Sha-Maria Law: ESPN sacrificed Rachel Nichols to honor George Floyd, the Alphabet Mafia, and America’s cultural insurrectionists

ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro is engaged in a prolonged war with the Taliban, commonly referred to in sports media circles as the "BLM-LGBTQ+ Alphabet Mafia."

Wednesday, under the tenets of Sha-Maria Law, the Alphabet Mafia beheaded NBA broadcaster Rachel Nichols for private disobedience of identity politics guidelines. ESPN removed Nichols from its NBA coverage and canceled her show, "The Jump." With a year left on her contract, according to reports, Nichols will no longer appear on the Worldwide Leader in Sports.

A year ago, Nichols, a white Jewish woman, gossiped with a male member of her tribe about ESPN management handing black colleague Maria Taylor a job that had been contractually promised to Nichols. Unbeknownst to Nichols, her comments were accidently recorded by a camera in her Orlando hotel room and subsequently shared with leadership of a Taliban cell headquartered in Bristol, Connecticut.

Because Nichols made these inconsequential comments during the summer of 2020, the first holy holiday celebrating the death of career criminal St. George Floyd, the Alphabet Mafia placed a bounty on Nichols' career at ESPN. Working with Taylor, the Alphabet Mafia newspaper of record, the New York Times, smeared Nichols as a bigot, forcing Pitaro to execute Nichols.

Some critics are comparing Pitaro to U.S. President Joe Biden, saying Pitaro's submission to the sports media Taliban is analogous to Biden's catastrophic Afghanistan exit. The New York Post's influential media critic Andrew Marchand published a column Wednesday night blaming Pitaro for fumbling the Nichols-Taylor dispute.

"In the history of sports media mismanagement, the way ESPN handled Rachel Nichols' situation may not be the worst, but it can make a case," Marchand wrote. "The fiasco was the result of embarrassing, indecisive management from ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro on down. More than a year ago, ESPN did not do anything of substance about Nichols' comments when they first found out about them. Nothing. Nada."

It's a fair take. However, I disagree. I am far more sympathetic to Pitaro's plight.

Full disclosure, ESPN rehired me in 2013 to found a website dedicated to covering the intersection of sports, race, and culture. Unfortunately, my black skin did not compensate for my woke shortcomings, my faith-based conservative values, and my toxic masculinity. I was a frequent target of Deadspin's attack. ESPN fired me in 2015. Six years ago, I was Rachel Nichols, a sacrifice to the Alphabet Mafia.

Pitaro inherited the Alphabet War from his predecessor, former ESPN president John Skipper. From 2012 through 2017, Skipper surrendered complete control of the network to the terror group Deadspin and its infamous warlord Nick Denton, the Osama bin Laden of the Alphabet Mafia. In mid-2017, I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal explaining the successful insurrection Deadspin pulled off in the Disney capital of Kabul, Connecticut. Deadspin's insurrection was quite similar to the events on January 6 at the Capitol. ESPN security opened doors and welcomed insurrectionists onto its campus. Many ESPN employees worked in a clandestine manner with Deadspin Proud Boys Tommy Craggs, Tim Marchman, A.J. Daulerio, and single token Alphabet nationalist Greg Howard.

Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, used Deadspin to bully ESPN into adopting the identity politics agenda. For years, Deadspin attacked ESPN executives relentlessly, exposing embarrassing details about the sexual malfeasance of the network's executives and personalities. Fear of being a target of a Deadspin "investigative" story terrified ESPN leadership, especially Skipper. In 2018, Skipper was forced to resign when it became public that someone was using his cocaine addiction in an alleged extortion plot.

Skipper and ESPN's longtime head of human resources and Alphabet Mafia soldier Paul Richardson negotiated a secret peace agreement with Deadspin. The network agreed to prioritize identity above talent and merit in its on- and off-air decision-making.

In front of the camera, sexual identity, skin color, and gender drove ESPN to form the worst Monday Night Football booth in the history of the iconic show, pairing legendary NFL coach Jon Gruden with solid baseball play-by-play man Sean McDonough and talented sideline reporter Lisa Salters. During the broadcast of FOOTBALL games, Gruden and McDonough routinely expressed horror at the level of violence displayed.

Behind the camera, sexual identity, skin color, and gender led the network to elevate female executives to supervising positions over studio shows, which led to no-impact, mostly attractive female broadcasters landing high-priced hosting jobs on nearly every studio show. Skipper gave huge contracts to Michelle Beadle, Cari Champion, Jemele Hill, Katie Nolan, Samantha Ponder, etc.

If you want to understand why Maria Taylor balked at a raise from $1 million to $5 million and left for NBC, you have to understand the culture Skipper, Richardson, and Deadspin created at ESPN. Taylor was radicalized by Taliban culture early in her career. She is quite talented. But ESPN raised her to feel entitled. Her black skin qualified her for reparations.

Nichols is talented, too. She's also accomplished as a journalist. She worked as a legit journalist at the Washington Post for eight years. Not Jeff Bezos' Washington Post. Nichols worked for the Graham family's Washington Post. Nichols fought her way to the top of sports media with hard work and cunning politics. She earned it. Yes, Nichols played woke to survive and thrive within corporate media. But she did not deserve this embarrassing public execution. She did not deserve the New York Times hit piece insinuating racism, nor the savage and irresponsible tweets about her personal life.

She whined to a friend that identity politics stole an opportunity she earned. Who wouldn't do that? Who hasn't done that?

Nichols and Pitaro are victims of a strategy Skipper and Richardson implemented a decade ago. Pitaro replaced Skipper in 2018 and immediately declared war on the sports media Taliban. Pitaro demanded that ESPN sportscasters talk about sports rather than Twitter-approved political talking points. He bought out Michelle Beadle's $5 million-a-year contract when she could no longer hide her utter disdain for football, the primary ratings driver for all of sports television. Pitaro bought out Jemele Hill when she chose sophomoric political commentary over sophomoric sports commentary. Pitaro declined to participate in the sports media fantasy that a cute Boston bartender, Katie Nolan, was the future of sports television.

Pitaro and ESPN executive vice president Norby Williamson were having great success smoking insurrectionists out of their Bristol caves. Everything changed in the summer of 2020. That's when a Minneapolis police officer assisted fentanyl activist St. George Floyd in the destruction of his life. In terms of cultural change, Derek Chauvin's knee was more powerful than Colin Kaepernick's.

It resurrected the Taliban, aka the Alphabet Mafia.

Insurrectionists in sports media and across American culture glorified St. George Floyd so they could use him to seize power and exact revenge on the infidels who stray from or don't adhere to the politics of identity.