A Nation of Rubes: Disney & ESPN Censor Hunter S. Thompson's Strange Occult Christmas Story
A Passage About Vanishing Children Vanishes
“The true voice of Hunter S. Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist: One who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.” - Hari Kunzru
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.” - Hunter S. Thompson
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It was exactly 22 years ago today, November 20, 2000, when the late great Hunter S. Thompson returned to gonzo journalism with a vengeance.
His comeback was composed for ESPN’s fledgling-then, defunct now Page 2 website. Thompson had been hired as sports scribe, but was at that moment far more concerned with 2000’s probably-stolen presidential election between George W. Butch and Al Bore, two spoiled blowhard bloodline brats of America’s ruling class, who at the time seemed like the worst choice in presidential election history but wow we’ve come a long way in two decades.
Yet in fall of 2000, it seemed an unprecedented nightmare. Oozing fury like an open festering wound, Thompson rat-a-tatted out a post-election controversial column that apparently remains so revealing and dangerous, even two decades later, that it needs to be censored by the platform(s) that published it, which (witch?) are of course a pair of the corporatized media’s “usual suspects”: ESPN and/or its parent conglomerate Walt Disney.
A little backstory on our flawed hero before the main course.
At the turn of the millennium, Hunter S. Thompson seemed a remnant of an earlier era, caught in an age uncomfortable with his loose cannon anti-establishment contrarianism. In his early 60s, presumably past his prime, run down and diminished (or so it seemed), Thompson had been marginalized from the mainstream for nearly two decades. His old standby, Rolling Stone, spiked several of his pieces for reasons unknown, and a couple books he had contracted to write never materialized. Thompson hadn’t completely vanished but it wouldn’t be wrong to say he was a shadow of his former glory, either.
Yet the internet was changing things, and everybody was battling for attention on this wacky new 1s and 0s communications and marketing system. ESPN dominated sports on cable television, but online it was still the Wild West, with many alternative voices gaining traction. ESPN.com, launched in 1995, wasn’t dominating like the TV network, and needed something, or someone, to grab some eyeballs.
A former managing editor at Rolling Stone, John A. Walsh, had been hired to supercharge a new destination inside ESPN.com, called Page 2. Its goal was to attract more upscale sports fans to ESPN properties via regular weekly columns from nationally-known journalists like Bill Simmons, Ralph Wiley, 60 Minutes’ Ed Bradley and others. Their wild card was a mostly mothballed Hunter S. Thompson, getting a shot at one last burst of glory in the twilight of his career.
It really wasn’t that much of a stretch; more like a professional life come full circle. Thompson began his journalism career as a sports reporter in the mid-1950s, and might have stayed one his entire life, if the Puerto Rico sports magazine that hired him didn’t fold almost immediately after he moved to San Juan in 1960.
Now, four decades later, it was back to the ballparks for Thompson. He was told to stick to sports, don’t do anything too “out there,” follow the script best he could. But history intervened.
Thompson’s first month coincided with the November, 2000, presidential election, and the long-time reporter smelled a rat. He titled his weekly Page 2 column “HEY RUBE,” and his first entry about the razor-thin, still up in the air battle between the two insufferable scions of the American Establishment was presciently titled “Prepare for the Weirdness” (since changed to “The New Dumb”). It was a barnburner.
After opening with a lamentation about the uncertainty of the 2000 election results and a nation in conflict and disarray, Thompson swerved hard into some uncharted territory for ESPN fans, delivered like a beanball to the head:
“The Autumn months are never a calm time in America. Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. A time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.
"There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in Autumn's football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings.
"Most of these things are obviously Wrong and Evil and Ugly — but at least they are Traditional. They will happen…"
The column ends with:
"Look around you. There is an eerie sense of Panic in the air, a silent Fear and Uncertainty that comes with once-reliable faiths and truths and solid Institutions that are no longer safe to believe in...Guaranteed Fear and Loathing. Abandon all hope. Prepare for the Weirdness. Get familiar with Cannibalism. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane.”
That’s some pretty wild stuff for anybody expecting an escapist analysis of last week’s Jets-Bills game. It really made an impression on me at the time, and as the years have passed I’ve taken to sharing those paragraphs in a Facebook post on the first day of Fall every year, as a warning to parents and others.
A couple years ago, I noticed that specific column vanished from the ESPN Page 2 archives. This year, I discovered it was back…except it had been edited. One back end of a sentence had been removed. This part, which I’ve italicized and placed [in brackets]:
"There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of schoolchildren in Autumn's football months. Preteens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized perverts [who traditionally give them as Christmas gifts to each other to be personal sex slaves and playthings].
You can see the contrast between the ESPN website and the opening page of Thompson’s collection of “Hey Rube” ESPN columns, in his book of the same name, atop this page. If you still have doubts, here’s video of me opening the book and reading the passage.
So what does it meeeeeean? Why in the world would ESPN/Disney remove that section from the article? Like I’ve said before, it’s my opinion that the godless fascists who’ve taken over American media remove all content that contains Truths and concepts they don’t want you thinking about. You may come to a different conclusion, something less sinister, and that’s fine, but you’re probably wrong. No matter how evil you think these people are, they’re actually worse.
Hey Rube was Thompson’s last book published while he was still alive, and it compiles the best of his ESPN Page 2 columns up through October, 2003. In his prescient preface to the book, Thompson explains why he titled the column and book as he did:
“It’s no accident that this column is titled Hey Rube. “Hey, rube,” is an old-timey phrase, coined in the merciless culture of the Traveling Carnival gangs of the early 20th Century. Every stop on the circuit was another chance to fleece another crowd of free-spending “Rubes” — Suckers, Hicks, Yokels, Johns, Fish, Marks, Bums, Losers, Fools…
“[Today], these people are everywhere. They are Legion, soon to be a majority, and 10,000 more are being born every day….We are slaves to mendacity and hostile disinformation, doomed like rats in a maze of fear. Bread and circuses were not enough to sustain the Roman Empire and they will not be enough for the United States of America…
“Who knows why it happened? But there no doubt about what it is: The suicidal collapse of the American Empire for the same corrupt and greedy reasons that plagued and destroyed so many other empires in the long curve of history…The Roman Empire and Adolph Hitler’s Reich both imploded because of internal corruption and a pampered, decadent citizenry. They were all either pimps or whores.”
Which are you?
Either way, Hey Rube remains a great, if slightly dated yet also timely, read. It’s a unique mix of politics and sports, and an at times blood-boiling recount of the first George W. Butch term, chronicled in something close to real time. It features guest appearances by Johnny Depp (talking about Osama bin Laden), Bill Murray, Sean Penn, Warren Zevon and a bunch of other notable names. You’ll like it.
Hunter S. Thompson continued writing for ESPN another year after the book was published. His last ESPN Page 2 column was posted online February 15, 2005. He committed suicide five days later. At least that’s the Official Story™. I doubt Thompson would’ve believed it.
