The Other McCain

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Amanda Marcotte: College Kids Are ‘Under Assault From Reactionary Forces’

Posted on | November 11, 2015 | 100 Comments

The notorious madcap feminist offers an interesting — and by “interesting,” of course, I mean derangeddefense of the protesting student mob at the University of Missouri:

Young people are under assault from reactionary forces and most of their grievances are not about imagined slights, but about very serious problems they are facing, on and off campus. . . .
[T]he revolt against Wolfe didn’t come out of nowhere. The accusations that Wolfe was indifferent to a handful of racist incidents on campus are only the tip of the iceberg. It appears that, for months now, the campus has been the staging ground for all manner of conservative attacks on the wellbeing of young people not just on campus, but across the state.

Marcotte asserts that “young people — particularly young women and people of color” are being “victimized” by, inter alia, the university’s decision (later reversed) to end health-insurance subsidies for graduate students and the cancellation of the university’s contracts with Planned Parenthood:

The school was listening to and willing to interfere with the health care and educational access the students had, to pander to the whims of a bunch of delusional culture warriors.
While all this is happening, black students on campus are reporting a series of racist incidents. Campus protests were invigorated by the protests against police brutality in nearby Ferguson, but it also appears that all this tumult is invigorating racists, too, who are getting increasingly confrontational and provocative.

Is this true? Are there “racists” at the University of Missouri who are “increasingly confrontational and provocative”? Does Amanda Marcotte, or anyone else, have a list of these racists? Can she name even one of them? And what about this “series of racist incidents” Marcotte describes — has anyone been prosecuted? Are police investigating? Have the federal Department of Education or the Department of Justice raised any concerns about the racist climate on the Columbia, Mo., campus that Marcotte blames on “reactionary forces”? Where is the evidence for Marcotte’s claim that “tumult is invigorating racists” at the University of Missouri? Sean Davis at the Federalist is deeply skeptical:

A reported incident of vandalism at Mizzou sparked university-wide protests, a boycott by the school’s 4-5 football team, and eventually the resignation of the university’s president and chancellor.
There’s only one problem: no evidence of the alleged incident, in which a poop swastika on the wall of a dormitory restroom was reported, has ever been made publicly available. Did this incident occur as reported, or was it an immaculate defecation that formed the foundation of an unimaginable deception?
According to Billy Donley, the president of Mizzou’s Residence Halls Association (RHA), the poop swastika was reported at approximately 2:00 a.m. on October 24, 2015.
“On Saturday, October 24th, at 2:00am an individual came into one of the restrooms in Gateway Hall and drew a swastika on the wall with their own feces,” Donley wrote in a letter several days after the alleged incident. “This event happened while many students, including myself, were already asleep.”
Later in his letter, Donley noted that he only found out about the alleged vandalism incident “via a flyer posted on the walls” of the dorm.

This allegation — smeared feces used to make Nazi graffiti in a dorm bathroom at 2 a.m. — is certainly remarkable and by “remarkable,” of course, I mean, preposterous. Sean Davis was unable to find anyone at the University of Missouri who even claims to have seen this fecal graffiti, and what kind of evidence do we have that it actually happened?

When asked if there was any photographic evidence of the alleged incident, one [university] staffer replied, “Not to my knowledge.” . . .
Multiple activists on Twitter pointed to this photo as proof that the incident occurred as reported, but a Google search for the same image shows that it has been floating around the Internet for nearly a year. A reddit thread from November of 2014 appears to contain the earliest publication of the photo in question, meaning that it most certainly does not constitute proof of the incident alleged to have occurred at Mizzou on October 24, 2015.
Maj. Brian Weimer, the public information officer for the Mizzou police department, told The Federalist that he also did not personally see the poop swastika that was reported to police. When asked if anyone in the police department personally witnessed the swastika, Maj. Weimer clammed up and referred all questions about the incident to the university’s custodian of public records.

This is not a trivial matter. As Sean Davis points out, campus “hate” incidents are frequently revealed to be hoaxes, and if such a hoax helped incite protests that led to the resignation of university officials, taxpayers in Missouri have a right to know why the university police investigation was inadequate. The dubious circumstances surrounding this incident suggest that University of Missouri students may have succumbed to paranoia, believing they are “under assault from reactionary forces” that exist mainly in their own fervid imaginations.

(Via Memeorandum.)





 

Comments

100 Responses to “Amanda Marcotte: College Kids Are ‘Under Assault From Reactionary Forces’”

  1. Fail Burton
    November 11th, 2015 @ 6:00 pm

    I think it’s about time the Missouri Bureau of Criminal Investigation launch a probe into a possible extortion/blackmail scheme aimed at the highest levels of the U of Mizzou administration and the college football team.

    It’s time the NCAA appointed an independent panel to investigate what happened and how colleges can protect themselves from their own student-athletes when they become willing or unknown partners in such schemes.

    It’s time ESPN’s reporters – who are so great at investigative “journalism” as long as they find what they want to find – launch an investigation into what has now been exposed as an obvious hoax and scheme aimed at bringing down key figures in the U of Mizzou’s administration by concocting a hoax and threatening the U’s football revenues, both now and in the future. Who is this “recruit” who Tweeted he would not now be attending Mizzou? What connections does he have to the perpetrators of this hoax? What would private emails, text messages and phone records reveal?

  2. Fail Burton
    November 11th, 2015 @ 6:18 pm

    You missed the point. These people don’t care about such things. They use them to target, demonize and attack institutions. Just now you had a controversy by the usual suspects at the World Fantasy Con. First it was the harassment policy and now they’re going nuts over wheel chair access and organizing boycotts. Why boycott? Why not talk nicely to them instead of making them look like louts. The answer is easy: they want them to look like straight white male louts who just don’t care.

    Look what’s happened at the U of Mizzou alone. You have the suicide of a mentally ill swimmer a couple years ago supposedly brought on by an alleged rape. The failure is put on the U. The true failure is expecting the U to be a daycare center for the mentally ill, deal with students who exhibit poor judgement in who and how they party with and being expected to act as law enforcement. U’s are not set up for such nonsense. It’s amazing how great students are at organizing but haven’t figured out how to chaperone themselves in a “rape culture.” No, they want the U to do that too.

  3. RKae
    November 11th, 2015 @ 6:39 pm

    Your surprise kind of reminds me of this story:

    The other day I drove to the store, bought some ham, some eggs, some cheese, some onions, some peppers; took ’em home, turned on the stove, stirred the ingredients in a pan…

    …then I stood back and screamed “Oh, my God! Where did this Denver omelette come from?!!! I didn’t want a Denver omelette!”

    Look, people, if you don’t want to make an omelette, don’t turn up the heat and mix the eggs and the meat! (Same advice for other stuff.)

  4. Mike G.
    November 11th, 2015 @ 6:51 pm

    I didn’t miss your point at all. My first sentence was my attempt at levity. My apologies if your humorroid is malfunctioning today.

    Then I went off on a semi-related tangent.

    There are people out there who make their living going around to businesses and suing them if they aren’t accessible to the disabled. ( We can’t use ‘handicapped’ anymore…it’s a microaggression.)

    Down in Florida, there is a guy who is retired, rides around in a power chair all day. He has bragged about getting major intersections changed because they weren’t “accessible” to people with disabilities.

    He does the same thing to businesses.

    His rationale for doing this…he doesn’t have anything better to do.

  5. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 11th, 2015 @ 7:35 pm
  6. Matt_SE
    November 11th, 2015 @ 7:50 pm

    One thing I’m grateful to the SJWs for: the resurrection of the Marxist lexicon. I haven’t heard the word “reactionary” used in earnest in a while. I can’t wait for “jingoistic,” “dialectic,” and “proletarian” to reenter mainstream conversation.

    (fucking commies)

  7. Finrod Felagund
    November 11th, 2015 @ 7:57 pm

    They already are. Maybe not students, but look at Chicago.

  8. RS
    November 11th, 2015 @ 7:57 pm

    As a practical matter, the football players were unwitting pawns in con that reaches far above the students in front of the cameras. That said, it is no coincidence that Mizzou is the only NCAA Division I FBS school in the state. It would not surprise me to discover there is some “advisor” behind the scenes directing the agitators. Note well, this did not occur at the St. Louis campus which is less than three miles from Ferguson and which is primarily a commuter campus for the St. Louis metro area.

  9. RS
    November 11th, 2015 @ 8:00 pm

    Don’t forget “hoarders,” “wreckers” and “malingerers.” Marcotte keeps a box of Leninist adjectives handy and pulls one out when her muse takes a smoke break. Next up is “counterrevolutionary.”

  10. Quartermaster
    November 11th, 2015 @ 8:12 pm

    Humorroid – That’s a good one. I’m stealing that.

  11. RS
    November 11th, 2015 @ 8:44 pm

    As I mention below, Ferguson is directly across i-70 from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, which is primarily a commuter university. No riots there though. I wonder why . . . .

  12. Fail Burton
    November 11th, 2015 @ 8:50 pm

    How do you know no football players were involved? We need an investigation.

  13. Neo
    November 11th, 2015 @ 8:56 pm

    “Young people are under assault from reactionary forces …”

    Physicists call it the “normal force”

  14. Daniel Freeman
    November 11th, 2015 @ 9:38 pm

    I have read a hypothesis that the “collectible” art world is just a fancy way of laundering money and making payoffs in public. Things like that make it plausible.

  15. Fail Burton
    November 11th, 2015 @ 9:41 pm

    I have a new name for this race-gender extortion racket: “The Crying Game.”

  16. Fail Burton
    November 11th, 2015 @ 9:45 pm

    A white supremacy doesn’t need hoaxes to be brought into existence.

  17. Fail Burton
    November 11th, 2015 @ 9:47 pm

    And how would I know what side of that issue you work on or how you see it based on what you said?

  18. mole
    November 11th, 2015 @ 9:57 pm

    Heres a way to make the SJWs ovaries (male and female) self combust with outrage.

    Every time they say something dumb preface your answer with

    “As a person of palour I find what you say problematic because….”

    People of pallor
    The politically correct appellation for the racial group formerly known as Whites or Caucasians.

  19. mole
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:02 pm

    Ive long held the same theory, along with a number of other baubles the strangely rich seem to swap with regularity between themselves.

  20. mole
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:06 pm

    This can all be traced back to the failure in the 60’s to expel and blacklist the scum who staged sit-ins and the like on uni campus’.

    Instead they allowed these people to not only ‘WIN” they taught the moochers and grievance mongers that there was no downside to disrupting education.
    By failing to expel and blacklist they then set the stage for those same people to enter academia and pass on the plague spores in their brains.

  21. RS
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:29 pm

    He who felt it, dealt it.

  22. Mike G.
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:31 pm

    I’m on your side. I should have made that clearer.

    Although I feel sympathy for people who are disabled, having been temporarily in their position myself, I think some of it has gone too far.

    I tried to be funny and it fell flat. Such is life.

    I just make my living correcting those deficiencies and it has been good to me and my family.

  23. Mike G.
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:32 pm

    I would hate to shake that guy’s hand, IYKWIM.

  24. Shawn Smith
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:33 pm

    These days, when virtually every American has a compact electronic camera on them at all times, if there are no pictures, something like this didn’t happen. The very first thing any college student would have done is take a photo & post it to Twitter.

  25. RS
    November 11th, 2015 @ 10:38 pm

    They were certainly involved, but I surmise they were pawns used by someone else. I don’t know, of course, but the whole modus operandi smacks of some larger plan targeted at D1 FBS universities because of the money involved. It makes standing firm difficult because the universities have sold their souls to ESPN.

    Of course I don’t know any of this. It’s pure conjecture based upon the fact that a strike does not benefit the players in any way.

    And I’d love an investigation, but it won’t happen. Our governor is feckless, so he won’t order the State Patrol to do it as the State Patrol is an executive department under his control.

  26. FenelonSpoke
    November 11th, 2015 @ 11:06 pm

    Considering that the head of the student government lied about the KKK being on campus and that he has meet with President Obama four times at the WH, somebody is sure being used.

  27. Finrod Felagund
    November 11th, 2015 @ 11:17 pm

    Best Of The Web loves to use ‘person of pallor’. It never fails to amuse me.

  28. SouthOhioGipper
    November 12th, 2015 @ 12:20 am

    What I don’t understand is why everyone is even listening to these children. They are CHILDREN. Meant to be seen and no heard. Why are thy being take so seriously by the grown adults? In the world I inhabit, kids their age are literally told by adults to shut their mouths and stop whining all the time.

    Where are the adults? It’s like Children of the Corn.

  29. Fail Burton
    November 12th, 2015 @ 12:41 am

    Remember, the hunger striker comes from a family of multi-millionaires and the father is a local railroad exec.

  30. Fail Burton
    November 12th, 2015 @ 2:09 am

    It’s quickly becoming obvious this is a hoax on the level of the UVA hoax, with perhaps as few as two major players behind it. ESPN, which has been a disgrace not doing their homework, is not only signal-boosting it on their site but stretching reality itself to attach it to a U of Mizzou mix-race swimmer’s suicide a few years ago. ESPN is not pushing this like Rolling Stone did but they are buying into the fiction. Everyone benefitting from and chasing after that NCAA money is going to have egg on their faces when the truth comes out. How can ESPN really police the NCAA itself or the mafia which has sprung up on college campuses sniffing after that football money?

  31. Fail Burton
    November 12th, 2015 @ 2:10 am

    This is a major scam. Where are the journalists?

  32. Jim R
    November 12th, 2015 @ 5:46 am

    Notice how quickly and smoothly the story goes from white racists to “conservative” racists.

    This is a sham to get democrat and especially black voters energized for the upcoming election when they’ll be asked to vote for an old white person.

  33. ericdondero
    November 12th, 2015 @ 6:40 am

    it’s all a matter of grade competition. The black kids, brought in by quotas, simply cannot compete with the Asian students and most whites. So, they cry “raaaaaaacism.” Note, they did bring up the flunking out issue. That’s what’s really at the heart of all this, and what nobody wants to talk about.

  34. M. Thompson
    November 12th, 2015 @ 7:22 am

    My thought exactly. She either lacks the self awareness to notice she’s talking like some old Commissar, or she thinks they were on the correct track.

  35. Southern Air Pirate
    November 12th, 2015 @ 7:50 am

    Interesting that Ms. Marcotte is kvetching about the removal of health care system from the University. They had to do that because of the ACA law they so happily championed now for the past 6 years. You know the same racist filled law that says what university supplied was considered a “Cadillac” plan, that says those with religious beliefs are not allowed to have those beliefs in the public square, etc. I guess plenty of folks have not read it since it was passed and fail to see where it would work and wouldn’t live up to your mythology of how the world should work.

    Sorry, but you wanted this law you need to live by it or quit kvetching about folks trying to change it.

  36. Matt_SE
    November 12th, 2015 @ 8:09 am

    Their choice of language is a social signifier. Use of absurd jargon lets her pretend she’s one of the chosen.

  37. Gunga
    November 12th, 2015 @ 8:46 am

    If Steve Urkel had a son…

  38. Gunga
    November 12th, 2015 @ 8:58 am

    Yesterday upon the University Square
    I met a controversy that wasn’t there
    It wasn’t there again today
    I wish, I wish it’d go away

    When I went to school at three
    The controversy was waiting there for me
    But when I looked around the hall
    I couldn’t see it there at all!

  39. Jeanette Victoria
    November 12th, 2015 @ 9:05 am

    OMG look at what the KKK did to the financial aid office at Mizzou!

  40. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    November 12th, 2015 @ 11:20 am
  41. Ilion
    November 12th, 2015 @ 11:56 am

    Maybe resident “students” have far more empty time on their hands than commuters do? Maybe commuters have lives.

  42. Ilion
    November 12th, 2015 @ 11:57 am

    Knowing how many people *don’t* wash their hands, I really don’t like to shake anyone’s hand.

  43. Ilion
    November 12th, 2015 @ 11:59 am

    Sure. But will a non-PP condom be “free” … and come with an abortion backup plan guarantee?

  44. Quartermaster
    November 12th, 2015 @ 12:02 pm

    She’s not on the cusp of middle age, she is middle aged and she has wasted her life like every other leftist.

  45. marcus tullius cicero
    November 12th, 2015 @ 12:26 pm

    …does this person offend you? I think is funny.

  46. Matt_SE
    November 12th, 2015 @ 2:21 pm

    Gee, I hope there’s not a fire. Who would get blamed?

  47. tricknologist
    November 12th, 2015 @ 7:58 pm

    Has there even been a single incident of “hate crime” on a college campus in the last 20 or so years that wasn’t a staged hoax by activists ?

  48. RKae
    November 12th, 2015 @ 11:01 pm

    It’s the ugly truth.

    Blacks used to be held out of sports. Then the wall came down; they moved in and did quite well. No affirmative action, no “outreach,” nothing to boost their numbers in sports. All they did was say, “OK, you can play,” and they played.

    So why do we need affirmative action and outreach to boost the numbers of blacks everywhere?

    They’re going to have to face the fact that they have to approach the rest of life like their ancestors approached sports: Just get out there and play. No one’s holding you back anymore.

    So either they’re no damned good at anything but sports, or their culture keeps telling them to ignore everything but sports.

    Blacks have some ‘splainin’ to do and they’re not willing to ‘splain.

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