Sports Illustrated goes to bat for wokeism, strikes out
March 22, 2024
Sports Illustrated is going down swinging.
Owner Authentic Brands Group has kept the sports magazine afloat by reaching a 10-year licensing agreement with Minute Media, the company behind sports websites FanSided and The Players’ Tribune. Once the gold standard of sports journalism, the magazine laid off all unionized staff in January after being caught late last year publishing AI-generated articles written by fake authors.
And so the woke pandemic continues to take a toll on the ailing media industry. At this point, Sports Illustrated might even consider praying for good fortune, although we here at AIM won’t hold our breath.
After all, this is the same magazine that claimed that private prayer on a football field endangered democracy itself. When a high school football coach took a school district to court for firing him for praying on the field, a disturbing duo of “faith and football teamed up against American democracy,” SI’s headline read.
But as AIM explained at the time, “Far from showing that democracy is in danger, the case highlights how American democracy actually works. The two sides are working their way through the legal system as they take the case to the Supreme Court for a decision.
“…If anyone is attacking ‘American Democracy’ it’s the progressives when they claim that the mere exercise of power by conservatives in America, as in the case of appointing Supreme Court justices, is always and everywhere an attack on ‘American Democracy’ by white nationalists, who love Donald Trump [but] hate Muslims and immigrants—legal or illegal.”
Similarly, merely supporting the Second Amendment is racist, according to the New York Yankees. Ironically enough, America’s baseball team joined SI in its anti-Americanism by tweeting the following after the Uvalde, Texas school shooting in 2022:
Each year, more than 4,100 Latinx people die from gun violence in the U.S. and 13,300 are shot and wounded.
— New York Yankees (@Yankees) May 26, 2022
As tragic as they are, Latinos’ 4,100 annual gun deaths in the U.S. are far fewer than the approximately 120,000 gun deaths Latin America saw in 2019, as we reported. Latinos aren’t disproportionately affected by gun violence in the U.S.
Sports, on the other hand, disproportionately represent excellence. Professional athletes are paragons of excellence, just like SI’s swimsuit models used to be paragons of female beauty before trans women (i.e., biological men) and “body-positive” women started appearing on the covers of many of its swimsuit issues.
Sports are one of the few remaining arenas where only the most skilled win, leaving no room whatsoever for DEI mandates. Oddly enough, Sports Illustrated is on a losing streak because for years now, it’s rejected the lessons of competence and fair play from the very subject that it was founded to cover.