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The National Football League hates you, sports fans. It has hated you since the day failed quarterback and failed activist Colin Kaepernick launched a players’ movement to take a knee during the pre-game playing of the national anthem to express their bitter hatred of the country that rewarded their talent with fame and fortune, and the NFL still hates you even during the Trump era.
Kaepernick is gone from the game for good, despite his ongoing delusion that he will one day suit up again and lead a team, but NFL contempt for the fans carries on.
An example currently causing controversy: male cheerleaders, who first made inroads in the NFL in 2018, but have now expanded into 12 NFL franchises – up from 7 in 2024 – much to the disgust of millions of football fans who don’t want to have the Left’s gender ideology forced upon them. The New Orleans Saints will have a whopping 12 men out of 47 performers on their cheer roster; three of the Saints women were replaced by males this season following tryouts.
The Minnesota Vikings caught some backlash on social media after hiring two new male cheerleaders, Louie Conn and Blaize Shiek. “I just lost all of my respect for the Vikings,” one Instagram user wrote in response, which echoed many others. Some announced they would cancel their season tickets or boycott the team. “The Minnesota Vikings has a man as their new lead cheerleader. As if you needed another reason to avoid the NFL and Minnesota,” one disheartened fan wrote.
But male cheerleaders have been around forever in college sports, the Left argues, and no one complained. Hey, Ronald Reagan and George Bush were college cheerleaders, you hypocritical Right-wingers! The obvious difference is that in college sports, male cheerleaders are studs who can hoist their female counterparts into the air with one arm.
They aren’t nonbinary gender activists pretending to be women and sashaying about in the same sexually provocative choreography as the women. Sports fans do not want to see this disordered display; only the Left does, because the Left views sports, especially football, as an all-American tradition to be subverted.
Another example of NFL contempt: for the sixth straight season, ESPN reports, the league, which has already alienated millions, will continue injecting divisive politics into the sport by resuming its on-field social justice messaging.
All 32 teams will feature an end zone message of their choice at each home game throughout the season. The teams were offered four options of blandly pointless, bumper-sticker slogans: “End Racism,” “Stop Hate,” “Choose Love” or “Inspire Change.” Once again, “It Takes All of Us” will be stenciled in the opposite end zone for all games, to make sure no fan can possibly escape the Left-wing politicization of the game.
How is a viewer at home even supposed to put any of this messaging into action? “Hey hon, at halftime I’m going to go do my part to end racism. Need anything while I’m out?”
Why do I consider causes like ending racism or stopping hate to be Left-wing? After all, who doesn’t want to end racism or stop hate? Because Left-wing terminology is never as innocuous as it sounds; language is always coded and redefined to align with their agenda. When social justice warriors call for ending racism, they don’t mean ending racism. They’re all for hating whites and Jews. What they mean by ending racism is dismantling what they believe to be the systemic white supremacy of capitalist American society. When they urge “Stop Hate,” they define “hate” as conservative resistance to their far-Left agenda.
The only difference this year regarding the NFL messaging is that “Inspire Change” has replaced “Vote,” because it’s not an election year (also, voting didn’t work out so well for the social justice crowd last November). I’m surprised they didn’t replace “Vote” with “Resist” or “Free Palestine,” but that would be too honest.
Who is offering these slogan options, by the way? Who is making these political demands on NFL teams, and why can’t – or won’t – the team owners side with fed-up fans and simply tell the social justice activists to go pound sand?
“We’re working hand-in-hand with players, and alongside our clubs, to amplify player voices and underscore what is most important to them,” Anna Isaacson, the NFL’s senior vice president of social responsibility, told The Associated Press. The fact that the NFL even has a senior vice president of social responsibility speaks volumes about the woke capture of traditional American institutions like the NFL. Notice how she said nothing about what’s important to the fans.
“For decades, the NFL and its players have been a unifying force in American culture and society that brings people of all cultures and backgrounds together to enjoy America’s most popular sport,” Isaacson continued. Exactly right, which is why shoe-horning partisan politics into the sport is inherently divisive – but that’s the intent. The Left’s aim has always been to make the political personal, and vice versa, because only then can the people be driven to enough resentment and unrest to wage revolution against the status quo.
The reigning Super Bowl champion Philadelphia Eagles, ESPN notes, will feature “Choose Love” for their season opener against the Dallas Cowboys on September 4. The Eagles will rotate all four league-approved end zone messages throughout the season.
“’Choose Love’ continues to resonate across the league,” Isaacson added. “It has become a unifying message of healing and hope, one that many players continue to wear voluntarily on helmet decals.”
So, as if it’s not enough to have to plaster these messages all across the end zones, players will also continue displaying the approved slogans on their helmets as well. How long before pro cheerleaders are pressured to incorporate wokeness into their cheers? “Go, Eagles! End whiteness!”
You know what would really “inspire change”? Slogans calling for the de-politicization of sports, like “Get Your Activism Off the Field,” “Back Off My Game,” or maybe the pithier “Shut Up and Play.” If the NFL really cared about unifying messages, they would turn off the spigot of Left-wing activism that is poisoning our sports, and let Americans of all colors and political stripes just bond over an exciting game.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior