Just in case you needed more incentive to stop watching cable news and instead subscribe to your local newspaper, here’s some compelling video evidence, brought to you by Fox Sports’ Clay Travis.
Travis appeared as a guest on a CNN segment hosted by Brooke Baldwin on Friday afternoon, ostensibly to discuss the controversy surrounding ESPN’s Jemele Hill. For the uninitiated, Travis is a low-ratings controversialist who traffics in lunatic conspiracy theories and bog-standard white grievance. If you’re CNN, you invite him on TV to talk about the heavy issues of the day only because standards-and-practices wouldn’t let you put a chimp in that chair instead.
What happened next was basically inevitable. Asked on CNN whether the ESPN host committed a fireable offense by calling President Donald Trump a “white supremacist,” Travis decided to talk about how much he loves boobs. No joke:
“I believe in only two things completely,” Travis said: “The First Amendment and boobs.”
Baldwin, understandably caught off guard and perhaps believing she misheard him, asked him to clarify:
“Wait, did you just say you believe in the First Amendment and ... wait, hold on, hold on,” she said. “I just want to make sure I heard you correctly as a woman anchoring this show. Did you say — what’d you just say? You believe in the First Amendment and B-O-O-B-S?”
“Boobs,” Travis confirmed. Both Baldwin and the show’s other guest winced in disbelieving unison as he reiterated the line he’d clearly thought up ahead of time in a bid to win as much CNN ― and now internet ― coverage as possible.
Just to make his intentions clear, Travis repeated the line several more times throughout the course of the segment, clearly seeking to amplify the outrage.
This is nothing new for Travis, who relishes his role as “the Alex Jones of Sports,” as the Daily Beast once labeled him. If this blog Travis penned on “boobs” in 2012 is any indication, CNN knew exactly what it was getting into when they brought him on.
Travis claimed CNN had invited him back for Monday, but CNN denied it.
Asked to respond to Travis’ remarks, the segment’s second guest, former ESPN editor Keith Reed, was at a loss.
“I’m astonished at almost everything I just heard,” he said, noting sports journalism grapples with blatant sexism on a regular basis. “For somebody to come on CNN and to say something like, ‘The only thing I believe in ...’ in a discussion about something substantive, it’s astonishing.”
Baldwin, still shocked, cut off Reed and asked, “Why would you even say that live on national television?”
She later emphasized that on Twitter after the show:
Meanwhile, on his own Twitter feed, Travis proudly followed up on the comment ― by doubling down on it: