This could easily be a Babylon Bee satire, but unfortunately it isn’t.
Professional race-baiter and ethics villain Al Sharpton responded to the routinely bombastic and semi-grammatical Truth Social post by Donald Trump by going on MSNBC and saying, “Donald Trump, himself…using the word “riggers” – Is this the kind of party the Republicans want to show the country that they are?”
Al has been particularly outrageous recently; for example, he denied that the United States was a republic rather than a pure democracy because he doesn’t know the difference. I did not, however, expect him to revive the risible “niggardly” episode that embarrassed the District of Columbia in 1999. It had its uses, though: the firing of mayor’s aide David Howard because he used the word “niggardly” to describe how a proposed city budget was inadequate—Howard was white—was the basis for the Ethics Alarms Niggardly Principles, described in the glossary under “N.” The three principles are applicable when the Woke try to ban words, phrases and innocent references because they “offend” people who are either looking to be offended or who are genuinely damaged by the racial paranoia inflicted on the public by the news media and people like Al Sharpton.
For example, I heard an ice cream truck go by our house a few days ago, the first I had heard in years. The last time I heard one, it was playing “Turkey in the Straw.” But in 2014, the race hucksters decided that the tune was racist dog-whistling. NPR made sure the ridiculous claim was given credibility, and now, as I found out last week, the old folk tune has been replaced by some generic thing that kind of sounds like that song but isn’t. The ice cream company was correctly employing Niggardly Principle Two, which says…
“When an individual or group can accomplish its legitimate objectives without engaging in speech or conduct that will offend individuals whose basis for the supposed offense is emotional, mistaken or ignorant, but is not malicious and is based on well-established impulses of human nature, it is unethical to intentionally engage in such speech or conduct.”
Al’s Trump-Deranged slime job, however, isn’t worthy of that Niggardly Principle, but the first one, which holds,
“No one should be criticized or penalized because someone takes racial, ethnic, religious or other offense at their conduct or speech due to ignorance, bias or misunderstanding by the offended party.”
…and Number Three, which says,
“When suppressing speech and conduct based on an individual’s or a group’s claim, sincere or otherwise, that such speech or conduct is offensive, however understandable and reasonable this claim may be, creates or threatens to create a powerful precedent that will undermine freedom of speech, expression or political opinion elsewhere, calls to suppress the speech or conduct must be opposed and rejected.”
Al Sharpton is really and truly claiming that any word that rhymes with “nigger” is presumptively a racial slur, at least if the speaker is white, and especially if the speaker is a Republican, or Donald Trump. Trump being Trump, he might well go out of his way now to use as many such words as he can—trigger, bigger, vigor, digger, jigger—just to mock Al. Then those who have swallowed Big Lie #4: “Trump Is A Racist/White Supremacist,” (for which there is no evidence at all) will be able to claim that the former President is deliberately evoking the slur, just like Al said. So Trump’s choice is either to avoid using “riggers,” thus appearing to confirm that he was wrong to use it in the first place, or to be defiant, his specialty, which Al and his acolytes will say prove “riggers” was code for “niggers.”
After all, everybody knows Donald Trump is a racist.
PS—If you have any friends who regularly watch MSNBC (I’m afraid I do), you need to ask them how they can do that in light of the fact that the network provides a platform for Al Sharpton. Sharpton makes Tucker Carlson, Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo and Rachel Maddow look like Edward R. Murrow. No trustworthy, respectable or ethical news organization would allow Sharpton to stay on the air. Use the “rigger” episode as an example. Let me know what they say.
Ethics Alarms 
Adds a whole new dimension to to tiresome use of Trigger Warnings.
-Jut
I think “trigger” may now be prohibited as well.
The vigor with which Sharpton shows that words like rigger, jigger, and digger trigger him makes me thing he needs his medication dose to be bigger.
And the way he took the proverbial digger makes me snigger…
Oh, the wonderful thing about Tiggers is Tiggers are wonderful things…
Ah, phooey. THAT was what I should have used as a graphic! Tigger!
By the way: my go-to rhyming dictionary online lists rhymes for “rigger” as
bigger, chigger, digger, jigger, snigger, and vigor. It has apparently banned “nigger,”which raises ethical issues of their own.
Any organization that employs a buffoon like Sharpton is suspect and such employment practices cast doubt on the skills and abilities of all others employed by the firm.
It is difficult to understand the logic of keeping Sharpton in the rotation considering the fact that even the vast majority of black people are embarrassed by that anorexic pencil neck runt.
I will take Sharpton seriously when he atones for Tawana Brawley.
jvb
Why? That’s just one of his scams.
I will take Sharpton seriously when he atones for Tawana Brawley.
jvb
Because that set stage for what was to come.. Without Brawley, Sharpton would be a local rabble rouser.
jvb
So… what should we now call the people at the shipyard who serve as the ground crew for the crane operating from 100 ft up? We always called them riggers; they rigged big items with hooks and cables, and clamps so the crane could lift them. But that was some 55-years ago, maybe something has changed.
Good stuff, and not just in principle. Who knew use of a banned word could be so insructive. (Oh, you didn’t know kit was banned? Well, you should have. On its face the word is a slur and everyone should take offense, take its etymological meaning personally. It’s threatening, will try to invade your safe space, and it’ll look at you with that systemically wrong look. The master of racial propriety and correctness, a guy that recognize rhyme when he sees it, has said so. But even righteous Al’s followers, all 2 of em, finally see him as the race huckster he has always been, and stupid in that he hasn’t learned a thing with all the racial mud slung gratuitously and vindictively at DJT with no appreciable results. (Hence the many, coordinated indictments, hence the overly defensive postures regarding 2020’s election integrity.) The entire country is wise to race-baiting, even if only after seeing it’s use has gotten the minority race(s) nowhere .. or about as far as the blunderbuss weapons used against GOPs and Trump, homophobia and xenophobia, have taken the libbies. Like covered elsewhere in EA, even CNN (well, Jake Tapper) can evolve. So why not MSNBC? Sharpton (look how svelte he is! I recall him in Tawana’s days of infamy as all pork, coyote ugly inside and out) is the worst of the politically crazed media. He is to media what Schumer and Schiff are to congress: need someone to lie straight-faced? Al says, “Pick me, pick me, I’m your man.” Can we say his days in that tainted sunshine are numbered? No, this is the hero that single-handedly sheparded $27 million of Minneapolis money to the Geo. Floyd family before George’s body cooled. He serves a purpose although the good reverend might want to, in the future, confine his inarticulate stabs at racial intelligence to his choir, the congregation is thinning.