Well, the puritanical social-justice mob has done it again, condemning (without a trial!) a man guilty of nothing more than the abuse and mistreatment of dozens if not hundreds of people for nearly 20 years to becoming even more obscenely rich than he already is.
That's a statement from Robert Sarver, the owner of the NBA's Phoenix Suns and the WNBA's Phoenix Mercury, declaring his intent to sell both franchises—"beginning the process of seeking buyers," as he puts it—due to our "current unforgiving climate."
Some background: In November of 2021, ESPN's Baxter Holmes published an extensive and damning investigation into ... Jesus, how to even summarize it? Into Sarver being, in total, a nightmare of a human being: a virulent unreconstructed bigot and sexist, a cartoonishly malevolent bully to those working under him, a weird leering sex creep, and more. Last Tuesday the NBA concluded its own commissioned follow-up investigation by suspending Sarver for one year and fining him $10 million, which sounds like a lot until you remember that a suspension doesn't really mean anything to a guy who can do his job (doing nothing, getting richer for it) from anywhere in the world and that $10 million is little more than pocket lint to someone with a personal net worth in the hundreds of millions. On the other hand I am sure that it made Robert Sarver feel very annoyed.
Was this feeble wrist-slap enough to slake the cancel-culture mob's crazed bloodlust? No! Sarver had scarcely enough time for the private helicopter ride to the suspension yacht before some of the NBA's biggest names, and the players union's executive director, were going public with demands that he be removed from the league entirely and permanently banned from returning to it. You might observe that being kicked out of the NBA is the closest thing to a job termination that can be done to a member of the league's ownership class, and that any normal working person would of course deserve a prompt firing (and entry on a do-not-rehire list) if discovered to have spent 20 years at their job slinging the n-word around, openly and unapologetically discriminating against women and minority employees, and asking their subordinates about their genitals—but that is only because you have been brainwashed into the cult of woke.
And now it has come to this. So unforgiving is our present climate, so intolerant of the smallest transgressions against politically correct liberal-left orthodoxy, that Robert Sarver has no choice but to sell, voluntarily, the two basketball franchises he owns, likely for a return several times the $401 million he reportedly paid to acquire them back in 2004, making him very much richer than he already is and putting him effectively beyond all reach of the public or its laws for the rest of his life. I ask you: Is this justice? Is it reason or fairness? When is enough enough?
