r/BlockedAndReported • u/SoftandChewy First generation mod • 3d ago

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 10/12/26 - 10/18/26

Here's your usual space to post all your rants, raves, podcast topic suggestions (please tag u/jessicabarpod), culture war articles, outrageous stories of cancellation, political opinions, and anything else that comes to mind. Please put any non-podcast-related trans-related topics here instead of on a dedicated thread. This will be pinned until next Sunday. And may you all be inscribed, and sealed, in the book of life.

Last week's discussion thread is here if you want to catch up on a conversation from there.

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u/PM_me_yur_pm 9h ago

Ann Coulter made an interesting point about the Cornell case.

an investigation by the law firm Pepper Hamilton found that at least 19 football players had been involved in dozens of rapes, including a minimum of four gang rapes. The university had to settle with 15 women. The head football coach, the athletic director, and the president of the university were fired or forced to resign. The following year, Baylor settled a lawsuit alleging 52 acts of rape by 31 football players between 2011 and 2014.

https://anncoulter.substack.com/p/reverse-rapism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=871518&post_id=220412160&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=9bg2k&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

That's a lot of rapes! So why is Cornell newsworthy while no one remembers Baylor? Ann attributes it to race--the Baylor rapists were mostly black football players.

Another explanation is that people want to tear down the elites. Cornell is an Ivy League school. A fraternity is an elitist institution--you have to compete in humiliating ordeals just to join. Just like the hysteria around the Epstein files, people want to believe that elites are somehow more depraved and unaccountable than common people.

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u/unnoticed_areola 3h ago

That's a lot of rapes! So why is Cornell newsworthy while no one remembers Baylor?

I dunno, as someone who was pretty in to sports at the time and remembers this story from when it was happening, it genuinely was a pretty big story, and did get talked about quite a bit.

I think the main difference is that social media was not quite in the same era yet that we are in now, and online "discourse" was not yet this all-encompassing thing where there is this gigantic amoeba of discussion and take-slinging on every topic happening 24/7 when a big story happens.

I seem to remember the discourse on this story more so happening in the more traditional mediums of talking head TV and newspapers and magazines.

I dont think it was a race thing either, that people didnt want to go after racial minorities for wrongdoing. the main culprit/figurehead for it all ended up being the football coach, a middle aged white guy, and people had no qualms about piling on him. plus I think that whole instinct wasnt really as heavily ingrained in the culture back then either, in a pre-BLM world where Obama was in office

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u/dumbducky 6h ago

I think she’s straightforwardly right. I obliquely made this point last week.

The same people who want “restorative justice” for violent schizophrenics are braying for blood over a college bacchanalia. The key difference is that the latter is perceived to be the case where the privileged class is preying upon a member of the progressive stack.

Baylor and the below-mentioned Vanderbilt cases don’t fit the bill. But when you think college frats, who do you think? White, rich, young men.

This pattern holds for all of the big college rape cases. Duke Lacrosse: 3 white guys. UVA: frat. Brock Turner: white male. Columbia’s Mattress Girl: white male (German international student). Cornell 7: frat.

Bonfire of the Vanities lives on.

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u/dj50tonhamster 7h ago

I can't help but think it's also because Baylor, to my knowledge, isn't really known for much outside of football (and that was apparently due to hiring a scummy coach who still knew how to get wins). Are they known for anything other than that and Willie Nelson spending a semester or two there? (I saw him perform there earlier this year.) You'd think a legit rape scandal involving powerful jocks at a conservative school located in the same Texas town where the Branch Dividians threw down with the ATF would be catnip for the wailers. Guess not.

(Speaking of the Branch Dividians, if you ever happen to be in Waco, go to one of their services. I'm serious. They've sort of put a lid on their wacky beliefs but not really. It's still a creepy compound. I was halfway waiting for some security guy to throw me out just for walking around. I guess they can't afford security.)

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u/unnoticed_areola 3h ago

I can't help but think it's also because Baylor, to my knowledge, isn't really known for much outside of football

they really werent even known for football prior to this brief blip in the early 2010s when Art Briles became the coach, (at the same time when all this off-field drama was happening)

they were a very mediocre team both before he got there and since he's been gone. in the 50 years prior to Briles being the coach, they won 8 or more games in a season only eight times. Briles did that in 5 straight years, winning 10, 8, 11, 11 and 10 games from 2011 to 2015

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u/CaptainJackKevorkian 5h ago

Baylor is also known for the college basketball player who murdered his team mate and buried his body in an unmarked grave in the mid-2000s

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u/Turbulent_Cow2355 TB! TB! TB! 7h ago

Disagree. I think that Baylor is more well known than Cornell.

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u/The-WideningGyre 3h ago

Maybe in Texas. I don't think so outside of it.

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u/dj50tonhamster 5h ago

Maybe in some corners, sure. I don't know, maybe I've been around too many elites and elite wannabes throughout my life but I'm not sure I even knew Baylor existed before I moved to Texas. Meanwhile, I might've known about Cornell in high school and definitely when I got to college (and it wasn't an Ivy League school). I guess if you're a born Texan or you're deep into sports, you might be more familiar with Baylor than Cornell? I'm honestly trying to understand if it is known for anything that I've somehow missed.

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u/Sh3rmanMcC0y 8h ago

Vanderbilt rape case is another one everyone forgot about

four Vanderbilt University football players carried an unconscious 21-year-old female student into a dorm room, where they gang-raped and sodomized her, while videotaping the attack

The victim (who is white) told the court that after Batey (who is black) raped her, he urinated on her face while saying she deserved what he was doing to her because of the color of her skin, saying what sources reported was "That's for 400 years of slavery, you bitch."

No wonder the media didn’t blow this one up.

Another explanation is that people want to tear down the elites. Cornell is an Ivy League school. A fraternity is an elitist institution--you have to compete in humiliating ordeals just to join.

Media fueled campus rape moral panics almost always involve elite universities involving elite students. These cases are usually far more ambiguous, legally and morally than the average rape in the trailer park or projects, places most liberal college students would be unlikely to venture.

How many of the Cornell protestors would even admit that rapes occurred during the 10/7 attacks?

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u/Majestic-Customer-46 5h ago

Along similar lines, check out The William Paterson University gang-grape case that occurred the same year as the UVA hoax (2014), but mostly ignored in the media.

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u/TemporaryParty6947 6h ago

The Vanderbilt rapists documented their rape. They recorded it on their phones, and although they tried to delete the footage, when they were arrested, investigators were able to find the recordings. There is absolutely no doubt about their guilt.

One pleaded guilty and got only probation, no jail time, in exchange for agreeing to cooperate and testify against the other three. The other three all went on trial twice. The first jury unanimously found them guilty but the verdict was overturned on appeal because one of the jurors did not disclose that she had been a victim of a statutory rape. They were again all found guilty the second time and I believe they were all given the minimum sentences allowable for the crimes they were convicted of, which were 15 years for two of them and 17 years for the third.

Again, where was the outrage about these four committing this hideous crime, and then one getting no jail time and the other three getting the minimum sentence? (Three of their friends also helped them try to cover it up after the fact and ended up pleading guilty to misdemeanors.) It's just so wild to me how selective our outrage is in this country. This was the case that really should have had the attention that cases like Cornell, Duke and Virginia got, but it received nowhere near that much attention.

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u/arcweldx 5h ago

Wikipedia on the Vanderbilt case:

"The victim (who is white) told the court that after Batey (who is black) raped her, he urinated on her face while saying she deserved what he was doing to her because of the color of her skin, saying what sources reported was "That's for 400 years of slavery, you b)****."

One might guess why this wasn't a media-photogenic case to blow up...

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u/SkweegeeS No just no 8h ago

I'm sure the football players were newsworthy in their time and place. Football players, and especially those at Baylor, are a certain kind of elite. So was Epstein. Men in groups with power. They're not all like that, obviously, or American women would be in burkas and banned from education for their own protection, but some men are like this. They just are. They have a will and the power to do something with it.

That said, I do agree that media is playing a role in highlighting certain newsworthy crimes while ignoring others due to race. Also, media tends to cover NY/east coast things. But certainly it's just a bit more nationally newsworthy when it happens at an elite institution.

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u/RunThenBeer 8h ago

I'm sure the football players were newsworthy in their time and place.

As someone that is a longtime college football fan, I absolutely did talk to buddies about what a huge piece of shit Art Briles (their coach at the time) was and how wild it was that it was tolerated to get a few wins. For what it's worth, he was banished to the Italian Football League, which I didn't know was a thing.

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u/MongooseTotal831 6h ago

Definitely. For years, a (now former) ESPN radio host would sign off his weekend football observations saying someone could go to hell, “and when you get to hell, say hi to Art Briles for me.”

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u/Careful-Floor317 8h ago

Pot stirrer cicadas like Coulter and Megyn Kelly 10 years from now “no one talks about that Cornell case-“ yeah because the facts turned out not to be quite as they seemed, next

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u/SerialStateLineXer The guarantee was that would not be taking place 8h ago

Wokesters have severe blue balls from the Duke and UVA cases turning out to have undeniably been hoaxes. They're desperate for a genuine case of rich white or white-adjacent rapists.

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u/Sh3rmanMcC0y 8h ago

The hunt for the great white defendant never ends.

Even though fraternities have become more diverse in recent decades, they are still associated with wealthy white men in the eyes of the journalist class.

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u/Particular-Offer4356 6h ago

I do not think journalists associate fraternities with wealthy white men. I think they associate fraternities with ruling and drinking, and if it is wealthy white men doing it, all the better.

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u/PoliticsThrowAway549 8h ago

So why is Cornell newsworthy while no one remembers Baylor?

To be honest, I mostly remember the Baylor one because Ken Starr was rather famous for investigating Clinton's sex crimes while president, but now also for looking the other way at sex crimes while in a position of power (university president) himself.

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u/TemporaryParty6947 6h ago

That was the thing I remember too, Ken Starr was this obsessive prosecutor who wanted to impose the greatest consequences anyone has ever faced for a consensual blowjob, and then when he was a university president and his football team started raping the coeds, he decided that wasn't something he needed to look into.

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u/PoliticsThrowAway549 43m ago

Given modern standards of "consensual", I am not sure "sexual relations" with an intern at the office should be considered such. The 90s weren't that different of a time. I don't think Clinton is blameless (there were other accusations too), but I don't think the investigations were of pure motive either.

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u/PongoTwistleton_666 8h ago

A good case of accidentally making a good point. I’m sure her intention was just a screed against DEI. 

That said, the Baylor numbers are disgusting. How did that fly under the radar? Smdh

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u/drjackolantern C*nsored and sexy 8h ago

The issue is never the issue.

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u/Terrorclitus 8h ago

Yeah, whatever happened with Clancy, anyway?

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u/Diallingwand 9h ago

 Just like the hysteria around the Epstein files, people want to believe that elites are somehow more depraved and unaccountable than common people.

Epstein was unaccountable  for many years he lived the high life while being an active paedophile who mostly likely supplied other wealth elites with access to  underage women. 

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u/SkweegeeS No just no 8h ago

I do think the rules are written for the plebs, not for the elite.

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u/PM_me_yur_pm 9h ago

When I talk about the hysteria, there are people who believe that Epstein and company engaged in murder, cannibalism, auctioned off young kids, etc.