A civil war has apparently broken out in conservative sports punditry.
Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy and The Blaze columnist Jason Whitlock engaged in a nasty exchange earlier this week, after Whitlock published a rambling and scathing opinion piece in which, among other things, he depicted Portnoy as an unscrupulous opportunist rather than a principled conservative.
According to Whitlock, formerly of ESPN and other outlets, Portnoy has built his career on exploiting "America's misguided masculinity temperance movement."
"Portnoy built a sports media empire pretending to be a fearless ESPN disruptor standing against the wokefication of sports and American culture," Whitlock wrote. "It’s now clear he’s a total fraud and sellout. His lone interests are money and access to barely legal women. He sold Barstool to a gambling company for hundreds of millions of dollars, and now Barstool is every bit as woke as ESPN."
Rather than responding substantively, Portnoy opted for mockery:
After Whitlock then answered with a video response, Portnoy then resurfaced an old tweet in which Whitlock praised him:
Whitlock explained his apparent flip-flop by claiming that Portnoy had "sold out" his conservative beliefs.
Portnoy got the last word, at least for now, with a lengthy statement in which he doubled down on attacking Whitlock over his weight:
It was unclear what prompted Whitlock's initial missive, and while neither he nor Portnoy made much of a coherent point during their petty exchanges, the dust-up was entertaining if nothing else. And for a pair of notorious provocateurs, perhaps that was the point.
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