Victor Davis Hanson: The Cornell 7 Case is What You Get When You Play With Feminism

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc:  Let’s look at the Cornell 7 first. I know that this is a continuing saga, but recently we had a journalist claim basically that it was [Donald] Trump who had caused it. And I want to just read her quote.  

Victor Davis Hanson: New York Times.  

Sami Winc: Yeah, New York Times.  

Victor Davis Hanson: What was her name? Cottle?  

Sami Winc: It was Michelle Cottle. And here’s what she says, “We can go to the president for this one,” meaning the Cornell 7 rape case. “I mean, we are in a moment in this culture where the glorification of being thuggish and swaggering and mistreating women is kind of making you a cool kid.”  

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, Michelle, I guess you suffer from amnesia. Do I need to go back to FDR’s liaisons in the White House? 

How about JFK deflowering a virgin in the presidential bed? Or we can go to Bill Clinton, who had every imaginable type of sex act, and “I didn’t have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and then lied about it under oath and then had his whole administration plagued with, Gennifer Flowers or Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky, and they all had one thing in common, Michelle. 

They were all typical examples of an apex man using his power, and his constructed privilege to take advantage sexually of someone who was subordinate to him. And I don’t remember you ever said anything if you weren’t around then.  

And then we had Joe Biden, and Joe was going to run for president in 2020, and they had a problem because they said, well, we got a problem. 

He’s handsy. He tries to kiss women too long. And some of them are… that famous picture of the judge’s daughter where he kind of grabbed her, and remember on the tarmac in Finland, he tried to kiss that little girl?  

And then there was Tara Reade. She was much more convincing than Stormy Daniels even. 

Her mother called up Larry King and outlined it when it happened, what happened to her daughter. It was pretty clear Joe Biden did it. So then they just had all these women come forward and say, they rounded them all up, and they say, “Can you go and give a little watered-down thing?” 

“Well, Sen. Biden, Vice President Biden was a little bit forward with me.” And then he came and said, “I guess I’m from an old generation where this was accepted, and it’s wrong, and I won’t do it again.” But of course, this whole administration, they had to keep him away from women.  

Whatever you say about Donald Trump’s past, there’s no evidence that while he was in the White House over a six-year period that he ever did anything like Bill Clinton, or JFK, or Joe Biden. 

So what she says is just partisan hackery, typical of The New York Times. And as I said last time, everybody here is confused as I am because there’s two different poles, and they mingle. There’s the unethical versus the illegal, and they can be both, or they can be separate.  

The first person who asked her to come to the party called her afterwards and taped it without her knowledge. 

And now he’s releasing it to exonerate himself. But the questioning is condemnatory. He says things like, “Well, remember when I asked you, ‘Are you drunk? And you said no.’” But she’d already said she’d had 10 drinks. So then he said, “And then when I asked you, ‘Were you okay if I brought a friend in?” 

So he’s trying to suggest, I’m a Cornell student, and it’s perfectly okay to have a drunk woman up there. But if she says, I’m not drunk, and she came up to my room, then she’s fair game for a threesome. And then he says, “And I felt that I was a little put upon, that she made advances toward me.” 

So, without being too graphic for our audience, the male and female roles in sexual congress are a little bit different. So if a male can perform the act, it’s a little bit hard to say that he was forced into it. I don’t think the drunk woman took a whip and said, “Would you please be ready for sexual intercourse and perform on me right now?” 

I mean, that’s absurd.  

So what I’m getting at is the guy who texted on Snapchat that everybody gets free blank and should come over here, and then the three people who had relations with her and the other people who were spoon-feeding her in very grotesque and pre-civilizational manner, dangerous drugs, they were unethical. 

I don’t know the law, as I said earlier enough. The #MeToo people now have gone wild. and they’re saying it was rape, but it’s gonna be very hard to prove to a jury if she testified either in writing or to investigators, or she wrote letters suggesting that she was not raped.  

But I would say that if you’re a 20-year-old girl, and this is a premier frat, and you all wanna go over there and be popular with the guys, and you’re drunk, and all of this happens to you, you’re not really going to accuse them of all this thing until you sink in and everybody starts saying, “You idiot, you blank blank,” as her peers did, and then she’s going to process it and things. 

Within two or three weeks, she was calling them and saying that you did this and this.  

So legally, I don’t know if they’ll be able to get any of them, and I don’t know if they should get any of them. But I do know that, morally and ethically, they’re all bankrupt, all seven of them, because they took advantage of a girl that was intoxicated that they said technically she said yes, technically she went up to my room, technically she said I could have a threesome, technically, technically, technically, technically is not morally, and you’re supposedly the best and the  brightest at Cornell University. 

You should have had a little bit of self-discipline not to. Even if you believe that she was flirtatious and aggressive, that doesn’t mean you can’t say no, because you know what’s going to happen.  

If you have an IQ of two, you know what’s going to happen. She’s going to wake up about 6:00 the next morning, and she’s going to, first of all, think to herself, “Have I been infected with multiple partners with unprotected sex? Was I attacked? What are these bruises? Oh my gosh, what did I do? I wouldn’t have done that right now.” 

So couldn’t they anticipate that response? And now you’ve got everybody in it, and the whole case is being torn apart because they’re going after Cornell because Cornell thought they could wash their hands of it. 

And they did. And they said, well, let the grand jury and the DA, if it’s a criminal matter, we’ll follow it. And then on their own, they made some boys write some mea culpa, and they expelled two, and they did other things.  

And then the DA said, I can’t take this case before a jury because I’ll find one person in the jury who will say, “Well, you know.” He’ll think back, and he’ll say that he had an experience with some woman, and she said yes, and then he had relations, and then the next day she thought better of it, and he’s not going to convict these kids. 

So I’m not going to do it. And then they blame the president, and then the president writes one of those Mickey Mouse. It’s just like a Hollywood script.  

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: And now we’ve got—Camille Paglia is very sensible. I like her a lot. She just said that women have to be careful. She wasn’t ridiculing the young 20-year-old. 

She just basically said that you are a human animal first. All of us are. And we have rules of civilization to protect the weaker sex physically, and that men have a different idea and perception of sexual conquest than women do. So when you go into those hostile environments, you can’t claim to be both a victim and naive because you should have known that. 

But I don’t think she was saying that what the men did was ethical. That was my point. I got some emails and said, “Victor, of all people, I thought you would condemn her for being a hypocrite.” I didn’t condemn her. I said that she was drunk, and she made a lot of stupid decisions, but she didn’t deserve to have that happen to her. 

And those boys should have been ashamed of themselves, and they should be punished. I don’t know if that means legally punished.  

Sami Winc: Yeah.  

Victor Davis Hanson: Legally punished.  

Sami Winc: Yeah. We’ll let the jury decide that.  

Victor Davis Hanson: As a general rule, any single woman should not go to a frat party after 10 o’clock in the evening. That’s what I would say. 

And then you say, “Well, why can’t you? It’s the same thing like I won’t walk in downtown Fresno after nine o’clock on an evening.” I just wouldn’t do it. Because I’m not dumb. 

Sami Winc: Yeah. You know, when the New York Times columnist Cottle says, “This culture where the glorification of being thuggish and swaggering and mistreating women,” and I thought, “Wow, is she talking about rap music culture or something?” 

I mean, it seems to me that that element in our culture is there, but it’s mostly there because of rap music.  

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, she doesn’t wanna talk about it, because who says, who developed the word or created H-O, ho? And if you read, listen to it, every time I go to the gas station, it seems like somebody’s blaring rap music, and it’s all the same. 

It’s beat up the ho, punch the B-I-T-C-H in the face. And then it’s really sick, graphic types of descriptions of rough sex. But the common theme is they hate women. And yet, because that is a black, and this is a black culture that used to give us The Four Tops, The Temptations … 

Sami Winc: Chicago. 

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, I mean, they gave us some of the best music, soul music. And so, she’s a person of the Left. If she believes that, then she should criticize rap music.  

But there’s an element there, too. I don’t know what they’re going to do when it gets out that the two of the seven who did not have sex, but may have egged her on, were white, and three of the people who did were non-white, whether Asian, Mexican, or black. 

And the person reportedly, and I can’t confirm this, so somebody will say, “Well, Victor, you shouldn’t say …” I’m saying I can’t confirm it, but there has been on social media a lot of reports that the person who broadcast that she was ready to have sex at a whim was black.  

And so, what is Letitia James gonna do, who’s a race hustler, when she come … 

She’s dispatched there to send them all to prison because that’s what the popular feminist movement is.  

But once she finds out they’re people of color, and once she finds out the victim is white, it’s gonna add a wrinkle to this whole thing. 

So my suggestion is that she’s gonna go Sunny Hostin, the woman on “The View,” and everybody was shocked, and everybody said, “Look at Sunny Hostin. Why is she doing this?”

Well, she’s doing this because the girl who was taken advantage of was white, and the people who took advantage of her, in some cases, not all, there were two white kids there, maybe three, were people of color, Latino, Asian, and black. And so being a racialist, she’ll always side with the non-white. 

The whole thing is a mess. It really is.  

Sami Winc: Yeah, it sure is.  

Victor Davis Hanson: And the other thing about it, when she says this culture of male thuggery, does she know anything called an internet influencer?  

Because you can’t go on social or digital media without some little ad where somebody comes, and she’s like a college girl or attractive girl, or you read in the paper this social influencer died, you have no idea, but then you read about her or you see her, and they’re in skimpy little things or half naked. 

What does she think the whole Kardashian family made their money on? What does she think that Madonna does? What did she think Miley Cyrus made her career on? It was graphic, disgusting, provocative sex acts to show the world that women could define their own sexuality without marriage, without children, without commitment, without fidelity, and that we are gonna be as promiscuous and as raunchy as men. 

And no man made them do that. That was a branch of the feminist movement. 

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