A recent Gallup poll showed a devastating collapse in public support for America’s premiere professional sports leagues. Just a year ago, pro sports had a positive favorability rating of 45% vs a 25% negative rating with the rest of the people being neutral. This gave a net +20 rating among all Americans. Today the net is -10 (30% positive, 40% negative).
Fully one-third of all Americans who used to view pro sports positively now think the opposite. This is a huge shift in perspective. This shift in favorability viewing has been most significant among Republicans and independent voters. Republicans went from +11 to -35. Independents went from +26 to -10. Perhaps even more dramatic has been the shift among non-whites where the numbers went from +51 to +16.
The causes of all this turnoff? Certainly the abortive attempts by some sports leagues to play to empty arenas may have something to do with that. However, social pressures are the most likely culprit in the rapid demise of favorability.
These numbers had to shock the more woke among NFL and NBA execs. All summer, these execs have been reading about the largely peaceful protests against the systemic racism responsible for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks among others and the crippling of Jacob Blake. How, they wondered, could sports fans not embrace those athletes who stood (or knelt) in support of social justice?
The players all endorsed the BLM movement or appeared to. So did the sportscasters, the advertisers, the TV networks, Hollywood, Big Tech, the New York Times, the major magazines, and just about everyone with a prominent soapbox except for Fox News — and even Fox waffled.
And that’s the problem. These people have been living inside a reality that has been constructed by the media and those who believe they control the information flow in this country. Common, everyday Americans on the ground had more information about these issues than those sports execs inside the bubble of leftist fantasy.
Americans achieved this by a process that Jack Cashill referred to as “samizdat.” In Eastern Bloc countries in decades past, samizdat was the secret copying and distribution of literature banned by the state. A few decades back Democratic-allied media got control of most TV stations. This made it difficult for conservative voices to get their message out. Eventually some conservative voices got into radio and achieved some measure of success. This was before the internet took off.
The unorganized nature of the conservative network world works in its favor. In today’s world the attempted censorship comes from Big Tech which has allied itself with the Deep State and from media outlets that refuse to report the actual news. What were formerly open platforms (think Facebook, Twitter, etc.), have become minefields for conservative voices to navigate. Despite these obstacles this has not stopped independent thinkers from speaking out.
Cashill explained,
To circumvent our mainstream media, conservatives have created their own samizdat, an unorganized network of blogs, public forums, news-aggregators, online publications, talk radio shows, citizen-journalists, and legal monitors such as Judicial Watch, a truth force that one Second Amendment blogger aptly called “a coalition of willing Lilliputians.”
Despite repeated attempts by Big Tech to thwart the samizdat, the internet has given the Lilliputians unprecedented reportorial power, and social media — Facebook and Twitter most prominently — have given them an ability to distribute their message in ways Soviet dissidents could only imagine. It was the samizdat that carried Donald Trump to victory in 2016 and, barring massive vote fraud, will carry him again in 2020.
As Facebook and Twitter find new ways to suppress speech they disagree with, intrepid independent thinkers find new ways to work around whatever limitations that are presented. Cashill noted that most real reporting in the last decade has been done by citizen journalists on the ground.
One such example has to be the identifying of the Michael Reinoehl as the assassin responsible for the death of Jay Danielson, a Trump supporter in Portland recently. Intrepid social media investigators had identified Reinoehl long before the media or even the police had done so.
Another would be the uncovering of evidence showing that George Floyd apparently died of a drug overdose of fentanyl and meth. People who read the NYTimes do not know this. The media is still trying to sell the narrative that Minneapolis officers were responsible. The real people on the ground know better. No fair-minded jury should ever convict any of these officers for any charges against them.
In his article Cashill goes on to discuss the “Minneapolis Effect” which is Heather Mac Donald’s “Ferguson Effect” on steroids. The numbers he quotes about violent crime are staggering. If you have a few minutes, you can find his full article here.
The media is desperately trying to spin, deflect and otherwise obliterate the damage being done to our country by Antifa and BLM. Despite their efforts more and more people are becoming aware of the absolutely false narrative being sold to America. I hear regularly from people who say that they cannot believe anything that they hear on the MSM. The time for a reckoning is approaching. The path to that reckoning starts on November 3rd with four more years for PDJT.