Shemy Schembechler Experiences Sudden Change Of Heart About Slavery After Short-Lived Michigan Job

Nepotism is a powerful force in big-time football, but in Ann Arbor this weekend, it was not quite powerful enough to overcome the discovery of thousands of tweets about the Woke Mind Virus. Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler, the son of the only person you know with the last name Schembechler, made it three days as the new assistant director of Michigan football recruiting before his obsession with far-right talking points did him in. Wolverines football coach Jim Harbaugh and athletic director Warde Manuel made Shemy's resignation public in a statement on Saturday night.

Shemy enjoyed a lengthy career as an NFL scout, most recently with the Raiders, before taking this job, but evidently neither he nor his new employer gave thought to what every college football fan does instinctively upon the announcement of a new hire—check the likes. Shemy eventually deleted his Twitter account, but not before screenshots preserved a massive collection of store-brand xenophobia, pea-brained false equivalences, and slimy trans panic. Perhaps the standout in this river of drool was the one that claimed "slavery and Jim Crow forced the black family to strive and create businesses and cultivate a basis of wealth for themselves and their progeny."

A few likes like these could be fat-fingered mistakes, but the unrelenting fascism on display in Shemy's tab points to nothing but an intimate, years-long familiarity with the nastiest and most hateful dredges of the internet. And what's scariest about this rhetoric might be its stickiness. There's a point beyond reason, somewhere around "Slavery was good for black families," where it feels nearly impossible to pull someone out with such quaint tools as compassion or education. They're left to isolate themselves deeper in this burrow as their worldview gets continuously uglier and bloodier.

But in the case of Shemy, a miracle occurred! He not only understands now that he was an idiot, but he can also explain specifically, with the eloquence of a seasoned communications professional, why it's wrong to endorse murderous systemic racism. After the firing, Shemy's PR firm relayed this message that came straight from the heart:

"Any words or philosophies that in any way seek to underplay the immeasurable suffering and long-term economic and social inequities that hundreds of years of slavery and the 'Jim Crow' era caused for Black Americans is wrong," Schembechler said in the statement, which was issued through a public relations firm based in Arizona. "I was wrong. We must never sanitize morally unsanitary, historical behaviors that have hindered the Black community, or any other community. There are no historical silver linings for the experience of our brothers and sisters."

In just three days at the University of Michigan, Shemy learned all of that! Maybe college isn't such a scam after all.

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