Does This Look Like the Face of a Convicted Cop Killer ESPN Paid Tribute to Before Laying Off 100 People?

Assata Shakur

In case you’re not a regular visitor ESPN’s women’s site ESPNW like I am, then you might have missed this piece they posted Tuesday: Five poems about the new feminism. And if you did, I truly pity you because they were every bit as awesomely life-changing as you could imagine five poems about the new feminism on a sports site could be. Here’s a sample of the first one:

Revolution

Dr. DaMaris Hill

(for Asatta Shakur)

Revolution ain’t a date in a history book

It’s an ivy that thorns

A lily that pricks. It stings

Like the splash of a copper colored girl

running in a skinned knee

ruining her Easter dress

It goes on from there, with a lot of unmetered non-rhymes about jumping into the ocean to get away from bees or something. (I’m not a poetry guy.) But what’s most interesting is that dedication to Asatta Shakur, whose name is actually spelled Assata Shakur. Which is actually an alias for her real name, Joanne Deborah Chesimard. At least that’s how they refer to her in the FBI posters that proclaim her their Most Wanted female fugitive domestic terrorist.

From Shakur’s Wikipedia page:

 In May 1973, Shakur was involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, in which New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed and Trooper James Harper was grievously assaulted; she was charged in these attacks. … In 1977, she was convicted of the first-degree murder of Foerster and of seven other felonies related to the shootout. … She escaped from prison in 1979 and, after living as a fugitive for several years, fled to Cuba in 1984, where she received political asylum. She has been living in Cuba ever since. Since May 2, 2005, the FBI has classified her as a domestic terrorist and offered a $1 million reward for assistance in her capture [and] the New Jersey Attorney General offered to match the FBI reward, increasing the total reward for her capture to $2 million.

Look, I’m just a simple fan of feminist sports websites. What I don’t know about violent clashes between militants and the police in the 1970s could fill a library. But I’d have to think that when you’re a major media outlet that’s losing subscribers by the tens of millions, drowning in red ink and preparing to end the careers of a hundred loyal employees, promoting cop killers on one of your platforms is not the best business model. Especially for a company that has repeatedly nagged its talent not to talk about politics and put Curt Schilling in the permanent Time Out chair for the crime of reTweeting memes.

I know the World Wide Leader has always wanted to have it both ways. To stifle anyone who wanted to talk about anything outside of sports while at the same time promoting their own SJW causes. You’d just assume they’d draw the line at posting glowing, if indecipherable, love sonnets to America’s No. 1 female terrorist fugitive. I’m not saying it would have saved anyone’s job. But posting more of this insane radical bullshit in the name of feminism will cost jobs down the road, I promise you.

@jerrythornton1