New York Post sports columnist Phil Mushnick is an anomaly in a business dominated by left-wingers. He's not afraid to call out race-hustling, the progressive politics of sports media or sleazy Super Bowl halftime performers. This week he had Spike Lee, former NBA player Charles Oakley and pandering media in his crosshairs.
Lee and Oakley provoked Mushnick's most recent column, accusing them of casting themselves as martyrs "when it suits them." Last Friday they were front and center in newspaper ads attacking New York Knicks owner James Dolan on behalf of the Big3 basketball league.
The Big3 ad promoted a June 27 outdoor festival at Flushing Meadow, NY, and portrays Dolan as someone with racial animus. Oakley is quoted saying, “It’s a plantation over there” (with the Knicks).
That's a "nauseating, historically cheap assertion," Mushnick wrote, adding, "As a plantation slave under Dolan, Oakley not only was paid many millions of dollars for seasonal work, but also had what no slave ever had: the right to quit."
The Big3 ad also attributed this quote to Lee, (seen in above photo at a Knicks game) the super-charged, attention-starved Knicks' fan, claiming Dolan had mistreated him.: “Players are not property. The fans are our guests.’’
Mushnick also zeroed in on media for promoting such race baiting:
"But where would racial hustlers be if not for selectively sighted, pandering, frightened media?"
Mushnick wrote that, for 25 years, Lee "has been allowed to jump on MSG’s court to accost players, intrude on games and excessively demonstrate his self-entitled presence, the kind that would have earned others ejections".
The media have had long given Lee passes for outrageous claims, Mushnick points out, including Hurricane Katrina.
Lee "seconded crackpot Louis Farrakhan’s reckless claim that levees were purposefully allowed to be destroyed as per a plan of President George W. Bush and the U.S. Corps of Engineers to rid the city of black neighborhoods." There was no mention that the entire city’s population had been strongly urged to evacuate, Mushnick says.
Also, Lee once tweeted the address of George Zimmerman after his acquittal of murder in the Trayvon Martin case. Or tried to. Lee sent a "wanted-dead-or-alive dictum" to 250,000 Twitter followers with the wrong address, one that belonged to an elderly couple who were terrorized at their home and forced to flee for their lives.
Mushnick noted that Lee gave the victims of his carelessness $10,000 in an out-of-court settlement, but is still considered relevant thanks to media looking the other way.:
"That episode, which would reasonably lead to the arrest and incarceration of most anyone else, was quickly forgotten, making less news than his row with Dolan.
"Still, Lee lectures about racial injustice when he’s a steady beneficiary of it."
If the Knicks organization is a "plantation" as Oakley alleges, it's a strange one. Because, as New York Post's Marc Berman pointed out, at the start of the 2019-2020 NBA season, the top five front office personnel, as well as their head coach, were black men. Berman and Mushnick appear to be the only sports media willing to challenge the Big3 race hustlers.
