NEW YORK: "The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right"
04/15/2017
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From New York magazine:
The Duke Lacrosse Scandal and the Birth of the Alt-Right

April 14, 2017 1:18 p.m.

By Reeves Wiedeman

It’s mostly devoted to trying to tie Stephen Miller to Richard Spencer, who were both at Duke U. during that hoax that so exemplified what Tom Wolfe had called two decades before in The Bonfire of the Vanities the “mania for the Great White Defendant.”

The article is pretty interesting from a Sapir-Whorf perspective. It treats the hoax not as one representative of a long string of hate hoaxes going back to Tawana Brawley a few weeks after Bonfire was published. Rather than a “hoax,” it is viewed as a unique scandal.

The word hoax only appears five times in the article, each time in a quote from a conservative. In sharp contrast, the word scandal appears in the headline and about ten other times, never in quotes. Most of the time the events are referred to as the lacrosse scandal, so that you can tell whose scandal it really was: not the black stripper/murderer, or the abusive prosecutor, or the 88 leftist Duke professors. Instead, it was a lacrosse scandal. Here’s the real scandal,  according to the article:

… the case’s collapse made it more difficult to address the issues — privilege, jock culture, the university’s poor relations with neighboring Durham — that much of the campus agreed needed reckoning with. The players were declared innocent, legally speaking, but …
The real scandal is those Haven Monahans.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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