Monday’s holiday didn’t stop panelists on the Fox News show “Outnumbered” from tackling the issues of the day, including Senate Democrats’ effort to put pressure on the National Football League to change the team name of the Washington Redskins.
Fifty senators wrote a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell on Wednesday calling for the removal of the “racial slur” from the name of Washington’s football team. Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth, however, said he viewed the team’s name as a “term of respect” for Native Americans.
“It’s a historical name. But I don’t think there’s a lot of people — first of all, when is the last time you heard people use that as a racial slur?” he asked. “It’s not used commonly at all as a racial slur. It’s used historically as a term of respect to people. And I think that’s how we should remember that.”
Panelist Katie Pavlich called the Senate’s involvement in the matter a “joke,” arguing that the football team’s name has been contested for years. Hegseth concurred.
“They use a bludgeon of political correctness to whack people over the head,” he said of the senators. “This is ridiculous. The market has spoken on this. If people didn’t want to attend games, if they wanted to boycott it, they could.”
Hegseth also said a CBS poll found last year that 90 percent of Native Americans didn’t find the name “Redskins” offensive. It wasn’t clear what poll he was referencing, but Goodell has used a similar talking point in defending the team name. In January, Goodell said “nine of 10 Native Americans support the name,” a stat that was thoroughly questioned at the time. As Bleacher Report pointed out, a National Annenberg Election Survey back in 2004 produced such a finding, but the validity of the poll was disputed.
“You can have all the lists you want, you can line them up, they can have their special interests, they can be outrageous — doesn’t mean they represent the majority of Native Americans,” he said. “And the Redskins’ name has not been used offensively.”
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Image via Fox News
If that’s true, I say Alabama’s been the Crimson Tide long enough. We need to give them a team name that respects Southern culture.
The “Alabama White Trash!”
Think of the possibilities. Squirrel-brain burgoo and pork rinds at the food court. They could have a '73 Chevy pickup with Tea Party banners drive around the field after a touchdown.Their mascot could be some babe with tattoos, and her teeth blacked out.
It could work, ya know?
The sad thing is, this actually touches on a very important issue: How do we define what society considers an offensive name? Is there a threshold of how many people find it offensive, or do we somehow just know it when we see it?
But because it’s the Fox clown show dealing with this, they don’t deserve the assumption of good faith. They deserve to be laughed at, like everything else they do.
I’d like to cordially invite Mr. Hegseth to accompany me to my local watering hole on the eastern edge of the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation and let him greet my neighbors with his notion of a term of respect.
I show my respect for the anti-American, right wing, scumbags, by calling them defective gene pool extremists
How long has there been a show called “Outnumbered”? And how long have they been using the symbol “Out#”?
This is absolutely classic and perfectly demonstrates how out of touch conservatives are. Maybe someone at the FoxNews marketing conference table under 70 noticed that the “#” symbol has been showing up on the moving picture box more frequently, so he suggested that FoxNews try to connect with the young hip kids and incorporate that symbol into their on-screen graphics.
“Yeah,” said the only other participant at the table under 70. "I too have noticed that the number sign is popular with the kids today. Let’s use it as a shorthand version of “Outnumbered”.
“All in favor?”
Edit: I just found the answer to my own question. The show premiered just under one month ago.
Edit 2: I see. It’s supposed to be like The View. It features a panel of four women. Yeah, outreach with women. And they’ve got pretty solid credentials, like Townhall, Breitbart, Fox Business News, etc. Yeah, outreach with women. Yeah, that’s the ticket.