"I mean, come on. That is straight out of the
fascism playbook."
The World Surf League is not generally known
for stoking fires, but that all changed over the weekend when Chief
Strategy and Brand Officer Dave Prodan took a torch to the
political right.
Prodan, who has been with the League since 1976 and also hosts
the very successful podcast The Lineup, introduced his 61st guest,
Jordy Smith, with the following monologue (listen
here).
Thank you to everyone who sent us notes on last week’s
podcast with Nick Carroll, many of you saying it’s the best one
we’ve ever done and, of course, as those who listen to it know,
Nick was fantastic in it. The comment that the WSL social team
pulled to promote the episode on Instagram was Nick asking if
online trolls in the surfing world were the counter-culture rebels
they so desired to be or just their parents. A reference to the
vitriol someone like 2x World Champ Tyler Wright suffers for
choosing to speak her mind. And that post, and you can still check
this yourself, drew the now standard complaints from this very same
community.
(Breathless voice) “All lives matter.”
“Keep politics out of surfing.”
“How great would it be to watch a surf contest? Shrug
emoji.”
All of which, un-ironically, proved Nick’s point for him.
The number of conservative, whining, fucking fascists in the
surfing world, some of which hold esteemed positions in companies
and on Olympic teams, is pathetic.
You don’t have to agree with what surfers are saying on the
platforms they more than earned, however, to cry foul on them to be
able to use their well-earned platforms at all? I mean, come on.
That is straight out of the fascism playbook. And this cancer, in
my humble opinion and the humble opinion of this podcast, has been
rearing its head in The Lineup circle ever since George Floyd’s
murder last may and our decision to acknowledge it.
Last week, here in the United States, eight people, six of
which were Asian American women, were gunned down in a hate crime
by a white supremacist male in Atlanta. There’s absolutely no
justification for it. And it doesn’t have a chance of correcting if
you continue to avert your eyes or or choose median opinions that
are more comfortable to you.
Me bringing it up here is not politics, it’s reality. And
the surfers whom you bitch about raising attention to racial and
gender violence and on platforms that they have earned is not
politics either. And if it makes you uncomfortable, good. That’s a
human response. It makes me uncomfortable too.
And again, you don’t have to agree with everything they’re
saying but they have earned the right to say it. And I hope they
keep saying it.
Whoa.
Extremely thinly veiled jabs at certain well-known conservatives
in esteemed positions at companies and Brett Simpson.
The League, which has pivoted hard
woke in recent months, is clearly tired of certain
elements in its fanbase which raises the question.
Is Prodan correct in his broadside or is he, himself, using
“fascism’s playbook” to silence oppositional thinking?
It seems he is brandishing an awfully big brush with which to
paint, no?
Or actually no?
More as the story develops.
