could not tell him when or where the supposed rape occurred. The only “proof” was her supposed “recovered” memories that came about through what are considered to be very dubious therapy techniques.

Innocent people have gone to prison since the passage of the Mondale Act and VAWA because the laws have no discernible standard of proof except for testimony, no matter how outlandish the testimony has been. Yet, that seems to be acceptable to Maxwell and others who claim essentially that wrongfully-convicted people are little more than collateral damage to the imposition of the greater good. Writes Maxwell:

The time we spend picking apart a traumatized survivor’s narration on the hunt for discrepancies is time that should be spent punishing serial rapists. “When a woman is coming forward to reveal that she has been sexually assaulted, statistics and empathy should demand we believe and support her.

Understand that Maxwell is saying that once an accusation is made, that should be it. No more investigations, no more examining of the evidence, nothing. Women don’t lie about rape, and now that rape can be nothing more than an after-the-fact declaration that last night’s roll in the hay really was done without consent, most men are rapists and serial rapists at that.

I would ask Maxwell what she thinks about the infamous Scottsboro Boys Case in which nine young black men were thrown into prison, some put onto death row for a while, after they were falsely accused of raping two white women near Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. Like “Jackie” at UVA, they made fantastic claims that were contradicted by medical evidence. Yet, it would seem that the jurors made the “proper” decision, at least according to modern feminists like Maxwell, because they discounted the evidence and believed the women.

As I have written before, the American legal system seems to be descending into madness, yet it is a madness that has come to us via the “Progressive” way of thinking. The author James Ostrowski describes Progressivism as a “cancer” that is “destroying America.” I do not know if resistance to this madness is futile, but resist we must, for if the Progressives and feminists like Maxwell have their way, there will be nothing to stop the destruction of innocent lives.

Do men rape women on college campuses? Yes, they do. I have no doubt that some sexual encounters either meet or would come very close to meeting the rape standard of forcing sexual relations when the woman has not given consent. I also believe that if a woman is passed out drunk or very drunk, that any sexual relations a man would have with her would be rape, and I have no problem with prosecuting someone who does such a thing.

Such encounters, however, are not what the activists are targeting. Instead, Maxwell and the DOE have established the “narratives” that vastly expand the definition of rape and sexual assault, and those narratives govern the current process. It does not matter that the narratives themselves are lies; once the narrative has been given life, it must be kept alive no matter how many lives it destroys.