By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--January 25, 2018
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The Tennessee native lost Wednesday, after taking a much worse pounding from journalists. When one reporter learned he was a Trump supporter, others started digging. Poring over his Twitter account, reporters found that he followed people who’d attended alt-right rallies. A November 2016 tweet appeared sympathetic to an anti-Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory. He had also called Serena Williams’s cursing an opponent “disgusting”—deemed a racist microaggression. But Mr. Sandgren never tried to politicize tennis, and he also followed celebrities like actor Hugh Jackman and the band Metallica. During his postmatch press conference Monday, Mr. Sandgren vehemently denounced the alt-right and acknowledged that some of his fake-news tweets were ill-informed. “I think it’s crazy to assume that, to say, ‘Well he’s following X person so he believes all the things that this person believes,’ ” he said. “That’s not how information works.”
By Tuesday morning, he had deleted all of his tweets since June 2016, no doubt concerned about his ability to score endorsement and sponsorship deals. But his opponents persisted. An ESPN interviewer lobbed questions about his deleted tweets. The off-court onslaught may have contributed to his mental fatigue during his quarterfinal match. In the press conference after his loss, he went on offense with a statement blasting reporters for distorting the truth “to create sensationalist coverage.” “You seek to put people in these little boxes so that you can order the world in your already assumed preconceived ideas,” he said. “You strip away any individuality for the sake of demonizing by way of the collective. With a handful of follows and some likes on Twitter, my fate has been sealed in your minds.” He continued: “You would rather perpetuate propaganda machines instead of researching information from a host of angles and perspectives while being willing to learn, change, and grow. You dehumanize with pen and paper and turn neighbor against neighbor. . . . It is my firm belief that the highest value must be placed on the virtue of each individual, regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation.”Basically Sandgren is getting the Curt Schilling treatment. Because he has political opinions, and he's outspoken about them, and they are not the opinions shared by the media, they take it upon themselves to conduct a rectal exam of his every expression, affiliation and inclination. They demand he explain to them why he thinks or expresses a certain thing, as if it's understood that certain points of view are beyond the pale, and that adhering to them makes you an automatic suspect of great evil and malevolence.
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