San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick received near universal media praise for his refusal to stand for the national anthem.
But did it backfire?
One journalist claims Kaepernick is the real reason Hillary Clinton lost the election.
Clay Travis, Fox Sports 1 contributor and owner of OutKick the Coverage blog, believes Kaepernick’s protests cost Clinton the election.
Travis maintains that Kaepernick’s claims that America oppresses black Americans – which is why he kneeled during the national anthem – had infuriated millions of Americans, and all they saw was a spoiled athlete who wasn’t even very good at his job anymore.
The Smoke Room reports on Travis’ comments:
“Fox Sports pundit and Outkick the Coverage founder Clay Travis believes NFL free agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick is responsible for Donald Trump winning the election.
“The only thing that’s changed since Colin Kaepernick started his protest? Donald Trump got elected president. You know the ultimate irony? I don’t think Donald Trump would have gotten elected president if Colin Kaepernick hadn’t done his protest. You know the difference in this election? Seventy thousand votes. One football stadium in the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. You flip 70,000 people; one football stadium in those three states, Hillary Clinton is the president of the United States. I think that Donald Trump won this election because of Colin Kaepernick’s protest. He cost the Democrats the 2016 election. He put Donald Trump into the White House,” Travis said in part Friday morning on his hit radio show “Outkick the Coverage.”
Former Secret Service agent – and conservative commentator – Dan Bongino also listed Kaepernick among the groups of people he thanked for Hillary Clinton’s defeat.
He wrote on Conservative Review:
“Thank you, Colin Kaepernick! We love you, Colin! Thank you so very much for your self-serving, ignorant, immature, anti-American protest, while bench-warming on the sidelines for the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers. It was your effort to publicly humiliate our flawed-but-good-and-decent country that infuriated millions of working-class, patriotic Americans of all races and creeds and likely contributed to the unprecedented voter turnout in rural America, where honoring our country (while still recognizing its faults) is the rule, not the exception.”
American’s were turned off by him insulting their country, their values, and throwing his left-wing politics into an area that used to be an escape from politics.
There’s no question that the cultural backlash against social justice warriors politicizing every aspect of American life contributed to Donald Trump’s victory.
And Kaepernick’s protests dominated the early part of the NFL season – during the last couple of months before Americans had to decide who they would vote for.
His protests also had a negative effect on NFL ratings.
Multiple polls found his national anthem protests as the number one reason fans tuned out of games.
Politics and sports were always intertwined, but as the sports media became completely monolithic in its liberalism, it was hard to find one day where politics weren’t injected into the headlines.
However, the media is way to the left of its audience.
And by promoting Kaepernick’s protests, some commentators believe they ultimately contributed to the backlash against Hillary Clinton and her loss to Donald Trump.