Downtown restaurant Loose Change posted a repulsive racist sign as advertisement for a sandwich, or at least that’s what you would be made to believe from the overreaction of several people on social media.
In actuality, the sign was a relatively benign series of puns using common immigration language. This didn’t stop the freak-out of vocal progressives on campus. The Southern Poverty Law Center on Campus-Clemson chapter labeled the sign as “callous” and “dehumanizing”, foolish nonsense that one would assume came from the national SPLC chapter and not students as high caliber as Clemson’s. (The SPLC recently settled a $3.4 million defamation lawsuit against Muslim reformer Maajid Nawaz for, of all things, labeling him as an anti-Muslim extremist. Lest you think I’m being too harsh.)
Clemson professor Bart Knijnenburg also led the brave crusade against the evil sandwich sign, spreading around Loose Change’s Yelp page to flood their reviews. You may remember Knijnenburg from a similar heroic escapade, where he called all Republicans “racist scum” and explicitly endorsed violence against them. Clemson only hires the best.
Then there came our sister publication, The Tiger. “The fact that words such as ‘feed a caravan,’ ‘built high,’ ‘bordered’ and ‘illegal’ were written in different colors or underlined makes the sign even more cruel,” an opinion piece whined, as if “bordered with a side of pub chips” is anything but an immigration related pun. The piece didn’t stop there, demanding that Loose Change walk the Game of Thrones walk of shame. “But apologies are quite literally the least they could do, especially when said apologies consist of blundering attempts and further offenses.”
Further offenses? Refusing to sufficiently apologize to our great moral arbiters at The Tiger is not an offense. In fact the only offense Loose Change committed was apologizing to the howling SJW mob over a rather vanilla sandwich advertisement. The Tiger said the sign was “blatantly” racist in a separate piece that was apparently mistakenly labeled “News” instead of “Opinion”. But to anyone not mired in progressive dogma, the sign is not only not racist in any fashion, it’s milquetoast. The puns used aren’t even controversial jokes, they’re mild.
The terms “snowflake” and “triggered” are vastly overused and incredibly grating, but they have staying power precisely because of pathetic displays like this. The depiction of college students as perpetually offended did not come from nothing; it came from incidents like this, a series of puns based on current events that may or may not have been in poor taste, but certainly are not the vile, racist messages that leads to browbeating someone into an unnecessary apology. Clemson is often labeled as a “conservative” campus, if only because if a similar sign had been posted near, say, UC Berkeley, there would be a series of protests, sit-ins, and a full list of demands issued to the university president about issues not connected in any way to the event. Instead, here at Clemson we just have influential student groups spewing the progressive buzzwords on social media until the offender kowtows to the incessant tweets of their moral superiors.
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