I’ve always loved Barstool Sports, but the company’s freakout after Roe fell has been telling. They’re willing to challenge elite politics when it comes to just about everything except sexual ethics.
In one of his “Emergency Press Conferences” last weekend, Portnoy reacted to Dobbs v. Jackson by saying the nation is “going back in time.” Portnoy’s employees at Barstool got busy retweeting his video and posting their own pro-abortion content as well. This includes the second biggest personality at Barstool and Portnoy’s right hand, Dan “Big Cat” Katz. Katz reacted differently when Portnoy interviewed former President Donald Trump two years ago, lambasting him for politicizing the company.
The CEO’s support for abortion, then, is all the more revealing about where the left draws the line on what matters to them. If Portnoy wasn’t kicked out of his social standing for his take on Covid restrictions or for speaking with Trump, his brazen appeal to the left on abortion shows how strongly they value men and women’s ability to have sex without consequences.
Barstool has raked in immense profits from podcasts like “Call Her Daddy” which provide women step-by-step guides to encourage new sexual experiences. While CHD Host Alex Cooper promoted “female empowerment” through performing raunchy sexual acts, men like Portnoy benefit from an increasingly loose culture surrounding sex. And his freedom to sleep around and enjoy women’s bodies for carnal pleasure partially hinges on easy access to abortion.
In lock-step with most on the left, Portnoy’s arguments in the video concerning a woman’s geographical abortion access and disrespect for conservatives’ regard for the Second Amendment hold no substantive constitutional ground. This makes sense considering he then ushered in one of the most consistent narratives of the leftist elite: the Constitution is no longer useful or worthy of respect.
“At what point do you look at the Constitution and say hey, this was written by people who had slaves. Maybe not everything is exactly to a tee in the Constitution? Like a million years from now, you’re going to use a document written…” Portnoy said. “The world evolves, people evolve, technology evolves, you’ve got to evolve. You can’t stick with this document and look at that and be like that’s the end all, be all.”
The obvious fallacies in that argument aside, Portnoy isn’t a full-fledged progressive by any means. In fact, he has a reputation for riling up the left. As the leader of what can only be described as a media and pop culture behemoth, Portnoy’s staunch views on individual liberty have generated a lot of negative attention from corporate media.
They groan when Portnoy appears on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” they roll their eyes as he champions private enterprise through his pro small business charity, The Barstool Fund, and they threw a fit when he met with President Donald Trump for an interview at the White House. Barstool Sports as a company is known for its outright rejection of political correctness.
Much of what makes Portnoy so iconic and Barstool so appealing to young people are these acts displaying such indifference for what causes corporate America seems to heed. According to a poll in Morning Consult, Gen Z-ers are far less likely than millennials to hold a favorable view toward cancel culture. Portnoy’s recent comments and his company’s actions, however, fail to provide the kind of independent thought unabridged by special interests that they crave. His arguments from the press conference are uniform to that of other woke corporations.
Later in the video, Portnoy called the left crazy and President Joe Biden a moron. But he defended his voting for them due to what he sees as the right’s involvement in Supreme Court failures, and he used the opportunity to insert one more plug of support for another leftist cause: same-sex marriage:
I end up having to vote for a moron like Biden because the right is going to put Supreme Court people in who are just ruining this country by taking basic rights away… You look at what they’re doing and it’s like, you’re taking away basic rights. What’s next? Same-sex marriage? Like what is next? It’s insane. That’s why we have to vote for the moron like Biden who’s borderline incompetent because it’s too dangerous to vote Republican.
Barstool also now has an LGBT podcast entitled “Out and About,” for which the company allocated $100,000 toward a rainbow flag truck. Many of the company’s most famous personalities were at the gay pride parades in Chicago and New York City in June, which they made sure no one missed on social media.
Further publicizing his recent elite opinion, a former critic of his at the liberal Business Insider published an article highlighting Portnoy’s pro-abortion viewpoint the same day Portnoy posted the video.
This level of pandering on sexual ethics helps someone like Portnoy eliminate some of his own bad press he’s amassed and makes him more appealing to those within the elite social spheres he runs, such as the Hamptons where he bought a nearly $10 million beach house earlier this year. Even though Portnoy has garnered so much of his following from young people eager to cling to a figure who doesn’t subscribe to the accepted mainstream narrative, he’s no rebel when it comes to toeing the line on what the left values most highly.
Source: The Federalist
