I’ve written here quite a few times about the baseball pundit lawyer Craig Calcaterra, originally the author of an excellent baseball blog called “Shysterball.” Since then he’s apparently dumped law entirely, and is a full-time baseball analyst. Craig is a good guy, based on my many interactions with him over the years commenting on amd sometimes criticizing his work; he once called me “a handful,” which I take as a compliment. Now he makes his living on various paid newsletter platforms writing about one of my favorite topics.
I would dearly love to subscribe to Craig’s fascinating baseball musings, except for two thing. First, it’s awfully tight at the Marshall household since the pandemic wiped out 75% of our business, and second, Craig has increasingly marred the enjoyment he brings to baseball with metastasizing knee-jerk wokism. Yes, it has become worse since Donald Trump was elected.
Sadly, this hard left bias, which used to be undetectable, now frequently creeps into his baseball commentary, as when he opined that pitcher Josh Hader should have been fined or suspended from Major League Baseball because of some gay-bashing tweets he wrote to a handful of pimply faced friends when he was in high school. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it turned out to have signature significance. After that, Craig increasingly let his political obsessions creep into his view of baseball. Once he left NBC Sports for Substack, he indulged himself by including pure political punditry along with what people pay for, his baseball thoughts, in his newsletters. I know, I could just skip the progressive garbage, but it annoys me. Unlike his baseball instincts, these intrusions are emotional and logically sloppy.
Now Craig is pushing his newsletter to potential subscribers following his move to a new platform; sure enough, he is one of the Substack refugees who are boycotting that platform for not censoring a handful—okay, two handfuls—of neo-nazi and white supremacy extremists. (I wrote about this example of the new Left’s obsession with restricting ideas, speech and people they find “offensive” here.) For a while, he is sending out free samples of the new publication to people like me who have exchanged emails with him over the years. In today’s edition, he includes a deranged rant against “right wing politics” that perfectly illustrates how a progressive bias and hanging out in woke bubbles (lawyers, journalists) will poison even the best of minds.
Since he sent me that rant and I didn’t ask for it, I feel justified in reprinting the whole thing here, after which I will offer a few comments:
Racism made simple
Ever since that plane had the door fly off a few weeks ago racist right-wingers have used it as an excuse to go after Boeing and the airlines for having diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (DEI). If you are asking why those two things would go together at all, I laud you for your ability to avoid all of the dumbest and most depressing political commentary and the circle jerks which surrounds it.
Most of you, I suspect, understand exactly why such an equation has been made: almost the entire animating force of right wing politics these days are the fearful, reactionary grievances of straight white men who no longer feel like they control everything. As such, any and all bad things — or, for that matter, even neutral things — that happen to that class of folks are blamed on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, gay people, and trans people, regardless of how nonsensical it is to do so. DEI policies mean that, sometimes, white men don’t get absolutely everything they feel they are entitled to. Boeing had a plane with a mechanical defect. Boeing has DEI policies. Ergo, the DEI policy caused the mishap.
That’s dumb enough on the surface, but like all malignant things, it has quickly spread. Now, instead of using mishaps as a means of going after DEI policies in at least some superficially reasoned way, a shortcut has been developed in which the very term “DEI” has been turned into a slur, the sort of which allows for discourse that would make unreconstructed racists of the 1950s blush. Stuff like this:
It’s amazing to me just how much work right wing jackasses put in over the decades to find euphemisms to mask their blatant racism only to have modern right wing jackasses simply spew out every possible thing short of the actual n-word. Those folks who tried to walk some line from the 1960s through the early 2000s really have to be kicking themselves for all of their wasted effort right now, when absolutely unadorned racism is considered completely acceptable to a wide swath of people on the political right.
I feel that I must repeat, after that rhetorical vomit, my conviction that Craig Calcaterra is a smart, erudite, rational and fair man when too much time watching MSNBC or reading Jamele Bouie hasn’t rendered his cerebral cortex non-functional.
To being with, I haven’t read any pundit on the right advocating the position that DEI is responsible for the 737 Max problems. What I have read, and figured out myself, is that an organization of any sort that elevates staff diversity, equity and inclusion over merit, experience and ability is legitimately subject to the rebuttable presumption that it is not prioritizing the right things, and that, in running any business or organization, not prioritizing the right things in hiring decisions inevitably leads to that organization not functioning as well as it could or should. Moreover, prioritizing DEI over competence and demonstrated ability in a business like air travel, where the safety of human beings who are entrusting their lives with an organization must ne of paramount importance, is irresponsible and incompetent, leading to another rebuttable presumption, that the organization itself is not trustworthy, and its management is more interested in winning woke points than in doing its job well.
This does not make me a racist or a straight white man with fearful, reactionary grievances because I’m not getting absolutely everything I feel entitled to. I am entitled to being able to take an airplane flight without being terrified that the plane’s wings are going to fall off because the plane’s manufacturer hired subpar engineers, managers or executives to combat “systemic racism.”
Craig is showing me what full immersion in progressive cant can do to the judgment and reasoning of a baseball analyst, and it’s frightening. But at least if he screws up, it won’t kill me.
Ethics Alarms 
… I laud you for your ability to avoid all of the dumbest and most depressing political commentary and the circle jerks which surrounds it.
I find commentary that uses terms like “circle jerk” to be sufficiently crude to discount altogether.
…almost the entire animating force of right wing politics these days are the fearful, reactionary grievances of straight white men who no longer feel like they control everything.
That being said, I feel there needs to be more attention paid to comments like this. It is true that there is always going to be resentment and consternation when societal upheavals present new disadvantages to a group. What is really disingenuous is to suggest that right-wing concern is about losing power, when instead the concern is about a coordinated attack to remove anyone with a conservative bent from society altogether. Cancelling, deplatforming, debanking, and in general viciously attacking the right makes the concerns of conservatives more than resent at loss of power. There’s a growing concern that survival itself is at stake. If Calcaterra were more honest, he’d admit that this is what is happening and try to justify as the the well-earned desserts of decades of racist behavior.
As such, any and all bad things — or, for that matter, even neutral things — that happen to that class of folks are blamed on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, gay people, and trans people, regardless of how nonsensical it is to do so.
If you ignore reality, with all the atrocious things that have been happening in the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity, I could see why someone on the left would agree to this statement. The problem is, there are so many instances to point to that make Calcaterra’s assessment here ludicrous. Does he believe it is good or even just neutral that grades are plummeting, and largely due to the mishandling of the Left? From teacher’s unions, to inflating grades, to welfare programs that hook generations on welfare and discourage strong families, to promoting sexualization and identity politics in the classroom at the cost of core class time, all of which gets wrapped up now in DEI, everything the Left pushes has led to a crisis in education. And that’s just one area. Do we need to point to crime in Democrat controlled cities? The uptick in drug use in Democrat-controlled states that have pushed legalization or minimal punishment? The rise of homelessness far beyond the national average in California? There are countless more examples that have been well-tracked just here at Ethics Alarms (which cannot be said to be a right-wing site), and the most the Left can do is accuse the right of saying mean things.
a shortcut has been developed in which the very term “DEI” has been turned into a slur…
And rightly so. It is destructive. I would love to have someone point to something positive DEI has accomplished, because for the life of me, I can’t think of anything.
And Calcaterra should take a moment to consider why someone would say, like Charlie Kirk, “I’m sorry. If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.'” This is what DEI has accomplished. By prioritizing race, it does make one wonder if the hire is for talent or to fulfill a quota. My wife, as an engineer, had to constantly struggle with the concern that she was hired to be the token woman in the department. And we’ve seen the results when someone is hired because of race or sex or some other factor other than merit. Quality tanks. We knew this when we were concerned with family members getting jobs just for being related and not for actual qualifications. When you create an environment where people are hired for qualities other than merit, you automatically create the suspicion that a diversity hire is not going to be able to do the job. Most of the time, the diversity hire does the job fine, just as, often enough, the family member performs just fine. That doesn’t justify those times when such hires turn out to be dreadful, especially when it happens at a high enough level to destroy entire businesses.
Those folks who tried to walk some line from the 1960s through the early 2000s really have to be kicking themselves for all of their wasted effort right now, when absolutely unadorned racism is considered completely acceptable to a wide swath of people on the political right.
And Calcaterra continues to demonstrate the point is entirely lost on him. All he has is all the progressives in general have: “Racist!” There’s no analysis, no argument, no weighing premises against conclusions and finding logical fallacies. It is just, “Racist!”