Yesterday, as Jay Maxson at NewsBusters noted, ESPN laid off 100 on-air personalities.
One would think that an awareness of growing financial vulnerability might convince the network to keep its employees' and contributors' most radical impulses in check, lest even more subscribers and/or advertisers get alienated. That certainly isn't happening at ESPNW, the network's women's sports website.
ESPNW posted a series of five poems on "the new feminism" in the "Voices" section of its website on Tuesday. One of them, which led off the series, was dedicated to a 1970s cop-killer.
The operative word is "was" because ESPNW has pulled the poem, changed the title of the post from "Five poets on the new feminism" to "Four poets on the new feminism," and explained the change in a note at the end of the remaining poems which reads as follows:
An earlier version of "Five Poets on the New Feminism" featured Revolution by Dr. DaMaris Hill. We have decided it is not an appropriate selection for our site, and have removed it from the feature.
Naturally, ESPNW didn't tell readers why Hill's poem was not "an appropriate selection."
Here's why: Hill's poem, as Bre Payton at TheFederalist.com noted (HT Weasel Zippers):
... (is) dedicated to Assata Shakur (spelling corrected — Ed.), an icon among black power enthusiasts who was convicted of murdering a police officer in 1977. She escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba in 1984, where she’s been hiding ever since.
... Shakur, whose real name is Joanne Deborah Chesimard, was the first woman to be named on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list and the FBI is currently offering a $1 million reward for information leading to her arrest.
That summary of Shakur's savagery suffices to explain why ESPNW exhibited nothing resembling intelligent adult judgment in publishing Hill's poem before pulling it within hours.
Shakur is not only an icon of Hill the poet but is also officially considered a heroine of the violent Black Lives Matter movement. Readers unfamiliar with the whole story of Shakur and her cohorts would benefit from learning just how depraved the crimes they committed really were, and just how nihilist their outlook really was.
Just a month ago, syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin laid that story out for her readers:
Forty years ago this week, a New Jersey jury convicted Joanne D. Chesimard – a.k.a. Assata Shakur — on first-degree murder, assault, and other charges in the 1973 traffic-stop execution of state trooper Werner Foerster and wounding of trooper James Harper. She received a life (plus 30 years) sentence.
But instead of serving behind bars, Shakur has led the pampered life of a “political fugitive” in socialist Cuba after her radical Black Liberation Army buddies busted her out of prison. The late Fidel Castro’s regime provided the fugitive murderer and social-justice vigilante an apartment, stipends, books, and funding for graduate school.
As she ages in comfort, the BLA’s self-styled mother hen is now a campus icon among the Black Lives Matter generation.
... At the time of Foerster’s murder, the BLA had been tied to the murders of more than 10 police officers across the country. Before the turnpike shootout, the BLA had ambushed two pairs of NYPD officers in a 48-hour spree, killing two of them; murdered another cop in Atlanta; and executed another pair of NYPD officers in 1972.
Chesimard, her brother-in-law Zayd Shakur (who died in the gunfight with Foerster and Harper), and another BLA member were wanted for questioning in the murder of two of those cops when they were stopped.
... BLA’s “sole goal,” domestic-terrorism expert and author Bryan Burrough noted in an interview for my new CRTV.com investigative program on Shakur, “was assassinating policemen.”
... Joseph Connor, whose father, Frank, was murdered by the BLA-aligned Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN in 1975, added that these violent left-wing extremists were far from freedom-loving peaceful protesters: “They were looking to subjugate people beneath them. They weren’t looking to free people, they were looking to murder people, they were looking to cause mayhem."
In 1998, Congresswoman Maxine Waters stated her unequivocal belief that Cuba had every right to grant asylum to Shakur "because we must respect the right of the government of Cuba to grant political asylum for individuals from the U.S. fleeing political persecution." Fleeing the U.S. after escaping from jail after being convicted of murder in an evidence-supported prosecution obviously has nothing to do with "political persecution" and everything to do with escaping accountability — except in the fevered mind of Maxine Waters and the modern, violent Black Lives Matter movement.
ESPNW's original decision to publish Hill's poem dedicated to Shakur is all the more odious because, as Malkin noted at the end of her column, there is reason to believe that the Trump administration might try to negotiate her extradition back to the United States. Thus, ESPNW's original de facto endorsement of Hill's "new feminism" poem and the murderer to whom it is dedicated was arguably a move to encourage Cuba to keep her, or to generate sympathy for her if she is returned.
I would suggest that ESPNW lose the self-important activism and concentrate on all of the wonderful accomplishments of the amazing athletes participating in women's sports. But it's a waste a of time. Nothing short of impending bankruptcy will change their minds, and that's at least several years down the road at the parent network's current rate of decay.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
