BY JOHN K. WILSON
When ESPN decide to shift an announcer named Robert Lee away from a football game at Charlottesville, the far right declared it was a crisis of political correctness.
On Fox News, Tucker Carlson announced:
Craziest story of the week: #ESPN dropping an announcer named #RobertLee from a game. The president of ESPN now sending this memo to staff pic.twitter.com/WT9HBPQ1He
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2017
On Carlson’s show last night, Britt McHenry called the story “a reflection of society right now & how left-wing & PC it’s gotten.”
In reality, this story is a reflection of how right-wing the conservative media have gotten, and how they have embraced what I called “the myth of political correctness” in a book 22 years ago.
What happened by ESPN wasn’t political correctness; this was corporate correctness, done in service of the conservative cause. Yet the right immediately blamed the nonexistent PC police.
The website Outkick the Coverage broke the story by announcing: “MSESPN Pulls Asian Announcer Named Robert Lee Off UVa Game To Avoid Offending Idiots.” But that was never true. No one was ever offended by Lee’s name, and ESPN doesn’t care about offended leftists.
It’s comical to imagine that any left-wing protesters are demanding that someone who shares the same name as a confederate general must be banished from public life. The fact that this was the imagined enemy shows how delusional the far right has become.
David Horowitz’s website announced that the ESPN was the peak of PC:
“If you thought we had reached peak-ridiculousness in the United States, you were wrong. Free speech is under constant attack by the triggered Left, American history is being erased right before our eyes, suppression of dissenting ideas in college is at an all-time high, and mobs of violent leftists are patrolling the streets to enforce their totalitarian groupthink. How could it possibly get any worse? Keep reading. On Tuesday, ESPN made an announcement that Asian-American college football announcer Robert Lee was yanked from an upcoming University of Virginia football game because, well, ESPN is run by idiots.”
Just received this email from an ESPN executive re the Robert Lee controversy. pic.twitter.com/OuBORlWO9f
— Yashar Ali ? (@yashar) August 23, 2017
The purpose of moving Robert Lee to call a different game was to avoid any discussion about confederate monuments. Think about it: Who wants all of us to stop talking about confederate memorials, and to go back to ignoring these monuments to treasonous racists? That’s the last thing the leftists want. ESPN was acting in service of the far right, to avoid any controversy and comments about confederacy in order to focus on what is really important: The commerce of college football.
Left-wingers had nothing to do with any of this. ESPN’s decision was all about brand management. They didn’t want anyone mocking them because they want to be taken seriously as serious sports journalists, an idea that badly backfired.
ESPN was trying to avoid politics and controversy, and ended up being falsely accused of political correctness. It’s a lesson in how the right-wing media uses PC as a tool to spread a false story of leftist conspiracies ruling the world.
“falsely accused of political correctness” ? I’m not so sure about that. Political Correctness is the idea that groups and classes of people, and even individuals, can be offended by some thought, word or deed having to do with their ethnicity, their religion, their culture. Because liberals, or if you prefer the political leadership of the left, has for decades practiced identity politics as a means to power, political correctness is rightfully its construct. CNN is the voice of the left in this country, has been since it was founded by Ted Turner. When CNN pulls an Asian-American announcer from a game to be played in a college town in a Southern town on the grounds he might be subject to jokes and “mocking” because they wanted to be sure they are taken seriously as “serious sports journalists”, and then do not make clear who would be making the jokes and mocking, they are guilty of projection. Fact is the “right wing” or conservatives, do not care about Political Correctness. Do. Not. Care. Therefore, CNN and John K. Wilson are projecting their own deep-seated Political Correctness bias on the so-called right wing media. This goes on all the time by left-wing media and academic institutions.