If you’re not on social media, good for you. If you are, you know that any good start by Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto is immediately followed by a flood of venom aimed at former major league outfielder Josh Reddick.
No sooner had Yamamoto thrown his World Series complete game last week than Reddick got 3 million views for one of his tweets from two years ago.
Many of those viewers were happy to tell him he was a moron.
In 2023, the Dodgers signed Yamamoto, the winner of Japan’s version of the Cy Young award for three years running, for $325 million.
Reddick’s tweet: “How do you give a guy $325 million without ever throwing a pitch in MLB”
How do you give a guy $325 million without ever throwing a pitch in MLB
On Friday, the Dodgers will turn to Yamamoto to keep their season alive and force a Game 7 against the Toronto Blue Jays. He could — and this sounds insane in modern baseball — throw his third consecutive complete game.
“If Paul Skenes did not exist, Yoshinobu Yamamoto would be winning the Cy Young, going away,” podcast host Chandler Rome said.
Then Rome asked Reddick to answer for his tweet.
“I don’t think I would say I regret it,” Reddick said. “I’d probably say that tomorrow if they gave it [that money] to somebody else. That’s just my opinion, and I’m allowed to have it because it’s social media …
“That was my opinion, and obviously it was wrong. This guy has been phenomenal, and very, very, very, very, very, very good to come over here and do what he’s done. I’ll admit I was wrong on that one.”
Reddick said he regularly hears about it from Dodgers fans.
“They enjoy it,” he said. “I just love how much I live in Dodgers fans’ heads every day, and how they just look forward to making it feel like they’re upsetting me by sending these tweets and just completely ruining my day.
“If you’re a Dodger fan: It doesn’t bother me. So you do you for your two seconds of fame, and go back to work.”
At the time of the podcast, Reddick’s tweet had 9 million views. Now it has 12 million.
“It’s like wrestling, man,” he said. “You’ve got to be the good guy or the bad guy. As long as you’re a guy who’s getting noticed, you’re doing something right.
“I’m just playing the heel for the Dodgers for the rest of my life.”
Veteran ABC News correspondent Terry Moran was suspended Sunday after he posted a harsh criticism of the Trump White House on X.
Moran, 65, took aim Saturday at President Trump and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who has been outspoken in his desire to see a step up in the deportation of undocumented migrants.
“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran wrote his post, which has been deleted. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” He also described Miller as “vile.”
Moran went on to call Trump “a world class hater” adding, “but his hatred only a means to an end and that end is his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”
Moran, whose title is senior national correspondent, has been an ABC News journalist since 1999 and is not a commentator. He conducted an Oval Office interview with Trump in April to discuss the first 100 days of the president’s second term.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller speaks to reporters Friday outside the White House.
(Mark Schiefelbein / Associated Press)
In a statement, an ABC News representative said Moran’s statements violated the division’s policy.
“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” the representative said. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt ripped Moran and called for action by ABC when the journalist’s post was raised during an interview Sunday on Fox News.
“This is unacceptable and unhinged rhetoric coming from someone who works at a major television network,” Leavitt said. “We have reached out to ABC, they have said they will be taking action, so we will see what they do. But I think this speaks to the distrust the American public have in the legacy media.”
The rapid suspension by ABC News demonstrates how networks are on edge over their news organizations antagonizing the Trump White House, which has shown a willingness to extract revenge on its critics.
Trump is suing CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview last October that he claims was deceptively edited to help his 2024 election opponent Vice President Kamala Harris. The suit — an obstacle to CBS parent Paramount Global’s deal to merge with Skydance Media — has gone to a mediator.
ABC News paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed over statements by “Good Morning America” co-host George Stephanopoulos, who incorrectly said on air that the president had been liable of rape, when it was sexual abuse. Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Bob Iger has asked that ABC’s “The View” spend less time talking about Trump, who typically leads the daytime talk show’s hot topics segment.
Lucy Connolly called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire and wrote “if that makes me racist, so be it”
Lucy Connolly’s 51-word online post in the wake of the Southport killings led her to jail and into the centre of a row over free speech.
For some, the 31-month jail term imposed for inciting race hate was “tyrannical”, while one commentator said Connolly was a “hostage of the British state”, and another that she was “clearly a political prisoner”.
Court of Appeal judges, however, this week refused to reduce her sentence.
Asked about her case in Parliament, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said sentencing was “a matter for the courts” and that while he was “strongly in favour of free speech”, he was “equally against incitement to violence”.
Rupert Lowe, the independent MP for Great Yarmouth, said the situation was “morally repugnant” and added: “This is not the Britain I want to live in.”
Others said her supporters wanted a “right to be racist”.
Northamptonshire Police
Connolly’s legal team argued her sentence was “manifestly excessive” but the Court of Appeal disagreed
Warning: This report contains racist and discriminatory language
In July last year, prompted by a false rumour that an illegal immigrant was responsible for the murder of three girls at a dance workshop in Southport, Connolly posted online calling for “mass deportation now”, adding “set fire to all the… hotels [housing asylum seekers]… for all I care”.
Connolly, then a 41-year-old Northampton childminder, added: “If that makes me racist, so be it.”
At the time she had about 9,000 followers on X. Her message was reposted 940 times and viewed 310,000 times, before she deleted it three and a half hours later.
In October she was jailed after admitting inciting racial hatred.
Three appeal court judges this week ruled the 31-month sentence was not “manifestly excessive”.
PA Media
Connolly’s appeal was paid for by the Free Speech Union, founded by Lord Toby Young (holding left edge of the banner)
Stephen O’Grady, a legal officer with the Free Speech Union (FSU), said the sentence seemed “rather steep in proportion to the offence”.
His organisation has worked with Connolly’s family since November and funded her appeal.
Mr O’Grady said Connolly “wasn’t some lager-fuelled hooligan on the streets” and pointed to her being a mother of a 12-year-old daughter, who had also lost a son when he was just 19 months old.
He said there was a “difference between howling racist abuse at somebody in the street and throwing bricks at the police” and “sending tweets, which were perhaps regrettable but wouldn’t have the same immediate effect”.
Free Speech Union
Stephen O’Grady said Connolly’s case demonstrated “police overreach”
Connolly’s case was also “emblematic of wider concerns” about “increasing police interest in people’s online activity”, Mr O’Grady said.
The FSU had received “a slew of queries” from people who were “very unsure” about “the limits of what they can they can say online”, he said, and who feared “the police are going to come knocking on the door”.
“There’s an immense amount of police overreach,” he added.
Responding to Mr O’Grady’s claim, a National Police Chiefs’ Council spokesperson said that Article 10 of the Human Rights Act “protects a person’s right to hold opinions and to express them freely” and that officers received training about the act.
They added: “It remains imperative that officers and staff continue to receive training commensurate with the demands placed upon them.”
PA Media
Raymond Connolly said the Court of Appeal had shown his wife “no mercy”
After the appeal was dismissed, Connolly’s husband, Conservative town councillor Raymond Connolly, said she was “a good person and not a racist” and had “paid a very high price for making a mistake”.
Her local Labour MP, Northampton South’s Mike Reader, said he had “big sympathy” for Connolly and her daughter, but there was no justification for accusing the police of “overreach”.
He said: “I want the police to protect us online and I want the police to protect us on the streets and they should be doing it equally.”
It was a “fallacy” and “misunderstanding of the world” if people did not “believe that the online space is as dangerous for people as the streets,” he added.
“We’re all attached to our phones; we’re all influenced by what we see, and I think it’s right that the police took action here.”
PA Media
Connolly had pleaded guilty but argued at appeal she had not intended to incite serious violence
In his sentencing remarks, Judge Melbourne Inman said Connolly’s offence was “category A” – meaning “high culpability” – and that both the prosecution and her own barrister agreed she “intended to incite serious violence”.
For Reader, this showed “they weren’t arguing this was a silly tweet and she should be let off – her own counsel agreed this was a serious issue”.
At her appeal, Connolly claimed that while she accepted she intended to stir up racial hatred, she always denied trying to incite violence.
But Lord Justice Holroyde said in a judgement this week the evidence “clearly shows that she was well aware of what she was admitting”.
Sentencing guidelines for the offence indicate a starting point of three years’ custody.
While the prosecution argued the offence was aggravated by its timing, “particularly sensitive social climate”, the defence argued the tweet had been posted before any violence had started, and that Connolly had “subsequently attempted to stop the violence after it had erupted”.
The judgement also highlighted other online posts from Connolly that the judges said indicated her “view about illegal immigrants”.
Four days before the Southport murders, she responded to a video shared by far-right activist Tommy Robinson showing a black man being tackled to the ground for allegedly performing a sex act in public.
Connolly posted: “Somalian, I guess. Loads of them,” followed by a vomiting emoji.
On 3 August, responding to an anti-racism protest in Manchester, she wrote: “I take it they will all be in line to sign up to house an illegal boat invader then. Oh sorry, refugee.
“Maybe sign a waiver to say they don’t mind if it’s one of their family that gets attacked, butchered, raped etc, by unvetted criminals.”
The FSU said she was likely to be eligible for release from August, after serving 40% of her sentence.
Some, including Mr O’Grady, argued her jail term was longer than punishments handed to criminals perceived to have committed “far worse” crimes.
Reform UK’s Mark Arnull, the leader of West Northamptonshire Council, said it was not for him “to pass comment on sentences or indeed discuss individual cases”.
But he added: “It’s relatively easy to understand why constituents in West Northamptonshire question the proportionality of Lucy’s sentence when they see offenders in other high-profile and serious cases walk free and avoid jail.”
Shola Mos-Shogbamimu
Shola Mos-Shogbamimu believed Connolly’s supporters wanted a “right to be racist”
The issue for writer and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu was that “those who have committed worse crimes” should “spend more time in jail, not less time for Lucy Connolly”.
Dr Mos-Shogbamimu added: “It’s not ‘freedom of speech without accountability’. She didn’t tweet something that hurt someone’s feelings; she tweeted saying someone should die.”
In her view, those making Connolly a “flag-bearer or champion” for free speech were asking for “the right to be racist”.
Free speech advocate Mr O’Grady said “no-one is arguing for an unfettered ‘right’ to incite racial hatred”.
Connolly’s case was about “proportionality”, he added, and “the sense that online speech is increasingly being punished very harshly compared to other offending… such as in-person violent disorder”.
