By now it is probably no secret that I take my shots at Clay Travis. He’s a big boy, he can handle a few errant shots from some small time blogger, right?
So what on earth could I be talking about today?
Clay Travis is not stupid in the traditional sense. He is educated and speaks well. He has a forum in which to share his thoughts which is considerably larger than my own forum.
So am I jealous? Not in the least.
A long time ago, I made my decisions. My first wife and I divorced during my senior year of college. We already had two children (5 and 2 when I graduated from Oregon with honors), so I chose to forego graduate school and ‘bigger better’ things to be a dad. I like to say that the difference between being a father and being a dad is simple: one is a donor, the other is there for the little things. I never missed a game, music event, school play, parent-teacher conference or any big moment. Hell, I never even missed a practice – and I coached for both of my children all throughout their youth.
So why does that even matter? Ir probably doesn’t. But in my mind it tells the story of a man content with his status in this life where professional jealousy is simply not a part of who I am. So, my verbal jabs at Travis stem from something more important. He is a hypocrite and that really bothers me,
Travis spends an inordinate amount of his time railing against ESPN. he accuses them of having a ‘liberal agenda’ which has nothing to do with sports. He puts himself on some mythical moral high ground. The problem, of course, is that when you base your worth to the industry on this moral high ground and that high ground is taken away, you have nothing left.
Let me be specific in this particular ‘rant’ against Travis’ hypocrisy. he cries about the ‘liberal ESPN agenda’ from the hidden depths of his own employers conservative agenda. So I am going to break down his willful ignorance on his own conservative bent. (Hint: ALL people who have a forum in which to speak have beliefs that they share through their forum.)
Here is an example tweet:
Interesting 2016 FBI stat for BLM protesters — black people were over twice as likely to kill whites as vice versa. https://t.co/4QedGNXn5D— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 29, 2017
This is a typical conservative approach to the Black Lives Matter movement. They take some words, minced up by multiple people, repeat them in some out of order piece and then present a counter argument of ‘facts.’
The problem, of course, is that Travis ignores context to make his false comparison. The Black Lives Matter movement has never been about ‘whites killing blacks’ as a sole concept. It is about the racial injustice manifested on city streets when unarmed men (and women) of color are killed by police officers. So, the proper comparative statistic would be how many unarmed white men (and women) are killed by police? He knows the answer, of course, is that it is a significantly smaller number. He projects false information to fuel his own (Fox) company’s unique agenda.
When confronted with this statistic, Travis was (not so) shockingly silent.
The incarceration rate of black men is 4,347/100,000 for white men the rate is just 678/100,000 #TakeTheKnee to #StandAgainstInjustice— Scott Reed (@DSAFootball) September 28, 2017
You see, the problem with trying to attack this truth is that there are only two potential answers for why black men are 6.4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. To attempt to explain this away, Travis has only two directions, neither of them a good choice. He could either say that black men are inherently more violent than white men, or he could admit that there is a significant amount of societal racial injustice that exists within America. His moral high ground would be destroyed and he would be left spewing more half-truths and angered rhetoric.