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Barely two days after the Eagles won the Super Bowl I was in downtown Philadelphia with a crowd of about 100 stranded SEPTA riders booted from an out-of-commission train because someone had set a fire in the tracks.
The hooliganism couldn’t have occurred on a worse night: sleet was turning to snow and the wind was kicking up. Passengers were told to wait for shuttle buses by the National Jewish Museum at 5th and Market Street but the buses never arrived. After a half hour waiting in the snow, the crowds were redirected back into the subway — no shuttle buses were available after all — to take the next train.
Not a single passenger voiced a complaint as they waited in the miserable weather.
How was this stoic behavior possible given SEPTA’s track record when it comes to chronic train issues? It was rush hour, and no SEPTA officials showed up to “direct” the emergency. The situation was ripe for mob anger; instead the crowd behaved as if participating in a candlelight vigil.
Contrast this to the “happy” football crowds that set fires in the city and destroyed property on the night of the Eagles’ Super Bowl win two nights before.
The Super Bowl riots were fueled by a runaway mob mentality and alcohol. This often makes sports fans enthusiastic to the point of fanaticism. As one commentator on Reddit stated: “Sports fans are the most aggressive obnoxious and brain dead people in the world. They are ready to beat each other to death over watching spoiled millionaires chasing a ball.”
Not all sports fans, but certainly the behavior of Eagles fans after the Super Bowl win gives that comment legs.
The celebration had 10,000 sports fans filling Broad Street where they jumped on garbage trucks, climbed light poles, piled on the roofs of bus shelters, set fires in the street, tore down and smashed two traffic lights near City Hall. The crowds then moved to Walnut Street where they vandalized a number of stores including Brooks Brothers (Philly mobs love attacking Brooks Brothers: the store was hit during the 2020 George Floyd riots), and a number of banks (Santander and Chase).
Unlike in 2020, no ATMs were blown up and no fast-food restaurants were torched.
In 2018, after another Super Bowl win over the New England Patriots, Eagles fans looted several stores in the downtown area. Progressive publications like Slate downplayed the misbehavior with the comment, “It’s a Philly thing.” As in, calm down, it’s just Philly being Philly, and it’s only a few rascals who do this anyway; most of the celebrating fans are peaceful.
This kind of “soft” reporting was common during the Floyd riots when woke outlets like The Philadelphia Inquirer blamed the burning of buildings near Rittenhouse Square on a few anarchists even though the riots cost the city upwards of 21 million dollars.
Slate also sugar-coated this year’s Super Bowl riots as a “wild tradition and borderline dangerous method of celebration” because of the fans’ “Bizarre and oddly heart warming public displays of affection.” (Slate referenced a guy at the 2018 celebration who shotgunned seven beers while sitting atop a greased pole).
When so called public displays of affection sink to the level of Bolshevik violence, you know the city has a serious problem.
Mayor Cherelle Parker, sensing an Eagles win, asked fans to please not climb street poles during post-game celebrations. What she neglected to ask fans was to refrain from vandalizing banks, and to spare Brooks Brothers another round of window smashing.
Pole climbers, after all, only wind up hurting themselves while fires set in the street and taunting police officers by shaking metal barriers or unscrewing lampposts from the sidewalk — as some fans did during the riot — point to a psychotic kind of crazy.
“Chaos in Philly as Eagles celebrations descend into riots,” the ever-vigilant Daily Mail reported. (If you want to get breaking news details not published by the Philadelphia press, go to the UK’s Daily Mail. It’s more hyper local than The Philadelphia Inquirer.)
“Police were out on foot, motorbikes and on horseback all lined up in front of City Hall in an attempt to deter fans from bad behavior but they were vastly outnumbered – many of them drunk after five hours of football,” DM reported.
Philadelphia Eagles fans have a checkered history. In 1968, distraught over a string of loses, they threw snowballs at Santa Claus during a halftime act in which Santa, attempting to cheer things up, threw candy canes into the crowd.
“Fans turned on him in his disheveled outfit, angry over another lost Eagles season, and cold, tired and feeling a bit churlish, they chucked snowballs at the woeful Santa imposter,” one report stated.
This year’s Super Bowl violence got me thinking: Are hardcore Democrat woke cities (sanctuary cities) more prone to violence and rioting than more conservative cities?
When you are a social justice-oriented city, a city where every arts and cultural institution is woke and a city that gleefully jumped on the Floyd bandwagon in 2020 and rioted to the tune of millions of dollars in damages, then riots have become part of your urban DNA.
The propensity to riot is there like a disease in remission but ready to surface when a call to arms is announced. Philadelphia is certainly one of these cities. All it takes is a crowd inclined to a mob mentality, a measure of alcohol and drugs, and a “topic” to get excited about: sports, politics, it doesn’t matter.
Violence even erupted at the Eagles Super Bowl victory parade on Valentine’s Day when two women in their twenties were shot and injured by a man wielding a gun.
The incident occurred on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway near the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the focal point of the victory parade. A personal argument gone awry is how reporters explained the shooting although 6ABC Action News and other news sources distanced the incident from parade celebrations: “While the location of the shooting is along the parade route, the parade had passed by that location about an hour beforehand. Police described the location as ‘outside the parade footprint.’”
The truth is that the victims and shooter would not have been in the area were it not for the Eagles celebration.
Mixed in with local news reports about the riots were stories about President Trump’s tense relationship with the Eagles.
In 2018 after the Eagles’ win over the New England Patriots, only a few Eagles players accepted an invitation from President Trump to attend a White House celebration. Because of the lack of response, Trump rescinded the invitation and then issued a general statement criticizing football players who knelt or raise their fists during the National Anthem, gestures meant to protest police brutality.
This year, as the first U.S. president to attend a Super Bowl, Trump was quick to post on Truth Social his affection for the Kansas City Chiefs: “What a GREAT Team, Coach, Quarterback, and virtually everything else, including those fantastic FANS, that voted for me (MAGA!) in record numbers.”
He said nothing about the Eagles.
In an article published by the student newspaper of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges — The Bi-College News –– a student activist quoted an inquiry by Front Office Sports as to whether the Eagles would accept a 2025 invitation to the White House: “Inside sources revealed that an Eagles star, who spoke anonymously, emphasized ‘We represent a city and a state that is pushing for equal rights, respect, and values that respect every human being.’”
That comment translates into a resounding no.
As for values that respect every human being, they were certainly on full display the night of the Super Bowl riots when those City Hall traffic lights came crashing down.