Politics is rapidly consuming the sports world.
Athletes are expected to repeat the talking points of the Democratic establishment.
Now an anti-American anthem protester was just given one eye-rolling distinction from Biden.
It turns out that bashing America relentlessly comes with perks.
U.W. Women’s National Soccer Team star Megan Rapinoe found that out the easy way.
Rapinoe rose to prominence after becoming the first professional athlete to kneel for the anthem in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, who started the trend in 2016.
Soon after, Rapinoe became a poster girl for “woke” politics and antipathy toward the United States, even though she represented the country in international competition.
Now Rapinoe was awarded the Medal of Freedom by Joe Biden.
Megan Rapinoe (@mpinoe) receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom pic.twitter.com/GGc4JGwJxg
— CSPAN (@cspan) July 7, 2022
Biden is desperate for a political win anywhere he can get one.
His approval numbers are stuck in the 30s, below Donald Trump’s numbers at the same time in his presidency, and Trump had to deal with the most hostile media environment ever seen.
Biden is attempting to hitch his wagon to celebrities in order to boost his own profile and distract from the crises he is exacerbating.
But it’s quite telling that Biden is honoring an athlete who kneeled for the American flag.
It’s easy to bash America, but not so easy to call out the human rights abuses in other countries.
Rapinoe had little—if anything—to say about WNBA star Brittney Griner being trapped in a Russian prison for a relatively minor drug offense, or Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai who was spirited away after accusing a Chinese Communist Party official of sexual assault.
Shuai emerged from her sudden disappearance and gave a controlled interview where she walked back her claims.
Those are the types of things that happen in countries that are not free, particularly for women.
U.S. women’s soccer is a testament to American freedom.
Other countries won’t even allow women’s skin to be visible in public.
Rapinoe and other entitled leftists take American freedom for granted.
In addition to bashing the country, Rapinoe also supported transgender athletes competing in women’s sports.
It’s easy for her to say because she does not have to suffer the ramifications of her own ideology.
She’s retiring from soccer, so no biological male can take away her position.
And she gets more social brownie points from establishment media for being sufficiently “woke.”
Unsurprisingly, Rapinoe had a lot to say about the Supreme Court ruling in the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe V. Wade and sent the abortion question back to the individual states.
Rapinoe, who’s in a long-term relationship with WNBA star Sue Bird and has virtually no chance of an unexpected pregnancy, said, “Obviously, you can understand from an individual perspective how difficult it is to live in a country where you have a constant, unrelenting violent tide against you, an onslaught as a woman…And it would be as a gay person, and as a non-binary person, as a trans person. Whoever this is going to affect because it affects a lot more than just women or cis [gendered] women. It really does affect us all.”
Rapinoe should compare notes with Brittney Griner and Peng Shuai “unrelenting violence.”