Women must always be believed

Or so the Democrats tell us

Bellevue, WA, Oct 8 – Prosecutors have dropped the charges against a now-former police officer who served 49 days in jail [Beginning  July, 2018] because of what investigators now say were fake rape allegations.

John Kivlin was one of three members of the Bellevue Police Department who was accused of sexual misconduct by the same woman, KING reported.

Kivlin spent 49 days behind bars because, after accusing him of rape, the woman told police he violated a protection order by repeatedly texting her.

Kivlin also lost his job in the process.

Now investigators have said that never happened, and the King County Sheriff’s Office said the Issaquah woman has a history of seeking out men on Craig’s List and then falsely reporting those consensual encounters as rape, the Seattle Times reported.

"The result of [the woman's] fabrication was that law enforcement arrested Kivlin for crimes he did not commit, prosecutors filed charges against Kivlin for crimes he did not commit, and the Court held Kivlin in custody for order violations which he did not commit,” the prosecutor said, according to KING.

The woman also accused Bellevue Police Chief Steve Mylett and another detective in the same department of raping her, sources close to the investigation told KING.

She claimed to have met all three men online.

"I never once violated my marriage vows. I would not jeopardize my relationship with my wife nor my children. I would never offend my God,” Chief Mylett told KING when the accusations were first made back in August.

Chief Mylett got dragged into the accusations because a text exchange between the woman and Kivlin, the woman accused his "boss boss," even though she didn't appear to know his name.

Bothell police were handling the investigation and declined to file charges against the detective who had been accused.

However, Chief Mylett has been on paid administrative leave since the woman made her accusations, while the Bothell police investigated, the Seattle Times reported.

Bothell Police Captain Mike Johnson told the Seattle Times that although the investigation has not yet been completed, detectives have been unable to find any corroborating evidence for the allegations against Chief Mylett.

The woman first met Kivlin on Craig’s List, and the two carried on a consensual relationship from September of 2017 until April, when she accused her police officer boyfriend of having punched her in the face twice.

Both the woman and Kivlin were married to other people at the time of the affair, the Seattle Times reported.

In July, the woman claim that Kivlin had been trying to force her to recant her story, and so police arrested him on assault and witness tampering charges.

Prosecutors eventually dismissed those charges against Kivlin after a thorough forensic investigation of his phone proved his accuser had lied.

“The investigation revealed [the woman] had made up evidence that Kivlin had contacted her in August. A forensic analysis of [her] cellphone revealed she was the one who initiated contact with Kivlin on Craigslist by posing as ‘Cynthia.’ The woman’s claim that Kivlin contacted her in August was not true,” the prosecutor wrote, according to the Seattle Times. “As a result of the investigation, Kivlin was released from custody and the new charges against Kivlin were dismissed.”

Prosecutors said the woman who accused the police officer had “fabricated evidence and used a sophisticated ruse to deceive Kivlin, law enforcement, prosecutors, and the Court in order to have Kivlin taken into custody and charged with additional crimes.”

Similar results into the investigation of the allegations against Chief Mylett are expected to be announced in the near future.

During the course of the investigation, detectives learned the 44-year-old woman had also made false rape accusations on two prior occasions in 2009 and 2010.

But King County Sheriff’s Sergeant Ryan Abbott said that investigators had not recommended charging the woman, even for her false allegations, due to concerns about her mental health, the Seattle Times reported.

Kivlin resigned from the Bellevue Police Department during the investigation and his attorney said they are not satisfied with the outcome.

“Although some may say that justice was served in this process, my client sure doesn’t see it that way,” Jeffrey Cohen told the Seattle Times. “She has destroyed lives and reputations and now he’s got to try to put his life back together.”

SOURCE






In defence of deadnaming. Graham Linehan must be free to blaspheme against the trans ideology

It is the free-speech warrior’s lot that he always finds himself defending tossers. Neo-fascists. Cross-burning white supremacists. Finger-wagging Islamists. Graham Linehan.

Yes, to the mugs’ gallery of people that us principled believers in freedom of speech must defend, we are now obliged to add Mr Linehan: the one-time funny man and co-writer of Father Ted who in recent years, courtesy of the unwitting window into the soul that is Twitter, has revealed himself to be an intolerant, oafish abuser of anyone who dissents from his narrow and Brexitphobic (natch) worldview.

For Mr Linehan has now found himself on the receiving end of both police pressure and Twittermob fury simply for something he said; simply for his beliefs; simply because he dissents from the increasingly eccentric and authoritarian ideology of transgenderism.

Given that Mr Linehan himself doesn’t believe in freedom of speech – consider his condemnation of Count Dankula, the meme-maker and shit-poster who was outrageously arrested for filming his pug doing a Nazi salute – some are chuckling about the fact that he now finds himself the victim of the very PC censorship he has previously approved of.

Fine, have a laugh about that, get it out of your system. And then let’s get back to defending Linehan, because even people who don’t believe in freedom of speech must have their freedom of speech defended.

Linehan’s speechcrime was to be trans-sceptical – or ‘transphobic’, to use the word preferred by trans activists and their allies, which include the police, the military, the Church, the educational establishment, the academy, and virtually every single celebrity. Such an oppressed movement!

Linehan has been getting into online spats for months with trans activists. He agrees with those feminists who argue that making it easier for men to identify as women (even referring to them as men is a transphobic hate crime, I know) is not good for women.

He believes such casual, fad-like self-identification reduces womanhood to a flimsy, easily adopted thing, like a piece of clothing, and threatens to throw open previously women-only spaces – from changing rooms to all-women shortlists in party politics — to people who have penises and the XY chromosomes.

For making these points, he has been subjected to the usual bile and censure. He has been accused of hate speech. He has been branded a ‘phobe’ and a ‘TERF’ (a trans-exclusionary radical feminist), which are to 21st-century discourse what ‘heretic’ and ‘denier’ were to 15th-century discourse: means of branding people as sinners against orthodoxy, possessed of foul minds and warped souls and deserving of expulsion from the academy, politics and public life in general.

The moralistic mobbing of Linehan by the trans speech-police and its allies moved up a notch when he got into a Twitterspat with the trans activist Stephanie Hayden. He dared to refer to Stephanie as ‘he’ and he even ‘deadnamed’ her, which is when you use the name a trans person was given at birth rather than the opposite-gender name they gave themselves later in life. Using ‘deadnames’ is like saying ‘Voldemort’ in the Harry Potter universe: a serious no-no that risks conjuring up monsters (though Twitter haters and woke police officers rather than dark lords).

Extraordinarily, Linehan was given a verbal-harassment warning by the police for his use of male pronouns, his ‘deadnaming’, and his claim that Hayden is a misogynist. What’s more, Hayden is now taking civil-court action against Linehan, accusing him of harassment, defamation and misuse of private information.

The intervention of actual cops into differences over transgenderism captures how intensely censorious this movement has become. Not content with having ‘TERFs’ like Julie Bindel and Linda Bellos harassed out of public-speaking events, or with successfully invading or closing down 15 public meetings of trans-sceptics in recent months, or with carrying out at least six incidents of violence or intimidation against feminists who oppose changes to the Gender Recognition Act that would make it easier for men to claim to be women, now trans activists want the police to punish ‘transphobic’ (read: heretical) speech.

Out of all the identitarian groups, trans activism is without question the most intolerant and the one most obsessed with linguistic policing. It wants to exercise total control over how people speak, and fundamentally think, about gender. But of course this tiny, strange movement cannot achieve this on its own. The truly worrying dynamic is the capitulation of so many cultural, political and social institutions to its Orwellian demands.

So, just this week the Wellcome Collection in London, a key health and cultural institution, announced it was holding an event and exhibition about ‘womxn’. You what? It said it used that mad, unpronounceable word in order to be more ‘inclusive’, in order to make it clear that all sorts of women (whisper it: even people who aren’t really women) could get involved. The end result, of course, is that women are erased; the word ‘women’ is turned effectively into a swearword that must have an X in it so that no one sees it and feels offended. Womxn: Newspeak much?

Orwellian isn’t too strong a word for what is going on. Consider the trouble Linehan and others are getting into for ‘deadnaming’. If we have a situation where someone’s birth name cannot be uttered, and where the police might even come after you if you do utter it, then we are conspiring in the erasure of the past itself, of historical truth, of actual, provable, documented fact.

For the fact is that trans activists were born a particular sex. And they were given a particular name. And these facts were recorded, honestly and faithfully, by public-sector workers and officials – from midwives to doctors to birth registrars – in order that society might know who its citizens are.

To erase these old names, and to allow trans-people to change their sex on their actual birth certificates, which is now happening, is to engage in an explicit act of memory-holing, as it was called in 1984. It pushes down the memory hole true, recorded events. It replaces the truth – that a boy was born – with a lie: that a girl was born. It represents the complete subjugation of social norms and historical records to the whims of tiny numbers of gender-confused people and the powerful institutions that bizarrely nod along to their every censorious demand.

So we have to defend Linehan. And we have to defend ‘deadnaming’. For ‘deadnaming’ is just a Newspeak word designed to demonise the telling of historical truths. Not satisfied with seeking to control contemporary discussion and attitudes, now trans activists and their allies (all institutions, in essence) want to control the past itself. History. No way. The past happened, it was true, and we should not allow that to be erased and forgotten just to make some people feel better about themselves.

SOURCE








Huge Backlash After CNN Go ‘Full Blown Racist’ Calling Kanye West ‘Token Negro’

CNN is being accused of racism after commentators Bakari Sellers and Tara Setmayer bashed rapper Kanye West over his support for Trump on CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, going so far as to call him a “token negro.”

“Kanye West is what happens when negroes don’t read,” CNN commentator Bakari Sellers said, in reference to an old Chris Rock bit.

Breitbart reports:

CNN’s Tara Setmayer went even further, calling Kanye West a “an attention whore like the president.”

“He’s all of a sudden now the model spokesperson—he’s the token Negro of the Trump Administration?” she also said.

Don Lemon laughed and giggled throughout the segment as the two commentators degraded Kanye West.

Turning Point USA Communications Director Candace Owens accused the network of racism over this language in a tweet sent Wednesday:

“Last night on CNN, Kanye West was called a ‘token negro’ and a ‘dumb negro’. I want you guys to imagine if those words were EVER uttered on FoxNews. CNN has finally committed to going full blown RACIST. They want their slaves back,” Owens wrote.

This isn’t the first time the liberal network has been accused of racism over some suspect comments. Analyst Jeffrey Toobin blamed Antifa violence on black Americans in August, raising the ire of Candace Owens again, who said that the network was being “horribly racist.”

“Blaming black Americans for crimes that an ALL-WHITE gang commits—why? Because white Democrats are incapable of violence, and only black democrats are?” she tweeted.

SOURCE






Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture

Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness, and race isn’t either.

On social media, the country seems to divide into two neat camps: Call them the woke and the resentful. Team Resentment is manned—pun very much intended—by people who are predominantly old and almost exclusively white. Team Woke is young, likely to be female, and predominantly black, brown, or Asian (though white “allies” do their dutiful part). These teams are roughly equal in number, and they disagree most vehemently, as well as most routinely, about the catchall known as political correctness.

Reality is nothing like this. As scholars Stephen Hawkins, Daniel Yudkin, Miriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon argue in a report published Wednesday, “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape,” most Americans don’t fit into either of these camps. They also share more common ground than the daily fights on social media might suggest—including a general aversion to PC culture.

The study was written by More in Common, an organization founded in memory of Jo Cox, the British MP who was murdered in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. It is based on a nationally representative poll with 8,000 respondents, 30 one-hour interviews, and six focus groups conducted from December 2017 to September 2018.

If you look at what Americans have to say on issues such as immigration, the extent of white privilege, and the prevalence of sexual harassment, the authors argue, seven distinct clusters emerge: progressive activists, traditional liberals, passive liberals, the politically disengaged, moderates, traditional conservatives, and devoted conservatives.

According to the report, 25 percent of Americans are traditional or devoted conservatives, and their views are far outside the American mainstream. Some 8 percent of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical. By contrast, the two-thirds of Americans who don’t belong to either extreme constitute an “exhausted majority.” Their members “share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.”

Most members of the “exhausted majority,” and then some, dislike political correctness. Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.

Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either.

Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. As one 40-year-old American Indian in Oklahoma said in his focus group, according to the report:

It seems like everyday you wake up something has changed … Do you say Jew? Or Jewish? Is it a black guy? African-American? … You are on your toes because you never know what to say. So political correctness in that sense is scary.

The one part of the standard narrative that the data partially affirm is that African Americans are most likely to support political correctness. But the difference between them and other groups is much smaller than generally supposed: Three quarters of African Americans oppose political correctness. This means that they are only four percentage points less likely than whites, and only five percentage points less likely than the average, to believe that political correctness is a problem.

If age and race do not predict support for political correctness, what does? Income and education.

While 83 percent of respondents who make less than $50,000 dislike political correctness, just 70 percent of those who make more than $100,000 are skeptical about it. And while 87 percent who have never attended college think that political correctness has grown to be a problem, only 66 percent of those with a postgraduate degree share that sentiment.

Political tribe—as defined by the authors—is an even better predictor of views on political correctness. Among devoted conservatives, 97 percent believe that political correctness is a problem. Among traditional liberals, 61 percent do. Progressive activists are the only group that strongly backs political correctness: Only 30 percent see it as a problem.

So what does this group look like? Compared with the rest of the (nationally representative) polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

One obvious question is what people mean by “political correctness.” In the extended interviews and focus groups, participants made clear that they were concerned about their day-to-day ability to express themselves: They worry that a lack of familiarity with a topic, or an unthinking word choice, could lead to serious social sanctions for them. But since the survey question did not define political correctness for respondents, we cannot be sure what, exactly, the 80 percent of Americans who regard it as a problem have in mind.

There is, however, plenty of additional support for the idea that the social views of most Americans are not nearly as neatly divided by age or race as is commonly believed. According to the Pew Research Center, for example, only 26 percent of black Americans consider themselves liberal. And in the More in Common study, nearly half of Latinos argued that “many people nowadays are too sensitive to how Muslims are treated,” while two in five African Americans agreed that “immigration nowadays is bad for America.”

In the days before “Hidden Tribes” was published, I ran a little experiment on Twitter, asking my followers to guess what percentage of Americans believe that political correctness is a problem in this country. The results were striking: Nearly all of my followers underestimated the extent to which most Americans reject political correctness. Only 6 percent gave the right answer. (When I asked them how people of color regard political correctness, their guesses were, unsurprisingly, even more wildly off.)

Obviously, my followers on Twitter are not a representative sample of America. But as their largely supportive feelings about political correctness indicate, they are probably a decent approximation for a particular intellectual milieu to which I also belong: politically engaged, highly educated, left-leaning Americans—the kinds of people, in other words, who are in charge of universities, edit the nation’s most important newspapers and magazines, and advise Democratic political candidates on their campaigns.

So the fact that we are so widely off the mark in our perception of how most people feel about political correctness should probably also make us rethink some of our other basic assumptions about the country.

It is obvious that certain elements on the right mock instances in which political correctness goes awry in order to win the license to spew outright racial hatred. And it is understandable that, in the eyes of some progressives, this makes anybody who dares to criticize political correctness a witting tool of—or a useful idiot for—the right. But that’s not fair to the Americans who feel deeply alienated by woke culture. Indeed, while 80 percent of Americans believe that political correctness has become a problem in the country, even more, 82 percent, believe that hate speech is also a problem.

It turns out that while progressive activists tend to think that only hate speech is a problem, and devoted conservatives tend to think that only political correctness is a problem, a clear majority of all Americans holds a more nuanced point of view: They abhor racism. But they don’t think that the way we now practice political correctness represents a promising way to overcome racial injustice.

The study should also make progressives more self-critical about the way in which speech norms serve as a marker of social distinction. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the affluent and highly educated people who call others out if they use “problematic” terms or perpetrate an act of “cultural appropriation.” But what the vast majority of Americans seem to see—at least according to the research conducted for “Hidden Tribes”—is not so much genuine concern for social justice as the preening display of cultural superiority.

For the millions upon millions of Americans of all ages and all races who do not follow politics with rapt attention, and who are much more worried about paying their rent than about debating the prom dress worn by a teenager in Utah, contemporary callout culture merely looks like an excuse to mock the values or ignorance of others. As one 57- year-old woman in Mississippi fretted:

The way you have to term everything just right. And if you don’t term it right you discriminate them. It’s like everybody is going to be in the know of what people call themselves now and some of us just don’t know. But if you don’t know then there is something seriously wrong with you.

The gap between the progressive perception and the reality of public views on this issue could do damage to the institutions that the woke elite collectively run. A publication whose editors think they represent the views of a majority of Americans when they actually speak to a small minority of the country may eventually see its influence wane and its readership decline. And a political candidate who believes she is speaking for half of the population when she is actually voicing the opinions of one-fifth is likely to lose the next election.

In a democracy, it is difficult to win fellow citizens over to your own side, or to build public support to remedy injustices that remain all too real, when you fundamentally misunderstand how they see the world.

SOURCE

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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