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Wokeness Lives: NBA Team Fires New Play-by-Play Man Over 'Racist' Social Media Posts from His Teens

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Welcome to Portland, Oregon, where 20th-century Chinese Communist dictator Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution appears to be alive and well.

According to KGW-TV in Portland, on Thursday night the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers fired new play-by-play broadcaster Braiden Bell for what the outlet characterized as “misogynistic and racist comments” Bell made in 2012 and 2013 on the social media platform X, then known as Twitter.

Bell made those comments as a teenager. You read that correctly: he got fired for comments he made shortly after going through puberty.

In fact, according to the New York Post, the beleaguered broadcaster is now 29, which would have made him roughly 15 years old at the time of the posts.

“I’m not racist at all.. But not gonna lie.. Asian people piss me off! Hahaha #Honest,” Bell tweeted on Dec. 9, 2012, per KGW.

The teenage boy also used indecent language toward girls. Imagine that.

“Gotta give a shoutout to all the big girls out there and those closet w***res,” he wrote on Nov. 30, 2012.

“We got a sl*t alert on aisle 10,” he wrote on Feb. 13, 2013.

You get the idea.

By any measure, that language qualifies as regrettable. Nearly 14 years later, Bell undoubtedly takes no pride in having used it.

In fact, assuming that nature worked as intended, perhaps a strong, older male intervened and taught Bell that real men don’t talk like that.

But — it cannot be emphasized enough — he was 15 years old.

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Call it whatever you want: wokeness, cancel culture, or Marxist indoctrination. No matter the label, this grotesque phenomenon of intolerance in the name of tolerance has made people unable or unwilling to think.

Take the Trail Blazers organization, for instance. After the KGW report on Bell’s teenage tweets, the team immediately fired the young man, and then put out a typical boilerplate statement.

“The Portland Trail Blazers have zero tolerance for racist, sexist, or harmful comments. Social media posts made by our recently announced play-by-play broadcaster are in clear violation of team and league policies, as well as our values and expectations. Therefore, we will not be moving forward with this broadcaster,” the statement read.

“The play-by-play role carries a long legacy of excellence, on the broadcast and in character, and we hold that standard without exception,” the statement continued. “We did not meet our own bar in this process, and for that we apologize to Blazers fans and to Rip City. We believe strongly that everyone who is a part of Rip City should feel welcome and safe and we will make sure that our new broadcaster reflects these values. We will do better.”

Of course, the coward who wrote that statement would never volunteer his or her own stupid 15-year-old self for scrutiny.

Moreover, KGW admitted that all of those inappropriate comments stemmed from Bell’s teenage years.

“KGW’s review did not locate any offensive tweets from Bell after he became an adult,” the outlet wrote. “In fact, by the latter half of 2015, Bell’s public tweets were almost entirely about sports.”

This appalling story produces many unsettling questions and reflections. Here, however, we will confine ourselves to two.

First, why did KGB — er, KGW — review Bell’s tweets in the first place? Or, more specifically, why did the outlet review comments the young broadcaster made as a 15-year-old?

Nothing Bell could have written during his teenage years — no matter how “racist, sexist, or harmful” — poses even a fraction of the threat to communal peace and harmony that KGW’s “investigation” did.

Indeed, imagine the character of the person who goes looking for offensive tweets written by teenagers, and then reports on their content.

“The tweets were from 2012 and 2013 and were first spotted by KGW reporter Devon Haskins,” the outlet wrote. “KGW was in the process of reporting a story on the tweets Thursday afternoon and reached out to the Blazers for comment. The team replied several hours later saying they had fired Bell.”

Shall we investigate the conduct of 15-year-old Devon Haskins? What about his editors at KGW? And what about the spineless executives in the Trail Blazers’ organization?

This is the kind of behavior Mao encouraged during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. It produced violent mobs of young people who aggressively enforced Communist Party orthodoxy. In its contempt for virtues such as charity, mercy, and forgiveness, it was — and remains — anti-Christian to its core.

Second, with the 2026 midterms approaching, and with the current fracture in the Republican coalition, these vindictive leftists might soon return to power.

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Michael Schwarz holds a Ph.D. in History and has taught at multiple colleges and universities. He has published one book and numerous essays on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Early U.S. Republic. He loves dogs, baseball, and freedom. After meandering spiritually through most of early adulthood, he has rediscovered his faith in midlife and is eager to continue learning about it from the great Christian thinkers.
Michael Schwarz holds a Ph.D. in History and has taught at multiple colleges and universities. He has published one book and numerous essays on Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the Early U.S. Republic. He loves dogs, baseball, and freedom. After meandering spiritually through most of early adulthood, he has rediscovered his faith in midlife and is eager to continue learning about it from the great Christian thinkers.




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