Jon Gruden, thoughtcrime, and technology
Until a couple of days ago I’d never heard of Jon Gruden. Now, of course, I’ve read of his resignation as Raiders coach in the face of the revelation of some private emails he sent some years ago that demonstrated “racist, homophobic and misogynistic comments.” He seems to have hit the politically incorrect trifecta there.
Several of his statements focused on football commissioner Roger Goodell. For example, he called him a “clueless anti-football pussy,” which I suppose is considered misogynistic? Or is it anti-gay? Or is it just anti-Goodell?
I don’t know, but I’m not interested in analyzing Gruden or his email sins. I’m far more interested in whether he’s been guilty of any discriminatory acts against anyone. Has he? Or is it all thoughtcrime from about three to ten years ago (which seems to be the approximate time frame involved)?
In fact, although Gruden’s old emails were against allowing gay players in the NFL, his actions were otherwise:
The email appeared to show a complete disconnect from Gruden’s messaging when his own player Carl Nassib came out as gay before the start of the 2021 season and became the first active openly gay NFL player.
Interesting, no?
I’m tired of this zero tolerance policy for any human being who’s ever expressed – or even thought – a nasty thought. I never liked policing that sort of thing. I’ll choose my friends, but other than that I cut people a lot of slack as long as they’re just talking amongst themselves and not doing anything to anyone. In that, I know, I’m quite outdated – but what else is new?
My more pressing interest is how it came to be that all these private emails were investigated. Apparently they were uncovered not because of any suspicion that Gruden had committed a criminal act or actually any offense at all:
The emails were reviewed as part of an NFL workplace investigation into the Washington Football Team. Gruden’s emails about Goodell were flagged in the investigation. Among them, were disparaging remarks about NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith.
So it was just some sort of fishing expedition? What’s that all about, and why is it okay? I don’t think it’s okay, at least not from what I’ve read so far.
Gruden denies being a racist, and adds:
I was in a bad frame of mind at the time [in 2011], and I called Roger Goodell a [expletive] in one of these emails too. They were keeping players and coaches from doing what they love with a lockout. There also were a lot of things being reported publicly about the safety of the sport that I love.
Doesn’t matter to those with a zero policy against thoughtcrime – until they themselves get caught, that is.
DeMaurice Smith had this to say:
The email from Jon Gruden – and some of the reaction to it – confirms that the fight against racism, racist tropes and intolerance is not over. This is not about an email as much as it is about a pervasive belief by some that people who look like me can be treated as less…
Actually, the fight against those things will never be over, because people are human and humans will be humans. That includes people of every race, ethnicity, and sex (all 500 of the latter, or however many there are at this point according to the left). The fight should be against what’s said in public and more importantly what is done to people, but since that fight is far closer to being over, other fights apparently must be fought, including those against thoughtcrime. That’s a dangerous game that will do more harm than good, and already has.
I also find this phrase interesting: “a pervasive belief by some that people who look like me can be treated as less.” How pervasive is that belief? I submit that it once was quite pervasive but no longer is at all pervasive and in fact is limited to a very few. What interests me most about the phrase Smith uses there is that he segues almost seamlessly from thought to action, without emphasizing that any action at all must be involved – from a belief (evidenced by insensitive and nasty remarks with a racial bent) to the way a person is actually treated.
Smith added this:
…[T]he news is not about what is said in our private conversation, but what else is said by people who never thought they would be exposed and how they are going to be held to account…
A purge?
As I said, I’d be curious whether there is any evidence that Gruden treated any black (or other minority) player worse than other players because of bigotry. I haven’t heard anything, but of course it’s possible. But I think it’s certainly possible to harbor stray bigoted thoughts that might be expressed in a moment of pique and yet never act out any such thoughts in actions. Surely if Gruden was such an awful bigot, such actions would be easy to demonstrate.
And then there’s the whole issue of emails. Along with other technology, they make it far easier than ever before to spy on people and go back in time to do so. It doesn’t take long to scan an enormous number of emails for certain words or phrases. Letters, on the other, hand, are far harder to obtain and search, and far less likely to even be saved.
When we first were using email, who ever envisioned these sorts of developments? Someone probably did, but that someone wasn’t me. I guess it all comes down to whether you value liberty – and liberty of thought, even if offensive – or whether you think it’s perfectly fine to snoop into people’s supposedly private communications in order to see whether their thoughts and expressions of those thoughts have always been sufficiently pure.
[NOTE: Some of the comments at that link are pretty clever. Here’s one: “Look at emails, etc. from all coaches, players in the NFL from the past ten years. Bet the NFL would have to shut down entirely. Problem solved.”]
Somebody was out to get Gruden. Most of his emails were when he was working for ESPN as a commentator so not even employed by the league and from his private email account. The tangential connection to the Washington situation is he was emailing Bruce Allen who the team president for Washington at the time but had worked with Gruden in Oakland previously.
Plus Allen is now retired and out of football so there is nothing they can get him on I guess unless wrongthink is criminalized.
Now there is pressure to release all 650,000 emails which would be insane but in these times who knows.
It is not just emails from many players which would prove to be “problematic”, but a considerable amount of unethical and often criminal behavior, often involving domestic abuse, sexual abuse, and even rape (a similar problem exists in the NBA, as well as in collegiate basketball and football, although the corruption of the NCAA perhaps exceeds that of the NBA and the NFL). The amount of coverage in the MSM (and on the mendacious leftist so-called “news” programs) over what is, in reality, a story of no importance whatsoever (while our moribund republic collapses under the influence of destructive policies, mass hysteria, and nearly universal insanity from our ruling elites) reflects badly indeed on the utter lack of seriousness in our current national discourse.
The you got this. Wrongthink bad, very bad, actual bad behavior not so much.
https://www.outkick.com/bucs-removal-of-gruden-from-ring-of-honor-begs-questions-about-warren-sapp-others/
Gruden also trash-talked Joey Plugs, referring to him as a “clueless p—y” in 2011:
https://thehill.com/homenews/576313-emails-show-jon-gruden-called-biden-a-clueless-p-criticized-nfl-racial-justice
It was the NYT that leaked the catty comment about Biden: “The New York Times did not reveal the specifics of Gruden’s comments on Obama — which were made to longtime colleague and friend Bruce Allen, the former president of what is now known as the Washington Football Team — but the outlet noted Gruden criticized the former president’s 2012 reelection campaign.”
How many Super Bowl halftime performers have songs in their catalogues with lyrics far worse than these examples?
Dwaz,
Pretty much all of them for this coming SB halftime show and in a couple cases VERY bad. But nevermind.
Diversity (e.g. racism) breeds adversity. Genderphobia (e.g. trans/homophilia) is a progressive condition. Sexism (e.g. masculinism) is anti-male and female. The Pro-Choice religion denies women and men’s dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a negotiable asset. Social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere.
Roe, Roe, Roe your baby, violently down the river Styx.
Apropos of the Washington Football Team, which had to give up its long-time name for the sake of wokeness, why didn’t the equally conscience-stricken MLB team in Cleveland change its name to the Cleveland Indigenous People rather than the Guardians (which has drawn snickers from the other 29 MLB teams)? The Guardians’ ballpark is called Progressive Field, which may explain a lot.
I stopped following the NFL when Collin Kaepernick began his kneeling antics; I’ve grown increasingly hostile to it as it has grown more and more woke. Yet I well remember Gruden during his first stint with the Raiders, and then the Bucs.
What happened to Gruden is just part of the ever metastasizing ‘cancel culture’. It should surprise no one.
More significant is the fact that this story is headline national news. I received multiple alerts with updates from both the NYT and the WSJ. Why? Why should the downfall of an NFL couch go much beyond the sports page? I think we all know why: to set an example. If it can happen to him, it can happen to any of us, no matter how unknown and inconsequential we may be.
I’m on board with neo’s post and the comments, but Grudin had a HUGE salary as a coach and announcer. And he was good at both and deserved what he was paid.
But how hard is it to keep your yap shut?! He certainly had morals clauses in his contract with both jobs.
You never, ever, ever put anything in writing you don’t want revealed publicly. Especially if you are a highly paid, public figure. I’ve read what Grudin wrote and they were dumb things, at best, to put in an email. The lips comment was beyond idiotic.
If you are a public figure and you feel you have to say something crude about another public figure, do it in person or dial the phone. Not sure why he felt he had to make the statements he did, but even if it pre-dated email, would he have written it down and sent it in the U.S. mail? A telegram?
Grudin was correct in his resignation statement. When you write the things he wrote it causes rancor and disruption on your team and you lose credibility as the team’s leader. I respect his decision to step down. Seems like a good guy. I hope he lands on his feet, but he screwed up and this is the result of his actions.
Rufus,
I agree what he said was rude, crude whatever but what if he said this verbally in private and it was recorded secretly? Is that different? Why? Are you not allowed to say offensive things at all ever if you have a high paying influential job?
Donald Sterling said a bunch of offensive things while talking to his mistress who secretly was recording them and they were released publicly and he was forced to sell the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA. Was that OK?
Rufus T. Firefly:
But to me that’s not the point at all.
Of course they were not only bigoted but it was stupid to put them in an email – stupid and naive. But that was not the problem for those who wanted him out – stupidity or naivete.
He certainly “kept his yap shut” in the sense of not saying these things. His error was writing them down – and yes, in the days of letters, he would also have either written them down or uttered them in a phone call or in person (none of which ever probably would have come to light unless the person he spoke to or wrote to revealed them).
And yes, of course once the letters were revealed he had to resign. I never said that wasn’t the case, because it’s pretty obvious that he could no longer function effectively as coach after this.
The problem is the fact that these emails were gotten hold of by other people in some sort of general fishing expedition. At the time he wrote them he wasn’t even a coach and he never had been accused of anything. However, the person he wrote to was part of a team that was going through an investigation that included looking at all of the emails relevant to that team, and that was how Gruden’s (apparently private) emails came to be looked at.
I have a big problem with that.
As someone just barely old enough to remember the mainstreaming of porn in the 70s, followed by the politically puritanical/culturally permissive 80s, followed by an even more aggressive mainstreaming of porn in the 90s, followed by the era of the naked selfie, followed by the #MeToo era and the fetishization of the transgender…it amazes me that the people upset with Gruden never stop to wonder how THEIR opinions will be viewed in the coming future.
We’re talking about a guy losing his job and becoming a pariah NOT because of anything he did but because of thoughts expressed privately years and years in the past.
Mike
DeMaurice Smith resents Gruden’s description of him as having lips the size of Michelin tires.
How about in your private diary? If this had been leaked would it not matter that Truman recognized Israel as a country?
https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2003/07/16/harry-truman,-the-anti-semite-n1244774
Yeah, “Cleveland Guardians” really sucks.
“Cleveland Indigenous Peoples” is good, but it’s a mouthful and kinda hard to fit on a baseball jersey.
Wuz thinking they might have gone with the “Cleveland Blazing Cuyahogas” but that has the same basic problem.
Surprised nobody came up with “Cleveland Engines”, though.
Woulda solved “the problem” pretty elegantly, I think….
PA+Cat (4:44 pm) said, “why didn’t the . . . MLB team in Cleveland change its name to the Cleveland Indigenous People rather than the Guardians (which has drawn snickers from the other 29 MLB teams)?”
I so wish I could take credit for this, but I read it somewhere on-line [paraphrasing now]:
The Cleveland Indians need only to change their mascot/logo from that silly grinning indigenous American [okay if I use that proper noun? — it’s blasphemous, you know] cartoon, to a likeness of Mahatma (Mohandas) Gandhi: and then lo! everything falls splendidly into place.
Just say your acct was “hacked”. That’s what lefties say, even when extremely unlikely
re: personal diary, be sure to encrypt it as fictional character Dr Maturin did.
neo states, “I cut people a lot of slack as long as they’re just talking amongst themselves and not doing anything to anyone. In that, I know, I’m quite outdated – but what else is new?”
Griffin asks, ” what if he said this verbally in private and it was recorded secretly? Is that different? Why? Are you not allowed to say offensive things at all ever if you have a high paying influential job?”
Scotland shows the way; where a law recently passed makes it a crime to express forbidden viewpoints privately, in your own home.
BTW, I’m with Ackler regarding the NFL and all major professional sports. Whores, each and every one.
Barry Meislin and MJR–
Come to think of it, “Indi-Peeps” would fit nicely on a baseball jersey, and the team could still replace Chief Wahoo with Gandhi.
Geoffrey Britain; Griffin:
To me it makes no difference if it’s said in private conversation and secretly recorded. Private is private, or should be. Of course, it depends where this private conversation takes place (and in many states it’s illegal to record a private phone conversation without the other person’s permission). If it takes place in public (like on a crowded street), one should expect that it might be overheard and reported.
Griffen,
I didn’t know that about Truman. Though I don’t share it, I do think his attitude toward Jews was somewhat understandable.
Millenia of persecution has led to an attitude among many Jews that it’s them against the gentiles. The relatively few non-Jews who actively sought to fight the holocaust and the current antisemiticism growing in the West demonstrates the survival value of doing the gentiles no favors.
Truman may have understandably resented his sense that the majority of Jews saw themselves as Jewish first and Americans second, while apparenty giving little credence to their historical treatment. Unjust treatment even in America.
neo, I entirely agree. Scotland’s passage of that law is an abomination.
Geoffrey,
Yes, Dennis Prager (a Jew), has talked about this for years and how he like Shapiro doesn’t care what Truman thought in private it is his public actions that matter.
I strongly agree with this and I have problems with people that go after people for private thoughts, conversations, etc. when there is no evidence of public appearance of these thoughts.
There is little notice that this is always a one way street.
I read Gruden’s comments about Michael Sam not that he opposed gay players but that he resented the league pressure on St Louis to draft a player most people knew (including Sam) couldn’t play in the NFL. (He played one year in the CFL). Sam’s whole I’m-gay thing was a publicity stunt and drafting him became a leftist cause celebre.
And I agree with Prager.
Teams fire coaches all the time, and it’s always about the win-loss record, and sometimes they say so out in the open. If they want a cover story, they usually pick “We’ve decided to go in a different direction.” (And sometimes that’s not entirely a cover story, but in some measure true.) Personality clashes between “upstairs” and the coach also occur, and can lead to firing, especially if wins don’t outnumber losses. Whatever the cause or causes, smart owners and managers spread a blanket of soothing words over these separations, so no one loses face.
It was disgraceful of the Raiders’ owner and managers to sack the coach by smearing him with dirt — whether they dug it up themselves or just handled what others dug up for them. It is disgraceful
Neo says, “The problem is the fact that these emails were gotten hold of by other people in some sort of general fishing expedition.”
The same thing happened to Brewers pitcher Josh Hader in 2018, when someone went fishing for racist, sexist, and homophobic tweets in Hader’s Twitter account, and published what they found. The “mean tweets” were made in 2011, when Hader was all of 17 years old and still in high school. Hader made a public apology, and the Brewers kept him on the team– he still pitches for them, and threw a combined no-hitter this past September.
Teenagers gonna teenage, especially online, but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some parents are warning their kids that Twitter (and the Internet as a whole) never sleeps and never forgets anything– and some stranger just looking to gin up outrage can churn through your adolescent tweets and e-mails years from now and get you unemployed or worse.
Gruden is known as Chucky for a reason and most if not all NFL fans hate Goodell. The live audience usually boos the #$&* out of him at the NFL draft.
PA Cat:
At least Twitter is public.
I agree that it’s how a person treats people which matters, not how he expresses himself when he thinks he’s talking in private. If there’s evidence that Gruden has treated black or gay players unfairly, let’s see it. Otherwise, News Flash: Guys who play a rough contact sport sometimes use crude language in private. Actually, guys in general sometimes use crude language in private, I’m told. Years ago, I had a colleague at work who couldn’t talk without using profanity or obscenity. In fact, I could tell how upset he was by the level of language he used. He started out apologizing to me, but he couldn’t stop swearing. I finally told him that I was not his mother, and that my only requirement was that he not aim the language at me. We got along fine.
I had never heard of the guy. I like football, but not enough to know the coaches of every team. But, I support him and will defend him for the same reason that I will support ANYONE whose rights are being abused… next time, it might be me.
It starts with one person.
It NEVER ends with just that person.
And now “Biden” has the US Military in his sights:
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2021/10/13/pentagon-begins-continuous-vetting-of-all-troops-for-insider-threats-extremism-social-media-may-come-next/
Witness the power of satan. A dark matric state that you are all in
Kate,
“Actually, guys in general sometimes use crude language in private, I’m told.”
It’s true.
True story. 1971, back from my and a few buddies first WestPak (overseas deployment to the pacific, off Vietnam for a good part of the time) got an apartment in San Diego with a buddy. Sitting around on a Saturday afternoon drinking beer and shooting the sh*t with a few friends. After a bit, one of the guys got our attention and hauled a tape recorder out from under the couch. He said, “guys were back in the states, we got to clean it up”. Played it for us, we counted us saying f*ck or a derivitive like mother f*ck*r… 29 times in one minute.
We had the decency to be appalled and had no idea of the amount of cursing coming out of our mouths. We were embarrassed enough to clean it up.
ymar,
I’m sure he’s involved but humanity’s fools and darker elements don’t need his help.
Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.
How about the Cleveland Spiders from the old National League team (pre 1901)
One of my former careers involved computer regulations (I held a certification in the area). My advice to companies was always; Institute a policy and state it in writing that all emails in company inbox and sent mail folders are deleted after six months. If employees have work related emails that need to be saved longer have them create additional folders and move the relevant emails to them.
Except for certain HR and Finance related emails*, there is no legal requirement on length of saving emails, but all companies are held to whatever standard they, themselves set. If you say you save them for 10 years, or forever, you can lose a lawsuit if there are emails missing, or, like in Hillary’s case, if they are deleted. If you say you delete them every night, and you do, and no emails older than a day turn up in discovery that is acceptable. You are held to the policy you set.
Few companies I advised on this understood the trap they were setting for themselves by storing all emails for long periods of time. If you have thousands of employees some of them are saying and doing stupid, illegal communications through their company (your company’s!) email every day; adultery, credit card scams, communications with drug dealers… And jokes are the worst! And people joke with one another in email all the time. I had a case where an employee joked with an executive about cheating a customer (the customer happened to be the federal government) on pricing. There was no cheating, but do you think the judge believed it was just a joke when the email turned up in discovery?
On several occasions I have been responsible for producing emails in discovery from lawsuits. In every instance embarrassing, questionable and sometimes illegal things turned up in emails on topics unrelated to the initial investigation. Discovery is a phishing expedition and company’s get sued.
At most every company of any size all employees are trained on email etiquette, often annually. It is explained to you over and over again that it is the company’s email and you use it at the company’s discretion. Even if Gruden sent the emails from a personal account, he sent them to someone(s) in the Redskins organization, and he would have to know they then become Redskins’ property. Someone at Gruden’s level signs morals clauses and earns millions of dollars annually to do a job. Anything he writes in an email is also the property of the other party and their organization. I’ve been an executive at corporations, and I communicated with executives in other organizations. I understood everything I communicated on my company’s letterhead, phones or systems to any other’s company’s letterhead, phones or systems was considered a communication from the company. It’s e-mail. Electronic mail. If you wouldn’t send it in a letter, don’t send it electronically. It’s a small sacrifice to make to earn millions of dollars a year but have to avoid writing racial and homosexual slurs in emails.
*There are also additional rules for defense contracting and relevant documents, etc. Save those in separate folders and purge inbox and sent items folders regularly.
Geoffrey Britain and ymar, I can accept that Satan exists, but I’m not convinced humans need the help.
There is a poem by a German poet, “Die Arme Teufel” (the poor devil) that depicts Satan coming to Earth and being frustrated because man is not only totally debased, but we humans have come up with ways to destroy ourselves he never even imagined; war, drug addiction, child abuse… He returns to Hell dejected as he is no longer needed.
I should add; I hate cancel culture, I hate folks being pilloried with no trial, no forgiveness.
But John Gruden made a very good living as a public figure. In 2011 John Gruden worked for Monday Night Football.
What man older than 13 would say something like that? Would you pay him millions of dollars to work on your TV show? Not only did he think it, and write it, he wrote it and sent it electronically where it could be and would be stored for years. Would you risk your network or league’s reputation employing someone that dumb, that impetuous, that immature? And how can a statement like that not disrupt from coaching a majority black team?
Again, I hate cancel culture, but he violated his contract. He is no longer effective as a coach. To his credit, he appears to understand this.
@ Geoffrey – it’s no longer just military and guys (presumably adults) in general.
The first time one of my boys, then in HS in the nineties, said something in front of me that raised my eyebrows, I asked where he got that kind of language, because he didn’t hear it from us, and we didn’t allow movies or TV shows with, shall we say, modern views.
He explained, “It’s what we hear all the time at school; we usually stop at the door and remind ourselves we’re back at home, and today I forgot.”
My favorite old (very old) joke about foul language is this: When a couple of women stepped into the elevator, the man inside respectfully removed his hat. As the car started moving, one of the women let loose a string of raunchy words. The man carefully replaced the hat on his head.
@ Griffin > “The you got this. Wrongthink bad, very bad, actual bad behavior not so much.”
There is some synergy between this and the Loudon County School Board story.
Good thinking at Griffin’s link, pretty much in line with Neo’s.
I frequently brief state officers and employees on our state’s ethics and conflict-of-interest laws. One of my stock lines is to tell folks that the “e” in “email” really stands for “evidence.” Digital is forever; once you hit the send button whatever mutterings you put down in writing now belong to the world, which can use those mutterings in any way it wants. And still, every six months or so there’s a headline condeming some poor schmuck’s “inflammatory comments” in an email. Lesson: if you’re going to say something nasty about someone, do it in person – it’s far safer.
Yeah, but Goodell is a clueless anti-football pussy.
No argument there, Cappy.
As a freshly minted engineer in 1986 I came to the realization that emails are likely to last forever and have since acted accordingly. Which is to say I never put anything in an email that I wouldn’t say in mixed company.
I hadn’t really thought about scanning old e-mails, but it’s theoretically possible.
I’ve literally never really thrown out any old e-mails, they just got backed up and zipped (in some manner or another), as they compress down considerably — ca. to 2-3% of original size at most, probably 1% (I have likely gotten rid of some e-mails with sizeable noncompressing attachments, I would say, but that’s it — not text-only non-spam mail at all)
Now, as to accessible, well, most of the 90s ones are on Thunderbird (IIRC) or Netscape. How easy to access those would be I have no idea. But, unzipped, they can probably still be scanned for text content even if not pulled into a program and accessed as mail.
Mind you, they are all now stored on 20+yo CDs I burnt back in the late 90s, so those might be of limited readability, too, though they have been in a cool, dry, and generally dark environment for all that time, so not an awful lot of bit-rot to strike them down.
The simple fact, is, you can probably put the entire content of any and all pure TEXT you have created in your entire lifetime — even uncompressed — onto a tenth of a modern hard drive or even much less than that, if you’re not a regular writer such as myself or Neo. Compress it, and modern compression techniques will crunch it down to about 3% (zip format) or even 1% (7z format) of its uncompressed size.
TBH, there is zero reason, really, to even think of getting rid of it. Text is just absurdly tiny given modern storage capabilities.
Yeah, some people just think of that as “clutter”, and toss it, but I am more of a “if I destroy it, there is no possible way to get it back. If I don’t NEED the space it’s using somehow, then why destroy it?”. Yeah, I have Scots in my ancestry, thanks. 😛
^^— What he said about text and hard drives and typing output of a lifetime.
Typing away here on a iPad Pro with 2TB of storage. That’s ~1.3M 500 page books.
Source: http://www.franca.com/cmps002/2lect/hardware/how_much_memory.htm
That’s uncompressed. As O Bloody Hell says, compressed text a whole other ballgame.
The real game in town is Video. Any new devices on the market have to be able to handle a reasonable amount of downloaded video. So this is where we see performance and storage limits in our electronic gear.
Compared to the storage requirements for compressed video, compressed audio and uncompressed text are virtually infinitesimally tiny and meaningless.
The 2TB I mentioned above would store 15.8 years of serviceable recording quality speech in 32kbs bit rate mp3. At 64kbps and ~8 years of recording time quality would be near perfect.
Source: https://www.sounddevices.com/audio-recording-calculator/
Take it as a given that it’s a solved problem for Big Brother to record everything you say and store it forever and do automated scans of it.
Gruden is forced out for un-PC slurs in his private emails.
What should be done with these “public servants” then?
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/10/14/emails-reveal-nebraska-ed-bureaucrats-disdain-for-parents-in-pushing-radical-sex-ed-curriculum/
I’m not sure what to make of this (NTB has suggestions), but the Gruden post seemed like a logical place to take note of it.
https://notthebee.com/article/this-mom-found-an-insane-list-on-her-woke-sons-laptop-where-he-listed-the-sins-his-classmates-had-committed
If this keeps up –
https://babylonbee.com/news/nfl-removes-all-coaches-players-fans-who-have-ever-said-a-bad-word-only-tim-tebow-remains
I just checked in at the Althouse site.
Seems that some students were horrified to see Laurence Olivier play Othello in blackface ! The film dates back to 1965.
Morgan Freeman played Othello at a Shakespeare in Central Park performance years ago. At the time, Freeman was sporting a conspicuous Afro. The audience started screaming out for Morgan to sing Jimi Hendrix numbers.
Olivier’s lips are as large as Michelin tires !
The real issue is that people’s LANGUAGE changes at a far slower pace than public morals, so to speak. Jon Gruden learned to talk that way when he was younger and 1) nobody really cared, and 2) there was no public record to speak of.
So he STILL thinks and talks that way. Doesn’t mean a damn thing.
The really ironic part is that the left is the one that claims you can’t actually BE racist if you don’t have power over other people. Apparently they have no clue that 99% of America has no power over anyone, so the idea that all white people are inherently racist doesn’t even pass THEIR contrived definition of “racist”