Virginia is scheduled to open its 2023 football season in Nashville against Tennessee, in a state where the House of Representatives just voted to expel two young Black legislators for leading a protest on the House floor.
I wrote a column last week calling on the University of Virginia to cancel the game, given the openly racist animus behind the vote – pointedly, the supermajority Republican House voted to expel the two Black legislators, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, while sparing a White Democrat who had joined Jones and Pearson in the March 30 protest, Gloria Johnson, who herself noted in interviews that the way the expulsion votes played out “might have had to do with the color of our skin.”
Tennesseans did their best in a flood of comments on the story and personal emails to me to try to deny that the obvious racist backdrop to the votes wasn’t what it seemed.
And I’ll give those folks credit: they tried hard.
“Incidentally, 65 Tennessee House members voted to expel all three, and so the vast majority were not racially motivated,” reader Stephen Eldridge wrote. “Only four or seven who voted to expel the two did not vote to expel the white rep, so at most only a very small minority of Tennessee legislators can even possibly be superficially (falsely) accused of racism.”
A fair point, but then, that would suggest that House Republicans are just god-awful at political optics.
Johnson’s involvement in the March 30 protest made it so that the articles of expulsion that were drafted had to include her with her Black colleagues.
The Politics 101 playbook would lay out that the expulsion play only works if you then follow through and expel all three.
And the way politics works behind the scenes, the leader of the House GOP, in this case, the House Speaker, Cameron Sexton, needed to whip the votes, to use the political parlance, that he needed to get expulsions for all three.
That this wasn’t done, and the vote went the way that it did – the two Blacks were expelled, the White wasn’t – could make you think that what happened was what Republicans wanted all along.
It’s hard to think otherwise.
Basically, they’re blatant racists, politically inept dullards, or a little bit of both.
‘Actually more violent than January 6th’
For another take, we heard from Julia Hovey, who asserted that the “’protests’ at the Capitol in Tennessee were actually more violent than January 6th,” which is borderline hilarious, in terms of how much one has to torture the two scenes.
The one in Tennessee involves three legislators armed with bullhorns leading a protest to raise attention to the need for gun violence prevention legislation.
The other involves a mob of 30,000 breaching, first, the Capitol perimeter, then using barricades, flagpoles and various items pilfered from police to breach the Capitol building itself, sending members of the House and Senate, and Vice President Mike Pence, scurrying for safety, as members of the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” and used information gleaned from a tour of the Capitol led a day earlier by a Republican congressman to try to hunt down House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the goal of all of this to be to overturn the 2020 presidential election to install the man who lost that election by more than 7 million votes.
These are facts, but the facts didn’t get in the way of reader Mert White observing that “if three Republicans had interrupted Biden’s State of the Union speech with bullhorns, the Dems would have wanted to hang them,” which would only be remotely true if it wasn’t also true that the 147 Republicans who aided and abetted the Jan. 6 insurrection by voting to decertify the 2020 election had not been expelled.
Our insurrection-loving friend Eldridge didn’t like this response, which I had to make in response to a few readers who had made points similar to White, “over and over again, like a rabid idiot,” Eldridge wrote, in reference to me being the “rabid idiot,” not those who had tried to excuse Tennessee Republicans by making false equivalencies like White offered.
“What did Trump do to generate an ‘insurrection’”? Eldridge wrote, asserting that he heard Trump “tell his audience to protest peacefully and warn Pelosi & Bowser of trouble and offer the National Guard to prevent problems, but they rejected his offer because having the National Guard presence would be ‘bad optics’ for Dems.”
Eldridge, of course, did not hear Donald Trump tell his audience, on Jan. 6, to “protest peacefully.” Trump literally told his audience to “fight like hell” before promising to lead them to the Capitol, which didn’t happen only because his Secret Service didn’t allow it.
Then when Trump, upset over not being able to accompany those marching on the Capitol, was pressured by top aides, even his daughter, Ivanka, to issue a public statement telling the mob that he had whipped into a “fight like hell” frenzy to disperse, he sat idly, and quietly, by for 187 minutes, watching the scene play out on TV, before finally relenting and telling the mob in a video statement to leave, doing so only when it was apparent that the attempted coup was a failure.
And just to be clear on this one, Pelosi and Bowser – Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser – did not reject any offer from Trump to have the National Guard on the scene to prevent problems, because no such offer was ever made. And after Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made a request for federal assistance after the mob attack had started, Trump took no action to call any federal forces to the scene.
The reason for that is obvious: from the moment Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, 2020, about the “big protest in D.C. on January 6,” and implored his followers to “be there, will be wild,” the plan was to sow chaos, using the ceremonial Jan. 6 certification vote in Congress as a backstop to Trump that he thought he could use to remain in power, if all else had failed by that point.
‘We just don’t like woke murders of our children’
One reader made the whole dust-up about trans terrorism, a concept invented out of the thin air by some on the far right because the gun violence issue at the heart of the issue in Tennessee, the March 27 shootings at a Nashville elementary school, was perpetrated by a woman who had recently started using masculine pronouns.
“We are not racists in Tennessee, we just don’t like woke murders of our children,” reader Reginald Hunter wrote to me in an email. “People who you defend are mentally ill. They need mental treatments, as do you. I am not from Tennessee originally, but am a proud resident for the last seven years. You need to go to church, and maybe divine intervention can straighten out your brain.”
The vitriol from Hunter, who presented himself to me as a churchgoing Christian, would get downright hateful as the weekend played out.
“If you are trans whatever, you are mentally ill. This country and its laws were based on Christian Judea beliefs. Your beliefs are based on a devil-influenced lack of morality,” Hunter wrote in another email, in which he warned me that “a civil war is brewing but we have all the guns, and your side doesn’t know what bathroom to use.”
When I observed to Hunter that it appeared to me that he was merely pretending to himself and to the world that he’s a Chrisitian, that “a real Christian wouldn’t have the hate for others who are not like you that you do,” and that “Christ taught you to love your neighbor. He didn’t teach you to hate. You do that on your own,” he doubled down, first, on the trans hate.
“I protect children that go to a large church’s mothers day out program. Your progressive trans people will never harm children under my watch,” he wrote, as if that’s what “progressive trans people” make it their life’s work to do – “harm children.”
Then things went off the rails on the civil war thing.
“Your bias and hate inspire me to load ammunition for the coming civil war,” Hunter wrote.
My response:
You don’t even understand your own religion. Before you can try to preach it to others, you need to learn the basics. Jesus didn’t teach the hate you espouse. If you’re following his teachings, you’d understand that we’re all God’s children.
You’d understand that trans people aren’t trying to harm children. You’d understand that a bullhorn isn’t the danger to children that guns are.
You’d understand that a reporter pointing these things out is reporting facts without bias.
My only bias is the truth.
You need to remove the log from your eye before you try to take the speck out of another’s eye, my brother.
No, go in peace, and understand that I understand that your constant threats of civil war are not done from anything that the Jesus that you proclaim to follow has taught you.
Hunter, after sending me nine emails, at least wanted to end on something of a positive note – at least as close to a positive note as he could offer up.
“My last comment is, I’m not wanting civil war, just preparing for it,” he wrote. “I leave this string with, we will just have to agree to disagree. Have a good day.”
My final note back to him: “I’ll sign off with, Jesus would tell you to do what you can to prevent the civil war, not prepare for it.”
Two sensible replies from the other side
Reader Shelli Jolivette Haynes feels that Jones and Pearson “broke their sworn oath” with their protest, and that “making this a race issue dilutes the truths of this situation and will not help the state.”
“God has not foresaken us – yet,” Haynes wrote. “But making all decisions based on race and other emotional ideals will hurt Tennessee the way it has hurt California, New York and Illinois – coincidentally states people are leaving in droves. We need to clear our heads and stop the nonsense – leaders need to lead.”
There is a lot of truth to what she’s saying about politicians making decisions based on emotion. Because people are indeed leaving states like California, New York, Illinois – 500,000 people have left California in the past two years, many citing concerns over cost of living, certainly some fed up with the politics, according to reports.
Of note are the news reports about folks who left for red states, and are now regretting it, because of the politics in their new home states.
Folks on the right tend to like to use some version of the phrase, You’re welcome to come, but don’t bring your politics with you.
The more of those folks from blue states who move in and bring their politics with them who stay and decide to vote blue, the more people on the right are going to hate it, when they make the elections in those states competitive.
Arizona and Georgia are two examples of once-reliably red states that are now competitive in federal elections because of the influx of new residents from elsewhere.
Florida’s relatively recent turn to DeSantis can easily be reversed if things keep moving the way they are politically down there.
We live in a 50/50 country, most people live in the middle, but we’re governed by the extremes.
That’s one thing that people on the center-right and center-left – which is where most of us are – agree isn’t a good thing.
Final thoughts
Virginia, 100 percent, is not cancelling the football game with Tennessee, and I knew that when I wrote the article that nothing that I could possibly have to say about that would make it come to pass.
It would hardly be the first time politics would find its way into sports.
The fact that games start with the playing of the national anthem is politics. That’s not done in other countries other than the U.S. and Canada in games and matches in domestic leagues.
Major League Baseball moved the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to the passage of a restrictive voting law in Georgia. The NBA moved the 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte after that state’s legislature passed anti-LGBT legislation.
As far back as 1993, the NFL moved the Super Bowl from Arizona after that state refused to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a paid holiday.
So there is historical precedent, but … nah, it ain’t happening, Virginia ain’t getting out of this game.
There’s too much money involved to make that call. Virginia is getting a reported $1.5 million to play the game at the neutral site in Nashville, and ostensibly would have to buy its way out if the decision were made to cancel.
That $1.5 million would represent roughly 10 percent of what Virginia Football brings in from ticket sales in a given year, so, not an insignificant amount of money there.
Not that it matters to probably anybody reading this, but the line we’re drawing is – we’re not going to cover the game in any way, shape or form.
No previews, no game recaps, analysis, nothing.
Given that stories on UVA athletics represent around 40 percent of our daily traffic, this is … something.
No worries, though. The rest of the UVA athletics media world will, no doubt, have plenty to say about the game.
Ours will be a lonely stand that will almost certainly amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things.
But it will be a principled stand.
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Chris Graham
