Sports reporter Emily Austin went public with her support for Donald Trump and paid a real price for it.
The backlash came fast, and the people telling her to shut up weren’t strangers.
But what NBA players were quietly telling her in private will leave you speechless.
A Pre-Med Student Who Ended Up Covering the NBA
Before her career in sports media, Austin was a pre-med student at Hofstra University who switched her major to journalism in 2020 and found herself frustrated during the coronavirus pandemic. That frustration turned out to be the beginning of something much bigger than a career change.
Austin often heard “my body, my choice” at school, a slogan she said she was on board with, but realized it wasn’t the case when it came to coronavirus vaccine mandates. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is really hypocritical,'” she told Fox News Digital. “That was like one example of a lot of things in college that really opened up my eyes to the hypocrisy of politics, at least on the left side.”
Austin found herself “repulsed” from liberal ideology during her time at Hofstra, including identity politics and victimization, which she believes Generation Z has “fallen into.”
When she began to pursue journalism, she had to initially choose between sports and politics and ended up picking sports. “I chose sports and told myself like, ‘Eww, who wants to do politics? You know, that’s for, like, old boring people,'” she said.
She was going to stay in her lane. Cover the games. Keep politics out of it. That plan didn’t last long.
She Said It Out Loud, and the Roof Caved In
During her second year of college, seeing Joe Biden polling higher than Trump left her concerned. She even posted a “very dramatic” Instagram story threatening to leave the country if Biden was elected. This led to her receiving a message from a Women for Trump organizer, prompting her to look more into what Trump stood for.
And then she stopped hedging.
“I just remember I came out and was like, ‘Hey guys, vote for Trump,’ and oh my goodness, it was just a wave of backlash and hate,” she said.
Even her agent advised Austin to delete her post and stick to sports following her public support for Trump. She described the aftermath as a “nightmare.”
Her own agent. The person paid to look out for her career told her to walk it back. Most people would have. Austin didn’t.
What the NBA Players Were Actually Saying
Here’s the part the sports media establishment doesn’t want to talk about.
Austin said she was “receiving messages from NBA players, like, ‘Hey, I’m voting for Trump too’ or, like, ‘Wow, you’re brave for saying that, like I could never.'”
Read that again. NBA players. The league that spent years plastering social justice slogans on jerseys and turning its courts into political billboards. Players from that league were privately telling a young sports reporter they were voting for Trump and didn’t have the nerve to say so publicly.
Her classmates also sent her messages saying they were voting for Trump, too. So it wasn’t just the players. The same campus environment that tried to shame her into silence was quietly full of people who agreed with her.
The NBA has spent years building a very specific public image on politics. The league leaned hard into one direction. Players who stepped out of that lane faced real social consequences inside the locker room and out. So those private messages to Austin weren’t just encouraging notes. They were admissions that the public face of the NBA on politics didn’t reflect what a lot of those guys actually believed.
Nobody wanted to be the one to say it first. Austin did.
She Kept Going Anyway
Sports reporter and conservative influencer Emily Austin spoke with Fox News Digital about her journey and why she felt compelled to speak out about her values and be a voice for what she described as the “under-represented.”
The host of “The Emily Austin Show” said that political commentary came “by accident.” But somewhere between the agent telling her to delete the post and the NBA players sliding into her DMs, the accident became a calling.
Austin has millions of followers across all social media platforms, with her Instagram account @emily.austin being her largest with over 2.6 million followers.
Austin said covering sports keeps her out of an echo chamber. She told Fox News Digital that “it keeps me meeting new people and hearing new perspectives and seeing new places.” That’s worth noting for a second. She’s not retreating into a corner of the internet where everyone already agrees with her. She’s still in the locker rooms, still on the sidelines, still talking to the same players who privately told her they couldn’t say what she said.
What This Actually Tells You
The sports media world has spent years pretending that professional athletes are a monolith on politics. Leagues, broadcast networks, and sports journalists built an entire narrative around the idea that athletes had found their voice, and that voice leaned one way. Anyone who didn’t fit that story got ignored or buried.
Austin’s story blows a hole right through that. If NBA players were privately telling a 20-something sports reporter they were voting for Trump and calling her brave for saying it out loud, then the public posture of the league was never the whole picture. It was just the only picture anyone was allowed to show.
The agent who told her to delete the post was probably giving her smart career advice. Sports media is not a forgiving place for people who step off the approved script. But Austin calculated differently. She figured the people being left out of the story were worth more than the people trying to keep her quiet.
And those NBA players who reached out in private? They’re still reaching out in private. That’s the part nobody’s going to put on a jersey.
Source: Fox News Digital