Ken Berwitz
Is the entire Mizzou protest based on lies?
The first column I wrote on the Mizzou controversy analyzedthe allegations and pointed out that firing a president had zero connection toany of the allegations or the demands for the protesters. In that column Iaccepted the protester\’s allegations as true. But as the week has gone on andthe protesters have been exposed as anti-first amendment, selectively racist,and, last night, willing to perpetrate actual lies to get more attention, isn\’tit time to examine whether these incidents are actually real?
So let\’s examine each of them in order.
1. There is no evidence of the poopswastika.
In this modern era, when college kids take photos of everything,when video emerges of virtually everything that takes place on campus, how isthat there is no eye witness who can say that a poopswastika ever even existed?
Not one person.
2. Mizzou\’s student body president, Payton Head, a gay blackman, accused unknown and never found perpetrators in a red truck of hurlingracial slurs at him off campus.
Assuming that this incident even happened, how is Mizzouresponsible for what a non-student says off campus?
Isn\’t it more significant that Mizzou students elected a gayblack man campus president? And that Mizzou almost universally supportedMichael Sam, a gay black man who became the first athlete to go public with hishomosexuality?
Moreover, given that Head also reported that the KKK was oncampus last night and that he\’d been in contact with the national guard …isn\’t it also fair to question whether this story isawfully convenient for someone who has political ambitions and gains a ton ofpositive coverage for it?
And if he\’ll make up the KKK on campus — and then be forcedto retract that comment after he\’s terrified thousands on the campus and hisallegation can be proven to be false — why wouldn\’t he also be capable ofmaking up an off campus racial slur?
3. The hunger striker, who claimed he was hunger strikingbased, at least initially, on grad school health care costs, is the son of aman who made almost seven million dollars last year.
Now, merely being rich doesn\’t mean you can\’t advocate forsocial justice. But when the first platform of your demands for social justiceis that the president of Mizzou should publicly denounce his white privilege,shouldn\’t you also have to acknowledge and denounce the fact that you arewealthier than 99.99% of the people on earth?
Moreover, on the privilege flow chart, doesn\’t being worthover $20 million rank an awful lot higher than merely being white?
On top of that, the “hunger striker” — I questionwhether he was actual hunger striking too, by the way, what evidence do we haveof that? — said he was hunger striking because of increased graduate schoolhealth care costs. YOUR DAD MADE NEARLY $7 MILLION LAST YEAR, BRO. Check yourprivilege. Do you really think he didn\’t have the money for health care?
The hunger striker has also been on campus for nearly eightyears. If Mizzou was such an awful, racist place, wouldn\’t you go somewhereelse for grad school?
