Morgan Bettinger, calling police when her car
was surrounded by protesters in 2020. Click
for original video, from UVA’s media outlet,
which includes the accusation that she
threatened the protesters but includes no
evidence.

They’re coming for you next: The entire future of Morgan Bettinger has apparently been destroyed because a leftist activist spread a false lie about her through social media, and the student population and many of the faculty and administration at the University of Virginia (UVA) quickly accepted it without question.

Bettinger, a student at UVA, was accused of saying that a group of “Black Women Matter” demonstrators blocking traffic in a 2020 protest would “make good speed bumps.” The accusation came from lefty activist Zyahna Bryant, also a student at UVA, who quickly organized a campaign to get Bettinger expelled. Though Bettinger was not expelled, a student panel found her guilty, and sentenced her to “50 hours of community service with a social justice organization, three meetings with an assigned professor to teach her about ‘police community relations,’ an apology letter to Bryant, and the expulsion in abeyance.”

In other words, she was to go to a political reeducation camp and get indoctrinated properly.

The problem is that Bettinger never said any such thing, and that Bryant’s claims were lies. These facts were unequivocally determined by a more careful investigation by the university’s Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights (EOCR), which found that Bettinger was innocent of Bryant’s charges of racism. Bryant had never recorded the actual comment, and hadn’t even heard it herself. Instead, Bryant had extrapolated her own interpretation from hearsay told to her by others.

What Bettinger actually said, which was also confirmed by numerous witnesses, had a completely opposite meaning, and was initiated when she started a conversation with the driver of a dump truck that was blocking the road and thus protecting the protesters from being hit by cars.

As Bettinger got out of her car, she claims that the driver of the dump truck initiated a conversation with her. “I had no interest in walking over to him to speak to him,” she says, “but out of being polite, when he spoke to me I answered.” According to Bettinger, the pair had a brief, casual conversation—a claim the driver later supported in a statement to Charlottesville police.

At some point during this conversation, Bettinger says, she told the driver something like “It’s a good thing that you are here, because otherwise these people would have been speed bumps.” While she says she doesn’t remember her exact words, she maintains that her comment was intended to thank the driver for protecting the protesters, many of whom were sitting in the middle of often-busy East High Street.

Zyahna Bryant heard a distorted third-party version of this conversation, and immediately rewrote it to change Bettinger’s intent. Instead of Bettinger wishing no harm on the protesters (the truth), she was now a white supremacist who wanted black protesters killed.

As is now normal behavior by college students, no one questioned Bryant’s interpretation of the facts, even though Bryant had no video of Bettinger saying this and actually wasn’t a witness to it. Bettinger was slandered, punished, and made a pariah at her school. Though she eventually did graduate, her career remains in limbo because of the black mark placed on her record due to the student conviction.

During the worst of the uproar, a Twitter mob gathered to threaten her, without ever reviewing any of the facts.

As the story spread online, comments kept rolling in, mostly on Twitter. “Absolutely insane. We need to see action from @UVA against hate speech,” wrote one student. “@UVA needs to expel Morgan Bettinger IMMEDIATELY. You all want an open racist attending your school???” one anonymous account tweeted.

Making matters worse, few people seemed to have even watched Bryant’s video. Comment after comment insisted that there was video proof that Bettinger had made the threats.

“what ‘allegation?!’ there is clear video photage [sic] of this girls [sic] racist and borderline violent behavior,” wrote one student. A few comments seemed like veiled threats. One anonymous person tweeted a photo of a canister of foam sealant with the caption “apply liberally to tailpipe.” [emphasis mine]

At one point Bettinger borrowed a friend’s car out of fear because her own car was now well known and she had found herself being followed by hostile individuals several times.

Since then Bettinger has sued [pdf] the University of Virginia to get her record cleared, but even a victory here will not really clear her name.

This story is simply another example of Obama’s legacy of hate, whereby the left is allowed to make any number of wild unproven accusations against their opponents, calling them “racists” and “bigots” and “white supremacists” without evidence, and those accusations are always accepted on face value, even though the actual evidence repeatedly shows the accusations were false slanders, time after time after time.

When will people recover their ability to question such accusations, and hold back their emotional response until all the facts are known? When will “innocent until proven guilty” return as the cultural law of the land?

Until this changes, we will continue descending into a new dark age, where critical thought is impossible and waiting for the facts is irrelevant because blind angry emotion must rule first.