Using an Indian as a mascot is demeaning and insulting to red savages, but using a Viking is to glorify and honor white savages. Got it?

University moves to remove the Viking as its sports teams’ mascot.

Robert Spencer:

The College Fix reported Thursday that “Western Washington University may scrap its Viking mascot and is currently conducting an investigation to help make a final decision on the issue. The effort was spawned in part from requests asking the public university to remove the names of four buildings on campus due to racism concerns,” one of which is the Viking Union.

A “strong majority” of WWU’s Legacy Review Task Force recommended that the Viking Union be renamed: “The Task Force was concerned about the harm caused by asking all members of the Western community to identify with a figure that is potentially exclusive on the basis of both ethnicity and gender.” Not only is the Viking a white male, that is, a member of not one but two taboo groups, but he is an imperialist: “Furthermore, the Task Force found names idolizing conquest as out of line with the university’s contemporary values around honoring local Indigenous communities.

[I]t’s hard not to notice that the entire mascot brouhaha, from beginning to end, is not only stupid; it’s incoherent. The Redskins and Indians were forbidden because the use of Native Americans as mascots was supposedly degrading and dehumanizing…. All over the country, teams at all levels dropped their Indian-related names in order to show their respect and regard for American Indians.

….

But wait a minute. If the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians degraded Native Americans, why do teams named Crusaders or Vikings glorify racism and white supremacy? If what Leftists have been telling us about nicknames and mascots for the last few years were even close to true, woke WWU should proudly retain its Viking name and declare that they’re doing so in order to demean and insult Vikings and white people in general. After all, if team names actually glorified the group that inspired them, then the Redskins and Indians had no reason to change their name, right?

But the Leftists don’t have to worry about consistency. … In reality there is no inconsistency, because the agenda really isn’t to refrain from degrading Indians and glorifying Vikings. The real agenda in complaining about sports team names, and ultimately forcing the renaming of the team, is to further the work of throwing Americans off-balance, ashamed of their culture, heritage, and history, and accustomed to seeing it all swept away. …

The more the message is pounded into the American people that America is a racist, white supremacist, imperialist monster that has opposed the noble indigenous peoples of the world at every turn, the fewer Americans will turn out to defend the country when it needs to be defended. Every allegedly white supremacist mascot, every pulled-down statue, is a step toward a larger dissolution.

Is Spencer being a tad overwrought here? After all, no one credits the Left with the capacity for thought, so can’t this reflexive knee-jerk against school mascots be lumped in with the rest of their inane rantings and dismissed? Maybe; the evidence cuts both ways.

For instance, is the demand to remove Notre Dame’s Leprechaun mascot a continuation of a plot against America, or just another data point along the Left’s path to infantile irrelevancy? Perhaps the answer is “yes”.