A Couple of Assholes Tried to Guilt the US Bank Stadium Into Sheltering Homeless People by Creating a Fake News Story

Most people who read my column are, like me, from Minnesota.  If you aren’t from Minnesota, you probably know that the weather this last week was – in the language of the locals – “chilly.”

A couple of guys decided it would be extremely nice if US Bank Stadium would allow homeless people to take shelter there because football stadiums are huge and the weather was deadly.

And they were right.  It would have been extremely nice.

So what they did was start a rumor that US Bank Stadium was going to do exactly that.  They tweeted how the Vikings were totally willing to open up the stadium and the city just needed to approve it.  Essentially, they wanted to force the city and the Vikings to do what they wanted by trying to make everyone look like assholes if it didn’t happen.

I’m sure they totally had several thousand cots just lying around for such a situation.

The city and the Vikings basically said “uh – no – that rumor is false and we can’t really do that” for all sorts of reasons including the fact there was a football game in the stadium at noon the next day and the stadium is not set up or staffed to be a homeless shelter.

Now it’s easy to say that they should have let folks in anyway but then you have to figure out how to get them out in the morning before the football fans started to show up at 10:00 AM.  It just isn’t something that can be done without – you know – planning.

However, because this fake news story was picked up as being a real news story, some homeless people made their way to the stadium for shelter.  Shelter the stadium was not equipped to provide.

And when the rumor mongers were called on their bullshit ploy, they basically said “why are you angry with us when the stadium was the one who didn’t provide shelter?”

Guess what assholes? Neither did you.

You were pissed about public funds paying for the stadium (I am too) and you decided that the Stadium should do something that was important to you.  Not important enough to, you know, open your house to a homeless family or work at an existing shelter.  No, it was just important enough for you to create a fake story and then act like a whiny toddler when it didn’t work.

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