A terminally woke writer for the Washington Post demands that Major League Baseball ban teams from holding spring training in Florida because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “disfiguring” racism and his “attack on diversity.”
Kevin B. Blackistone, frequently featured on ESPN and ESPN radio, is nominally a sports writer for the Post. I say “nominally” because he mainly only uses sports to discuss race and racism. Just in the last few months, he has attacked Tony Dungy for being a conservative-minded Christian, praised LeBron James — because of course he would — attacked the NFL for not having enough black coaches, decried critics of Brittney Griner, and on and on it goes. So, he only writes about sports so he can rail against evil white supremacy and our irredeemable and systemically racist country. And, unsurprisingly, he’s at it again, wailing about Florida’s new era of Jim Crow.
In his March 5 piece, entitled, Baseball Can No Longer Ignore Ron DeSantis’s Culture Wars, Blackistone is once again stoking division by making a long series of false accusations about Ron DeSantis and the political revolution he is leading in the Sunshine State and suggesting that MLB tell the 15 teams that have spring training there to move away in protest.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis waves to the crowd after speaking about his new book ‘The Courage to Be Free’ in the Air Force One Pavilion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on March 5, 2023, in Simi Valley, California. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Blackistone’s central thesis is that Florida is now somehow exactly the same with its climate of racism and Jim Crow 2.0 as it was in the 1920s when MLB first began moving spring training out of Florida and into Arizona.
“There was a time when America’s pastime showed a weariness of Florida’s hostile approach to inclusiveness, which in some ways is being reconstituted by its current governor, Ron DeSantis,” Blackistone blares at the outset.
With Kevin leading with a lie, it isn’t surprising that nearly every word he wrote from there is heaped one upon the next in a growing mountain of lies.
Blackistone notes that in the last few months, DeSantis called African American studies (his quotes) “indoctrination” and suggested that Florida should remove state funding for any school that bases classwork on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or critical race theory.
The Post screedist then delivers this whopper: “The latter is the higher-education scientific analysis of race and racism in society.”
Yes. He called the BLM propaganda in Critical Race Theory “scientific.”
Fernando Tatis Jr., #23 of the San Diego Padres, fields a ball hit to right field during a Spring Training game against the Los Angeles Dodgers on March 6, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona. Matt Thomas/San Diego Padres/Getty Images)
Then Blackistone went for the jugular by saying that CRT “has been purposefully disfigured by DeSantis, an Ivy Leaguer, and others of his reactionary ilk into a boogeyman for White citizens who believe they are losing this country that wasn’t theirs in the first place.”
CRT is not “scientific,” nor is it educational. Instead, it is anti-white propaganda that pits black people against America — not just against whites, but against the country’s entire history, laws, and ethos. It teaches blacks that they cannot get ahead, that they are permanent victims, and that they need special handouts because they are unable to achieve on par with Asians and whites. The result of this sort of indoctrination leads quite directly to the situation recently seen at a Springfield, Ohio, elementary school where older black kids were seen beating little white kids and forcing them to kneel and pledge allegiance to BLM. This sort of violence will only grow as CRT inculcates more students.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans to reform public universities by banning “critical race theory” and investing millions of dollars in Sarasotaâs New College. He made his remarks at the Bradenton campus of the State College of Florida on Tuesday, January 31, 2023. (James A. Jones Jr./The Bradenton Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Blackistone next lied about schools shutting down libraries in Florida because of DeSantis’ education policies.
“Some public schools in DeSantis’s state directed teachers to remove or wrap up classroom libraries in response to a statewide mandate that schoolbooks be age-appropriate and “suited to student needs,” Blackistone falsely wrote.
The left widely claimed that Florida schools emptied their shelves of books because Florida’s new policies require sexually inappropriate books to be eliminated from school libraries. The truth is, though, that no Florida school has eliminated its library, nor will such a thing occur.
Next, Blackistone indulged another of the left-wing media’s favorite lies by assailing the state’s education law with the defamatory and false label of the “don’t say gay” law—a law which, oddly enough, doesn’t say the word “gay” anywhere in it.
“And about a year ago,” Blackistone wrote, “DeSantis signed into law the “don’t say gay” bill, so nicknamed by critics, which prohibits public schools from any teaching on sexual orientation or gender identity unless they are considered “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate.” Yet a league that started celebrating Pride Month several years ago is deeply rooted this time of year in Florida.”
LGBTQ employees protesting CEO Bob Chapek’s handling of the staff controversy over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, aka the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, walk out from Walt Disney Animation on Tuesday, March 22, 2022, in Burbank, CA. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
In fact. the education law has nothing to do with anyone being or not being gay. Instead, it actually restricts sexually inappropriate content in the classroom for students under ten years of age. That includes heterosexual sex, by the way.
Ultimately, Blackistone is demanding that the teams band together to oppose Florida, saying that “they could collectively, or through MLB’s front office, let their displeasure with DeSantis’s leadership, with its hints of the troubling days of yesteryear, be known. After all, so many of the issues DeSantis has made noise standing against are the same issues baseball has made noise standing for in recent years. Diversity. Inclusion. Education about the game’s (and the country’s) unsavory racial past, which merits at least a small display now at its Cooperstown, N.Y., museum attached to the Hall of Fame.”
Blackistone wraps up by repeating Jackie Robinson’s lament that baseball didn’t do enough to stem the tide of Jim Crow back in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Just as he started with a lie, Blackistone ends with one writing, “If history is repeating itself in Florida, so, too, should Robinson’s sentiment.”
Florida is in no way “repeating” the hate of Jim Crow. But Blackistone is doing his level best to use that hate to stoke division today.
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