Young Chiefs Fan Should Sue Deadspin Into Oblivion For Inventing Blackface Hoax About Him
Just when you think legacy media can’t be any more despicable, they find a way to prove you wrong.
On Monday, the sports blog known as Deadspin — which is owned by G/O Media — published a hit piece in which Senior Writer Carron J. Phillips falsely accused a young Kansas City Chiefs fan of dawning blackface during the team’s Sunday game against the Las Vegas Raiders. Upon clicking on Phillips’ article, readers are greeted with the headline, “The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress,” accompanied by a picture of a young fan wearing a Chiefs jersey and American Indian headdress with half of his face painted black.
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time,” Phillips fumed.
Anyone who solely reads Phillips’ article and nothing else about the so-called “controversy” would likely take the senior writer’s “reporting” as true — that a young fan showed up to Sunday’s game in blackface with the intent to mock black and Native Americans. As per usual with America’s irreparably broken media, however, Phillips’ accusations are total bunk.
Different camera angles reveal that the other half of the Chiefs fan’s face — the side Phillips chose to omit — is painted red. In other words, his face was painted in Chiefs’ colors.
To anyone with a lick of common sense, it’s clear that a fan painting his face and dressing out in mascot garb at a sporting event is there to show support for his favorite team. But for race-obsessed leftists like Phillips, division must be created where there is none.
Even after it was obvious to the public that the aforementioned fan wasn’t doing blackface, Phillips doubled down on his lie, writing on X: “For the idiots in my mentions who are treating this as some harmless act because the other side of his face was painted red, I could make the argument that it makes it even worse.”
“Y’all are the ones who hate Mexicans but wear sombreros on Cinco,” he added.
But the young Chiefs fan wasn’t the only target of Phillips’ unhinged rant. Throughout his hit piece, the Deadspin writer lambasted the NFL for allowing this non-incident to happen, claiming that if the league had “outlawed the chop at Chiefs games and been more aggressive in changing the team’s name, then we wouldn’t be here.” Predictably for the unhappy, devoted leftist, the Washington franchise ditching its “Redskins” mascot and the NFL’s capitulation to Black Lives Matter and the “silence is violence” crowd following George Floyd’s death wasn’t good enough for Phillips.
The senior writer used his Monday diatribe to further push critical race theory-type thinking by insinuating that the league’s leadership are “oppressors” and blasting them for expecting non-white, “oppressed” individuals, including players, to help root out so-called “oppression” in institutions such as the NFL. Because as we all know, anyone who gets paid millions of dollars to play football is oppressed.
Deadspin Deserves the Sandmann Treatment
There are only two possible explanations for Phillips’ apparently defamatory story. The first is that he only saw the photo of the fan from one angle and disregarded basic journalistic fact-checking because he was eager to push his “Racism is everywhere!” agenda. The second and more likely reason, given his willingness to double down on the phony story, is that Phillips knew the fan’s face was painted with multiple colors and went out of his way to falsely accuse the fan of hatefully mocking black and Native Americans anyway.
Whatever the definitive reason, neither option reflects well on Deadspin or Phillips.
Unfortunately, the Chiefs blackface hoax has become the norm for corporate media outlets like Deadspin — which has a history of using sports as a vehicle to engage in left-wing activism.
Recall several years ago when self-professed “news” organizations went out of their way to smear Nick Sandmann, who was a Covington Catholic High School student attending a pro-life rally in Washington, D.C. Rather than practice actual journalism, America’s drive-by media immediately rushed to use a short clip of Sandmann — who was wearing a MAGA hat — smiling at a Native American demonstrator to baselessly accuse the student of racial harassment.
By the time the full video emerged showing that it was Sandmann and his classmates who were being harassed by the Native American demonstrator and members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, the damage had already been done. Sandmann’s name had already been dragged through the mud, his life and future career prospects tarnished by the media’s lies. And with Deadspin’s latest smear hoax, history is repeating itself.
The family of the young Kansas City Chiefs fan at the center of Phillips’ smear should follow Sandmann’s lead and sue entities like Deadspin and Phillips into oblivion for furthering these incredulous lies.
Passivity is not going to cut it with a rabid, leftist press that is intent on rewriting truth and destroying unifying aspects of American culture. Deadspin must be held to account for this latest sham, and if that means taking them to court over every penny they’re worth, then so be it.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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