Uh-Oh

Out of Laramie, Wyoming, comes this fascinating story: 

Posts of a violent sexual nature made on a Facebook page called “UW Crushes” caused controversy at the University of Wyoming. An anonymous poster, styled as a conservative, targeted a specific student at UW who he wanted rape because she “runs her liberal mouth all the time.”

The student, Meg Lanker Simons [sic], has since been cited by campus police as it appears she posted the threat herself...

Read the whole story. Then look it up on Google and read it at a bunch of other news outlets, too.  To me it's just captivating, in a terrible sort of way.

Truthfully, I'm not sure what to think here. I've followed Lanker-Simons on her Tumblr for a while now, and she's certainly an insufferable hard-left griefmongering activist. But she never really struck me as a stupid person, and faking a rape threat would certainly qualify as stupid. So I have my doubts. I'm very interested to see what comes out of this.

If it does turn out that she faked her own rape threat, then that will say something remarkable about the current crop of campus anti-rape activists, a group of which Lanker-Simons is a textbook member: namely, that they have to resort to fabricating a rape culture in order to protest about it. That just doesn't make any sense, which, as before, is why I'm skeptical.

But suppose it is true that she made the threat up? I think the reaction will be pretty predictable. "It doesn't matter if she made it up," her anti-rape-culture agitator buddies will say. "What matters is that rape victims have a voice and aren't blamed for being the victim," etc etc. All very true, of course, but when you're creating sexual violence threats out of whole cloth, then you do your movement a great disservice, and it's kind of inevitable that the "voices" of your crowd will start to seem a tad suspect.