Lilly McKim 🇺🇸🐊

I’ve always liked Stephen Miller. He’s principled, smart, and fearless. I didn’t know this about him. In spring 2006, three Duke lacrosse players—David Evans, Collin Finnerty, and Reade Seligmann—were accused of raping Crystal Mangum at a team party. Within days the campus verdict was in. The season was canceled. The coach was forced out. Their faces were on every cable channel. 88 Duke professors signed a full-page ad thanking protesters for not waiting for the facts and declaring the case exposed “racism and sexism” no matter what a court decided. The school suspended the players. Durham DA Mike Nifong, a Democrat fighting a tough primary, went on TV promising convictions. Saying “wait for the evidence” got you called racist. Except for one student. He wasn’t on the team. He wasn’t a friend of the accused. He was just a 20-year-old junior (later senior) who kept writing in the student paper that in America you’re innocent until proven guilty. Then he did something no other Duke student did: he went on The O’Reilly Factor and Nancy Grace—not as a lawyer or pundit, but as a student—telling millions his own university had rushed to judgment. Most of campus called him racist. The News & Observer called him the “lonely voice insisting that the players were innocent.” He stayed that voice for a year. Then the case collapsed. DNA cleared all three. Mangum’s story kept changing. The photo lineup was rigged. Worst of all, Nifong conspired with the DNA lab to hide the exculpatory results. On April 11, 2007, North Carolina AG Roy Cooper dropped every charge and declared Evans, Finnerty, and Seligmann “innocent”—victims of a “tragic rush to accuse.” Nifong resigned, was disbarred, and was briefly jailed. Years later Mangum admitted she lied. The student who refused to back down, who was called racist for defending three fellow students while 88 of his own professors had already convicted them in print, who went on national TV at 20 to stand for the presumption of innocence? His name was Stephen Miller. #StephenMiller #DukeLacrosse

Another lying ass politician!! Wes Moore opened his 2015 book with a dramatic telling of the first time he led soldiers in combat in Afghanistan. That story, and Moore’s other grandiose tales of leading soldiers in combat, are not true, according to his commanding officer, retired Lt. Col. James A. Gottschling, who oversaw Moore’s daily activities during his brief deployment to Afghanistan in 2005 and 2006. Gottschling told Spotlight on Maryland that Moore was never a paratrooper and was instead assigned to a desk job working in noncombat information operations.