The readers of Tony’s Kansas City, an influential libertarian blog, are generally slow to anger and even slower to threaten a boycott, but an unhinged editorial by the Kansas City Star’s Jenee Osterheldt has moved them to action. More troublesome for the Star, the boycott has the tacit endorsement of the eponymous Tony Botello.
The boycott may get traction. An editorial that begins, “Some blissfully ignorant and privileged folk think Kansas City Chief Marcus Peters should explain himself better. You know, ‘whitesplain,’” can go no place good. A mixed-race lifestyle and culture columnist in her late thirties, Osterheldt should have figured out by this time that the Star is written in “whitesplain,” better known as “English.”
For the record, Peters and other football players have chosen to dishonor the national anthem by refusing to stand while it is played. Osterheldt thinks that’s cool. She too proudly sits out the anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance. Says she in what may be the most wild-eyed sentence ever written by a paid Star editorialist, “Quit screaming about the importance of an anthem and a flag while going mute when it comes to black lives, brutality, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and white supremacy.”
Like so many on the left, Osterheldt seems to have no greater passion than attributing hate to others less enlightened than she. That she uses a fake southern dialect no more convincing than Hillary Clinton’s–“But y’all worried about the anthem, not the humans”–elevates her rhetoric from the merely crazed to the fully cringe-worthy.
As Botello acknowledges, boycotts rarely work against monopoly media outlets, but the one being organized by a person he refers to as an “awesome TKC tipster” sounds serious.
“For me, this anti-American, anti-Anthem column is the last straw. Along with the help of two employees who have volunteered their time, I’ll be contacting as many KC Star advertisers as possible today and encouraging them to remove their marketing from this paper,” writes the tipster.
The tipster continues, “I’m already talking to Nebraska Furniture Mart about limiting their next ad buy and taking the Star off their distribution list. They’re not as loyal to the newspaper as some people think. I’ve had at least half a dozen advertisers call me back and they are willing to listen to what I have to say.”
Star editors are in a bind. To prove their commitment to “diversity,” to avoid seeming the “ignorant and privileged folk” Osterheldt rails against, they will have to retain a columnist who has no knowledge of history, no grasp of logic, and no obvious talent beyond insulting the Star’s dwindling audience.
