The Morris North Star embarrasses us once again


I completely missed this when it happened, but our local conservative trolls got kicked off the air of the campus radio station a few weeks ago. KUMM allows and encourages student groups to broadcast on our station, and the right-wingers took advantage of that, as is their right. That would have been fine if they’d gone on the air to talk about their political views, but instead, it was their childish version of talk-radio hate speech. They used their time slot to rail against gay and transgender people, and the station manager yanked their show, called “Deplorable Radio”, off the air.

The two hosts of the show, Brandon Albrecht and Tayler Lehmann, are also on the masthead of the alternative Trump-loving student paper, the Morris North Star. Here’s what pissed off the station manager:

“Everybody knows everybody here at Morris. Like, definitely, you see one tranny that’s trying to punch someone, you know it’s automatically that one guy, that you know, I’m talking about. I bet you know. I’m not going to dox anybody and name them on air. But you two know if I say the tranny who looks like he’s going to punch someone.”

Like he says, we know everyone here at Morris, some better than others. I scarcely know any of the North Star clique and probably know the members of MOQSIE slightly better, and that rant made no sense at all. I’m trying to picture who among our small transgender community would look like they’re wanting to punch anybody, and drawing a complete blank. They had events to celebrate coming out week a short while ago, I attended some, and the opposite is true: everyone in that group was actively trying to avoid the right-wing thugs. Those nasty people were actively scheduling their own counter-programming to protest the existence of sexual diversity on campus; MOQSIE put on an informational session on respecting gender differences, for instance, and the North Star scheduled a panel on the “oppression olympics” right afterwards (they concluded that the most oppressed group on campus was white men, of course).

Surprisingly, the entire encounter at the radio station was recorded on video.

The station manager overstepped their (by the way, the City Paper source did not use the correct pronoun for the station manager) bounds with the claim that “tranny” is prohibited by the FCC; it is not. It is still hate speech, and they were entirely within their bounds to appropriately shut down the use of campus facilities to broadcast hate. The FCC doesn’t prohibit saying “Sieg Heil” on the air, either, but if Nazis were doing a radio show here, I would hope someone would step in and say “NO.”

Also weird: one of the things that the thugs were babbling about is how few and weak leftists were on our campus.

As one host observed that the school’s left-wing “Antifa” presence is nicer than branches found elsewhere, host Brandon Albrecht said Morris leftists are merely more timid, because there were fewer of them.

But then you read the comments, and you get stuff like this:

I used to attend U of M Morris and it’s essentially a school full of communists and socialists. The students are so far beyond the left that they were actually threatening students like myself who voted for trump. That school is not a school to educate it’s a school to silence free speech and push their agenda

Which is it? Do we have an overwhelmingly liberal student body, or are we weak and timid?

I’m glad to see somebody standing up to the North Star. This is the same right wing group that called a cop on me a while back for allegedly destroying their newspapers (I didn’t, and they had no evidence) and had me hauled off to the station to make a statement, so I have no sympathy at all for them — being asked to stop spewing hatred on the radio is a reasonable request, one that they’re unable to fulfill.

Comments

  1. birgerjohansson says

    “Leftie” here presumably means someone with a more modern outlook than Monty Burns?
    I grew up when the were real lefties around, as in communists who thought Mao was great. I am not impressed by the complaints of the north star.

  2. birgerjohansson says

    Virtual hordes? Like the ones that interact with electrons in Quantum?
    They briefly exist by borrowing energy from the vacuum, then fade again.

  3. Tinjoe says

    Using all your Freethoughtblog ad money to buy a radio station to silence their free speech is going too far.

  4. birgerjohansson says

    ” allegedly destroying their newspapers ”
    -You let your shadow fall on the newspapers, thus making them unclean and all liberally.

  5. Zeppelin says

    Which is it? Do we have an overwhelmingly liberal student body, or are we weak and timid?

    The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. […] However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

  6. birgerjohansson says

    I get it. The university is being infiltrated by androgynous humanoids from Gethen. You can only look through their telepathic camouflage if you possess a more primitive brain.

  7. jrkrideau says

    Ah those poor little boys. Not being allowed to use hate speech on the University’s radio station.

    I thought the police person was a nice touch.

    As birgerjohansson says those three boys probably have never meet a real leftie. When I was at university I had a prof who organized a memorial service for Enver Hoxha and my girlfriend’s older sister had named her two cats Stokely and Mao.

  8. whheydt says

    About things banned from the radio, this story is from my father…. During WW2, the song “Right in Der Fuhrers Face” was banned from radio play, due to the use of the Bronx Cheer in the song. Despite this (according to my father) Arthur Godfrey played it every morning at 6 AM. He got away with it because he was too popular to go after for doing so.

  9. lumipuna says

    one host observed that the school’s left-wing “Antifa” presence is “nicer” than branches found elsewhere

    Everyone knows most college campuses nowadays are terrorized by roving gangs of violent antifa. If that doesn’t match your lived experience as a college student, it means your campus must be an anomaly. Just trust the experience of these random other students at your campus.

  10. says

    I’ve been challenging that contradiction (that we’re both pathetically weak and wildly dangerous all at the same time) for years when wingnuts visit my blog or when we cross paths on Facebook posts. It was in one of those “discussions” way back in maybe 2008 or so that I heard someone say for the first time, “I don’t care that they’re contradictory. I believe that they’re both true, so they are.” It was, at the time, the closest I’d ever come to seeing Orwellian Doublethink in real life. In retrospect, it’s obvious that I didn’t find the moment anywhere near as scary as I should have.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    If you can harness that doublethink for commercial purposes, you can get rich while turning the Trumpistas into a real ( instead of imagined) marginalised lumpenprolitariat.
    Yum.

  12. Jeremy Shaffer says

    I’m trying to picture who among our small transgender community would look like they’re wanting to punch anybody, and drawing a complete blank.

    Maybe the North Star guys simply provoke an expression of “I’m about to punch someone” in those they encounter, and for reasons they no doubt lack the self-awareness to figure out why.

  13. Moggie says

    Violence against trans people is all too common, and with “the tranny (sic) who looks like he’s going to punch someone”, it sounds like this turd is setting up a “self defence” excuse for such an attack.

  14. Vivec says

    See also: the liberals are the tools of powerful globalists that are capable of dropping billions of dollars to pay individual protestors….but are also incapable of swinging elections consistently in favor of said globalists

  15. Snoof says

    Vivec @ 22

    See also: the liberals are the tools of powerful globalists that are capable of dropping billions of dollars to pay individual protestors….but are also incapable of swinging elections consistently in favor of said globalists

    We also see it applied the other way around, too: Christians are the dominant majority in the United States and hence the law should reflect their practices, but they’re also a tiny persecuted minority beset by foes on all sides and thus require protection from democracy and other forms of mob justice.

  16. emergence says

    And of course they think that white men are somehow the most oppressed group in existence. American Indian tribes are continuously cheated out of their land, LGBT people are disowned by their families, assaulted, and murdered simply for being who they are, black people are trapped in multi-generational poverty due to the lingering effects of redlining policies, dreamers need to fight just for the right to live in the country they grew up in, and women are the primary victims of domestic abuse and sexual assault, but apparently these pasty douchebros think being criticized by the aforementioned groups makes white men the real victims.

    Do you know how long these fuckers have before they can graduate PZ?