Woke Mob Sacks National Football League
By NBP Editorial Board | September 15, 2020, 16:24 EDT
The National Football League used to be about football. But this season, since the killing of George Floyd, it has become political football. Or, in other words, “systemic racism” in America.
Four years ago, national weathervane Roger Goodell was horrified by a player taking a knee during the national anthem to protest alleged police brutality against blacks, because he thought it was an insult to the country. Nowadays, the $40 million-a-year NFL commissioner is horrified that he was horrified.
The opening week of the NFL was a perfect picture of the ideological civil war in America. Owners and officials apparently decided to kowtow to the Woke Mob, who pretend that racial relations in America still resemble the middle of the last century – as if nothing has changed. This, despite the fact that America is the only predominantly white nation in the world that has elected a black leader – and not once, but twice.
Starting now, the NFL honors kneeling during the national anthem and endorses a song described as the black national anthem (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) to be sung before the games, as if the country actually has two anthems instead of one. Players can wear social justice messaging as helmet decals (“Stop Hate”; “It Takes All Of Us”; “End Racism”; or “Black Lives Matter”) or the name of someone who is said to be a victim of systemic racism or police brutality. End zones say “It Takes All Of Us” and “End Racism.” The league also plans to feature stories of “a victim of social or racial injustice or police brutality and tell that person’s story ‘in and around’ the games.”
The NFL implicitly endorses Black Lives Matter — giving credence to an organization that stands for something called “queer Black feminist theory” and “disrupt[ing] the Western-prescribed nuclear family requirement.”
Black Lives Matter was founded on a lie in 2014 – when 18-year-old black man Michael Brown supposedly cried “Hands up, don’t shoot” in Ferguson, Missouri and was shot to death by a 28-year-old white cop. Yet the evidence shows that Brown, who had just committed a larceny, had attacked the officer and was advancing on him in a threatening manner when he was shot. Three official inquiries into this purported instance of police brutality came to the same essential conclusions. Neither the local grand jury in 2014, nor then-U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigators in 2015, nor a brand-new investigation by a new local prosecutor in 2020 resulted in charges against the police officer involved.
Yet Black Lives Matter has made a multimillion-dollar name for itself by seizing upon this and other alleged police atrocities (many fake) in menacing and frequently violent fashion.
The allure of the organization is in the name, because black lives obviously matter – as do we all. Yet the name has nothing to do with what this group wants.
If Black Lives Matter were about black lives mattering, do you suppose the organization would encourage one-mommy-one-daddy households? Is there anything that would help black lives more?
Let’s see … About 65 percent of black families in 2018 were headed by a single parent, according to The Annie E. Casey Foundation.
And children who grow up without two parents in the home are much more likely to live in poverty, commit crimes, get an inadequate education, and suffer from anger and depression.
And yet an enemy of black people is … the nuclear family? More likely, an enemy of black people is Black Lives Matter.
Does violence affect black people in America disproportionately more than others? It sure does. One answer is more law and order. Black Lives Matter wants less. Some of its affiliates seem to want none. Defund the police, they say.
Does the NFL care?
Remember, this is the same league that didn’t let the Dallas Cowboys wear helmet decals honoring five police officers killed by BLM protesters in Dallas in 2016. So while they wouldn’t let players honor those who died protecting people, they will pander to Marxists who want to dismantle the nuclear family and get rid of cops while portraying America as a fundamentally racist place.
None of this virtue signaling by multi-millionaire athletes and owners and their lackeys will accomplish anything useful. But it will surely alienate followers of the NFL. Viewings during the first week were dreadful. Take away the Tom Brady-in-Tampa storyline (which drew well because of its unique circumstances), and ratings were significantly down from last year.
During the 2016 and 2017 NFL seasons, the league’s television ratings declined by more than 17 percentage points between the two seasons. A pair of polls — one from UBS and another from JD Power — suggest that national-anthem-kneeling was the top reason for people tuning out of games.
More important than dollars and cents, of course, is doing the right thing. Here the league is failing spectacularly.
The league can offer a straw man narrative that racially motivated police brutality is a serious problem in America based on occasional YouTube videos, but the left-leaning Washington Post‘s database shows that only 14 unarmed black men (out of 43 million black Americans) and 25 unarmed white men were shot and killed by police in 2019. That doesn’t say how many were reaching for a police officer’s weapon or otherwise threatening an officer, either.
One person dying under any circumstances is sad. A person dying at the hands of government employees unjustifiably is an act that cries out for justice.
But the data tells us what those of us who live in this country ought to suspect already: This kind of behavior is exceedingly rare.
And there’s no evidence from the data that police shootings tend to be racially motivated. The evidence (as found in a 2019 study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the United States of America) suggests they aren’t.
Empty gestures reacting to non-problems won’t change some ugly facts in America.
Such as: Despite being 13 percent of the population, black Americans committed 52.2 percent of the murders and non-negligent manslaughters in the country in 2013, according to FBI crime statistics. Most black murder victims are killed by other black people, about 94 percent from 1976 to 2005, according to National Review.
Do you believe black lives matter? If so, doesn’t that mean that all black lives matter? Black women make up roughly 14 percent of the population of child-bearing females in the United States, but in 2016 they got 38 percent of the abortions.
Racial animus has been a problem in this world ever since there were at least two groups of people who didn’t look like each other. It possibly always will be. It’s wrong, and it’s sad. We should avoid it.
But racism-mongering has become the opiate of the masses. It takes away attention from the more pressing problems of poverty, crime, dependency, and abandonment. These problems can best be dealt with by renewing emphasis on commitment, responsibility, empathy, and love.
Is the NFL doing anything about these problems?
In his so-sincere mea culpa video, Goodell makes the statement: “Without black people, there would be no NFL.” Sure enough, about 70 percent of NFL players are black. So it makes sense that the commissioner would want to appear to show interest in their concerns. But he hasn’t shown interest in the real problems of black Americans – school choice, education, broken families, crime, and poverty.
Instead, the league lobbies Washington politicians and bureaucrats for its own selfish interests (including $468,500 in donations to federal candidates during the 2018 election cycle through its political action committee, Gridiron PAC), just like many other mega-corporations.
When you boil down the National Football League and Black Lives Matter, you’re left with two elements: money and power.
How to fix this situation?
Here’s a radical idea, stemming from the Latin word radix, which means root.
Why doesn’t the NFL return to its roots?
Don’t let the Woke Mob take over this great American game.
Just play football.