When Maga media blowhard Clay Travis offered $2m to Colin Kaepernick last week to appear on the daily talkshow he hosts with former CIA analyst Buck Sexton, it represented the culmination of a years-long obsession on the right with the onetime NFL star. In Travis’s telling of history, Kaepernick taking a knee during the 2016 NFL season was the event that catalyzed professional sports into the era of “woke” excess from which, he claims, it has been struggling to recover ever since.
But more than simply confirming the right’s longstanding villainization of Kaepernick, Travis’s offer was also a smarmy bid for publicity for his new media venture, Sport & State. Sport & State, which launched in August, is Travis’s bid to get back to his roots as a media mogul who sold the wildly popular Outkick to Fox Sports for a rumored $100m, and reclaim some of the cultural territory lost to fellow sports bros and Magagitators like Pat McAfee, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro. But if there’s one thing Sport & State won’t be doing, it’s engaging with anyone beyond the Magaverse. There has been no response from Kaepernick since Travis made his “offer” of $2m to charity in exchange for an interview, which suggests he understands that it was extended more in a spirit of trolling buffoonery than sincerity. No one associated with the left or progressive politics ever appears on Travis’s shows, for the simple reason that they are designed purely for the right to talk to itself. (Some would say the same could be said of the left, although the disregard for dissenting perspectives in the Magasphere seems way more extreme.) More than it heralds a renewal of Travis’s career or an injection of fresh energy into the Trumpist mediasphere, Sport & State is a case study in the stagnation that has taken hold on the right as Donald Trump stares down the barrel of defeat in November’s midterm elections.
