In the final seconds of the 2009 film The Blind Side, Leigh Anne Tuohy,
played by Sandra Bullock, reflects on the murder of a 21-year-old black
athlete in a local housing project. The young man had dropped out of school,
fallen in with the wrong crowd, and died in a gang-related shooting. That
could have been my son Michael, Leigh Anne says right before the credits
roll. I suppose I have God to thank for that.
A decade later, its hard to imagine a film from a major studio ending that
way. The film began with Leigh Anne Tuohy seeing a homeless teenager named
Michael Oher walking down the street in the cold. She and her husband Sean
decided to take care of him. Finally, after years of sacrifice, Oher goes to
college and eventually goes on to become a successful NFL player.
In 2009, when audiences werent lobotomized by procedurally generated Marvel
slop, that plotline resonated. The Blind Side made over $300 million on a
relatively small budget. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar, although as she herself
admitted during filming, her acting wasnt even that good. Leigh Anne Tuohy
used the films success to help children find foster homes on social media.
Outside of a few whiny articles on NPR or The Daily Beast, people loved the
movie.
In the years that followed the films release, though, the tone changed. As
Barack Obama set race relations in this country backward by 50 years,
academics the source of most bad ideas and cynicism in the world for some
reason began obsessing over The Blind Side. They kept writing about it
years after everyone else had moved on. In 2015, for example, a Clemson
professor wrote this article in the journal Studies in Popular Culture.
Heres the title: Racial Discourse in The Blind Side: The Economics and
Ideology Behind the White Savior Format.
That same year, a University of New Mexico professor authored a piece
entitled The White Cinematic Lens: Decoding the Racial Messages in The Blind
Side.
As the years progressed, so did the Lefts obsession with The Blind Side.
Their fixation continued after the Obama years. In 2019, a professor at Texas
State University somehow attempted to connect Donald Trump with The Blind
Side, with a piece entitled Colorblind Racism, The Trump Effect, and The
Blind Side. If you want to lose 50 IQ points, you can read the abstract
online.
That same year, in 2019, the popular YouTube channel Be Kind Rewind
released this video, explaining that the movie has a white savior problem:
Got it? The film should have been about all the people who didnt house or
educate or care about Michael Oher. It should have been about the kids who
played basketball with him. Why? Because theyre black, and the family that
took care of Michael Oher is white. Thats the level of analysis.
All of these articles and videos and plenty more examples I could have used
demonstrate that The Blind Side triggered a deep, underlying pathology
that tortures the supposedly intellectual Left. They simply cannot tolerate
the films message. To this day, they cannot get over it. And they definitely
cant allow any other major studio to make a film like it.
In the past few days, predictably, this effort has entered a new, somehow
even more demented and tragic stage. Michael Oher filed a legal complaint
against the Tuohys. The media is promoting it relentlessly. They could not be
more thrilled by this development. Watch:
The crux of the legal complaint is that the Tuohys tricked Michael Oher into
thinking he was adopted when, in fact, the Tuohys simply had a
conservatorship over him, allowing them to take most of his money. So,
theyre not good-hearted white people helping out a black kid. Theyre evil
white supremacist thieves. Thats the idea.
Before we get into the actual complaint, a couple of points. First of all,
that report you just saw implies that the Tuohys defrauded Oher because they
wanted money. What they dont mention is that the Tuohys are extraordinarily
wealthy. In fact, theyre far wealthier than Oher has ever been, even after
his NFL career. But were expected to believe that this family which is
worth well over $200 million schemed to rip off Michael Oher.
Is that plausible? Right away, it doesnt pass the smell test, as I said a
few days ago. It sounds a lot like a washed-up athlete who burned through the
cash he made in the league, and now hes looking for a payday and some
relevance. And indeed, Ohers claim is especially suspicious, since according
to the Tuohys, Oher has been shaking them down for $15 million for a long
time now. Allegedly, he filed this lawsuit only after trying to get the quick
cash from a family he knows is rich, and which still loves him.
But there are more problems with this complaint, beyond the ones I just
mentioned. For this accusation to make sense, the Tuohys would have had to
see this homeless teenager walking on the side of the road, and say to
themselves, this kid is going to make us rich. His grades are terrible. No
college program is interested in him. His father abandoned him. His mother is
a drug addict. But hes going to make us a lot of money some day. And then
theres going to be a movie about him, and well get royalties from that. And
through all this, as they raise him and send him to college, Oher is
blissfully unaware of this scheme for more than a decade. And then it hits
him.
Quoting from Ohers legal complaint:
The lie of Michaels adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators
Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the
expense of their Ward, the undersigned Michael Oher. Michael Oher
discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February
of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he
consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of
the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familiar relationship
with the Tuohys.
So, the claim is that Michael Oher realized only in February of 2023 that he
hadnt been legally adopted. It took him until this year to figure that out.
Is that possible?
Corporate media is certainly buying it, with no skepticism whatsoever. NBC
wrote up the allegations without applying any form of scrutiny. MSNBC wants
you to know that this is all your fault.
Ohers lawsuit is an indictment of movie audiences that over and
over again lap up stories about white people saving some downtrodden
Black person.
You might listen to that quote from the MSNBC article and wonder what
universe MSNBC is living in. Because in this universe movies about white
people saving black people are extremely rare. And at this point basically
non-existent.
For its part, The Guardian brought out the big guns. They report that, The
Blind Sides white savior tale was always built on shaky ground. According
to the piece:
The movie version of The Blind Side has come to represent a low
point for the white savior trope the unlikely story of the rich
white lady who turns a downtrodden Black teen hulk into an improbable
Sunday pro. Jeffery Montez de Oca, the founding director of the
Center for Critical Study of Sport at the University of Colorado in
Colorado Springs, took aim at the films framing of adoption as a
signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of
domination that not only make charity possible, but also creates an
urban underclass in need of charity. In her seminal tome White
Fragility, Robin DiAngelo excoriates the film as fundamentally and
insidiously anti-Black.'
What all these stories have in common is that they dont interrogate the
claims in Ohers lawsuit at all. The media is so giddy that The Blind Side
is under attack that they dont care to do any actual journalism. They just
trot out the usual fake experts to call it racist, as theyve been doing for
a decade.
Inside Edition even got in touch with the actor who portrays Michael Oher in
the film, to ask him whether Sandra Bullock should surrender her Oscar. A
question so stupid that the actor should respond by laughing hysterically,
but thats not exactly what happens:
Notice the snark at the end. The movie grossed over $300 million, the anchor
notes, implying that the Tuohys somehow received all of that money, or even a
significant amount of it. In reality, they received less than 3% of the
proceeds, which is nothing compared to the $200 million they sold their
company for. This is the level of reporting were seeing on this, with one
exception.
Over at The Blaze, Jason Whitlock decided not to simply rewrite Ohers
complaint to push a narrative. He wrote some fantastic articles on this topic
you should read, and he motivated me to personally go and read some of the
many pieces of documented evidence contradicting Michael Ohers claims. These
are pieces of evidence that every major media outlet is ignoring.
For example, Heres what Oher wrote in his memoir in 2012:
Since I was already over the age of eighteen and considered an
adult by the state of Tennessee, Sean and Leigh Anne would be named
as my legal conservators. They explained to me that it means pretty
much the exact same thing as adoptive parents, but that the laws
were just written in a way that took my age into account. Honestly,
I didnt care what it was called
My mother was going to be at the
hearing to agree that she supported the decision to have the Tuohys
listed as my next of kin and legal conservators.
That was more than a decade ago. Michael Oher, an adult in his mid-20s at the
time of that memoirs publication, clearly acknowledges the distinction
between being adopted and being a legal conservator. He admits that he was
NOT adopted. He uses the term conservators several times in the book. But
were told to believe that more than ten years later, he finally decided to
look into it and realized he had been tricked. Were supposed to believe that
he just realized some truth that he himself had already publicly acknowledged
in a book he published over ten years ago.
So how was Michael Oher supposedly not aware of any of this? Did he not read
his own memoir? Did he not watch the movie The Blind Side? Theres a scene
in the film where Leigh Anne establishes legal guardianship over Michael
Oher. Theres no scene where she says that shes legally adopting him. Why is
that?
To be clear, I cant say for sure who is right or wrong in this case, though
I have my very strong suspicions. It wouldnt surprise me if all parties
concerned are at least partially in the wrong to some extent. Thats usually
how these kinds of conflicts go. And if the media wants to tell us that the
Tuohys arent really saviors, I would certainly agree with that. Theres
only one Savior, and his name isnt Tuohy. But then again, the Tuohys never
claimed to be saviors. They also never claimed to be saints or martyrs. They
did a nice thing for a kid who needed help. Thats a fact. And thats all.
Does this conflict stem from the fact that although the Tuohys became Ohers
guardians and treated him like a son, they dont intend to actually pass
their fortune down to him because they want it to go to their actual kids? Is
Michael Oher upset that hes not now, today, as a 37-year-old man, reaping
the financial benefits of being a blood relation to the Tuohys? These are
purely speculations. But I think reasonable ones.
The key point is that the medias complete lack of curiosity on all of these
obvious red flags tells you everything you need to know about the Lefts
perspective on race. A decade ago, only a handful of insufferable outlets
complained about The Blind Side. Now all of academia and the major media
outlets are doing it. Theyre united to smear a family that helped save a
young black teenagers life, without any regard for facts or contrary
evidence. After eight years of Barack Obama, and all those BLM riots and
George Floyd funerals, weve arrived at this moral guidance: Let the black
teenager on the side of the road freeze to death. Dont help him, or youre a
racist.
At least now we have some clarity from the party of Black Lives Matter, and
from the corporate media. Somehow a sports movie from 2009 has led them all
to admit what they really think. Better to leave the black kid languishing in
the gutter than reach out and help him. Better to look the other way than be
a white savior. Thats the message coming in loud and clear. And I suspect
that a lot of white people who have watched this Michael Oher saga play out,
and who have seen everything thats happened over the past decade or so, are
going to take the message to heart and respond accordingly. The next Michael
Oher, the next disadvantaged black kid who needs a helping hand, might not
get it. He might end up suffering the fate that Oher likely would have
suffered had the Tuohys not stepped in. Thats apparently what the Left
wants. And now, tragically, theyll get it.
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Let's go Brandon!