Liz Clarke and Mark Maske of The Washington Post blame President Donald Trump (seen in a photo of his Alabama speech last year when he called for protesters to be fired) for catapulting the NFL's national anthem protests into a national issue last year. Not Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid, Michael Bennett, Travis Kelce or the other players who blatantly disrespected veterans throughout the 2016 and 2017 NFL seasons. In the October 4 Post, the writers explore the reasons behind the comparative calm during the first month of this season and also offer support for one of the pet projects of the NFL's social justice warriors — bail reform for people accused of crimes.
Clarke and Maske write that Trump's speeches and Tweets "turned many fans against the league, spurred more players to demonstrate and triggered considerable angst among NFL owners over the league’s image and their own bottom line." That was in the past.
So far in 2018, only a handful of players are regularly protesting during the pregame playing of the national anthem. The media and fan furor surrounding the protests has significantly died down. Clarke and Maske listed five reasons for dwindling focus on protests, among them the fact that many of the league's most active social justice warriors are directing their energies to off-the-field sites.
"(T)he best explanation is a shift of focus by many of the players who have concluded that working for change in their communities is a more effective tool for addressing systemic social and racial ills than kneeling during the anthem," Clarke and Maske suggest. They also cited the NFL Players Coalition, a group of 100 players who squeezed $89 million out of the league, that now works "to address inequity and injustice in education, police treatment, criminal sentencing and other issues. ... (I)ts work has proceeded without triggering a political firestorm."
In Atlanta last month, NFL players Adalius Thomas, Harry Douglas, Tim Lester and Reggie Brown attended the coalition's “Listen and Learn” forum on "racial and economic disparities in the city’s incarceration rates and bail policy. In Philadelphia, the Eagles' Malcolm Jenkins and Chris Long met with community leaders to discuss bail reform and jobs for people released from prison. The Saints' Demario Davis and Redskins' Josh Norman handed out school supplies for migrant children.
Davis raised the issue of "class warfare" among crime suspects: “When you think about a bail system that keeps one person in jail because they can’t pay a $10,000 bail, and people are going free because they can pay a $1 million bail, they’re in jail because they’re poor. That person could be the breadwinner in the house, so the spouse is being hurt, the children are being hurt. It’s going to have these cataclysmic results that directly affect the family’s life.”
Neither Davis, Clarke or Maske noted that these people may be poor, but they are also suspected of committing crimes, leading to "cataclysmic" results for their families and their victims. Yet many NFL social justice warriors are determined to change the bail system, and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell recently attended a bail hearing for a suspect accused of committing an armed robbery!
According to the WashPost article, among the other reasons for the more respectful, less radical NFL is the league's July decision not to punish protesters, and these factors:
"President Trump has opted not to seize on the topic with the fervor he did in September 2017, when he called NFL players who knelt 'sons of bitches' and urged team owners to fire them.
"Another factor, in the view of Gabe Feldman, professor of law and director of the Sports Law Program at Tulane, could simply be 'issue fatigue' more than two years after quarterback Colin Kaepernick triggered a national conversation about social activism — and whether, when, where and how professional athletes have a right to take part — by kneeling during the anthem ceremony before a San Francisco 49ers game."
Also, Nike's "Just Do It" campaign with Kaepernick shifted focus onto the Swoosh and away from the NFL, the story says.
