Last Updated on November 18, 2022
Trump hating Democrats, rappers, the liberal press, and Shad White all have one thing in common: They need scapegoats.
In professional wrestling, the bad guy is called the “heel.”
In the world of political theater playing out on ESPN, Twitter, and down in Mississippi, the stars have aligned, and they’ve got their man. His name is Brett Favre.
While Shad White has generally kept his comments about Mr. Favre — Mississippi’s own Hall of Fame NFL football hero — in bounds, he’s been just loose enough with his language to send clear dog whistle messages to his comrades in the leftist media, indicating that the pile-on is afoot.
And boy have they piled on. (More on Shad White’s proximity to corruption later in the article.)
Blatant Defamation Used to Further Narratives
“Gillie Da King,” a former rapper turned Barstool podcast host, tweeted recently, “The difference between being a white man and a black man Brett Favre stole 77 million and nobody’s sayin shit.”
This completely false tweet has gotten nearly 20,000 likes. No one has ever even accused Brett of stealing $77 million before, it appears Gillie made the number up out of whole cloth.
Gillie isn’t alone. Social media and sports outlets have been littered with smears about Favre. The Daily Caller reported recently that text messages reveal that a reporter was “grossly misleading” in an article for Front Office Sports about Brett Favre’s role in the deaths of dogs in lab experiments.
The author of the article, A.J. Perez, publicly claimed that there would have been “no dog test” without Brett, while privately saying Favre had “no role” in the testing. Perez, a liberal, has attacked former President Donald Trump online.
The sports reporter is just one of many journalists to dishonestly attack Brett in recent months. Many have claimed that Brett “stole” welfare funds. SiriusXM host Qashim Rashid, for example, got over 51,000 likes on a tweet that said, “Brett Favre knowingly stole $5M in welfare.”
These attacks aren’t grounded in fact. Brett worked with state officials to get a $5 million grant from the Mississippi Community Education Center (MCEC) that was approved by the attorney’s general office to build an athletic facility at his alma mater the University of Southern Mississippi.
Favre also received $1.1 million from MCEC for recording radio ads. Once Favre found out it was welfare funds, he swiftly returned the money. Favre has denied knowing it was welfare funds and the state auditor Shad White has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence Favre knew it was federal welfare funds.
“Now, whether or not Mr. Favre knew that this money was specifically coming from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, there are no documents out in the public right now that suggest that,” White told Fox News.
White also said in a 2020 statement: “I want to applaud Mr. Favre for his good faith effort to make this right and make the taxpayers and TANF families whole. To date, we have seen no records indicating Mr. Favre knew that TANF was the program that served as the source of the money he was paid.”
Still, Favre gets bashed in the press. After Davante Adams pushed a photographer to the ground, former NFL player and current ESPN commentator Robert Griffin III tweeted, “Davante Adams pushing someone down and Draymond punching his teammate were wrong. But lets focus our attention on Brett Favre and the evil of stealing millions from the poorest people in our country in Mississippi.”
Another former NFL player Charles James II tweeted, “They reporting more on Davante Adams pushing over the camera man than Brett Favre stealing from the poor but I guess I’m tripping.”
Favre never stole from the poor. The state auditor Shad White, who has gone on CNN to try and get famous off of Favre, noted in a recent interview that there is no expectation that people who received grants from MCEC should have known it was misappropriated welfare funds.
Anchor Byron Brown asked White, “When recipients receive the money, is it incumbent on them to know where this money’s coming from when they apply for a grant like this?”
White responded: “Well I’ll give you an example of why it’s very difficult sometimes for recipients to know the rules around the money. One of the expenditures that we saw when we examined how TANF money had been spent, was an expenditure buying an ad in the Clarion Ledger. So, if you asked yourself, well is it the Clarion Ledger’s job to know that TANF money could not be spent on an ad in the Clarion Ledger? The answer is no, obviously. The Clarion Ledger doesn’t have folks who are TANF experts…So, really there are some situations where the end user can very easily argue, ‘No I’m not supposed to know the rules you’re the one who’s supposed to know the rules.'”So if a newspaper is not supposed to know that the money they received was in fact federal welfare funds, why is a retired NFL player supposed to know? Favre is being smeared because he is a proud conservative. The Washington Post made this clear with a recent column entitled: “Ron DeSantis isn’t the future of the GOP. Brett Favre is.”
Shad White Needs Brett Favre.
Without Favre, his former boss, and the Governor who appointed him would receive all the focus of the Nancy New non-profit scandal that bubbled into the press a few years ago.
Shad White’s headline-grabbing investigation into TANF fraud achieved levels of notoriety rarely seen, given the relatively small amounts of dollars involved.
To achieve such notoriety, Auditor White’s strategy hinged one man: Brett Favre.
Without Favre, Shad’s pedestrian investigation into Nancy New’s and John Davis’s fraud would’ve remained just that: pedestrian.
But Shad White wanted headlines. So he went camera hunting like a coon dog.
With Favre, Shad has just the heel he needs. He gets to pretend he’s fighting hard to uncover unprecedented levels of corruption while at the same time claim that he’s working hard to find cash for Mississippi’s poor.
Shad certainly has earned himself a lot of camera time for a five million dollar gymnasium that was funded through a non-profit.
One wonders whether Shad has any other more lucrative instances of fraud he’s not making so much noise about.
Mississippi’s Long History of Corruption in the Auditor’s Office
Shad White cast Phil Bryant in the role of “whistleblower” in his roll-out of his office’s investigation into Nancy New’s non-profit scandal that also embroiled Dept. of Human Services Director John Davis.
Davis, who Phil Bryant appointed to the Human Services post, has pleaded guilty.
Former Governor Phil Bryant also appointed Shad White to serve as Mississippi’s State Auditor after scandal-plagued Stacey Pickering left the auditor’s office for a cushy job at the state Veterans’ Affairs board.
So close was Shad White’s connection to former Governor Phil Bryant, three State Auditors questioned White’s involvement in the Bryant investigation.
Shad White, for his part, is content to use loose language to let Brett Favre out to dry.
Mississippi has a long history of corruption connected to Bryant, Pickering, and Barbour.
Pickering left office after receiving scrutiny behind the scenes for his involvement with no-bid contracts doled out in connection with Haley Barbour-connected Howard Industries, which was heavily tied to human trafficking and importing illegal aliens.
