Max Kellerman, the inferior half of ESPN’s windbag duo on First Take, has some thoughts about the rioting in cities. Unsurprisingly, he’s wrong.
UFC fighter Colby Covington, an outspoken Trump supporter, called LeBron James and other woke athletes “spineless cowards” following his victory against Tyron Woodley on Saturday. Kellerman attempted to offer a rebuttal to Covington’s comments, and he failed on every count.
“When he talks about, like, Black Lives Matter, 93% of the protests are peaceful,” Kellerman said. “And, by the way, the 7% that are not, they have a very broad definition of what’s not quote-unquote ‘peaceful;’ for example, if you block traffic or something like that.” He then added, “Even then, a big percentage of that that wasn’t peaceful is actually outside agitators, extremist right-wing agitators posing as protesters in order to make the protests look bad.”
ESPN’s Max Kellerman says without any evidence that “extremist right-wing agitators” are responsible for the riots around America.
This is insanity. pic.twitter.com/woOvFtwIvr
— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) September 22, 2020
The 7% of nonpeaceful protests Kellerman is diminishing add up to 570 separate violent demonstrations in fewer than 220 locations across the United States. The Princeton study he’s quoting makes no mention of “blocking traffic” being classified as violence. Moreover, it’s unlikely that a study determined to make the riots sound as benign as possible would inflate the total number by including such a thing.
Of course, Kellerman also spreads the unfounded false-flag conspiracy theory that right-wing agitators have infiltrated the peaceful protests to make them appear violent. This has become the popular left-wing narrative for Democrats who stopped making excuses for rioters only after they realized that riots don’t poll well.
Kellerman’s political analysis is just as insightful as his sports analysis, which is to say that it’s embarrassingly worthless. Between calling southerners stupid and crying that the Notre Dame “Fighting Irish” moniker is offensive, Kellerman misses no opportunity to use his position on a sports network to tout sophomoric political takes.
It’s no surprise that First Take, like the rest of ESPN’s programming, finds its ratings in the toilet. When you combine hatred for half of the country with open advocacy for sports to be canceled, you get Kellerman blathering on to a smaller television audience than Jay Leno’s Garage and Cartoon Network.
