The NFL doubles down on woke, BLM style

The National Football League kicks off its season tonight. For a great many Americans, today must feel like Christmas.

I’m not among that group. However, I do look forward to the start of the NFL season, at least in years like this one when the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins doesn’t appear to be awful.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. The NFL has decided to preach to us during games, and its preaching will be BLM themed.

Until recently, the NFL was probably our least woke major sports league. Unfortunately, that’s no longer the case.

The NBA, typically the most woke league, used its “bubble” end-of-season last year to promote BLM themes relentlessly. This ensured that I wouldn’t watch any pro-basketball, and I think many conservatives also boycotted televised games. However, this year the NBA decided largely to avoid politics during its telecasts.

Major League Baseball was also chockfull of BLM propaganda in its shortened 2020 season. This year, most venues were devoid of such rubbish.

However, MLB pulled its all-star game out of Atlanta in protest of that state’s voting regulations. By taking the Democrats’ side in a political dispute, it ensured that I would not attend a major league game this season for the first time since baseball returned to Washington, D.C. in 2005.

The NFL, unlike the NBA and MLB, apparently has decided to go all-in on BLM this season. At Newsweek, Mark Davis reports:

The NFL should be primed to welcome back fans after COVID and social justice activism drove so many away. But now comes news of additional scoldings delivered via NFL uniforms and playing fields. Ostensibly meant to inspire us to better ourselves, this messaging is in fact one more example of woke corporate America mobilizing to characterize us as a racist culture in dire need of upbraiding at every turn.

Players will get to choose from various slogans to display on the backs of their helmets, including “Stop Hate,” “End Racism” and the famously divisive “Black Lives Matter.” One wonders about the fate of any player choosing to leave his helmet unadorned.

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with a sincere wish to stop hate and end racism, and black lives do indeed matter. But the agenda here has been clear from the outset. The Left has weaponized George Floyd’s death to gain a foothold, and presumed that our nation’s issues involving policing are not only fueled by racism, but are just a small part of an entire culture desperate for enlightenment at the knee of activists. . . .

These slogans are not just innocuous phrases pasted across helmets and stenciled onto end zone turf. These messages tell every fan that the NFL sees America as a deeply broken land so riven by racism that the league must pepper stadiums and TV screens with constant sloganeering more suited to an incorrigible child than to a nation of grownups who can be relied on to make progress without finger-wagging from the world of sports. The fact that the NFL has a “Senior Vice President for Social Responsibility” is evidence that fans will need to brace for more of this, even if viewership continues to dwindle.

If the NFL’s in-game sloganeering is as widespread as Davis suggests it will be, viewership may plummet. I’ll watch the Washington team’s opener on Sunday to see for myself.

I fear, however, that this season might be the first since the early 1960s in which I tune the team, and with it the league, out.

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