Vindictive sportswriter pretty pleased with himself for (he thinks) ending career of backup catcher

We told you Friday about the disgusting attack leveled against Seattle Mariners catcher Steve Clevenger by USA Today columnist Bob Nightengale. Because Clevenger had made a couple of posts on social media criticizing Black Lives Matter, President Obama and the Charlotte rioters, Nightengale went on the warpath, demanding that the Mariners release Clevenger. The posts were harshly worded, but they weren't inaccurate and they certainly weren't racist. Didn't matter. Nightengale simply labeled them as such and that's apparently all that needs to happen for someone's career to be thrown into the shredder. The cowardly Mariners mostly complied with Nightengale's demands, suspending Clevenger without pay for the rest of the season - not because he actually did anything wrong, but because the Mariners felt the negative media pressure they know will keep coming from a cockroach like Bob Nightengale.

That was bad enough, but Nightengale was just getting started in his war against a backup catcher on the disabled list. Late Friday afternoon, Nightengale wrote a second column, spiking the ball over his takedown of Clevenger and now upping the ante. Nightengale now demands that Clevenger never be allowed to play Major League Baseball again, and baldly asserts the lie that Clevenger is a racist:

This isn’t a star player who committed an act of domestic violence. This isn’t a player who was busted for performance-enhancing drugs. This is a 30-year-old backup catcher, with a career .227 batting average, hanging on for dear life to his fading baseball career. It’s over. And even he knows it. Clevenger has no plans to file a grievance over his suspension, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation. The person spoke to USA TODAY Sports only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

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If he has no interest in an appeal, then the Major League Baseball Players Association doesn’t, either. Everyone is offended by his remarks - likening protestors to "animals," most notably - and now, they hope he can just quietly go away. It’s up to him if he wants to adopt these stances as his brand. He's free to show up on Rush Limbaugh’s talk show. Perhaps he can join Donald Trump’s campaign. Maybe he can form an alliance with Curt Schilling and join his Periscope adventure. But as far as playing baseball, at least in this country, it’s over. This wasn’t some random act that triggered an ugly dark side to him. This wasn’t a slip-up. It had been building. Finally, he could no longer keep his racist thoughts to himself. He had to share them with the rest of the world.

So "everyone" is offended by Clevenger's posts, yes? I wonder how long it took Nightengale to interview everyone and find that out. This, of course, is a classic media tactic of projecting one's own opinions onto the public writ large. I feel this way so everyone must feel this way. But astonishingly, Nightengale still wasn't done trashing Clevenger. He came back on Saturday with a third column that goes back into some of Clevenger's past social media history, and once again calls out previous comments for the purpose of falsely portraying them as racist:

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In an August post from Clevenger’s deactivated Facebook account obtained by USA TODAY Sports, Clevenger called the Black Lives Matter movement“a racial group no different from the KKK…and the reason is because there’s white people like you (who) support them.” Clevenger's comments came in a Facebook thread under a posting that originated from conservative author Ann Coulter. Clevenger, 30, was suspended by the Mariners for the remainder of the season Friday after tweets from his private Twitter account became public. One tweet suggested Black Lives Matter activists be “locked behind bars like animals!” Screenshots of Clevenger’s posts were obtained from an acquaintance of Clevenger’s who requested anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject. Another person who viewed the posts confirmed their authenticity to USA TODAY Sports. Both noted that the tone and spirit of the posts were in line with others Clevenger made in the past and had expressed concern Clevenger’s views, publicly aired, would get him in trouble with his employer.

First let's talk about that comment comparing BLM to the KKK. As I said about the other posts referenced and linked above, that is certainly a harsh thing to say. But for Nightengale to treat it as self-evidently racist is just absurd. Maybe Nightengale thinks that Black Lives Matter is really just a benign group of minorities who wants everyone to know that black lives matter, rather than the radical organization it actually is that foments anger, chaos in the streets and violence against police officers. The reason Clevenger made the comparison is that he knows BLM does these things. If Nightengale is offended because he is too ignorant to realize this, that doesn't make Clevenger racist. It makes Nightengale an idiot. What's happening here is far more insidious and troubling than just a ballplayer getting released by a team, or a sportswriter criticizing him. If that's all you see here, you need to look deeper. Essentially, America now has a speech code, and members of the media like Bob Nightengale are the self-appointed enforcers of the speech code. Here's how it works: Yes, it's true, the First Amendment still protects you from criminal sanction for expressing your opinions. But the speech code makes that protection nearly irrelevant. If you express an opinion that the keepers of the code don't like, they will hound you and hound everyone associated with you until it becomes far too much trouble to remain associated with you. The Mariners didn't suspend Clevenger because he hurt the team or committed any real wrongdoing with his tweets. They suspended him to end the firestorm of media pressure and negative publicity that will not end until they do, because the keepers of the code have put a target on Steve Clevenger's head. They've declared him a racist on the basis of a handful of tweets that can be easily read as not racist at all, but it doesn't matter. Once someone with a big enough megaphone decides to hang that label on you, it's all over unless your employers, colleagues and associates have a great deal of courage and are willing to tell the Nightengales of the world to shove their demands where the sun doesn't shine. Usually, they take the path of least resistance and give the speech code enforcers what they want. It's easier and cleaner. They just don't want any trouble. Also recognize that the media and the political left have set a massive trap for the rest of us with the way they talk about this issue. When they report on these incidents, race is front and center in their reporting whether it deserves to be or not. White cop this. Black man that. Black witnesses so on and so forth. The race of every person involved is thrown in your face as a central component of the story. But let you to talk about what's happening in the same terms (black people commit violence, black rioters attack white photographer) or don't even mention race but talk in harsh terms about what black rioters are doing ("should be caged like animals") and you're now a racist because you're only allowed to reference race in the matter proscribed and approved by the media and the left. They can obsess over race all day every day, but if you even hint at it in expressing your own point of view, then everyone connected to you will be hounded and harassed until your career is over and your life is ruined. To some degree, of course, this is also just a personal power trip by a sleaze like Bob Nightengale, who enjoys the fact that his megaphone as a national sports columnist gives him the opportunity to put gunsights on the head of anyone he chooses and inflict harm into that person's life. He doesn't know Steve Clevenger at all. He doesn't know his wife or his family. He doesn't know anything about his personal character. Nightegale doesn't care. Clevenger said something that irritated Nightengale, so Nightengale has decided to make sure Clevenger can never again do what he does for a living. And he's become quite the obsessive stalker about it too. Three columns in two days, digging into the man's deleted social media history and tarring him as a racist. All this for a backup catcher who's been on the disabled list for months. Why? Because Bob Nightengale is an important and powerful man and he can hurt whomever he wants to hurt, and you can't do anything about it because he is protected by the First Amendment. But the First Amendment can't protected anyone against the malevolence of Bob Nightengale. Because the speech code is above the Constitution, and its enforcers are all-powerful. Step out of line and they will end you. I hope some organization sees value next season in Steve Clevenger's skills as a ballplayer. He deserves that. And if the creepy stalker at USA Today goes on a rampage as a result, I hope that organization tells him what he can do with his demands. Someone needs to start doing that. In fact, just about everyone needs to start doing that.