The existential threat of liberal narratives

Oddly enough, conservatives are celebrating with high fives and wild excitement. Their happiness at the retraction of this story doesn’t appear to be based upon the singular idea that an injustice was done to particular individuals, or that a fine public university’s reputation (ahem) was wrongly besmirched. (Although they do pay lip service to that.) In reality, conservative jubilation over the Rolling Stone debacle is about something altogether more discomfiting: They evidently have staked out the position that rape doesn’t happen very often and that women routinely lie about it. They are saying that the idea of rape being a problem on campus is a false “liberal narrative.”

Here’s Brit Hume of Fox News, spitting fire on Monday:

Rolling Stone magazine’s overdue apology and retraction for its bogus story about that UVA fraternity rape brings to three the number of nationally exposed whoppers that have made their way into the national bloodstream. First was the claim that a white cop in Ferguson Missouri shot dead a young black man as he stood before him with his hands up. Then Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid refused even to try to defend his outright lie that Mitt Romney had paid no income taxes. And now the Columbia Journalism Review’s indictment of Rolling Stone’s recklessness on the UVA story. Three stories on widely divergent topics with one common thread: they all fit nicely into the favored political narratives of the American left. The claim of an epidemic of sexual assaults on college campuses. The idea of Mitt Romney and other businessmen as “fat cats” who unjustly enrich themselves at the expense of others. And the notion of American police forces as hotbeds of racist violence.

The three stories have collapsed but the larger claims they fed live on. Today at the White House, for example, a question to spokesman Josh Earnest about the UVA case. Was it about those falsely accused? Or the damage to the university or the fraternity? Of course not. It was about whether the exposure of the false story might quote, discourage other victims of sexual assault from coming forward.

The Rolling Stone music, you might say, has stopped. But the beat goes on…

Hume essentially says that there is no problem of rape on campus, no problem with wealthy businessmen using special loopholes to avoid paying taxes and no problem with young black males being unfairly targeted by police forces around the country. These are all just false “notions” that were given currency by lies and hoaxes perpetrated for the purpose of spreading a false narrative — which now exist independently of the false stories that “fed” them.