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It’s been almost a year since the Jan. 6 riot, when violent Trump supporters, whipped up by the outgoing president and his lies about a stolen election, stormed the Capitol building, hoping to overturn a free and fair election. One of their targets was Mike Pence, whom some of them wanted to hang. Did almost getting murdered cause the former vice president to turn on Trump, even as he’s continued to defend their actions? Absolutely not. But his continued, baffling downplaying of that fateful day has not gone unnoticed by those who helped save his life.

As per Insider, Pence went on the Christian Broadcasting Network, where he yet again tried to write off the day he was nearly killed as just like any other, all while slamming Democrats.

“I’m not going to allow the Democrats or the national media to use one tragic day in January to demean the intentions of 74 million people who stood with us in our cause,” Pence told the network. “And I’m not going to allow the Democrats to use one tragic day in January to distract attention from their failed agenda and the failed policies of the Biden administration. We’re going to focus on the future.”

Pence’s comments didn’t sit well with Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, one of many officers who fought back against violent Trump supporters that day. He suffered both physical injuries and emotional trauma; on top of going to therapy, he’s unable to raise his left arm. So when he spoke with NPR, Gonell did not go lightly on Pence’s comments

“That one day in January almost cost my life,” Gonell said. “And we did everything possible to prevent him from being hanged and killed in front of his daughter and his wife. And now he’s telling us that that one day in January doesn’t mean anything. It’s pathetic. It’s a disgrace.”

He added, “He swore an oath to the country, not to Donald Trump.”

Gonell also came for the Republican lawmakers who, after the siege, went ahead and voted against certifying the 2020 election, effectively condoning the actions of the deadly mob.

“We risked our lives to give them enough time to get to safety. And allegedly, some of them were in communication with some of the rioters and with some of the coordinators or in the know of what would happen,” Gonell said. “And it makes you question their motives and their loyalty for the country, as we were battling the mob in a brutal battle where I could have lost my life and my dear fellow officers, as well.”

Gonell added: “They’re telling us, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that bad.’ It was that bad when they were running for their lives. It was that bad when we were struggling to hold them off so they could have a chance to escape to safety.”

Gonell was one of the Capitol officers who testified before the House back in July, describing the scene as a “medieval battleground” and telling lawmakers, “To be honest, I did not recognize my fellow citizens that day, or the United States they claimed to represent.”

Trump, meanwhile, still claims that his speech that day, which ended with supporters attacking police officers, was “extremely calming.” But at least Pence’s former staff are more horrified by what happened than he is.

(Via Insider)

While much of the world spent their New Year’s Eve with family and friends watching the countdown to 2022, Kodak Black spent part of the holiday behind bars. According to TMZ, the rapper was in Florida’s Greenacres neighborhood to celebrate the new year with friends and help pay off credit card debt for five families who lived in the area. Police then arrived to arrest him on trespassing charges connected to a four-month-old cease-and-desist letter. His lawyer, Bradford Cohen, told TMZ that the letter was issued by the local Housing Authority in September after Black was caught riding around in Pompano Beach.

Cohen added that the September arrest was unwarranted. He also claims Black was never officially served the cease-and-desist letter because he was never given it directly. Furthermore, Cohen says the letter included very few details, none of which said that the rapper was not allowed to be in the Greenacres neighborhood. Broward Sheriff’s Office says Black was booked early in the morning and released on a $25 bond a couple of hours later.

The rapper is currently out on a supervised release following his exit from prison last year. It remains to be seen if the arrest will be marked as a violation of his supervised release.

Kodak Black is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Jeff Bezos is the richest person on the planet, according to Forbes, and not without hard work: He goes out of his way to crush unions and he overworks his employees so much they have to urinate in bottles. (Maybe that’s why he wasn’t the billionaire named Time’s Person of the Year.) On New Year’s Eve, while so many were hunkering down due to the Omicron variant, the Amazon founder was living the high life. And the only thing everyday people could do was make fun of his look.

Bezos posted a picture of him and his main squeeze, Lauren Sanchez, enjoying a roofdeck end-of-2021 celebration. She was dressed relatively normally, in a black crop top and leather pants. He, however, was not. He had tight white chinos, an orange patterned ‘70s shirt, and — why not? — sunglasses in the shape of hearts.

The entrepreneur, who stepped down as CEO of the company he founded and, like most billionaires, has grown even more unimaginably wealthy during the pandemic, was doing what he always does: enjoying himself while the world he could easily save suffered. And so a helpless people did the only thing they can do: They made fun of him.

If it makes you feel better, there’s one thing that makes Bezos — who has so little idea what to do with his money that he keeps going to space for fun — feel bad: His girlfriend clearly would rather be shtupping Leonardo DiCaprio, who just starred in a movie that also makes fun of him.

The Weeknd will almost certainly release his sixth album at some point this year, but its arrival could come sooner than later. The singer first announced the album at last year’s Billboard Music Awards, and since then he’s been teasing it through interviews, tweets, Instagram posts, and more. His last update came back in October, when he said it was “complete.” He added that the only thing that’s missing is “a couple characters that are key to the narrative.” He kicked off 2022 with another update on the project.

On New Year’s Day, The Weeknd shared an Instagram post showing a text message conversation between him and La Mar Taylor, the co-founder of XO Records as well as the singer’s creative director. “Happy New Year brother! What we thinking ??” Taylor asks. In response, The Weeknd says, “Happy new year! Everything feels chaotic again. Music can heal and that feels more important than another album rollout.” He added, “Let’s just drop the whole thing and enjoy it with the people… XO.”

The news comes after The Weeknd delivered a pair of guest features to end 2021. The first was “Tears In The Club” with FKA Twigs, from her upcoming third project, and the second was “Poison” with the late Aaliyah, which will appear on the singer’s posthumous album Unstoppable.

Almost a year after Twitter permanently banned former president Donald J. Trump, they’ve come for another far right demigod. As per The New York Times, the social media service kicked off the new year by booting Marjorie Taylor Greene over her repeated insistence on sharing COVID-19 misinformation.

The controversial Georgia representative was given the axe after receiving her a fifth “strike” for posting pandemic lies. Her fourth came in August, when she baselessly claimed that vaccines were “failing.” Less than a month before that, she received her third strike for falsely saying COVID was not dangerous for people who were obese or over the age of 65. (Apparently her tweet falsely comparing COVID to cancer was no big deal.)

Nevertheless, it’s not as though Greene will be entirely absent from the social media service. Her congressional account, @RepMTG, remains active, in part because she has yet to use it to spread dangerous fibs about a once-in-a-century public health crisis.

Greene’s ban comes as the Omicron variant runs roughshod over the nation, including Florida, whose governor, Ron DeSantis, has long downplayed the severity of the virus. Hospitalizations are on the rise, largely for people who remain unvaccinated. So perhaps don’t put your life in the hands of someone who only learned about the importance of the Holocaust in her late 40s.

(Via NYT)

The Houston Rockets were unable to defend their home court on Saturday evening against the Denver Nuggets. Despite a 29-point outing from prized rookie Jalen Green, the Nuggets rode a Nikola Jokic double-double to a 124-111 win. But during halftime of the game, reports indicate that something happened in the Rockets’ locker room that led to one of their players getting up and leaving.

According to Tim MacMahon and Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Kevin Porter Jr. “lost his temper” during the mid-game intermission, which led to him deciding to leaving the arena altogether.

Shams Charania of The Athletic added some details, indicating that widely-respected Rockets assistant John Lucas got after Porter, Christian Wood, and other players on the roster. This apparently rubbed Porter the wrong way, and as a result, the youngster threw something at Lucas after a “heated exchange” between the two. To add insult to injury, Wood would not enter the game during the second half.

The line from the team was that Porter was having his thigh examined — he has been dealing with lingering left thigh issues this season. But after the game, Rockets coach Stephen Silas did acknowledge that something happened in the locker room during halftime.

“We had a spirited debate,” Silas said, per ESPN. “I have certain demands of this team as far as playing hard. … I wasn’t satisfied with the effort.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone at this point who thinks the Chicago Bulls made a mistake bringing in DeMar DeRozan this summer. One day after DeRozan capped off a win over the Indiana Pacers by hitting a walk-off, off-balance three-pointer as time expired, the standout guard hit yet another game-winning buzzer-beater from behind the arc.

Chicago found itself in a close game against the Washington Wizards, and after DeRozan hit a pair of free throws with less than a minute remaining to put the team up by one, the Wizards put the ball in Bradley Beal’s hands. Instead of trying to win it himself, though, Beal got the ball to Kyle Kuzma, who pulled up from deep and drilled a triple.

After a timeout to advance the ball, it seemed obvious that DeRozan was going to have the chance to go back-to-back. Washington understood this, tasking rookie guard Corey Kispert with staying attached to his hip, but the ball got into his hands, anyway. DeRozan was at an awkward spot in the corner, but after a dribble and a pump fake that got Kispert into the air, he was able to get a decent look. While Beal tried his best to contest, it didn’t matter, because DeRozan buried his jumper.

According to the fine folks at Basketball Reference, this was the first time anyone hit game-winning buzzer-beaters on back-to-back days in NBA history.

The Bulls won, 120-119, with going for 28 points, nine rebounds, and five assists.

Kirk Herbstreit drew the ire of college football fans for a comment he made on Saturday morning. While appearing on College GameDay live from the Rose Bowl, Herbstreit spoke about the rise in opt-outs among football players whose teams are not appearing in the College Football Playoff.

“What’s the difference, as a player, in saying these games are meaningless when, [Desmond Howard], we played in ‘meaningless games.’” Herbstreit asked. “I know you guys were here a lot. But, I just don’t understand, if you don’t make it to the playoff, how is it meaningless to play football and compete? Isn’t that what we do as football players? We compete? I don’t know if changing and expanding [the playoff] is gonna change anything, I really don’t. I think this era of player just doesn’t love football.”

Howard did add some perspective by saying much of this stems from players having a singular focus on winning a championship and that they don’t value other bowl games as a result, but followed it up by saying “kids don’t really care about that, they have a sense of entitlement, and it’s like, ‘if we’re not going to the one that matters, then it just doesn’t have as much value’ to them as it did us growing up.”

For context, Ohio State, one of the teams in the Rose Bowl, is without starters at wide receiver, offensive tackle, and defensive tackle because those players have stated their intent to focus on getting ready for the 2022 NFL Draft. That’s also been the case with other high-profile players like Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett and Michigan State running back Kenneth Walker, who both skipped the Peach Bowl to do the same. While the New Year’s Six games that aren’t part of the playoff have long managed to avoid these sorts of widespread opt-outs, it hasn’t happened to this level in the past and has led to conversations about whether or not a rubicon has been crossed. (It must be stressed that, you know, there’s a pandemic happening right now, and there is no way to know how that impacted these decisions unless the players explicitly say it weighed into their decision.)

Of course, there’s having that conversation and then there’s accusing players of not loving football, particularly when these players are not compensated for the millions they generate in revenue beyond the recent steps forward in benefitting from name, image, and likeness opportunities. So he tried to explain himself and didn’t do himself a ton of favors.

“Not all of them,” Herbstreit said. “Let me put it to you this way: Every coach that I talk to in the country, when I’m breaking down a roster, I’m going over their two-deep in a production meeting, and one of the things they’ll say to me with a guy — like [Georgia linebacker] Nakobe Dean, ‘this guy loves ball.’ And then I’ll be like … when they first started to say that to me, I was like, ‘yeah.’ But now I’m starting to realize, no, this guy’s a gym rat. He’d be here even if we didn’t ask him to be here. And that’s becoming more rare, and the reason that’s becoming more rare is they have so many distractions — they have [cell phones], they have video games, they just don’t grow up with the same passion that I think we had. There are some that still do, but I don’t think as many.”

While one has to wonder if any coaches have explicitly told Herbstreit that a player does not love football or if this is just him reading between the lines on a compliment they pay their athletes, the obvious thing hanging over this is that Herbstreit and his employer, ESPN, are responsible for airing most every bowl game, including the New Year’s Six and the College Football Playoff. They’re also the main driving force behind the conversation surrounding the sport, and like basically any sport in the world, the conversation around college football is largely about who wins a national championship. This has especially been the case since the advent of the playoff — ESPN, beyond its airing of the games, has a once-a-week show during the latter half of the regular season explicitly designed to generate conversation and drama about the race for a national championship.

It must be stressed that ESPN isn’t the only guilty party here by any stretch of the imagination. The sheer amount of money involved in the sport in the race to win a title, even before the playoff became a thing, is pretty stunning — the schools with the best stuff get the best coaches and players, who generally win the most games and championships, and as such, lucrative salaries for coaches and gigantic investments into things like facilities and infrastructure around a program to appeal to the nation’s top recruits have become more and more common. Georgia, for example, has famously spent hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years with the singular goal of toppling Alabama and winning a national championship.

And of course, if a coach feels like it, they can cut bait at almost any time and go to another place to try and achieve their goal of winning a ring. Many coaches at the highest level have relatively low buyout numbers in their contracts if they want to go get another job, but if the school wants to fire them without cause, they’re owed much, if not all, of whatever they have left on their deal. An example: Lincoln Riley’s buyout to leave Oklahoma for USC was $4.5 million, but USC needed to pay his predecessor, Clay Helton, more than $10 million to fire him. That buyout had to descend considerably over the years, and was reportedly a reason why USC was hesitant to fire Helton in the past.

So basically, there’s a ton of money in the sport, all of it channeled at the highest level towards the ruthless pursuit of a national championship. Players get none of it, and don’t get huge paydays until they finally make it to the pros. The most important thing is winning a championship, something that is hammered home so frequently on the network that airs the playoff that one of its higher-ups quite literally said earlier this year that its coverage can be far too playoff-focused. Considering this, one can argue, the logical endpoint for all of this is players who are not playing for a national title but are four months away from making a ton of money in the NFL Draft are going to prioritize that over everything else.

Herbstreit is someone who legitimately loves the sport of college football and the pageantry that surrounds it — as a Penn State alumnus, I watch Herbstreit, every single year, effusively praise the environment at the White Out game, and I posit alma mater’s football marketing department really appreciates that. It really stinks to see him say this sort of thing about this generation of college football players, in part due to the environment with which the sport exists right now. Hopefully all of this leads to some reflection on how we got to this point and how those with the ability to make things better going forward begin really discussing the sport of college football beyond the race to win a title.

Football fans were saddened to learn of the death of John Madden earlier this week. Madden, who passed away suddenly at 85, helped introduce people to football in a number of ways — he was a Super Bowl winning head coach with the Oakland Raiders, a broadcaster whose enthusiasm for the sport came through any time he did a game, and a person whose name is on an NFL video game giant.

That last thing has made it so Madden was a constant in the lives of football fans even after he decided to leave the broadcast booth. EA Sports’ Madden series doesn’t include his face anymore, but it’s a medium through which people can experience and learn about the game of football, which Madden famously wanted with the franchise.

Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves is apparently someone who loves playing the game, as he fancies himself the best Madden player in the NBA. And in his eyes, there was only one way to pay tribute to Madden following his death: fire up the game and lay a whooping on someone.

Edwards is a famously great quote and is always eager to talk up his ability to do stuff — he once said that he can throw a baseball 100 miles per hour. We are in favor, however, of an NBA Madden tournament so we can see just how good he is at the game.

While many artists were canceling their New Year’s Eve performances, like The Strokes, Flaming Lips, and LL Cool J, Kanye West was getting one together at the last minute. Along with Future, Kanye threw a NYE bash in Miami last night, with both rappers performing. The party was also hosted by Justin LaBoy, but details of the private show didn’t really hit the internet until Kanye posted it on his Instagram yesterday.

Dubbed New Year’s Eve Black Party, it’s worth noting that the event took place in the exact same city where Miley Cyrus was hosting a NYE special for NBC. Her co-host, Pete Davidson, has been linked with Kanye’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian lately, so it was perhaps another attempt by Kanye to get her attention. Lately, he’s made it known that he hopes the couple get back together. And, he also very recently purchased a home on the same street as his ex-wife. She did wear a wedding dress during one of his many Donda shows, so clearly they’re not on horrible terms, but the divorce does seem to be pretty final on her end. She reportedly has no desire to reconcile, so probably skipped both of the New Year’s Eve parties just to be safe.