In part one, I started with Stephen A. Smith screaming at D.L. Hughley over his White House dinner with Donald Trump, then went through what credibility is, why it’s so much easier to lose than to build, and how Charlie Kirk built a career out of manufacturing the appearance of it. If you haven’t read it, start there. This part is about the people who had something worth protecting and decided to sell it anyway.
Stephen A. Smith belongs to the same economy of manufactured authority. Smith knows basketball. He knows television. He knows how to turn a twenty-second disagreement into a fifteen-minute monologue that sounds like a leaf blower having a nervous breakdown. But political science is an entirely different discipline, and Smith regularly approaches it as though speaking with sufficient confidence eliminates the need to understand it. His brand depends on presenting himself as the reasonable guy willing to entertain every argument, even when the competing positions have radically different evidentiary foundations. In political psychology, this resembles false equivalence, reinforced by audience capture: the incentive to preserve an audience by repeating narratives it rewards. Smith has confused treating people fairly with treating every argument as equally credible.
Take transgender athletes and bathroom access. In 2016, Smith criticized women who said they felt unsafe sharing bathrooms with transgender women, calling their fears hyperbolic, before explaining that women didn’t need to feel unsafe to object to sharing a bathroom with someone they regarded as male. So the underlying argument was essentially that discomfort was sufficient justification for exclusion. That’s a preference, not empirical evidence. On Bill Maher’s show in March 2026, he declared that “biological men should not be competing against biological girls in sports, period.” Smith delivered the line with the confidence of a man who had personally completed a longitudinal study involving every athletic competition since the invention of running. He hadn’t. He was repeating a categorical political position without examining how eligibility rules, hormone exposure, competitive advantages, and differences among sports complicate the issue.
There are legitimate questions about fairness and eligibility in athletics, and different sports require different forms of evidence. But Smith talks as though transgender participation constitutes an athletic emergency sweeping the country. In December 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker, a former Republican governor, testified that he knew of fewer than ten transgender athletes among approximately 510,000 NCAA competitors. Fewer than ten. Stephen A. can spend an entire television segment yelling about more people than that because somebody missed two free throws.
The bathroom argument is even more revealing. Researchers Amira Hasenbush, Andrew Flores, and Jody Herman compared Massachusetts localities with and without gender-identity protections and found no evidence that those protections increased criminal incidents involving safety or privacy in restrooms, locker rooms, or changing facilities. Such incidents were exceedingly rare. That’s the kind of research a political commentator ought to consult before announcing that public discomfort constitutes a policy argument. Smith has access to researchers, producers, and the world’s most sophisticated information technology, yet he keeps treating his personal intuitions like they’ve survived peer review. At this point, somebody at ESPN ought to tell him that Google Scholar is free. They don’t even make you scream your question into the search bar.
