The Cleveland Indians missed their chance in 2016 to win their first World Series since 1948. Unfortunately, it was their last chance. The Indians will never win now.
The franchise is soon to rebrand itself as the Cleveland Guardians. This is an understandable but silly reaction to decades of agitation by some of the worst people humanity has to offer — namely, white university professors with way too much time on their hands.
Back when I was in college, this eyerollworthy activism came to an end at the same moment as their insufferable, incessant panel discussions. Now, they have become powerful bullies, wielding a campus-brainwashed army of overcolleged but severely undereducated Twitter zombies. Corporate America cowers in the face of them — the corporates don’t care about American Indians at all, obviously, but they are completely spineless in the face of angry leftists.
I was perfectly happy to see the American Indians — or rather, the “Guardians” — ditch Chief Wahoo, especially that gross, toothy stereotypical form he had taken in recent decades. But as for as the name “Indians,” there is no evidence I’m aware of that any significant number of actual American Indians were ever offended by it.
Prior to 2020, there wasn’t even any evidence that even the poorly understood “Redskins” moniker was considered offensive by any significant number of Native Americans. Multiple surveys taken through 2019 suggested that, at most, about 10% of Native Americans were offended by it. Fully 70% said in 2016 that they wouldn’t even mind being called a “Redskin,” which I find absolutely crazy. I wouldn’t ever call someone that — the name is supposed to refer to warriors’ face-paint, so it seems a bit inapt anyway — but this laudably thick-skinned attitude offers quite a contrast with the misconception that the campus Left has been trying to create.
That alone ought to highlight the disconnect between reality and the politically correct Left’s narrow, gnostic emphasis on using proper terminology and being offended by the correct things as the one true path to salvation. I mean, who cares if you are an actual racist who literally hates black people and calls the police on them just for existing. As long as you’re a liberal and you do the proper offense-taking at the right things, you can easily be forgiven for actual racism. In fact, Amy Cooper, the infamous Central Park liberal racist, was last seen in May suing the employer that had fired her for her racism.
In 2020, a Berkeley-University of Michigan survey produced suspiciously divergent results from everything else available. Perhaps Indians’ opinions really did change from 2019 to 2020. Or perhaps the survey was a bit cooked to get a desired result as part of a long-running political activist campaign. Either way, note that even that 2020 Berkeley study couldn’t get a majority of its Native American respondents to object to “Redskins” as offensive — only 49% of Native Americans surveyed were offended.
And “Redskins” is the name that, out of all the Indian sports names that could theoretically justify offense-taking, is probably the worst. In comparison, “Indians” seems quite gentle, perhaps even neutral. It is a term used by the federal government. To me, it was evocative of the supposedly more politically correct “Irish” nickname that Notre Dame’s corporate promoters tried to push over a decade ago, deliberately omitting “Fightin’.”
So, Cleveland Guardians it is. Largely white college professors preaching European leftist ideologies are succeeding in their goal of purging all memory of Native Americans from the popular consciousness. Er, I mean, achieving social justice or something.
Don’t worry, it won’t be long before someone decides that “Guardians” is racist, too. After all, what exactly is it you are guarding? You’re probably guarding it from nonwhite people, aren’t you? Isn’t “Guardian” just another name for the police? What’s wrong, do you not believe that black lives matter or something?
Yeah, go ahead and dismiss it, but that won’t seem quite as ridiculous when it actually happens, which at the current pace of things should be roughly next Wednesday.
In the meantime, Atlanta, you’re next.
