LEFTY-NARRATIVE FAKE NEWS: 18,000 Facebook shares later: a tale of legal misinformation.

Related: Social Media As Social Disease.

APPARENTLY, #METOO IS A CESSPIT OF CULTURAL INSENSITIVITY: Banishment of an acclaimed UC Irvine professor sparks debate over whether #MeToo can go too far.

For years, the professor told the assistant dean that she was beautiful and greeted her with hugs and a kiss on each cheek.

During their time together at UC Irvine, Francisco J. Ayala, 84, and Benedicte Shipley, 50, perceived their encounters in dramatically different ways.

He said he believed he was showing her admiration, respect and the courtly manners of his native Spain. She said she felt objectified and humiliated. Her version won out this year, when officials concluded that Ayala had sexually harassed Shipley and two other women.

The university swiftly moved to erase his presence. The world-renowned geneticist resigned, was banned from campus and stripped of prestigious University of California titles. And though he had given Irvine $11.5 million in donations, his name was taken off the university buildings he helped support.

The sanctions have bitterly divided the campus, drawn international attention and underscored the growing complexity of the nation’s pitched battles over sexual harassment.

Universities treat their donors so shabbily, it’s beginning to look as if the only winning move in the PC game is not to play.

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LEFTISM AND RACISM GO TOGETHER LIKE, WELL, LEFTISM AND RACISM: The Backlash Against Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Has Chilling Echoes to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany.

BELIEVE ALL WOMEN: Woman jailed for falsely accusing teenager of raping her in public toilets.

A woman who falsely accused a teenager of raping her has been jailed for 18 months. Sophie Skinner, 25, went alone to a Wetherspoons pub in Abergavenny, Wales, in June 2016 where she was seen on CCTV ‘looking for attention’. She came across Damon Osborne, who was 18 at the time, and got chatting before she made her way to another bar.

The mother-of-three came across Mr Osborne again later that night while he waited for a lift home. She asked him if he wanted to have sex and the pair went into some nearby public toilets where CCTV caught her initiating sex. She then told him she could get him into ‘trouble’ after he refused to have a relationship with her because he had a girlfriend. Skinner went to another bar where she was again captured on CCTV ‘desperately looking for attention from others’, before returning to the Wetherspoons and telling bouncers Mr Osborne had raped her.

But women are morally stainless and never lie. All the best people assured me of that, when it suited their political needs.

Plus, the value of cameras. Quoth her victim: “If there was no CCTV in this case she may have been believed and I would be spending years in prison. It would have ruined my life.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO CHEAT: Couple divorce after Google Street View captures wife stroking another man’s hair.

WHEN IDIOTS LARP AS CIVIL-RIGHTS ACTIVISTS: Somali man whose deportation from the UK was stopped when plane passengers staged a mutiny is a GANG RAPIST who attacked teenage girl.

But the passengers who thought they were doing a good deed were unaware that the man they were defending had been sentenced to nine years in jail for his part in a vicious gang rape of a teenage girl – and that another member of his gang later fought for Islamic State in Syria.

Today The Mail on Sunday can reveal how Ahmed and three other youths preyed on a 16-year-old stranger after she became separated from her friends during a night out in London’s Leicester Square, in August 2007.

In a planned attack, they lured her back to a flat in Crouch End, North London, by pretending her friends were waiting for her there – then gang-raped her.

The gang, aged between 18 and 20, were caught when neighbours heard the girl’s cries for help and rang police.

All four men denied rape, despite DNA evidence. They were found guilty at Wood Green Crown Court and each jailed for nine years. Police detective Emma Bird said at the time: ‘The sentences given out by the judge reflect the seriousness of this offence.’

Ahmed, 18 at the time of the rape and living in Clerkenwell, North London, is thought to have been granted refugee status after arriving in Britain from war-torn Somalia as a boy.

Nice gratitude, Ahmed. The passengers should be named publicly, and prosecuted.

GO FOR THE FEELZ: The fourth installment in Sarah Hoyt’s short story course

CRACKS IN THE WALL: Dave Chappelle defends Kanye West’s Donald Trump meeting: ‘I support him.’

OPEN THREAD: It’s Saturday Night.

21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: New DNA-based test to verify blood compatibility approved by FDA.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Thousands line up for zero-down-payment, subprime mortgages.

I’m sure it will work out OK this time around.

WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF OPEN ILLEGALITY? Video: Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams: Democrats’ “blue wave” in November would be comprised of those who are “documented and undocumented.”

TIM BLAIR ON CHE GUEVARA: “So, for many, the question remains: how did such an incurable doofus, sadist and epic idiot attain such iconic status? Because lefties are suckers for a pretty picture.”

Read the whole thing.

REPLACE THEM WITH “UNDOCUMENTED JOURNALISTS:” New York Times scrambles to defuse a full-blown staff rebellion.

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I’M IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WRITING ABOUT TENNESSEE REGIONALISM AND THE BREDESEN/BLACKBURN RACE.. Excerpt:

The three regions are enshrined in the state constitution. East Tennessee extends from North Carolina to the Cumberland Mountains. Middle Tennessee covers the Nashville Basin from the Cumberlands to the western part of the Tennessee River. West Tennessee goes from there to the Mississippi. These divisions have real consequences: The constitution provides that no more than two of the five justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court can come from the same grand division, and signs at the state line once welcomed visitors to “the 3 states of Tennessee.” More important, they also reflect significant cultural and historical differences.

East Tennessee, which never had many slaves, was pro-Union during the Civil War and would have seceded from the Confederacy like West Virginia if it could have. Its population, mostly descended from small farmers and mountain dwellers, has a distinctive political history. Before the U.S. was founded, settlers in East Tennessee operated under their own constitution, the Watauga Compact. Later, East Tennessee was briefly the aspirational state of Franklin.

Middle and West Tennessee are much more traditionally Southern. Until recently East Tennessee, with about 40% of the state’s population, was heavily Republican while the other two divisions were Southern Democratic territory. Now the whole state has gone red, apart from its core urban enclaves. Still, differences remain. Historically, most of Tennessee’s Republican politicians came from East Tennessee. And they were typically down-home, folksy deal-makers—Sens. Howard Baker Jr., Lamar Alexander and Mr. Corker.

Mrs. Blackburn is in a different mold: Less folksy, more flashy. She’s running not as a deal maker but as a disrupter. She stands for building the wall and crushing Mr. Trump’s “deep state” opposition. On substance, Tennesseans agree with these things. But on style, her fit in East Tennessee is less than perfect. Mr. Bredesen’s down-home commercials and low-key speaking style are a better fit, even if the policies he’d support aren’t.

It doesn’t help that Mrs. Blackburn hasn’t spent as much time in East Tennessee over the past several years as she might have, partly due to the demands of her congressional seat. It’s not an accident that when Donald Trump and Mike Pence came to the Volunteer State in recent weeks, they both stopped in East Tennessee to gin up enthusiasm.

Mr. Bredesen has had his share of miscues. He touted a 16-year-old “A” rating from the National Rifle Association only to have the NRA indignantly point out that his current rating is a “D.” He indulged in an extended equivocation on the Kavanaugh nomination before ultimately announcing that, were he a senator, he would vote “yes.”

The Kavanaugh confirmation may end up saving Mrs. Blackburn’s candidacy. Tennesseans have a strong sense of fairness, and—as befits the region’s Scots-Irish character—a strong regard for matters of character and reputation. The Kavanaugh circus looked like Washington politics at its worst, and that seems to be helping Mrs. Blackburn, who’s running ads tying Mr. Bredesen to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. In 2018 this may be enough to overcome her other weakness.

If Mrs. Blackburn wins, it will be a case of national issues outweighing local culture. And that will be fine with Mrs. Blackburn, and Mr. Trump.

The latest polls look good for her, and the swing since Kavanaugh is amazing.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “‘Critical race theory’ is a mess, for example. It’s an explicitly political situation, in which ‘whiteness’ has to be bad and therefore can’t do anything right, and they take these ideas and launder them through the academic process. And these departments exist specifically to launder these ideas, to put them through the academic process and give them the appearance of being rigorous studies, so then activists can go and say, ‘Oh, a study has shown…’”

Hey, those NPCs don’t just program themselves, you know.

STEPHEN PRESSER: Making Law Professors And Law Students Great Again.

It was little noticed, and of little effect, but more than 2,000 professors signed a letter urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. Given that he is the best qualified nominee in some time, having graduated from Yale and Yale Law School and having served a clerkship with Justice Anthony Kennedy and for more than a decade on the nation’s second highest court as the author of opinions embraced by the Supreme Court itself, this is curious.

This cri de coeur from the professors tells us more about them than about Kavanaugh, and it tells us about the diseased state of jurisprudence in the law schools.

Yeah, pretty much.

OUCH: “In national profile after national profile, Beto O’Rourke kept getting labeled ‘Kennedyesque,’ but the adjective was never applied where the comparison is most accurate, his driving record,” Jim Geraghty tweets, linking to his latest article, “The Beatification of Beto.”

WELL, SOMEONE NEEDS TO: CrossFit’s Greg Glassman Disrupted Fitness. Next, He’s Taking on Healthcare.

NEO: WOMEN LIED, BLACK MEN DIED.

Why didn’t it occur to Democrats that their approach to Kavanaugh might bother black men as well as white ones? My theory is that Democrats now think so completely along racial lines that it probably wouldn’t occur to them that a black man could identify with something happening to a white man, and a preppy white man at that. That must be why writer Jemele Hill of the Atlantic could write something like this [emphasis mine]:

On Tuesday night, I was in an auditorium with 100 black men in the city of Baltimore, when the subject pivoted to Brett Kavanaugh. I expected to hear frustration that the sexual-assault allegations against him had failed to derail his Supreme Court appointment. Instead, I encountered sympathy. One man stood up and asked, passionately, “What happened to due process?” He was met with a smattering of applause, and an array of head nods.

Hill, who is a black woman (formerly a sportswriter), assumed that these black men would identify with the woman’s story of sexual assault, rather than the man’s story of false accusation. She thought they would accept and perhaps join in with the Democrats’ ridicule and demonizing of Kavanaugh’s rage at being falsely accused.

On a related topic, note that the bill is coming due for American literature’s most celebrated rape apologist. A week ago, Steven Crowder posted this parody video:

And proving out Muggeridge’s Law, which as the late Tom Wolfe wrote, postulated that “We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known,” on Thursday, Milwaukee’s Fox affiliate posted this headline: “Shorewood School District cancels ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ play due to potential protests.”

The stated reason was the school district getting last-minute jitters over the play’s use of the N-word, but it’s still memory holing what was an American classic. “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches,” Ray Bradbury wrote in the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Which Witch Will Be The Witch To Bewitch Brett Kavanaugh?

Though Jeff Dunetz is on it, this might be a topic best outsourced to the Washington Post.

I BLAME STEVE GREEN: WaPo columnist blames Trump for Americans drinking more. As Jazz Shaw writes:

What I find odd here is that the booze business needed any sort of a bump. Traditionally, the liquor industry has been seen as one of the most recession-proof business channels in the country, perhaps second only to the Mafia. When times are good, people drink to celebrate. When times are hard, they drink to console themselves. Or at least that’s how it’s traditionally been perceived.

So is Parker onto something? Is Trump actually driving people to drink? I’ll wait until martini time this afternoon to decide, but if he is I say good for him. And now he’s got somebody on the Supreme Court who really likes beer, so we should be in good shape from here on out.

Say, I wonder if the DNC-MSM would be writing similar headlines if Hillary won? (No, actually I don’t.)