Facts are Beside the Point - Why Clutter the Narrative with Unimportant Factual Details

“The revolution ate its children”

Maximilien Francois Robespierre

We Can Handle the Truth | The American Spectator

By Ross Kaminsky – 12.9.14

The lies and fabrications progressive opinion demands we all live have now come to a head.

What do the recent University of Virginia gang-rape charges made in Rolling Stone magazine, rape implications against an Oberlin College “campus conservative” by talented-but-annoying darling-of-the-left Lena Dunham, and the unending “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and “die-in” pantomimes of murder-by-racist-cop regarding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, have in common?

The obvious answer is that all three stories are unsupported by actual evidence. While something tragic certainly happened in Ferguson and something bad may have happened to a young woman in Virginia, the aspects of the stories that made them national sensations were fabrications.

(Given Lena Dunham’s admissions that she was drunk and high on both illegal and prescription drugs, and that she willingly had sex with someone even after he had done something exceptionally inappropriate to her in public, no part of her insinuation of rape seems credible… and further scrutiny demolishes it entirely.)

The more important answer is that in each case liberal activists, whether “feminists” (the true motivation of too many being hatred of men) or race hustlers like Al Sharpton (who needs to raise a few bucks to pay down $4.5 million in tax liens), are telling us that the truth doesn’t matter.

Writing for Politico, a young woman named Julia Horowitz, an assistant managing editor at UVA’s student newspaper, argues that “to let fact checking define the narrative would be a huge mistake” because “only eight to nine percent of sexual assault reports are later determined false.” (Other studies suggest the rate of false rape claims is much higher, but even at that number, how would you like to be the one out of eleven men falsely accused of a terrible crime? But hey, we’re just men.)

Per Horowitz, not only is checking the veracity of the explosive Rolling Stone article barely useful, but it threatens “progress.” The story, she pleads, “struck a chord with us.” In other words, confirming your worst fears about young men is more important than the truth.

As a student, Horowitz is just another future brick in the wall of institutionalized ignorance that we suffer through daily in MSNBC rants and major newspaper op-eds. More troubling than her young views are those of Zerlina Maxwell, a frequent contributor to various “mainstream media outlets” (as her own website describes them), feted by the New York Times, and a woman who appears to be making a living pontificating about “rape culture” (which gives her ample reason to claim that such a culture actually exists).

In a Robespierre-like screed for the Washington Post, Ms. Maxwell offers the following stunning analysis of the collapsing Rolling Stone story:

Many people (not least U-Va. administrators) will be tempted to see this as a reminder that officials, reporters and the general public should hear both sides of the story and collect all the evidence before coming to a conclusion in rape cases. This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

In important ways, this is wrong. We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist...

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