This comes with a hat-tip to POWERLINE. More on this is just below the videos plus some past stuff posted. Enjoy…
- “… This is campus rage manufactured in order to preserve the claims of victimhood.” – Heather Mac Donald
- “Another example of left-wing rhetoric leftists don’t act on: The left tells us that colleges are permeated by a “rape culture,” yet virtually all left-wing parents send their daughters to college. If you were to believe any place has a culture of rape, where 1 in 4 or 5 women is raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, would you send your 18-year-old daughter there? Of course not. So how do any left-wing mothers or fathers send their daughters to college? The answer would seem to be they know it’s a lie — but that doesn’t matter, since the left views telling the truth as incomparably less significant than combating sexism, sexual assault, misogyny, toxic masculinity and patriarchy.” – Dennis Prager
More via the COLLEGE FIX:
…During Mac Donald’s speech, a few students came to the front of the room and unfurled large banners, including one written entirely in Spanish and another that read “We won’t be silenced.”
A “debriefing and self-care session” was held after the talk, and the activists plan to “continue the conversation among students, faculty, and administrators at Colgate University about allowing speakers like Mac Donald to take up space on our campus unopposed.”
Mac Donald, in a statement to The College Fix, said her experience at Colgate was nothing new.
“My Colgate experience presented a more extreme version of something I have encountered in all the campus protests against me: the questions from the protesters in the hall invariably have nothing to do with my talk,” she said.
Mac Donald described the protesters’ suggestion to effectively cover their eyes or ears during her talk as “a stunningly apt emblem of the campus left’s rejection of dialogue.” She said many questions she fielded were from a cheat sheet of her writings prepared by protest organizers.
“Not surprisingly, then, the Colgate protesters’ questions were even more out of left field than usual: a large number focused on the post 9/11 war on terror, a subject I have not written about for nearly twenty years and that I certainly did not address at Colgate.”
“… This is campus rage manufactured in order to preserve the claims of victimhood.”
But the heated questions did not prompt Mac Donald to recant any of her previous statements. In fact, she also took on the ubiquitous 1-in-5 campus rape stat during parries with protesters.
“Let’s put that number in perspective,” she said. “… Our most violent city, Detroit [editor’s note: my city of birth], when you look at all four of the FBI’s violent index felonies — that includes murder, rape, aggravated assault and robbery — all four of those combined gets you a violent felony rate of 2 percent. So 20 to 25 percent [of campus rape victims] is a catastrophe.”
She continued that such a “sexual holocaust,” if it were really going on, would prompt a stampede of women away from college campuses, yet the opposite is true, females are now the majority on them….
Is it true that 1 in 5 women are raped on America’s college campuses? If so, what does that say about our universities and the people who run them? If not, how did that statistic get into the mainstream? Caroline Kitchens, Senior Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institute, looks at the data and explains the very significant results.
Lies of the Left
Dennis Prager reads from Heather Mac Donald’s article in from The City Journal about the “rape culture.” As usual, the left over-exaggerates… and what parent would put their daughter in AP classes to prepare them for the worse crime wave in human history, which is: one-in-five women are rapped at college. OBVIOUSLY the definition is the issue.
As society gets further away from Judeo-Christian norms… more-and-more regret will rear its head from drunken hook-ups.
For more clear thinking like this from Dennis Prager… I invite you to visit: http://www.dennisprager.com/
A great back-and-forth between George Will and some Democrat Senators who — as HotAir points out in George’s response to their asinine letter, these “Senators were likely faced with the difficult task of flipping back and forth to dictionary.com to translate Will’s writing, so we should probably have some sympathy.” HotAir continues:
- For the entire time I have been writing I have cited George Will as one of the top five wordsmiths of our generation. Whether you agree with him or not… whether you think he leans too far in one philosophical direction or the other… there is no denying that Will is a master of the English language and flexes it like Mr. Olympia in the final pose-off.
Here is more from HotAir on the fun tiff:
In case you missed the origins of this story earlier in the week, George Will took to his usual platform at the Washington Post with some words of caution regarding federal government intervention regarding sexual assaults on the nation’s college campuses. In it, he attempted to inject corrective remedies into some of the hyperbole currently engulfing the topic. Of course, in his usual fashion, Will led off with a paragraph which seemed designed to poke a stick in a few wasp nests.
Colleges and universities are being educated by Washington and are finding the experience excruciating. They are learning that when they say campus victimizations are ubiquitous (“micro-aggressions,” often not discernible to the untutored eye, are everywhere), and that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate. And academia’s progressivism has rendered it intellectually defenseless now that progressivism’s achievement, the regulatory state, has decided it is academia’s turn to be broken to government’s saddle.
A careful reading of Will’s full editorial would show that he was essentially making two points. First, the “math” being cited to define the number of sexual assaults taking place was unfit for a 3rd grade Common Core tutorial. Second, Will noted that expanding and inflating the definition of sexual assaults to include micro-agressions – such as a boy staring for too long at a young coed with a low cut blouse – would tend to dilute the pool of actual assaults and diminish the seriousness of the real problem.
Such a stance brought the usual list of suspects up on their hind legs and into an immediate attack posture. This culminated in a coalition of Democratic Senators (Feinstein, Blumenthal, Tammy Baldwin and Robert Casey) penning a letter to the WaPo, chastising them for allowing Will to breath the same air as the rest of us.
After running their letter and litany of complaints, this weekend the Post ran a rare response from George Will….
Here is a larger portion of George Will’s response from the WASHINGTON POST:
The administration asserts that only 12 percent of college sexual assaults are reported. Note well: I did not question this statistic. Rather, I used it.
I cited one of the calculations based on it that Mark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute has performed {link}. So, I think your complaint is with the conclusion that arithmetic dictates, based on the administration’s statistic. The inescapable conclusion is that another administration statistic that one in five women is sexually assaulted while in college is insupportable and might call for tempering your rhetoric about “the scourge of sexual assault.”
As for what you call my “ancient beliefs,” which you think derive from an “antiquated” and “counterintuitive” culture, allow me to tell you something really counterintuitive: I think I take sexual assault much more seriously than you do. Which is why I worry about definitions of that category of crime that might, by their breadth, tend to trivialize it. And why I think sexual assault is a felony that should be dealt with by the criminal justice system, and not be adjudicated by improvised campus processes.
Read the senators’ letter here, and Will’s response in full here.