October 26, 2016
Source: Bigstock
T. Rees Shapiro of The Washington Post did yeoman’s work exposing this hilarious part of the hoax, but most of the media have followed The New York Times“ lead in ignoring the Haven Monahan angle and instead treating it as a boring story of technical miscues in journalistic methodology.
The larger question of why the mainstream media were so credulous about this palpable fraud has, of course, been of negligible interest to the mainstream media.
Why did they acquiesce to such conspiracy-theory insanity?
First, Erdely’s article was part of the well-organized push by the Obama Administration over the purported “rape culture on campus” crisis.
This is not to say that there is a vast left-wing conspiracy among the federal government, the Democratic Party, and the news media (but not to deny it, either). Let’s just assume that there is much coordination about what is going to be treated as big news and what isn”t.
Back during the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, for example, it was mandatory to Believe the Women.
But after Bill and Hillary were sent to the White House in the Year of the Woman as a package deal, all sorts of women started accusing Bill of sexual harassment and even rape. At that point the orthodoxy became that we must Move On past such he said/she said trivialities as who raped whom.
Although feminism continued its grinding march through the institutions in the years after Bill survived impeachment for his perjury in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment case, high-level feminist hysteria was muted compared with the 1970s or early 1990s. Barack Obama, for example, radiated the usual black male impatience with white women’s claim to equal victimhood.
But in 2012 the Obama reelection campaign made the fateful decision to gin up feminist and black anger to inflate turnout. What made Trump the GOP nominee was Obama’s decision four years ago to revive grievances against white men. Perhaps black paranoia was always inevitable, but Obama’s decision to stoke women’s resentment for votes, when he’s never shown any indication of taking feminist ideology seriously, is hard to forgive.
And with Hillary running in 2016, it is now obligatory to believe the women about whatever they have to say about Donald Trump (but not what women say about Bill”don”t get the two golf buddies confused).
Second, Erdely’s morality play about what Tom Wolfe calls the Great White Defendant taps into a widespread wish that criminals weren”t so depressingly black. Indeed, Coakley’s story closely resembles a 2013 episode of Law & Order: SVU called “Girl Dishonored.” Tom Wolfe made lots of money telling Americans the truth, but Dick Wolf made even more telling them what they wished were true.
Third, nobody is supposed to mention the obvious anti-Gentilic malice in Erdely’s article because there is no such thing as anti-Gentilism.
Fourth, these hate hoaxes about evil straight white males are the KKKrazy Glue that holds together the Democratic Party, so nobody should dare notice the pattern, at least not until after Nov. 8.
