"I always felt that the privilege came with the responsibility to keep this daily half-hour a safe place for family fun. No social issues. No politics. Nothing embarrassing, I hope. Just a game."
Pat Sajak gave a speech at the end of his final episode of Wheel of Fortune, which aired last night.
It sounds classy and even benevolent on the surface, but let's unpack this.
He's boasting about something being a "safe place" where talk about social issues doesn't exist.
I didn't even need to look up his political affiliation, because it's abundantly clear which players from which team would typically go out of their way to state that social issues don't matter even for one minute of the day. Obviously he's a Republican.
And not a nonchalant innocent bystander with whom we can respectfully disagree and call it a day, as his cute speech would suggest. It is no secret that he spends his riches on funding conservative speaking events on American college campuses, serves on the board of a publishing house for books by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, and is a regular writer for far right outlets where he is an outspoken climate denier and has stated in no uncertain terms that public employees should not be allowed to vote on issues that directly affect their lives.
Guess which demographic tends to see the least effects from social issues in the country? Wealthy straight white males like him. And guess who else shares his demographics? The majority of Republicans in Congress, who repeatedly vote against any legislation that will curb the effects of those very social issues (198 of 267 GOP members of Congress are straight white males, a less than subtly disproportionate representation compared to them comprising about a quarter of the overall population). So to therefore use his platform in front of millions of people, virtually all of whom will never even be able to conceive of his wealth and privilege, to effectively tell the country that he doesn't care about the fact that they'll never have his wealth or privilege while he actively does all he can to ensure that as many people as possible will never be able to attain his wealth or privilege, takes a special kind of chutzpah.
Bigger picture: these social issues he's minimizing are literally the reason why game shows need to exist in the first place. People wouldn't be fighting for spots to win a direly needed $10K if they didn't live in a country that ranks near the bottom in the developed world for social mobility. Earlier in that final episode he even joked about the need to pay for surgery, in a country where one in three viewers of his show has medical debt. That's a hundred million people - one of whom will never be him or anyone in his bloodline.
Wheel of Fortune commands top prime time advertising revenue, and has long been a magnet for political candidates and super PACs. Needless to say, much of that prize money does not come from the most wholesome and honourable of places. For Sajak to claim that his show is not a place for politics is disingenuous at best. That place is right in his pocket.
"Safe place" has become a term for those who ARE affected by social issues, and the fact that he appropriated that term to make himself look virtuous for ignoring the very social issues he has actively helped perpetuate is beyond reprehensible.
In short: inequality is precisely what employed Pat Sajak for 43 years and made him a 1%er. He's worth about $65 million and has less people skills than a Walmart greeter. He is an embodiment of the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. And his game show that attracts huge sums of money from political advertising is designed to make him look like a nice guy for appearing to give a little bit of it back.
Reality check: it's not just a game.
Thanks for the memories, Pat. But that parting gift of yours left more than a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. You'd have been much better off saying nothing. What you've actually done is gotten people like me to spend 30 seconds on Google and find out how much of an incorrigible two-faced charlatan you are.
Here he is pictured with anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
