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September 2017

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A Do-It-Yourself Liberal Education By Charles Lipson

By on September 20th, 2017

In the name of social justice and diversity, students at elite colleges are casting aside the very works that probe those topics so deeply. The central authors of the Western tradition—from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Orwell—are no longer part of the required curriculum in the social sciences and the humanities. Their absence carries a high price.

It means liberal-arts students are no longer liberally educated. They are not historically literate or well-versed in such uniquely Western achievements as free speech, government by consent, rule of law, secure property rights, and religious toleration. That don’t understand the rarity or fragility of those achievements, the struggles needed to secure them, or the ways they protect ordinary citizens from tyranny.

One cost of this ignorance is now painfully obvious. Free speech is imperiled on campus, burned at the stake of other values deemed more important: “social justice,” “inequality,” and “oppression.” The campus warriors overlook the crucial question: Who decides?

To understand the other losses inflicted by this cultural shift, it helps to remember a once-popular but now forgotten name from mid-century America: Clifton Fadiman.

Fadiman served as a friendly, knowledgeable guide to the world of liberal education, a maître d’hôtel for that rich banquet. He played that role at a time when many Americans wanted to improve their education and appreciated a helping hand. Many, like me, lived far from good bookstores, far from universities. Beyond reading Shakespeare and “Huckleberry Finn,” we didn’t know where to begin. Fadiman showed us.

His most lasting achievement was “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” a book meant for Americans who wanted to educate themselves and so enrich their lives. That guide, now in its 4th edition, is still immensely valuable.

Intellectuals looked down their noses at Fadiman and his ilk, dismissing them as “middlebrow.” Whether their brows were middle, high, or low, these egalitarian educators were doing important work. They were skilled guides for anyone with a library card and a thirst for learning.

Fadiman and others, like Encyclopædia Britannica, which published the Great Books, revealed a great truth: With a little guidance, you can do a lot to educate yourself, and you can do it at any age. Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan does that. The Kirkus review of the first edition captures its flavor well:

“[Fadiman] sees, in the books and writers he has chosen, the tools not only of self-enhancement but of self-discovery. … This is not a reading plan for the scholar, but for ‘everyman‘ — the high school student who can go no farther in formal education, the college graduate who has bypassed the treasures of literature, the average layman who is reasonably literate, but needs a refresher on things half experienced in the past.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

A Jacksonian speech in Turtle Bay By Rich Lowry

By on September 20th, 2017

As someone said on Twitter, never before has been there so much murmuring of “holy sh**” in so many different languages. Donald Trump’s speech at the United Nations was a sometimes awkward marriage of conventional Republican foreign policy and a very basic version of Trump’s nationalism.

The headline obviously was the threat to destroy North Korea if we are forced to defend ourselves. If the point of the speech was to get the world to take notice, this surely succeeded. But it’s still an open question of what exactly the administration’s North Korea policy is — a rhetorically forceful version of the usual hope that we can get China to pressure North Korea and eventually sit down to negotiate again with Pyongyang, or something different?

Also, Trump called the Iran nuclear deal an embarrassment to our country, which is a pretty strong indication that he wants to get out of the agreement and probably will (even if this continues to be an internal battle in the administration).

It’s very safe to say that the reference to Kim Jong-un as “rocket man” aside (which will occasion twelve hours of intense cable debate), we’ve never heard such direct, undiplomatic language from a U.S. president at Turtle Bay.

In general, Trump defended the American-created and -defended world order, but he did it on his own terms. He emphasized the importance of sovereign nation-states and said we should accept their different cultures and interests. This is fine as far as it goes. In his version of post-war history, however, Trump gives short shrift to how important a vision of liberal democracy was to the United States. And there was a tension between his avowal to accept the ways of other nation-states and his (appropriately) excoriating attacks on the political and economic systems of North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. Indeed, George W. Bush could have spoken in exactly the same terms about those rogue regimes, if with more elevated rhetoric.

All things considered and given the alternatives, it was a fine speech. It wasn’t really an “America First” speech — it defended the world order and even had warm words for the Marshall Plan — but in its signature lines about North Korea, it was thematically a very Jacksonian speech. What exactly this means in terms of policy remains to be seen. But everyone is paying attention, if they weren’t before.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Nationalism without isolationism: Trump’s UN triumph By Benny Avni

By on September 20th, 2017

For 50 minutes on Tuesday, President Trump dazzled, and appalled, UN denizens in a speech that was the most detailed and reasoned defense to date of his “America First” ideology. The nationalism was still there, but any hint of isolationism was absent.

If “Rocket Man” Kim Jong-un refuses to end his missile and nuclear programs and keeps up his “suicide mission,” Trump said, and if countries fail to isolate him despite the UN’s own resolutions, America “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

And he didn’t shy away from attacking several other sacred cows of Turtle Bay. He chastised the UN bureaucracy and hinted America won’t continue blindly pouring cash into it. He asked other countries to shoulder more responsibility in maintaining global peace and prosperity.

And then there was this: The nuclear deal with Iran is “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” Trump said. “Frankly, that deal is an embarrassment to the United States, and I don’t think you’ve heard the last of it — believe me.”

The usual suspects were appalled. “It was the wrong speech, at the wrong time, to the wrong audience,” Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom told the BBC.

In reality, it was a more-refined and a better-reasoned version of the worldview Trump’s been proclaiming since the campaign. It was a defense of the role national interests play in facilitating global cooperation.

He talked about three principles — “sovereignty, security and prosperity.” But the speech might as well have been titled “sovereignty, sovereignty and sovereignty.”

The word appeared in the speech 19 times. Trump also mentioned “patriotism” and, of course, he vowed, “As president of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first.”

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

‘Future Dead Cops’: A Hateful Tweet Exposes an Academic Cancer Universities house too many propaganda mills masquerading as liberal-arts, social-science, and studies departments. By Abraham H. Miller —

By on September 19th, 2017

When Michael Isaacson, an adjunct professor at John Jay College, publicly tweeted about his looking forward to teaching future dead police officers, more than a bit of truth about our system of post-secondary education was encoded in that message. You might think of Isaacson, a self-congratulatory founder of the Antifa thugs, as something of a deviant. He isn’t.

His tweets reflect what far too many professors on campuses nationwide think but are afraid to say outside the confines of their classroom. Since the 1960s, universities have been increasingly taken over by the far Left, whose members have cloned themselves by imposing tacit political tests for recruitment, promotion, and tenure.

The wide-eyed, long-haired militants who smashed their way into the dean’s office, shouting, “Up against the wall, [expletive deleted],” in a few decades became deans. Within the university, they fashioned every hare-brained policy from social promotions to leftist-dominated studies departments that are merely propaganda fiefdoms organizing for off-campus political activities while masquerading as intellectual disciplines.

There are really two universities: the humanities, the social sciences, and the studies departments versus engineering, business, and the natural sciences. Serious intellectual work still occurs on campus in the latter fields but far less so in the former.

Universities are bureaucratic hierarchies, and hierarchies are status systems. In the contemporary university, status is defined by access to external research support. Universities, especially public universities, can no longer count on public largess as they did decades ago. Departments that can bring in external funding with its generous allocations of overhead money are valued. Others are not. Universities need research contracts and grants to survive.

Universities might talk about their commitments to political correctness, but as Congress exempts itself from its own legislation, so too do universities exempt high-valued departments from the political nonsense they sell the public. As my colleagues in engineering used to chide me, “p.c.” to them meant simply “personal computer.”

The traditional argument for the liberal arts and social sciences was that they broadened students’ intellectual horizons, made them think conceptually, and compelled them to grapple with unpopular ideas. We can debate whether that mission ever was achieved, but one thing is eminently clear: Those goals no longer exist. They have not for decades.

The liberal arts and social sciences are largely, although not exclusively, default majors for students and an assumed safety valve for institutions. These are little playpens inhabited by faculty and students who are more concerned about the conflict in the street than the life of the mind. Their function is to sop up tuition money and provide a dress parade when the government representatives come to do their so-called cultural audits.

The time, energy, and intellectual commitments in the real university do not allow for demonstrating or being concerned about which speakers should be disinvited. And while the University of California, Berkeley, has gotten a lot of attention for its demonstrations, it should be remembered that at the height of the Free Speech Movement, the strongest and most populous student group was Campus Crusade for Christ, which outnumbered FSM participants about five to one.

During major demonstrations at Berkeley, most students were in class, not in the streets. But that is never news. Even today, Berkeley, which needed phalanxes of armed police to protect the free-speech rights of mainstream conservative Ben Shapiro, boasts one of the best engineering colleges in the country. Rest assured, few if any of Berkeley’s engineering students were embroiled in demonstrations.

The students and faculties of a lesser god have been left to create their own propaganda mills and therapeutic societies based on a leftist ideology that has worked nowhere and came visibly crashing down with the Berlin Wall. At some point, serious intellectuals would not be saying that real Communism has not been tried. They would be responding to the overwhelming weight of evidence that Communism and other leftist fantasies simply do not work. But propaganda mills masquerading as academic disciplines do not care about evidence.

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Princeton’s Constitution Day Lecture Titled ‘F%*# Free Speech’ Should we ‘rethink’ academic freedom and free speech? By Katherine Timpf

By on September 19th, 2017

This year’s annual Constitution Day lecture at Princeton University was titled “F%*# Free Speech: An Anthropologist’s Take on Campus Speech Debates” and maintained that “the academy has never promoted free speech as a central value.”

According to an article in Campus Reform, the lecture was given by the chairwoman of the Department of Anthropology and director of the Program in African Studies, Carolyn Rouse.

In the lecture, Rouse stated that we should “rethink academic freedom and academic values” and that “the way in which free speech is being celebrated in the media makes little to no sense anthropologically.”

“Put simply, speech is costly,” Rouse said. “So, contrary to the ACLU’s statement on their website regarding the role of free speech on college campuses, the academy has never promoted free speech as its central value.”

Rouse might want to rethink this. After all, in the wake of the election, Rouse has been seeking submissions for her “Trumplandia” project — “a virtual space for documenting the impact of Trump’s presidency on the world” — something she says was inspired by her belief that “the changes promised by the president-elect to ‘make America great again’ were authoritarian and racist.”

The irony is as rich (and sickening) as a mayonnaise-covered chocolate truffle: This professor actually has the nerve to knock those who value free speech on campus, while using her position as a campus leader to spearhead a project that openly calls the president “racist” — an obvious example of the kind of speech that some might want to censor.

To be fair, it doesn’t seem that Rouse actually went so far as to say that there was anything wrong with the First Amendment in itself. Rather, according to Campus Reform, she seemed to define “free-speech absolutism” as the idea that all opinions should be considered equally, without, as Campus Reform puts it, “reference to any peer review process or any system of credentials,” e.g., a skeptic without any experience in climatology being free to call climate change a hoax. Rouse also argued that academia is a “semi-autonomous social field,” and that all “semi-autonomous social fields” have the right to make their own rules for themselves.

Now, Rouse is right to say that all kinds of institutions have all kinds of rules. Where she’s wrong, however, is the insinuation that the best way to counter incorrect or uninformed speech is to limit it. This is especially wrong when we’re talking about academia, seeing as the entire purpose of something such as classroom discussion is to learn and grow from a free exchange of ideas. Someone is out there spreading falsities? Well, then counter it with truth. That is, after all, how the real world works. Rouse suggests that it doesn’t — that “free-speech absolutism doesn’t exist,” because everyone tailors his or her own speech to fit within the bounds of socially acceptable standards — but anyone who has ever seen Twitter or a comments section could easily tell you that that’s simply not true.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Strange Case of Confederate Cool Leftists love Johnnie Reb in movies and songs. But statues? Not so much. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 19th, 2017

How exactly did the Left romanticize the Lost Cause Confederacy, and by extension its secession and efforts to preserve slavery?

To use a shopworn phrase, “It’s complicated.”

Good Ol’ Rebels

Well before the end of Jim Crow, post-war leftist Hollywood still largely continued its soft mythologies of the Confederate Lost Cause. Perhaps the cinematic romance arose because of the lucrative fumes of earlier Gone with the Wind fantasies, which themselves might’ve come from an understandable desire to play a part in “binding up the nation’s wounds.”

In George Stevens’s mythic Shane (1953), the tragedy of the post–Civil War heroic gunslinger seems eerily tied to his past as an against-the-odds ex-Reb. In contrast, the movie’s odious villain, Unionist Jack Wilson, is a hired gun and company man (brilliantly portrayed by then newcomer Jack Palance).

Wilson shows off his bought cred by gunning down a naïve southern sodbuster, “Stonewall” Torrey (played by Elisha Cook Jr.), accompanied by slurs about the Confederacy. (“I’m saying that Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs. You too.”)

In the movie’s final shootout, replaying the Civil War provides the catalyst for more violence. This time Shane — and the heroic South — wins for good, with a payback Civil War exchange with Wilson:

Shane: I’ve heard about you, Jack Wilson.
Wilson: What have you heard, Shane?
Shane: I’ve heard that you’re a low-down Yankee liar.
Wilson: Prove it.

Wilson is then blown back across the barroom under a hail of bullets. Even out on the Wyoming range, the Hollywood subtext is that sodbuster homesteaders can find a former Confederate loser to protect them, with courage and chivalry, against the northern corporatists trying to steamroll them. The noble savior Shane, we are assumed to believe, had no part in slavery or insurrection but was fighting for his southern soil in service to the Confederacy.

Part of the dark mystery and tragedy of John Ford’s anti-hero Ethan Edwards in The Searchers originates in Edwards’s edgy Lost Cause mettle — and acts of bravery that never seem to result in his own positive outcome. His prior stint with the Confederacy is alluded to not just to remind the audience of his unrepentant side but also to emphasize the origins of Edwards’s formidable skills, doggedness, and principles — especially valuable in times (and only during such times) when frontier law fails and such assets are necessary, even if acquired in nihilist service to the losing side.

John Ford drew on that Confederate romance of noble opponents in several films, from Stagecoach (1939) to The Horse Soldiers (1959). A common theme is audacity fueled by admirable past loyalty to a bad cause, a key ingredient in classic portraits of the tragic hero from Homer to Erwin Rommel.

Hollywood Westerns — often in the 1950s and early 1960s — increasingly saw in the Confederate romance a way of reuniting the country, and they partook of the leftist pushback against a federal establishment. Indeed, it is hard to watch a Western in which a southern officer is portrayed purely negatively. At worst, they are daydreamers plotting to rebuild a western confederacy (Rio Conchos). At best, they play into the stereotypes that the better fighters of the South lost the war only because of overwhelming industrial output and manpower of the North — and thus former Confederates are especially valuable Indian fighters on the frontier, a safe space for them that is the United States but not the North.

The True Grit movies have a larger-than-life Rooster Cogburn character, an anti-hero and former member of the Quantrill Raiders, the pro-Confederate rangers’ gang that included Jesse and Frank James. John Wayne first portrayed Cogburn in 1969, in a finale to his earlier southern roles in John Ford’s cavalry movies.

In 1969’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Clint Eastwood mastered the art of portraying Confederates as noble opponents, especially in a haunting scene of an oppressive Union POW camp overseen by a psychopathic criminal commandant, set to the moving lyrics of Ennio Morricone’s “Story of a Soldier.”

Eastwood later went the full Confederate, in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). The former son of the South, Wales becomes a 1970s cowboy version of Dirty Harry, serving as a jack-of-all-trades multiculturalist equalizer — fighting back against vicious northern red-leg marauders and in behalf of abandoned women, the poor, and Native Americans.

The supposedly left-wing 1960s and 1970s, in fact, were the heyday of Confederate Chic. True, there were plenty of In the Heat of the Night portraits of the now-familiar racist white Neanderthals, but with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow segregation, the romance of the Old South reappeared

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

1 in 3 Male College Students Supports Violence Against Offensive Speakers Daniel Greenfield

By on September 19th, 2017

If you want to understand how we got to Berkeley or Charlottesville, here’s a truly disturbing survey on college students and support for free speech.

It won’t surprise anyone that support for free speech among college students is weak. What this survey measures though is support for suppressing free speech, not just legally, but through harassment and even violence.

As the headline says, 1 in 3 male college students is for using violence to silence unpopular speakers.

But the deeper you dive into the survey, the more disturbing it becomes. I’ve noted before that millennials across the political spectrum tend to be illiberal. This survey (which is funded by the Koch Foundation) surveyed across the political spectrum.

Republican and independent college students are a little better than Democrats. But not by much.

When asked, “Does the First Amendment protect “hate speech”? 44% of students said it didn’t. Only 39% thought it did.

39% of Republican students and 41% of Democrat students and 44% of independent students thought that it did not.

Public students were more likely than private school students to think that it did not. Only 31% of female students, compared to 51% of male students thought it did.

51% of students supported heckling offensive speakers. And I’ll quote from the survey…

The responses to the above question show a very distinct variation across political affiliation, with 62 percent of Democrats but “only” 39 percent of Republicans agreeing that it was acceptable to shout down the speaker.

39% of Republicans is a whole lot.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

YAIR NETANYAHU AND THE ANGRY LEFT Caroline Glick

By on September 19th, 2017

The new enemy of the left-wing establishment.

Yair Netanyahu, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 26-year-old son, has been getting some harsh press in recent weeks.

Yair walked (or toddled) onto the stage of public life when he was five years old as he and his then two-year-old little brother Avner accompanied their parents, Bibi and Sara, into the Prime Minister’s Residence for the first time in 1996.

For nearly 20 years, the Netanyahu boys were little more than a silent presence standing to the side of their parents on election nights. But while Avner remains on the sidelines while serving as a combat soldier, Yair is no longer a stage extra in his parents’ story.

In recent years the older Netanyahu boy has taken to Facebook. And it works out that he is quite an iconoclast.

Yair’s iconoclasm is unsurprising. The Israeli establishment has been bludgeoning his parents since Yair was learning to finger-paint. It would be bizarre if he sought its approval.

Not only does he not seek acceptance from the leftist elite, he clearly hold its members in contempt.

And he’s happy to tell everyone what he thinks about them. Indeed, over the past month, as the criminal probes against his parents have dominated the news cycle, the frequency of Netanyahu’s controversial postings has steeply intensified.

In the last month alone, Yair’s posts have caused media furors three times.

At the beginning of August, Molad, a far-left NGO that supports the BDS movement, published a scathing attack on him on 61, a satirical website it runs.

Titled “Five things you didn’t know about Crown Prince Yair Netanyahu,” the piece attacked him for his political views, for continuing to live with his parents and for having publicly funded security guards, and a publicly funded car and driver.

In response, after pointing out that Molad never criticized the children of any other premier despite ample reason to do so, Yair referred to Molad as a “radical, anti-Zionist group financed by the Fund for Israel’s Destruction, and the European Union.”

Molad, which is funded by the New Israel Fund, European EU-funded foundations, anti-Israel, Jewish- born billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, responded in fine democratic form.

It filed a libel suit against Yair Netanyahu.

Two weeks after the Molad brouhaha, there was the face-off between the neo-Nazis and the violent leftists from Antifa at Charlottesville which left one leftist demonstrator murdered by a neo-Nazi.

The Israeli political and media classes stood as one with the US political establishment and condemned the neo-Nazis while ignoring the violent far-left protesters.

In so doing Israel’s national leadership incidentally or, in some cases deliberately, lent support to the US establishment’s condemnations of President Donald Trump for his decision to condemn “both sides” for their resort to violence rather than just the neo-Nazis.

Just as the conventional wisdom that only the neo-Nazis were to blame was getting set in stone, along came Yair Netanyahu and his Facebook page.

In a post in English, Yair condemned the neo-Nazis as “scums” who “hate me and my country.”

But, he said, “Their breed is dying out.”

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California Dems Protect Child Rapists and Fight Trump The #Resistance Dems are at it again. Daniel Greenfield

By on September 19th, 2017

The Paris Commune, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the California legislative supermajority of Dems are shining examples of what happens when insane leftists take over a formerly prosperous place.

“The issue of resistance is beyond the symbolism,” Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon declared. “A lot of other municipalities, as well as other states, are looking towards California … to be the leader of this resistance.”

The “resistance” is to President Trump, democracy and sanity. California has the best student government in the world. And like every student government, it’s eager to serve every leftist cause.

Forget good government. California is leading the “resistance.”

California lawmakers don’t waste time on trivialities like the pension bomb. Instead they tackle the serious issues. That’s why the California Assembly passed a bill mandating that Trump publish his taxes. The bill is unconstitutional. U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton settled that back in the 90s. If California wants to revisit that, it’ll have to rely on a dissent from Clarence Thomas. Not to mention Scalia.

The bill would be signed by Governor Brown who hasn’t released his own tax returns.

But following the law is for Republicans and little people.

And California legislators compulsively generate bills that are immune to math, laws, precedent or legality. And that can only produce a complete and utter disaster if they are implemented.

And they wouldn’t have it any other way.

In addition to the multiple gratuitous legislative attacks on President Trump, which are as bizarre as they are unprecedented, there was a bill, introduced by Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco, to remove sex offenders from the sex offender registry. Wiener claimed that the sex offender registry was homophobic. The bill, which passed, will allow child rapists to be removed after 20 years, and gives child pornography distributors a pass after 10 years.

A spokesman for Governor Brown, whose former pal Jim Jones would have been thrilled by the legislation, spoke glowingly of the bill. But this is a state in which a statue of another Jim Jones ally, Harvey Milk, the Democrat pedophile who lured runaway teens, decorates San Francisco City Hall.

Move over undocumented immigrants. Here come the undocumented sex offenders.

Sadly, the “supervised heroin” bill which would have allowed heroin addicts to shoot up under the supervision of “qualified medical professionals” failed. But Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman claims that her bill got lots of “momentum” and will be back. Eggman is a member of both the LGBT Caucus and the Latino Legislative Caucus. And those are the only qualifications in California politics now.

Worse news still, it’s now illegal to ingest “any marijuana product while driving”. But employers are not allowed to ask about your criminal history.

California did manage to pass the “Gender Recognition Act” inventing “non-binary” as a new gender and a bill sealing the juvenile records of teenagers who commit murder and other horrifying crimes.

The sanctuary state bill that bars law enforcement from asking illegal alien criminals if they’re illegal aliens went through to media applause. Landlords are also prohibited from reporting illegal aliens to the authorities. Businesses would be forced to demand a warrant from ICE: whether they want to or not.

“An employer… shall not provide voluntary consent to an immigration enforcement agent to enter any nonpublic areas of a place of labor,” the latter bill mandates.

The bill actually punishes Californians for cooperating with Federal law enforcement. Where do they think they live anyway? America?

There are extensive fines for landlords and businesses that choose to follow United States law and actually cooperate with immigration authorities.

Before long, everyone in California will be banned from reporting illegal aliens.

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The Injustice of the ‘Rape-Culture’ Theory For those in the grips of hysteria, proof is the enemy Cathy Young

By on September 19th, 2017

“If rape culture in America is real, why does the case for it rest on so much fabulism?”

I n July, a case that had become a rallying cry for campus activism against sexual assault came to a conclusion of sorts—with a victory for the accused man. Columbia University settled a lawsuit brought by 2015 graduate Paul Nungesser. It stemmed from an accusation of rape hurled at Nungesser by fellow Columbia undergraduate Emma Sulkowicz, who famously carried a mattress around campus to protest the school’s alleged mishandling of her complaint.

The lawsuit charged that Sulkowicz’s activism amounted to gender-based harassment of Nungesser and was condoned by the university, which had allowed her to make a senior art thesis of her mattress-toting. The settlement included a public statement from Columbia that not only reaffirmed that Nungesser had been exonerated in an investigation conducted by the school, but also acknowledged that his final year on campus following his exposure as an accused rapist was “not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.” He found himself shunned by most of his classmates, harassed by activists, and depicted naked in two revenge-porn drawings by Sulkowicz, exhibited in a campus gallery as another part of her art project.

The acknowledgment was as close as the university could bring itself to repudiating Sulkowicz’s crusade, which had been hailed on the cover of New York magazine three years ago as the harbinger of a new “sexual revolution on campus.”

While other activists have continued to support “Mattress Girl,” her revolutionary halo has been tarnished considerably in those three years. New information provided by Nungesser (first disclosed by this author in The Daily Beast in early 2015) showed that in the weeks following the alleged rape, the two had had banter-filled Facebook chats in which Sulkowicz discussed coming to his parties, talked about having a “Paul/Emma chill sesh,” and gushed, “I love you Paul!” in response to his birthday wishes.

Sulkowicz’s defenders have argued that victims of sexual violence often act in ways that seem irrational to outsiders, particularly when the assailant is someone close to them. (Sulkowicz and Nungesser had been close friends and had been sexually intimate on two prior occasions.) While this is no doubt true, the totality of the circumstances makes Sulkowicz’s account highly improbable—particularly since her rape claim did not involve an ambiguous incident that a victim could initially excuse as a misunderstanding, but a sudden physical assault in which she was choked, hit in the face, and anally raped so violently that she screamed in pain.

But even as Nungesser finally got a measure of satisfaction, progressive opinion was exploding in outrage on a related matter—the fact that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was suggesting that fairness to the accused should be a high priority in campus sexual-assault proceedings under Title IX, the federal gender-equity law. DeVos has invited advocates for accused students to her “listening meetings” on the issue, along with activists championing victims. In response, psychologist Peggy Drexler, a Web columnist for CNN, decried her initiative as “a huge step back for women’s safety, and equality in general.” Drexler had even harsher words for Acting Assistant Secretary Candice E. Jackson, who had spoken sympathetically of meeting with a mother who said her son had become suicidal after being falsely accused. “Jackson’s words,” Drexler wrote, “specifically serve to perpetuate rape culture.”
N ot long ago, the concept of “rape culture”—at least as applied to contemporary liberal societies in North America and Western Europe—existed only on the fringes of radical feminist activism and academic rhetoric. Yet in the past several years, this term has become ubiquitous in mainstream left-of-center discourse; indeed, in many bien-pensant quarters, the very denial of its existence is nothing less than heresy. When some musicians tried to organize a boycott of a Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra benefit concert because conservative author and radio host Dennis Prager was guest-conducting, the offenses imputed to Prager included the assertion that “there’s no culture of rape at our universities.”

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