The week that was in the Depp-Heard soap opera had one particularly interesting revelation, as a tech company specializing in detecting inauthentic on-line traffic called Cyabra reported that 11 percent of 2,300 Twitter accounts focused on the Depp-Heard issue were fake—and most of those fake accounts were pro-Heard. This isn’t a “minor” revelation either, since the vast majority of Twitter accounts on the case are pro-Depp. This means that a very significant percentage of pro-Heard content on Twitter is from fake accounts. Funny how only Fox News (which I generally don’t care for) among mainstream media outlets found the time to pick-up on this story. I put together this image from the “comments” section of a pro-Heard video a few months back that shows what “inauthentic” looks like:
There was more commentary about Amber Heard’s appeal brief. The general consensus is that while there are some “interesting” arguments in the brief, there is nothing really there to overturn the verdict. A YouTuber going by the handle “Lawyer You Know” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4U_DHvBhRg points out that Heard’s attorneys made a conscience choice between what they believed would help her in a trial over what would help her in an appeal. Instead of bringing in the therapist to drone on and repeat what was on those notes about what Heard had told her (otherwise they would be “hearsay”), subject to cross examination, they chose to allow Heard to testify to fantastical stories that no one save her diehard supporters in the mainstream media and other lunatics like Eve Barlow and Michele Dauber believed. Her testimony thus rendered those alleged therapist notes meaningless for the purposes of an appeal.
What made those stories worse (besides the lack physical and documented evidence), was that they were contradicted by the audio evidence; I find it interesting that more has not been made of Heard’s admission that she couldn’t “promise” that she wouldn’t be physical “again.” Heard’s testimony—unlike Depp’s—came off as completely self-serving and lacking of any admission of her own guilt. If she had just kept her stories “believable,” was honest about her own behavior, and had that therapist “corroborate” what she testified to, maybe Heard would have had a better chance—although I doubt it, since the therapist would still have to explain what people heard on those audio tapes.
Heard’s claim that she “believed” she was abused and thus was not guilty of “actual malice” is for many worthy of an eye-roll, given her personality disorders. We remember that excruciating audio when she apparently is off her medication (we hear Depp advising her to take her medicine), claiming that she feels as if Depp is “killing” her and throwing her against a wall in metaphorical terms; Heard clearly views anything that isn’t going her way in terms of the physical. She apparently literally feels “pain” in a way she imagines is “physical.” If she fully knew that the way she was “exaggerating” the alleged abuse was damaging Depp (and the more the “better”), then yeah, we can say “actual malice” was behind it.
The jurors in the Virginia trial were forced like the rest of us to consider what was real and what wasn’t given Heard’s propensity to tell the most absurd lies; she was never wrong or at fault for anything. Given the audio evidence, this was impossible to believe, and it was too obvious that Heard repeatedly lied to conceal her culpability. This propensity for lying was obviously lost on the UK trial judge; he gave considerable weight to Heard’s lie that she paid the $7 million to charity in determining her “credibility.” He was made a complete fool of like all the rest of Heard’s supporters.
Now to go off in a slightly different direction but including someone “close” to Heard. Stanford University is currently being sued by the parents of a Stanford soccer player named Katie Meyer, who recently committed suicide. It is not entirely clear what this case involves, but we know is that this started when a male football player was alleged to have kissed a teammate of Meyer, who was 17-years-old at the time, thus “underage”—but wouldn’t college students be assumed to be at least 18?—and apparently that individual was convinced to file charges. The charges were eventually dropped, but in the meantime we are told that Meyer, for whatever reasons, encountered the football player sometime later while bicycling and “spilled” coffee on him.
What happened next is that the Stanford administrators dealing in these matters, apparently at the behest of Michele Dauber, attempted to persuade Meyer to make some sort of statement or accusation herself on the case (they apparently had a difficult time persuading her to do this), perhaps to reopen the case or whatever; there seems to be a deliberate effort to keep things “unclear.” That led to Meyer being sent threatening messages from school administrators, including withholding her diploma.
But something else must have happened to cause her to commit suicide; did she have conversations with Dauber that caused additional mental distress? I am just “speculating” here, but the fact that Dauber for some reason chose—or was forced—to delete her Twitter account suggests that someone was afraid that the frequent hate content of her tweets contributed to an atmosphere around the school that made female students feel much more “unsafe” than in fact was the reality. There can be little doubt that for female students “on the edge” psychologically, Dauber was just the kind of paranoid fanatic who could push them over the edge.
This then brings us to Title IX, which this particular case is under the jurisdiction of. We are learning that a group of U.S. Senators wants to “reform” Title IX by expanding the definition of what constitutes sexual “violence” against female students as anything that a male student does or says that “upsets” or makes them feel “devalued.” Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, in one of the few things she did right, was to make the definition of what constitutes sexual “crimes” more explicit rather than subject to “interpretation,” and to provide the accused even a modicum of due process rights. Why was this necessary? Consider what this student gender activist stated in The Hill recently:
“Violence is violence,” Zoey Brewer, a senior at the University of Tennessee and youth organizer with Know Your IX, a survivor-led group empowering students to end sexual and dating violence in their schools, told The Hill. “It’s unacceptable regardless of how bad you think it is or how bad your school thinks it is.”
One problem with this statement is that there is no question that sexual assault and rape is violent and a crime. The other problem is that these people want to expand what constitutes as “violent”—you know, Amber Heard’s definition of “violence” that was mostly a fiction of her own feverish mind. Just what constitutes “bad”? I mean, we are talking about a school (I know about it, because UTK was where I got my degree of whatever) that was, and still is, a predominately white school. Minorities were tolerated as long as they kept their mouths shut, but apparently there are plenty of white female students eager to fill in the “victim void.” I sure remember back then seeing all those notices pasted on the walls of the student union about the “epidemic” of campus rape, wondering WTF are they talking about.
I was once persuaded to expand my horizons and listen to a speech by a visiting professor named Catherine MacKinnon; I knew something was wrong when the only other male present was a reporter for the local city newspaper. I felt like Robin Williams’ character sitting in that radical feminist meeting in The World According to Garp; I decided then and there that I wasn’t going to let people like this dump fecal matter on me as a male again and I just had to take it.
So here we are back to square one, treating women like they're psychologically and emotionally “weak,” when we know that all they have to do is breath a word and your life could be toast. This is not about sexual assault or rape, since these do not fall under the “reasonable person” statute; this is about anything that makes a female feel “uncomfortable,” “unsafe,” or more likely, feel “devalued”—which could be anything an unreasonable person could make sound “reasonable” to her personally; in most cases, the accusers’ “reason” is the only one that matters.
The prior Obama administration policy that those senators want to return to extending what qualifies as sexual harassment and reducing the rights of the accused (an obvious ploy for the white female vote) that was, according to a 2020 New York Times story, so “contentious” that schools felt undue pressure “to ramp up investigations of misconduct and warned that their failure to do so could bring serious consequences. Critics said schools felt pressured to side with accusers without extending sufficient rights to the accused. And dozens of students have won court cases against their colleges for violating their rights under the Obama-era rules.”
Stanford, we are
informed, left the Obama rules in place instead of abiding by the new guidance,
and thus we can now understand part of what went wrong in the Meyer’s case. Dauber and her group likely put pressure on the school to up its case load, and the school "complied" to her demands and put pressure on Meyer to "comply."
The DeVos regulations are anathema to radicals because they specifically define sexual harassment per the Supreme Court as “‘unwelcome conduct that is so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive,’ and they require colleges to hold live hearings during which accusers and accused can be cross-examined to challenge their credibility.” Before, schools were not permitted to cross-examine accusers or question their claims at all; it was the accused who had to “prove” they were innocent. Under the DeVos rules, schools were required to follow the innocent-until-proven-guilty rule, rather than the workplace rule where the accused could be simply fired on the basis of an unproven accusation.
The proposed changes by the senators are simply a return to Obama administration rules, in which according to the Times “defined sexual harassment broadly and held schools liable for episodes they knew about or ‘reasonably should’ have known about. They asked schools to adopt a ‘preponderance of evidence’ standard in adjudicating cases and discouraged cross-examination and mediation between accusers and accused.” What this means in simple terms is that what “she says” is all the “evidence” you need to find the accused “guilty.”
Of course that’s not the only problem with Title IX and the way it’s been abused. We are told that 57 percent of college students are female; if this was the other way around, male students in this majority, this would be regarded as a “crisis” and in need of immediate “correction.” Instead, no one is asking why male applicants are being discriminated against by largely female administrators making admissions decisions. Furthermore Title IX’s mission “statement” includes this, which apparently equates “female” and “sex” as meaning the same thing, which of course is one of the grand hypocrisies of our society:
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Now, this statement and Title IX generally has been most equated with the sports participation, and the problem with that is the assumption that as many females as males go to college with participation in a sport the reason why they are attending a certain school. Whether this is true or not is a matter of opinion; the fact is that many schools have been forced to either fabricate a sports program for female students, or add non-participating “athletes” to existing programs to meet the quota, or to reduce the number of male programs to comply with Title IX requirements.
Now, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke decision banned racial “quotas” in college admissions or representation in particular programs, and using any kind of “race-based” considerations for under-represented minorities is currently under threat by the current court. Title IX doesn’t mention the word “quota,” yet radical female activists have essentially made quotas an “essential” element of the law that is illegal for minorities, and thus is indicative of the power of (white) woman to gaslight society in maintaining their own quota system benefiting themselves.
Just like how white women who were the principle beneficiaries of affirmative action now no longer see the “need” for it once it is viewed as a “threat" to them—white women were the “face” in many recent anti-affirmative action lawsuits—it is now hypocritically asserted that despite the fact that “affirmative action” for female students remains part of the unspoken culture on college campuses, over-represented (white) female students still face more discrimination than under-represented minority students.
This is about “power.” In this society, if white men are “1A,” then white women are “1B,” and all other demographics fall in behind them. Title IX needs to be abolished because of its abuses in giving preferential treatment to female students in admissions, in denying male students due process rights and destroying their lives by the simple accusation by female students, and unfairly force-feeding quotas to benefit female students when they have been deemed illegal for under-represented minorities. There should never have a been a separate policy for female students, but one that simply was part of a universal policy that covered all students; by having one focused on women, Title IX succumbed to the radicalism of those with an agenda, and the oppressiveness that follows it.
With the hypocritical effort now being pushed in Congress to re-expand what constitutes “sexual crimes” and deny due process rights for the accused, I think it is about time that someone brings the abuses of Title IX before the Supreme Court, and because of the nature of those abuses this is (unfortunately) the just the court to do it.
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