Mea Culpa re: Shemy
I want to apologize to the readership. When news of Shemy's hiring hit the message board on Wednesday, and a reader referenced liking a Steve Deace tweet, I reached out to a mutual who knew Shemy better to say he should take that down. Shemy called me. I congratulated him on the position, and after chatting I told him he should take down the Deace like, and anything else he doesn't want to be associated with. He also explained on that call what he was hired to do, which I shared on the MGoBoard thread.
That I didn't know there were hundreds of racist, insurrection, and anti-trans likes is no excuse. Like Michigan, I could have taken 20 seconds to look. Had I done so I might have advised Shemy to turn down the position, because that's the kind of stuff that sticks, and it would hurt Michigan. I don't think he would have listened because this job meant the world to him. But at least I wouldn't feel like I deceived you, nor acted in a way that could be interpreted as a cover-up.
I mean, you know you could make this an actual post, right?
Seth, you have shown me enough through the years that I will never question your character. It never crossed my mind that you were trying to deceive me or cover anything up. Actions have consequences, and unfortunately, Shemy and others like him must learn that ignorance is not ok. I hope that this is enough for him to get educated on why some of the things he liked are untrue and hurtful.
Lol nice PR statement. Get fucked Shemy.
EDIT: Was addressing Shemy’s PR statement. As for Seth, thank you for writing this.
Ace?
No and to be clear I meant Shemy’s “apology” statement released by a PR firm. I already saw and liked Seth’s response on Twitter.
ehh it was a joke on my part
no worries
good on you to make the edit!
You're a good man Seth. Ace on the other hand not so much.
Seth, you’re not the one who needs to apologize. This was a massive PR botch by the AD and frankly disappointing how they let this hire happen. Personal relationships are complicated, but it’s Warde’s responsibility to prevent hires like this
All good Seth. Keep up the great work. MGoBlog rules!
As mentioned a dozen times: C'mon Athletic Department do a simple background check before you hire anyone. Bad look for the athletic department. Not hard to track radical social media posts/likes.
Speaking of which, Ace and Sam Webb are really in a major pissing match on Twitter.
All it’s doing is making them both look bad IMO. I understand Ace’s passion for this issue, but kindness often converts more than zeal. And Sam should know he’s always going to be viewed as a propagandist, whether he agrees with that designation or not. I’m sure he thinks he’s defending his reputation, but all he’s doing is continuing to feed the conflict.
Yeah, I think it was Lincoln's tweeting relative who said, " Better to not to post and be thought a fool than to post and to remove all doubt ".
The real failure here is on the Michigan side.
Seth, you acted reasonably with the information you had at the time and I suspect you assumed (like many of us) that it just wasn't possible for Shemy to get hired with that kind of extensive online baggage.
In retrospect, we all like to think we can do things differently. However, life is busy and we can't be everywhere all the time. You reached out quickly to try to head off a problem. That's understandable.
I appreciate you taking the time to post this and certainly respect you for it.
What is Seth's opinion on lepers? Let that be the judge!
Appreciate all you do Seth. I’m sure you’d have handled it differently given a second chance but hindsight is 20/20. You’re a blogger. UofM has seemingly infinite resources to deal with this sort of thing and they failed you and everyone else.
good on you for addressing this properly.
Don’t apologize but you will because you’re a stand up guy. I don’t keep up with twitter but from reading the blog I can tell everyone loves you.
Appreciate all that you do Seth, no need for an apology!
If you want to help someone tho, you need to reach out to Ace and those around him to get an intervention for the young man.
He is clearly hurting and not well off, calling for WTKA to fire Sam Webb over his imaginary coverage of this situation is unhealthy.
You made a mistake of ignorance, not malice... And you owned it. Good on ya.
So what is MGoBlog going to do journalistically to find out how this happened?
You made a mistake of ignorance, not malice... And you owned it. Good on ya.
So what is MGoBlog going to do journalistically to find out how this happened?
I don't know that the blog itself is obligated to do anything necessarily, but I do wonder if it would be interesting to at least have someone do a little digging. I don't know how much access the place collectively has to do such a story though - probably not enough. I think the central question is this - how did the most basic tenets of modern vetting get overlooked? Everything I can think of that would even serve as part of a feasible explanation is deeply troubling if not damning for the athletic department.
I would disagree that twitter likes is not the basic tenets of modern vetting. Things like criminal record, driving record, civil lawsuits, child support arrears, things that a person has actually done are really still the basics.
I agree with you.
Background checks commonly include criminal history, employment history, educational history, SSN tracing, employment eligibility (citizenship or visa status), and sex-offender registries.
Social media is sometimes looked at, but no-one is checking the "likes" of the the average Joe/Jill working in the AD. Social media checks can be risky for employers. Pictures of candidates at PRIDE rallies and they don't get the job? Pictures of candidates with young kids, or an announcement that they are pregnant and they don't get the job? Check social media and then discover that Black applicants are less likely to get interviews or be hired? These could all result in a discrimination case. Proper social media vetting requires using a 3rd party search with narrowly defined criteria. Large organizations shouldn't assign this to an intern or low level staffer. They should pay for that external service. Do I informally search for candidates who are interviewing? Yes. Should I? Probably not.
Given his name and ties to the football program, Shem should have been more thoroughly vetted. But let's not pretend UM or any large organization is checking the twitter likes of all potential employees as part of pre-employment checks. They don't. It's reasonable to do so for high profile, public facing hires. It's not reasonable to do for every hire.
Are they Michigan sports journalists? Is this the biggest Michigan sports story going in the last month?
Either you ask the question, or you carry water for the university and their screw up.
Angelique is the best positioned person to ask those questions.
I wouldn't hold my breath though.
Nothing against U-M there: it's how it is at most big football programs. The beat reporters are prone to becoming very comfortable in their gig as the years go by.
All-expenses trips to nice places for high-profile football games in the middle of winter is fun!!!
It's much better that than risk getting demoted to the Pistons' beat and sitting at DTW dealing w/ missed connections, and when you finally get to Milwaukee, SLC or Cleveland, they lose by 25 anyway.
Props for your accountability here, Seth. We all make mistakes and errors in judgement. The best path forward is to admit them and learn from them.
Carry on.
Genuine question, though not because I'm interested in sorting people into tribes/factions/etc... If Shemy calls again, do you take it?
I think there should be an Ace ban the same way there is a Yoder ban. He's no better than any other troll. If Ace had a problem with the original WTKA/Bo/Dr. Anderson pod he could have done what any decent and professional person would have done - reached out directly to the people involved. Instead, he blasted it on social media - despite these people ostensibly being colleagues and former close associates. You don't do that to educate and start a conversation - you do that for your own vanity and likes.
I'm cool with an Ace ban if it means people stop talking about Ace all the time.
Brian should get some sort of HR award for dealing with Ace as an employee as long as he did.
Similarly, I've always said Mike Tomlin should get a freaking Nobel Prize for being able to keep the antics of both Leveon Bell AND Anthony Brown in check as long as he did. It wasnt until they went to other teams that the outside world found out what complete nutjobs both players were.
You never know what someone is really like unless you parent them, manage them or marry them.
*Antonio Brown... and in his defense, he was a normal, humble dude over his first few seasons in the league.
We'll never know if it was the fame or the concussions or the Burfict cheap shot that altered his personality and mentality, but he was a different person when his time overlapped with Bell in Pittsburgh
Thanks Seth.
Not overtly necessary but more information can provide context in both short & long runs.
The Internet never forgets and seldom forgives.
Our society seems to rather point & laugh or torch & pitchfork everyone/anyone.
I wish there was more empathy everywhere - (not justifying Shemy, just an observation).
It is disappointing a tarnish again has come to Michigan football.
That said, there's no other team or school, imperfect or not - - for me.
Go Blue.
This is a better apology than anything Shemy or the University provided, so kudos to you Seth.
I really do wonder what exactly some universities and large corporations do when it comes to background checks? No one checked if George O’Leary actually had a masters degree. Obviously a different situation, but still something that seems like it would be very simple to do.
I often find myself agreeing with the sentiments that Ace puts out there but completely turned off by what a sour person he's become.
Anyone that's listened to you Seth knows you're a great guy. It doesn't seem like you have a bad bone in your body. Really no need to apologize unless it makes you feel better.
Also, I think this blog and folks in the Michigan community, at least the vocal ones, might be a little naive or in a bubble when it comes to the grand political picture. Trump is polling ahead of Biden (I know . . . ) and roughly 70% of Republicans still think the election was fraudulent. Some of the posts Remy liked were obviously beyond what is acceptable, but others were pretty mainstream memes or tweets (Ben Shapiro, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Thomas Sowell) and still cited as evidence of his blatant racism and many seemed extremely appalled by them. Maybe it's just because I have conservative friends and family in the south so I've been desensitized, but that seems like a low bar for accusations of racism. Perhaps it's just indicative of the extreme divide in this country. Sorry for the politics. . . I know it's lame to try to be more moderate or neutral these days, but I think most sane people want the same things in society when you get down to it, but just have different ideas of how to get there. I don't think you want the discourse to be sloppy and alienate, label, and dismiss those who you should want to win over with your ideas. TL;DR Shemy is probably a wack job, but it's not great to paint with a broad brush as if he represents all conservatives. A little nuance is a good thing even if it's not as emotionally satisfying. Basically, do the opposite of what Ace does on Twitter.
Regardless of the political elements of what Glenn liked (and I'll save myself from a long discussion about the quality of polling in this country especially as it applies to presidential elections), but the fact remains that it was his public twitter account where he was liking posts that showed a bunch of black teenagers seemingly breaking into a car and say "Biden voters". People are going to see shit like that and if you're going to be a face of the University recruiting young men, especially young black men, portraying black teenagers as thugs and saying BLM is a gang is going to be a detriment to your ability to do that job.
I'm not naive enough to believe the sentiments Glenn liked aren't shared by a subset, if not a majority, of the guys in the football administration. But if you're dumb enough to like thousands of them from your public/business twitter account then you deserve to be taken to task.
I agree. My point is that political affiliation is not an accurate proxy for someone automatically being racist. It's a bit hypocritical to use such sweeping generalization about a group of people since that's what racists do . . . make judgements about an individual based on stereotypes of their group. If liking a Ben Shapiro tweet is racist then we're fucked. That shouldn't be lumped in with what you described above because that's the bad faith bullshit that makes everyone hate eachother. At the end of the day Shemy is an idiot for posting or liking anything political on his public account given there's zero upside and anyone with two braincells to rub together should be able to figure that out. Why piss off half the people when you don't have to.
You kind of contradicted yourself there. You start by saying something along the lines of "the views Schemy has on a lot of things are shared by a lot of people, like 70% of republicans" and then say "its not great to paint with a broad brush as if he represents all conservatives."
So which is it?
Also you keep trying to parse his tweets to say well a lot of it is not so bad. The thousands of tweets provide a body of evidence and give context to some of the ones, which on their own may not be that bad, that when combined start to paint a picture.
Also here's a racist tweet from Ben Shaprio: "Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage."
And Sowell is pretty much wrong about everything he says. He's been discredited by every serious researcher that has reviewed his work going back 40 years.
People absolutely deserve criticism for listening to those 2 people. The first is demonstrably bigoted and the second is the equivalent of declaring that the sun orbits the earth because people used to think that, it's all junk science that has been confirmed to be junk by recent research.
I’ve read Thomas Sowell for almost 30 years. He’s one of the most prominent minds in the supply-side Chicago school of economics. I’m not reacting on anything he’s said in the political space, but when it comes to supply-side economics, he’s one of the most well respected people. In fact, his Basic Economics book totally prepared me for much of my class work at Ross.
Literally no actual economists take him seriously. He hasn’t published a peer reviewed article since the 70s. Even calling him an economist at this point is extremely generous.
He isn’t one of the most respected on any topic. Actual economists have refuted all of his arguments.
That's not at all true. All supply-side economists think he's in the same group as Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, Eugene Fama etc. I understand that demand-side economists don't like him because reasons.
Again, I'm not talking about Sowell's politics.
As someone who has an educational background in economics, supply side is basically refuted at this point. It's just a massive transfer of wealth to the already wealthy and significantly harms anyone who is not on the higher end of the wealth spectrum. If that is your thing you are either incredibly wealthy or incredibly naive.
I have a background in economics as well. In fact, I have a concentration in economics at Ross.
You may be thinking of old school supply-side guys like Laffer etc. The Chicago school is a little different in that the supply of money should be kept in balance with demand. And to think that the chicago school of supply side economics is totally refuted is just false. That school has had more Nobel laureates in economics than any other school in the world (save maybe Oxford)
As someone who has an educational background in economics, supply side is basically refuted at this point.
No shortage of prominent economists who strongly disagree. There is a pretty good case to be made that supply side policies are the main reason for the United States outperformance vs Europe.
Edward Prescott won a Nobel Prize. The US had similar marginal tax rates as most European countries in the 1970s and Europeans and Americans worked about the same number of hours. When marginal rates dropped in the 1980s American's started working far more hours than Europeans. He wrote a paper showing how the difference is the disincentive taxes have on work.
You can disagree but Edward Prescott has a Nobel Prize. His opinion counts.
Working class Americans working more hours for less pay isn't the flex you think it is.
Okay he’s not in the same group as Friedman and Smith. Like I said, he has contributed nothing of note to economics. His books are just political musings. You can’t separate his politics from his economic ideas cause he has zero economic ideas.
And besides Smith’s works are 250 years old. Friedman’s 1976 Nobel was based on stuff about the Great Depression. This is all way out dated ways of thinking that most real economists don’t agree with today.
Friedman and Smith boil everything down to the most simplistic way of looking at an issue, but life is not a textbook.
He has contributed nothing of note to economics?!
what?!
we’re just going to have to agree to disagree on this.