“There’s a racial division in this country that’s being instigated by the president, and we here at ESPN haven’t had the stomach for that fight.”
With those words, The Washington Post reports Dan Le Batard launched into an impassioned monologue Thursday. The host of popular ESPN TV and radio shows ripped into both President Trump in the wake of “Send her back!” chants at a rally the night before, and his own network, which has been advising its on-air personalities to refrain from political commentary.
Le Batard, 50, was speaking on his radio show when he noted that he was the son of Cuban immigrants and said, “What happened last night, this felt un-American.”
At the rally Wednesday in Greenville, N.C., Trump was criticizing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a Somali refugee who became a naturalized American citizen, when the “Send her back!” chants rang out. Trump, who tweeted on Sunday that “ ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” such as Omar should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” said Thursday that he “felt a little bit badly” about the chanting and tried to quickly end it, but he let it go on for 13 seconds at the rally before resuming his remarks.
On his show, Le Batard read a tweet posted Wednesday evening by Fox Sports 1′s Nick Wright, who wrote, “I don’t talk politics on here but this isn’t political, this is obvious: This is abhorrent, obviously racist, dangerous rhetoric and not calling it out makes you complicit. The ‘send her back’ chant + the ‘go back to where you came from’ are so antithetical to what we should be.”
“It is so right, what he is saying there,” Le Batard said of Wright. “It is so wrong, what the president of our country is doing, trying to get reelected by dividing the masses, at a time when the old white man, the old rich white man, feels oppressed, being attacked, by minorities.”
“This isn’t about politics; it’s about race,” said Le Batard, who noted that ESPN personalities “only talk about it” when outspoken sports figures such NBA coaches Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich offer opinions on the subject.
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