And you thought the Oscars had become yet another hard-left political platform.
Wednesday night’s ESPY Awards may have trumped any recent Academy Awards telecast. The annual event is meant to honor greatness in sports. Created by ESPN, a network which increasingly injects its liberal agenda across its content, the night featured a crush of misinformation on crime and race in the USA.
The evening did include calls to improve local communities to help stop violence. That’s a very noble theme. The crumbling of the family unit, and the dearth of fathers, has had a profoundly negative impact on our culture.
But, just as often, we heard the kind of overheated rhetoric the Black Lives Matters crowd embraces.
Here’s Dwyane Wade, who just signed a fat contract to join the Chicago Bulls, using a sporting event as a political soapbox.
“The racial profiling has to stop. The shoot-to-kill mentality has to stop. Not seeing the value of black and brown bodies has to stop. But also the retaliation has to stop. The endless gun violence in places like Chicago, Dallas, not to mention Orlando, it has to stop. Enough. Enough is enough.”
A just-released study by a black Harvard professor crushed the BLM mantra about shootings involving police officers and people of color. So did excellent reporting by Heather Mac Donald. Apparently, Wade didn’t see that information. It’s not fully his fault. The media did its best to downplay it.
Wade will get an up close look at the city with arguably the worst gun violence and the strictest gun control laws. Chicago is a nightmare, run by Democrat politicians and steeped in gang warfare. Yet far more athletes lecture us about police brutality, which at its worst can’t come close to matching the body count from the Windy City.
New York Knicks star Carmelo Anthony pulled a Bernie Sanders on the crowd. Rather than unite viewers and remind them of the country’s strengths, Anthony painted a picture of a crumbling nation. Nor did his speech capture the remarkable progress in race relations in recent decades.
“We cannot ignore the realities of the current state of America. The events of the past week have put a spotlight on the injustice, distrust and anger that have plagued so many of us. The system is broken … but the urgency to create change is at an all-time high,” Anthony said.
Actually, we don’t know all the facts in the two highly publicized police shootings that left two black men dead. Two events in a massive country like the U.S., even if they’re as awful as many fear, do not depict a broken system.
The evening took a somber turn when the mother of a young slain athlete, Zenobia Dobson, took the stage. The mom mourned her son as she accepted the Arthur Ashe courage award on his behalf, and made a plea for more gun control legislation. Of course, President Obama couldn’t resist getting in on the act.
“It’s up to all of us to build a country that’s worthy of Zaevion’s promise.” —@POTUS on Zaevion Dobson #ESPYS https://t.co/7pKls0rIaE
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 14, 2016
ESPN has not so quietly transformed into the MSNBC of sports broadcasting. Its talent repeatedly push far-left talking points. So does its programming slate.
Wednesday’s event didn’t feature a single athlete condemning the “Ferguson Effect,” where cops are pulling back from fully doing their work following the BLM uprising and the drumbeat of cultural criticism.
Maybe they’ll mention it at the 2017 ESPY Awards. Just don’t hold your breath.
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