One of our heroes has fallen.
Curt Schilling – the oh-so-recently beloved Twitter troll namer and shamer, who bragged about getting nine trolls fired or kicked off athletic teams after drawing attention to their tweets – has been suspended by ESPN for posting an image to Twitter comparing Muslims to Nazi-era Germans.
Schilling shared the tweet on Tuesday morning.
It featured a picture of Adolf Hitler in full Nazi regalia, along with the words:
It's said only 5-10% of Muslims are extremists. In 1940, only 7% of Germans were Nazis. How'd that go?
Schilling isn’t believed to have created the meme, but he did helpfully point out that:
The math is staggering when you get to true #'s.
The tweet was deleted within 10 minutes, but not before it had spread far and wide online, outraging many.
A companion post on Schilling’s Facebook page was reportedly left up for hours.
By Tuesday afternoon, ESPN announced that it had relieved Schilling of his duties as an analyst for the Little League World Series.
Josh Krulewitz, ESPN’s vice president of communications, wrote that Schilling’s tweet was way out of line:
Curt’s tweet was completely unacceptable, and in no way represents our company’s perspective. We made that point very strongly to Curt and have removed him from his current Little League assignment pending further consideration.
The Nazi-Muslim extremist meme was far from a fluke – the former professional baseball player is known for sharing his conservative, anti-liberal, pro-military, pro-gun views.
As the Boston Globe reports, Schilling has used Twitter for other contentious scuffles, including engaging in a lengthy debate last year about evolution, saying at one point that “it’s been disproved about a thousand times.”
On the same day he shared the tweet about Muslim extremists, he also apologized and said that he accepted responsibility for the “bad choice”:
I understand and accept my suspension. 100% my fault. Bad choices have bad consequences and this was a bad decision in every way on my part.
— Curt Schilling (@gehrig38) August 25, 2015
This incident is just the latest reminder that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a keyboard jockey or a famous athlete who helped your team win World Series titles – we all have to be careful of what we share online.
If you need a refresher course on how to delete your old, embarrassing, far-too-easy-to-find tweets, we’ve got you covered.
Image of ESPN microphone courtesy of Leonard Zhukovsky / Shutterstock.com
Andy
Curt is still a 6x MLB allstar, a 3x world series champ, and world series MVP. I guess if he got a boob job, wore a dress, and changed his name he’s be getting an award for courage. This is PC at it’s worst and finest.
namimbi rasheed
He is 100% right and i agree with him fully, life is getting dangerous if people likehim are not being taken seriously
Disagree
I am still wondering what is wrong with his tweet. It is just statistics expressing current and historic atrocious behaviours.
May be I need a course on repeating statistical information that is proven and documented.
Dan
It is insensitive to those of the Islam and Muslim faith, had he compared the Nazi’s to the KKK; he would be applauded.
Arsca
It’s a shame that in our modern era we cannot criticise religions. Guttenberg’s printing technology helped the commons to get theirs hands on that era’s religion book called the Bible and suddenly they could read and criticise the priests interpretations. Now we have the V2 of it called Internet, but the censorship hits if you dear to open your mouth about the obvious. This view is promoted by Homeland and other traditionally religious countries and cultures.
LilysMom
Criticism of Christianity is certainly allowed, from the internet all the way up to President Obama! How did we get from 9/11 all the way to here??? Curt only spoke the truth. It’s only been in the last 7 years that that truth has been stifled…..
Hava Care
We may not agree with what he said, but we should defend to the death his right to say it.
Otherwise – the extremists win.
Anonymous
His rights were not violated. This is not the government punishing him. ESPN is a private company and does not have to allow him to speak freely if they think it will hurt their bottom line.
bvv
Freedom of expression nowadays: it is OK to say anything about everything… as long as it is not critical towards Islam\Muslims… because that is racist. Or so they say…
This nonsense would have been unthinkable in the western world 30 years ago. Where have our traditional values gone?
Sixdollar
This is America and we still have the freedom to express ourselves. Curt should be given a medal instead of being chastized.
Anonymous
Thumbs up Curt. Let the PC extremists live on in their own non – offended so called rights dream world. Their own hell defined and limited world.It limits expand even as they live in an ever shrinking pool of freedom.
Kayat Akbar
We should all Boycott ESPN. Freedom of speech is gone and ESPN needs to gain some juevos. The real Nazi’s is the Media.
Anonymous
Freedom of speech does not include immunity to criticism. He said something controversial and was met with a mixed reaction. If he can’t that, maybe he should stay out of political discussions.
Dan
This is ESPN, iN A VAIN ATTEMPT TO BE PC! Based on the replies, “How’s that going?” ESPN?
Akmel
ESPN really. Half of your programs deal with statistics. Geez grow up the guy did not tweet anything that was not true. Why doesn’t American Corporations stand up for their employees anymore ?? Instead of cowering down. Its not like he lied (NBC Anchorman). Give the guy a raise for saying the obvious.
Anonymous
His net worth is only 1-million dollars.
Mo
I’m a muslim and I really don’t see what’s wrong with what he said. He isn’t saying muslim’s are bad, he is talking about the muslim extremists. Those extremists don’t represent my religion, they make up their own religion and call it Islam.