Spike Lee film hagiography is scrubbed, but the league’s stale spectacle marches on.
The NFL is seeing its racially obsessive woke agenda go from offputting to something far worse for a league that fancies itself as a cultural trend-setter: inanely boring. America’s most popular sports institution is bringing back the “End Racism” cliches on lettering behind end zones for the 2025 season as the one-time lightning rod figurehead for its Black Lives Matter gesticulating fades into total irrelevance.
“All 32 teams will feature an end zone message of their choice at each home game throughout the season, selecting from four options: ‘End Racism,’ ‘Stop Hate,’ ‘Choose Love,’ or ‘Inspire Change.’ Once again, ‘It Takes All of Us’ will be stenciled in the opposite end zone for all games,” the Associated Press reported Aug. 14.
Two days later, on Aug. 16, the league’s television partner in pushing a loaded agenda instead of focusing on sports, ESPN, announced that it was permanently shelving a once-hyped Spike Lee multi-part film documentary on National Anthem kneeler and ex-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
“ESPN, Colin Kaepernick and Spike Lee have collectively decided to no longer proceed with this project as a result of certain creative differences,” the network blandly said in a statement.
From ‘Global Icon’ to Yesterday’s News
What neither the league nor the NFL wants to admit is Kaepernick’s angry young wealthy black athlete schtick is as outdated in American popular culture today as polka music in the age of the Beatles. Kaepernick has not played in a league game since Jan. 1, 2017. In keeping with the inherently short shelf life that comes with becoming one of America’s 24-hour news cycle phenoms, his high-water mark in the Big Media spotlight feels like eons ago.
“Colin Kaepernick: A cultural star fast turning into a global icon,” a CNN headline exclaimed in 2018. The article focused on a lavish Nike ad campaign dedicated to pushing him into such status. Nike knows exactly how this works. Being “reviled” is every bit as important to this shallow celebrity crafting as being “celebrated.” For a while, Kaepernick was both.
Now he faces the inevitable downside of the artificially manufactured curve: being forgotten.
It turns out that the ESPN documentary has been dead for some time. “That thing fell apart a year ago,” director Lee told Business Insider in an Aug. 19 interview. “No one had ever asked me about it. I was on a red carpet and a guy asked me the question, I wasn’t going to lie.”
The key takeaway there is that for years no one even bothered to ask Lee when the film, announced by ESPN with great fanfare in 2020, was going to air. Lee was brought on board in 2022, and again that was supposed to be a big deal.
NFL Players Take On Trump as America Yawns
Media professionals who have made a comfortable living out of injecting racial divisiveness into sports are perplexed. How could such an important project be dropped, especially when it includes me?
“I don’t remember the exact day it happened. It’s still a blur… But one day I got a note from Spike Lee’s production company saying Lee wanted to interview me for his upcoming documentary about the life of Colin Kaepernick,” USA Today “sports” columnist Mike Freeman lamented. “Lee knew that I had covered Kaepernick’s protest movement extensively, and the interview focused partly on that, and on other aspects tangential to the former quarterback.”
What went wrong?
“I don’t know. What I do know is that this is all incredibly sad. It’s devastating,” Freeman wrote.
It really is a mystery. The author of a 2020 book titled Football’s Fearless Activists: How Colin Kaepernick, Eric Reid, Kenny Stills, and Fellow Athletes Stood Up to the NFL and President Trump cannot fathom the notion that the American people would grow weary of being forced to endure captive-audience lectures on race when all they wanted to do was watch a football game.
Here’s a riveting excerpt from Freeman’s book:
“No, the Trump era isn’t solely about white versus black. It’s about white – or Trump’s version of it – versus almost every other race and religious belief, or part of the country that doesn’t fit what he thinks of as American.
“All of this is the core story of football’s fearless fighters … This [is] an old problem of race and class that goes back to the origins of this nation, which started with the beginning of the near eradication of Native Americans.”
Race, class, historical grievance: This is the very stuff of cultural Marxism. It is what the NFL is eager to foist on its fans, whether they like it or not. And it very much realizes that the vast majority of fans do not like it. That doesn’t matter. The platform is far too valuable not to be repurposed to serve a loaded agenda.
As Liberty Nation News reported on Feb. 9, the day a record-breaking 127.7 million Americans watched Super Bowl LIX, the league took its racial obsessiveness to bizarre and deeply jarring levels, even portraying white coaches as a manifestation of oppressive leadership types.
Colin Kaepernick was just one vehicle for this intentionally corrosive agenda. His lemon has now been squeezed. But the social engineering will go on. The only way to truly put an end to the NFL’s bitter race-baiting is for all those millions of fans to join the ever-growing ranks of their exasperated fellow Americans and stop giving their money and time to people who despise them.
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