Anonymous Mailbag

It’s Tuesday, and I’m here to solve all your life’s problems.

I can also hopefully make you some money as well. Right now if you are a new user, you can bet $5 on any team to win their Sweet 16 game, and if you’re right, you get a 30-1 payout. That means if you put $5 down on any team, you get back $150. Take Gonzaga and enjoy your free money.

As always you can send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.

Okay, here we go:

“Clay, I’m a conservative football coach. I follow many conservative people on Twitter such as Ben Shapiro, Brandon Tatum, and you. However, I never like or share any posts because this could easily lead to backlash like we’ve seen with other conservative coaches. I am in the market for a new coaching job as I try to climb the coaching ladder. Should I wipe my follows of conservatives or make my account private? I don’t want to miss out on a job by a school who looks through my follows, but I also don’t feel I have anything to hide.”

For many people out there, I think the benefit of having a public Twitter account attached to your name is minimal. I’m talking about people like you who never tweet themselves and don’t have any real need to be on social media. I have a Facebook account, for instance, that I opened in 2004. I haven’t checked it in over a decade, at least.

Why?

I just don’t have the time, and I don’t see much of a benefit.

My circle of friends is pretty small, and my free time is even smaller. If you don’t have my cell phone number to text me, you probably aren’t that good of a friend. And I just don’t see much value in spending time on social media in my free time given that I spend a lot of time on social media already with my current job.

But my current job requires social media, that’s what I do for a living.

Why do anything on social media that would make you less likely to get a better job in your chosen field if your line of work doesn’t have much to do with social media? I just think the risk/reward here for a coach is really slanted in favor of risk. That doesn’t mean you can’t consume the content you like, it just means you do it without being public.

This would be my advice, by the way, for all young kids out there looking for jobs. As soon as you apply for college, I’d scrub every tweet you’ve ever sent and start fresh. And I’d make your Instagram feeds private and allow only friends to follow you there. Facebook too. Why would you want to be judged in your adult life by something you said or a picture you posted when you were fourteen or fifteen years old?

In many ways, I was fortunate because social media didn’t really take off until I was a fully grown adult. So I’ve always behaved pretty much the exact same on social media for the past decade or more. Can you imagine the idiotic things you and your friends might have said or done on social media when you were a teenager? So my advice for everyone reading this is to wipe clean your adolescence once you are applying to college and start fresh.

One suggestion, coach, if you don’t want to abandon social media entirely: follow left wing media too and then mute their accounts if you don’t want to see what they are tweeting all day long. That way you never see their tweets — although there’s nothing wrong with exposing yourself to opposing viewpoints. (That’s why I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal every day.) If you’re ever quizzed about your Twitter follows, then you have an easy answer: you try to see what people of a variety of backgrounds are saying online because you have to coach kids who come from liberal and conservative households and want to make sure you are aware of everything that might be going on in their lives.

I think that makes a great deal of sense.

By the way, most coaches are going to be conservative in nature because success in sports, most often, tends to rely on personal responsibility and self reliance. That is, unless you are a physical freak of enormous talent, your work ethic in sports, as in many parts of life, often dictates your success. And no one else can control your work ethic but you.

Coaching, by and large, is a sport that rewards grinders. And most grinders are capitalists who believe in personal responsibility and consider excuses, victim culture, and blame to be the opposite of successful athletic traits.

That’s why OutKick is wildly popular with coaches and athletic administrators. Now most of these guys, like you, avoid retweeting us for fear of getting the woke police on their campuses or in their organizations upset, but they’re all out there reading right now.

Hi guys!

I wish this weren’t the case, but, sadly, it’s reality.

Good luck on the job search.

“I have a question that will probably be frequently asked in which we know the short answer. Why is the media failing to cover the Deshaun Watson situation as much?

You have a law degree. I work for the Department of Justice. I understand the law to an extent, and every person deserves their fair and equal day in court. But, the media has become Judge, Jury, and Executioner for others with far-less evidence. The hypocrisy of the lack of media coverage for Mr. Watson is maddening but not surprising.

What catalyst has to happen for the overall media to cover these types of issues more evenly, regardless of race, gender, or socioeconomic status?”

I’m going to write a long column on the Deshaun Watson situation tomorrow, but the easy answer as to why there isn’t more coverage is because there are conflicting identity politics narratives at play here: the 14 women, mostly minority, who so far have filed lawsuits against Deshaun Watson, are usually at the peak of the victimization pyramid. That’s how #believeallwomen became a viral phenomenon on the left wing.

But #believeallwomen really only applies when a white Republican man is involved. Because when it’s Joe Biden or Deshaun Watson, suddenly the #believeallwomen hashtags disappear. It’s really #believeallwomen (unless the accused agrees with me politically.)

And stories — as well as hashtag activism — disappears even faster when, as here, you have a black quarterback being accused of sexual assault. The sports media have put black quarterbacks at the peak of the sports victimization pyramid. So how do you pick sides when two identity culture victim ideologies collide?

You can’t. When two identity politics victims collide, the narrative collapses. The sports media, quite simply, has no easy villain to demonize. There isn’t a clear hero and villain, so the story is mostly uncovered.

A case like Deshaun Watson illuminates the extreme hypocrisy of the identity politics laden woke culture and its impact on sports.

Speaking of which, here’s another anonymous mailbag question on the same topic.

“Do you find it curious that the usual voices of the #metoo movement have said literally nothing about Deshaun Watson accusations? I looked at Jemele Hill’s Twitter feed just now and not a mention of this. Wonder how the media would be handling this situation if it were Josh Allen or Kirk Cousins accused of this pattern of sleazy behavior at best?”

After your question arrived, I hopped on Twitter and asked Jemele Hill this question.

Hey @jemelehill will you be speaking out in support of the 14 brave & courageous minority women who have accused a powerful $100 millionaire athlete in Deshaun Watson of sexual assault. #believeallwomen, right?

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 23, 2021

Not surprisingly, she hasn’t responded.

The answer, of course, is she will be either completely silent or mostly silent about this case. Because if she speaks out, she’ll lose her bona fides among powerful black male athletes for not supporting Deshaun Watson. If Jemele has to make a political decision about which victim ideology to jettison, she’ll kick the #metoo movement to the curb in favor of protecting — and believing — the rich black male athlete over the poor minority women he’s accused of victimizing.

The woke claim to hate capitalism, but it sure is amazing how quickly they pick the money every single time, isn’t it?

This is, of course, why identity politics are so noxious. Because they represent the antithesis of fair and impartial justice. Rather than being judged without bias on the facts of the case, identity politics demands that justice be the exact opposite of blind. It demands redress for past injustice with further injustice in the future.

As you point out, imagine for a moment that the exact same allegations are being made against Bills quarterback Josh Allen, a white quarterback of roughly similar age and skill level to Deshaun Watson. Jemele and her woke brethren would be screaming to the rooftops about how this was evidence of Josh Allen’s #whiteprivilege if he had 14 female sexual assault accusers.

But they say nothing at all about Deshaun Watson.

The woke sports media has so completely won the battle over what’s permissible to say on Twitter that most white people in sports media are terrified to utter a word at all about Deshaun Watson for fear of being called racist and turning into a target themselves. Think about that for a moment. A hundred millionaire black athlete is so established at the peak of the athlete victimization culture that almost no one is even talking about a story that is truly without precedent in the history of pro sports.

We have never before seen 14 different women sue any current athlete for sexual assault, much less one of the best young quarterbacks in the game. And there’s almost no discussion or coverage of it!

In fact, to my knowledge, ESPN has one writer even covering the story at all.

Compare that to, for instance, the twenty-year-old Peyton Manning mooning incident of several years ago that ESPN covered as if it were Watergate.

The truth is Watson is benefitting from the very height of #blackprivilege. Watson stands accused of something no athlete has ever been accused of before, of potentially being a serial sex predator of (mostly) powerless women of vastly inferior economic status to him, and almost no one is saying a word in sports media about this case.

This is exactly what #metoo was supposed to exist for.

Having said all of this, I’m trying to cover this the same way I did the Brett Kavanaugh case. I think you have to look at all the facts alleged by the accusers and determine whether or not they have legitimacy. In other words, does it seem true based on the available evidence? I don’t #believeallwomen. I think that’s insanity. You can’t presume to believe any one identity group. Men lie, women lie, black people lie, white people lie, Asian and Hispanic people lie. Gay and straight people lie. The religious and the anti-religious lie.

That’s why justice is blind, because people are influenced by identities and always have been. What’s different now is we are explicitly saying that people should be believed because of their identities. This is the exact same argument that was made in courtrooms in the Jim Crow South. It’s why Emmett Till was murdered and received no justice.

And it’s just as wrong today as it was then.

The fact that these people who claim that they want to be on the right side of history don’t see that they are making the same arguments as those made in the Jim Crow South boggles the mind.

The ultimate truth here and back then is this: it’s not about truth or justice, it’s about power and who has it. And power, especially when wielded to favor one identity group over another, ultimately corrupts the justice system.

Which is why I’ve been arguing for years now that all precedents should be evenly applied, regardless of the identity of those before the court. And why I’ve always done this with OutKick audio, video and my articles.

Precedents matter, so does consistency, otherwise you end up with rank hypocrisy. Which is what’s going on right now in the sports media with Deshaun Watson.

“I am a teacher in Los Angeles School District. A lot of us want to go back to teaching in schools and think the union is over the top nuts. If you criticize the union on their twitter feed, they will block you including me. A union leader wore an anti-cop shirt in a zoom union meeting and they defended her. I asked, ‘I am a union member. What if I wore a pro-police shirt, would you defend me too?’ That got me blocked. If you go to their twitter or instagram page, it is full of stuff that criticizes Republicans and are basically fully woke. For instance, they had posts for ‘Womyn’s Herstory Month’ yesterday.

A lot of us think that many parents will pull their kids out of LAUSD and send them to a charter or private school or another district with the union being too woke and us not going back into the classroom. That would hurt the teachers a lot more. If we just lost 10% of the students, that would mean 10% less teachers. We have already lost 100k+ students over the last 10 years for numerous reasons. If I had a kid, I wouldn’t send them to an LAUSD school because of the radical teachers.

Also, if you think it is just the union, here is the first mandatory training we have to do later this month by the district ‘Identify the specific ways the constructs of privilege, whiteness, merit, and individualism may be present in your setting, and consider relevant data. Determine the immediate changes you will personally make, small or large, to promote increased racial and cultural sensitivity, inclusiveness, and awareness in your work.’

I would leave but I do enjoy my school and I have too much invested time-wise with my district and would be a huge pay cut if I went somewhere else.”

You want to know what drives me crazy about this entire situation? Teachers aren’t considered essential workers. But do you know who are considered essential workers? Day care workers! The people who make far less money and aren’t represented by a union have been required to work at their jobs for over a year taking care of kids. And they’ve mostly been fine! Because kids aren’t the primary vectors of virus risk and because most day care workers get infected outside of work, not at work.

If I were president, I would mandate that all teachers return to work immediately by labeling them essential workers. Just like Ronald Reagan did with the air traffic controllers. If I got sued, so what? I’d fight that legal battle as necessary too.

But in the meantime, I think the vast majority of the American public would agree with me, and we’d probably make immediate progress on schools reopening.

It has now been over a year since schools shut down in this country, and wildly, many schools in the South, like mine, are getting close to completing the school year that we had entirely in person. That is, my public school kids finish their school year on May 21st. So we have roughly eight weeks of school left until the entire school year has been completed.

We started in person back in August with zero issues, by and large.

As for your particular situation, at some point if your union leadership continues to ridicule your beliefs and perspectives — and even blocks you on social media for asking legitimate questions — I’d have a hard time continuing to be a member of that union.

I’d be looking for somewhere else to teach.

While I understand that you like your school, eventually the woke mob will come for that school too.

“I had a meeting planner I have worked with many times who wanted to hire me to speak to a company LIVE in May. I’d love to do it since every event has been virtual over the last year. He called to say the client would like me to be vaccinated for the event. I said I will gladly bring a negative virus test, but will not be getting vaccinated.

I believe people who are not at risk (99.9% recovery rate) should not be vaccinated especially with an unproven solution with many current problems. If they are all vaccinated and I am negative I cannot be a threat. What do you think will happen with airlines, concert venues, amusement parks in the future requiring a ‘Vaccination Passport’ for entry?”

This is the massive battle that’s coming.

Within a month or so, I think virtually everyone who is clamoring for a vaccine will have one. Let’s say that’s roughly 60% of the adult population. What happens then? How aggressively will COVID vaccines be mandated for the remaining people who aren’t as eager to get them?

I think this will be an absolutely gargantuan battle.

My hope is that COVID deaths, which are collapsing rapidly right now, will continue to collapse as the elderly, who are the ones truly at risk from COVID, receive their vaccines and that eventually the media will move on to something new as COVID dwindles in the months ahead. But my fear is vaccination will turn into an epic battle, and we’ll be fighting this for months and months into the future.

I’ve said this for months, and I’ll continue to say it whenever anyone asks me about the COVID vaccine: I’m not in a rush to get a vaccine at all because at 41 years old, my risk of dying from COVID or having a serious illness from it is virtually zero. The same is true for my wife and kids, whom I spend 95% of my time with.

Now my parents and other elderly relatives have all received the vaccine, and I think that’s smart for them to do because of their increased risk. But the last thing I’d try to do is cut the line in front of anyone who has real risk factors at play.

Will I eventually get the one shot vaccine? Probably at some point in the months ahead. But am I in some sort of hurry to do so? No. I don’t feel in danger from COVID. And truth be told, given the fact that I’ve been living my life as I normally would for nearly a year now, I’m pretty confident I’ve already had COVID. I haven’t ever had antibody testing, but I have three different COVID tests, all negative. (Full disclosure: those tests came in June of last year just to see how the process worked, at the White House, and in Mexico in order to return to the country.)

As for your particular case, you’ll have to weigh the financial impact of your decision if getting vaccinated is a requirement for your talk to occur in person. As for your larger question, vaccine passports seem difficult to enforce and would seem to add a substantial amount of time to enter into any venue.

Plus, I just can’t get over the logic here. The same people who scream that asking for a driver’s license to allow someone to vote is impermissible are now going to insist that everyone in the country has to carry a vaccine passport with them to travel on airplanes or go to concerts? This seems untenable.

Again, I think this will ultimately come down to what the COVID death rate looks like by summer. Since most people dying with COVID are elderly and in poor health, once those people stop dying with COVID, as would hopefully occur post-vaccination, I’m hopeful the media obsession with reporting cases and deaths will be replaced by something else.

But ultimately I think by May and June, there will be virtually no waits for vaccination to occur and many people will be choosing not to be vaccinated. When that happens, get ready for a vaccination battle the likes of which you’ve never seen before.

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As always, thanks for reading the Anonymous Mailbag. Send your anonymous mailbag questions to claytravis@gmail.com, anonymity guaranteed.