Why Won’t the Media Review the Campus Rape Book?

Campus Rape Frenzy, the new book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor. Jr. deals with the gross unfairness and lack of due process for males accused of sexual assault on campus. It has been reviewed by The Wall St. Journal, National Review, The Daily Caller, American Conservative, Real Clear Politics and Campus Reform. Notice any trend in that list? Yes, they are all conservative outlets.

So far we haven’t noticed any mainstream or liberal outlet reviewing the book, though it’s possible that we or Google have missed one or two. MTC didn’t expect The New York Times to review it since The Times rarely reviews conservative books. In this case, the book demonstrates that in one case after another The Times produced slovenly, misleading and inaccurate reporting on the subject as it did in the Duke lacrosse fake rape case. But all, or almost all, other outlets boycotted the book too? Under pressure from campus feminists and liberal orthodoxy, our press corps, like our universities are signing on to massive dishonesty.

Here is an anonymous online commenter making a similar point:

“I’m trying this on for size for why I avoided the book. The book is simply too depressing and discouraging. We have gotten to the point that, under powerful pressure from the Federal government and others, most of our universities, supposedly the bedrock of our intellectual life and important repositories of our knowledge of the past, have created systems that are massively unfair and inconsistent with our historic principles of justice.

The average person dares not question this massive apparatus without the high risk of personal or professional woe and possibly destruction. The underlying source of this is the power of the state, which has taken a well-intentioned statute and turned it into a weapon of political and cultural destruction. This has happened in plain sight. Our politics, our media, our educational leaders and so far our courts have proved to be timorous and so far ineffective counterweights to this power. I already know this. It’s discouraging to drag myself through it again.”

Author

  • John Leo

    John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.

10 thoughts on “Why Won’t the Media Review the Campus Rape Book?

  1. “MTC didn’t expect The New York Times to review it since The Times rarely reviews conservative books.”

    It’s not a conservative book.

  2. But why should it be reviewed?

    For a True Believer there is no possible purpose which is served by reviewing such a work. They already know that the “Due Process” nonsense exists only as a tool of the Patriarchy, an artifact of the Neo- Colonialist, Hegemonic, Misogynistic Power which assaults Womyn by the very fact of its deeply embedded, systemic, and unavoidably perverse oppression.

    For a True Believer, sex is rape.

    As Bruce Bawer notes in his comprehensive work, The Victim’s Revolution, quoting Andrea Nye’s statement in Words of Power: logic is a tool of male oppression. So why would any True Believer even bother to glance at a logical, scholarly work (by two male rape apologists) which through its defense of Due Process thereby defends Rape & the continuing oppression of Womyn??

    Why listen when they’re not telling me what I already know is true?

  3. The sad thing is that this really isn’t a “conservative” book. The authors are not conservatives. They’re writing in a vein that used to be mainstream liberal — an abuse of civil rights by overreaching government officials. Thirty years ago, a book like this would have been celebrated by civil libertarians as an expose of injustice. But now that “liberalism” has completely embraced the notion that we’re in a “rape culture” on college campuses, a book that argues against it has to be shunned.

    This illustrates the pathetic decline of liberalism into a crusade for power no matter how badly it tramples on truth and individual rights.

  4. I’d be happy to read the book and interview the authors, but no one contacted me about it. Perhaps that’s because conservative publishers target conservative media. After all, I wrote a book about Donald Trump and it hasn’t gotten any reviews in the mainstream media, and certainly not in the conservative media. How many liberal books has Minding the Campus reviewed? There is certainly a problem where people live in self-created media bubbles, but it’s a problem that crosses all ideologies.

    1. I’m glad to review it too-not that anyone cares. What media/academic institution do you represent that anyone should care?

  5. The commenter quoted has it mostly right, but not in one crucial respect. The weapon would be useless without willing and eager hands within the universities to wield it. Those hands are more responsible for fashioning the weapon than the hands of the bureaucrats.

    Unless and until the actions of the university bias response teams and other faculty and staff dedicated to the proposition that all men are created toxic are correctly understood in Nietzschean terms as will to power, works like Johnson’s and Taylor’s will be ineffective. These people are going to have to be driven from the universities; they will not be argued out of their entrenchments.

  6. I have an eight year old son who shares my dual Canadian / US citizenship. While we are a multiple Ivy league degree household, we will likely look north to Canadian schools for my son’s university education.

    While Canadian schools have some of the same social issues challenging US students, they don’t cost tens of thousands of dollars per year. McGill University, ranked higher than most US institutions, costs less than $1,800 US per year for tuition for Quebec residents. You also have far less emphasis on identity politics, and their related personal and dollar costs.

    Finally, Canadian schools are far more interested in academic merit-based admissions as the means to limit student populations. US schools often charge more money to set the bar on who can attend, with or without debt, unless the student is a star athlete which in the end does more for the sports program than the individual.

    The way we look at it, US schools have become exceedingly expensive day-care facilities and diluted the value and rigor of a university education. We won’t pay for it if we don’t have to.

    1. Have you ever watched Dr. Janice Fiamengo’s posts on YouTube? If you haven’t, you should. Also, Dr. Jordan Peterson’s posts…

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