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Sports

The White House Wants ESPN to Fire Jemele Hill

Hill made the apparently controversial observation that President Donald Trump is a white supremacist.
Screen Capture via YouTube

ESPN SportsCenter anchor Jemele Hill was thrown under the bus by her company yesterday for tweeting the entirely reasonable statement that the current President of the United States is a white supremacist.

I would like to ask you, friends, to spot the lie.

Obviously, you can't because Donald Trump rose to power on wave of xenophobia, stoking an angry base of aggrieved white men who were just begging for the go ahead to say all the hateful things they used to be too polite to say out loud. He then hired a racist Attorney General denounced for attempting to suppress elderly black voters by none other than Coretta Scott King, a senior policy advisor whose senior yearbook quote included the phrase "There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are American and nothing else," and Steve fucking Bannon (probative link unnecessary).

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If all of that flew under the radar for you—to be fair, there has been a lot with this guy—then Trump's true stripes were never more apparent than during the violent clashes at Charlottesville, a fNazi rally to protest the removal of a Confederate statue, when the president not only did not condemn the Nazis and Klansmen rallying in the first place, but also said some of them were actually "very fine" people.

This was his attempt to clean up his own mess:

"We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides. On many sides. It's been going on for a long time in our country."

These are words that were publicly spoken by our president, in direct response to a hateful gathering of racists and anti-Semites.

But Hill's comments, sure, those are the fireable offense.