MalikaAnon: The Conspiracy Against Malika Andrews and the Sexist Wrath of First Take
490For over a year, NBA Today host Malika Andrews has been the subject of a deranged, sexist conspiracy about her hating Black people that's rapidly begun to swallow the online NBA fandom. I spent months researching what was happening with her and wrote an extensive article about it, but to my dismay, no outlet was willing to publish it without it being drastically condensed. And so, in order to salvage my research, I decided to convert that article into a YouTube essay and this is the result. This is the first time anyone has done a deep dive on the movement against Andrews - which I've purposefully decided to call "MalikaAnon" because of how bonkers it is.
But this video isn't merely an explainer about what the conspiracy about her is, who started it and who's spreading it: it's a video about how pretty much of all this can be traced back to First Take. Much of this essay is dedicated to the awfulness of it and Stephen A. Smith, both of whom I hold primarily responsible for the horrifying amount of racism, sexism, antisemitism, harassment and even death threats that've been directed at Andrews since September 2022. This video is about how one brief, on-air confrontation between Malika Andrews and Stephen A. Smith birthrd a negative perception against her that grew more and more and more deranged until it became an outright conspiratorial hate movement.
The amount of harassment and hateful comments that Andrews began receiving is shocking. For the sake of creating an accurate record about all this, I included as many tweets about her in this video as possible that I believe are relevant to conveying how bad this all is. As a result though, there are a LOT of ugly, unfortunate posts contained within this video.
I spent months working on this entirely because I not only believe that what's happening to her is awful and unacceptable, but because I felt I was the only person out there who'd ever be able to produce a primer like this about what's going on - at least until it got SO bad that the situation against her might've become unmanageable. What the NBA community is doing to this innocent woman, as of this video's publishing, is despicable and it needs to stop before it gets even worse.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Setting the record on MalikaAnon and Brandon Miller
12:35 On Josh Giddey and Dez Bryant
17:29 Malika was widely beloved
20:04 The sexism of First Take and Stephen A. Smith
32:08 The Ime Udoka situation
41:49 The fallout of the First Take phone call
48:38 The scope of the movement against her
53:41 None of this is deserved
Music courtesy of: _afro94 (soundcloud.com/afro94, https://afro94.bandcamp.com/releases, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt80p0-FXtKasVTXILVJiXw/videos)