Michael Jordan and NBC team up to smear NASCAR fans as racists

On NBC’s Today show, Jordan was interviewed about Bubba Wallace, Jordan’s driver, who recently became the second black driver to win a NASCAR Cup Series race. Prompted by NBC’s Craig Melvin about why Wallace is booed at races, Jordan said the sport “needs to change.” He later said that by buying a team, he was “diving into the teeth of racism.” Melvin then complained about the sport’s lack of diversity and its association with the Confederate flag.

This isn’t a new smear from NBC. In fact, NBC’s Dateline tried to smear NASCAR fans as bigots back in 2006, when the show sent “Muslim-looking men” and a camera crew to a race in Martinsville, Virginia. NASCAR fans didn’t care then, and they didn’t disapprove of Wallace, either — at least not until Wallace staged his own Jussie Smollett moment.

Wallace was not booed by fans until after he took offense at a pull rope in his garage stall, acting as if the commonplace object had been intended as a threatening noose by a member of his racing team. Rather than refuse to jump to conclusions or simply dropping the issue when the FBI determined there was no hate crime, Wallace insisted it was a “straight-up noose” and that fans were the ones who were “delivering hate” without waiting for the facts.

Even so, Wallace later pushed back on the narrative that all fans were racist after he had fed into it. “We always want to pay attention to the negative, but the narrative that’s been out there now is saying all NASCAR fans are racist and whatnot, and that’s totally not true,” Wallace said in July 2020.

Yet both Jordan, who owns a race team, and Melvin, whose wife, Lindsay Czarniak, covers NASCAR, are content to ignore that while implying that the fan base is actually just racist to its core.

It’s the same accusation of bigotry that NBC tried to push 15 years ago, and once again, it is completely unfounded.