In a vacuum, I suppose there is a certain reasonable justification for ESPN suspending Jemele Hill for two weeks after she suggested that fans could boycott sponsors of the Dallas Cowboys for forcing their players to stand for the national anthem. As a SportsCenter anchor, Hill exists in that strange broadcast netherworld between journalism and entertainment, a place made even stranger by the fact that ESPN long ago allowed its corporate and league affiliations to occasionally distort when and how they cover certain things. A lot of the Cowboys’ sponsors are their sponsors, and the average employee knows that you don’t go fucking with the gravy train.

But what happened to Hill yesterday did not take place in a vacuum. If you understand everything that went into ESPN’s treatment of Hill, you know just how badly they’ve fucked her over, and how pathetic they look as a result.

Hill, of course, was already forced to apologize earlier this fall when she called President Trump a white supremacist on Twitter. Never mind that such a label is wholly appropriate for Trump given his history of discrimination in real estate, his support for blatantly oppressive policies, and his fervent defense of, uh, Nazis. Never mind that Hill vented about Trump on her own personal Twitter feed, far away from a national SportsCenter broadcast. And never mind that the “outrage” over Hill’s tweets came from phony MAGA bots and disingenuous racists who perceive any justice for others as an injustice to them. ESPN still found Hill’s tweets too direct enough, too truthful and too damning, to let them stand unchecked. So after her new round of tweets about Jerry Jones and the Cowboys, they finally found a cheap excuse to drop the hammer and formally discipline her. And look at this goddamn disgrace of a statement:

You’ll notice that ESPN never actually mentioned what her supposed second violation of the company’s social media guidelines were. In fact, her initial tweets about Trump didn’t technically violate those guidelines to begin with. And to characterize her tweets as “impulsive” is a gross implication, like Hill was drunk and unhinged when she fired off perfectly acceptable, fact-backed, laudable viewpoints. None of this is genuine. This is ESPN finding any excuse possible to discipline Hill and get puds who read Daily Caller off their backs. This is ESPN going, "Sorry the mouthy lady was mad at all the racism." And in the process, they offered up Hill—whose only crime was to be too accurate in speaking her mind—as a sacrifice to those same jackasses, including the president himself:

Keep in mind that whenever the president takes time out from wiping chicken grease off the remote to attack an individual on Twitter, he sets into motion an entire industrial complex of nihilists, trolls, racists, sexists, truther media outlets, bots, and shitbags. When he mobilizes them, he does so specifically to direct their endless, unquenchable ire onto that person. Whether it’s Hill, or Carmen Yulin Cruz, or Alicia Machado (boy, I can’t quite put my finger on what those three people might have in common), Trump knows he can make their lives utter hell with a single tweet, and gleefully sets the wolves on them if they dare to displease him. A decent boss—shit, a decent person—would support Hill and protect her from this horseshit. ESPN didn’t. They shoved her into the wolf cage and locked the gate shut.

There is a strain of cowardice here that now runs down the spine of all American life now. Everyone is too goddamn afraid of Trump and his band of yokels. You can see it in ESPN’s actions. You can see it when the NFL quietly walks back their support for anthem demonstrators. You can see it in the August New York Times ceding column space to loons like Erick Erickson. You can see it in Facebook and Twitter’s tacit refusals to root out abuse. And you can DEFINITELY see it in the Republican legislators and cabinet members who whinge about Trump’s glaring stupidity behind closed doors but will never publicly declare the obvious. Those sniveling toads are too afraid of losing the electoral support of Trump and his minions. And ESPN, already badly bleeding thanks to onerous rights fees and cord-cutting, is too scared of losing them as viewers, even if their threats to tune out are 100% hollow.