Imagine you’re an executive at The North Face, which is ostensibly an outdoor recreation company. It’s June of 2023, several years after the moral panic over BLM and George Floyd has subsided. You’ve run a few gender-bending advertisements for Pride Month to keep your overlords at Blackrock happy. Everything is normal. Everything is fine, you think.
Then one weekday, at 3:00 a.m., one of your “brand ambassadors” — someone you’re paying to represent your company to millions of people all over the world — suddenly freaks out on social media. He says he’s just been subjected to a flagrant act of white supremacy at a bar in Bozeman, Montana. He claims the culprit is a guy named John Talbot, who works at an apparel company called Outdoor Research. And then, to explain exactly what he’s talking about, your brand ambassador, whose name is Manoah Ainuu, uploads this footage to Instagram. Watch:
Let’s recap this story you just heard. White guy John with Outdoor Research approached black guy Ainuu, who works for The North Face, and tried to introduce himself. Then, white guy John proceeded to ask too many questions. And then, to add insult to injury, he tried to shake Ainuu’s hand. He was too polite, which as we all know, is a telltale sign of white supremacy. Then, if you can imagine it, John refused to buy Ainuu a beer, saying he did nothing wrong. He denied that he was a racist, which is the purest possible evidence that he’s a racist. Put it all together, and this was a modern-day lynching in Bozeman.
But North Face’s brand ambassador wasn’t done there. For good measure, Ainuu also uploaded some more thoughts about this highly upsetting, clearly racist incident. In one of these posts, Ainnu wrote, “I hope there are repercussions … ideally an extermination.” Ainuu added that John had displayed “gaslighting, toxic masculinity, and white guilt.” He accused John of wanting to fight him. He also told his 15,000 followers on Instagram, “Reshare and tag [Outdoor Research] so this boy has consequences for his actions. … Our outdoor microcosm can’t have people like this.”
Again, pretend you work at The North Face, or Outdoor Research for that matter. You’re sitting in their corporate offices and you see that. What do you do, when you’re confronted with a rambling video like this, which doesn’t even come close to making any kind of substantive accusation at all? It’s just an incitement to harass some random guy. Do you fire this brand ambassador immediately, and tell all your other brand ambassadors to stop uploading unhinged videos at three in the morning? Do you feel shame that you invested $7 million in hiring brand ambassadors who are apparently delusional and unstable? Or, for some reason, do you try to “exterminate” this white dude who made the mistake of not buying Ainuu a beer?
As you might have guessed, The North Face went for that last option. They apparently decided that 3:00 a.m. rants on Instagram about awkward encounters at a bar really scream “outdoor recreation,” so they went to bat for their brand ambassador. Dave Burleson, who was The North Face’s senior athlete coordinator at the time, publicly called on John’s employer to punish him: “Outdoor Research, please hold your employee John that is in Bozeman right now accountable. … To the racists in the outdoor industry, we will find you and we will remove you.”
It’s like George Bush standing on top of the rubble after 9/11 promising to hunt down Al Qaeda. Except in this case they’re hunting down random white people who have socially awkward encounters with black men at bars. And it gets worse. When Dave Burleson at North Face posted that bizarre response on social media, he was apparently aware that Ainuu was a deranged and unreliable activist. Just a couple years earlier, a movie producer and ice climber named Ari Novak says he alerted Burleson and North Face to Ainuu’s tendency to lie about racism. In one instance, at the 2020 Michigan Ice Festival, Novak says he had told Ainuu that it was dangerous to climb in an area that was closed at night. In response, predictably enough, Ainuu accused Novak of racism. Novak says he told The North Face about this episode, but they seemingly didn’t take any action whatsoever.
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Here’s how Novak described Ainuu: “He’s always trying to create a situation where he can have a fight over race.” There are many other troubling examples along these lines, but the basic idea is that North Face had reason to know all of this. And still, despite everything they knew or should have known, they called on Outdoor Research to fire John Talbot.
A predictable result followed. Within hours, according to exclusive reporting from The Daily Wire’s Spencer Lindquist, Outdoor Research responded. They ordered John to leave Bozeman immediately, like he was a diplomat being recalled after an international incident. And for good measure, Outdoor Research strongly implied that John was guilty of some unspoken act of white supremacy. They said their company, “… does not support or tolerate discriminatory conduct based on race or any other reason, and we take these matters very seriously.”
Ultimately, even though Ainuu admitted Talbot hadn’t said anything racist to him, Outdoor Research terminated John Talbot. They caved to the mob and his reputation and livelihood was destroyed. That’s all according to Talbot’s new lawsuit against The North Face and their brand ambassador. Talbot is fighting very hard in court to get compensation for what was done to him. If he fails, he’ll never work in the industry again. He’ll have a very hard time providing for his family.
This is what a single incoherent, unintelligible accusation of racism can do to someone in 2023. All it takes is an unhinged black guy, saying that a white guy didn’t buy him a beer, and his career is ruined. If that surprises you — if that seems like something that should never happen in a country with due process and the rule of law — then you should know that it’s actually just the beginning. As bad as unfounded accusations of racism may be, the impact of accusations like that pales in comparison to what malicious accusations of rape can do to a man. Rape accusations don’t just end your career. They can put you in prison, whether they’re true or not.
Yesterday I went into some detail about the case of former Major League Baseball pitcher Trevor Bauer. He was a Cy Young award winner, and one of the best pitchers in the league. He was also a Trump supporter who said some things that trans activists didn’t approve of. Now, just a couple years later, he’s been exiled to Japan, because no team in the United States will hire him. How did that happen?
In the summer of 2021, Trever Bauer was publicly accused of brutally beating a woman he had slept with. Here’s how The Washington Post reported on the accusations at the time: “A temporary domestic violence restraining order filed against Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Trevor Bauer and granted by a court Monday details graphic allegations about two separate encounters and includes photos of bruises and a bloodied lip suffered by the woman who obtained the order.”
This initial article from The Washington Post was mostly fair. It went on to explain that the restraining order was issued “ex parte,” meaning the judge never heard Bauer’s side of the story. The article included the fact that Bauer denied the allegations. The Post also reported that there were, “records of text messages between Bauer and his accuser … in which his accuser discusses wanting to be choked and slapped during sex.” Some of those messages were sent after Bauer supposedly abused this woman. Right away, those are red flags, which tell you that there might be two sides to this story.
But very quickly, the news media and Major League Baseball dispensed with any pretense that Bauer was entitled to the presumption of innocence. Within days, the MLB put Bauer on “administrative leave,” which would turn out to be permanent. Then, a few weeks later, the Post ran a follow-up article, which claimed that Bauer had beaten up another woman several years earlier in Ohio. This article did not name the woman. It also didn’t include a series of text messages from this accuser, which Bauer had provided to the Post weeks before their article was published. In these messages, which were sent after Bauer allegedly assaulted this woman, we can see that the woman desperately wants to see him. She sends him hundreds of messages while he’s in the dugout at a game. He keeps telling her that he wants to end their relationship, but she keeps bombarding him with frantic messages that are frankly unhinged.
None of that mattered. The Washington Post didn’t bother to print those messages, because they knew the damage was done. Bauer would never play baseball professionally in the United States again. A few months later, the MLB formally suspended Bauer for two full seasons. The league said that it had conducted an “extensive investigation,” and concluded that Bauer had violated their “domestic violence and sexual assault policy.” But somehow, the MLB’s investigation apparently didn’t uncover the texts from Bauer’s primary accuser, which I briefly touched on yesterday. In case you missed it, here’s Bauer describing some of those messages:
Last night, in response to a post from Elon Musk, Trevor Bauer said that it appeared that his accuser’s lawyers had access to all of this evidence the entire time. Bauer wrote that, “Speaking specifically about the video of her laying in bed next to me with no marks on her face the morning after she claims I brutally attacked her, an email containing that video was sent to her attorney Bryan Freedman before the hearing in 2021 and it was never turned over to us. Perhaps that’s why he insisted on adding his name to the released parties section in the settlement agreement.”
So, this appears to be a setup from a sociopathic gold digger and potentially her attorney as well. This woman admitted that she was going to rip off Trevor Bauer, repeatedly, in writing. In the interests of fairness, we should tell you that, as of this week, the woman in question is still coming up with innocent explanations for those texts. She’s appearing on podcasts saying she was being “sarcastic,” and that Trevor Bauer abused her, as she said he did. She says these texts are being taken out of context. At the same time, this woman agreed to drop her claims against Bauer, without receiving a single cent from him. That’s a pretty strong indicator that she doesn’t have any case. Either way, Trevor Bauer will be able to continue his career, such as it is, in Japan.
But this could have ended very differently. Trevor Bauer was also investigated by the local district attorney. And that’s something that doesn’t happen when you’re accused of offending a random black guy at a bar — at least not yet. Prosecutors in California were thinking of throwing Trevor Bauer in prison for the rest of his life, as they’ve done in many similar cases. Fortunately for Trevor Bauer, however, the evidence was completely nonexistent. So, the D.A.’s office ultimately concluded there was no case here.
This is why false accusations of rape are just as evil and just as dangerous to society as rape itself, and should be treated as such. Fabricated rape accusations have the potential to ruin lives and families forever. If you knowingly subject someone to that kind of hell, then you should face a lifelong punishment yourself. But, of course, that’s not what’s going to happen here. The woman who lied about Trevor Bauer will likely face no consequences at all.
At the same time, as Trevor Bauer himself admits, this doesn’t mean that men are completely powerless. Here’s Bauer’s reflection on what he did wrong. This is from early last year, before he could go into detail about the specifics of the charges against him. Watch:
That’s some honest self-reflection, which is something you very rarely see anymore. What Trevor Bauer is saying is absolutely right. Men can choose not to hook up with random floozies. They can choose not to engage in this kind of degenerate sexual behavior with women they barely know. That’s the moral path. It also happens to be the smart path, from a purely self-interested perspective.
This isn’t to blame Trevor Bauer for what happened to him. He’s not responsible for this woman’s pathology. At the same time, we should acknowledge that sociopathic women out there, who will lie and smear innocent men in order to make some money. There are also sociopathic race hustlers, who have no compunctions about ruining the lives of people like John Talbot. No matter how well-meaning you are or what your politics are — keep in mind, John Talbot had literally worked on DEI committees in the past — you are vulnerable. The identity of your accusers will matter far more than the facts of whatever situation you’re involved in. So act accordingly.
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