Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will highlights the absurdity of the left’s penchant for political correctness in Prager University’s latest video.
Will begins by highlighting The Washington Post‘s “warpath against the Washington Redskins football team” for having a supposedly racist team name. Under the logic of political correctness, The Washington Post would have to change its own name for having the word “Washington” in it. The name comes from George Washington, a slave owner and a tobacco farmer.
“Surely the Post should change its name and should demand that the nation’s capital [Washington, D.C.] be renamed, perhaps as Eleanor Roosevelt City,” Will said. “Obviously it cannot be named for her husband [Franklin Delano Roosevelt], he who ordered the internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent, two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens.”
Another name that progressives should be incensed over is “Oklahoma,” since the name is Choctaw for “red people.”
“If it is intolerable to have a football team named Redskins, it must be worse to have a state named red people,” Will said.
Other examples of political incorrectness that should cause progressives to be volcanically angry include:
- The Thomas Jefferson memorial, since Jefferson was a slaveholder.
- Jacksonville, FL and Jackson, MI since they’re named after Andrew Jackson, “tormenter of Native Americans.”
- Cities like San Antonio and St. Louis, since they’re named after religious figures.
- The Massachusetts state flag, which features a Native American holding a bow-and-arrow, which obviously perpetuates the stereotype that Native Americans are violent.
- The Minnesota state seal, which features a Native American riding a horse and holding a spear and a white farmer tilling the field. This perpetuates “subliminal slander” that Native Americans are violent as well as “nomadic” and “unproductive,” while the white farmer is “industrious.”
“You should feel sorry for the progressive sensitivity enforcers,” Will said. “Those who constantly find reason to take offense are rarely happy people. The problem, however, is that such people make almost everyone else miserable too.”