The COVID-19 pandemic has turned East Lansing into a ghost town. The Grand River strip is dotted with restaurants that no longer have bustling dining areas. People have retreated indoors to self-quarantine, shutting down most club activities. Even MSU’s museum has closed, depriving students of hours of fun on mandatory class field trips. What is left in a college town with no college?
Unfortunately, much like the coronavirus, our friends at The Morning Watch have proven highly resilient. They have chosen to continue to chase new lows for horrific campus takes. Their latest, “A Symptom of Coronavirus: Less Leftist Bias,” may be the worst one yet.
Penned by the big boss himself, Sergei Kelley, the article finds him in a unique situation. One of The Morning Watch’s goals is to “expose leftist bias” on campus, a questionable endeavor already but near-impossible when the RA boards are unused and campus events are shut down. Now that there is no leftist bias to expose on campus, where do they go from here? It’s not easy to sneak into the Zoom lectures for a sociology class in the hopes that you might record a prof suggesting that privilege is a real phenomenon.
The answer — the coronavirus is actually good.
Kelley hedges this claim at the start of this article by saying, “This is not to trivialize our situation, but a blunt description of a consequence.” I have no idea why he would do this if he wants to work in conservative media, where the default response to claims of offensiveness is to claim victory on the basis of hurting your opponent’s feelings. But make no mistake — Kelley has deep respect for the coronavirus. It has done what he and his publication never could: stop left-wing events on campus.
One of the only things that hasn’t been straight up cancelled is a BLEXIT event with Candace Owens sponsored by MSU’s Turning Point USA chapter. This was merely postponed from April 7 to April 30, which seems inadequate as projections of the pandemic’s course suggest that normal life may not resume until June or July. However, given that Turning Point can’t get 50 people to an event, the event will definitely be CDC-compliant, so maybe they felt they could risk it. (Update: shortly after publication, MSU Turning Point canceled the event.)
There is no way to read this and not think it is trivializing the issue. This article absolutely salivates over the possibility that a deadly pandemic will stop Michigan State from putting up posters about not wearing blackface for Halloween. Your loved ones dying of severe, painful flu will be worth it if we don’t have to take a bias workshop so the university can pretend it tried to stop racist incidents on campus!
This could be excusable as an awful joke if this was simply placed in The Morning Watch’s satire section. But after our B. Bunny ethered their satire section back in January, their satire writer has disappeared. Perhaps they are too scared to place this trash opinion in the “just a joke” section and instead are forced to acknowledge that their honest-to-God opinion is that the coronavirus is good.
If you want a more serious response to coronavirus from the Watch, you have to go all the way to their Twitter page. In an attempt to look like an actual news site, they put out a press release on Twitter stating that they will be cancelling in-person meetings and telling readers to wash their hands and practice social distancing. The release also said they would be “focusing on exposing other avenues of leftist bias.” I suspect that will mean watching MSNBC on repeat and getting mad all the time instead of being cool and watching classic college basketball reruns on ESPN2.
Actually though, what other avenues are there to expose? The Morning Watch is a campus site. It’s not built to talk about national issues. At The Evening Look we pride ourselves on being able to talk about that sort of thing when campus events are slow, but they rarely talk about anything more consequential than ASMSU votes.
There is one avenue left for leftist bias left in the Watch’s purview: us. If the RA boards, bias workshops, and non-threatening liberal speakers are all taken away, the only thing this virus can’t kill on campus is our website. We will be stepping up our game in these last couple months of spring semester to fill the void of leftist bias left behind by the pandemic. Expect ASMSU endorsements, analysis of this ghost town, and more responses to whatever trash comes out of The Morning Watch’s keyboards.
We look forward to being your source for MSU’s leftist bias in these dark days.
-K. Sins
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