Latest / The Nation Podcasts / Massive GOP Spending Hasn’t Slowed the Coming Blue Wave; plus The Cornell Rape Case / Start Making Sense

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Massive GOP Spending Hasn’t Slowed the Coming Blue Wave; plus The Cornell Rape Case / Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner.
• 0:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Later in the show, the gang rape at that Cornell fraternity party, Ketha Pollett will argue, it could have been stopped if someone, some man, had bothered to intervene, but no one did.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: But first, nothing Trump is doing to win the midterms
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: First up today, this week's political update that we turn to Harold Meyerson, he's editor at large of the American prospect, Harold, welcome back.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: Always good to be here, John.
• 0:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Democrats' chances of winning both the House and the Senate get stronger every week.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm now a subscriber to Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: which predicts every day the chances of each party in each house of Congress.
• 1:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nate Silver now predicts Democrats chances of winning the house at 95% the highest ever.
• 1:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He predicts a 25-seat Democratic margin in the new Congress.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their chances of winning the Senate he puts at 77% he predicts 52 Democratic senators will be elected.
• 1:27
  [SPEAKER_03]: sounds great.
• 1:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's quite possible that the Democrats will actually get more than 25 new house seats and five new Senate seats, which is what Nate Silver's totals amount to, but I would gladly accept what he has.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: And 52 senators is actually quite important because since
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_03]: 51 Senators would mean that if Fettermen votes the other way, then we have a tie that JDVans could break.
• 2:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: So 52 is really sort of the working minimum requirement for the Democrats in the Senate.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, these large margins in the House and the Senate, we find, despite Republican spending more than a billion dollars on their campaigns, it seems Trump's only chance of avoiding this kind of a blue wave is to mess with the voting, but the fact here is that nothing he's tried so far has succeeded.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Here's my list of the things he's tried that failed.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jerry Mandarin was approved by the Supreme Court, but that's not going to give him a majority in the house.
• 2:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The scheme to enlist the post office and screwing with mail ballots was rejected by the Supreme Court.
• 2:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Senate wouldn't pass his save act, which would have restricted voting.
• 2:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: His demand that states hand over their voter rolls has been rejected by 26 courts and accepted by none.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: his midterm convention was a flop, his current campaigning in red states has been pretty pathetic.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then there's his promise to give every American a $5,000 check if voters keep Republicans in power.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I doubt people really believe that.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And through all of this, his approval ratings have gone slowly but steadily downhill.
• 3:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: He looks weaker every day.
• 3:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Republican candidates see that.
• 3:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: judges see that, voters see that.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Am I missing something here?
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think the short answer is no.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: He has been forwarded at every turn, and while there's no doubt that he's going to contest some election results,
• 3:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: The sheer scope of those results is outlined in Nate Silver's predictions, his probabilities, are such that it's going to be not merely implausible as they were in terms of the 2000 election.
• 3:55
  [SPEAKER_03]: but also kind of just a relative drop in the bucket, compared to what we're seeing shaping up as a wave election.
• 4:05
  [SPEAKER_03]: This is like King Canute discovering that he couldn't stop the tide coming in.
• 4:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's sort of reaching that level of desperation for Trump.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if that's in remotely apt analogy, he really can't stop a tide or a wave.
• 4:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And now we have Trump's attack on California voting.
• 4:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Department of Justice announced in the last couple of days, it is bringing charges against 28 people.
• 4:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It said we're non-citizens who had registered and voted.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were arrested in mostly Los Angeles, Los Angeles County.
• 4:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: 28 cases out of how many registered voters in California?
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think it's 28 million, so even if all of them are born out and so far when Trump has made these kinds of allegations, the vast majority of them have not been born out, they proved to be erroneous, but even if all of them are turned out to be correct,
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: that is literally one and a million, which doesn't suggest and not only any mass illegal voting going on, but barely any infinitesimal illegal voting going on.
• 5:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I would just add one more thing to that.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Trump's argument has been that the Democrats are bringing illegal aliens into the country to vote.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: All of these 28 people are legal permanent residents.
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: plus which he claims to have stopped people coming in illegally over the past two years.
• 5:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: So if we're to believe him on that, that diminishes his claim even on his own terms.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: 28 arrests follows a lawsuit against the state of California from the Justice Department to force the state not to count the votes.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: of 20,000 people whose names appear on a list, the feds say are likely non-citizens who are on the voter rolls, 20,000.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's less than in July when Trump said there were 190,000 non-citizens on state voter rolls.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, is it 190,000?
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it 20,000?
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or is it 28?
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: it's not much of a hat to begin with.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, he's balancing what the textbooks say, you have to do in terms of making a lie credible.
• 6:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: You should go for the big lie.
• 6:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: If that seems implausible, let's pick another figure.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_03]: That seems to be the operating method of behind-trump's claims.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know how much you've read about the list of 20,000 names.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: These were on the thumb drive and the lawsuit that has now been filed in defense of mostly in L.A. County, but some not in L.A. County argued that not only that the president has no authority to do this, but also that there's no explanation of the methodology that led them to pick these 20,000 names.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, I think that gives kind of an unfairly negative portrayal of the eonymini-mini-mini-mo methodology, which the Trump administration, I think, is crucially following.
• 7:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, I mean, it's the same bunch of critics of sailing him yet again.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm still thinking about the no kings vote early day on Saturday.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: They say there were 3,000 events in all 50 states and that makes no kings vote early.
• 7:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: The largest single early vote activation in American history.
• 7:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: The events I saw here in LA were both fun and had a kind of defiant field to them.
• 7:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is your assessment of the change in the
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: strategy of the no king's coalition from organizing mass protests against authoritarianism to now mass organizing for voting.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, it's a logical progression and following the title of the famous Bayard Rustin paper from protest politics.
• 8:17
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's literally that.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And if you know the leaders of indivisible
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_03]: kind of cooked all of this up.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: That was always their intention.
• 8:29
  [SPEAKER_03]: They understood that you had to literally go from protest to politics.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that's what they have done.
• 8:35
  [SPEAKER_03]: And you know, I think the signal achievement of no kings was the original protest because that was really kind of the first fight back.
• 8:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: major fight-back activity early on in Trump's second term.
• 8:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: As far as early voting goes, we've seen a lot of democratically voting independent of the no-kings rally, a record set for instance in Harris County, which is used in Texas, which certainly is a welcome development for James
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_03]: other Democrats on the Texas ballot.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, and we know every poll is shown Democrats to be more motivated to go out and vote than Republicans are.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: And each success of poll of Trump's approval rating, I think reinforces that gap and probably indicates that gap with anything is growing a little wider.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there was one shadow over No King's Road early, and it's a pretty dark one.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: On Saturday, at 1.30 in the afternoon, Eastern time, the peak of No King's Road early activity, the main Instagram account for the No King's Coalition was frozen and taken offline by Mitha.
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mitha is what used to be Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's, what should we call it?
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: media monster that includes Facebook, Instagram, what's app, messenger, and threads.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The no kings Instagram account is where we get photos and videos and updates of what's happening at the 3,000 different places.
• 10:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: After two hours of protest calls, meta-reactivated the account,
• 10:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: But did not restore access to the no kings administrators who were the authorized people who were on this account?
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the Instagram account of no kings was ultimately useless on this historic day that so many thousands of people worked on.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Mark Zuckerberg, let's remember that Mark Zuckerberg, after January, he's one of these people who switched sides after January 6th.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He banned Trump from social media posts that defended the effort to overthrow the elections.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: But then, when Trump won the 2024 election, met a made a million dollar donation to Trump's inauguration.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: paid Trump $25 million to settle his lawsuit over the post-January six shutdown and they also contributed $5 million to his ballroom and you may remember Mark Zuckerberg was on stage at the inauguration next to the other oligarchs.
• 11:13
  [SPEAKER_03]: What we know about Trump's base is that it's effectively been winnowed down to a bunch of billionaires who are really doing the only thing which could boost Republican voting in the midterm, which is spending a gazillion dollars on it.
• 11:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: In the case of Elon Musk, nearly 400 million that we know about, but these guys are all over that.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: They are the core constituency.
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_03]: They are also the constituency for whom Trump has delivered.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: All of them have gotten fat more fabulously wealthy since, you know, reoccupied the White House, which is not the case for about 90% of their fellow Americans.
• 11:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: We've seen their incomes not just stagnate but begin to fall of beneath the cost increases
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So now we have a kind of a new and more vivid appreciation of the power of private ownership of so much of social media.
• 12:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: If Zuckerberg can shut down the no-kings Instagram account, you know, what else could he do?
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And is that they really, right now there isn't much of an alternative for our side.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: We are dependent on
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: these kinds of privately owned media.
• 12:33
  [SPEAKER_03]: It's not a good situation, and of course, in terms of legacy media, you also have the Ellison's purchase of CBS and CNN news, not to mention all the cultural institutions.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: They've bought, you have Murdoch at Fox, and so we have to both cling to what we still
• 12:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: The other thing that that seems to be in the works now is that the liberals in Congress are going to, first of all, investigate Meta's shutdown of the No King's Instagram account.
• 13:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Senator Chris Murphy, Chris Van Hollen, Bernie Sanders, and the House Judiciary Committee Democrats led by Jamie Raskin and Primalajaya Paul have said all said that they will hold investigations.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the next step would be some kind of federal oversight, and maybe even legislation controlling what they can do and what they can't do, that may not happen right away, but it certainly should be on the Democrats agenda.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I don't doubt that it'll be on the Democrats agenda.
• 13:38
  [SPEAKER_03]: The ability to enact legislation that has so much support, it can override a Trump veto, is very limited, however, because you need two thirds in both houses.
• 13:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: really setting up the kind of safeguards that we need requires trifecta government control.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_03]: And that also means the Supreme Court that isn't at the back-and-call of not Trump himself, at least their Republican Party, which it has become the most effective branch of government defending Republican interests.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_03]: So they need that, but look, they can summon Zuckerberg,
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: They can hold them in contempt if he doesn't show up.
• 14:19
  [SPEAKER_03]: They can do a lot to expose the oligarchs who are not exactly at this juncture, a trusted group of folks by the American public.
• 14:28
  [SPEAKER_03]: And they're becoming, I think, less so with each passing day.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's even possible that these people who've been to power will see Trump's waning power and the Democrats growing power and become a little less enthusiastic about doing Trump's work for him.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, having flipped already several times, we know their constitutionally pliable and able to flip yet again.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So we shall see.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: In Trump himself did one, especially I'm on a thing last week, that Homeland Security raid on the home of Ilhan Omar, who, of course, represents Minneapolis in Congress.
• 15:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And of course, is a Muslim and an immigrant from Somalia.
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now Trump is attempting to strip her of her citizenship, so he can deport her.
• 15:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: This actually has never happened before an American history.
• 15:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Even if the height of the red scare in the Palmer race, when they were deporting radicals and activists, they never deported a socialist member of Congress.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Trump is really, there I say, making history with this effort.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, he is.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, Lord knows if his father could have been deported to not see Germany, but in any of it.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, this is sort of the logical consequence of coming together of the anti-immigrant, the anti-Muslim, the anti-Squad, you name it.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's sort of a logical consequence of that.
• 15:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: On the flip side of that, however, I think we're about to have an election where you're
• 16:00
  [SPEAKER_03]: uh... who you know supported trump well over forty percent in the twenty twenty four presidential election you're gonna see massive flight from that and that that sort of bolsters my contention which i've written you know that a steven miller has been really kind of a of a pro bono boom for the democrats
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_03]: You know, his rage at immigrants and at non-whites has, you know, really one of the major factors given that he's behind the deployment of ice and the border patrol and they're most aggressive policies that's been a major factor in the massive reduction in Trump's support.
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: So as a political strategist, he's actually been inadvertently great for the Democrats.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_03]: As a human being, he is still Trump's, you know, version of, of himler or barria, but be that as it may, he is not the kind of person you want forming government policy when Latinos represent upwards of 15% of the electorate.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this week we can see that Trump is going down and we can see that makes him more desperate.
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: But his desperation doesn't necessarily make him more dangerous.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Swinging and missing does not make Trump more powerful.
• 17:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: It convinces his congressional allies to take a step back.
• 17:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: It convinces more judges to rebuke him, forcefully.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: it convinces many of his former supporters to turn the page, and he's actually been retreating a lot in the last week, halting public financing for those ads that promoted himself, calling off the live streaming of the Ford Hood murderers execution.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: resuming Stalin connections to Ukraine, firing his press spokes of women.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: All this suggests his string of defeats is maybe eroding his resolve.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so as his power drains away, we are seeing the beginning of the political death spiral of the regime.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: My question is, where does this leave the Democrats?
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: We need to think not just about beating him, but about what comes next.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Democratic leadership has been talking about
• 18:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: restoring what we have lost you're storing obama care subsidies Medicaid funding you know vaccine research taxing the rich but restoring what we have lost i don't think it's going to be enough
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_03]: Well, and I don't think the democratic base thinks it's going to be enough.
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_03]: I think, you know, we need to be talking about a vastly more progressive form of taxation that addresses the major causes of unaffortability.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_03]: So universal childcare, certainly, universal pre-K, universal public college tuition
• 19:06
  [SPEAKER_03]: for alternative sources of energy beyond fossil fuels because we've seen the flow of fossil fuels are blocked.
• 19:16
  [SPEAKER_03]: That leaves Americans stranded up the creek without a paddle.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: So a host of pharmacies that go beyond what Trump directly revoked is absolutely necessary.
• 19:36
  [SPEAKER_03]: Because it's not just Trump revulsion, but the data centers of come to represent.
• 19:42
  [SPEAKER_03]: is also a revolt against the oligarchic control of the economy.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_03]: We didn't authorize the data centers.
• 19:51
  [SPEAKER_03]: We didn't vote to have our power bills double a treble.
• 19:56
  [SPEAKER_03]: All of this is a part and parcel of Trumpism, but even a part from Trump, it's clear that the super rich are exploiting Americans,
• 20:07
  [SPEAKER_03]: I won't say as never before because they certainly did it during the late 19th and early 20th century, but it kindred levels and that has to be addressed beyond and above restoring a specific cuts that Trump has made.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Harold Meyerson, reading bit Prospect.org, thank you, Harold.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_03]: Always good to be here, John.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now it's time to talk about the gang rape at that fraternity house at Cornell for that.
• 20:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: We turn to Katha Pollett, poet, essayist and award-winning columnist for the nation.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: We reached here today in Berlin.
• 20:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Katha, welcome back.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, hi, John.
• 20:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me on the show.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, a brief reminder of what happened with that Cornell gang rape at the Kai-5 Frahaos in October 2024, two years ago.
• 21:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: The woman we know is Jane Doe was a sophomore at Cornell.
• 21:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: She went to a party at the Kai-5 fraternity house.
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: She says,
• 21:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: She was pressured into snorting ketamine, smoking pot, and drinking alcohol until she passed out and could not consent to sex.
• 21:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: She reported that she had been raped to the Cornell University police a couple of weeks later.
• 21:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what did she say had happened at that fraternity party and why do we know so much about it now?
• 21:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: She went to the front.
• 21:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: She was already kind of drunk.
• 21:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: She and had, I have to say, John, to me an underplayed element in this story is the drinking and drugs aspect.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: She and had, I think it was 10, 9 or 10 units of alcohol before she arrived there.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I will tell you, and all the millions listening out there, I don't think I've ever done that.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that is a lot.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would have thrown up all over you, and the 10 million.
• 22:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think a person who drinks that much, it was three hours, that she is really in a state to consent to sex.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe this is a minority opinion, but that's where I think.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then she had a whole lot of ketamine with these guys, and I barely know what ketamine is, but it's illegal.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that's another aspect I have to say.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: That both of these things are illegal.
• 22:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what is this?
• 22:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: What do water colleges doing?
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: If you're under 21, it's illegal to drink and yet every These places are a wash with alcohol Catamine is a prescription drug, and you don't have a prescription for it.
• 22:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's illegal.
• 22:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: So to me There's a very unexplored aspect of campus culture here
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: So anyway, she goes to the front and to see her friend and her friend, who is not such a friend, who says, oh, well, let's drink some more and have some kettamine.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And why don't we have a three sum with my friend who you've never met?
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, she apparently, maybe she may have said, and things...
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: went on from there.
• 23:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, what I heard about the threesome was that she was intrigued by the idea that she would get to see these two guys having sex with each other and that was part of the interest in being in a threesome she thought.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I feel terribly sorry for her.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Clearly, this was not what she had expected to happen.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, they do whatever they did for a while.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then, one of these young men, Jonathan Newell, snap chats, the 57 plus members of his fraternity saying, free sex up here, come on and get it.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's is the most shocking part.
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: because nobody, these were people who with no risk to themselves, could have just called the campus police or gone up there and said, what the hell is going on here?
• 24:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Nobody did that.
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that just tells you so much about this so-called bro brotherhood culture of fraternities.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then things started seriously to go south, and she was dissociating, she was hiding under the blankets, and people just kept, you know, showing up and doing whatever they did.
• 24:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just find this so horrible.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, um, for a week or so, she didn't talk about this very much, and finally she was convinced that she had been assaulted and went to the campus police and told them, quote, I can say with 100% confidence, I was raped.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that statement did not make it into the
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: six-page summary that the police gave to the district attorney.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the district attorney said there was no evidence and didn't bring any charges against the men involved.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right, in journalism, we learned to ask the follow-up question.
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Don't wait, and this, this, this, this, this, this, this attorney could have said, wait a minute.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: So why, why did she go to the police?
• 25:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is she charging?
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: He could have, he could have interviewed people.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: He could have done all kinds of things.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, he said, oh, this is all fine.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is never mind.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think that, you know, around this story is the implication,
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: that there was, I don't want to call it, cover up, but there was a massaging of the whole situation to exempt the school.
• 25:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and let's talk about the school here for a minute.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So she also filed a complaint.
• 25:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: The same complaint, of course, went to the school's titled Nine Office, and they are very defensive.
• 25:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, they say they held a number of hearings, they took evidence, they interviewed people, and they did punish some people.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: What were the
• 26:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: oh yeah this is great so the two men who organized this they were expelled and one of them fled to Dubai where his parents live and work then some of the others were suspended and can come back and I think they have come back
• 26:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then some of the others had to get this right reflective essays.
• 26:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: I would give anything to see these essays.
• 26:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: I wonder if they put that through an AI program.
• 26:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: They even wrote them themselves.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, give me a break reflective essays.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I will not rape rapers bad.
• 26:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, really, what if I now realize rapists there?
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I thought I had some doubts before, but now I'm pretty sure a rape is bad.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's this sickening and apparently this reflective essay business is a common practice.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now we have her filing a civil complaint where the, because people are saying, oh, this will never fly in court and that's probably true.
• 27:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that may well be true.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I should say, not being a lawyer.
• 27:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It may well be true because, among other whatever other reasons there are, in New York State, as in many other states, apparently, if you drink voluntarily, if you're not being, you know, secretly given a Mickey fan or whatever, if you get intoxicated voluntarily, you cannot say, I didn't consent.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like that drink means I consent.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I wonder which sex thought of
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there have been the most shocking cases in New York state, which we all think is so blue and progressive, where I wrote about one in a few years ago, where a woman was so drunk, she could hardly stand up, and two policemen take her up to her room and have their way with her, and they said, oh, it's all consensual.
• 28:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: We were, we were counseling her.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We were a council here, I wonder what they've said, and this went to court and there was, you know, the cops were found that guilty because there is this rule.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that is why people are saying she could not have prevailed in a criminal case, but in a civil case the rules are very different.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So she sued seven men accusing them of sexual assault and lawyers for at least three of them have denied criminal wrongdoing.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: The others have not made public statements.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's also suing the school and she's suing her sorority.
• 28:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is pretty interesting.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a sophomore.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: She had a big sister in the sorority who was kind of her mentor and advisor on what sorority girls are supposed to do.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: The big sister said to her a few days after the events that there were rumors circulating that she was a quote slut.
• 29:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she told investigators at the school that Jane Doe, the victim, responded with a laugh and said, quote, unfortunately, the rumors are true, closed quote.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: So what do you make of the role of the sorority and of her state of mind at this point?
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: these sororities are all involved in the whole drinking culture, drinking and pleasing men culture that the fraternities are in.
• 29:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And she was taken by I think it was her house mother.
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or whatever they call that person to a bar after she had the ten drinks She was taken to or maybe it was by that at that point only eight or seven or eight and they she'd She said, oh, I'll drive you to the bar and so she drives her to the bar and There at the bar they give you some kind of a stamp on your hand that says don't serve this underage drunk in person later But they did so she's suing the bar also and
• 30:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I mean, I can see how it looks, it might look like, oh, you're, you're looking around for someone to blame for decisions that you made.
• 30:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, these are underage kids.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll stop there.
• 30:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: These are underage kids.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they're drunk.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I can promise you if this was men, the fact that they were drunk would be completely exculpatory.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it does work that way for women.
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And your big point is that the rationale for traditional gender roles is that men's responsibility is to protect women, that women need protection, and that they need men to protect them.
• 30:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: And you point out that's not really what happened at the Kifi fraternity.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I just want to read you a little bit from the Kifi.
• 30:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: statement of mission or whatever they call it.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, okay, is building better men all in caps through lifelong friendships, leadership opportunities, and character development.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I say, if gangregree a drunk girl high on ketamine, counts as building better men's new lifelong friendships, I guess a future is in good hands.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, this case is disgusting.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And not only that, I will say, too, that Cornell has a whole history that I, people have actually died being hazed and so drunk they fall into the gorge and all that also say with fraternities.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have the statistics from these are from USA today at Cornell from 2018 to 2024.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Title IX office received over 1,200 complaints of rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a six-year period at one school Cornell.
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: 1200 cases.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's 200 a year.
• 31:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's do a little math at the school years eight months.
• 31:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's 25 cases every month.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's almost one every day at Cornell.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now of the 1200 complaints over this six year period.
• 32:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Cornell filed charges in 162 cases.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: and found against the accused in 51 of the cases.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And almost all of these led to what the school calls minor sanctions.
• 32:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think the minor sanctions are?
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Uh, writing some essence.
• 32:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Reflective essays, reflective essays, the English department has, has a lot of work to do.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: In only 4% of the cases reported were the accusations upheld.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's pretty shocking.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: That sort of means, well, in 96% of the cases reported to us, we think the woman was lying or, you know, nothing happened, or this is beyond our
• 32:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's like nothing so it really is like you can rape somebody and you have a very very good chance of getting away with it
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So all this so far that we've been talking about it's been about Cornell.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then there's another part of the story, which the New York Times did a great job reporting and put on page one, which is the story of the online campaign to unmask Jane Doe.
• 33:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: It started with one guy writing on X, formerly Twitter, please help me discover the Cornell girl.
• 33:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: This guy turns out to be a young Neo Nazi who posts about a lot of interesting topics.
• 33:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the end, 11,000 accounts made almost 25,000 posts that purported to name her, that is frightening.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It is frightening.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And in fact, one of the worst things that happened there was that her parents were swatted.
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you know what that is?
• 33:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Explain swadding for those who don't know.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: swatting takes place when a person calls in a false report of something very serious going down to a police department and then the police department has to show up, you know, guns drawn and that's what happened and there have been cases actually where people have been seriously injured and terrible things have happened because of this nonsensical swatting and you just really wonder what is
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: where it's just people are so eager to use the internet to use the online resources to cause terrible, terrible destructive things to happen to other people.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: But this was, in this case, it was all about, yeah, let's find out how this Jane Doe is and make her life really miserable.
• 34:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the university in effort to make up for its previous
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sally Yates to investigate for the university and the governor is appointing Tisch James the heroic attorney general of New York to investigate whether there's any criminal issues that can be brought to criminal court.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is this a good thing?
• 35:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I think it is.
• 35:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we have to have something outside the internal bureaucracy of Cornell taking action here since they've been proven to be so ineffective and self-protective.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: at Oxford and he said to me, he wrote to me that the purpose of the Title IX office on campus is not to enforce Title IX as Cornell claims it's to protect the university from charges of negligence and since he says to me, most universities are negligent in some way in these cases.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're very afraid of being held legally liable.
• 36:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So then, if that's true, the aim of the Title IX director is to downplay or ignore the incidents.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: So as to shield the administration from legal action, and that will be their main goal.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then, quote, this is why he writes, when students came to me who'd been assaulted, I took them immediately to a local attorney who specialized in these matters and didn't bother with the University of procedures.
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I don't know if that's a solution, but something really has to change, and I think the thing that has to change is taking women seriously, that not just saying, oh, fraternities, well, yeah, that's the way they are, but really cracking down, but I'm a carceral feminist, so there it is.
• 36:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you mean you're a carceral feminist?
• 36:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I think that punishing men or people in general for the bad things they do is okay.
• 36:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's good.
• 36:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think writing a reflective essay or a meeting with the victim and saying how sorry you are and how all this.
• 37:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think that's all nonsense.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't think people, those people are sorry.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: We can see that in the way that after the event, the first guy she was with, he calls her, just wanted to see how you are because there are rumors going around.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I try to shut them down when I hear them, but that's not true.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: He started them.
• 37:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was the person who
• 37:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: placed the snapchat, come and get it, post.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: So he was in there from the very beginning, and now he's saying, oh, I'm trying to protect you.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, and then she, and this is so tragic because she is, like, so many women, protective of men, and what is it called, man-tending, where you figure out what the man needs and try to give it to him, and she says, she says, oh, and, you know, if you're feeling bad, you please call me and, you know,
• 38:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's really sad is that, yes, it took her a great big three weeks for the penny to drop and for her to realize what had happened.
• 38:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now people are saying, oh, she waited forever.
• 38:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I don't think three weeks is very long to put it all together and go to the police.
• 38:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Kathy Pollett can read her column on the Cornell gangrapes at thenation.com and you can
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Katha, thanks for talking with us today.
• 38:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks so much for having me, John.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's always wonderful to talk to you.
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Start making sense.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: A podcast from the Nation Magazine is recorded at our upstairs studio in Los Angeles.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer.
• 39:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ricky D'Ambrose is executive producer, Boskarsun Kara is president of the nation, Katrina Van Nouvelle is editor and publisher of the nation.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our theme music is Barcelona Afrobeat, License by Creative Commons.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can find out more about start making sense at thenation.com and subscribe to start making sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner, thanks for listening.