Remember Jonathan Butler, that University of Missouri graduate student with the super-rich daddy who went on a seven-day social-justice hunger strike that prompted the ousting of the school’s president and chancellor?
Well, it turns out that when he wasn’t fighting for equality and justice, he was stealing and saying misogynistic and classist things in video and blog posts, which were uncovered by Heat Street’s Jillian Melchior.
In a blog post from 2011, he explains that he stole “free” hotel breakfast every single day for 61 days because he wanted to get caught and be “Beat like Rodney King.”
“Now ideally in my mind I wanted S.W.A.T. team members to drop from the sky, tear gas to be thrown while I has [sic] attacked by 5 different german shepherds, and beat like Rodney King,” the post states. “But in my disappointment I was only greeted at the front by two managers.”
Elsewhere in the post, he refers to one of these managers oh-so-sensitively as “‘stubborn middle age crisis I’m a lonely old bag and I hate the world’ lady manager.” You know, because she dared to do her job and tell him not to steal from the hotel. How’s that for supporting the working class?
He also admitted that when the staff doubted his claim that he was eating the food because he knew the maid, Maria, by asking her last name, he said:
“Not knowing Maria’s real last name the first thing that came to mind was to say, ‘Sanchez,’ he says. … So was it wrong to eat the food, probably yea. Was it wrong to give a last-name like ‘Sanchez’ to Maria the worker, yea, probably.”
#related#He also posted a series of videos — which have now been deleted but can still be found on Heat Street — with some pretty unlikable stuff. For example: One where he sings about cooking up crack cocaine, and another where he allows his guest to rant on and on about how women “will lie, cheat, steal to get what they want” because “that’s how females are these days. They will just—just lie” before ultimately seeming to agree with him when he jumps in and shouts “Just lie! Just lie! That’s dirty.”
The Butler we see here is pretty damn different from the bleeding-heart social justice warrior portrayed in the recent “Most Influential Students” profile about him in his school’s newspaper, The Maneater:
“I love my community, and I love this world enough to advocate for equality,” he says in the article. “The reason why I’m doing all these things is because I’m optimistic that change can happen.”
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.