Bozell & Graham Column: The Kavanaugh Combat and Campus Cranks

October 2nd, 2018 11:22 PM

For Washington Post readers, we offer a quiz. Guess which one of these tweets from a D.C. Catholic college professor about the Brett Kavanaugh battle is considered scandalous and newsworthy? 

1. "Swetnick is 55 y/o. Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with & by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!"

2. “Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

If you work at The Washington Post, the answer is obviously (1). Questioning the shaky story of a Kavanaugh accuser is apparently a far more heinous rhetorical offense than murder/castration/hog-feeding fantasies.

The first example is from Catholic University. William Rainford is the dean of the National Catholic College of Social Service. The Post reported “Scores of graduates (translation: leftists) signed a letter to the university's president, provost and board of trustees objecting to Rainford's comment and calling for his resignation.” Rainford was suspended from his duties, issued a written apology that he had “unfortunately degraded” Julie Swetnick, and deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts. John Garvey, the university’s president, sent an email to the campus that the tweet “demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to the victim.”

Not “alleged victim.”

The second example is from Christine Fair, an associate professor in Georgetown’s Security Studies program. Her rabid tweet was reported on October 1 in the Daily Caller, not in the Post.

Twitter suspended Fair’s account – temporarily – but Georgetown would not suspend her. They issued a perfunctory statement to the Caller that “The views of faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own,” and “we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”

Now imagine how a conservative white male student of Fair feels about what interactions he can expect after this. Then imagine when he finds Fair’s blog sites, titled “S–t Men Say” and “Tenacious Hellpussy.”

How Georgetown can be perceived as having a Catholic identity at this late date is anyone’s guess.

The Post isn’t reporting on Christine Fair’s latest doozy, one in a series of splenetic fits. In November 2016, after former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani wrote a Post op-ed on why she as a liberal Muslim had voted for Trump, Fair tweeted "I've written you off as a human being. Your vote helped normalize Nazis in D.C. What don't you understand, you clueless dolt?" She added: "YOU publicly voted for a sex assailant." After this and more social-media hate speech, Nomani complained to Georgetown. The Post covered that, but nothing happened.

The liberal judgment of the Post became crystal clear on the afternoon of October 1, after the Caller scoop, when the top story on the “Afternoon Buzz” e-mail was a second story on the Catholic University scandal. They reported “More than 100 students, alumni and others gathered on campus to ‘demand dignity for survivors of sexual assault, and to reject victim-blaming in all its forms,’” and demanded Rainford’s dismissal.

So this is where The Washington Post lands. Free speech by college professors is precious... when you say you want Brett Kavanaugh and his white-male supporters dead, castrated, and fed to pigs. But even the mildest questioners of unproven accusations must be shamed and fired, because “Democracy dies in darkness,” or something.