The Other McCain

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UVA Fraternity Cleared by Police, But Fraternities Are Punished Anyway

Posted on | January 13, 2015 | 26 Comments

Jackie’s story was fake, but as Allahpundit says, “someone needs to intervene to stop the sort of gang rape that never actually happened to Jackie,” so despite the dishonesty and journalistic malpractice, there are new rules for fraternities at the University of Virginia:

The University chapter of Phi Kappa Psi was officially reinstated by both the University and the national Phi Kappa Psi fraternity organization, the University announced in a press release Monday morning.
“The reinstatement resulted after consultation with Charlottesville Police Department officials, who told the University that their investigation has not revealed any substantive basis to confirm that the allegations raised in the Rolling Stone article occurred at Phi Kappa Psi,” the release stated.
Charlottesville Police Captain Gary Pleasants said the investigation into the incident is still ongoing, but that no evidence indicates Phi Kappa Psi should continue to be under sanction.
“We are looking at the allegations in their totality,” he said, adding that investigators have not yet made a determination about the accuracy of the incident as a whole.
He said police hope to conclude their investigation in a couple of weeks, and they will not disclose more specifics about their investigation until that time.

To read between the lines, it appears that while police are still trying to figure out what (if anything) happened to Jackie, it has been determined that Phi Kappa Psi had nothing to do with it. Meanwhile:

Last Tuesday, [UVA President Teresa] Sullivan authorized new addenda to the University’s Fraternal Organization Agreement that were submitted by the four student-led Greek leadership councils. The new addenda outline specific practices that each fraternity and sorority will put in place to enhance the safety of their members and guests. Sullivan also announced the immediate reinstatement of all social activities, with the stipulation that the FOA addenda must be signed by the president or designee from each fraternity and sorority by Jan. 16. Phi Kappa Psi became the first fraternity to sign the Inter-Fraternity Council’s FOA addendum on Jan. 8.

This is sort of like the way gun-control advocates use any mass-shooting incident to urge passage of new laws which would have done nothing to prevent the highly publicized atrocity. They’re always trying to “close the gun show loophole” by exploiting hysteria over shootings committed with guns that weren’t bought at gun shows. And never mind the violent crimes in cities like New York and Chicago that have ultra-strict local gun-control laws. Facts and logic are irrelevant to the progressive agenda, and Allahpundit points to a quote in an article last month revealing the Rolling Stone reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely had her own agenda at UVA:

Alex Pinkleton, a rape survivor and U-Va. student, said of Sabrina Rubin Erdely . . . “However, she did have an agenda and part of that agenda was showing how monstrous fraternities themselves as an institution are and blaming the administration for a lot of these sexual assaults.”
Fraternities were important to Erdely, as Pinkleton, a friend of Jackie’s, told [CNN’s Brian] Stelter: “I didn’t like that it seemed like she was looking for a story that had to be at a fraternity,” she said.

Erdely had to have a rape at UVA and it “had to be at a fraternity.” She could have added it had to be at a white fraternity, because Erdely’s choice of UVA was by no means accidental in that regard: Erdely “knew she wanted to write about sexual assaults at an elite university,” as she told the Washington Post. Obviously, she wanted a story with villains who fit the profile of the privileged white male patriarchal oppressors on whom feminists blame “rape culture.” Phi Kappa Psi was a target of opportunity and why Jackie and Erdely pinned their gang-rape tale on this specific fraternity is a mystery yet to be solved.

Meanwhile, it’s Double-Secret Probation for fraternities at UVA — “No more fun of any kind!” — and perhaps this is not entirely a bad thing. For months before the Rolling Stone story, I pointed out that if university administrators really wanted to stop “rape culture” on campus, all they had to do was to crack down on underage drinking.

Over and over, these “he said/she said” stories have the same narrative arc: An 18-year-old freshman girl, away from home for the first time, goes to a party, gets fall-down drunk and then has a sexual experience that is unfortunate and regrettable, but which cannot be proven as rape. The guy involved in the incident was usually also drunk and he insists that whatever happened between him and the girl, however unfortunate and regrettable, was consensual. Because incidents like that usually cannot be prosecuted as crimes, universities have taken to using disciplinary tribunals to hear such claims, and feminists have become angry that these extra-judicial processes are ineffective.

The legal drinking age is 21. Simply enforcing existing law — thus reducing the number of drunk teenage girls who are most commonly the complainants in these incidents — would be a logical response. However, media hype about a “rape epidemic” on campuses (a manufactured crisis based on phony statistics) was part of a political propaganda campaign whose feminist leaders do not give a damn about facts or logic.

Feminism’s message is clear: “Shut Up, Because Rape.”

UPDATE: Few have noted that Erdely’s feminist agenda required white rapists at an elite university. A story involving students being raped at a third-tier school or being raped by non-white males would do little or nothing to advance the gender/race/class narrative of Cultural Marxism. This idea — a high-profile sex crime perpetrated by upper-class white males — was what sent the New York Times chasing after the Duke lacrosse rape story in 2006. Because rich white guys are the Demonized Scapegoat within the Left’s paranoid worldview, only certain crimes get that kind of major-media push. Last month, a freshman girl at William Paterson University in New Jersey said she was sexually assaulted by five males, but because (a) it’s not an elite school and (b) the accused rapists are black, this isn’t the sort of gang-rape that feminists care about.

Some victims are more equal than others.

 

Category: Crime, Education, Feminism

Comments

26 Responses to “UVA Fraternity Cleared by Police, But Fraternities Are Punished Anyway”

  1. RS
    January 13th, 2015 @ 1:08 pm

    If you believe that fraternities are not aware of the current climate, you are kidding yourself. The amount of self-protection in place is quite astounding. The Feminist press is feeding upon a caricature based upon Animal House. Whatever may have occurred 30 years ago is no longer relevant to the discussion.

    These young men, as horny as they might be, are not stupid. They know the consequences of being accused. To say there is a slow reversion to Victorian mores is not stretch, because the stakes are so high.

  2. Fail Burton
    January 13th, 2015 @ 2:02 pm

    Gender feminism is nothing more than a version of the KKK. Americans can’t wrap their heads around that. Ironically, the very stereotypes about women being helpless shrinking violets prevents us from seeing this thing from a neutral viewpoint. Feminism reinforces that denial by claiming the marginalized and oppressed can technically never be bigots, racists and supremacists, thereby clearing the field for a type of in-your-face bald racism and supremacy unheard of in modern American mainstream pop culture.

    All the fights this country fought up til 1965 will have to be rethought and refought. In the meantime, there is only the barest sign the realization of who these people are is beginning to seep into the mainstream. I’ll tell you this: when R. Crumb has had the earth slide from under his feet to the point he has gone from Left to Right while standing still that is a sign of how liberalism has been emptied of actual liberals and filled in with hateful proxies who wear that face but are in fact hateful bigots using liberalism as camouflage.

  3. robertstacymccain
    January 13th, 2015 @ 2:16 pm

    Let’s stipulate that “a neutral viewpoint” when it comes to male/female interaction is very difficult to attain. I absolutely understand what feminists mean about wanting issues like rape to be viewed from the standpoint of female experience. What has happened, however, is that the male perspective is so completely silenced — because we’re all misogynists — that facts and logic disappear in a fog of subjectivity.

    More than that, however, the adult viewpoint — more specifically, the parental viewpoint — is being silenced by feminists. Relatively few of these people are married adults who have raised children to successful adulthood. Instead, the “rape culture” narrative is controlled by spoiled brats — e.g., Amanda Marcotte, Jaclyn Friedman and Laurie Penny — who have turned their lives into an extended juvenile tantrum. What I might have said about the sexual climate on campus when I was 25 is different than what I would say about the situation at age 55. My perspective has shifted and, as a parent, my interest in young people’s safety and well-being has increased.

    Yet feminists insist that there is only one way to discuss all this — their way — and that any criticism of their rhetoric is “hate.” It’s simply a totalitarian worldview, and it’s dangerous.

  4. M. Thompson
    January 13th, 2015 @ 2:20 pm

    It’s worse than Victorian. At least that time had a heroic outlet for men.

  5. Trespassers W
    January 13th, 2015 @ 2:35 pm

    THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

  6. Fail Burton
    January 13th, 2015 @ 3:42 pm

    I don’t think it is that tough to have a neutral viewpoint since I’m talking about hate speech. When it comes to rape it is a crime. There are many traumatic crimes. I don’t see what me being an empath from Star Trek has to do with it. My sitting here and imagining what it may be like to be shot, raped, bludgeoned on the head or kidnapped is beside the point. There are laws against rape, and they don’t include star chambers or vigilantism. These women show absolutely no interest in what it’s like to have to sign up for the draft and maybe take a bayonet in the guts and I’m having trouble seeing them sitting around being empaths about that. They’re eagerness to pie-chart and occupy everything in sight always stops short of the draft office and Vet’s Hospitals. You want respect you give it. They give supremacy and show a marked disinterest in human failings as genderless or their own responsibility as American citizens who sit at home writing fierce poems while men charge into machine guns. None of this exists in a vacuum. We are all in this together. At least some of us are. Penny and Marcotte don’t give two shits about equal protection or men.

  7. Zohydro
    January 13th, 2015 @ 3:45 pm

    I’m certain that, unless human nature has fundamentally changed lately, the sea is still rich with DTF co-eds at every university—as inconsequential to The Narrative as they may be, and that the horizontal life yet thrives, albeit less conspicuously, underground…

  8. M. Thompson
    January 13th, 2015 @ 4:23 pm

    Except there are no spoon-heads here. Just female-persons who want to control everything.

  9. K-Bob
    January 13th, 2015 @ 4:32 pm

    Welcome to campus! Males, please check your dicks at the bursar’s office. You can have them back at the end of term.

  10. Adobe_Walls
    January 13th, 2015 @ 5:05 pm

    No apologies to the Frat at all. I seem to recall the national Fraternity was considering law suits. Has that right been signed away as well.

  11. Jim R
    January 13th, 2015 @ 5:14 pm

    And the infantilization (is that a real word???) of our country goes on. Never mind that college students are, in the main, legal adults who are supposed to have the good sense to take care of themselves (or bear the consequences for foolish choices). Never mind that parents are supposed to help their kids, even as adults, make smart decisions. Never mind that parents are supposed to teach their kids HOW to make smart decisions.

    No: we must have The State (in the form of unelected, effectively unaccountable university bureaucrats) make those decisions for them. It’s a form of prior restraint: instead of punishing violations of the law (for example, underaged drinking), The State attempts to make it impossible to commit a violation. This is laudable to some extent, but are we not a free people? Are adult students not supposed to be able to govern their own behavior?

  12. Jim R
    January 13th, 2015 @ 5:16 pm

    My sitting here and imagining what it may be like to be shot, raped, bludgeoned on the head or kidnapped is beside the point. There are laws against rape, and they don’t include star chambers or vigilantism.

    Well said.

  13. Art Deco
    January 13th, 2015 @ 5:28 pm

    The arts-and-sciences faculty I know best had a 9-fold increase in the size of their enrollment between 1928 and 2008, even though the population of the nexus of counties within which that school is located had increased only 45% during that time period. During the era in which my grandparents came of age, the children of working people tended to leave school at about 14, the bourgeois might receive a high school diploma, and only a small sliver of the haut bourgeois and patrician population availed itself of tertiary schooling. Such schooling was screened by entrance exams (for public and some private institutions) and by cash-on-the-barrelhead tuition (for private institutions). It was also animated by a principle of in loco parentis.

    As we speak, About 30% of each age cohort matriculates at a four year college at some time in their life. The in loco parentis function was abandoned around about 1968 and the age at first marriage marches ever upward while inhibitions about sexual expression among the young dissipate. The whole sequencing of introduction to adult life – which used to feature wage employment and apprenticeship while living with family for some years, then (perhaps) a move to a boarding house (with some adult supervision, depending) conjoined to lawful imbibing, and then marriage, sex, and (after an interval) children – is now bollocks. We have instituted willy-nilly years of haphazard schooling conjoined to debauchery as a right of passage for our middle classes and some of our working people.

    It’s time to promote commuter institutions and to revamp curricula so people spend less of their youth in that filthy environment. You could start with eliminating the baccalaureate degree in favor of a new degree schedule 1, 2, 3, or 4 years of study of a discrete subject (about 35 credits each year), of replacing some degree programs with certificate programs which feature briefer runs of classroom education followed by internships and apprenticeships, and of reducing research universities to no more than (say) 30% of total enrollment in favor of state colleges sited for convenience.

  14. Marie Harf on Obama’s Unified Front on Extremism | Regular Right Guy
    January 13th, 2015 @ 5:39 pm

    […] UVA Fraternity Cleared by Police, But Fraternities Are Punished Anyway […]

  15. Adobe_Walls
    January 13th, 2015 @ 5:57 pm

    There will be alcohol at gatherings of college or college age folks. As it ever was so shall it ever be.

  16. Adobe_Walls
    January 13th, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    How?

  17. Southern Air Pirate
    January 13th, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    “Simply enforcing existing law”~quotes RSM.

    Note that that no one on the left dono want to enforce the law. See DUIs, gun crimes, or even basic provisions to receive a piece of the social net. In doing so then they know that the laws are broken or incapable of preventing the crime they rail against. This also takes money from the organization teams and folks getting fat monetarily off these crisis issues. Since if we enforce the laws than that takes from the mission statement of the various social change groups. Instead it’s all about adding more and more laws. Even if as noted in numerous situations these laws (tougher DUI laws, tighten background checks, sexual deviant lists, etc) do nothing to prevent the crimes that happened and won’t prevent a next time since it has been shown that the criminal ignores the law or that they passed all the hoops without issues and still chose to commit the crime.

    Again it’s all about the money and whereas most of the right or conservative social justice groups look to remove laws or put in real common sense laws that have a bite (until undone by judicial systems); the lefts social warriors look to add more and more laws because you can get rich not by digging a ditch but by being a PITA social justice warrior.

  18. RS
    January 13th, 2015 @ 6:01 pm

    I was watching a German documentary about the Fall of the Berlin Wall. A former Stasi officer noted that their brief was to catch and punish people before an actual crime against the state had been committed. In other words, they wanted to find people whose thought processes indicated they might go off the reservation. Orwellian? Of course. But not dissimilar to what we see now in various venues of our society.

  19. RS
    January 13th, 2015 @ 6:12 pm

    During the era in which my grandparents came of age, the children of working people tended to leave school at about 14, the bourgeois might receive a high school diploma, and only a small sliver of the haut bourgeois and patrician population availed itself of tertiary schooling.

    Indeed. Our insistence upon celebrating 8th Grade Graduation is an artifact from the time when most persons’ education ended at age 14. My father was a) the first of his family to attend high school and b) the first to attend college. He lived in the depths of the Ozarks and was the son of dirt farmers but could quote Latin poetry until the day he died. He read a Greek New Testament.

    We have seen the dumbing down of our society to the point where it is unrecognizable. Our Community colleges are filled with people taking various “remedial” classes because they haven’t mastered material from 5th grade. It is all part of the plan. Keep the populace stupid. Then they will be easily swayed by promises of free stuff, because they don’t have intellectual capacity to know that there is no such thing as “free stuff.”

    Sorry for the long rant.

  20. DJF
    January 13th, 2015 @ 6:40 pm

    But by the end of their time at a modern university the propaganda will have convinced many they don’t want it back, or convinced the others they don’t want a university “education”

  21. DeadMessenger
    January 13th, 2015 @ 7:10 pm

    I hope not. I would 100% support them in suing Rolling Stone, Jackie, and Erdely blind.

  22. Jim R
    January 13th, 2015 @ 7:55 pm

    Our Community colleges are filled with people taking various “remedial” classes because they haven’t mastered material from 5th grade.

    My niece (just graduated from basic training; hard to believe) HAD planned to get her nursing degree “on the cheap”: first couple of years at community college to get her basic coursework out of the way, then transfer to the local state university for her BSN.

    That plan was blown out of the water in part when she got to DETEST community college as a haven for morons and slackers who, as you say, were trying (not very hard) to learn what they ought to have known by the time they graduated high school if not middle school. She was bored out of her mind and not learning a damned thing. Example: one of her “computer science” classes was essentially “How to use MS Word”, starting with “this is how you turn on the computer”.

    But, on the other hand, I have always looked at this situation as a sort of job security for me: I may be – AM – bad-tempered, insubordinate, sarcastic, impatient, and completely tactless, but I can string more than four words together into a coherent sentence, do not tremble before a book with more words than pictures and am not cowed by an algebra problem. Compared to some of the kids coming out of school today, I’m friggin’ Lavoisier.

  23. RS
    January 13th, 2015 @ 9:01 pm

    I have any number of anecdotes to validate your niece’s experience, though mine are from an instructor’s point of view, via my spouse. This is part of the problem denominated as “Higher Education Bubble” discussed frequently by Glenn Reynolds.

    High schools are largely places where say, two-thirds of the teenagers spend their time without learning much. When they get to a community college, instructors who try to maintain standards quickly learn that to do so is a recipe to losing one’s job or getting sued.

    Community colleges are businesses, first and foremost. Federal education dollars are tied to enrollment and retention. If too many students flunk English 101 because they cannot write a coherent paragraph, the college loses money. The easy way out is to continue the pattern set in high school: Do the time, get the certificate.

    Of course, that certificate is worthless, even though the taxpayers, through direct grants and subsidized loans have paid for it. And now, the current administration wants to make community college “free” for everyone, guaranteeing the problem will get worse.

    God help us.

  24. Bob Belvedere
    January 14th, 2015 @ 9:29 am

    Also, keep the population juvenile, immature in attitude..

    Damn well put, by the way.

  25. Lee Cockrell
    January 14th, 2015 @ 3:13 pm

    In the meantime, the UVa student newspaper is attempting to whitewash its history by claiming they were for due process all along.

    https://medium.com/@leecockrell/dismaying-uva-sexual-assault-response-by-president-sullivan-uva-student-council-and-cavalier-de6cf7fd888c

    And Jann Wemmer of Rolling Stone posts an excuse worthy of nothing but eye rolling.

    http://www.richardbradley.net/shotsinthedark/2015/01/14/jann-wenners-bizarre-note-to-our-readers/

  26. Ongoing
    January 19th, 2015 @ 6:31 am

    Ongoing

    UVA Fraternity Cleared by Police, But Fraternities Are Punished Anyway : The Other McCain