The Glade 4.0

MSESPN Pulls Asian Announcer Named Robert Lee Off UVa Game To Avoid Offending Idiots

UPDATE: ESPN ISSUES OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON MOVING ROBERT LEE FROM VIRGINIA GAME:

“We collectively made the decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville were unfolding, simply because of the coincidence of his name. In that moment it felt right to all parties. It’s a shame that this is even a topic of conversation and we regret that who calls play by play for a football game has become an issue.”

Additionally, I had a conversation with a senior employee at ESPN who wanted to make it clear that this was not a mandate or a demand from the company, that it was a people first decision and that assignments are switched all the time.

…

In a story that seems made for The Onion, but is actually true, according to multiple Outkick fans inside ESPN MSESPN decided to pull an Asian college football announcer named Robert Lee off the William and Mary at University of Virginia college football game because they were concerned that having an ASIAN FOOTBALL ANNOUNCER NAMED ROBERT LEE would be offensive to some viewers.

Did I mention that Robert Lee is Asian?

Is this even real life anymore? This might even be worse than MSESPN apologizing for the fantasy football slave draft a couple of weeks ago.

To avoid offending left wing idiots Robert Lee, the Asian college football announcer, not the Confederate General who died in 1870 and shares a name with him, was switched to the Youngstown State at Pittsburgh game and Dave Weekley will now call the William and Mary at University of Virginia game.

Unless someone tries to take down Dave Weekley statues between now and kickoff.

In which case ESPN will be royally ****.

But, seriously, is there anything more pathetic than ESPN believing people would be offended by an Asian guy named Robert Lee sharing a name with Robert E. Lee and calling a football game? Aside from some hysterical photoshops and Internet memes which would make everyone with a functional brain laugh — Robert E. Lee pulling out all the stops to stay in Charlottesville now! — what was the big fear here? Does ESPN really believe people are this dumb or that having an Asian announcer named Robert Lee is too offensive for the average TV viewer to handle?

Yes, yes they do.

I’m sorry you work for such an idiotic company, Robert Lee.

But just to make it clear for everyone out there, the Asian man on the right is not long deceased Confederate General Robert E. Lee. He’s a different person entirely, one that is still alive and did not fight in the Civil War.



And this is Confederate General Robert E. Lee.



They are not the same person.

Every time I think MSESPN can’t possibly get dumber, they get dumber.

God save us all.

“We collectively made the decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville were unfolding, simply because of the coincidence of his name. In that moment it felt right to all parties. It’s a shame that this is even a topic of conversation and we regret that who calls play by play for a football game has become an issue.”

It's just astounding that a line like this is a serious explanation.

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Is it a bad sign that I didn't immediately make the connection between his name and the Confederate general, and initially assumed they just pulled him because he's an Asian guy with a stereotypically white name and thus they pulled him out of a desire to avoid the appearance of cultural appropriation?

In fact, that’s the crucial point: ESPN was not just ready to accede to nonsensical, hypersensitive left-wing orthodoxies, but willing to create new orthodoxies that didn’t even exist yet. It self-censored even when it did not have to, acting to narrow its own boundaries of acceptable speech. As Vox put it, “It’s not just virtue-signaling, but virtue creating.” Big corporations are now enforcers, not victims, of political correctness.

Corporate appeasement of the Left is necessary because the Left takes scalps. Mozilla pushed out its CEO and co-founder, Brandon Eich, because he donated to an anti-gay-marriage referendum campaign. Just a mere “senior software engineer” at Google, James Damore never had a chance with his violation of orthodoxy in a memo exploring male-female differences. By contrast, conservative boycotts, whether against Disney or Ben & Jerry’s, inevitably seem to fail. However, in response to Chick-fil-A’s COO’s opposition to gay marriage, the mayors of Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco — wielding substantial market power between them — threatened to exclude the restaurant from their cities. Corporations want to avoid that at all costs. However, here they run into a difficulty: The Left’s social-media mobs are unpredictable. CEOs never know when their corporation will be attacked, even if it’s just for not condemning the latest outrage, not opposing Donald Trump, or not boycotting an entire state. The only way to not get left behind is to get ahead.

The woke world is a world of snitches, informants, rats. Go to any space concerned with social justice and what will you find? Endless surveillance. Everybody is to be judged. Everyone is under suspicion. Everything you say is to be scoured, picked over, analyzed for any possible offense. Everyone’s a detective in the Division of Problematics, and they walk the beat 24/7. You search and search for someone Bad doing Bad Things, finding ways to indict writers and artists and ordinary people for something, anything. That movie that got popular? Give me a few hours and 800 words. I’ll get you your indictments. That’s what liberalism is, now  —  the search for baddies doing bad things, like little offense archaeologists, digging deeper and deeper to find out who’s Good and who’s Bad.

Is it a bad sign that I didn't immediately make the connection between his name and the Confederate general, and initially assumed they just pulled him because he's an Asian guy with a stereotypically white name and thus they pulled him out of a desire to avoid the appearance of cultural appropriation?

How can it be virtue signalling when it was a leak? If no one leaked it to the press we'd have never known about this.