Professional sports have been overtaken by the far left.
More and more athletes are pledging not to simply “stick to sports.”
And one NFL star just gave the league a giant headache with this new protest.
The NFL didn’t learn any lessons from the Colin Kaepernick debacle of 2016.
Kaepernick began the anti-American anthem protests by kneeling for the Star-Spangled Banner.
As the protest spread around the league, viewership plummeted.
The protests gradually quieted down after NFL owners promised to earmark $89 million for players’ social justice causes, but they began anew after the death of George Floyd.
Now the league has fully embraced Black Lives Matter, an openly Marxist organization with a radical anti-American, anti-family agenda.
The ratings have again taken a tumble as a result of the renewed commitment to social justice.
And one of the top quarterbacks in the league completely bent the knee to the Black Lives Matter agenda.
Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford wrote a piece for The Players’ Tribune talking about how he’s committed to the “woke” cause.
In Stafford’s article titled, “We Can’t Just Stick to Football,” he parrots all the talking points of BLM and the hard left.
Stafford wrote, “Police brutality, white privilege, racism — it’s all real…These are not political problems. These are human problems. It should not be seen as a political statement to discuss this stuff honestly.”
Needless to say, this is an incredibly naïve take.
Stafford is falling for the leftist trap of believing the issues they care about are not political issues, but the solutions to these issues are invariably more left-wing policies.
For example, addressing “white privilege” and “racism” will somehow translate into high taxes, even more funding into the coffers of teachers’ unions, and pushing for racism to be considered a public health crisis, granting the federal government broad powers to “fix” the problem.
This is the definition of political jockeying.
The left recruits people to their cause through culture and easily digestible slogans that go on T-shirts.
But the people imbibing these cultural cues never dig past the surface.
That’s the case with Stafford.
There’s no chance he’s dug into any statistics on police violence against various ethnic groups or how teachers’ unions are sabotaging charter schools even though they’ve shown considerable promise in closing the achievement gap.
Stafford is just doing his part of regurgitating the left’s talking points without doing his homework.
The left thrives on this kind of ignorance.
As the left doubles down on the far-left rhetoric, more Americans are changing the channel from Fox Sports to Fox News.
Fox News saw its highest summer ratings ever, even surpassing the broadcast networks.
The excesses of the left are turning people away in large numbers.
Polls show that support for Black Lives Matter has dropped down to pre-George Floyd numbers.
Stafford is jumping on the train at the exact wrong time.