Your Daily Ten@10 - 2025/212

This is edition 2025/212 of the Ten@10 newsletter.

Hi all,

This is the Ten@10, where I collate and summarise ten news items you generally won't see in the mainstream media.

Enjoy!

• 🏀 Team Unity Over Politics – The NZ Breakers decided not to wear rainbow insignia for the NBL Pride Round, choosing collective unity (“all or none”) to avoid singling out players for personal beliefs.
• 🌈 No Anti-Pride Agenda – The team’s move wasn’t anti-LGBT; simply a choice to stay out of political symbolism in sport.
• 😡 Media Overreaction – Journalists and activists whipped up outrage, portraying the decision as homophobic despite little public backlash.
• 📱 Online Echo Chamber – Reporters mistook social media noise on X and BlueSky for genuine public outrage.
• 💼 Sponsor Pressure Tactics – Media sought corporate condemnation, pushing sponsors like BNZ to comment, turning neutrality into moral tests.
• ⚙️ Ideological Enforcement – These “backlash” campaigns operate like passive-aggressive Struggle Sessions, designed to punish dissent and force conformity.
• 📰 Constructed Outrage – The “backlash” was manufactured by a few offended journalists and activists, not an organic public response.
• 🎭 Sport as Escapism – Fans largely want politics kept out of sport; it’s meant to be unifying entertainment, not another battleground for ideology.
• 💰 Corporate Virtue Signaling – Pride Rounds started as inclusivity gestures but became hollow marketing gimmicks for revenue and branding.
• 🔄 Backfire Effect – The more militant and compulsory these campaigns become, the more resentment and cultural fatigue they provoke.
• 🧠 Academic Overreach – Calls for “re-educating” players who opt out of symbolism expose ideological policing rather than true inclusivity.
• 🏫 Thought Policing in Academia – Professors demanding ideological “education” for dissenting athletes reveal growing intolerance for autonomy.
• 🏳️‍🌈 Compromised Media Neutrality – Many newsrooms hold Rainbow Tick certification, committing them to advocacy rather than journalistic neutrality.
• 🔍 Conflict of Interest – Journalists who are part of ideological schemes can’t credibly define what counts as “homophobia.”
• 🚫 Enforcers, Not Reporters – Media acted as ideological enforcers, ensuring non-compliant athletes were publicly shamed.
• 🙄 Most Gays Don’t Care – The author, a gay woman, notes most LGBT people aren’t offended; only the activist-academic-media class craves outrage.
• 🎭 Activism as Career Fuel – The activist class thrives on moral drama to maintain relevance and control narratives.
• 🤝 Return to True Inclusivity – Sport should unite people through competition, not ideology, and athletes should be free to decline political participation.