A Shift You Won’t See On The Gridiron

     Geez. Not yet six AM and the day has already become strange. I just found myself explaining “sync idle” to the C.S.O. (Never mind why.) But let’s get to the most recent burr under my saddle, shall we?

     Surely you’re familiar with the sojourn of nine-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan Holden Armenta. Some arrogant idiot over at Deadspin gave the poor kid a dressing-down for his face-paint and headdress. Called it “racist.” Mind you, a nine-year-old kid can hardly retaliate against that sort of mistreatment, but a whole lot of other right-minded folks did. For as we were subsequently told, Holden Armenta isn’t just a Chiefs fan; he’s also an American Indian. (I refuse to call them “native Americans,” as if their ancestors arose spontaneously from the primordial soup whereas mine arrived by boat. In case you’re curious, they came to this continent over the land bridges that existed before and during the most recent ice age. So there!)

     I don’t read Deadspin – I’ve lost all interest in pro sports – so I have no idea what sort of pseudo-repentance the arrogant idiot or the editors of that publication may have performed, if any. Doesn’t matter, really. The point was “clicks.” Bringing in the “eyeballs.” And of course, “virtue signaling,” as if there could be any kind or degree of virtue in slandering a child, regardless of the facts.

     But the well-publicized incident put me in mind of another well-publicized case that should have embarrassed its progenitors greatly: the Duke Lacrosse scandal. Remember that one?

     Much of the faculty of Duke University leaped onto the affair in support of Crystal Gail Mangum, the black stripper who lodged the false rape allegations. After the allegations had been proved false – in the process of which they ended the career of an overly enthusiastic prosecutor, if memory serves – the lacrosse players’ faculty accusers doubled down. They asserted, in their several ways, that they had done the right thing, arguing that the importance of bringing public attention to the immense social problem of white sexual exploitation of black women overshadowed the fact of the players’ innocence.

     This is the Left’s post-embarrassment technique for shifting attention. Claim you were merely highlighting some “social problem.” Shove aside the injustices involved and bellow that your intentions and the “social problem” were and are more important. Above all, never, ever apologize to those you wounded, misled, or offended.

     The do it a lot, Gentle Reader. There was an incident some time ago in which some militant feminist group put up fliers on a college campus bearing the names of thirty-odd male students there, characterizing them as “potential rapists.” The authors of those fliers had no basis for accusing any of those male students of anything. Indeed, they selected the names of the boys they chose to slander at random from among the college’s male student population. The event didn’t get the national hullaballoo of the Duke Lacrosse case, but it did raise a row among those of us who, for our sins, keep track of developments on college and university campuses.

     And in the aftermath, when those feminists received the thunder of denunciation they deserved, just as with the Duke faculty who piled onto the slander of the Duke lacrosse players, that feminist group bellowed that the issue of rape on campus was far more important than the damage to the reputations of thirty-odd completely innocent young men.

     I have little doubt that we’ll see The Shift deployed in the case of the Salvadoran immigrant transman who shot up Joel Osteen’s megachurch. The horror of the general availability of guns is so much more important than the flood of mentally disturbed transgenderists and unassimilated immigrants from Latin America! The Left was merely doing its job in publicizing that, can’t you see?

     It has been said, and by Bertrand Russell at that, that while a man may be kept ignorant, he cannot be made ignorant. It’s also been said, by chess master and author Gerald Abrahams, that once an alert mind has become aware of a strategic or tactical idea, he will never thereafter fail to note its existence.

     I hope those statements are true. It’s up to us, Gentle Reader, to prove them.