Fox News Host Laura Ingraham told LeBron James to "shut up and dribble."
Photo credit: NBA.com
“Lebron and Kevin, you are great players, but no one voted for you,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham said during one of her recent rants.
“So, keep the political commentaries to yourself. Or as someone once said, shut up and dribble.”
On February 15, NBA superstars Kevin Durant and more notably Lebron James were featured in a pre-recorded conversation for “Uninterrupted” where they shared their opinions on President Trump.
"The number one job in America … is someone who doesn't understand the people, and really don't give an f*** about the people,” James said.
“It's not even a surprise when he says something. It's like, laughable. It's laughable and it's scary.”
Durant echoed James’ comments about the president, comparing him to a “bad coach” on a basketball team.
The issue is not whether people agree with James’ statement or if Ingraham’s response was racially charged, although it probably was. The issue is whether or not Ingraham is right about players needing to just “shut up and dribble.”
For the following reasons and many more, Ingraham is dead wrong.
To start, Ingraham insinuates that no one cares about what LeBron thinks by saying “no one voted for you.” This implies that not enough people think like James in order for his comments on the matter.
In the very same rant though, Ingraham says that “Unfortunately a lot of kids and some adults take these comments seriously.”
So, which is it? Do not enough people care or do too many people care? According to the 1.5 million likes James got on his Instagram post responding to Ingraham, the latter is probably true.
Another one of Ingraham’s “arguments” is that because James is just a basketball player and not a politician he should not comment on politics. In response to some of the backlash she received, the Fox News host said that “If pro athletes and entertainers want to freelance as political pundits, then they should not be surprised when they’re called out for insulting a politician.”
This could be a fair argument if it were not extremely hypocritical.
Kid Rock, Clint Eastwood, Dogg the bounty hunter, Ja Rule, and Phil Robertson from Duck Dynasty, are a very small sample of the many celebrities Fox News has had on its show as guests to hear their political opinions. All of these guests talked politics, and we never heard a word from Ingraham saying their opinion doesn’t matter, or that they should shut up.
One of the more controversial things that the law school grad said in her rant, was that LeBron was not educated enough for his political opinion to matter.
“There might be a cautionary lesson in LeBron for kids,” she said. “This is what happens when you attempt to leave high school a year early to join the NBA.”
First off, James graduated high school and received a diploma before he graduated. With that in mind, using Ingraham’s argument that people like James are not educated enough, more than 30 percent of the U.S population can’t have a political opinion because they didn’t go to college. Taking into account that the majority of NBA players went to college but did not finish, that only leaves 40 percent of the population because that’s how many people in the U.S. have college degrees.
This means more than half of the people in the country should not have a political opinion, leaving people like Laura Ingraham to do all the thinking and decision making for everyone else.
The most disturbing thing about Ingraham’s response to LeBron is the underlying message: if you don’t agree with me, I will try and silence you rather than debate you.
If she were to have her way, anyone that disagrees with her or her position would have to shut up and watch in silence rather than create productive discussion on the issues and how to solve them. No matter what your political belief is, being silent is not the answer.
Why should anyone listen to Laura Ingraham anyway? After all, no one voted for her to be president.