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December 8 Update | Please read this before commenting.

Here’s how a widely-circulated story printed in Slate magazine yesterday described the incidents that led to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s Interpol arrest warrant:

“During a business trip to Stockholm last August, Assange had unprotected sex with two women … who upon realizing that they had both slept with him—and that he had blown them both off—jointly approached police about his refusal to take an STD test. At the time, Assange’s Swedish lawyer confirmed that ‘the principal concern the women had about Assange’s behavior … related to his lack of interest in using condoms and his refusal to undergo testing, at the women’s request, for sexually transmitted disease.’ (Assange actually did use a condom with one of the women, but it broke.) … The ‘consent of both women to sex with Assange has been confirmed by prosecutors,’ as a former attorney wrote in an impassioned op-ed.” [bold and italics in original]

But here’s how the New York Times reported the incidents back on November 19:

“According to accounts the women gave to the police and friends, they each had consensual sexual encounters with Mr. Assange that became nonconsensual. One woman said that Mr. Assange had ignored her appeals to stop after a condom broke. The other woman said that she and Mr. Assange had begun a sexual encounter using a condom, but that Mr. Assange did not comply with her appeals to stop when it was no longer in use.”

Note: See second update below for new details on the charges released by Swedish authorities on December 7.

Slate characterizes this as a case in which Swedish prosecutors have confirmed that the sex in each instance was consensual, but are pursuing charges anyway. Their only sources for this claim, though, are two of Assange’s lawyers. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Slate vouches for the lawyers’ analysis in their own account of the incidents, even though it’s clear that whether the sex was consensual is under dispute. (Even the Daily Mail — Slate’s only non-Assange source for their piece — whose own reporting is deeply creepy in many ways, is more honest about the charges than Slate is.)

And that’s another thing — the phrasing of the second quote from the Assange lawyer. According to the Times accounts, both women initially consented to sex, but withdrew consent when a condom broke or was removed. If that’s the case, then the lawyer’s gloss — that the “consent … to sex … has been confirmed” — is technically accurate but fundamentally dishonest. If someone consents to sex with you, then asks you to stop, and you don’t stop, that’s rape.

One final confusing element of this story is Assange lawyer Mark Stephens’ recent claim that “Assange is wanted not for allegations of rape, as previously reported, but for something called ‘sex by surprise.'” I’ve been able to find no reference to such a charge in Swedish law, and no confirmation in any media coverage of the Assange story of any such alteration to the charges.

I have no opinion on whether Assange is guilty of the charges against him. I by no means reject the possibility that he’s being set up — I just don’t know. But I’m getting a strong sense that his lawyers are misrepresenting what’s being alleged, and I’m troubled by the online media’s willingness to go along with those misrepresentations. For more on the media and blogosphere’s questionable treatment of this case see this comprehensive post from reader/commenter Neogaia.

December 7 Update | Assange has been arrested in London in connection with the sex charges against him. The charges are rape, sexual coercion, and molestation — not the mythical “sex by surprise.” (See this excellent post for more on “sex by surprise” — the phrase doesn’t refer to any Sweden-specific crime — it’s actually just a dismissive Swedish slang term for rape.)

Comparing the charges announced by police with those listed in the official English-language translation of the Swedish penal code, we see that Assange’s lawyer’s claim that the charges against him carry a maximum penalty of a 5000 Kroner fine (variously described in US media as $700 or $715) is also false. Rape carries a maximum penalty of six years, sexual coercion and sexual molestation two years each.

Update | The Swedish authorities have released details of the allegations against Assange. They claim that he used his body weight to hold one woman down during a non-consensual sexual act, that he had sex with her without using a condom in violation of her “express wish,” and that four days later he “deliberately molested” her “in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity.” The other complainant alleges that he took sexual advantage of her while she was asleep, and that he did not use a condom.

Update | I should note for clarity’s sake that Assange hasn’t actually been charged with anything. He’s been arrested, and the Swedish authorities have specified the charges they’re considering filing against him, but those charges have not been filed at this time. Sweden is seeking to extradite him for questioning, nothing more.

Update | Again, please read this before commenting.

So yesterday on Twitter someone sent me a link to a video, and asked me whether I’d seen it. The video turned out to be The History of Political Correctness.

“The History of Political Correctness” is an oddity, even on its surface. It’s a cheaply produced 23-minute documentary hosted by a guy named William Lind. The video is festooned with stock footage of marching Nazis and long-haired hippies, and is dedicated to the theory that every left-liberal cultural development of the last half century — from political correctness and the student movements of the sixties to afrocentrism, gay pride, environmentalism, and sexual promiscuity — can be laid at the feet of the social theorists of the Frankfurt School.

This charmingly paranoid thesis is presented in over-the-top terms, as when Lind offers an introduction to the work German philosopher Max Horkeimer:

“Horkheimer wrote, ‘logic is not independent of content.’ That means an argument is logical if it helps destroy Western culture, illogical if it supports it. Such twisted thought lies at the heart of the Political Correctness now inculcated into American university students.”

The video is mostly just loony, but there’s a sinister undercurrent to a lot of the ranting, most notably when Lind turns his attention to sexual liberation and gay rights, which he sees as fundamentally corrosive to society. His views on race and religion are primarily implied rather than stated, but they have been made explicit in other contexts, and an overview of them makes Lind’s perspective clear:

• In 2002 Lind delivered a version of his Frankfurt School speech at a conference of the anti-semitic and holocaust-denying Barnes Review. In that setting, it should be noted, he emphasized the Frankfurt group’s Jewishness considerably more than in the video.

• In a 1999 essay Lind suggested that the United States would have been better off if the South had won the Civil War. In the same essay, he argued that Reconstruction — the period after the Civil War when blacks gained the opportunity to exercise political and economic power for the first time — had done more damage to race relations in America than slavery itself.

• In a 2006 column Lind predicted that Iraq war veterans from the “inner cities” would adopt the tactics of the Iraqi resistance when they returned home to their “ethnic” “gangs,” waging terrorist war against the United States from within.

• In an interview just this October, he argued that “where public transit is heavily used by minorities, everybody else is going to avoid it. They’re doing so not because they’re dirty, nasty racists, they’re doing so out of self-preservation.”

“The History of Political Correctness,” which apparently dates from sometime in the early 1990s, it is having a bit of a surge in popularity right now. (I had never heard of it before I was directed to it yesterday, but a Google blog search turns up a long list of recent hits.) The video has a patina of scholarliness, thanks to the intermittent presence of legitimate historian Martin Jay. But it’s bunk through and through, and it’s bunk delivered in the service of a deeply distorted understanding of American history.

In class the other night I was talking about Emmett Till, and placed his murder in 1954. One of my students said she thought it was 1955, and I said something about how I thought it was ’54, but there was a chance I was wrong.

Someone quickly Googled, and confirmed that she was right. (I don’t know what I was thinking.) But before that happened, another student expressed shock that I had admitted the possibility that I might have been mistaken — in her experience, professors almost never did that. I said, “I’m a white guy teaching black history. If I insisted I was always right, I wouldn’t last five minutes.”

It’s a specific story with a larger point — there’s no surer way to turn potential allies against you than arrogance, and no quicker way to turn skeptics into friends than humility.

Early this week my Google search results started lighting up with hits on an old post on White Student Unions. It took me a while to track down the source, but I eventually did — it turns out that someone was posting flyers at West Chester University advertising a meeting of a new white student group on campus.

West Chester, outside Philadelphia, is a public university of twelve thousand students. Its student body is about 85% white. As photos of the flyers circulated on Twitter, WCU students were upset and annoyed … but also skeptical.

As it turns out, they were right to be. University administrators have announced that there is no White Student Union forming on the campus, and that the flyers were a hoax. The intent, they say, was “to draw anti-racists together” — it was a case of good intentions gone awry.

The identities of the students who posted the flyers have not been released, and the university plans to take no disciplinary action.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that White Student Unions are pretty much entirely mythical — whenever they’ve been proposed, to my knowledge, they’ve been nothing more than provocations from one side or the other. I know of no instance in which students have established a WSU as an actual, functioning organization.

Two big developments yesterday in the effort to pass the DREAM Act in the current lame duck session of Congress…

First, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin have introduced a new, scaled-down version of the bill in hopes of tempting wavering senators to join the team. The changes to the bill are major, and they make vote-counting a lot more difficult, at least in the short term. The new bill may shift a large number of votes, or none — it’s just impossible to say right now. If I get word on new commitments, I’ll pass them along in an update.

Second, though, is the big hitch. Yesterday all 42 Senate Republicans signed a pledge to filibuster any and all legislation in that body until agreement is reached on an extension of the Bush tax cuts. If the Democrats call their bluff, this could put not only the DREAM Act but also DADT repeal, extension of unemployment benefits, and other priorities in peril.

But if you can remember the last time the Democrats called the Republicans’ bluff, you have a longer memory than me.

I give it 24 hours until we’re back on track.