The Authoritarian Moment

by Ben Shapiro

  HOW SPORTS WENT WOKE, THEN WENT BROKE

  The radicalization of entertainment is most obvious in the context of sports. Sports is the ultimate broadcasting entertainment: it is designed to hit all subgroups. It’s pure competition, merit against merit, winners and losers. The narratives are generally apolitical and the plot lines perfectly simple. Sports is about taking on the competition, muscling through adversity, working with teammates. Sports unifies.

  Or at least it used to. Yes, politics played a crucial role in sports narratives—from Jackie Robinson breaking the color line in Major League Baseball to Muhammad Ali giving up his boxing career for refusing the Vietnam draft to the American Olympic hockey team defeating the Soviets. But once the game began, all exterior conflict was telescoped into the sport. Americans had strong rooting interests, often politically oriented, but the primary concern was the exhibition of skill on the field.

  Sports leagues worked to keep politics off the field or court entirely. When Denver Nuggets star Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf refused to stand for the national anthem in 1996, NBA commissioner David Stern, a committed liberal, suspended him without pay. Rauf had violated a league policy requiring players and trainers to “stand and line up in a dignified posture.”44 When asked why he had remained apolitical in a contentious 1990 North Carolina Senate race, Michael Jordan explained, “Republicans buy sneakers, too.” Years later, he explained, “I wasn’t a politician when I was playing my sport. I was focused on my craft.”45

  This sentiment was considered relatively uncontroversial. But then something changed.

  What changed was the renormalization along racial and political lines.

  ESPN, the top sports channel on the planet by a vast margin, began losing money hand over fist. The network cleared cash in two ways: through advertising, which was viewer-reliant, and through carriage fees. Fully 75 percent of ESPN’s money comes from cable and satellite subscribers; cable and satellite companies pay ESPN to carry the network. ESPN takes that money and pays sports leagues in order to carry their content.

  Now, the vast majority of cable and satellite subscribers don’t watch the vast majority of content on ESPN. So as people cut their cable and carriage fees dropped, and as other sports cable competitors got into the business and bid up the price of sports programming, ESPN found itself in a world of hurt. As sports journalist Clay Travis describes, “Its business model was under attack on two fronts. The cost of sports it rented and put on the air was surging just as its subscriber revenue was collapsing. . . . In 2011, at the height of its business, ESPN had 100 million subscribers. [By 2018], they’d lost 14 million subscribers.”46 ESPN responded by putting more hot talk, more cheap-to-produce, guaranteed-to-create-controversy hot takes on the air. As Travis points out, ESPN “was elevating the talent that most fervently connected left-wing politics and sports. Jemele Hill, Max Kellerman, Sarah Spain, Bomani Jones, Michelle Beadle, Pablo Torre—the more left-wing your politics, the more you got on television.”47

  This was a reflection of both the political culture of the sports journalists themselves, who voted overwhelming Democrat, and the desire to superserve a customer base that skewed disproportionately to the Left. Demographic composition of fan bases varies widely based on the sport. NBA fans are disproportionately black, for example; NHL fans are disproportionately white. And ESPN spends a disproportionate amount of time on sports viewed by minority audiences. As of 2012, according to Deadspin, SportsCenter spent 23.3 percent of its coverage on the NFL, 19.2 percent of its time on the NBA, and just 2.1 percent of its time on NASCAR. Yet according to a 2015 Harris poll, just 5 percent of Americans said that basketball was their favorite sport, compared to 6 percent who said auto racing.48 ESPN isn’t skewing its coverage out of a weird sense of diversity, however—they’re doing so because black Americans watch more TV than white Americans,49 and have historically spent more money per capita on “visible goods” like footwear, clothes, cars, and jewelry.50

  And superserving a disproportionately left-leaning population means catering to their political belief system—which just happens to reflect the values held by the higher-ups at ESPN. By catering to a small subsection of the population—a population that preferred its sports with a heavy dose of politics—the sports world renormalized itself around woke propositions.

  Sports leagues began catering to their political audiences, allowing politics to spill over onto the field. In 2014, a white police officer shot to death eighteen-year-old Michael Brown; Brown had assaulted the officer, attempted to steal his gun, fired it in the officer’s car, and then charged the officer. Members of the media repeated the lie that Brown had surrendered to the officer with his hands raised. The slogan “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” became shorthand for the accusation that Brown had been murdered, and for the broader proposition that police across America were systematically targeting black Americans. And the sports world followed suit: five players on the St. Louis Rams walked out during the pregame introductions with their hands raised in the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” pose.51 The NFL quickly announced there would be no consequences, with NFL vice president Brian McCarthy explaining, “We respect and understand the concerns of all individuals who have expressed views on this tragic situation.”52 This wasn’t out of a generalized respect for free speech values, however—it was about catering to wokeness. In 2016, after a Black Lives Matter supporter shot to death five police officers, the NFL rejected the Dallas Cowboys’ request to wear a decal paying tribute to the victims.53

  Over the course of the ensuing years, sports media’s and leagues’ embrace of on-field wokeness only increased. When Abdul-Rauf protested the national anthem, it was utterly uncontroversial for David Stern to suspend him. When Colin Kaepernick, after being benched as starting quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers in favor of the immortal Blaine Gabbart, decided to kneel for the national anthem in protest at the police shooting of armed stabbing suspect Mario Woods,54 the media rushed to his defense. ESPN covered the millionaire Kaepernick as a hero, blanketing its network in worshipful praise for the benched QB, even as he declared that he would not “stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color.”55 The sports media then spent years propping him up as a civil rights icon. Eventually the quarterback, who had once donned socks depicting police officers as pigs, was given millions of dollars by Nike—also attempting to superserve leftist populations—in order to sell shoes with the slogan, “Believe in something. Even if means sacrificing everything.” In reality, Kaepernick sacrificed nothing—he had already been benched when he made his protest, would later avoid even the most basic preconditions for rejoining an NFL team, and has cleared millions of dollars in advertising. Nonetheless, Kaepernick is now treated as a hero in the sports world; in 2020, the NFL itself tried to leverage a team into signing him. For good measure, EA Sports named Kaepernick a “starting-caliber” quarterback in its Madden NFL 21 game, despite the fact that Kaepernick hadn’t played for years and wasn’t very good the last time he did.56

  The politicization of sports had dire ramifications for its audience numbers. Ratings, which were already in recession, went into steep decline. The most popular league in America, the NFL, saw ratings declines of nearly 10 percent during the 2017 regular season.57 ESPN saw such dramatic drop-off that ESPN president John Skipper, who had overseen the politicization of his network, admitted in late 2016, “ESPN is far from immune from the political fever that has afflicted so much of the country over the past year. Internally, there’s a feeling among many staffers—both liberal and conservative—that the company’s perceived move leftward has had a stifling effect on discourse inside the company and has affected its public-facing product. Consumers have sensed that same leftward movement, alienating some.” Jemele Hill, an outspoken and censorious leftist, immediately shot back, “I would challenge those people who say they feel suppressed. Do you fear backlash, or do you fear right and wrong?”58

  In 2018, Skippe
r was replaced by Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of its consumer products. He quickly admitted that ESPN had strayed from its core mission: “uniting people around sports.” Pitaro stated, “We have to understand we’re here to serve sports fans. All sports fans.” ESPN’s internal research showed that all fans, liberal and conservative, didn’t want to hear politics on ESPN.59

  But the network—and the leagues—had already been renormalized. It was simply too late to pull out of the tailspin. By 2020, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody resulted in nationwide protests, virtually every sports league mandated wokeness. The NBA festooned its sidelines with the phrase “BLACK LIVES MATTER”—a semantically overloaded phrase suggesting that America was irredeemably bigoted against black Americans. That was in and of itself a rather shocking contention coming from an 80 percent black league60 in which the average salary is $7.7 million per season.61 NBA players were told they could emblazon woke slogans on the back of their jerseys, limited to: Black Lives Matter, Say Their Names, Vote, I Can’t Breathe, Justice, Peace, Equality, Freedom, Enough, Power to the People, Justice Now, Say Her Name, Si Se Puede, Liberation, See Us, Hear Us, Respect Us, Love Us, Listen, Listen to Us, Stand Up, Ally, Anti-Racist, I Am a Man, Speak Up, How Many More, Group Economics, Education Reform, and Mentor. Thus, it became a common sight to see Group Economics blocking Justice, and I Can’t Breathe throwing up an alley-oop to Enough.62 How any of this had anything to do with sports was beyond reasonable explanation. (The NBA’s newfound commitment to political issues apparently stopped at calling America systemically racist—Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey was forced to apologize for tweeting “Free Hong Kong” as the Chinese government subjected that formerly free city to complete subservience. LeBron James, the most celebrated politically oriented athlete in America, called Morey “misinformed.” After all, LeBron, Nike, and the NBA make bank in the Chinese market.)63

  Major League Baseball opened its season with “BLM” stamped onto pitchers’ mounds, universal kneeling before the national anthem, and Morgan Freeman voicing over, “Equality is not just a word. It’s our right.” The Tampa Bay Rays tweeted out, “Today is Opening Day, which means it’s a great day to arrest the killers of Breonna Taylor”64 (Taylor was accidentally killed during crossfire when police knocked on her apartment door to serve a no-knock warrant and were met by gunfire from her boyfriend inside). The NFL followed suit, with Roger Goodell admitting he was “wrong” by not overtly siding with Kaepernick in 2016,65 and the league painting social justice warrior slogans in the end zones during games—phrases like “It Takes All of Us” and “End Racism.”66

  Racism, as it turns out, was not ended. But at least the leagues had pleased their most ardent customers.

  Unfortunately for the leagues, there weren’t that many of them anymore. The NFL’s ratings dropped 10 percent in 2020;67 the NBA Finals declined 51 percent year-on-year;68 MLB’s World Series was the least watched of all time.69 To be sure, not all of that decline had to do with politics. Sports viewership dropped across the board due to the pandemic. But the long downward trend of sports as a unifying factor in American life continued at record rates in 2020.

  CONCLUSION

  When it comes to the politics of our entertainment, many Americans prefer to remain in the dark; better not to think about politics being pushed than to turn off the TV. The result: large-scale emotional indoctrination into wokeism, courtesy of censorious, authoritarian leftists in our New Ruling Class. Americans now float atop a tsunami of cultural leftism, from movies to television shows, from streaming platforms to sports games. And all of this has an impact. It removes an area of commonality and turns it into a cause for division. It turns the water cooler into a place of abrasive accusation rather than social fabric building.

  We are told by our New Ruling Class that worrying about culture is a sign of puritanism. Meanwhile, they practice witch burning, insist that failure to abide by certain woke standards amounts to heresy, and use culture as a propaganda tool for their ideology and philosophy, renormalizing our entertainment in order to renormalize us. Our entertainment can reflect our values, but it can also shape them. Those in positions of power know this. And they revel in it.

  If entertainment is where Americans go to take a breath—and if the authoritarian Left seeks to suck all the oxygen out of the room—we begin to suffocate. America is suffocating right now. And as our entertainment becomes more and more monolithic, less and less tolerant, more and more demanding, we become a less fun, less interesting, and less tolerant people.

  Chapter 7

  The Fake News

  Authoritarian Leftism pushes revolutionary aggression; it calls for top-down censorship; it establishes a new moral standard whereby traditional morals are considered inherently immoral.

  If there is one institution that has, more than any other, engaged in the cram-downs of the authoritarian Left, it is our establishment media. That media often cheers revolutionary aggression; participates in censorship of dissenting views, and seeks to have it cemented by powerful institutions; and promotes the notion that there is only one true moral side in American politics.

  In the summer of 2020, that truth became crystal clear.

  In response to the death of George Floyd while in police custody, massive protests involving millions of Americans broke out in cities across America. Never mind that even the circumstances surrounding Floyd’s death were controversial—the police had been called to the scene by a shop owner after Floyd passed a counterfeit bill, was heavily drugged on fentanyl, resisted arrest, asked not to be placed in the police vehicle, and was in all likelihood suffering from serious complicating health factors.1 Never mind that there was no evidence of racism in the actual Floyd incident itself. The impetus for the protests was rooted in a false narrative: the narrative that America was rooted in white supremacy, her institutions shot through with systemic racism, that black Americans are at constant risk of being murdered by the police (grand total number of black Americans, out of some 37 million black Americans, shot dead by the police while unarmed in 2020, according to The Washington Post: 15).2 That narrative has been pushed by the media for years, in incidents ranging from the shooting of Michael Brown (the media pushed the idea that Brown had surrendered while shouting “hands up, don’t shoot,” an overt lie) to the shooting of Jacob Blake (the media portrayed Blake as unarmed even though he was armed with a knife).

  The narrative didn’t just result in protests. It resulted in violence, rioting, and looting. In Los Angeles, my hometown, the city shut down its iconic Rodeo Drive at 1 p.m. in the aftermath of looting.3 Melrose Avenue was systematically looted as well, and police cars were left to the tender mercies of rioters, who promptly set them on fire and spray-painted them with the slogan “ACAB”—All Cops Are Bastards.4 Looters attempted to break into the Walgreens a few blocks south of our home; a few blocks north of us, the Foot Locker was looted. For days on end, in the middle of a pandemic, the authorities informed law-abiding citizens to lock themselves in their homes at 6 p.m. Santa Monica and Long Beach saw looting as well. The Los Angeles Times labeled the events “largely peaceful.”5 Similar scenes took place in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, where days of rioting resulted in “jarring scenes of flaming debris, stampedes and looted storefronts,” according to The New York Times. Police officers were injured and hundreds were arrested. The Times labeled the events “largely peaceful.”6 So did The Washington Post, which used the hilarious phraseology “mostly peaceful displays punctuated by scuffles with police.”7 The media’s desperate attempts to downplay the violence reached comical proportions, with reporter after reporter explaining that the protests were “mostly peaceful.” Ali Velshi of MSNBC stood in front of a burning building while intoning, “This was mostly a protest, it is not generally speaking unruly, but fires have been started.”8 All of this came to its sadly hilarious culmination during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August: a CNN reporter stood in front of a flaming backg
round, the chyron reading, “FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING.”9

  Overall, the protests were “mostly peaceful” only in the sense that many protests took place that didn’t break into explicit violence. But riots and looting related to the BLM movement cost somewhere up to $2 billion, making them the most expensive riots and civil disorder in American history.10 The rioting hit some 140 cities.11 At least 14 Americans died in violence linked to the BLM unrest12; more than 700 police officers were injured; at least 150 federal buildings were damaged.13

  Many in the media went further than merely downplaying the violence: they fully excused it, cheered it, and justified it. They indulged their own Revolutionary Impulse. Now was a time to celebrate the revolutionary aggression inherent in their left-wing authoritarianism.

  Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times explained, “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.”14 She also cheered that some had termed the riots the “1619 Riots,” in honor of her pseudo-history of the United States, The 1619 Project.15 “Nobody should be destroying property and that sort of thing, but I understand the anger,” explained CNN’s Don Lemon. “Our country was started . . . The Boston Tea Party, rioting. So do not get it twisted and think that ‘Oh this is something that has never happened before, and this is so terrible, and these savages,’ and all of that, that’s how this country was started.”16 Fellow CNN anchor Chris Cuomo wondered, “Now, too many see the protests as the problem. No, the problem is what forced your fellow citizens to take to the streets: persistent, poisonous inequities and injustice. And please, show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful. Because I can show you that outraged citizens are what made the country what she is.”17 Harvard associate professor Elizabeth Hinton explained to Time that “rioting” didn’t really capture the essence of the events—instead, the mob violence should have been termed an “uprising,” since it “really captures the fact that the violence that emerges during these incidents isn’t meaningless, that it is a political expression, and it is communicating a certain set of demands.” USA Today printed an article tendentiously explaining, “‘Riots,’ ‘violence,’ ‘looting’: Words matter when talking about race and unrest, experts say.”18 NPR printed the commentary of Marc Lamont Hill, who declared the riots “acts of rebellion.”19