ESPN columnist Howard Bryant seized the opportunity to trash America on July 4, the nation’s Independence Day, in a column for ESPN’s website, titled, “Baseball, barbecue, and losing freedom this Fourth of July.”
Outkick’s Clay Travis, in a column bashing Bryant’s suppositions, described Bryant as a “man currently being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to opine on sports for ESPN, despite having no discernible talent whatsoever.”
Bryant started his diatribe by decrying Major League baseball requiring its 30 teams to wear Independence Day-themed baseball hats. “Next is the USA-themed socks, the marketing, the freedom-inspired spikes, gloves, wristbands, the inevitable paeans to the armed forces,” he complained.
“By now, we’re all numb to the spectacle,” he opined, continuing, “Grilling, baseball and fireworks, first replaced by symbols — and now by a country tearing itself completely apart. July 4, 2022, falls in the midst of devastation. It is Independence Day in America with independence under current and relentless assault.”
“The U.S. Supreme Court has run a chain saw through what two generations of Americans had known to be the legal baselines of their lives,” he hyperventilated, adding, “Tens of millions of women today do not feel freedom and certainly are not celebrating independence.”
“Ah, yes, just what we needed, a man arrested for assaulting his own wife standing up for women’s rights,” Travis commented, referring to Bryant’s case in the past.
Then this woke piece of business from Bryant: “The people who can become pregnant (italics added) who feel celebratory toward the Court may do so from the victory of their position, but it nevertheless remains true that the power of choice — and the right to privacy — has been taken from all of them.”
“The spectacle of all-white juries acquitting proud, admittedly guilty white killers of Black people largely predated your birth,” he wrote, then segued to the events of January 6, 2021: “You tell yourself to not think about the utter, enraging hypocrisy, to resist the useless and flaccid equivalencies. (Imagine if Black people did that…)”
After venting about black players who knelt for the national anthem, Bryant charged, “If the past several years have reinforced anything, it is that there has always been a separate set of rules, a concierge lane, a front door exclusively for white America. Jan. 6 crystallized this truth.”
Then a bald-face lie: “When the barricades were overrun, and elected officials of both parties hid under their desks, and the cops were killed …”
Cops killed?
“A significant percentage of white America believes this country belongs to them,” he stated. “There are two rules in the United States, never directly articulated but rife with consequence when broken: Beyond what the mainstream, which is to say white America, determines to be acceptable, it is forbidden to express humanitarian compassion and concern for the people of Palestine — just ask Dwight Howard. And it is unacceptable to unequivocally advocate for Black people.”
Travis picked that apart:
This first “rule,” “it is forbidden to express humanitarian compassion and concern for the people of Palestine,” is barely disguised anti-Semitism. People express support for Palestine all the time. Huge parts of the Democratic party, in fact, now make it one of their baseline beliefs. … As for the second rule, it is “unacceptable to unequivocally advocate for Black people.” Are you kidding me? We had an entire NBA season played with “Black Lives Matter” emblazoned on the court.
Bryant concluded:
And that, you know so painfully well after more than a half-century in this land, is the difference. Black people have known it for centuries, and the alarm will always ring for the ones who have forgotten. You participate in the American dream at their pleasure. This is theirs, not yours, and thus they can trash the Capitol if they want because the Capitol building is theirs. After all, they came here to build a better life. The laws enacted in that building, before your ancestors fought to undo them, were in protection of them.
You? You were brought here to work.