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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Didn't get that one, either. Especially at the time and the circles I wandered, there were only so many times you could offer or threaten to (skull)fuck a suspected gay before the 'suspected' bit would have rubbed onto the jokester too, so may have been more present for other people.

I'll certainly recognize the possibility it was a joke or even a friendly joke, and the timeframe would be about right for when the whole 'submissive and breedable' meme took off (which, uh... is even more awkward to write out). And, to be clear, there's a lot of not-joking interpretations that would still require little and minimal immediate intervention. At the other extreme, it's certainly possible that Student 1's specific allegation (to directly quote the e-mail: "[redacted] threw ice at me, and after it hit me, said 'You bitch, I'm going to rape you.'") was either exaggerated or even wholly false.

Sometimes these are things you can figure out, and sometimes they aren't. Most teenagers are awful liars, but that mostly just lets you eliminate what didn't happen, rather than increase certainty in what did.

But, notably, none of those simple investigatory steps happened here for months. I don't, and Duane Morris LLP's report does not, make any serious analysis of the specific bullying allegations. The teacher in question claims to have believed the student, and wrote down the name of another student that Student 1 claimed was a witness for the specific matter. And then sat by as nothing happened about it.