Clay Travis chronicles how Silicon Valley leftism infested ESPN, Sports with biased politics
I remember taking a part-time back in the mid- to late 90’s cleaning a bowling alley at night and during that time, ESPN would play throughout the building. Over a few hours of vacuuming, sweeping and mopping, the loop of repeated Sport Center clips would make my brain hurt.
Looking back though, it was a eye-opening moment: ESPN was scamming their audience into believing they were a 24 hour outlet of sports news and coverage. Much of the time was devoured with reruns of the same shows, over and over and over again.
Fast forward to 2018 and Clay Travis has burst another bubble for me with his new book “Republicans Buy Sneakers Too.”
Travis chronicles the assault from the left, social media and outlets like CNN over a remark he made on Brooke Baldwin’s show when he repeated his “motto”: I only believe in two things completely: the First Amendment and boobs.
Queue the outrage.
Check out the clip below.
What Travis outlines is a much deeper shift in the sports culture: New York liberalism in journalism has been replaced with the leftism of Silicon Valley. ESPN and sports outlets dominate the list of most expensive channels for providers, with each of us paying $8 for ESPN.
In just the early chapters of “Republicans Buy Sneakers Too,” Travis explains how the ratings collapse and perpetual outrage on Twitter fueled a new approach to getting attention. Moreover, in the wake of President Trump’s surprise in win 2016, the bias of sports reporters was ramped up.
Travis notes of sports media that “80.4 percent voted for Hillary Clinton, 9.8 percent didn’t vote, 5.9 percent voted for a third party, and just 3.9 percent voted for Donald Trump.”
Yes, 96.1% of sports journalists did NOT vote for Trump, so Travis clubs them over and over again with examples of their divisive bias: Michael Sam, the heroism of Caitlyn Jenner, a Barack Obama townhall, the firing of Curt Schilling, the Rush Limbaugh controversy, the forced apology of Don Jones and others.
Travis labels Disney’s sports machine “MSESPN.”
“The problem was ESPN’s collapsing business model left the network flailing. It had no idea how to respond to social media, so ESPN chose to overinflate the significance the company placed on it, leading to sports becoming just like politics,” Travis writes, later adding that “Listening to Twitter backfired in a big way. Social media isn’t saving companies like ESPN; it’s killing them.”
Then there’s the NFL, kneeling during the anthem and the “lionization” of Colin Kaepernick.
There’s a lot of content before Travis gets to the overrated player with “Police are Pigs” socks: Curt Schilling vs Jemele Hill is really interesting.
Travis uses the best strategy to destroy Colin’s protest, quote him:
“One thing that Fidel Castro did do is they have the highest literacy rate because they invest more in their education system than they do in their prison system, which we do not do here, even though we’re fully capable of doing that….We do break up families here. That’s what mass incarceration is. That was the foundation of slavery, so our country has been based on that as well as the genocide of Native Americans.” – November 2016.
“There’s a lot of things that need to change. One specifically? Police brutality. There’s people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. People are being given paid leave for killing people. That’s not right. That’s not right by anyone’s standards.” – August 2016
“There is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police. So that’s a large part of it and they’re government officials. They are put in place by the government. So that’s something that this country has to change. There’s things we can do to hold them more accountable. Make those standards higher. You have people that practice law and are lawyers and go to school for eight years, but you can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That’s insane. Someone that’s holding a curling iron has more education and more training than people that have a gun and are going out on the street to protect us.” – August 2016
Travis gives you more: comments on Trump and Hillary, never actually voting, “bodies in the street” remarks and then Jason Whitlock’s assessment of Kaepernick as “Twoke, Twitter woke.”
Truly great stuff.
Overall, “Republicans Buy Sneakers Too” is read meat for the tribe and not something reviewers on the left would even give a fair shake. He’s honest and pro-sports: “Where you were born, who your dad or mom is, how much money you have, where you went to school, all of it is stripped away, and we get fair and equal competition. The best (or woman) wins.”
YES!
The SJWs can now scream “NO!” and handout participation trophies in a safe space.
For that alone, it’s worth your time.
photo/ twitter
