I sat on my thoughts about the Cornell case for a bit. I wanted more of the actual details before I said anything, because the madness flying around social media already was chaos, and I didn’t want to add to it. A week later I’m more convinced the rush to judgment will do real damage. Serious questions came up about what happened that night at Cornell, and instead of anyone slowing down, a lot of people locked into the ugliest narrative and ran with it. Leaders and celebrities piled on with points that don’t hold up once you look at the record. That part genuinely bothers me. We keep doing this, and then we act surprised when nobody trusts anyone and we have a loneliness crisis. The thing I can’t get past is the double standard on intoxication and responsibility. It’s looking more and more, from what’s actually known, like this sits closer to regret than to the story that spread. When a woman has been drinking or using, the default idea is that she stopped being a person who makes choices and became something that happened to her. The men in the room are still treated as fully responsible for every decision. I don’t know how we keep pretending that’s fairness. Telling young women that the moment they’re around guys and substances they lose their judgment is one of the most disempowering things we do. It trains them to see themselves as victims on their own nights out. That belief harms them, it doesn’t protect them. We should want the facts of this case before anyone turns it into a lesson, but in the meantime we don’t have to use it to teach another round of girls that they have no agency once they choose to start partying. One of the guys said back in 2024 that he felt like he was the one on the receiving end of sexual misconduct because he was too drunk to consent. Almost nobody wants to talk about that. If intoxication wipes out agency, it can’t only wipe it out for her. And the leap to “fraternities are the problem and should be shut down” is lazy. We hear every bad night. We don’t hear the ordinary ones. As I wrote last month for the Daily Wire, research on men who were in fraternities keeps showing better outcomes later—graduation, jobs, networks, friend groups, family formation, how they rate their own lives. That doesn’t excuse whatever went wrong in that house or in other viral stories we hear, but scrapping the whole thing because of the worst chapters is just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I’ve learned a lot recently from Fraternities Know Men, and their research shows fraternities could help solve our crisis of young men today—we just need to do more to reduce the cases of bad behavior which is the only thing that makes the headlines. All of this fuels the divide between the sexes today. A lot of young men already feel like the world is against them, and watching how fast this turned into a mob doesn’t calm that down. Of course some of them are checking out and disengaging. The message they’re getting is that the world has already decided: men are the enemy, no matter what. I keep hoping a case like this forces us to deal with the actual mess—accountability that runs both ways, the social-media conviction problem, the depravity of society today, the way we talk to girls about their own choices. I don’t think it will. Sadly, I think it just makes everything worse.