Sunday’s Super Bowl was merely “a stage to promote the Left’s vision of equality, a utopia where a handful of powerful elites select winners and losers based on skin color, sexuality, and gender.” That’s the opinion of The Blaze commentator Jason Whitlock.
Whitlock claims NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has presided over chaos and racial division at the expense of merit. The NFL rejected the values that once made it “the strongest force in popular culture,” he says.
In place of merit, “football is now in the business of manipulating and controlling outcomes off the field. A handful of powerful elites ignore merit and decide who officiates, who tosses the coin, who sings, and who reports on the games. It sounds harmless and inconsequential.” But it’s not.
Whitlock says Goodell is the modern-day equal to incompetent Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside of Civil War fame. Burnside’s tactics during the Battle of Antietam failed, and Goodell’s are tanking as well, Whitlock says.
Taking that analogy a step further, Whitlock says, “Rebel forces bullied Goodell into turning television’s largest platform and sports’ greatest meritocracy into a showcase for the Left’s tokenism and quota system that is cleverly branded as diversity, inclusion, and equity.”
Pre-game festivities were clear examples of tokenism, in Whitlock’s estimation. Mary Mary sang the black national anthem in the parking lot of SoFi Stadium. Tennis great/lesbian Billie Jean King narrated a video about Title IX and inclusion (reminding us of the NFL’s video claiming football is “gay, lesbian, queer and transgender”). King and black official Ron Torbert facilitated the pre-game coin toss.
Mixed-race singer Jhene Aiko sang America the Beautiful. Mickey Guyton, a black woman known for creating a tribute to George Floyd, performed The Star Spangled Banner. This inclusion blitz was anything but inclusionary.
Whitlock’s exclamation point on the diversity-inclusion-equity agenda was the Pepsi halftime show featuring Snoop Dog, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Kendrick Lamar and Dr. Dre. “(G)angsta rappers are not appropriate for Super Bowl halftime,” Whitlock writes. “Gangsta rap is lyrical pornography. It’s to be ingested in the privacy of your headphones.”
The Dre- and Snoop-hosted “gangsta party” was “a celebration of gang culture on the Super Bowl stage” and the mainstreaming of black culture. The white equivalent of these rappers would be culture poisoners Hugh Hefner and porn king Ron Jeremy, Whitlock said.
The inclusion script is “poisonous fruit” that is also seen on the NFL’s playing field.
Media raved about several playoff games being close, but Whitlock noted obvious blown calls by the Super Bowl’s officiating crew as evidence of a decline in competition and performance. For instance, on the Rams’ winning drive there was a play in which three of their offensive linemen committed false starts, but the diverse officiating crew missed all of them.
Instead of easing up on the inclusion foot pedal, the NFL plans to accelerate it. Qualified officials will be pushed out to make room for more black and female referees. The league will exert greater pressure on owners to hire black head coaches. This is the “deadly script” of the modern day “General Burnside,” Whitlock predicts.
