During a press briefing this afternoon, sentient Mein Kampf audiobook Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that ESPN should fire Jemele Hill for her recent tweets about Darth Cheeto, continuing the trend of people on the right declaring everyone else to be snowflakes and then melting like a snow cone in a dumpster fire whenever someone dares call them on their shit. And the much more disturbing trend of the White House using its governmental authority to attempt to get members of the media fired for daring to tell the truth.
I’m curious to see what ESPN decides to do with Hill, whom they already publicly reprimanded for merely repeating Wikipedia-level facts about the president. At this point, stating that Donald Trump is a white supremacist is one of the least controversial things you can say about him. If he were on Tinder, his bio would read, “Likes eating KFC and empowering racists; hates elliptical machines and large gloves.” But ESPN, already annoyingly self-conscious about being branded liberal, might take further disciplinary action against Hill to appease a demographic of feckless racist fuckboys who’ll never be satisfied.
Which would be a shame, because fuck them. But also because Hill is one of the sharpest and most important voices in sports media today—a fact reiterated by an extensive (and must-read) profile of her and Michael Smith published today in The Ringer. In it, Bryan Curtis delves deeper into the relentless and hateful and bizarre criticism Hill has received since employed at ESPN. Sometimes it even exists in non sequitur form. ESPN could be airing a Little League baseball game or a 30 for 30 on badminton, and people will still call in to complain about her.
I hope they (ESPN) don’t let those motherfuckers win. But I feel like they already have.