You can hate Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports 1. You may not like his opinions, or you may think he is just plain wrong about things, but one thing you can’t say is that he is insincere. But, that is exactly what NBC’s Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk did when he accused Whitlock of tailoring his comments to turn FS1 “right-wing” to counter ESPN’s left-wingism during a recent discussion of the racial graffiti spray painted on the front gate of LeBron James’ L.A. mansion.
Florio jumped to his column on PFT to attack Whitlock and to call conservatives racists after Whitlock’s comments about the vandalism.
The discussion stemmed from the May 31 act of vandalism on the front gate of LeBron James’ Brentwood home. An unknown person defaced the gate with the N-word and police quickly said they were going to investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.
Of course the incident made big news in the sports world, and subsequently formed part of the conversation on June 1 as Whitlock told his FS1 audience that the Cleveland Cavaliers star can’t really experience true racism because James is too just rich to have it bother him.
Whitlock dismissed the incident as merely a “disrespectful inconvenience” for James and then slammed the player for comparing his graffiti to the brutal 1955 murder of 14-year-old African American Emmet Till, who was murdered simply because he was a black boy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“There’s NO analogy between [Emmet Till] and what happened to LeBron James,” Whitlock said.
It should be noted that the vandalism still hasn’t been proven to be a hate crime. Police have not figured out who committed the act nor has it been proven that it was a racist attack on James himself. In this day and age when many so-called “hate crimes” end up being hoaxes, it would behoove us all to wait to find out what the police investigation turns up before we pass judgment on the level of “hate” inherent in the crime.
Even if the vandalism was committed with racial animus at its heart, Whitlock insisted that “racism” is not something LeBron James ever really has to face.
“James allegedly had the N-word spray painted on his $20 million Brentwood home,” Whitlock said. “He wasn’t there, his family wasn’t there, he heard about it. He’s on stage, ‘Oh, my family is safe.’ From what? Spray paint? They’re in Cleveland! Again… racism is an issue in America, but it is primarily an issue for the poor. It’s not LeBron James’ issue.”
Whitlock was called out by several pro players and others for saying James doesn’t really suffer from racism because he has the money to escape it any time he wants. And maybe you might disagree with Whitlock, too, like NBC’s Florio does.
Florio took his criticism of Whitlock one step further, insisting that Whitlock was insincere in his comments that rich blacks don’t really face consequential racism.
Still upset that ESPN has been charged with losing audience because of its liberal bias, Florio accused Whitlock of purposefully injecting right-wingism into his comments to sex up Fox Sports 1 for a conservative audience:
There’s another dynamic possibly at play here. Multiple FOX employees have reveled in the demise of ESPN, erroneously pinning it on left-leaning politics. This has set the stage for a not-so-subtle effort to use the ESPN example as a way to bully others in the sports media from daring to tiptoe to the left of center, possibly setting the stage for “fair and balanced” right-of-center views to take over the sports conversation.
He went on to accuse Whitlock of “not truly believing what he is saying,” and of insincerely injecting right-wing tenets into his comments just to grab ratings:
This doesn’t mean FS1 will be going the way of FOX News. Horowitz knows that echo chambers don’t sell nearly as well as octagons, and that creating thick conflict out of thin air becomes the agenda and the objective, regardless of whether those throwing the punches truly believe what they are saying.
Florio suffers from a series of lie-filled, left-wing ideas with this obscene column apart from his attack in Whitlock’s integrity.
First, he accuses Whitlock of being an insincere liar. Which he clearly isn’t. Again, you may not like Whitlock’s ideas but he is fairly consistent with them and cogently explains them to his audience.
More importantly, Florio obviously takes it for granted that anyone who discounts racism must by definition be a conservative “right-winger.”
No one, not anyone on the right and not Jason Whitlock, is discounting the existence of racism. But, Florio employs his liberal dog whistle with his claim that conservatives don’t believe there is any such thing as racism, or worse yet saying conservatives are winking at racism and excusing it away as no big deal, or perhaps even secretly reveling in expressions of racism.
Calling conservatives racist is the equivalent of the practice blood libel against Jews or saying the Holocaust didn’t really happen. And, that is exactly what Florio believes of everyone of the center-right in American politics. They are all racists, either secretly or overtly.
Now, Florio adds to that despicable assumption that African American Jason Whitlock is a mewling, cloying, insincere Uncle Tom, to boot.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail.com.