Curt Schilling is best known for winning Game 6 of the 2004 American League Championship Series while wearing a sock soaked in blood from a stitched-up ankle injury. He’s also a Trump supporter who’s long been an outspoken conservative and was fired from his job as an ESPN analyst earlier this year after posting a tasteless meme image and writing the following on Facebook about North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law:
A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.
Men’s Rooms™: Designed for the Penis! Anyhoo, Schilling has for several years seemed to engage with the world mostly through right-wing memes, and he had been disciplined by ESPN before for sharing an image that compared Muslims to Nazi-era Germans. The loss of his ESPN job has, not surprisingly, made him even more prominent in right-wing circles; last week, Schilling asserted that he plans to run for Senate against Elizabeth Warren in 2020, and now Breitbart.com has announced that Schilling will anchor its first online radio show, which will debut Tuesday(!) and run from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. daily. The publication’s announcement says that “the caller-intensive show will feature Schilling’s unfiltered and insightful commentary on a mix of topics ranging from politics and culture to current affairs and perhaps some sports.”
Writes the ex-pitcher himself in a sentence that seems to be missing a few words:
I am proud to be a part of a team that will continue to point out the very thing that’s ruining this country: liberal, progressive, socialist agenda driven by the elite globalist connected to American politics and the Clinton family.
As Gabe Sherman at New York magazine notes, the move to hire a well-known figure with a TV background comes amid widespread speculation that Donald Trump and Breitbart could collaborate to launch a TV network after this year’s election. It also so happens that I’m currently working on an article about right-wing hot takes and the world of sports. Here’s an excerpt from a draft I handed in last week before the Schilling news broke:
As for the ghastly culture-war napalming of the sports landscape that I feared, it could still be coming. The rumors of a post-election Breitbart/Trump far-right TV network launch are still percolating, and I will bet you one bloody sock that when/if that network gets off the ground, it will feature sports content contributed by, among others, former MLB pitcher and baseball analyst Curt Schilling, whose passion for tasteless right-wing Facebook memes got him fired from ESPN. If Donald Trump has proved anything, it’s that you still can’t go broke underestimating the American public, or at least a particular white male segment thereof. Verily, the Takening of sports still looms.
The Breitbart announcement notes that Schilling’s show will be called Whatever It Takes.
