Political Correctness Goes Bezerk In America
MISSOURI GOES SUDDENLY SILENT ON … FOOTBALL TEAM?
Hype over players missing details of sex assault claims
It wasn’t the campus radicals who forced the administration at the University of Missouri into defeat.
It was the football team.
But the team’s record off the field has some commentators crying foul. And ostentatiously missing from the hype over the team’s activism over claims of racism on campus are details of the other claims that have erupted.
Claims of sexual assault against team members. And rape.
Within hours of African-American football players at the school declaring they were on strike until the school’s president was booted, both President Tim Wofle and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin had resigned.
Gary Pinkel, Missouri’s head football coach, supported the strike, which the Kansas City Star tied to Pinkel’s “experiences with civil rights and activism in the past.”
But what is perhaps more relevant is Pinkel’s experience as a coach of a football team with a problematic record regarding sexual assault and violence against women. Several recent investigations allege the University of Missouri has been negligent in handling claims of sexual assault and rape against multiple members of the football team.
In February 2010, Sasha Menu Courey, a member of the University of Missouri swim team, was allegedly raped by a member of the Missouri football team, a charge supported by Rolandis Woodland, a former receiver with the football team.
An investigation by ESPN in February 2015 revealed the school never investigated the alleged incident despite administrators having known about it for more than a year. Courey herself took her own life in 2011.
It was the trigger for a larger investigation which found 14 percent of the players on the University of Missouri basketball and football teams from 2009-2014 were involved in criminal incidents. The University of Missouri basketball and football teams also had the dubious distinction of having the second highest-number of allegations of sexual assault, violence against women and harassment among those athletic programs investigated.
Pinkel’s coaching staff was accused of misconduct in the case of Derrick Washington, a former running back accused of raping a student in 2008. The university did not investigate (as required by federal law) and according to Washington’s mother, football coaches met with Washington’s parents and “indicated to them that criminal charges likely wouldn’t be filed.”
According to Vice Sports, “Pinkel knew of the incident, but never disciplined Washington.” Washington went on to be accused of assaulting a woman on the soccer team, but the case was dropped allegedly because of pressure put on the student not to press charges.
Pinkel only suspended Washington from the football team when Washington was about to be charged with felony deviate sexual assault for a third attack on a woman. Washington only left the university after a fourth assault on a woman, this time for beating his ex-girlfriend.
The Washington case and other incidents led to an accusation by Vice Sports two months ago Missouri football had a “rape culture.”
However, today Vice Sports claimed “the football players at Missouri embodied both parts of the student-athlete hybrid at a time when critics of the NCAA’s amateurism model have questioned the value of that role on college campuses.”
Gina Loudon, the host of “America Trends,” a WND columnist and an author of “What Women Really Want,” slammed how the narrative has shifted.
“The hypocrisy is glaring,” she told WND. “To overlook sexual assault by athletes and turn around and hail them as heroes shows these people are about an agenda and they don’t really care about how flawed that agenda is.”
Loudon charged sexual assault by college athletes is a serious problem on college campuses around the country. She charged leftists with upholding dangerous double standards and selective outrage.
“It’s a dirty secret of college sports athletes how much they victimize women and are still protected,” Loudon stated. “In this case we have all this outrage over faceless people ostensibly using the N word. This is sticks and stones. If we’re really moving to where we’re going to demand the heads of presidents not for what they did, but because they didn’t protect people enough from insensitive words, that is a path with no good end and it sets a really dangerous precedent.”
#mlk protested actual, documented discrimination. Now we shut down games & fire chancellors 4unsubstantiated allegations #Mizzou #fail
— Dr. Gina (@RealDrGina) November 10, 2015
“Mizzou could garner a lot more respect if they took a strong stand on their players raping women rather than someone’s hurt feelings over words that no one can even prove were said.”
Jack Cashill, a WND columnist and the author of the book “Scarlet Letters: The Ever-Increasing Intolerance of the Cult of Liberalism,” sees the athletic program at the University of Missouri and the current political hysteria as simply one example of a much larger problem.
“Unfortunately, the campus culture at the University of Missouri is normative at universities with major sports program,” said Cashill.
“Successful athletes, mostly black, commit any number of crimes and other abuses against a largely passive student population. Meanwhile black activists cry wolf every time, real or imagined, someone utters something ‘hurtful’ in the vicinity of a black person. If the activists and the athletes ally, as they did at Missouri, the liberals who run the university capitulate and the alumni and state legislators keep quiet.”
Cashill suggests drastic consequences are needed.
“It is way past time to rethink the role of state universities.”
Jesse Lee Peterson, a WND columnist and author of the upcoming book “The Antidote: Healing America From the Poison of Hate, Blame, and Victimhood,” argues the entire situation at the University of Missouri was artificially created.
“One thing I am 100 percent sure of is that they were not concerned with racial justice because there is no racial problem there,” he said to WND. “The whole thing by black students that they don’t feel protected and they’re not safe – is a lie, it’s an illusion, it’s just a way to manipulate and to put fear into the president of the school and others so they can get rid of them and replace them with people who are going along with them. And they are mostly liberals who are racist against whites and oppose conservative blacks and the Republicans.”
Loudon concurred.
“I don’t buy that there is even a real issue here,” she charged. “I reject the premise that there is a racial situation at hand on Mizzou campus at all. It is created by those who endeavor to use blacks and other minorities.”
Peterson observed that college football has, in many cases, had a negative impact on campus.
“What I’ve noticed is that they’ve started to turn sports into politics,” he said. “And they’ve started to use it for liberal politics and racial redistribution of power, take away power from the white man and give it to the black. And the fact that these sports teams walked off in support of them, this is going to have a negative impact across the country at colleges and universities because the sports bring in a lot of money so liberals are going to start using them to get what they want.”
He also alleged some players may have been intimidated into going along with the boycott, even though they didn’t agree with any radical political agenda.
“You won’t even have peace within the team,” he said. Indeed, reports indicate despite the façade of unity, the struggling football team was fiercely divided. ESPN quoted one player as saying, “If we were 9-0, this wouldn’t be happening.”
The team is 4-5 on the season and has lost four in a row.
Ultimately, Peterson doesn’t blame African-Americans for the political controversy and fawning media coverage. He blames weak white men.
“The fact is that white Americans, white men especially, keep caving in to these pretenders, to these lying liberal black and white intimidators, pretending there’s a race issue, and then cowering down to them rather than standing up to them,” he charged. “It will spread. It will definitely spread across the country to other white colleges and it’s going to affect them in negative ways.
“This fear that white Americans are showing is unreal to me. It’s hard to understand why they are continually catering to these people. What do they expect to get from appeasing them? Whenever they want something, they are just going to cry racism and intimidate people so they can get what they want. We are absolutely going to see this spreading like wildfire across the country.”