Free Republic

To see how NPR, activist scholars, and the Justice Department set the stage for the latest eruption of hysteria over alleged campus rape, watch here:

California’s “yes means yes” law turns the idea of sexual consent upside down. Suddenly, nearly all sex is rape, unless no person involved reports it as such. Consent, under the California law that is spreading to other American universities, is required to be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” The law also states that “a lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” Also, previous sexual activity “should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.” The law also states that incapacitation due to drugs...

Police have arrested a group of men who they allege sexually assaulted a South Florida teen and forced her to have sex with at least 16 men. ....on Dec. 4 the 16-year-old victim left school and willingly got into a car, but it is unknown if she knew any of the people in the vehicle. According to the arrest report, the high school student was taken throughout Northwest Miami-Dade and drugged with powdered cocaine, crack cocaine and molly pills, laced marijuana cigarettes, marijuana, and alcohol. She was then forced into prostitution and given a financial quota of over $1,200. "The...

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. Consider the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. “sexual assault.” Herewith, a Philadelphia magazine report about Swarthmore College, where in 2013 a student “was...

Interestingly, they don’t specify that she’s going to re-report it *for Rolling Stone.* RS is supposedly revisiting the UVA story too but you would think at this point they’d want nothing more to do with Erdely, especially with her previous work for them and others newly under suspicion. What happens if they agree to let her “re-report” Jackie’s story for them and then her previous bombshell for the magazine begins falling apart under scrutiny?There are only two ways an Erdely mea culpa can go. She could in theory blame the whole thing on Jackie, but she won’t. “Rape culture” true...

JOURNALISTS, SAYS Jorge Ramos, shouldn't make a fetish of accuracy and impartiality. Speaking last month at the International Press Freedom Awards, Univision's influential news anchor told his audience that while he has "nothing against objectivity," journalism is meant to be wielded as "a weapon for a higher purpose: justice." To be sure, he said, it is important to get the facts right — five deaths should be reported as five, not six or seven. But "the best of journalism happens when we, purposely, stop pretending that we are neutral and recognize that we have a moral obligation to tell truth...

The young woman who introduced Jackie Coakley to journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely used Jackie’s story to push a federal law eroding due process for men on college campuses. Emily Renda, a 2011 sociology major who wrote on Title IX and the campus rape myth for her college thesis, testified before a U.S. senate panel earlier this year. Here’s what she said in June.

One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna*, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for...