How the Conservative Alibi Machine Keeps Running

Stephen A. Smith, Brandon Tatum, bothsidesism, and the monetization of credibility.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

It was a Friday afternoon. I had not checked my socials yet. I was not looking for Stephen A. Smith. I am never looking for Stephen A. Smith. At this point, Stephen A. Smith arrives in my inbox with the inevitability of a Spirit Airlines delay announcement. You do not ask for it. You do not benefit from it. You just look up one day and realize your plans have been disrupted by something loud, preventable, and deeply committed to lowering standards.

And yet there he was — already in my orbit before I opened a single app — sitting across from Brandon Tatum on his podcast and nodding along like a man who had completely forgotten he used to be a journalist.

This is how it always goes. There is not a week that passes without something Stephen A. Smith says finding its way into my inbox. I do not go looking for it. My readers bring it to me, with the reliability of a UPS driver who has been delivering the same broken package to the same address for years. The message is always some version of the same thing:

“Prof. Ealy, did you hear what Stephen A. just said?”

When I see that message, I never wonder whether what Stephen A. said was stupid. That part is already baked into the equation like taxes and disappointment at the DMV. The only variable I am ever calculating is the degree of stupid. Was it the kind of stupid I can safely discard — the kind that burns hot for six hours on social media before collapsing under its own weight like a Temu lawn chair — or was it the kind of stupid that, left unchecked, stops being merely stupid and graduates into dangerous? I triage accordingly. Most of what comes through does not clear the bar. Most of it gets thrown into the mental recycling bin next to old Skip Bayless clips and every “both sides have a point” conversation ever uploaded to YouTube.

But sometimes a take clears both bars at once. Stupid and dangerous. Insanely stupid and dangerous. And the combination creates a specific obligation.

This was one of those times.

Before I get to Smith — and I will get to Smith, because this man has earned his own courtroom — let me tell you about the man he was sitting across from. Because understanding what Brandon Tatum is explains exactly what Stephen A. Smith was doing in that room.

Brandon Orlando Tatum. Born in Fort Worth, Texas. Grew up to be an All-American high school safety, played college football at the University of Arizona on a full scholarship, went undrafted in the NFL, joined the Tucson Police Department for six years, and somewhere in the middle of all of that managed to obtain a bachelor’s degree in sociology. I learned all of this with a quick Google search and about ten minutes of effort, because contrary to popular belief, I was not willing to spend my entire Friday conducting a Ken Burns documentary-level investigation into Brandon Tatum.

Sociology. The academic discipline whose entire purpose is the systematic study of human society, group behavior, inequality, and historical structures of power. Brandon Tatum has a degree in the field that produced the scholarship on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the most thoroughly documented acts of racial violence in American history, a catastrophe so well evidenced that the state of Oklahoma has an official commission report about it — and has argued publicly that the massacre was fabricated, highly exaggerated, or not racially motivated.

I need you to sit with that for a moment.