Covington 2.0? Youth Hockey Team Gets Death Threats as Video of Them Enjoying 'Indigenous' Music Triggers Liberals
It seems there’s a new type of “hate crime” that’s sweeping North America: Enjoying — gasp! — music.
In an incident that is drawing comparisons to the recent Covington Catholic High School controversy, a youth hockey team in Canada has been forced to forfeit the rest of its season after an online video triggered angry liberals.
Members of the Fort McMurray Junior Oil Barons, a small hockey team based in Alberta, are now facing death threats after a video clip showed them dancing in the locker room to energizing music.
So where’s the scandal? After all, teams getting pumped up in the locker room before a game or at halftime is extremely common. The problem is that their choice of music happened to be from a group with Native American ancestry.
“An uproar ensued last month when a video showing players dancing to the song ‘Electric Pow Wow Drum’ by electronic group A Tribe Called Red made the rounds on social media,” Fox News explained.
“It was uploaded to Facebook and features one player banging a hockey stick on a garbage can lid similar to a drum and two others dancing while the rest of the team shouts and laughs,” that outlet continued.
Young players dancing to inspiring music is now racist, at least according to the left.
“Saw this on Snapchat today and thought how disrespectful this is, first the elder and now this? What’s next,” asked a user identified as Britney Commonda. The “elder” apparently referred to Nathan Phillips, the Native American activist whose confrontation with high school students in Washington in January sparked the Covington controversy.
The video Commonda posted has so far received over 300,000 views, and many of the nearly 1,000 comments were from other people outraged by the clip.
As happened with the Covington Catholic teens, who were criticized immediately by their own diocese when the controversy was just beginning, the hockey players in the video were denounced by their own league, according to the CBC.
“It is wrong and will not be tolerated. The display of ignorance is sad and gravely unfortunate,” the Fort McMurray Minor Hockey Association president Travis Galenzoski said in a statement reported by the CBC. “These players will know how deeply impactful their wrong actions are.”
That statement is no longer on the hockey association’s website.
However, parents of youths on the team said the association’s statement endangered the team.
“FMMHA’s media statement was released within three hours of the video surfacing,” the parents said in a statement posted to Facebook.
“This action, coupled with the failure to contact any staff member on the video about the video, demonstrated a lack of thorough investigation to the facts of the video and breached the fiduciary duty it owes to its players in looking after their safety and best interests.”
The controversy about the hockey video spiraled so far out of control that some of the team members said they needed police assistance and were receiving death threats.
“At least one of the schools the team members attend, had police presence after FMMHA’s social media release in direct response to threats made against them,” the statement continued.
“As a result of the threats towards the team both through social media and verbally, the parents of the team made a choice to not finish the season, as they felt it was too dangerous not only for the players and families, but for the host communities’ players and families as well.”
The statement also pushed back against the accusations of racism over a song. In their statement, pointing out that some of the kids dancing in the video were themselves Native Americans.
“The video showed a few team members, some of them Indigenous, engaging in a motivational dance,” the statement said (emphasis added). “This was not intended as a derogatory or racist act.”
It’s worth pointing out that the song in the video is from an electronic music group, which combines hip-hop with reggae and dubstep. In other words, the players were dancing to modern music that happened to be produced by indigenous musicians, not some sacred tribal ritual.
Being outraged over the “cultural appropriation” of music made using synthesizers and computers, by a band founded in 2008, is a bit rich. But acting perpetually outraged to the point of death threats toward kids seems to be the trend this year.
Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that a person’s skin color or cultural background doesn’t determine which music they’re allowed to enjoy, or even dance to behind the closed doors in a sports locker room.
Newsflash: Black people are allowed to like Eminem. Hispanics are allowed to dance to Tom Jones or Michael Jackson. And yes, kids between hockey games can let off some steam by listening to all sorts of music, whether they’re white or Native American or any other cultural background.
For all the talk from the left about “diversity” and “coexisting,” they sure seem to go berserk the moment anyone enjoys the contributions of a different culture.
Maybe liberals should stop being so triggered by everything that they double down on the same hatred and threats that they claim to stand against.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
