The Patriot Post® · Racists, Tigers and Chickens Come Home to Roost — Oh My!
The freshman class at the University of Missouri must be the most racist, sexist and homophobic student body in America. After all, it was just last year that Mizzou was lauded by the Leftmedia for its tolerance and inclusion after rallying around Michael Sam, the star football player who had recently announced his homosexuality to the world. Since the faculty is largely unchanged, the only conclusion we can draw from the recent resignation of university president Tim Wolfe is that he recruited a bunch of racist students over the last year and now must be punished for his sins. How else does one explain Mizzou going from the gold standard of tolerance and diversity to a hotbed of racism, sexism and homophobia in just a single year?
The impetus for the unfolding scandal was the hunger strike of Jonathan Butler, a black graduate student, which would not end, he declared, until “either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost.” Butler claimed the university had consistently failed to address incidents of intolerant behavior.
The primary complaint stems from an incident last month in which a white student jumped on a stage where black students were rehearsing a skit and allegedly shouted racial slurs. The evidence for Wolfe’s indifference apparently comes from the fact that Wolfe, riding in his car during the homecoming parade a few days later, did not step out of the vehicle and prostrate himself before a mob of angry black protesters.
Butler’s demands received little attention until he was joined in solidarity by some members of the Missouri football team, who declared their refusal to play another game until Butler’s demands were met and Wolfe resigned. (Based on the Tigers’ current 4-5 record, the result might have been the same whether they played or forfeited). Not only did they demand that Wolfe resign, but in doing so he had to issue a hand-written apology in which he declared his “white privilege.” Sadly, the student bullies won, and Wolfe resigned.
It’s unfortunate that Wolfe gave in so easily, but once the football team was involved — putting millions of dollars of football revenue at risk — Wolfe had the weaker hand, and he knew it. Mizzou plays BYU this Saturday, and a forfeit to the Cougars would have cost the university a $1 million penalty for failure to play, plus potentially millions more in lost revenue.
Yet there is an element of schadenfreude here. While this phony scandal is ridiculous, we also admit to somewhat enjoying the show. Because, to paraphrase Obama mentor and America-hater Jeremiah “G-D America” Wright, for liberal academia and the cult of victimization it has created, their “chickens are coming home to roost.”
For several decades now our once-vaunted establishments of higher learning have been run by liberal academics who loathe everything that made America great. They preach America’s sins without extolling her virtues, and they infect students with the idea that America is an evil, imperialistic nation founded by rich, white slaveholders for their own enrichment. They teach these young, impressionable minds that they are either victims of oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia, or they’re guilty of perpetuating those sins.
The problem for the Dr. Frankensteins of liberal academia is that they can no longer control the monster they created. It was all fine and good when their weak-minded little whelps were turned loose on the world of business and politics, where they would be good little warriors for liberal causes. It is another thing entirely when their perpetually offended little howling hobgoblins of heresy turn on them and find offense in every innocuous word, look or gesture. Once that Pandora’s Box of liberal victimhood lunacy is opened, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to close.
The ironic part of this story is that at no time in our nation’s history has there been less racism, less sexism, less homophobia and less bigotry in all of its forms. That isn’t to say it isn’t real, but it is no longer the widespread and culturally accepted practice it once was.
In fact, such bigotry has become so rare that liberals have been forced to do the job that racist hate-mongers will no longer do. These days, the offender is as likely to be a “victim” as a perpetrator of true bigotry. For example, the media was briefly atwitter this month following a string of fires set to black churches. The media interest came to a screeching halt, however, when it was revealed that David Lopez Jackson, a black man, was arrested for two of the arsons and named as a suspect in several others.
This was just the latest in a long list of “hate crimes” in which the instigators of the crimes were the supposed victims themselves, or those who were simply lying about a crime being committed. Examples abound, including Al Sharpton and the Tawana Brawley hoax, the Duke lacrosse rape allegations (where the so-called “victim” was not only exposed as a liar but was later convicted of murdering her boyfriend), Nazi flags and anti-Islamic flyers at Oberlin College, the lesbian waitress who claimed she was denied a tip by Christians, and the list goes on and on. Yet that never prevents the media from jumping on each new accusation and screaming it from the rooftops as fact before ever making the first attempt to verify.
In a way, this is a good thing. After all, if the leftist Cult of Victimhood is having to manufacture incidents of bigotry out of whole cloth, it means that actual incidents of bigotry have become difficult to find.
Still, as amusing as all of this can be, this also should be a warning for Americans of all political and ideological stripes of frightening things to come unless we immediately begin to crush this idea that every offense, real or perceived, is worthy of a lynch mob marching the streets with torches and pitchforks, demanding the blood of the accused. We need to start teaching these kids that life isn’t fair, that you don’t always get a trophy, and that there is no constitutional right to never be offended.
From “free speech zones” and speech codes that ban “offensive” or “hurtful” speech, to leftist laments of “microaggressions” or “triggers” that cause poor little sheltered students to get the vapors, it should be blatantly obvious that our institutions of higher learning are now all too often centers of pampering and indoctrination into the Society of Sniveling Sissies. It’s long past time that we teach these kids (and faculty) that life in the real world means growing a spine and taking life as it comes.