ESPN analyst calls Trump’s base stupid and ‘susceptible to propaganda’

Kellerman said his controversial and hotly contested piece on the First Take show just this morning while talking about the topic of what the ongoing events in the NBA such as cancelled games and practices mean for the NFL.

Here below is a small excerpt from the discourse:

You made the argument a couple weeks ago, you thought if SEC football wasn’t played that could swing the general election because people in Trump’s base would be very upset that they didn’t have football, which is practically a religion down there.

I disagreed because he would simply shift blame because the pandemic is raging. They seem to be susceptible to very low quality information and easy to propagandize and almost immune to facts. Because, as Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s advisor, said, they have alternative facts. If they stay in their propaganda silos — like the Fox News propaganda silo — it wouldn’t matter what happened because they’d say the handling of the pandemic has been great. The handling of the pandemic has been the worst in the industrialized democratic world, by far. By far, in the United States, at a federal level, it’s been a disaster. And as a result we’re dealing with this pandemic. And yet I didn’t think that would affect voters because the blame would be shifted.

If the NFL doesn’t play football — I think the NFL players have a lot of power here — if they don’t play football, at a certain point, the core will remain but the [NFL] football base goes all throughout the country. It doesn’t just hit one or another’s political base, but insofar as there’s a such thing as swing voters still, it would absolutely affect some of them. If the NFL season isn’t played or it’s interrupted, as a result of social justice issues — and of course we all understand this is against the backdrop of the pandemic … I know we exist in this sports bubble and we have this outsized idea of the effect of sports, but I think that might actually have political consequences in a general election.

This speech happened on the heels of a recent massive deal signed between the SEC conference ESPN and Disney. The deal gives ESPN and Disney exclusive rights starting in 2023.

Many experts in the world of professional sports are currently speculating on the SEC’s possible reaction to Kellerman’s depiction of their fans and viewers.