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[Order a copy of Robert Spencer’s forthcoming book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, by clicking here.]
For the left, to be accused is to be convicted: if someone is charged with transgressing against one of the left’s dogmas, he or she must be destroyed. The charge doesn’t have to be proven. This is because the left’s objective is not, contrary to its arrogant claims, to bring about a society of justice and equity. The left’s objective is to terrify the populace into submission and, above all, to preserve and protect its own counterfactual narrative, which is the basis of its power. Those whose lives are destroyed in the process are just collateral damage. A case in point is the horrifying experience of a college student, Morgan Bettinger.
The Daily Caller recently reported that Bettinger, a student at the University of Virginia, was driving home from work on July 17, 2020, when traffic stopped: a group called Black Women Matter was blocking a street near the UVA campus, and a dump truck was parked in an intersection to keep cars from driving into the protest. Bettinger, stopped on the road, got out of her car and began talking to the driver of the dump truck “about how she was thankful he was there to prevent the cars from turning protesters into speed bumps.”
Some of the protesters heard her. But they misheard, or willfully misrepresented, what Bettinger was saying. Zyahna Bryant, whom the Caller identifies as “a UVA student activist,” claimed that Bettinger had “threatened protesters, saying that they would ‘make good f–king speed bumps.’” Bryant didn’t just make this claim before her comrades in Black Women Matter. She “tweeted a video of the incident to her thousands of followers and it quickly went viral.” There was just one problem with Bryant’s video: it didn’t establish what she claimed. At no point did it show Morgan Bettinger saying what Bryant claimed she said.
The facts, however, didn’t matter: “Almost immediately, Morgan became a target of vicious harassment online, as the incident came to the attention of university administrators and local media.” Bettinger “was called a ‘Nazi,’ a ‘racist,’ and ‘coddled little white girl’ who ‘promotes domestic terrorism.’” Leftists discovered her identity and publicized it. Bettinger was ostracized, even in online classes. Local leftist journalists moved in for the kill, repeating Zyahna Bryant’s version of events as if it was established fact. UVA’s student council president called for Bettinger’s expulsion, and one of her professors said she should be arrested.
Through it all, Morgan Bettinger was never given even one chance to offer her own version of what had happened. Nevertheless, “after witnesses failed to corroborate the incident, the university investigators rightly determined that there was no evidence Morgan said what Bryant accused her of. Even if she had, it was simply a hypothetical statement, not a threat, the university correctly determined.” That was good enough, but the case didn’t end there: UVA allowed a student panel to judge Bettinger’s case, and while it accepted Bettinger’s version of what had happened over Bryant’s, it “determined she was being insensitive about the issues BLM was supposedly fighting for.”
Thus convicted of the left’s cardinal sin of “racism,” Morgan Bettinger was “sentenced to 50 hours of community service, leftist re-education classes, and put on probationary expulsion. If anyone complained about her, she would be expelled for real. ”Bettinger managed to graduate from UVA, but the injustice that was done to her was never rectified. The Daily Caller has now told her story and others in its new documentary, “Demand for Hate,” about hate crime hoaxes in Old Joe Biden’s America.
But why did all this happen in the first place? In his landmark exploration of Soviet totalitarianism, The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn notes that the Soviet authorities would often arrest entirely innocent people. These were not mistakes that were acknowledged and rectified. Solzhenitsyn writes:
In the Dzhida camps in 1944, interrogator Mironenko said to the condemned Babich with pride in his faultless logic: “Interrogation and trial are merely judicial corroboration. They cannot alter your fate, which was previously decided. If it is necessary to shoot you, then you will be shot even if you are altogether innocent. If it is necessary to acquit you, then no matter how guilty you are you will be cleared and acquitted.”
“Just give us a person—and we’ll create the case!” That was what many of them said jokingly, and it was their slogan. What we think of as torture they think of as good work. The wife of the interrogator Nikolai Grabishchenko (the Volga Canal Project) said touchingly to her neighbors: “Kolya is a very good worker. One of them didn’t confess for a long time—and they gave him to Kolya. Kolya talked with him for one night and he confessed.”
The idea was to establish the state’s word as paramount. Reality didn’t matter. What the state determined, that was all that mattered. Orwell neatly captures this point of view in the section in 1984 where the imprisoned dissident Winston Smith is forced to acknowledge that two plus two equals five, because the state says so. The complete docility and submission of the people was the goal.
In Old Joe Biden’s America, little is changed. Now we have to affirm that men can not only become women, but also become championship female athletes. Now we have to affirm that flooding the country with millions of illegal migrants benefits everyone. Now we have to affirm that galloping inflation and the betrayal of our allies, and an ever more aggressive surveillance state, are responsible governance. It’s the same impulse writ large that nearly destroyed the life of Morgan Bettinger: what the left says is real is what’s real. Now this idea is on track to destroy the lives not just of one college student, but of everyone in this once-great land.
If street-trash ever block my vehicle, they’ll have two choices . . .
Get their useless asses outta the way of my truck, or stand still and be turned into speed-bumps.
Robert Spencer, always able to distill the issue into a succinct and entirely comprehensible explanation. The question is, who is reading and understanding? I pray for Truth, Justice, and The Rule of Law.
Time to really start cracking down on these leftists scum and started exposing them to the American People
Indeed. That will take an American Administration.
I only hope that Ms. Bettinger wasn’t permanently scarred by the experience. She ought to consider resort to the American tradition, the lawsuit. Give the university and this corpulent Zyahna person an emotional, and financial, experience of their own.
turnabout’s fair.
Miserable and feckless are the elements of these sick pathetic clowns.
Most of these fools will suffer mental illness the rest of their worthless lives.
Useful idiots are running America today from the president of the United States to the board rooms at major corporations and college campuses.
It’s time to push back hard and end these people once and for all.
Black women matter? Who ever says they don’t? More like entitled black Karens, or based on Zyahna Bryant’s photo, black sows matter.
No comparison between this behavior and a real woman of any race!
50 hours of community service?
That would be like driving back and forth over those speed bumps. ~
Diversity is stupid.
“Diversity” is meaningless — a word that, like Humpty told Alice, means “exactly what I want it to mean” — no more, no less. Didn’t Earn It. DEI.
Soooo tired of the “give us more, more, more” from entitled people.
Note the charge of which the student panel convicted her: Insensitivity.
This is like “microaggressions,” and I bet we’ll see more of it. It is entirely subjective so it is impossible to know what it is in advance and avoid it, and the accusation is presumptive proof of itself so no defense is possible.
The left’s jurisprudential inspiration is Andrei Vyshinsky.
A professor at a local college complained to mean that after she handed back the first exam in her course, a black student who had failed the exam came up to her after class and said “wow! You really don’t like black people do you?”
Here is what she said to defend herself against this claim of racism—>
The obvious response should have been “I resent your false accusation of racism. You clearly don’t like studying, do you?”
I like that – speed bumps – If faced with asswipes blocking my road I will drive slowly over the human speed bumps – bwaaa haaaa haaa
that’s a good second reason why I need to buy a Kenworth.
You may as well. They all demonstrated the I.Q.s of speedbumps.
I can only hope that there are enough young people who can break out of this mental prison, and recognize what modern universities have become: reeducation camps.
Candace Owens endured a similar scenario at her school just as she was beginning to be heard.
This is outrageous. Why didn’t I hear of this incident??
Because of our friends in the lamestream media. Or should I say the Communications and PR wing of the Dumbacrat party?
I always travel with self-defense. If that is the way you want to go out.