People are noticing that the Campus Rape hysteria is very much like the 1980s child rape hysteria

1. Fanned by activists and lawyers with something to gain from it being true? Check.

2. Alleging horrible crimes? Check.
3. Wild, unbelievable details? Check.
4. A demand that we suspend critical faculties and just believe the accusers? Check.
5. Treating the victims as children having  no agency, power or responsibility for the outcome? Check.
6. Kangaroo courts led by crusading women? Check.

One of the most glaring modern instances of a moral panic is probably the alleged great ritual satanic abuse cases at preschools such as Fells Acres andMcMartin in the 1980s, in which presumably competent adults suddenly began to believe obvious confabulations by young children being incompetently interviewed, which ranged from unlikely in the extreme (a sexual assault that took place in a hot air balloon) to obviously physically impossible (children being driven through nonexistent underground tunnels beneath a school). Families were arrested and put on trial in these bizarre cases and, in the case of the Amiraults of Fells Acres, put in jail for lengthy periods. Even after people woke up to the obvious problems with relying on the extensively coached testimony of 4-year-olds, and a Massachusetts parole board recommended 5-0 that Gerald Amirault have his sentence commuted, prosecutor Martha Coakley (yes, that Martha Coakley) lobbied to keep him in jail, and then-acting Governor Jane Swift denied the commutation.

I'm not too worried about this happening in red states but in places like Massachusetts (McMartin), Washington (Wenatchee) and south Florida (the people Janet Reno railroaded to propel herself onto the national scene without ever apologizing for the travesty and abuse of power that she sponsored) you never know.

In these perennially bigoted districts young men are liable to get similar treatment as black men accused of rape in the Jim Crow south or ugly unpopular women got in Salem (once again MA). As with the racists back then, being feminist and left wing means never having to prove anything against the class of people you hate.

Now I'm sure you're saying "Hang on a tick: My good man you go too far! The crusaders in this case are progressive college women, not toothless hillbillies." Which forces me to point out that the formal "separate but equal" doctrine in the south did not arise in the libertarian 1870s but in the oh so progressive 1890s with Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and the rise of eugenics and "scientific racist" notions  championed by liberal patron saints like Margaret Sanger and Woodrow Wilson. Jim Crow back then was seen by these liberals as a rational, progressive and (dare I say it?) "Scientific" response to the "pollution" of "the race" in the south. And today's unreasonable rape hysteria has its basis in modern academic feminist theory.  Feminists I might add that consider Margaret Sanger their patron saint.

Progressivism has some very vile and hateful threads. And because progressives are never required to account for or repudiate them  (Hillary Clinton headlined a star studded beatification of Margaret Sanger and Woody Wilson the segregator of the Federal government is a Democrat demigod for crissakes) they keep popping up to poison our social discourse.

Maybe we should put young college women into day care. We are treating them like toddlers anyway. Megan McCardell has more here.