USUALLY, IN A JOURNALISTIC FRAUD OR PLAGIARISM SCANDAL, THE FIRST CASE YOU FIND OUT ABOUT IS JUST THE FIRST CASE YOU FIND OUT ABOUT: Ashe Schow: Has the Rolling Stone gang-rape author EVER corroborated a story?

In the wake of Rolling Stone’s refusal to fire the author behind its now-retracted and now infamous University of Virginia gang-rape story, one has to wonder if this is a rare mistake or a pattern of behavior.

There are some big hints that it is the latter.

Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author in question, actually has a history of writing articles based solely on one person’s account, with no indication that she even tried to corroborate the story or hear any other potential side. . . .

Every story Erdely writes begins the same way — with a story about her main source’s experience written as if Erdely witnessed it herself. From there the article only seeks to bolster the source’s account — all with a credulity that lends itself more to fiction writing than journalism.

The question is whether Rolling Stone will do what the New Republic did in the wake of the Stephen Glass controversy — that is, to review Erdely’s past work and decide whether she should continue to be trusted as an author.

Well, I know the answer to that question already, but yeah.

OUR OLIGARCHS ARE A POLITICAL MONOCULTURE: National Journal: The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley: In an industry where only liberal ideas are “allowed,” many libertarians and conservatives keep their political views secret.

See, I think that the Republicans in Congress should regard them as enemies. Because, you know, they are.

UPDATE: Link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!

GOOD: IRS Workers Are Miserable and Overwhelmed.

THAT’S BECAUSE WE’RE GIVERS: Men More Likely Than Women To Go Back In Time And Kill Hitler: Moral Judgments Study. “Women were more likely to fall into the deontology camp and agonize for a long time over a decision, while men were somewhat more likely to lean toward utilitarianism and make a quick decision, the researchers found. That leads to a gender difference in making a moral decision, they say, with a stronger emotional aversion to harmful action being seen among women.”

You know, I felt better about the 19th Amendment before I knew that women, given a choice, would let Hitler live.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: The hypocrisy and dishonesty of attacks on Connecticut College professor Andrew Pessin.

Andrew Pessin is a distinguished philosophy professor at Connecticut College. He is also, as I understand it, the only Jewish professor at the college who regularly speaks up on behalf of Israel in an intellectual climate that is often dominated by left-wing and foreign students hostile to Israel.

This made him the target of one Lamiya Khandaker, a student who took his intro to philosophy class without incident last Fall. In February, she sent him an email complaining about a Facebook post from the previous August, in which used the metaphor of a rabid pit bull to describe the situation in Gaza, to wit, “One image which essentializes the current situation in Gaza might be this. You’ve got a rabid pit bull chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape.”

Reading the post, it’s ambiguous whether the rabid pit bull analogy is meant to apply to Hamas, Hamas and its Palestinian supporters, or Palestinian residents of Gaza more generally (whoever heard of a hastily-drafted, unclear, FB post?). However, I have seen his previous Facebook posts on the Gaza war last Summer, and they are full of criticism of Hamas, and don’t say anything nasty about Palestinians more generally, suggesting that he was, in fact, referring to Hamas.

In any event, Khandaker suggested that she found the post racist. Pessin clarified in response that he was not referring to Palestinians in general, but to Hamas and why its behavior provides a rationale for the Israel blockade of Gaza.

Khandaker is an idiot. Palestinians aren’t a “race.” They aren’t even a nationality. But, of course, the vast majority of campus “racism” complaints are just dishonest political hit-jobs.

Plus:

Speaking of animal analogies, Hamas’s charter calls Jews the “descendants of apes and pigs.” Pro-Hamas activists who gin up phony racism controversies like this one would like you to forget that.

Shame on the Connecticut College faculty for feeding the digital lynch mob rather than standing up for their colleague, or at least wallowing in ignominious silence.

How much per year does Connecticut College cost to attend? Why spend that on an environment in which political hit-jobs are met with “ignominious silence?”

DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES UPSET AT INSUFFICIENT KOWTOWING: Media pile on Rand Paul after aggressive response to NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.

They’re your enemies. Treat ’em like Obama treats Fox News. And you have to laugh at this: “Rand Paul thinks he knows how to be a journalist better than you do.”

Here’s a hint: He does. Because it’s not that hard to be a better journalist than Savannah Guthrie, and most of her peers. The truth is, they’re not very good at what they do, but so long as they function as Democratic operatives with bylines, they don’t have to be. And that’s the real problem.

UPDATE: Republican strategists — and FOX producers — should probably click through and read the comments here. . . .

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Campus Rape and the ‘Emergency’: It’s Always an Excuse for Authoritarianism.

Want to make the “emergency” go away? Make the “cure” something that campus administrators don’t like.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Secret Service manager put on leave during probe of alleged assault.

A STALIN RERUN FROM PUTIN: “‘Russian Paper Removes Article About Soldier Wounded In Ukraine,’ Radio Free Europe reports. Did the Russians use Photoshop, or go old school, Stalin-style, and breakout the airbrushes? No — they used a far cruder technique: scissors. On 50,000 newspapers.”

IT’S LOOKING INCREASINGLY AS IF NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN MIGHT REPRESENT A BEST-CASE SCENARIO: “Let us hope that Mr. Obama does not become the Neville Chamberlain of our time.”

BILL STRAUB: What Have the 2016 GOP Hopefuls Done in the Senate? Here’s what Rubio, Cruz, Paul and Graham have been up to in the 114th Congress.

ROBERT TRACINSKI: The Hugo Awards: How to Fight Back in the Culture War. (Let me note, however, that the Hugo fight is not an “outgrowth” of GamerGate — it’s been going on for several years and just finally reached the breakthrough point.) “This year, the Sad Puppies campaign (and a related slate of recommendations called Rabid Puppies) swept the field. The response was a total meltdown among the leftist elites who had assumed, in previous years, that they (and their favorite publisher, Tor) basically owned the Hugos. So they did what the Left always does: they smeared everyone who disagrees with them as racists. Correia notes that on April 6, eight different news sites, from Entertainment Weekly to The Guardian, all published suspiciously similar hit pieces describing the Sad Puppies campaign and its organizers as racist and misogynist. Clearly, someone was feeding these sites the new official narrative, and they all swallowed it without any attempt at basic research.”

And then had to humiliatingly retract.

DAVID FRENCH: Social-Justice Warriors Aren’t So Tough When Even ‘Sad Puppies’ Can Beat Them. “Correia, Torgerson, and their Sad Puppies allies are living arguments against cultural defeatism. With humor and verve, they’ve taken on the allegedly unstoppable Left, stopped it, and thrown it into spasms of impotent rage and amusing disarray. In its rage and self-righteousness, the Left always overreaches. Always. I’ve seen that reality in 20 years of on-campus battles, we’re seeing that reality as their hate campaign against Memories Pizza helped make the owners a pile of money, and we saw it when we watched unhinged rhetoric help turn American Sniper into the top-grossing movie of 2014.”

REMEMBER, IT WAS PERFECTLY TIMED TO GO WITH A WHITE HOUSE CAMPUS-SEX-OFFENSE CAMPAIGN: How Deep Is This Education Official’s Involvement In The Rolling Stone Hoax?

A top-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has emerged as a potentially key figure in Rolling Stone’s false article, “A Rape on Campus.”

Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department’s civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Groves’ letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans’ report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article’s publication.

In the letter, Groves wrote that he has suffered “personal and professional” damage as a result of Erdely’s reporting and comments Lhamon made about him which were included in the article.

As the Rolling Stone article fell apart, Lhamon’s involvement has gone virtually unmentioned. But a deeper look reveals her ties to Emily Renda, a University of Virginia employee and activist who put Erdely in touch with Jackie, the student whose claim that she was brutally gang-raped by seven members of a fraternity on Sept. 28, 2014, served as the linchpin for the 9,000-word Rolling Stone article. . . . Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions.

I wonder if anyone has put in a FOIA request for her emails, and I wonder if they’ll “disappear,” you know?

THE NEW MCCARTHYISM: Academic-purity group backed by Greenpeace and AFT urges activists to “expose and undermine” professors and campus research centers that work against “progressive values.”

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Exclusive: Intense Helmet Cam Video Captures American Volunteers’ Nearly Deadly Run-In With Islamic State.

BUT THERE IS ALWAYS TOMORROW: Here’s the Lamest Liberal Attack on Rand Paul You’ll Read Today.

Ryan Cooper needs to do some remedial reading.

OH, GOODY: CDC: Drug-Resistant Shigella Spreading In The US. “A group of bacteria called Shigella is responsible for 500,000 cases of diarrhea in the US every year. Now a new report says a multi-drug resistant strain of the bug is entering the country in infected travelers and causing a series of outbreaks.”

MOTIVATION: An App That Lets You See What You’d Look Like After Losing Weight.

AT AMAZON, the Sports & Fitness Outlet Sale.

Plus, pre-order the Star Wars Digital Movie Collection.

SHE USED TO BE HELD UP AS THIS SORT OF BENEVOLENT GENDER PIONEER, BUT WHAT SHE TURNED OUT TO BE IS A BITTER, ANGRY TAKE-NO-PRISONERS PARTISAN: After Wisconsinites vote to amend the state constitution to change how the state supreme court’s chief justice is selected, Shirley Abrahamson sues in federal court to keep her position under the old provision.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THE ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY DEBACLE:

Last Monday afternoon, Entertainment Weekly posted a story in its Books section with the ominous headline: “Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign.”

Within a few hours, the headline changed to: “Correction: Hugo Awards voting campaign sparks controversy.”

That’s some correction. So what happened?

Both versions of the EW story were about the annual Hugo Awards given out to science fiction and fantasy writers. In the original version, EW’s Isabella Biedenharn claimed that “misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards,” urging their followers to “cast votes against female writers and writers of color.”

Turns out that the slate of authors recommended by one of the groups, at least, did include women and minorities. Several of them, in fact.

The group’s campaign, in fact, had nothing to do with women or minorities, but an effort “to get talented, worthy, deserving authors who would normally never have a chance (to be) nominated for the supposedly prestigious Hugo awards,” according to Larry Correia, who along with Brad Torgersen, started the “Sad Puppies” campaign to bring more ideological diversity to the Hugo nominations.

“I started this campaign a few years ago,” Correia wrote on his blog, “because I believed that the awards were politically biased and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned.”

But since the EW reporter didn’t bother to reach out to Correia, or anyone else involved, to check her facts, she apparently didn’t know this.

This story, like the now-completely discredited Rolling Stone “campus rape” article, shows the dangers of an increasingly biased mainstream news media.

Yep. And charges of racism, misogyny, etc. are almost always just political tools to defend insiders against outsiders nowadays.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of Michigan Cancels American Sniper Screening to Protect Students’ Feelings, Will Show Paddington Instead. “College is daycare.”

The Center for Campus Involvement, an official university organization that hosts non-alcoholic events for students, had planned to screen American Sniper at a gathering on Friday night. But this plan drew outrage from a bunch of easily offended students, including the Muslim Students’ Association. . . .

To guard against the waves of anti-Islamic violence that would surely break across campus if American Sniper was screened, administrators substituted a different movie. Students will now be able to enjoy Paddington, which hopefully will not challenge any of their political or religious views, or inform them on culture or current affairs, in any way at all.

Though I’m surprised that Paddington isn’t drawing any protests of its own. After all, the film initially garnered a “PG” rating from the British Board of Film Classification for “dangerous behaviour, mild threat, mild sex references, [and] mild bad language,” according to BBC News. The producers complained that this judgment was extreme—apparently “mild bad language” referred to a single utterance of the word “bloody”—and the final warning changed “mild sex reference” to “innuendo.”

But do the students at UM possess the fortitude to sit through a movie containing “innuendo” and “dangerous behaviour”? Nothing about them suggests to me that they do.

Is it worth six figures to attend such a place? Is it worth tax dollars to support it? Why, exactly?

APPARENTLY, IT’S BECAUSE LOS PAPAS WON’T LET GIRLS BRING BOYS HOME: Why Do So Many Young People in Latin America Hook Up in Parks?

SPACE: To Boldly Go Where No Body Has Gone Before: What to do when an astronaut dies in space.