Alpha Phi: So racist and evil. Shut it down!

Though liberal media outlets are beginning to notice that contemporary American universities are churning out incompetent, weak, and intellectually stunted graduates, the moral signaling and rent seeking continues.

One "A.L Bailey," a columnist for AL.com, has decided to whip up a hate mob against the Alpha Phi sorority at the University of Alabama. Their crime? They made a recruitment video showing their members having fun.

Bailey snarls:

No, it's not a slick Playboy Playmate or Girls Gone Wild video. It's a sorority recruiting tool gaining on 500,000 views in its first week on YouTube. It's a parade of white girls and blonde hair dye, coordinated clothing, bikinis and daisy dukes, glitter and kisses, bouncing bodies, euphoric hand-holding and hugging, gratuitous booty shots, and matching aviator sunglasses. It's all so racially and aesthetically homogeneous and forced, so hyper-feminine, so reductive and objectifying, so Stepford Wives: College Edition. It's all so ... unempowering. ['Bama sorority video worse for women than Donald Trump, August 16, 2015]

Presumably, sororities should try to recruit members by showing videos of white girls being lectured by illegal aliens on what racist scum they all are for being alive. That looks fun.

Obviously, the connection to Donald Trump shows that this was really just clickbait. But is there a deeper agenda? Who is the author anyway?

Some have condemned Bailey, the writer of the op-ed, for being a hypocrite as she runs a fashion and lifestyle blog. ['The video is worse for women than Trump': University of Alabama sorority slammed for 'racially-homogenous recruitment film, Daily Mail, August 16, 2015]

Where is this website? Alas, the comments and the bio don't reveal it.

Whoever wrote it, there's definitely some resentment going on here.

Remember all those bikini-clad, sashaying, glitter-blowing, and spontaneous piggyback-riding days of college? Me either. But according to a new video, it's a whirlwind of glitter and girl-on-girl piggyback rides at the University of Alabama's Alpha Phi house.

Well, it's a video designed to show people having fun. If they showed people sitting in sorority meetings designating cleanup responsibilities, paying dues, and trying to file paperwork with various organizations before putting on an event or philanthropy, it would be more realistic, but it wouldn't be a very good video.

It's not like colleges show the prospective students they are trying to talk into a lifetime of student debt videos of professors making them buy books by Tim Wise.

Not long ago, the prolific Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart observed, "So, anyway, the next time you hear a story about evil male misogynists slut-shaming a woman, take a closer look. Throughout history, slut-shaming has been driven by women, against women" [Mean Girls: Why the only people women should fear online are other women, August 10, 2015].

Here, "A.L. Bailey" compares random sorority girls doing normal fun, girly things to porn stars. But she also implicitly accuses them of being racist, so that makes the "slut-shaming" progressive and necessary, as opposed to shameful and patriarchal.

Amazing how in the modern world, the jockeying for social status, especially among women, is most often expressed in the language of egalitarianism and social justice.

If I’m completely wrong and there’s a different person with a long career of writing for various publications including AL.com who has the initials “A.L. Bailey,” runs a fashion blog, and who also lives in Hoover, then I apologize. Seriously, I would hate to be wrong on this. But that would be an amazing coincidence.

Mr. Kirkpatrick I have come across your blog post dealing with Alpha Phi sorority in Alabama. You identify the author of a column on AL.com as A.L Bailey the fashion blogger. This is incorrect. There are two A.L. Baileys who live in the same area. Both are females and both are writers.

Above, I had orginally suggested that the A. L. Bailey who wrote the post was Amy Lemley Bailey, aka The Fashionista, and I wrote:You can probably see where this is going. From a Senior Opinion Writer at Alabama Media Group -As she said in a later email, it's a "weird situation and an easy mistake to make" but it's still a mistake.

So let's be clear. Amy Lemley Bailey, aka The Fashionista, did NOT write the column denouncing the Alpha Phi sorority. She had nothing to do with it. It's simply a (remarkable) coincidence.

The Daily Mail may also be wrong in claiming the writer of the original piece is a fashion blogger.

That is why you hedge your bets when making claim you can't totally prove 100%, even when you find it almost impossible you are wrong. Because sometimes you are. So Ms. Bailey, I completely apologize for misidentifying you.

The meat of the entry and how such a column reflects moral signaling? I stand by all of it. And I've told the opinions editor that if "A.L." wants to take a crack at me here at VDARE.com, she can do it. So we'll keep you posted.

Many thanks also to the professional and courteous staff at AL.com for alerting us to the error.