WELL, ACCEPTING THAT WOULD LESSEN THE OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: Women’s group can’t accept that ‘rape culture’ just might not be a thing.

When you’re committed to perpetuating the myth of a rampant “rape culture” on college campuses, evidence to the contrary becomes baffling.

And so it goes for the American Association of University Women, which analyzed 2014 reporting data from colleges and universities across the country and found that 91 percent of schools had no reported incidents of rape. Most people would see that number and cheer. Hooray! College women aren’t being raped in the U.S. at rates on par with the Congo!

But not the AAUW. Accompanying that percentage on a chart on its website are the words: “What’s wrong with this picture?”

Read the whole thing. Today, as we saw with the UVA scandal, a feminist is someone who’s horrified at the thought that a woman might not have been raped.

SINCE THIS WAS ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE, YOU’D THINK THE PEOPLE WORRIED ABOUT IT WOULD HAVE MADE ANTI-TERRORISM A HIGHER PRIORITY: France’s far right reaps political gains as fears of terrorism grow.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies,” including one of the most insidious:

Trope Two: “Like shouting fire in a crowded theater”

Example: ” There is no freedom to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.” Prof. Thane Rosenbaum, Daily Beast, January 30, 2014.

Nearly 100 years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., voting to uphold the Espionage Act conviction of a man who wrote and circulated anti-draft pamphlets during World War I, said”[t]he most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”

That flourish — now usually shortened to “shout fire in a crowded theater” — is the media’s go-to trope to support the proposition that some speech is illegal. But it’s empty rhetoric. I previously explained at length how Holmes said it in the context of the Supreme Court’s strong wartime pro-censorship push and subsequently retreated from it. That history illustrates its insidious nature. Holmes cynically used the phrase as a rhetorical device to justify jailing people for anti-war advocacy, an activity that is now (and was soon thereafter) unquestionably protected by the First Amendment. It’s an old tool, but still useful, versatile enough to be invoked as a generic argument for censorship whenever one is needed. But it’s null-content, because all it says is some speech can be banned — which, as we’ll see in the next trope, is not controversial. The phrase does not advance a discussion of which speech falls outside of the protection of the First Amendment.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: David Axelrod told where to direct his questions about shooting death of Laquan McDonald.

AND YOU THOUGHT THE BLACK PANTHERS WERE THE APOGEE OF RADICAL CHIC: Meet the Americans Who Are Beheading on ISIS Videos.

I DOUBT THE FOLKS AT TNR ARE FAMILIAR WITH THE TRANSITIVE PRINCIPLE:

FOR WHOM THE MEMORY HOLE TOLLS:

● “Justly revered as our great Constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws.”

—Woodrow Wilson, as quoted in 2008 by Robert Curry in “Woodrow Wilson’s Constitution.”

●“Student Fascists Win Again: Princeton to Chisel Woodrow Wilson’s Name Off Buildings.”

—Ben Shapiro, November 20th. Ben asks, “What’s the point of the purge? By wiping away history, the left gets to place itself at the top of the moral pantheon, deciding by godlike whim who is a saint and who a sinner. We can’t learn from the past – we have to excise it wholesale to build the new world. History is a foundation of Western civilization; Western civilization is exploitative and evil, and so its history must be erased.”

Oddly enough, Wilson, one the early popularizers of the “living Constitution,” would have likely approved the sentiment driving today’s Princetonians, even if he never thought he’d eventually become one of the left’s unpersons.

Related: “Arushi Garg, left, a law student, said the 1920s made her uncomfortable.”

ROGER SIMON: Islam Needs an Intervention:

Think about a family.  When there’s a cousin addicted to crystal meth, what do you do?  Give him money for more or stage an intervention?  The latter obviously.  Only in this case the size of the intervention is huge,  almost incomprehensibly so.  But it is necessary. Otherwise, there is no reason to think it will ever stop.

How do you make an intervention so huge?  Well, obviously, you have to destroy ISIS military and totally.  But that, as I indicated, is only temporary. Beyond that, we have to launch a major ideological war. This will take allies in the Islamic world like Egypt’s al-Sisi, a man who says Islam needs reform but whom, not surprisingly, our president disdains.

Sharia law should be outlawed in the United States and in as many Western countries as possible since it is in direct contradistinction to Western values in its misogyny and homophobia.  Those from the Islamic world who seek to immigrate should be required to take classes explaining our values and why Sharia is unacceptable to us.  Otherwise they should not be admitted.  This may not work, but it is a start.

Don’t look for much change (or hope) until after next year at the earliest, though.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Why should journalists know anything about economics or history? That’s the question the journalism department at UNC-Chapel Hill couldn’t answer, and so it has eliminated these basic requirements.”

THE YALE PROBLEM BEGINS IN HIGH SCHOOL: “A month before the Yale Halloween meltdown, I had a bizarre and illuminating experience at an elite private high school on the West Coast. I’ll call it Centerville High,” Jonathan Haidt writes, adding that he asked the kids a series of questions as to the type of school they wanted, versus what they were mentally trapped within:

So let me get this straight. You were unanimous in saying that you want your school to be a place where people feel free to speak up, even if you strongly dislike their views. But you don’t have such a school. In fact, you have exactly the sort of “tolerance” that Herbert Marcuse advocated [which I had discussed in my lecture, and which you can read about here]. You have a school in which only people in the preferred groups get to speak, and everyone else is afraid. What are you going to do about this? Let’s talk.

Read the whole thing.

OBAMA HAS JUST BEGUN, Victor Davis Hanson writes, asking “How much damage can he do in his last year in office?” Well, a lot, obvious, just look at the headlines coming out of the Islamic Mideast and the American Midwest:

Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with Obama: Après nous le déluge.

And that’s precisely the reaction of his friends at the New Republic, who have discovered an even greater looming threat to mankind than ISIS or global warming — a (wait for it!) Republican White House.

Expect an increasing amount of rhetoric along those lines next year, especially if her operatives with bylines suspect that Hillary just might not have what it takes to make it to electoral nirvana next November.

OOPS: The commander in chief’s meltdown in the polls. “President Obama’s petulant news conference in Turkey insisting there is no need to shift our strategy for fighting the Islamic State might have been the low point in his presidency. But that does not mean he’s hit rock bottom.”

BUT YOU GET TO FEEL SMUG: Electric Cars And The Coal That Runs Them.

EUROPE AND ISLAM — A CLASH OF FAILURES: At The Week, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes:

As I wrote last week, for some Muslims, the modern world presents a crisis for Islam. If Allah grants victories to the faithful community of believers, then Islam’s current situation is a problem. The Islamic world has been in retreat for decades, if not centuries. The exit of colonial powers has left the Middle East and surrounding regions to corrupt governments, seduced by foreign intrigue or foreign aid. Globalization sends constant reminders of the economic superiority of the West into the Muslim world, along with messages preaching the superiority of Western hedonism, human rights, and feminism. For certain Muslims, this is not an unfortunate turn in history, but a sign of the Muslim world’s defection from Allah. Islam must be purified to restore the ummah to the conditions of the early centuries of the faith. Islam’s failure to conquer, or even to produce workable, livable arrangements with its own domain, becomes an invitation to fundamentalism and conflict.

Something similar is happening to French society. After World War II, France devoted itself evermore fully to its conceptions of universal values. France disavowed political nationalism, and joined the European project with enthusiasm. France was to show that if French men were to become Nietzsche’s last men, well, what’s wrong with that? Every man wants to be free, prosperous, leisured. History has a direction, away from religion, prejudice, divisive nationalism, and toward reason. History was a march toward universally applicable and universally appealing human rights. In a few years, the sons of Algerian and Iraqi immigrants will drink coffee, a little Bordeaux too. They will pretend to be existentialists, and organize to keep French working hours distinctively French. Everyone in their heart wants this, no?

It turns out not.

Read the whole thing.

THEIR ROOTS KEEP SHOWING: Progressive Overshoot: Efforts Begin as Liberalization, End as Stalinism.

SO WE MIGHT ACTUALLY GET SOMEWHERE? The new space race is a private-sector affair.

MOTHERS USED TO WARN GIRLS ABOUT PSYCHOPATHS: Then they stopped doing it.

YES, THAT GLOBAL WARMING: Standoff over government climate study provokes national uproar by scientists.

SPEAKING OF GLOBAL WARMING: German Professor: NASA Has Fiddled Climate Data On ‘Unbelievable’ Scale.

BARRACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, SUPERGENIUS: The anti-ISIS coalition guarantees the chaos will spread. But hey, the Jihadists will be really upset when they hear our president is pivoting to global warming.  Or something.

BUSTED: CAUGHT ON TAPE: Lying Campus Feminists Report GamerGater To Police For Non-Existent ‘Threatening Comments.’ “A GamerGate supporter who snuck into an anti-GamerGate panel at Northeastern Illinois University and streamed it online was reported to the police and falsely accused of making “threatening comments.” He caught the whole thing on film.” Obviously, those making the false reports should themselves be reported, and perhaps sued for slander or libel.

AT AMAZON: Black Friday Deals Week: Musical Instruments.

JOURNALISM: Emails Show Politico’s Mike Allen Promised Positive Coverage of Chelsea Clinton. “Allen’s eager attempt to draft “no-risk” interview questions with Chelsea Clinton’s camp is especially noteworthy given Allen’s public opposition to low-risk interviews with powerful figures. . . . In Chelsea Clinton’s case, Allen pledged much more than a ‘super-safe, softball interview’—he literally promised her team total and precise control over the interview questions he would pose to her.”

SWEET HOME, CHICAGO:

…And here we go:

● “Video: The shooting of Laquan McDonald.”

—Allahpundit, at Hot Air.

● “Did Corrupt Rahm Emanuel Wait to After Election to Release Video?”

—Steve Bartin, Newsalert. (And a reminder to a suddenly and “unexpectedly” incurious MSM: “This ‘Mayor of Chicago’ who suppressed Laquan McDonald tape was Obama’s WH Chief of Staff, Chairman of House Dem Caucus, & Chairman of DCCC.”

●“CHICAGO ERUPTS! Laquan McDonald Protesters ATTACK POLICE, Toss BOTTLES, Steal Police Bikes (Video).”

—Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit.

● “Chicago Releases Video of Police Shooting of Suspect; City Braces for Violence That Some Predict Could Be Described as ‘Tuesday’”

—Ace of Spades.

And finally, good advice from John Nolte, as the media gets ready to whip up a hot fresh riot in time for Thanksgiving (and in honor of the one year anniversary of last year’s holiday season riots): “Praying for my many family members in Chicago. Told them if they see any CNN trucks, they need to run.”

Indeed. ™

HEH: “And some write for prestigious, even respected, media outlets. Another writes for Gawker.”