‘This Is Bad for America, But Great for Us’
How Clay Travis rode the Trump wave from ordinary sports blogger to well-paid darling of the alt-right.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...is-alt-right-espn-conservative-liberal-215658
Is ‘tank’ too strong a word?” Clay Travis asked gleefully, tapping out a tweet to his nearly 500,000 followers. It wasn’t, he decided, and he hit send: “NFL ratings tank as Trump feuds with NFL protesters, ESPN subscribers plummet.” He sat back and felt a wave of validation as the likes and retweets spiraled higher and higher.
Travis, 38, is among the most listened-to sports personalities in America. He made his name tying the business woes of ESPN to its coverage of politically progressive athletes. But since Donald Trump’s election he has evolved into something much bigger than just a sports bro with an unlimited supply of attitude. In warp speed, he has gone from opining and blogging on SEC football and posting leering pictures of quarterbacks’ girlfriends to a darling in Republican media circles, a reliable source of ammunition in an increasingly bitter and polarizing national culture war. He is an oft-cited source on websites like the Daily Caller, Breitbart and Lifezette, delivering anti-politically correct hot takes like offering $50,000 to charity if progressive commentator Shaun King would take a DNA test to prove he is black.
It was Travis who, after violence this summer in Charlottesville, broke the story that ESPN had pulled an Asian announcer named Robert Lee off a scheduled telecast at the University of Virginia. ESPN said it was a simple maneuver to protect an employee from online abuse, but Travis claimed it was the epitome of PC-culture run amok. The scoop landed him not one but three appearances on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox. When ESPN host Jemele Hill called Trump a “white supremacist,” Travis was summoned to CNN as the designated conservative voice; he promptly deployed a favorite line about the two things he believes in: “the First Amendment and boobs.” Viewers were aghast, but a vast swath of conservatives roared with approval. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, he notes proudly, follows him on Twitter.
Then, on Friday night on a stage in Alabama, Trump picked a very public fight with professional football players, calling for them to be fired for kneeling in an ongoing protest over racial injustice, inequality and police brutality. When Travis woke up the next morning, he turned to his wife and said, “This is bad for America, but this is great for us.”
On Monday, two days after his early morning prediction, Travis was sitting in the third-floor TV studio of his six-bedroom mansion outside Nashville, preparing for his first show since Trump had called any NFL player who kneeled a “son of bitch.” He wore a shirt emblazoned with his favorite acronym: DBAP, short for Don’t Be a Pussy (They are for sale on his website.). His wife, Lara, a former Tennessee Titans cheerleader, wore a pair of pink yoga pants and was curled up in a red leather recliner across the room. “Usually, I can’t watch because I’m afraid what he might say,” she told me.
Over the course of the weekend, the New York Times, Washington Post and Sports Illustrated among countless others had applauded players for standing up to a bully of a president, who they said was preying on a divided country. Travis remained unmoved. While others were busy counting the number of kneeling players, he was parsing the ratings figures. And that was all he needed to ridicule what he called a self-defeating protest: CBS was down 1 percent, Fox down 16 percent and NBC 11 percent for its NFL games on Sunday and that was proof, according to Travis, that the protesting players were driving fans away.
“What are the players protesting?” he asked over and over again during his nearly 33-minute Periscope show, which was simulcast on Facebook and would be viewed more than 70,000 times. The civil rights movement, he said, had an aim: “The goal was voting rights!” But these players were alienating the fans that paid their salaries. “I don’t know that players are making rational decisions when they think about where their income comes from,” he continued. “When the television ratings tank … players make less money.” His audience ratified his view: “White people don’t watch football anymore,” read a comment on the Periscope feed.
This kind of explicitly race-tinged view is not uncommon among Travis’ followers (a caller on his radio show that morning had called Barack Obama a Muslim, though Travis had corrected him and ended the call) and it speaks to a consequence that the two-time Obama voternever imagined when he launched his website, Outkick the Coverage, in 2011. Travis is adept at spinning the numbers to fit his narrative—NFL ratings are, in fact, down lately, but the cause is nearly impossible to discern (pregame shows were way up on Sunday); ESPN, meanwhile, did lose an estimated 200,000 subscribers this month, but over the past year the network has lost households at a lower rate than Fox News. Math aside, Travis has fashioned a powerfully appealing identity from the playbooks of an array of media stars on the right. He has the in-your-face masculinity of Mike Cernovich; Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show; and the independent media company model of InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Travis even has a catchphrase like Fox News: “I’m a radical moderate,” he likes to say.
On Wednesday, in the wake of news that Tennessee Senator Bob Corker might not seek reelection in 2018, Travis mused that he might run to fill the seat.“He’s the perfect voice for the moment,” said a sports media executive. But as he has ridden the Trump wave to fame since the election, many who know him well have watched with something bordering on discomfort, even dismay.
A few minutes before Travis began taping his Periscope show, I sat with Lara, a former guidance counselor turned stay-at-home mom, on the patio outside their house overlooking the driveway where Travis’ Mercedes and her luxury SUV were parked. She was a Hillary Clinton voter in November (Travis says he voted libertarian) and I asked how it felt for her husband to be embraced by a part of the electorate that represented exactly what she voted against.
She thought about the question for a few seconds, clearly wrestling with an idea that had been on her mind. “He might be looked at as the person who supported Trump when he went after black athletes,” she said. “I hope he’s not remembered for that in history.”
(More at above url)
How Clay Travis rode the Trump wave from ordinary sports blogger to well-paid darling of the alt-right.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...is-alt-right-espn-conservative-liberal-215658
Is ‘tank’ too strong a word?” Clay Travis asked gleefully, tapping out a tweet to his nearly 500,000 followers. It wasn’t, he decided, and he hit send: “NFL ratings tank as Trump feuds with NFL protesters, ESPN subscribers plummet.” He sat back and felt a wave of validation as the likes and retweets spiraled higher and higher.
Travis, 38, is among the most listened-to sports personalities in America. He made his name tying the business woes of ESPN to its coverage of politically progressive athletes. But since Donald Trump’s election he has evolved into something much bigger than just a sports bro with an unlimited supply of attitude. In warp speed, he has gone from opining and blogging on SEC football and posting leering pictures of quarterbacks’ girlfriends to a darling in Republican media circles, a reliable source of ammunition in an increasingly bitter and polarizing national culture war. He is an oft-cited source on websites like the Daily Caller, Breitbart and Lifezette, delivering anti-politically correct hot takes like offering $50,000 to charity if progressive commentator Shaun King would take a DNA test to prove he is black.
It was Travis who, after violence this summer in Charlottesville, broke the story that ESPN had pulled an Asian announcer named Robert Lee off a scheduled telecast at the University of Virginia. ESPN said it was a simple maneuver to protect an employee from online abuse, but Travis claimed it was the epitome of PC-culture run amok. The scoop landed him not one but three appearances on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox. When ESPN host Jemele Hill called Trump a “white supremacist,” Travis was summoned to CNN as the designated conservative voice; he promptly deployed a favorite line about the two things he believes in: “the First Amendment and boobs.” Viewers were aghast, but a vast swath of conservatives roared with approval. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, he notes proudly, follows him on Twitter.
Then, on Friday night on a stage in Alabama, Trump picked a very public fight with professional football players, calling for them to be fired for kneeling in an ongoing protest over racial injustice, inequality and police brutality. When Travis woke up the next morning, he turned to his wife and said, “This is bad for America, but this is great for us.”
On Monday, two days after his early morning prediction, Travis was sitting in the third-floor TV studio of his six-bedroom mansion outside Nashville, preparing for his first show since Trump had called any NFL player who kneeled a “son of bitch.” He wore a shirt emblazoned with his favorite acronym: DBAP, short for Don’t Be a Pussy (They are for sale on his website.). His wife, Lara, a former Tennessee Titans cheerleader, wore a pair of pink yoga pants and was curled up in a red leather recliner across the room. “Usually, I can’t watch because I’m afraid what he might say,” she told me.
Over the course of the weekend, the New York Times, Washington Post and Sports Illustrated among countless others had applauded players for standing up to a bully of a president, who they said was preying on a divided country. Travis remained unmoved. While others were busy counting the number of kneeling players, he was parsing the ratings figures. And that was all he needed to ridicule what he called a self-defeating protest: CBS was down 1 percent, Fox down 16 percent and NBC 11 percent for its NFL games on Sunday and that was proof, according to Travis, that the protesting players were driving fans away.
“What are the players protesting?” he asked over and over again during his nearly 33-minute Periscope show, which was simulcast on Facebook and would be viewed more than 70,000 times. The civil rights movement, he said, had an aim: “The goal was voting rights!” But these players were alienating the fans that paid their salaries. “I don’t know that players are making rational decisions when they think about where their income comes from,” he continued. “When the television ratings tank … players make less money.” His audience ratified his view: “White people don’t watch football anymore,” read a comment on the Periscope feed.
This kind of explicitly race-tinged view is not uncommon among Travis’ followers (a caller on his radio show that morning had called Barack Obama a Muslim, though Travis had corrected him and ended the call) and it speaks to a consequence that the two-time Obama voternever imagined when he launched his website, Outkick the Coverage, in 2011. Travis is adept at spinning the numbers to fit his narrative—NFL ratings are, in fact, down lately, but the cause is nearly impossible to discern (pregame shows were way up on Sunday); ESPN, meanwhile, did lose an estimated 200,000 subscribers this month, but over the past year the network has lost households at a lower rate than Fox News. Math aside, Travis has fashioned a powerfully appealing identity from the playbooks of an array of media stars on the right. He has the in-your-face masculinity of Mike Cernovich; Rush Limbaugh’s national radio show; and the independent media company model of InfoWars’ Alex Jones. Travis even has a catchphrase like Fox News: “I’m a radical moderate,” he likes to say.
On Wednesday, in the wake of news that Tennessee Senator Bob Corker might not seek reelection in 2018, Travis mused that he might run to fill the seat.“He’s the perfect voice for the moment,” said a sports media executive. But as he has ridden the Trump wave to fame since the election, many who know him well have watched with something bordering on discomfort, even dismay.
A few minutes before Travis began taping his Periscope show, I sat with Lara, a former guidance counselor turned stay-at-home mom, on the patio outside their house overlooking the driveway where Travis’ Mercedes and her luxury SUV were parked. She was a Hillary Clinton voter in November (Travis says he voted libertarian) and I asked how it felt for her husband to be embraced by a part of the electorate that represented exactly what she voted against.
She thought about the question for a few seconds, clearly wrestling with an idea that had been on her mind. “He might be looked at as the person who supported Trump when he went after black athletes,” she said. “I hope he’s not remembered for that in history.”
(More at above url)