“Jemel, in contrast, actively attacks roughly half of the country and the sitting president in strident terms and doesn’t get fired or even suspended.”
Jemel Hill is supposedly a sports commentator on ESPN. She and her brother were frequent guests on Mike and Mike and other radio shows, and they even got a new prime time show in ESPN’s line-up. ESPN continues to hemorrhage viewers as it takes a left turn with its praise of anthem kneelers and other political commentary. Jemel Hill went on a Twitter rant Tuesday calling Trump and those who surround him white supremacists. She received no real punishment for this behavior, and her superior’s lame response shows the double standard and decay of ESPN into a political outlet.
Keep in mind that just a couple of weeks ago, sports commenter Robert Lee was removed from a game in Charlottesville. ESPN worried his name, which is similar to the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, might disturb viewers. Even though the guy was Asian and very few sane people would mistake him for a dead white guy, he was punished anyway. On top of that, conservative commentators like Curt Schilling were fired for being on the “wrong” (or conservative) side of the transgendered bathroom debate. Even singer Hank Williams Junior had his Monday Night Football song pulled for making some mild anti-Obama statements.
Jemel, in contrast, actively attacks roughly half of the country and the sitting president in strident terms and doesn’t get fired or even suspended. The only discipline she gets is being “talked to,” which means nothing happened. Besides the double standard of punishing right-wing commenters or attacking a guy for simply having the wrong name, this also shows the ridiculous nature of attacks from the left.
Even though the guy was Asian and very few sane people would mistake him for a dead white guy, he was punished anyway.
There are white supremacists out there. Some of them have voted for Donald Trump, but the term “white supremacist” is now used as a favorite attack by the left. Like the terms homophobic or racist, the term has largely lost its value as a clinical description and is used more as an attack to provoke an emotional response and shut down discussion.
There is no standard definition of the phenomenon; it simply seeks to connect the incredibly tiny minority of active Neo Nazis and Klan members with conservatives in general and seeks to attack immigration and conservative policy as racist without offering actual arguments. Like the victims who blamed the hurricane response on racism, the use of the term also suggests that they believe in some kind of cosmic conspiracy led by white people that targets and keeps black people down.
Above all, this tragically shows how far ESPN and sports have fallen in America. The civic ceremony of honoring the flag used to unify Americans. Sports used to be a great equalizer and neutral ground where people of all races, locations, and economic status could come together to root for (or boo) their teams. Now they have been politicized by an obviously biased company that wants to use sports as a Trojan horse to lecture Americans who disagree with them.
It shouldn’t be this complicated, but ESPN should really just stick to sports.
