Social justice warriors learn the hard way, as Shreveporter sportscaster Tim Brando found out last week.

Brando, a fixture around Shreveport Regional Airport for many years travelling to the various sports gigs he announces, occasionally ventures into social/political commentary when not behind the microphone. He found that voice again when complaining about a proposal by the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors to name the basketball court at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center after both Dale Brown and Sue Gunter, past coaches of the men’s and women’s basketball teams, respectively.

Both were very successful, although by the numbers Gunter’s accomplishments were greater. However, Brown’s teams brought in far more dollars and much more publicity. His name currently graces the court, and in 2021 the supervisors rejected adding her name.

However, figures close the inner workings of LSU athletics allege that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, who appointed all members to the Board, system President William Tate IV, and some influential donors pressured the Board to change its mind, which it did in its meeting last week. One of those was Brando, who saw political correctness run amok behind it all.

“It will only enhance the image and perception that people have about our state about backroom dealings and kangaroo courts that date back all the way to the Great Depression,” said Brando prior to the meeting. Naming Supervisor Mary Leach Werner, a large donor to Edwards, as the driving force behind the move because she didn’t like the idea of a white dude born in the 1930s getting the honor, Brando decried, “Well, I’m sorry we don’t need your woke politics running this institution of higher learning.”

One may wonder where Brando was when the woke Tate was named president, or LSU was fixated with what went into its toilets, or tried to shun a free-thinking faculty member, etc. Answer: like so many on the political left who eagerly bought into wokeism, it took something hitting close to home to question the ideology engaged in a headlong sprint to the extreme.

Because only a few years ago, Brando showed himself an early woke adopter when he spoke publicly about the opposition to Shreveport building a downtown arena for minor league basketball and other purposes. Opponents could draw upon some terrible economics behind the idea, including hefty taxpayer subsidies required in all likelihood, but Brando seemed immune to that data. Instead, he claimed opposition to this use of tax dollars came from whites fuming that basketball had too many black players.

So, according to Brando, systemic racism permeates white Shreveporters, but he doesn’t seem to consider that his reaction to the court naming controversy is, according to the cosmology he has espoused, misogynistic. Blaming it all on politics – and especially by verbally assaulting a female supervisor in the process – by that cosmology only shows the white male privilege he invokes and constitutes “microaggression.”

Naturally, this is the problem behind the bankrupt idea of wokeism. Drawing upon unstable intellectual foundations bereft of confirmatory data, it survives by only taking more nonsensical and outrageous forms drawing upon the concept that the strength of emotional commitment sustains the argument. Thus the demand for ever-increasing orthodoxy eliminates any reasonable explanations counter to the faith, rejection of which reveals Brando as a hypocrite.

Brando should stick to sports commentary. He’ll get shredded by the sharks swimming in the woke waters, even if on this occasion he actually made a lucid remark about politics.