An Ivy League Lynch Mob

Article here. Excerpt:

'When you hear the phrase “lynch mob,” what image comes to mind? Most of us will probably think of tooth-free rednecks with pitchforks off to find themselves some darker-skinned folks to harass. Or we might cast our minds back to a time when angry, hungry people regularly rounded up eccentric old women, blamed them for causing crop failures and other local calamities, and then had them dunked or burned as witches.

I saw a different kind of lynch mob recently at Columbia University. There wasn’t a pitchfork in sight. No one started a fire. Yet this gathering of self-styled justice enforcers, who were loudly demanding the metaphorical scalp of an individual they suspected of doing something bad, nonetheless had the same scary moral righteousness and disregard for due process as every other lynch mob in history. It’s just that they were better dressed, better educated, far more middle-class than the usual fire-wielding dispensers of mob justice. It was an Ivy League lynch mob.
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A male student told me my insistence that individuals suspected of a crime must be fairly tried and found convincingly guilty before we ruin their lives — and being expelled from a prestigious university for rape would undoubtedly be life-ruining — was evidence that I had fallen for the “liberal paradigm” of justice, which tends to benefit white, well-off men. Apparently there is another “paradigm,” a better one, in which women who accuse men of rape are instantly believed and the men in question swiftly and severely punished.

The speeches made by students from the mattress-strewn steps leading up to the beautiful Low Library were chilling. Many focused on the need to believe women who make accusations. “I believe!” they hollered, to cheers from the crowd. This casual assertion of belief in all accusations of sexual assault mirrors the gullible fanaticism of the 17th-century Salem trials, where, likewise, claims and denunciations were taken at face value. When twelve Boston-based ministers said that the Salem magistrates should not rely so heavily on “spectral evidence” — that is, evidence based on dreams and visions rather than proven facts — they were roundly condemned. And so it is today that anyone who says that a rape allegation should be treated seriously but should not be automatically believed runs the risk of being branded a “rape apologist.” It would have been a brave student indeed who stood up at the Salem-like belief-fest at Columbia last week and said, “We have to prove accusations, not naïvely accept them.”
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The Christian moralists, anti-porn crusaders, and Victim Feminists of the 1970s and ’80s must be beaming with pride at the rise of the idea of “rape culture,” for it embodies their every prejudice and ill-founded panic and their lust for authoritarianism as a solution to the alleged sexual swagger of dumb, media-fueled men.

There really is only one thing to say to the bleating students, the illiberal liberals, of Columbia and other privileged campuses: You have lovely, lazy, intellectual lives that many of the world’s still-repressed women would sell their souls for, so, please, shelve the slave songs and self-pity and grow the hell up.'