When a minor-league baseball team showed a video during a Memorial Day game that showed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among the “enemies of freedom,” most people cried foul. The Media Research Center’s Matt Philbin did too — well, kinda.
Philbin asserted in a May 29 post that “for once, Ocasio-Cortez and her media enthusiasts are right to cry, just not for the reasons they think.” When one writer pointed out that she is “a regular target of criticism by right-wing media and GOP officials,” Philbin sneered: “That’s certainly the way AOC sees things.” Philbin then switched into sorry/not sorry mode, suggesting that, just maybe, she deserves all the hate right-wingers like him send her way:
Ocasio-Cortez has made herself the mouthpiece for a fundamentally un-American ideology, one that has a track record of failure, misery and, in may cases, tyranny. She has regularly said the kind of things (untrue, extreme, ignorant) that get the media howling when Donald Trump says them.
Obviously, it’s horrible that she gets threats, and the authorities should track them and punish the criminals who make them. There’s gotta be a special place in hell for those who make threatening phone calls. But Twitter isn’t a nice place. Unfortunately, to take and defend a controversial position on social media is to stir up the fever swamp and poke at things — left and right — better left on the bottom. And that goes for everybody.
The Grizzlies apologized to Ocasio-Cortez. That’s nice. More important, the team apologized to the ones who really deserve it: the fans who came to the park for some baseball and got politics. They could stay home and watch Fox or CNN for that. Memorial Day should be observed at ballparks and arenas across the country, but it shouldn’t be an opportunity to score political points. No entertainment event should be. So Grizzlies, shut up and hit the ball.
Philbin continued his sorry/not sorry act two days later in a post attacking another writer, this time Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell, for pointing out the insult, which included a copy-and-paste from his earlier post:
To be clear, a video — any video — insulting any political figure should never have run at a ballpark, Memorial Day or not. Because nobody should have politics intrude on their day at the game. If they want partisan hackery mixed in with their sports, they can stay home and watch ESPN — or read the Post sports page. As for the content, is it hate speech? Not really. Is it an “implicit incitement to violence,” as Boswell condemns it? No. It’s an over-the-top and debatable description of her policy stance. Ocasio-Cortez has made herself the mouthpiece for a fundamentally un-American ideology, one that has a track record of failure, misery and, in may cases, tyranny. Americans still, thankfully, have an innate distrust of socialism.
And to show how much Philbin opposes politics in sports, he used his ostensible sports-themed post to attack “the left” for having “eschewed overt patriotism, and at various times embraced socialism, apologized for communism, and loudly denounced the history of America and the rest of the West.” He went on to whine that “I eagerly await [Boswell’s] reaction column to the next Emmy’s or Oscars, or whichever is the next entertainment awards show festival of hate for Trump and other Republicans. Should be an enlightening read.”