There’s hypocrisy, wokeness, ignorance, pettiness, and incompetence, and then, there’s the Far-Left Sports world.
For those not paying attention the last decade or so, liberals and the far-left – via blatant discrimination against conservatives, Republicans, and people of traditional faith – have come to dominate the sports reporting world. Whereas in years past, you actually had to have a deep understanding of sports – and maybe even played sports in high school and college – to get hired as a sports reporter or editor, now it seems one need only be qualified enough to check an “Identity politics” box for the liberal media executives looking to fill sports slots with like-minded progressives.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone. As I have been saying on a loop for the last few weeks while promoting a book intended to keep the 4th of July and our Founding Fathers from being canceled, over the course of the last number of decades, liberals and the far-left have gotten a vice-like grip on what I call the five major megaphones of our nation. Those being: the media, academia, entertainment, and — as we have seen the last three years of the pandemic — science and medicine.
Now, over the course of the last few months, a number of far-left, highly entitled, and privileged sports “reporters” have thrown a fit over the creation and rapidly growing success of Saudi Arabia backed LIV Golf. Much of the criticism – and even unhinged rage – seems to revolve around the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by alleged Saudi Arabian operatives in Turkey as well as “human rights abuses” in Saudi Arabia.
To be sure, Khashoggi’s murder was horrific, but if the despicable killing of one human being is “impossible to ignore” for liberal reporters going after LIV Golf, what would they call the torture and killing of thousands of Uyghurs in China?
You know…China. That nation where many believe a deadly virus was deliberately created in a lab in Wuhan and then was subsequently released killing upwards of 15 million people worldwide.
What say these liberal sports reporters on that subject?
Oh, wait a minute. As China is the paymaster for many Leftist-dominated companies and enterprises, they all seem to have gone mute.
For instance, seemingly liberal Brandel Chamblee, of the NBC-owned Golf Channel, has been one of the loudest and most hypocritical when going after LIV Golf as well as Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman – the two most prominent names associated with the new golf circuit. Chamblee recently tweeted for them to be removed from the Golf Hall of Fame.
Said the former journeyman golfer: "As far as I know, it’s never happened that an athlete has been kicked out of their Hall Of Fame but both Norman & Mickelson should be removed from the Hall Of Fame. They’ve dishonored the game & they threaten to destroy the game that they have both so enormously profited from.”
Gee, didn’t NBC Sports recently host the Winter Olympics from China while raking in millions of dollars? As that was the case, it then becomes easy to see why some would believe NBC essentially crawled into bed with China and purposely turned a blind eye to the atrocities against the country’s Muslim minority citizens.
Chamblee – again an employee of NBC Sports – as well as a number of other liberal sports “reporters” have suggested the Saudis are backing LIV Golf as a form of “Sports washing.” If Chamblee and the others are truly offended by that, would they characterize NBS Sports teaming up with the Peoples Republic of China as: “profit or self-interest-washing?”
This, by the way, would be the same China FBI Director Christopher Wray — in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum — warned of: “the threat posed by the Chinese government here at home to our economic security and our freedoms,” he declared, has “reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before, and it’s vital — vital — that all of us focus on that threat together.”
Not so “vital” for liberal sports reporters or the liberal mainstream media.
A number of liberal sports “reporters” are outraged by LIV Golf’s success. But, as they stomp their feet over that issue, their collective silence with regard to the continued torture and killing of the Uyghurs coupled with millions and billions of dollars being made by liberal Big-Tech companies, Hollywood, and other sports entities such as the NBA in China is not only deafening, but shameful.
But, hey. As long as these liberal sports “reporters” and editors continue to discriminate against Republicans, conservatives, and people of traditional faith in their hiring practices as they make sports ever more “Woke” and unwatchable, what’s the problem?
In closing, as many liberal reporters – sports and otherwise – are unwilling to confront China and do seem – from their elitist Ivory Towers – to espouse Socialism and Marxism, they may very well know this quote from “The Little Red Book” by Chairman Mao Tse-tung: “We must have faith, first, that the peasant masses are ready to advance step by step along the road of socialism under the leadership of the Party, and second, that the Party is capable of leading the peasants along this road.”
My parting question to these elitist Liberals would be: What if we “Peasant masses” will never go along with your socialist-woke dogma and are finally waking up to the reality that we are the vast majority of the population and do represent the voice of the working-class, disenfranchised, and even, fed-up sports fans?
Tick, tick, tick.
Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the book: The 56 – Liberty Lessons from those who risked all to sign The Declaration of Independence – Before they and the 4th of July are Banned.