You're never going to get me to say anything bad about Tommy Craggs. The guy once sent me to Panama for a story and said nothing as I blew several deadlines in a row for it. He knew I fucked up, I knew I fucked up, and he knew that I knew that he knew I fucked up, and he said nothing, presumably in the knowledge that getting on me about it would just make me more anxious and that even if it took forever, I'd eventually write something that was worth sending me out there for. He's a great editor and a great guy and I'm proud to call him a friend.
He's also a god damn communist. If you've been reading Deadspin for a while, you've probably noticed that over the past few years it's gone from being the dirtbag website you go to if you want to see what your favorite ballplayer's cock looks like to being the dirtbag website you go to if you want to see what your favorite ballplayer's cock looks like or read a sanctimonious 9,000-word essay on how the fact that Auburn's offensive line isn't paid in cash is emblematic of the broad moral failures of capitalism. That's because Tommy Craggs is a god damn communist.
When this site runs stories about the ways in which bad football writing is indicative of the systemic racism that affects every aspect of American life, or about how the use of language in sports broadcasting illuminates the hard-wired class and gender inequities that make the idea of American meritocracy a sick joke, or about the ways in which baseball is best viewed as a metaphor for American imperialism, it invariably attracts complaints that Deadspin is just using sports as an excuse to run leftist propaganda; that the people who run the site are more concerned with their political agenda than with anything else; and that this agenda involves the downfall of capitalism. As someone who's worked closely with Craggs, I can tell you this is all literally true. He doesn't dislike sports—he has curiously strong opinions on Illinois basketball and the Oakland A's and is always up to gush over Steph Curry—but his principal concern, as long as I've worked with him, has been using sportswriting as a pretext for convincing the public that organizing society around the pursuit of individual advantage regardless of its effect on others is wrong. In private conversation, he openly talks about this, using words like "propaganda" approvingly and talking about who among his enemies will be first against the wall. The means are those at hand; the end is the destruction of the American way of life. That's because Tommy Craggs is a god damn communist.
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