Etiquette and manners

Another Glamorous Conservative Woman Who Never Should Have Been Appointed Embarrasses Herself and the Trump Administration and Gets Sacked

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Wait, isn’t that Kristi Noem? No, too young; it has to be Pam Bondi, right? No? It can’t be Kimberly Guilfoyle, she’s a brunette. I’ve got it: that’s Katie Zacharia! No?

I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sick of this pattern. The Biden administration may have put a lot of incompetent, unqualified women in various positions based on DEI bias, but hiring women because somebody thinks they are hot and have sexy hair is just as unethical, and arguably even worse.

“MAGA Barbie” is a derisive moniker these days used to describe Indiana Fever WNBA guard Sophie Cunningham, but she’s actually very good at her job (playing women’s pro basketball) as well as her avocation (calling out the racist, anti-white lesbian thugs in her league and reminding the public that biological males have no right to play women’s sports). I think it would be wise to apply expand the employment of the term to professional bimbos like former ESPN reporter and Fox News personality Britt McHenry, who was just fired as a US State Department press adviser.

How hard is it to behave in a dignified, professional fashion when you know you represent the United States and also know that everyone has a camera at the ready to record your behavior in public? Too hard, I guess, for people like McHenry—you know, morons.

McHenry, 40, was hired as the Trump State Department press adviser covering Europe and Africa. Despite the fact that she also was responsible for handling press for Kimberly Guilfoyle’s text message scandal (Heluva job, there, Britt!), she was promoted three days ago to a new job managing External Affairs & Press for Under Secretary Jacob Helberg’s team. Then she did this, according to the New York Post:

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“The Great Stupid” Headline Of The Month: TMZ

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

TMZ, the celebrity news site, has always been pretty stupid (along with its readers), but I thought this headline had to be a joke. When have you ever heard of a news story involving someone who isn’t famous saying a word? Apparently TMZ’s audience is so woke and unfamiliar with the core value of freedom of speech that a stranger uttering the two-syllable word “nigger” is as news worthy as an actual crime. Readers are expected to react with horror: “How could this happen? What is the country coming to? What can we do to halt this unbearable assault on our sensibilities?”

What ever happened to “Sticks and stone can break my bones but words will never hurt me”? TMZ never even reveals to whom the dangerous word was addressed, if anybody.

The story goes on…

A Delta passenger was caught on video using the n-word while being escorted off a flight by cops … after allegedly screaming “death to America” and pretending to shoot fellow travelers. Video circulating on X shows the unruly passenger being removed from a Delta flight Thursday, which was scheduled to travel from New York City’s JFK International Airport to Atlanta.Law enforcement sources tell TMZ … the passenger has been identified as Jerome Anixter, a 60-year-old Brooklyn man, who was arrested and charged with assault, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest and obstructing governmental administration. We’re told Port Authority Police responded after Delta reported a disruptive passenger who appeared intoxicated while the plane was at the gate preparing for departure. ..

And so we see what TMZ considers, in order, worst, bad, and least bad: the uttering of a word, “Death to America,” (a threat) and “pretending to shoot fellow travelers.” (With what, his finger? But that still can constitute criminal assault).

TMZ is also deliberately trying to get the man, whose disruptive behavior seems to have fallen well short of actress Selma Blair’s recent flying freakout, attacked or killed by some anti-hate speech vigilante by branding him as a racist. Nice. If that word is the lead, then presumably simply using the word would justify a TMZ story if the guy didn’t do anything else. Perhaps we can look forward to future news flashes like “DoorDash delivery man says “Poopy-head”! and “Dog-walker says supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!” If the non-famous are going to be publicly shamed for mere words now, the least TMZ could do is start headlining real affronts to communication with headlines like “Woman on bus says “Statue of limitations!” or “Teacher uses “Irregardless”!

This is The Great Stupid, my friends. Banishing it from the culture will be like trying to get rid of bedbugs.

[WordPress suggests that I tag this story “Art.”]

Oh Look! “The Ethicist” Is Wrong. Again.

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

This one is easy. A son, racked with guilt because he missed his dying father’s last moments in a hospice because he was drunk, asked his father’s physician if Dad had suffered. The doctor answered that he had died in his sleep, peacefully. In reality, though the doctor wasn’t present, there was some indication that the father had been “in distress” before he shuffled off these mortal coils, according to some in the shift on duty.

“Did I betray a position of trust by lying to him?,” the doctor asks The Ethicist, aka. Kwame Anthony Appiah. “What, if anything, makes a lie morally acceptable?”

No, the doctor didn’t betray a position of trust because the dead father was the patient, not his son. The MD had no professional duty to the son in this situation, any more than it would have been unethical for him to bluff the son into folding a winning hand in a poker game. What makes a lie morally acceptable, that is, ethical, is when it accomplishes more good than the truth would, particularly when the truth would achieve no good at all except in an ethical system where the truth is always the best course. Which is to say, Fantasy Land.

Let’s consider the various options open to the doctor.

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J.D. Vance’s Wishy-Washy “Town Hall” On CBS

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

Speaking of Vice-Presidents, yecchh.

Our current VP was subjected to a CBS “town hall” over the weekend where a series of generally none-too-bright questioners peppered Vance with questions that he hesitated to answer with the clarity and forcefulness necessary. I thought Vance’s strength was supposed to be communication. Maybe Trump can get rid of him…

You can read the transcript here, but my main nausea came from Vance’s weenie responses to two questions regarding illegal immigration. CBS set him up to some extent with the first one, asked by a nun, Sister Nancy Sylvester. The Veep is Catholic, of course, and spoke as if he felt he owed some kind of deference to Sister Nancy despite the fact that her question bypassed law and policy and went straight to toxic empathy. She asked…

“Mr. Vice President, we are sisters who minister at the southern border in the United States, as well as here around Detroit, and they are constantly seeing families who are affected by our immigration policies. They see the trauma of children who are separated from their parents, sometimes on a moment’s notice. They go to school and they come back and they’re not there. And they have to sort of fend for themselves. And so they, the sisters see the kind of effect, the fear and violence of the ICE behavior. We know the complexity of this issue, but what really pains us is how it’s being implemented in such ways. And so I’m going to, sort of know that both of us share the same faith. We may not always agree, ’cause I understand you don’t always even agree with our pope sometimes. And so I want to, though, wonder what would you say, how would you justify to people of faith, especially those of us who try to follow the gospel, how the behavior of the ICE men and women can constantly be justified to, in terms of the kind of values we live, wanna live by, and also what policies would you advocate to try to promote more compassionate and respective behavior toward our immigrant sisters and brothers?”

Elected officials and responsible citizens can’t accept the false premises underlying such a question, but Vance did. He replied, after wasting time showing his concern for the Pope’s health and pandering to his fellow Catholics,

“So let me say, one, we’re trying to strike the right balance. And when you have a country where approximately 25 million illegal aliens have come in over the past 30 or so years, many of them completely unchecked and unvetted, we’re trying to strike a balance between how do we do law enforcement, but how do we also do it humanely, and how do we not do so little law enforcement that you actually empower some of the worst people in the world. And so—I think that it is constantly a work in progress. When you’re talking about millions and millions of people and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of law enforcement officers, you know, we’ve even just in the past year or so increased training protocols. Because I do think that men and women of ICE, by the way, it’s like the men and women of law enforcement. Most of them are amazing people who are patriots and they want to do a good job protecting their country. Sometimes you have some people who make mistakes. Sometimes you have some people who really screw up. And obviously we have a responsibility to prosecute, investigate when people do screw up.”

Clear as mud, and incompetent. His duty was to begin by saying, first, that the Sister was talking about illegal immigrants, and the “immigration policies” of enforcing the law. These aren’t “immigrant sisters and brothers,” but illegal immigrants who should not benefit from taking what isn’t theirs to take, It’s nice that she and her colleagues are trying to ease the burdens law-breaking illegals have inflicted on their own children, but that is not the fault of the United States or its primary concern, nor should it be. “Following the gospel” means, as the wonderful Pope has made clear, open borders, and the disastrous consequences of that are blazingly evident in Europe and increasingly in the U.S. You cannot govern competently and responsibly with faith and the the idealistic teachings from a culture 2,000 years ago. Law enforcement wouldn’t have incidents of overreach, bad decisions, accidents and mistakes if lawbreakers didn’t force the government to deal with their destruction.

I have a dear friend and occasional commenter on EA who thinks like Sister Nancy. This is the poison well of misplaced Christian charity that creates the “Good Illegal Immigrant” myth and the absurd parallels between Mary and Joseph and the millions of illegals the Biden administration encouraged to first break our immigration laws, and then to engage in further lawbreaking.

Then CBS host Tony Dokoupil introduced another questioner, a naturalized citizen named Niv Agarwal. Sister Nancy had just asked, “I’m interested in how, from your very core of your faith, how would you want to be, how do you want to treat immigrants? Because in many cases, we get, they all are called terrorists sometimes by people. They are—like, how does, what, what would you want? What would you want to do?” Great: Shut up, Sister, you ignorant slut. Tony segued to Niv, whose infuriating question was along the same lines. He said,

“Hey, my name is Niv. My family and I immigrated here about 20 years ago, and I became a citizen about five years ago. So you were the first person I voted for, actually….One reason, because of the reasons you just mentioned, I was concerned about border safety, as in the trafficking and the drugs, not because I think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, but after seeing ICE behave like military police, and you recently call H-1 visa workers foreign indentured servants. I think Americans are anything but safe. So I’m just curious, why, why are you scapegoating immigrants for the issues you’re supposed to be solving as a Vice President?”

Immediately, Vance should have said,

“Let’s get two things straight once and for all, Niv. First, the issue is illegal immigrants, not legal immigrants like you. Stop letting open borders advocates confuse the issue by adopting their dishonest rhetoric. Second, if an illegal immigrant has a job in this country, by definition he or she is taking that job away from an American, because if that illegal wasn’t here, an American would have that job. So if you don’t think immigrants actually take away jobs from Americans, you’re confused. Nobody is “scapegoating immigrants.” Again, we are talking about illegal immigrants. I would think, as an immigrant yourself, you would insist on that distinction. We are correctly pointing out the harm done to the nation, society, the economy and law-abiding citizens when foreign citizens come here illegally, and ICE acts exactly as law enforcement has to act when criminals are being protected by rogue state and local governments and misguided Americans who have accepted pro-open borders propaganda as you have.”

If the Republicans get clobbered in the mid-terms, a main reason will be their incompetence and rhetorical cowardice.

Unethical Quotes of the Month: President Trump and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

First Trump’s…

Now Jeffries….

“Well, it’s an extraordinary insult, but he continues to repeat it. And what’s so ironic is that Donald Trump is clearly the dumbest person ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue…”

Jeffries was talking to the execrable Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNOW so of course there was no push-back. Such a classy exchange between a President and a Congressional leader! “You’re stupid!” “Oh yeah? Well you’re stupider!” I can just imaging Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun talking to each other like that.

Actually I can’t. Those career-long adversaries has respect for the positions they held, our institutions, and, yes, each other. They also understood the importance of civility.

Donald Trump’s penchant for stooping to ad hominem attacks is another one of his obnoxious and self-destructive habits. I wish someone would explain to him that “IQ” does not mean “intelligence” and that it is ignorant, indeed stupid, to think so. I’d bet at some point Trump’s IQ was tested, probably as a kid, registered in the relatively high range, and his parents or teachers told him it meant something. (My father told me that what proved one’s intelligence was what you did, not how you scored on a test.) The President has always been obsessed with ratings, scores and numbers (“Subscriptions way down!). Heck, if I used that to measure the value of my life, I would have killed this blog years ago. Maybe myself too.

You could excuse Trump a bit, especially given his “tit for tat” reflex, for resorting to ad hominem since his political foes constantly use the practice. Trump is fat, he’s orange, his hair is weird, he’s nuts, he’s demented, he’s stupid. It’s still no excuse for him returning fire in kind. Furthermore, it is extremely unlikely that Hakeem Jeffries is “low IQ.” He had an impressive academic record, he was a law review editor in law school and graduated at the top of his class, clerked for a judge and was a corporate litigator before entering politics.

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Comment of the Day: “Stop Making Me Defend Shawn Gillis!”

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Beginning with a quote from the post, Cees Van Barnevelt delves deeper into the issue. Her comment also reminded me of the Debrahlee Lorenzana affair, which I wrote about way back in 2010. [That’s Debrahlee above.] She was a Citibank employee fired because she was deemed to be dressing too “provocatively.” She sued and lost. The post discusses some ethics issues germane to Cees’ Comment of the Day on the post, “Stop Making Me Defend Shawn Gillis!”

***

No, Gillis’s point, and he is accurate, is that many women at co-ed gyms dress to attract the male gaze while the official narrative is that they are just “expressing themselves.” “Observational humor” is supposed to reveal taboo truths.

Women at the gym may dress to attract the male gaze but not from every male. If the wrong man (unattractive to her) looks at her one second too long it may cause problems for him (complaints to gym management, public shaming).

Gym influencer Joey Swoll has many TikTok videos shaming women in tight clothes filming themselves, publishing the video at TikTok while shaming the men who walked into that video looking one second too long; these men might have looked wondering why somebody was filming at the gym!

At work you have a similar dynamic. Recently there was a TikTok generated trend of dressing up as an “Office Siren”, with women wearing clothes more suitable for a night club. This trend is getting people fired (e.g. dress code violations, risks for sexual harassment claims).

Shaming men for the “male gaze” and excusing women who dress inappropriately has undesirable social effects. Males are getting overly cautious around women, to protect themselves from creep shaming and claims of sexual harassment. At work this may mean that women have trouble receiving one-to-one mentoring from male colleagues who do not want to be alone with a women in one room. At the gym men do not volunteer to help a women who is stuck under gym equipment. A women gets a heart attack, and a man thinks twice about doing CPR or using an AED considering the potential for accusations. Men are getting afraid to ask a lady out in person, do to the potential for creep shaming and #MeToo accusations. You can lament about the dating crisis and the loneliness epidemic; shaming men for being and acting like males is one of the main causes.

Stop Making Me Defend Shawn Gillis!

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

The wild—and increasingly weaponized—hypocrisy among alleged feminists is not to be borne, and I’m happy to flag it as the unethical—but woke!—cultural poison that it is.

Perpetually unfunny comic Shane Gillis was back for the third (or is it fourth?) time as a host of the now totally ideologically-captured Saturday Night Live last week. During his rambling monologue to begin the show, Gillis said, “I haven’t been to the gym in so long I didn’t know women just dress like whores now? Look, I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe it.” Gillis then went on to describe the ubiquitous tight short-shorts that dominate young women’s attire at the gym as featuring “wrinkles [that] go around the cheeks and all combine at the butthole,” adding, “You’re not allowed to look… because they are filming. I’m in the background of about 10 TikToks right now.”

The Hollywood Left’s explosion of fury, which sure sounds like mandatory feminist outrage from beta males to me, focuses on Gillis’s use of the word “whores”—I even saw it censored on Axis news sources as “wh*res.” Not to go back into the misty past, but as I will always remind readers here, Bill Maher called conservative women like Sarah Palin and others “cunts” and “twats” on his HBO show with nary a peep from feminists. Today, over a decade later, the same people who laughed at Bill’s hilarious misogyny want to cancel Gillis. Here’s Forbes virtue-signaling to the mob:

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Senator Le Pétomane?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

There are so many reasons for Michiganders regardless of party and ideological bent not to vote for Abdul El-Sayed that the revelation that he likes to fart in public seems trivial in comparison. He’s a Communist who lies about his beliefs; he has called for defunding the police and he is anti-Semitic, though to today’s Democrats that’s a good thing. He refused to disavow his pal Hasan Piker, who is a vocal America-hater. Naturally Bernie Sanders, AOC and Obama are supporting El-Sayed.

Now a longtime aid to the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan has quit and gone rogue, calling his former boss for whom he worked as a bodyguard and a staff assistant a “manufactured man” who has maturity more appropriate to a high school locker room. Jordan Domingue told the media that during El-Sayed’s gubernatorial and Senate campaigns, he realized that the candidate was a “30-year-old leapfrogging into a job he was inexperienced for and only got through connections.”

“Now I’m far from blameless, and will reflect for years how I let myself be captured by loyalty and personality,” Domingue added. “When he acted like an entitled mobster to elected officials in 2017-2018, I excused it as a justified outsider earning their place. When he would say one thing to one group and another thing to a different group hours later, I considered it just the norm or ‘strategic ambiguity’ as he calls it.”

What Domingue really found intolerable, however, was El-Sayed’s affection for openly passing gas in front of staffers. “He would openly do so without warning or embarrassment as his form of stand-up comedy,” Domingue wrote. “To this day for him, the act of farting is easily one of the funniest things a person can do.”

Is that a good reason to vote against him, along with, you know, the fact that El-Sayed is an anti-American lunatic, which doesn’t bother the Mad Left these days? Le Pétomane was the stage name of Joseph Pujol (1857 –1945) who was a professional “fartist.” Not only could he fart at will, he could fart tunes. The Governor in “Blazing Saddles,” played by Mel Brooks, is named in honor of Le Pétomane.

There are lots of reasons to be dubious about this story. For one thing, it has “disgruntled employee” written all over it. For another, it was first reported by The Gateway Pundit, which is on the EA blacklist. I will also point out that supporters of Donald Trump are ethically estopped from assailing a candidate for having a sophomoric sense of humor and running for an office “he was inexperienced for.”

I also note that the levels of dignity and decorum, not to mention maturity, that the public has a right to expect from its elected officials has already been reduced to high school and even elementary school level by such class acts as GOP Rep. Lauren Boberg, Senator Fetterman dressing like gym rat and this…

Nonetheless, thinking that farting intentionally at the workplace is acceptable conduct does raise serious questions about judgment and socialization, if not sanity. And wouldn’t you agree that a superior intentionally farting among staffers in the workplace constitutes creating a “hostile work environment”?

The Cornell Frat Rape Ethics Train Wreck, Part II

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I paused Part I when I hit item #6 and the post began reaching Alizia Tyler-level length. Since then, about 24 hours ago, there have been new revelations, commentary and developments. Picking up where I left off…

7. The New York Times tracked down the detailed filings in the private Title IX proceedings Cornell undertook, including hundreds of pages of emails, text messages, photographs and interviews with “Jane Doe,” her friends and the alleged rapists. This section from the Times report is, I think, definitive (the Times is playing it straight for a change):

At 3:05 a.m. on Oct. 20, 2024, one of Jane Doe’s roommates sent her a text.

“Are you coming home tonight?” she asked.

Four minutes later, Jane Doe texted back that she didn’t know.

The roommate went to sleep, she would tell investigators. When she woke up at 11 a.m., she uploaded a photo of her empty room to Snapchat. “Only I made it back home,” she wrote on the post.

Around 11:15 a.m., she said, Jane Doe arrived home, still in her “big boots and small dress” from the night before, according to the roommate. She had consumed ketamine and had sex with multiple men, she told her two roommates. One roommate told investigators that Jane Doe did not use the word “rape” or “assault” yet.

It seemed like she was “in shock,” her other roommate later told investigators, “not really understanding the gravity of what she was saying.”

The next day, on Oct. 21, Jane Doe went to her “big sister” — a woman designated as a mentor — at Cornell’s Tri Delta sorority and told her there were rumors circulating that she was a “slut.” The big sister, a junior at Cornell, told investigators that Jane Doe added with a laugh that “unfortunately they are true.”

To me, this means that the accuser was not raped and didn’t regard herself as being raped. The editorial comments of her friends indicate biased allies doing their best to frame the event in the manner most favorable to someone they care about. I know, I know: victims of sexual assault blame themselves, are awash in shame, and often take time to “process” what occurred. Or they are persuaded by others to reexamine what happened in a way that avoids accountability, provides a path to financial damages, and that victimizes others. Whichever went on here, I don’t see how a criminal prosecution and conviction is possible unless politics tramples the law—which, as we all know, it often does.

8. The student received a text message from Jonathan Newell, one of the men she would go on to accuse of sexual assault. Note that his name is out there but hers is being withheld by the news media, despite the fact that both, or neither, may be victims. “I just wanted to apologize for how things went down the other night,” Newell wrote. He said that he and Matthew Ingalls, another student she accused of sexual assault, both “felt terrible” that they were too stoned and drunk to “shut it down and kick people out before it got way out of hand.”

“Jane Doe” replied to him, “At the end of the day none of the sexual stuff was illegal and honestly I really liked being with you and Matt.” Not illegal means, “I wasn’t raped, but you know that.”

9. Here, thanks to reader James Flood, who flagged it in the comments to Part I, is feminist Camille Paglia on the basic principles of feminist hypocrisy the incident and one like it highlight…

10. Among the messages in the infamous SnapChat exchange among members of the fraternity during the orgy or what ever you want to call it was an alert that there was “free pussy” upstairs. Victory Girls opines in part,

“The female student’s original claims were that sex and drug use at the Chi Phi fraternity house just off of Cornell’s campus was consensual, but now, the story, perceived to be pushed under the table for two years, has risen back to the surface. And now, Jane Doe is telling a different story…his kind of stuff happens every weekend on any given university campus-this is one time that it is actually hitting the news…This case is not just a case of them versus her. This case, and the behavior that surrounds it, are a cry for help…

“Some young people go to college with a specific career goal in mind. Some young people come to a university to explore their identities, to embark upon new horizons and, yes, to belong. …Fraternities and sororities sell the price tag of lifelong friends, leadership opportunities and exclusive networks and experiences on their websites and social media of carefully-curated videos and photos. The guys want the hot girls at the parties and the girls want to go to the parties at the “husband house.”

… Fraternities use slogans like, “building better men”, “friendship, justice and learning”, “transforming lives”, “courage to be more”, to name a few of their catchy and contrived mottos. Sororities talk of philanthropy, “bravery”, “togetherness”, “family”, “values” and “inspiring positive change”…Nothing says “bonding” and “gentlemen” like putting “free pussy” in a group chat. On the flip side of this coin, the young woman who was allegedly raped spent some time drinking at a sorority house on campus before going to the Chi Phi house to meet a guy she was chatting with for an alleged hook-up. How she ended up upstairs with no girlfriends who value “togetherness” is also a big, glaring question. So much for the “values” of the sisterhood.

…Special prosecution or not, this case, and all of the young people involved, is a tragic depiction of a toxic campus community….they all need to take a good, hard look. Universities’ blanket statements that “they take sexual violence seriously” and their willful ignorance of what happens on off-campus houses that still bring money into the University is not enough. Organizations that claim to raise “gentlemen and leaders” and “brave women” do not lend themselves to this type of behavior. A “gentleman” in a formal suit one evening who later participates in a chat (or who is an “innocent” bystander in said chat) advertising “free pussy upstairs” is not a “productive member of society.”…A girl that offers to sniff ketamine off a guy’s junk and have a threesome is a woman with severe insecurities who needs REAL friends who will stop her from the self-destructive behavior that she may later regret and encourage her to have dignity and respect herself. This is not a Cornell problem. Or a college problem. Or a left versus right problem. Or even a legal problem. This is a bigger MORAL problem. This is a right from wrong problem…

I have stated many times here that I believe fraternities are disasters-in-waiting, despite anecdotal evidence that they and sororities have social and socializing value. My college killed its fraternities in the 19th Century. “Morality” is not the issue here, and citing it just fogs the conversation. People are being hurt by this kind of conduct. Ethical people don’t engage in conduct that hurts people. For “Jane Doe” to seek to harm (or benefit from while harming) those who were willing participants in an activity she consented to and encouraged or appeared to consent to and encourage is unethical.

11. The New York Times reports that two of the fraternity members accused by “Jane” were expelled. Another who had already graduated is barred from campus. Two more were suspended. The remaining two men, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar, were ordered not to contact Jane Doe, to study sexual harassment, social media use and bystander intervention, and to write “reflection papers.” Their crime was being part of a group of men who entered the room after reading the Snapchat “free pussy” message. A lawsuit filed by Kretzschmar against Cornell shows that he was not found responsible for sexual assault. Cornell ruled that he had committed a lesser offense of “attempted sexual exploitation.”

Come on.

Watch “Animal House,” for heaven’s sake.

A lawyer for Kretzschmar said in a statement that the discipline his client received showed that he was “never accused of, nor found responsible for, rape. He was not even present during any sexual activity.”

“Jane Doe” has received no academic discipline at all. Ever since the Obama era’s despicable (but typical for that administration) “Dear Colleague” letter, universities have operated from a position of presumed guilt for male students accused of sexual assault and presumed victim status for their accusers. You know. Justice. “Equity.”

There is a lot more, but that’s enough for now.

The Cornell Frat Rape Ethics Train Wreck, Part I

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I was first made aware of the sudden re-emergence of a 2024 gang rape allegation as a media and social media obsession when a friend who was raped began posting furiously about the story on Facebook. A knee-jerk progressive, she is certain that there was a cover-up at Cornell and that the alleged victim is telling the truth, because all women must be believed.

I don’t know what really happened at the Chi Phi fraternity on a fateful October night in 2024, and neither do you, and neither does my friend. Anyone who presumes they do know based on a partisan or ideological bias has elected to board the newly launched Cornell Frat Rape Ethics Train Wreck in the dining car. Shame on them.

“Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is having a bad year—look at the sudden resurgence of anti-Semitism here—and fraternity rape hysteria should be viewed with particular skepticism. The infamous Duke Lacrosse case occurred in 2006 and my commentary was lost when the old Ethics Scoreboard left the building, but it is still a tag on Ethics Alarms, with this the most directly relevant post. The imaginary gang rape that disgraced Rolling Stone was extensively covered here, however, as you can see. In 2014, “Rolling Stone” reporter Sabrina Erdly wrote a feature about an imaginary co-ed named “Jackie” being gang raped at a University of Virginia fraternity party. UVA president Teresa A. Sullivan, a good little feminist, suspended all fraternities with no actual evidence of wrongdoing. But you know, men are pigs, women are always the victims, and one must always believe all women, even imaginary ones (there was no “Jackie”) when they cry “Rape!”

Ethics Alarms has analyzed several instances of false rape claims as well as the cynical #MeToo fad, which, like the Cornell episode was weaponized by the Left for political gain. The hysteria got many sexual predators their just desserts, and also amassed many unjustly maligned male victims. I don’t know what happened at Cornell, but I do know that the case has already been co-opted by Democrats to inflame a core constituency, angry white progressive women convinced that the U.S. is an oppressive patriarchy that would have the culture emulating “A Handmaiden’s Tale” if it had its way. There’s an election approaching, after all. Hence the emergence of a mother who murdered her three children as the object of sympathy.

Here are what I consider salient facts based on what we do know:

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