ESPN: We replaced Robert Lee as broadcaster because we feared dank memes

Jazz wrote about it earlier, I know, but it warrants another post. Do you realize what you’re witnessing here? In a PC age, this shines as one of the single stupidest examples of political correctness we’re ever likely to see. It’s so fantastically stupid that the consensus among even ESPN-skeptic conservatives last night on Twitter when the news first broke was that it was a hoax, and that the statement from the network confirming the story at Clay Travis’s Outkick The Coverage site was either a prank that had fooled Travis or was written by Travis himself. Not until a Washington Post reporter received the same statement from ESPN did people begin to believe they had actually done this. It’s the “sensitivity” equivalent of a solar eclipse, rare and wondrous in its majesty. Partial PC eclipses happen all the time but few achieve totality. Don’t look directly at this one or it’ll blind you.

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Every employee of this fading garbage network should be ruthlessly wedgied until they apologize.

“Eventually.” Imagine this poor bastard being pulled aside by the imbeciles who run ESPN and being, ahem, “asked” not to cover the UVA game because he happens to share a name with a long-dead Confederate at the center of a renewed public debate over white supremacy and memorials. And when he wanted to know why, they wouldn’t even tell him the truth, that they didn’t want to risk getting cross-wise with the left on its latest crusade even by coincidence. “Because of the memes,” they told him.

Because of the memes. How are they doing meme-wise this morning?

Supposedly Lee gave in … “eventually.” The least the network could have done for him would have been to say “He fought us all the way on this.” Instead they made him complicit in idiocy to cover their own tracks. He should change his name to Stone Walljackson out of spite and demand to cover only SEC games from now on.

The headline on this S.E. Cupp piece insisting that the ESPN debacle will mean ultimate victory for Trump and his allies in the debate over monuments seems overstated at first blush, but I don’t know. Conservative media and talk radio will have a field day with it. Tucker Carlson hastily arranged to have Travis on his show last night in primetime, just a few hours after the story broke, sensing the legs the story might have. Absurdity this dense is worth its weight in PR gold to the anti-PC side:

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It also rendered inarguably true the assertion made by President Trump himself as well as many others that this debate will descend quickly and embarrassingly down a slippery slope. I’d argue the pre-emptive removal of an Asian-American sportscaster, who had nothing to do with the Civil War or slavery, from a college football game simply because his name sounds similar doesn’t represent a gradual slope, but a 1000-foot cliff…

The list of offensive iconography grows by the hundreds every day. From removing Lee statues all over the South to changing the name of Fenway Park’s Yawkey Way and Boston’s Faneuil Hall, even abolitionist strongholds aren’t spared the scrutiny of ravenous liberal activists on a mission to run as far as they can towards crazy with this argument.

I’m honestly surprised Trump hasn’t tweeted about it yet. I guess he was too busy dogging Jeff Flake this morning. He’ll get around to it.

Here’s Travis on Carlson’s show. In lieu of an exit question, I’ll make the same hackey joke a million other people made last night: What we need now is to find a Confederate general named Bob Costas somewhere in the historical record.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | November 21, 2024
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