Sports Fatwa: There Are No Innocent Questions

We’ve written in the past about the relentless radicalizing of the sports press box. There  is no segment of today’s journalism that squeaks more than the people who cover games for a living. As we suggested then, something about trying to step up in class seems to have made The Wide World of Woke into a thing. 

“There are days where ESPN’s reporting sounds more like corrective seminar on white entitlement than a news item. Sports, always an escape from reality, has been turned into a re-education camp for viewers.”

But we never really expected the rest of the sports industry to get all “Caitlyn Jenner ESPN Sports Woman of the Year” on us. When Colin Kaepernick, raised by white parents, decided to explore his blackness by kneeling for the national anthem in 2017 he was met by a solid wall of criticism from president Donald Trump on down.

“The football field is not the place to exercise your political takes” was the mildest comment directed at Kaepernick, who’d gone 2-16 as a starter in San Francisco before finding his inner BLM. Good riddance was another common sentiment after Kaepernick turned down a contract from the 49ers and slunk off to find a willing team that would come to his rescue. 

It never happened. Kaepernick had to console himself with uber-Woke Nike giving him a  a multi-year contract for a series of commercial opportunities about what a hellhole America is unless Barack Obama is president. Or something like that. 

But that dynamic has changed since Kaepernick’s knee hit the turf. The people running pro sports have received an inoculation of white liberal guilt and a bracing seminar on Marxist persuasion. From being the last island of sanity in a sea of derangement sports is now a cancel-culture paradise— where everyone is entitled to an opinion. So long as that opinion agrees with Around The Horn on ESPN. 

Fighting for free speech has just gotten too hard. The latest example of radicals trying to eliminate NFL voices they can’t abide came when the Washington New Names defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio had the temerity to juxtapose the January 6/ 2001 riot with the two years of BLM rioting in 2020-21. 

Del Rio (who’s been a head coach in Oakland and Jacksonville) tweeted he’d  “love to understand … why the summer of riots, looting, burning and the destruction of personal property is never discussed but [the Jan. 6th riot] is.” The next day he elaborated, saying that “businesses are being burned down, no problem… and then we have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down… and we’re gonna make that a major deal.”

He also posited that it was just his opinion, and everyone has the right to an opinion in America. That, apparently is now a toxic hate screed under the Nancy Pelosi rules of speech in the sports world. Twitter jackals quickly demanded Del Rio’s scalp, and the NFL obligingly caved. Del Rio’s coach in DC, Ron Rivera, put a $100 K price on Del Rio’s free speech, mumbling something about hate and insensitivity. He grovelled and scraped to appease the locals from whom his owner is now trying to extort a new stadium. 

Sensing blood, the BLM faction of the NFL declared this infringement of Del Rio’s speech rights was not enough. NFL HOF member Ed Reed, who made too many tackles with his head, demanded harsher justice (if not grammar) for Del Rio. “Today, (sic) im sick and tired! A dust up! 100,000 is not enough, money ain’t nothing to a person who is recycled through coaching. Its always one, first it was Saban now its Jack to just remind US what it is! Man if u coached by him put your pants on! Its simple right and wrong, Wrong,”

While the NFL itself hasn’t fired Del Rio (yet) it wasn’t for lack of AOC wannabes trying to jack him up. The Washington coach has had to shut down his Twitter account and issue an apology to people who live to be offended by anything not articulated by Joy Reid on MSNBC. 

The arbitrary cancellation brought FOX News firebrand Tucker Carlson into the ring. “He thought he had a right to respectfully express himself in the land of the free, but it turns out no. Just hours ago the coach of the Washington Commanders, a fascist moron called Ron Rivera, announced that Jack Del Rio has no right to talk, and he’s being fined $100,000 for doing it.”

The major change in this fatwa on free speech is not the grievances of BLM or other minority groups. Their voices have been loud and clear for decades on what they see as a racist America. The real pinch-point has come not from the real victims of historic wrongs but from the white liberal class that has never experienced anything remotely resembling hardship outside of an uncharged Tesla battery. 

Robin D’Angelo’s White Fragility is their bible. Faced with their hollow Tik Tok existence they’ve taken to adopting the pain of others to legitimize their pointless existences. From the Rockefeller Foundation to the harpies of The View, acquired pain is the new aphrodisiac. 

Take Del Rio’s own team, formerly known as the Redskins, as an example. The name had over 90 percent approval from American Indians  in polling done by the Woke Washington Post. But because white liberals wanted to acquire Ibrahim X Kendi’s pain the team name was changed. To Commanders. (Yes, it’s okay to puke now.) 

Because this demographic and its “influencers” have the ear of everyone from Disney to network execs to political hacks they have a disproportionate effect on which show trials go forward (Jan. 6/ 2021) and which (Hillary Clinton’s perversion of the 2016 election and the Trump administration) do not. 

Apparently this group of Karens and Neils now has standing with sports leagues, which are turning themselves inside-out to apologize for the slave trade and the poll tax. Doing a public shaming of Del Rio for his opinion is just the latest example of Mao’s Cultural Revolution returned to life in North America.

The hypocrisy is that these cringing sports leagues are now in the habit of saying they want themselves to represent the Real America or Real Canada. Showing the diversity of the land. Just don’t ask the NFL or NBA why, in a land where blacks constitute 12 percent of the population, their workforce is over 70 percent black. 

Then the Ed Reeds and Colin Kaepernicks want to talk about a meritocracy, where the best get the cheese. Because @CNN and the New York Times won’t call them on their bullshit. Too bad no one explained that to Jack Del Rio. Might have saved him some grief.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx