“The Rage at Cornell: ‘Rapists Still Walk Among Us’.”
That’s the headline on a Free Press report on protests at the Ivy League school in the wake of an explosive rape accusation. Olivia Reingold attends the Cornell protests:
“We are known as the rape school, but we don’t have to be,” Sya Taylor boomed into a microphone before a vast crowd, her pink hair falling over her face. “We can be the students that lead a nationwide reform movement against the institutions that perpetuate rape at every single level.”
Cornell’s main building is covered in graffiti (“Smash the patriarchy!”) and windows have been broken. More than a thousand demonstrators have descended on Cornell’s campus, demanding the university President resign and proclaiming, “We are Jane Doe.”
For my money, Byron York of the Examiner has the sanest take (“The Political Path of the Cornell Rape Allegation“) on the Cornell situation. The rape allegation comes from an ugly scene at the Phi Chi fraternity house. Cornell investigated and handed down stiff penalties for several of the frat guys:
If the alleged victim, whose behavior that night precluded criminal charges against the men, wanted some retribution, or justice, for what took place, she got it: two expulsions, two suspensions, an entire fraternity chapter put out of business, and more. If she had stopped there, she might conceivably have been able to move on to living her life, with less alcohol and ketamine.
The alleged victim instead filed a massive lawsuit earlier this month, two years after the ugly incident. She sued Cornell, a bar that has served her a drink on the night in question, each of the fraternity brothers involved, the local fraternity chapter, and even her own sorority:
The lawsuit said that Delta Delta Delta “held itself out to the public, and more particularly to [the woman] herein, as possessing the proper degree of safety measure to adequately protect its members and to use reasonable care and diligence in its monitoring and policing of the [local chapter’s] house and those living in and utilizing said house.” In other words, the woman is suing her sorority for allegedly not putting a stop to her heavy drinking.
The prosecutor reopened the case and “now the matter is in a new realm — the realm of politics.” And, as York points out, it’s just getting started. Wendy Kaminer, meanwhile, finds the case of the Cornell 7 “murky”: “The fraternity members’ treatment of Jane Doe may have been morally repulsive, but it’s not clear it was criminal.”
“Missing details keep U.S. plague response on hold,” according to Axios:
Two big unknowns stand in the way of determining how serious the plague threat in Russia is and whether travel advisories, restrictions at U.S. ports of entry or other precautions are warranted.
We still don’t know which pathogen killed a Russian researcher, or how well contained it is.
Why it matters:Though public health experts say there’s no cause for Americans to panic, the episode serves as a wake-up call emphasizing the nature of global biological threats and the need for pandemic preparedness.
Fox Digital observes that the hardest hit by the bio-leak could be Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The violent French protests started with students but quickly spread:
What happened over the past week is what always happens when school pupils protest: the movement gets hijacked by extremists of various stripes. Already, the main union behind the protests, the Union syndicale lycéenne, is a far-left organisation. Unsurprisingly, far-left tropes were apparent in the banners and slogans of those protesting – from anti-racism and the supposed need to decolonise education to the plight of Gaza and the usual ‘anti-Zionism’, which swiftly descended into anti-Semitism.
The current riots lead Dominic Green to reflect on whether the collapse of Charles de Gaulle’s France is upon us (highly recommended). The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson sees the riots as a warning for the U.S. and other Western countries about mass immigration, which can split a country in two:
Among the “protesters,” we don’t see a broad cross-section of French society but overwhelmingly nonwhite males, immigrants and the children of immigrants. The barricades are being raised largely by Muslim youth of North African and Middle Eastern descent. Outside many schools, students weren’t chanting about funding cuts or classroom conditions, they were chanting “we are antifascists” and other such slogans. In Marseille, rioters flew the flag of Algeria and Hamas, not the tricolor. It was the same at a number of high schools that saw rioting.
RCP says our leaders should be studying what is happening in France.
Former President Barack Obama will appear at a rally to support Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed ten days before the midterms. On the other hand, Matthew Hennessey of Free Expression dubs El-Sayed “Mr. Financial Know-Nothing“:
“I’d rather an economy that makes 1,000 millionaires than one billionaire,” Abdul El-Sayed said recently in a clip featured on his X feed. Mr. El-Sayed is the Democratic candidate for U.S. senate in Michigan. “Most billionaires don’t park their money making more businesses. They park their money in the stock market. That is not meaningfully investing in opportunity. It’s just investing in other billionaires.”
Start with the numbers. The U.S. has more than 1,000 millionaires. Something like 23.6 million, actually. So we’re doing pretty well on that front.
But here’s the critical thing: A stock market isn’t a parking garage. Nobody “parks” money in an investment with the expectation that he’ll come back later and pick it up. Investors seek return. They want action. No risk, no reward.
An educated person Mr. El-Sayed’s age should know all this. By now he should have outgrown the child’s view of financial economics, in which every transaction is hocus pocuniks and wealth goes into the stock market to hide. That he not only clings to these views but peddles them should embarrass him and alarm his supporters. Since it appears to do neither, we can only assume he—and they—are getting something useful out of their ignorance.
But impossible promises have no use. And fairy tales often end with painful lessons.
Meanwhile, “Democrats are poised for a win in the midterms — but can they govern?” ask Doug Schoen and Carly Cooperman in The Hill:
If the Democrats win, what will they do to best position themselves for 2028? Because if the Democrats do win, it will be from collecting protest votes, not from offering solutions.
The data bears this out. According to NBC, a plurality (46 percent) of independents said their midterm vote will be “a signal of opposition to the president.”
Peter Savodnik has an interesting piece at The Free Press headlined “The Democratic Party’s Crooked Kingmakers.” Savodnik writes about the hosts of “Pod Save America,” “who have built a media juggernaut—and are using it to channel a new progressive rage.” I want to quote this:
[I]n a mock-serious tone, [former Obama speechwriter Jon] Lovett, a co-founder of Crooked Media, which produces the podcast, declared: “I do want to get this out of the way: I denounce you.”
That elicited a chuckle from Piker, who replied: “I denounce myself as well.”
The hard-to-miss point was: All the controversy around Piker—the streamer has declared that “America deserved 9/11,” that accusations of Hamas committing sexual violence on October 7, 2023, are “rape fantasies,” that he would pick Hamas over Israel “every single time,” that the collapse of the Soviet Union “was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century,” that “pound for pound” the U.S. is worse than Al Qaeda—was overblown.
Meaning it’s permissible—desirable—for Democrats to make room for Piker in their “big tent.”
Before I go, USA TODAY’s Nicole Russell has a good, measured column on the death of Renee Good at an ICE protest in Minneapolis. … President Trump says he will pay for the series of TV ads praising the president and his accomplishments. The ads were formerly paid for by the government.
