Oberlin College Refuses To Pay
The fantasy lives of the left bring consequences
My RSS feed turned up an interesting story recently: Oberlin College Refusing To Pay $33 million In Court-ordered Defamation Damages To Gibson’s Bakery. If you're not familiar, Oberlin is a small liberal arts college that takes its name from the Ohio town in which it's located. Therein is a bakery called Gibon's. In November of 2016, bakery employees spotted a customer shoplifting and aprehended him despite being physically attacked by the shoplifer & his companions. The police arrived, put an end to the altercation and arrested the shoplifting trio who later pled guilty and allocuted to their crimes. In particular, they stated that their race had nothing to do with the matter, the relevance of which will be seen below.
What should have been a minor incident for all concerned has turned into a six-year legal odyssey. You see, the shoplifter (who I assume has long-since graduated & moved on with his life) was black, and Oberlin is very progressive. The now-familiar mob formed, the requisite protests ensued and a boycott was called for (I gather the college had business with the bakery). Things deteriorated from there, and eventually Gibson's sued Oberlin and its Dean of Students, Maredith Raimondo for "libel, slander, interference with business relationships, interference with contracts, deceptive trade practices, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent hiring, and trespass."
The trial was comprehensively covered by Legal Insurrection; the upshot is that an Ohio jury awarded Gibson's thirty-three million dollars in compensatory & punitive damages. This was later reduced to to twenty-two million due to a state law limiting punative damages, but the full amount was restored on appeal (I can't say why). They apparently won attorneys fees, as well. In 2019, Oberlin alum Abraham Socher wrote an excellent account of the case entitled O Oberlin, My Oberlin. While I continue to follow the case as Oberlin attempts to wriggle out of paying the judgement, that is not the subject of this post.
Rather, I want to talk about something that, in my view, drove this entire debacle for Oberlin: the fantasy lives of liberals and the consequences thereof. I can't speak to all liberals of course, but I can't help but notice that many liberals of my acquaintance are deeply invested in a world-view that features them as the kind, compassionate, enlightened & wise defenders of the good against the forces of oppression, racism & evil… so much so that when, in the course of my regrettably few civil debates with them, I suggest that our discussion is not a titantic struggle between good & evil, but simply a disagreement over policy on which men & women of good will can disagree on principle, they find the thought deeply discomfiting.
Of course, the reality is that we live in a time and a place of peace, prosperity, and, yes, tolerance, unparalleled in human history. So much so that countless people of all races & creeds, often at great personal risk and/or sacrifice, come here every year. This requires an active fantasy life to support the idea that our civilization is about to collapse under an onslought of wickedness. The endless stream of existential, imminent-yet-never-realized environmental threats is an example of this, as is the persistent phenomenon of fake "hate crimes". I once indulged a friend in a long explanation of how Donald Trump was "destroying" the economy. When he paused for breath, knowing that he was retired, I said "I assume you've moved all your assets out of stocks & into cash, gold & other defensive commodities, then?" Bewildered, he responded "Of course not!" One sees that when it came time allocate his hard-earned money, he acted on his better judgement that the economy was & would remain fine; the rest was just his active fantasy life. The thankfully passé fashion of pretending to be a member of a resistence organization (rather than a political party that lost an election) was one of the more exasperating manifestations of this phenomenon.
Engaging in this sort of fantasy life to preserve one's self-image is, while sad, of course one's perogative… until acting out such fantasies harms others. The "defund the police" movement is a particularly wretched example of this: to indulge the left-wing fantasy that there's a "war on black men" being waged by police, and that they need to "rescue" those black men, liberals have spawned a massive crime wave that disproportionally affects the very people in whose name they claim to act.
It therefore pleases me when, like in the case of Gibson's, our civic institutions prove to be up to the challenge of punishing such behavior. Ironically, the very week Donald Trump was elected president, Rolling Stone magazine settled with Dean Nicole Erasmo of UVA (the subject of another liberal fantasy) to end her defamation case. More recently, the Senate aide who doxed two Repulican Senators on the Judiciary Commited during the Kavanaugh hearings was sentenced to four years in prison. Of course, the Oberlin case, with its $44 million judgement, is the biggest example of which I am aware.
Still, the assault on empirically testable reality to support liberals' shaky self-images will continue; eternal vigilence is the price of not merely liberty, but of sanity.
Update: Oberlin appears to have exhausted their last appeal, now that the Ohio Supreme Court declined to take up their case. David Gibon's widow, Lorna Gibson, penned an article for Barri Weiss's Substack Common Sense entitled Will I Ever See the $36 Million Oberlin College Owes Me? that I recall being one of the most-read articles on RealClear Politics this week. When I visited the Wall Street Journal article, the most-liked comment pointed to the Substack article. This is pleasing on multiple levels.
Update: Late last month, Oberlin students discovered that the college now employs an associate vice president of risk Management & Operations. The editorial, in the Oberlin Review, is entitled "College’s Concerns Around Liability Stifle Progressive Values". Indeed they do.
Update: The IRS contractor that leaked Trump's (along with many others) tax returns, was recently sentenced to five years in prison. On the other hand, Michael Mann's defamation suit regrettably succeeded.