Down at the Hater’s Ball, we were joking around at the banquet about the things you stop enjoying when you become race aware. Pop culture is an obvious one, given the absurd levels of anti-white vitriol we see on TV and in movies. I mentioned that sports stop being fun, as you spend all your time noticing the propaganda and lose track of the games. I’m not the first guy to notice this. At Mencken last year, I was hanging out with a couple of people who despised sportsball because of the endless racial agitation in it.

Back in Lagos, I’m enjoying my free evenings by watching some television and catching up on some movies. I happened to catch about five minutes of a basketball game. It was Cleveland versus Toronto. The announcers were carrying on like LeBron James had just cured cancer, whenever he put the ball in the hoop. Some famous black guy was on the sidelines doing back flips for some reason. It was like watching a bizarre African circus, but the stands were packed with whites. I lasted about five minutes and turned it off.

The NBA has always been an odd business. The people who own the teams are the types who do business from card tables and folding chairs. They keep a bug-out bag ready and leave their car idling in the parking lot, just in case. The owners are all Jewish. The players are all black. The fans are all white. The NBA is pretty much a long running advertisement for upside down world, where blacks are the elite and whites are at the bottom. It is, in many respects, a metaphor for where we are as a society in the current age.

Anyway, it got me wondering how these sportsball leagues remain in business, despite their hostility toward their customers. Going to sporting events is a civic nationalist sort of thing, if you think about it. It is the last place we have where people from the community can meet in public and enjoy something together. The downtown shopping area is dead. Malls are dying off. The movie theater has been replaced by the home theater system. A sportsball game is one of the last public gathering places we have now.

As with so much of our society, the sportsball model assumes the sorts of social arrangements that come with an 80% white society, where people trust one another and take pride in their place. You have an emotional attachment to the local teams, because they represent local pride, even if the players are mercenaries. In a world where all relationships are transactional and one place is as good as another, what’s the point of following the local team? That seems to be showing up in surveys like this about the NBA.

Another tell that sportsball is headed for a bad time is what is happening with college sports. There, fan loyalty has the added hook of attendance. Alabama football not only plays on state loyalty, they have tens of thousands of graduates who can show their pride by supporting the football team. That means donations. Talk to the people who fund raise for athletic departments and they will tell you that the younger graduates are far less willing to give than previous generations. The “culture of giving” is not there with millennials.

It’s not just the changing demographics of America, it is the berserk impulse by the people running the sportsball leagues to destroy what makes sports appealing. Here’s a story about how NASCAR is trying to grovel at the alter of multiculturalism. I can guarantee you that not a single racing fan in the South has said to his buddy, “You know what would make NASCAR perfect? More blacks.” Sports used to be an escape and a celebration. Today, even NASCAR is a sermon and warning. How is that sustainable?

The funny thing is the sportsball leagues appear to understand that their model depends on fooling whitey about their intentions. I went to opening day for the Lagos baseball team and the pre-game ceremonies would have made Leni Riefenstahl blush. I enjoy some flag waving still, but I was offended by the volume and intensity of it. There were calls to hero worship the military, the cops, some civic group they trotted out. I went to see a baseball game and instead I got a Orwellian rally to celebrate the great leader and his works.

The reason they lay it on so thick is they feel they have to. They say flag waving is the last refuge of a scoundrel, so a sport worried about its appeal will resort to claiming it is your patriotic duty to love baseball. Looking around at the crowd that day, I saw very few non-white faces. It was all white families and white business people skipping out from work. Baltimore is a 70% black city that has to import its sports fans. When America is 70% non-white, from where will they import their fans then? Will it matter?

Given what’s happened with the NFL ratings the last few years and the drop in live attendance for all sports, sportsball is in for a rough time. Professional sportsball is not the same business as selling cheap junk from China. For sportsball to work, there has to be an emotional bond between customer and team. That means the fan has to trust the owners of the team are on their side. In our deracinated, low-trust society, that can’t happen. Therefore, it is hard to see how the sportsball model holds up much longer.