In the American political theater, the moral panic over border security is often performed with theatrical dread. Politicians thunder from podiums, painting immigrants with a broad, xenophobic brush and warning of foreign threats to public safety. This righteous fury relies on a staggering sleight of hand. It demands that we look outward at the border while shielding our eyes from the violence thriving in our own backyard, protected by institutional silence, cultural complicity, and a pervasive domestic rape culture.

Americans should put their binoculars down and look right in front of them.

A $350,000 Ivy League education may buy access to elite institutions, but it cannot buy basic human empathy. The distance between a lecture hall discussing moral philosophy and a group chat advertising “free p*ssy” is the exact width of American hypocrisy.

The Cornell group chat frat are not only accused of failing to report the incident or intervene. Seven students are accused in the lawsuit of assaulting a classmate—and then, in the words of the alleged group chat, advertising her as if she were a free giveaway. The phrase “free p*ssy” is the entire philosophy of American rape culture distilled into two haunting words.

Where were the voices of moral courage among those who knew what was happening? Where were the people willing to challenge their peers or intervene on behalf of a classmate? An institution cannot claim to cultivate ethical leaders while remaining indifferent when ethical courage is actually required. This case serves as a reminder that intellectual achievement is no guarantee of moral character. A person can be brilliant enough to graduate from an Ivy League university and still be profoundly deficient in the basic human decency required to recognize another person’s suffering—and act.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Those who most loudly portray outsiders as sexual threats can be remarkably less willing to confront sexual violence within their own communities and institutions.

And when institutions prioritize reputation over justice, they are not just failing victims; they risk signaling that certain kinds of violators are too valuable to punish. This is the bedrock of American rape culture—a system where power can become a shield, and victims are treated as collateral damage.

When leaders weaponize xenophobia to portray immigrants as an inherent threat to women’s safety, they invoke a dark historical irony. The evidence does not support this claim. Meanwhile, sexual violence remains deeply entrenched within American society, sustained by a culture that too often gaslights survivors, delays justice, and fails to adequately confront sexual violence within fraternities, athletic programs, and powerful institutions. 

America has built an entire ecosystem around denying its own structural violence. We scrutinize the background of every stranger who crosses our borders while turning a blind eye to those accused of violence sitting in our lecture halls, corporate boardrooms, and legislative chambers. The call is coming from inside the house.

True safety will never be achieved by building walls or scapegoating the vulnerable. It requires a radical, uncomfortable reckoning with the rot at home—starting with the courage to dismantle a culture that protects powerful campus networks and other homegrown perpetrators while preaching morality to the rest of the world.

Imagine redirecting even a fraction of the outrage reserved for people from other countries seeking safety and opportunity toward the privileged young men in our own lecture halls accused of reducing a classmate to a sexual commodity. The border we actually need to fortify is the one protecting women from an American culture that treats their safety as dispensable.