Whenever a left-winger in the dying media knows his side is losing an argument, he breaks the emergency glass and starts calling people bigots. And so that’s what Nathan Tayler Pemberton did this week in The New York Times.
Pemberton on Monday wrote that he could see a “newfound unity” among the “online right” and attributed it, curiously, to “what it’s been missing most: a woman to hate on.”
Right. Because if there’s one thing you can say about the Democrat Party, it’s that all of its women are far too likable. Not a single nag in sight over there.
Pemberton said skeptics of the 2024 “Cornell Seven” gang rape allegations, filed in a civil suit last month by a woman named only as “Jane Doe,” intended to “portray Doe as a kind of out-of -control sexual fiend.” He said critics, however, are “unable to dispute the basic narrative of the assault.” Both assertions are laughable, and it’s a wonder that Pemberton’s editor didn’t spank him and then send him home for making them.
Nobody is portraying Doe as anything. It’s in her own lawsuit that she got drunk then went to see a male friend at a fraternity house before proceeding to engage in a drug-fueled threesome. She contemporaneously assured those involved that it was consensual, and she told others that it was true, she had been involved in group sex, without any indication she had been offended, let alone assaulted. She also told one of the men involved that she was looking forward to attending an upcoming party at the same house where the incident occurred.
It was only after Doe had been disinvited from that party that she began suggesting that the sex was not consensual. There’s not much left to dispute as far as the “basic narrative” goes. Doe said multiple times she had agreed to the group sex. She said it to multiple people. Then she said the opposite almost two weeks later. And then two years later, she filed a lawsuit, and her lawyer says it’s her own sorority’s fault that she was allowed to leave the sorority house that night after having gotten drunk (something she did to herself at the adult age of 20).
It’s true that many people online — whether they’re on the “right,” I don’t know — have attempted to expose Doe’s identity, which Pemberton called “relentlessly harassing.” If it’s harassment to have your name published while being accused of unspeakable horrors, the seven men Doe is accusing might have their own lawsuit to file. Their names were first published by Cornell’s student newspaper. Their faces were posted online, and Doe’s public lawsuit names them all individually. Sounds fair to me.
Nobody is gleeful about the rape allegations. To the contrary, all serious people are angry. Pemberton is angry, too, but only because his preferred narrative has been all but proven to be a lie. Now he’s making up his own lie and calling people bigots.
Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of "Traitors: The Democrat Party’s Collapse into Anti-American Filth."