EXCLUSIVE The shocking secret about mushroom killer that is being kept from Australia: GUY ADAMS reveals the sensational truth about trial that has rocked a nation
She lied about deliberately picking death cap mushrooms. She lied about buying and using a Sunbeam food dehydrator to preserve them. She lied about having cancer, to ensure four relatives accepted an invitation to visit her home for a 'special' lunch. And she lied about using multi-coloured plates to prevent herself accidentally eating the poisonous beef wellington she then served.
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Midnight food runs and blackout blinds - Life a year later for reclusive parents of Trump's would-be assassin
The parents of Matthew Crooks have remained stubbornly silent and hunkered down a year on from their son's attempted assassination of Donald Trump last July. Matthew and Mary Crooks refuse to speak about their son's actions on July 13, 2024, when knocked on their door this week. Blackout blinds line every window of their modest brick home in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, and cameras cover every angle to spot intruders. Crooks was 20 when he fired on Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, striking the president's ear and killing retired firefighter Corey Comperatore before being shot dead by a law enforcement sniper. Since then his family are barely seen by neighbors, with many assuming they had moved from the leafy area. His sister Katherine, 24, a janitor, has been spotted leaving her apartment less than a mile from her parents' home. But her parents have essentially become recluses, the only sign that the home is still lived in is the vehicle on the driveway moving, though neighbors can't recall the last time this happened. Crooks's father even resorted to buying groceries at 3am in a bid to avoid prying eyes, not keeping to a regular routine. Both he and his wife, who is visually impaired, had previously worked as social workers since 2002. But can reveal that their son's high profile assassination attempt has resulted in neither renewing their licenses, which expired in February of this year. One neighbor told they assumed the family had moved, adding: 'We haven't seen anyone coming or going for quite a while. 'Most of us thought they had moved on or are still keeping to themselves.' His family's silence is just one of the puzzle pieces surrounding the attack, with the FBI still unable to point to a solid motive for why the mild-mannered student targeted Trump that day. Federal profilers have speculated he may simply have wanted to commit a mass shooting and found a convenient target for his dark fantasy in the timing and proximity of Trump's rally, held just 40 miles from where he lived with his parents. In April, Crooks searched websites for information on major depressive disorder and depressive crisis treatment. He left no manifesto or explanation for the shooting. According to CNN, Crooks's parents had attempted to reach their son when they could not find him earlier that day, but he did not respond. They then called law enforcement to tell them that their son was missing. It is not known whether they were aware that he was armed. Since the attack investigators have focused on Crooks's online activity in the months and days leading up to it in a bid to gain some sense of his state of mind. Intriguingly it has emerged that he searched online for information on Michigan mass-shooter Ethan Crumbley and his parents. Crooks left home on the day of the rally armed with an AR-15 style rifle that was bought legally by his father in 2013 and transferred to him in 2023. He was an enthusiastic member of Clairton Sportsmen's Club, which he visited the day before the incident to practice. It offers high powered rifle benches with targets up to 187 yards - roughly the distance crooks was from Trump when he shot him. Immediately after the attack the FBI removed 14 firearms from the small family home as well as explosives, a second cellphone, a laptop and a hard drive. In addition to the arsenal recovered from his home investigators recovered rudimentary explosive devices from Crooks's car, a bulletproof vest, additional magazines – bought both online and the previous day from Allegheny Arms & Gun Works – and a drone. Another mystery is why the FBI allowed his body to be released so swiftly after the shooting. While Crooks body was cremated just 10 days after the shooting, it is unclear exactly what the family have done with his remains. There is no plaque or obvious burial spot at the family's plot of land in Mount Royal Cemetery, Glenshaw, which is home to three generations of Crooks. His great grandfather, great grandmother, grandparents and uncle are all buried in the same area, along with other members of the family dating back to 1929. Crooks was 'neutralized' by a Secret Service sniper 26 seconds after he first shot. By then he had already fired eight bullets. He hit Trump, 78, in a grazing shot to his right ear, and struck retired fire chief Comperatore, 50, in the head, killing him. He grievously wounded audience members James Copenhaver, 74, and David Dutch, 57, who suffered 'life altering' injuries as a result of the attack. It comes as the Secret Service suspended six agents over failures during the attack, nearly a year later. Myosoty Perez was one of six agents suspended for between 10 and 42 days. She was sent to the location of the rally ahead of time and was specifically tasked with helping to secure the surroundings, the New York Post revealed. Another agent who helped to coordinate security for the rally was also reportedly suspended, along with four people from the Pittsburgh field office. The final suspension was reportedly an agent on the counter-sniper team. A U.S. Secret Service report released just days before the 2024 election confirmed that 'multiple operational and communications gaps preceded the July 13 attempted assassination.' The Secret Service also described some of the gaps as 'deficiency of established command and control, lapses in communication, and a lack of diligence by agency personnel,' while also noting that 'the accountability process [was] underway.' Dan Bongino - who now serves as Deputy Director of the FBI and formerly spent 11 years as a Secret Service agent - said last year that Butler was an 'apocalyptic security failure' and called for a full house-cleaning of the upper leadership ranks in the Secret Service D.C. headquarters. But in the aftermath, the agency was hounded with questions about security failures and Director Kimberly Cheatle was forced to resign. Now it has emerged that six agents have since been suspended for their actions that day, ABC News confirmed. They range from supervisors to line agents. 'We are laser focused on fixing the root cause of the problem,' Matt Quinn, the Secret Service deputy director, told CBS. All of the agents have now been suspended according to federally-mandated procedures, Quinn said. He also noted that the Secret Service has introduced a new fleet of military-grade drones and set up new mobile command posts that allow agents to communicate over radio directly with local law enforcement - which was widely seen as one of the major issues with the Secret Service's response to the shooting. Witnesses have explained that having multiple command stations during the July event led to confusion and a scattered response. Scathing: Dan Bongino (pictured with Trump) - who now serves as Deputy Director of the FBI and formerly spent 11 years as a Secret Service agent - said last year that Butler was an 'apocalyptic security failure' A damning 180-page report released by a House of Representatives task force in December even concluded that the shooting was 'preventable and should not have happened.' It noted that Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe testified that the agency had been operating under the assumption that local law enforcement was going to secure the AGR complex, from where Crooks fired eight shots. The report also included a firsthand account from a Butler cop who spotted Crooks and yelled out that he has a gun - though there is no evidence to suggest the message reached the Secret Service security detail surrounding Trump before Crooks began firing. It concluded that federal, state and local law enforcement officers 'could have engaged Thomas Matthew Crooks at several pivotal moments as his behavior became increasingly suspicious.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
How US immigration raids hurt summer pleasures, from berries to barbecues
From his father's strawberry farm in central California, Tomás Diaz noticed a border patrol vehicle driving toward a field of workers. Diaz, himself Mexican American and a US citizen, yelled in Spanish: 'Run for your life! That's immigration!' As the men scattered, the agents grabbed whom they could. In the chaos, six workers escaped, and Diaz was detained for interrogation. 'Why did you yell at the Mexicans to run?' an officer pressed. 'No reason at all,' Diaz calmly replied. This did not happen yesterday, but in 1953. Driven by fears of border infiltration by communists and 'criminal' and 'diseased' migrants, the Immigration and National Service (the Department of Homeland Security's predecessor) carried out 'Operation Wetback' from 1954 to 1957. Border patrol officers raided public spaces, workplaces and homes and formally deported about 400,000 Mexicans (hundreds of thousands more repatriated out of fear). More than 70 years after Operation Wetback, the mass deportation campaign orchestrated by Trump, homeland security (DHS) adviser Stephen Miller and DHS secretary Kristi Noem is using Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers to conduct Orwellian raids. Trump's administration knows that targeting workers in the food chain is the easiest way to reach Miller's quota of 3,000 arrests a day. Labor department data affirms that 42% of US farm workers lack proper documentation. Ice agents are rushing into fruit orchards, vegetable fields, dairy barns, processing plants and restaurant kitchens to arrest people on the spot. The consequences of these raids will be profound in our food labor system and greater society. First and foremost, these raids are traumatizing people. Many arrestees are 'disappeared', their locations unknown by loved ones and lawyers. Second, the raids will affect summer food chains and other industries throughout the year. The juicy watermelons and peaches, berry pies, barbecue, ice-cream and lobster rolls we are currently enjoying come from the labor of a heavily immigrant workforce. Almost every bit of American food and drink passes through the hands of an immigrant, and the DHS is denying this reality while terrorizing food workers with brutal efficiency. In the seafood industry, Latin American and Caribbean workers in fish-processing plants in New England and on the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf Coast ensure cod, crawfish, crab, scallops and lobster get to our markets and restaurants. An early Trump 2.0 raid targeted a seafood depot in Newark, New Jersey. Without warrants, agents demanded documentation from workers who looked Latino, and detained three immigrants and the warehouse manager, a Puerto Rican veteran who was eventually released but distressed that his citizenship and military service meant nothing. In New Bedford, Massachusetts (the nation's highest-value fishing area), at least two dozen Guatemalan men have been taken. Latin American and Caribbean workers stepped into New England's seafood industry at the turn of the century, a critical juncture when the children of Euro American fish workers rejected their occupational inheritance. If these workers are deported in large numbers, seafood circulations will decline precipitously across the nation and globe. Summer ice-cream is made possible by the milking labor of (mostly undocumented and male) Latino dairy workers. In April, a raid occurred at a dairy farm in Vermont, a US state that would topple economically if not for milk's production. Sixty-eight per cent of the state's milk (and 43% of New England's milk) comes from farms reliant on immigrant workers. Enjoyed meat at a Fourth of July or weekend barbecue? A whopping 71% of animal-processing workers in the US are immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. When Ice agents raided the Glenn Valley meat-processing plant in Omaha, Nebraska, and detained 76 workers, they took half of the plant's workforce. Though Omaha has been a home for Mexican meatpackers for more than a century, the local police and sheriff cooperated with Ice dragnets by blocking traffic around multiple production plants. Raids on food workers in California (which provides a third of the vegetables and more than half of the nation's fruit and nuts) have gone the most viral. Video captured a fieldworker being chased down in the fog, while berry and citrus workers were harassed across three counties. Ice agents raided a grocery store; grabbed a tortilla truck driver; and arrested a female street vendor outside a Home Depot who held desperately onto a tree as bystanders filmed and yelled: 'They're kidnapping her!' It's already happening, but food sellers in our informal economy will stop working in public in greater numbers. Meanwhile, in brick-and-mortar establishments, Ice detained employees at nine restaurants in Washington DC; an Italian restaurant in San Diego; two Mexican restaurants in the Rio Grande Valley; and a Mexican restaurant in Pennsylvania. Food workers are often rendered invisible in spaces like fields, warehouses and kitchens. Trump's administration is hoping that this food precariat is expendable enough that Americans won't care or fight back against these workers' arrests and detentions. They're wrong. Food workers are increasingly visible as the public records and spreads word of Ice incidents. Protesters showed up at the Omaha meat plant, and locals decried the arrest of a beloved Salvadoran bagel shop manager on Long Island, New York. Chilling videos of Ice agents invading private homes and smashing car windows to grab Latino drivers are inspiring popular backlash. And, as in the 1950s, US-born Latinos realize the hunting of 'illegal' bodies leads to their own racial profiling. In the 1950s, many agricultural employers railed against the INS and border patrol for deporting undocumented workers, claiming citizens were too unavailable or unreliable (in reality, this was often a union-busting argument). Today, food industry bosses are similarly pushing back against government. Glenn Valley owner Chad Hartmann accused the federal government of traumatizing his employees and failing to improve the E-Verify system that checks immigration status. The dairy industry has called out the deportations as myopic and reckless. Employers surely remember the first year of Covid, when food labor flows halted. Foreign workers were held up or quarantined at the border, while some US citizen farm workers stayed away from harvesting sites for fear of contagion and death. Suddenly remembering his agribusiness donors, Trump declared a stop to immigration raids in the food industry on 12 June. Five days later, DHS leaders reversed Trump's reversal, telling Ice agents to carry on. This whiplash reveals the administration's internal dysfunction and callous denial of immigrant workers as fuller human beings with longstanding ties to the United States. Their ideal is a white America, with foreigners used for labor but considered return to sender at a moment's notice. What can the past tell us about what's to come? Consumers will feel the financial pinch first, and growers will blame increasing workforce instability and losing time on training new employees. Agriculture scretary Brooke Rollins's ridiculous idea of using Medicaid recipients as farm workers will likely be supplanted by Trump's expansion of the H-2A visa program. From 1942 to 1964, the bracero program (which offered around 5m labor contracts to Mexican men to work in US agriculture for six to nine months at a time) was shored up as the legal solution to the 'wetback' crisis. The H-2A program is bracerismo reincarnated; it binds a guest worker to one employer for the entirety of their contract, even if problems arise regarding wage theft, substandard living conditions or threats to physical safety. Swift backlash against grievances keeps guest workers feeling silenced and chronically deportable. Cruelty and dehumanization are the points of Trump's immigration schemes. We must not lose sight of this while protesting raids in food spaces. Immigrants' value lies far beyond 'doing the jobs Americans won't do'. Their mistreatment and unfreedoms are inextricably bound up with, and will affect, those of other Americans. Most recently, Maga acolyte Laura Loomer's X post about feeding the nation's 65 million Latinos to alligators in the Everglades generated loud condemnation. The US has long consumed the labor, cuisine and culture of Latinos, both citizen and immigrant. Loomer's rhetoric takes that consumption to a grotesque level of real, not just imagined, violence. Today's Ice raids are an echo of the past, and stem from the Trump administration's racialization of Latinos. At best, they can be instrumentalized for labor; at worst, they are a perpetually foreign population to be eradicated. Through showing solidarity with the diverse people who hold our food chains together, the public can give the Trump administration a much-needed reality check that it can't talk (or eat) out of both sides of its mouth. Lori A Flores is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
How the rightwing sports bro conquered America
This February, Pat McAfee was broadcasting live on ESPN, the most watched sports network in the US, when he aired a salacious rumor about the sex life of a teenage college student. Once a workaday punter with the Indianapolis Colts, McAfee is now the most influential pundit in American sports with an eponymous ESPN show, who has more than 11m followers across YouTube, X, Instagram and TikTok. To howls of merriment from his panel, McAfee spelled out the rumor centered on a 19-year-old female student at Ole Miss, a public university in Mississippi, as it was 'being reported by everybody on the internet': that the student had sex with her boyfriend's father. 'Ole Miss dads are slinging meat right now!' roared 'Boston' Connor Campbell, one of McAfee's sidekicks. McAfee did not directly name Mary Kate Cornett, the college freshman at the center of the rumor, but she has since described how McAfee's amplification of this 'completely false' story encouraged others in the sports talk world to do likewise, resulting in her receiving a deluge of threats and harassment. Cornett has engaged lawyers to explore suing McAfee, ESPN and others involved in spreading the rumor for defamation. McAfee appeared moderately chastened by the episode: 'I never, ever want to be a part of anything negative in anybody's life, ever,' he said recently while addressing the outrage that his boosting of the rumor prompted. But he has not yet apologized, and in no way does his future as one of ESPN's most bankable stars seem in jeopardy. Whatever blowback ensued has blown right on by. The whole episode served as a demonstration of power: the world of sports influencers such as McAfee, which is particularly influential among young men and can be understood as an extension of the Donald Trump-aligned 'manosphere', now stands as an important bastion of the culture of insensitivity and entitlement on which Trumpism thrives. The Pat McAfee Show, a two-to three-hour afternoon blast of high-volume sports chat, sweating and raw, uncomplicated American male heterosexuality, launched in 2019. It has quickly become a favored media stop for many of the top names in US sports and culture. Tom Cruise spent 30 minutes on the show recently ('I appreciate the shit outta you,' McAfee told Cruise); LeBron James stopped by for an hour. Throughout the show's history, McAfee has courted controversy: he's called WNBA star Caitlin Clark a 'white bitch', he's made jokes about child abuse, he's helped air rumors linking celebrities to Jeffrey Epstein. None of it seems to matter: McAfee, whose show moved to ESPN on a five-year, $85m deal in 2023, powers on unperturbed, growing in cultural might with each passing month. McAfee is now the avatar of a new generation of sports talk stars who have upended the rules about public speech, remade culture in their own brash image, and are completely bulletproof. Among McAfee's peers in this dripped-out new world of costless needling are Barstool Sports boss Dave Portnoy; former NFL players Will Compton and Taylor Lewan, who co-host the show Bussin' With the Boys; and NFL receiver-turned-podcaster Antonio Brown. Sports are also a major, though not exclusive, topic of conversation for Joe Rogan, Theo Von and other leaders of the manosphere. The Wikipedia pages of many of these figures contain hefty 'controversy' tabs. Portnoy has faced extensive and credible accusations of sexual misconduct; Brown refers to WNBA star Clark, an athlete on whom the anti-woke right seems psychotically fixated, as 'Cousin Itt', referencing the Addams Family's hirsute, non-verbal relative, and is so crassly sexist online that even the famously feminist redoubt of Barstool Sports has described him as a 'crackpot'. In an earlier era, reckless promotion of tasteless gossip about a teenager's sex life might have been enough to sink a career like McAfee's. Provocation, abrasiveness and a delight in offending have been essential to sports talk – on radio and cable TV – for decades. But in the years before social media, on-demand programming and betting turned sports into an all-hours, all-platforms juggernaut, there were still lines that sporting pundits could not cross: shock jock Don Imus, for instance, built his career on being outspoken but was fired by WFAN/MSNBC in 2007 after making racist and misogynist comments including describing the Rutgers women's basketball team as 'nappy-headed hos'. Today's sports broadcast world runs according to a new set of rules, in which 'respectable' TV and the demi-monde of sports podcasts, streaming, and shitposting increasingly intersect: all engagement is good engagement, and the best type of filter is no filter. Whatever faint norms of decorum constrained earlier generations of professional sports talkers have faded completely. There's a reciprocal flow of testosterone and ideas between these shows, the world of sports, social media and real life. A handful of subjects and themes recur: veneration of the military, glorification of strength and traditional 'male' values, celebration of gambling, the denigration of women and anything thought to represent 'woke' culture. On any given day across the sporting bro-zone you might hear Bussin' With the Boys and their guests rail against pronouns and cancel culture, the hosts of Barstool Sports' Pardon My Take podcast argue Taylor Swift needs to 'release a sex video' to make her presence at NFL games tolerable to the average male fan, or McAfee devote 30 minutes (as he did recently) to describing his day among 'maybe the baddest motherfuckers on earth': the drill instructors at the US Marine Corps training center on Parris Island in South Carolina. These interests and obsessions mirror the president's cultural politics, turning the sports bros into critical emissaries for Trump's peculiar brand of popularly elected vandalism. It's worth questioning, of course, how influential these influencers really are. A recent poll from the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics found that 35% of young men had an unfavorable view of Rogan, while a further 36% had never heard of him or did not know enough about him to have an opinion. The much-rehearsed idea that the minds of young male voters have been irretrievably colonized by the manosphere is surely overblown. But there seems little dispute that these influencers have been effective in platforming rightwing figures and ideas. The sports bros are an essential part of that legitimizing apparatus – all the more so because their endorsement of the right's reflexes, priorities and modes of attack is couched in the ostensibly apolitical language of sports. The cultural supremacy of the sports bros is now so total that Barstool's Dave Portnoy is now famous for his online pizza reviews that can make or break restaurants in America. When a casual day trader from Massachusetts who built his media empire on college gambling advice becomes the arbiter-in-chief of America's favorite food, something fundamental has shifted in how we determine cultural authority. The unsinkability of these sporting mouths, bobbing forever on the surface of our cultural consciousness, parallels the envenomation of online discourse and the transformation of Trump from presidential punchline into the most consequential political figure of the century. Trump, let's not forget, first reached the White House after navigating a storm of outrage over the Access Hollywood tape, a victory that set a precedent for the practitioners of 'locker room talk' who have found fame in his wake. With the tacit endorsement of the sports bros, on whose shows he became a regular guest during last year's election, Trump not only seized the young male vote, he also engineered a complete reversal in his own reputation throughout the sporting world from his first to second terms. Interestingly, McAfee himself declined an invitation to have Trump on his show during last year's election campaign, reasoning that he and his sidekicks are 'not the ones' to be asking questions about politics – an uncharacteristic moment of modesty. But UFC-adjacent comedian Theo Von and Barstool Sports' Bussin' With the Boys both featured extended conversations with Trump during the campaign. These appearances showed Trump to be extremely well-versed in sports, which is perhaps no surprise when you consider the amount of time he spends tweeting about them, watching them and playing them – not to mention his own tangled history with the business side of sports (Trump owned a New Jersey-based team in the short-lived United States Football League during the 1980s). These podcasts also helped humanize Trump, presenting him as a relatable guy who works long hours and is sympathetic enough to engage a jumpy figure like Von in a conversation about drug addiction. The warm audience Trump received helped normalize his politics and support. Today the sporting world, with a few notable exceptions, genuflects before Trump in a way that seemed unthinkable during his first term. Beyond the unquivering Trumpian stronghold of Dana White's UFC, the big professional leagues such as the NFL and NBA either kept their distance from the 45th president or were at outright war with him; now No 47 is the guest of honor at the Super Bowl and every second athlete is doing the Trump dance, the double fist pump and minor hip swivel that the president has turned into his signature choreographic move on the campaign stage. The president's political endurance has perhaps, in turn, acted as a kind of bro bat signal, helping to validate the obnoxiousness and resistance to introspection on which the sports bros thrive: if he doesn't have to censor himself, apologize or pay lip service to feelings, why should they? The personality of American culture has long been split between purity and profanity. The death of consequences for figures like McAfee suggests the balance of power has definitively swung in favor of the trolls and tough guys, and now none of puritanical old America's sanctities will hold them back. It says everything about the sports bros' invincibility that among the top names floated by progressives to counter the blitzkrieg of Trump's second term and lead them to 2028 is Stephen A Smith, the sports pundit who turned relentlessness into a career and is something of a spiritual godfather to the McAfees and Portnoys of the world. The only person who can defeat a sports bro is another sports bro. Might there be another strategy for the left to combat this tide flooding the sporting-cultural zone? Recent reports suggest Democrats are slinging money to all corners of the country in a desperate attempt to find the progressive answer to Rogan: the chatter is all about 'speaking with American men' and investing to generate a 'return on culture', and Democrats such as Hakeem Jeffries and Josh Shapiro have in recent months zombied from sports podcast to sports podcast in a doomed and focus group-refined attempt to revive a cadaverous Democratic party with the tonic of their everyman cool. These appearances might be wooden and inauthentic, but it does suggest a key role for sports in the left's attempt to pull itself off the canvas following the catastrophe of last November. Sports are hardly the exclusive preserve of the right. The Golden State Warriors' four-time championship winning head coach, Steve Kerr, is probably the most vocal critic of Trumpism at work in American sports today, and Democrats have long associated themselves with sports: Barack Obama, of course, is an accomplished hooper, while Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate for New York City mayor who loves Arsenal and cricket and has spun his appearances at Knicks games during the recent NBA playoffs into campaign trail gold, is living proof that it's possible to be passionate and knowledgeable about sports while eschewing the ugliness of bro culture. But left-leaning sports pundits? That's a tougher ask. The pallor of recent attempts to seed a more robust progressive presence online highlights how severely Democrats have been left behind in the new world of sports talk. Broadcasts such as the Pat McAfee Show are powerful engines of political orientation not because they address politics directly – they almost never do – but because their politics emerge in the interstices of everything said on screen. There aren't many popular voices in sports punditry that do for the left what McAfee and his cohort do, casually yet masterfully, for the right: embody an ethos, solidify an idiom and transmit a set of values that find a natural downstream outlet in electoral politics. Influential Twitch lefty Hasan Piker occasionally discusses sports but they are not his main focus; pundits such as Pablo Torre and Bomani Jones lean liberal but they do not have the same reach that the McAfees of the world do, and they don't express their politics with anything like the same splash. Over the past decade sports broadcasters who discussed politics from a leftist perspective, such as former ESPN host Jemele Hill, were gradually forced out of the mainstream. NFL star Travis Kelce, who hosts a popular podcast with his older brother Jason, seems vaguely progressive in orientation but he also said playing in front of Trump at this year's Super Bowl was 'a great honor', a tellingly wimpy political intervention. Like LeBron before him, he's too big to get too real, too good to get dirty; the Kelce-James brand of progressivism is very much by the book, a progressivism of the civics class. Where the right is loud, the sporting left speaks with a militant squeak. On-field athletic competition is about domination, strength, winners and losers, yes, but it's also about finesse, beauty, cunning and wit; it's a place where conservative fantasies of order and the cerebrations of the progressives can both find a home. But if any side should be controlling the field of sports talk, it is the left, since so many of the inequalities that plague society at large now infect sports as well, which are increasingly run on extractive lines for the benefit of predatory rentiers, autocrat-backed sovereign wealth funds and private-equity ghouls. Meanwhile the leveling mechanisms that still keep the American professional leagues interesting and unpredictable – collective wage bargaining, drafts, salary caps and luxury taxes – have their roots in this country's unlikely tradition of sporting socialism. Far from being a natural stage for the tiresome politics of cultural revenge in which the right traffics, sports (as a thing to shoot the shit about) offer a rich canvas for the exploration of many issues about which the left cares deeply: race, gender, class, social mobility and the corrupting influence of money. The left should not be afraid of learning from the lords of the sporting bro-zone even as it spurns their machismo and lack of tact. A culture used to crew necks can't go back to buttoned collars. For example, as part of his deal with ESPN, McAfee is allowed to swear live on TV: 'The following progrum is a collection of stooges talking about happenings in the sports world,' announces a disclaimer that airs before each show, read aloud in a geriatric voice reminiscent of Grampa Simpson. 'There may be some 'cuss' words because that's how humans in the real world talk.' This is one area where the bros and the left should make common cause: swearing is good. Viewers love McAfee not despite the fact he's loose, unpolished and has a dirty mouth; they love him because of these things. This is a man, let's not forget, who first came to prominence at age 23, while playing for the Colts, after being arrested in downtown Indianapolis for taking a pre-dawn swim in a canal. Asked to explain why he was soaking wet, McAfee replied: 'I am drunk.' The charge was dismissed but the hearts of a city were won, and a media career was born. Why can the left not take the best of McAfee and his ilk while jettisoning the worst? Surely it's possible to talk sports in a way that's biting, real, unfiltered, funny and even mean – to 'connect with men where they are', as we are repeatedly told the left must – without descending into toxicity, cruelty, belligerence and hate. If progressives want to reclaim the White House, they could do worse than to start rambling for hours on end about games and players that have nothing to do with politics at all. Sports-loving leftists of America, unite: you have nothing to lose but your parlays.
