Yesterday we learned that a football player at Oklahoma State was too horrified by head coach Mike Gundy’s T-shirt to play on the team this coming season.
The offending shirt had the One America News (OAN) logo on it. Running back Chuba Hubbard, a redshirt junior from Sherwood Park in Alberta, Canada, believes wearing an OAN T-shirt is “completely insensitive to everything going on in society,” and “unacceptable,” and he “will not stand for” it.
Mike Gundy went fishing on Lake Texoma donning an OAN t-shirt pic.twitter.com/gq9c2I6HGl
— Kyle Boone @ ? (@Kyle__Boone) June 15, 2020
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Cowboys linebacker Amen Ogbongbemiga stands with him.
I stand with him! https://t.co/WWOs2ALxml
— Amen Ogbongbemiga (@closedprayer) June 15, 2020
Chatter ensued. Teammates piled on. In due course, Gundy posted an apology video.
Today’s hostage video. https://t.co/1bQZsBoPMm
— Let's Start Our Own MAGA CHAZ! (@NolteNC) June 16, 2020
There are probably people who, never having seen even one news item from OAN, believe wholeheartedly that it must be a den of denialist racism, because someone else said it is. I don’t know if Hubbard or any of the Amen-corner teammates has actually seen a news item from OAN. (I don’t catch much from OAN, and have no idea what Hubbard thinks he’s referring to. I don’t know if he could point to convincing examples or not. Merely reporting on BLM’s funding sources, for example, or documenting BLM’s links to Antifa, is just competent journalism, and has nothing to do with whether black lives matter. Of course they do.)
We’re kind of at the “Whatever, man” stage in that regard. It isn’t necessary to believe lies, or affirm them, or suppress truth or deny it, to demonstrate that you think back lives matter. But there are people who will accept nothing less. That’s where we are.
The real concern is the apparent requirement for Gundy to issue an affirmation that he’s now disgusted by OAN. It’s not enough to tell the athletic director, OK, I won’t wear a T-shirt. There has to be a public confession. The Stalinist trappings of totalitarianism are being enforced by seemingly benign institutions that America still doesn’t recognize as being taken over by Bolshevism.
We’ll see if Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley, a few miles down 77, can avoid a similar pitfall. He probably doesn’t have much to worry about come Bedlam this fall.
