Private Lives: Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast The First Email
If you’re looking for a martyr for the cause of privacy you’ll spend a lot of time before coming up with now-former NFL GM/ coach Jon Gruden. In case you missed it, “Chucky” had the misfortune to entrust innermost thoughts in emails to fellow NFL executive Bruce Allen, a longtime colleague with the Washington football club.
“Innermost thoughts” is a felicitous way to say he wallowed in stupid-guy-talk about gays, blacks, women and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. There is little way to excuse the bile he spread, especially for a man with his football pedigree of Super Bowls, ESPN broadcasting and coaching at every level of the league. He’s supposed to be better than that.
While many of his black players swear by Gruden— who won the SB with Tampa in 2002— saying he was an even-handed figure who never breathed a word of racism, cancel culture will make sure these allegations stick to him. As a result, his prospects in sport/ broadcasting are probably nil. No doubt he— like most us— never thought private communications with a friend would ever emerge.
In football, ball security is job security. Turnovers will sink you. Now we know that email security will sink you when the laptop harpies want you disgraced. But that’s what can happen to a white 60-something alpha male in today’s safe-space culture. You lose your job. Hey, you wrote it. You own it.
How the emails emerged is, however, a cautionary tale for anyone who might provide a convenient whipping post for Woke World. The recently emerged Gruden emails were part of a huge trove of 650,000 in an investigation of Washington NFL owner Daniel Snyder over workplace improprieties with staff and cheerleaders on the team. (A report from lawyer Beth Wilkinson was filed in May and was quickly ignored— although the NFL says the investigation continues.)
That wasn’t fast enough for someone(s). While there has been no finding so far about Snyder (a member of the exclusive 32-person owners’ club) someone on the inside did decide to quickly turn over Gruden’s garbage to the New York Times. Less than four full years into a 10-year contract with the Las Vegas Raiders Gruden resigned, and the blogosphere had a scalp.
From the comments of Raiders’ owner Mark Davis you can be sure Las Vegas not the source of the leak. Davis told ESPN: ”I have no comment. Ask the NFL. They have all the answers."
It’s not as though the NFL doesn’t countenance salty language. As OutKick founder Clay Travis points out, “Every rapper the NFL has performing at the Super Bowl has more offensive lyrics than Jon Gruden had in his emails. How does the NFL reconcile the difference in treatment?” And those lyrics were public, not hidden in an email.
Gruden— and anyone seeing the story with a clear eye— must now understand that the conventional understanding of privacy in communication is extinct. There’s no mercy in the face of left-wing zealots who dismiss emails about bribery and fraud from Hunter Biden but will demonize an NFL coach with recidivist thoughts.
The larger implications are chilling. This can happen to anyone who gets on the wrong side of Big Tech. Who has not produced an unfortunate email, a letter, a broadcast in their lives that can become fodder for the politically motivated when unearthed years or decades later? It strikes fear into ordinary people that their distant past will scuttle them.
And fear is the point. Making people afraid of their past is part of that plan. The Obama Left has advanced their agenda this far and fast by instilling dread into people who still believe there is fairness in the system. But for those on the Left who insist that— in spite of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot— socialism has never had a fair trial, any means at eliminating opposition is permissible. And encouraged.
So now we have punitive use of personal privacy as a gotcha’. And free speech becomes a hollowed shell.
Author G.K. Chesterton saw the contradictions of free speech in the early 1900s. “If free thought means that we are not free to rebuke free-thinkers, it is surely a very one-sided sort of free thought. It means that they may say anything they choose about all we hold most dear, and we must not say anything we think in protest against all we hold most damnable.”
Don’t expect conventional conservatives to belatedly rally to protect privacy. Journalist Julie Kelly sums up in a tweet the current disillusionment with leaders on the right. “Don’t identify as a conservative anymore. It’s a loser’s movement with stragglers holding on to an era that doesn’t exist anymore, in large part because those same folks fumbled every cause. Government restrictions on vax mandates aren’t “conservative?” Who cares.”
Certainly not the people who buried Gruden in a heartbeat after his emails emerged. After all, his failing was just a stepping stone on the way to bigger targets.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author of Cap In Hand is also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, his new book with his son Evan is called InExact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx