Despite the network’s vow to steer clear of political commentary, ESPN host Dan Le Batard went on a rant Thursday calling Trump supporters racist and blasting the station for refusing to call it out.
Le Batard’s ire was raised by a recent rally in North Carolina in which a handful of crowd members began chanting “send her back” in a brief protest of Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The President had innocuously suggested earlier in the week that Omar (D-MN) and other members of the so-called ‘Squad’ – Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) – hate America so much they should leave.
President Trump acknowledged the poor tone of the “send her back” chants at his rally, insisted he disagrees with them, and vowed to stop them in the future.
Political Commentary
Le Batard, however, as with his sports commentary, was way behind and woefully uneducated on the news.
“This felt un-American what happened last night … It’s not the America that my parents aimed to get for us, for exiles, for brown people,” Le Batard said. “There’s a racial division in this country that’s being instigated by the president and we here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight because Jemele [Hill] did some things on Twitter and you saw what happened after that and then here, all of a sudden, nobody talks politics on anything unless they use one of these sports figures as a meat shield in the most cowardly possible way to discuss these subjects.”
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Hill famously was suspended from ESPN for calling the President “a white supremacist” on social media, adding that his supporters are ‘largely other white supremacists.’
“It is antithetical to what we should be,” Le Batard continued. “And If you’re not calling it abhorrent, obviously racist, dangerous rhetoric, you’re complicit.”
Stop what you’re doing and watch this.@LeBatardShow responds to the racist “Send her back” and “Go back to your country” attacks against Ilhan Omar and other congresswomen.
“If you’re not calling it abhorrent, obviously racist, dangerous rhetoric, you’re complicit.” pic.twitter.com/ntOC2Seg3b
— Erick Fernandez (@ErickFernandez) July 18, 2019
Well, if you’re not calling it ‘obviously racist’ it means you have a few brain cells in your head to acknowledge that ‘love it or leave it’ in America is a common, racially neutral, phrase espoused in this great nation.
Calls Trump Supporters Racist
Le Batard then went on to call Trump supporters racists.
“This is deeply offensive to me as somebody whose parents have made all the sacrifices to get to this country. ‘Send her back,’ how are you any more American than her? You’re more privileged, you’re whiter, you’re richer, people don’t know whether your money is real or not. You’ve had every privilege afforded to you, every privilege! And now, what you do with that power? You go after brown people and black people and minorities? And around here, we won’t talk about it?”
Hmm … Is being perpetually confused about what you’re talking about a prerequisite for working as an ESPN pundit? A CNN panel recently pointed out that the ‘Squad’ excludes white people purposely because “they’re racist.”
Omar’s own comments have backed that notion up, declaring “this is not going to be the country of white people.”
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What Makes Omar Anti-American
It’s not that anyone is more American than Omar. It’s that they’re more patriotic than Omar. That’s not even vaguely debatable.
- They don’t ask a judge for compassion for ISIS recruits who were being sentenced for planning on joining the terrorist organization.
- They don’t dismiss 9/11 as “some people did something” and refuse to answer if they are “pro-al Qaeda.”
- They don’t describe acts of terrorism as a reaction to the United States’ “involvement in other people’s affairs.”
- They don’t attack American soldiers.
- They don’t equate the United States Army and America in general to Al Qaeda.
- They don’t say “ignorance really is pervasive in many parts of this country.”
None of the above complaints have anything to do with Omar’s skin color and everything to do with her anti-American ideology.
Political Commentary Killing ESPN
ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro admitted in a Los Angeles Times profile this past May that the social justice bent his network had taken in the era of President Trump hurt them with viewers.
Part of the problem is that, like Le Batard, multiple hosts on the network dive into commentary on topics in which they have no knowledge. Viewers are not only forced to listen to it, but they know full well that the hosts are typically full of it.
Sports fans watching ESPN, aside from listening to Hill’s rants about white supremacists, were forced to listen to hosts blast the legendary Tiger Woods over his friendship with the President, mocking him as stupid and claiming “he’s not black.”
They even watched as a well-liked football announcer was pulled from coverage of a University of Virginia game because of the crime of being named Robert Lee.
ESPN has been a disgrace to sports for quite some time.
“Without question our data tells us our fans do not want us to cover politics,” Pitaro confessed in his interview.
His vow to change that gave ESPN a path to recover from years of plunging ratings on both television and radio programming, along with the shedding of employees – some of them prominent names – by the hundreds.
Le Batard’s smear of Trump supporters sends them back to square one. Unfortunately for the network, they signed him to a four-year contract extension in 2018. Do you plan on watching or listening to ESPN during that time?
