Kermit Davis hasn't even coached a basketball game at Ole Miss yet, but liberal media are already crying foul against the new coach of the school that flies the Confederate flag. Evan Grossman of the New York Daily News freaked out because Davis (in photograph) said his players will respect the flag and the national anthem, and Jemele Hill did what she does best -- took to Twitter to call people racists. USA Today condemned Davis for "forced patriotism."
During his introductory press conference this week, Davis said:
“We’re going to be a respectful team that respects the flag and the national anthem. All those things from culture is what we’re about. It’s who we’re going to be.”
From the reaction that followed, you'd have thought Davis had endorsed police brutality. Grossman went off on the coach because nobody asked him about standing for the anthem and "NFL anthem demonstrations against police brutality and racial inequality have not trickled down to NCAA basketball”:
"Why in the world did Davis even bring up the anthem? Neither Ole Miss nor NCAA hoops has participated in the protests Colin Kaepernick started two years ago, but Davis wants Rebels fans to know that his teams won’t be disrespectful enough to care about social issues and they won’t dare step out of line."
Grossman also hates Ole Miss because its students protested when the university stopped allowing the marching band to play that old Confederacy favorite "Dixie". Also because it's a university that preserves Civil War monuments and spent $10,000 to repair one after a drunk driver damaged it.
"At Ole Miss, reminders of treason, racism and slavery are OK, but protesting against social injustice is not," Grossman raged. He and others at his newspaper (especially Carron J. Phillips) are obsessed with alleged racism.
If you think Grossman is over-reacting, it's not just him. "Smith’s comments raised eyebrows on social media," he says. Whose? Well maybe it's only one eyebrow, but it belongs to Jemele, who lives for opportunities like this. The Twitter ranter extraordinaire, author of the famous Trump's a "white supremacist" tweet, jumped all over Davis with this one:
Woooo that’s a dogggggggggggg whistle. And ole boy probably should worry about that confederate flag more than anything else. https://twitter.com/sbnation/status/976106249430454272 …
Hill is free to race-bait away without fear of suspension now that she's not on the air at ESPN anymore. She works with a whole group of race agitators as a writer at The Undefeated blog.
Never one to be left out of a race debate, USA Today believes Davis is now "putting himself at a significant disadvantage when it comes to recruiting young black players." Davis is "backing the forced patriotism endorsed by a wildly unpopular and controversial president who has repeatedly uttered racist things," writes Chris Korman." That's a wildly unpopular president who won 30 states in the 2016 election.
