As soon as the hobo encampments began popping up on university campuses all over the country, it was only natural to wonder how long these students could hold out before something else grabbed their attention.
College kids aren’t known for their commitment to anything, especially right before the beginning of summer vacation. And it was never clear exactly how stinking up a few random quads, and holding out for “humanitarian aid” in the form of a Chipotle burrito bowl, was ever going to affect what’s happening in the Middle East.
Of course, the whole operation, as I’ve outlined previously, was never even about Gaza or Israel in any way. Instead, it’s about repackaging anti-white hatred into yet another astro-turfed national campaign of riots and civil disorder, just in time for the presidential election. So at some point, it stood to reason, these kids would stop pretending to care about the war in Gaza altogether. They’d drop the act and move to something else.
Over the weekend, as if on cue, the pivot took place.
All at once, on campuses and inside newsrooms all over the country, Left-wing outrage over the Middle East subsided. And it was replaced with abject horror concerning a new, supposedly far greater crime against humanity. This act of pure, unadulterated evil took place, if you can believe it, on the campus of the University of Mississippi. And it was all recorded on video.
If there are children in the room, avert their eyes. If you have a sensitive stomach, turn away now. This is footage of the atrocity that was caught live, on camera. Brace yourself:
A white Ole Miss frat boy dances like a monkey and makes monkey noises near a Black woman who was protesting for Palestine.
Is this heart warming? (Video: @StaceyJSpiehler)pic.twitter.com/MgKqIVI3DH https://t.co/0FsAamDMPw
— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) May 3, 2024
If you’re anything like me, you probably missed the part of that footage you’re supposed to be angry about. For such a supposedly earth-shattering event, it’s tough to spot.
Instead, what you see is a bunch of frat bros who probably aren’t even that political. They’re probably just tired of the narcissistic and highly fragrant Leftists who have been defiling their campus. They’re pro-America more than anything else. The American flag overalls are a pretty big clue there. Beyond those overalls, what’s the big deal, you might ask?
Leave it to the crack reporting team of the Mississippi Free Press to explain why exactly we should be outraged. As one of that papers’ reporters put it, quote: “A white Ole Miss frat boy dances like a monkey and makes monkey noises near a Black woman who was protesting for Palestine.”
If you go back and look at the tape, and focus entirely on the right-hand side of your screen, you’ll see about two seconds of a student jumping up and down while flailing his arms and making a face. We’re supposed to conclude that this student was “dancing like a monkey” and therefore was insinuating that black people are like monkeys. And in turn, we’re supposed to be extremely outraged by this.
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There are a lot of logical leaps here, which I’ll get to in a second. The path from normal to outraged requires you to jump across five different widely spaced Lilly pads. But first, it’s important to understand that this was the unanimous reaction from the Left. Even as a supposed “genocide” is going on in the Middle East, this is what they’ve now decided to hyperventilate over.
Jemele Hill got the lynch mob started. She wrote: “What fraternity does he represent? That fraternity’s national leadership needs to be contacted immediately and that frat should be barred from campus.”
CNN, NPR, Newsweek, the Associated Press and pretty much every other outlet published self-serious pieces about this supposedly racist “confrontation.” A former DNC field director named Adam Parkhomenko wrote that this incident is yet more proof that America is a “racist country.” The NAACP chapter at Ole Miss bemoaned the “abhorrent but also entirely unacceptable” and “deeply disheartening” behavior in the footage.
The Guardian reported that “some said” that Mississippi’s governor reminded them of a “segregationist” because he put out a tweet praising the students in the video. The Daily Beast called the clip “gross.” Left-wing lobbyist Nina Turner wrote: “This is a video showing anti-Blackness.” Turner also scolded Congressman Mike Collins, who had praised the students in the video: “Representative, that is a white man making monkey gestures at a Black woman. And these protesters are NOT terrorists. Don’t play games. Check yourself.”
To be clear, it’s not just commentators on the Left who are saying things like this. Some conservative pundits joined in as well. For example, Rob Smith wrote: “The Ole Miss incident was incredibly racist. I don’t care what ‘influencers’ say or post, I care what elected officials do. @RepMikeCollins is an absolute clown for posting what he posted. I said what I said. Cry more.”
Former RNC chairman Michael Steele agreed: “@RepMikeCollins this is not ‘taking care of business’; and if you think it is, exactly what is the business you are referring to? Your casual approval of racist behavior and the need you seemingly feel to brag about it is an abject failure of your leadership as a member of the United States Congress and not a proud moment for you or #OleMiss.”
So, this is yet another moment where several commentators on the Right join in with the outrage mob on the Left, which is something that never happens the other way around. And in response to this outrage from all sides, the student’s fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, has kicked him out. Ole Miss has opened a “student conduct investigation,” which sounds ominous. Instead of everyone just ignoring this episode and moving on, because there’s about ten million more important things happening, it’s following the standard cancellation template from 2020. This student’s being doxxed online and threatened. His picture is all over. Organizations are cutting ties. You know the drill.
The other familiar part of this story is that, once again, the mob is claiming that out-of-context video footage tells us everything we need to know about the particular incident. But as a basic factual matter, it’s not even clear that this student was making monkey noises. Again, he’s featured in the video for something like 1.2 seconds. I never noticed the “monkey noises” until everyone pointed it out. Without that prompting, I’m not sure I ever would have interpreted it that way.
More to the point, there’s something funny and ironically racist about Leftists always trying to connect monkey noises to black people. This is a recurring theme, and you have to wonder why that is.
They did the same thing in late 2022 when someone allegedly made monkey noises at a girls’ high school volleyball game in Texas. You probably don’t remember that whole debacle, because the narrative was embarrassing for everyone involved and the media immediately dropped it.
So to refresh your memory, here’s the allegedly racist footage, which was uploaded by a mother in the stands.
Watch and listen, and see if you can detect the monkey noises here:
1. Hi Friends and Family, sadly my post is not one of celebration. This past Friday my daughter's Varsity Team Paetow High School(Katy,TX) played against Jordan High School (Katy,TX), and were heckled and harassed with the student section making monkey sounds towards our black pic.twitter.com/b5Lp0t0uij
— Lakeesha Kemp-Adams (@KeeshaKA) September 4, 2022
You’ll notice that no one in the stands or on the court reacted in any way to these allegedly racist monkey noises. In fact, not even the players who were supposedly being targeted by these chants reacted. It was only after this woman got home and uploaded this footage, saying she heard a racist monkey chant, that some sort of investigation was launched by the school district. The story fizzled though, because if you listen to that footage, it’s not remotely clear what this woman is talking about. People do all kinds of chants at sporting events and they make all kinds of noises for all kinds of different reasons.
So for all we know, that’s what’s happening at Ole Miss. Maybe this frat kid saw a large, irate woman intentionally antagonizing him (and all of his friends). And maybe he decided to jump up and down to yell and mock her — not because she’s black, but because she’s being antagonizing and annoying. It’s even possible he had no animus towards this woman whatsoever. After all, during this same interaction, the frat bros also referred to this large black protester as “Lizzo.” And as we’ve been told relentlessly, Lizzo is the paragon of female beauty. All women should aspire to look and act like Lizzo. So maybe in this instance, imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Who knows.
But here’s the important point. Even if this student did what they accuse him of — even if he was imitating this Lizzo look-alike in a disparaging way — then at worst, he’s guilty of making an inappropriate joke. You can call it racist or bigoted if you want to feel more oppressed. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you call it, this is not the sort of thing that a kid should have his life destroyed over. There are much worse sins than engaging in a mocking dance for two seconds, no matter how “bigoted” that dance might allegedly be. And the response to this student should reflect that.
In fact, at a public university like Ole Miss, it’s also not clear that the school has any right to punish him at all. The First Amendment allows students at public universities to exercise their right to freedom of speech — which includes speech that many people find bigoted or offensive.
There’s been a lot of that kind of speech on college campuses in the last few weeks, if you haven’t noticed. And there’s no argument that this Ole Miss incident is somehow uniquely offensive and horrible, because pretty much every day, college kids are caught on camera doing something far worse than this.
The pro-Palestine protesters have said plenty of vile things. One activist held up a sign at Columbia saying Jewish students should be Hamas’ “next target.”
Someone just yelled “Kill the Jews” at a rally at Northeastern University the other day. It’s not clear who exactly said that, but you’d think there’d be some proportional amount of interest in answering that question. And of course, there’s systematic anti-white and anti-Asian bias at all of these schools, in both admissions and hiring. And that impacts a lot more lives than whatever this frat boy was doing for two seconds.
So if we’re going to destroy this one kid’s life over this two-second dance, then we should also expel all of these protesters and fire every administrator in every one of these schools. Until we do that, then no one should even pretend to care about this one Ole Miss frat boy being “bigoted” or whatever. It’s so disingenuous it’s actually nauseating.
This is a point that goes without saying, but if this was a black student making racist statements and gestures at a white frat boy, none of these people would give a damn. The outrage mob would either ignore it or outright defend it. We know that’s the case because they don’t give a damn when white people are beaten to a pulp on camera.
For example, here’s a story that precisely no one on the Left cares about. Remember the black guy in Brooklyn who was arrested for sucker punching a 57-year-old white woman in the face, breaking her jaw? He’s reportedly a habitual offender who’s done this several times. Here’s that footage:
It’s another “random, unprovoked attack.” They just assume that none of these videos of black people punching white people can possibly be racially motivated. They’re all just random. The frat kid’s dance is immediately determined to be racist, but a black person going around punching white people is just acting “randomly.” Well maybe the monkey noises — if they were monkey noises — were also random. Random things happen all the time, apparently.
Anyway, that assault happened in March. What happened next?
In a rare move in New York, prosecutors upgraded this guy’s charges to a felony. They also wanted to put him in jail before trial. But the judge overseeing this case, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew Sciarrino, rejected the prosecutors’ bail request. So he’s back out on the street where he can punch more white women. And if you have a problem with that, you should know that the judge doesn’t care. He just retired to Florida. That’s not an exaggeration. The judge has left the state. He’s fled the hellhole of New York — which he helped turn into a hellhole — for a state that actually enforces laws.
I could give about a million more examples of anti-white violence that’s not simply tolerated, but endorsed by the most powerful institutions in this country. And none of it gets a fraction of the attention of one white student doing a dance for two seconds at Ole Miss. But I don’t need to go through all of these examples because it’s not 2020 anymore. There’s no excuse for anyone on the Right to fail to recognize what’s going on here. When one side is allowed to commit racial violence with impunity, while the Lynch mob assembles to punish the other side for mockery and jokes, that’s a pretty big clue that no one really cares about the mockery and jokes. It’s all a power play. Unless conservatives want a beat-for-beat replay of 2020, which is clearly what the Left wants at this point, then it’s well past time we stopped pretending otherwise.