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Until Proven Innocent: Cultural Marxism at Duke
How did a drug-addled stripper succeed in
smearing the reputations of three Duke lacrosse
players, dividing a community along racial lines,
and making a mockery of the American legal system?
That’s the question that Stuart Taylor and KC
Johnson pose in their recent bell-ringer book,
Until Proven Innocent.
Unless your news source is the New York Times,
you know by now that Crystal Mangum accused three
young lacrosse players of brutally raping and
sodomizing her in the early morning of March 14,
2006. (My August 30 editorial was one of the first
to publicly disclose the accuser’s name:
www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2006/0830roberts.html
. I surmise the Old Grey Lady editors didn’t
take note.)
Now fast forward to April 11, 2007 –
that’s the day North Carolina attorney general
Roy Cooper stood before a hushed crowd and
declared, “We believe that these case were the
result of a tragic rush to accuse and a failure to
verify serious allegations … we believe these
three individuals are innocent of these
charges.”
Call it the perfect scandal. The Duke lacrosse
case emerged from the rarified nexus of a
mentally-imbalanced lady of the night, a
racially-divided community, a cabal of Duke
University professors, a politically-ambitious
prosecutor, and a media enterprise that cared more
about hyping a morality tale than getting the facts
right.
For the first time, Until Proven Innocent weaves
the delicate strands of the story, rendering the
outrageous at least comprehensible.
From the very beginning, the Durham police knew
Crystal Mangum was a crock. At 1:22am they were
summoned to pick up a semi-conscious female at a
local grocery store. Not a word was mentioned about
rape.
Fearing she might harm herself, the officers
decided to have her committed to a local detox
facility. But Mangum knew she could side-step the
detention center if she played the rape card.
Problem was, she couldn’t make up her mind
whether there had been three assailants, five, or
twenty.
But there was one person stood by her to the
bitter end – Tara Levicy, the hospital nurse
who later said she never doubted a woman who
screams “rape.” Over the ensuring months,
Levicy would repeatedly amend, back-fill, and
embellish upon the details of her hospital
encounter.
Now enter district attorney Nifong who once
proclaimed, “My name is Michael Nifong, and
I’m the chief asshole of the Durham County
district attorney’s office.” He knew the
case was a flaky as grandma’s pie crust, but
after all, probable cause means different things to
different people. Plus, Crystal Mangum would be a
godsend for his stalled political campaign.
Nifong, 56, was already mapping out his
retirement plans. If he could win the May 2
primary, those four extra years in office would be
worth an extra $15,000 to his annual retirement
pension. Playing the chivalrous defender of a
single mom who claimed to be brutalized by three
well-heeled Dukies would translate into a boatload
of Black votes.
Within days of the alleged attack, the campus
potbangers were brandishing signs that read,
“You Can’t Rape and Run” and
“Castrate.” All that was missing was the
scalpel and hang-noose.
The story also fit perfectly into the
neo-Marxist morality tale of race, class, and
gender oppression. So the Duke Gang of 88 issued
its guilty-until-proven-innocent manifesto,
“What Does a Social Disaster Sound Like?”
Equally reprehensible was the conduct of the
media, which modeled itself on the yellow
journalism of a by-gone era. On March 25 the local
News and Observer ran a steamy front-page article
titled “Dancer Gives Details of Ordeal”
– somehow omitting the word
“alleged.” Within days the New York
Times, CNN’s Nancy Grace, and the rest of the
media posse were in hot pursuit of the “scummy
white males” who refused to own up to their
heinous crime.
The American legal system is founded on the
principles of due process and the presumption of
innocence. Mob rule is the antithesis to what our
country stands for. So exactly what went wrong?
The roots of the Duke fiasco can be traced back
to the Frankfurt School, founded nearly a century
ago and modeled on the Marx-Engels Institute in
Moscow. “The traditional idea of revolution
and the traditional strategy of revolution have
ended,” wrote philosopher Herbert Marcuse.
“[W]hat we must undertake is a type of
diffuse and dispersed disintegration of the
system.” [www.newtotalitarians.com/FrankfurtSchool.html
]
And exactly what did he mean by a “diffuse
and dispersed disintegration of the system”?
Marcuse was outlining a breath-taking plan to
weaken constitutional protections, bias the media,
politicize the academy, portray men as the unruly
oppressors of women, and eventually turn American
society against itself.
And that’s what happened at Duke
University.
Carey
Roberts probes and lampoons political correctness.
His work has been published frequently in the
Washington Times, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com,
ifeminists.net, Intellectual Conservative, and
elsewhere. He is a staff reporter for the New Media
Network. You can contact him at E-Mail
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