Every last one one them. Whether their skin is light or dark. And not because they “hate America,” but because they love it… They love it enough to make a public statement of protest about our White-Supremacist-In-Chief’s comments yesterday at a “rally” in Alabama that was way more Klan than “Campaign.” The man whom white people calling themselves “christians” LOVE to support stood behind a podium and said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired. He’s fired!'” Followed by cheers…

Then, without any sense of irony, the most unpopular president in history promised that this action, taken by an NFL owner, would “make them the most popular person in the country.” “For a week,” he clarified. And then, like some shitty animal who feeds off the bloodthirsty cheers of a frenzied, white crowd, he went on to criticize the NFL for trying to make the game safer. You can see the total transcript of his remarks RIGHT HERE. He lamented how penalties for hitting people too hard is “ruining the game.”

“Because you know today if you hit too hard: 15 yards! Throw him out of the game! They had that last week. I watched for a couple of minutes. Two guys, just really, beautiful tackle. Boom, 15 yards! The referee gets on television, his wife is sitting at home, she’s so proud of him. They’re running the game! They’re ruining the game. That’s what they want to do. They want to hit. They want to hit! It is hurting the game.”

He did this a day after it was announced that Aaron Hernandez had one of the worst cased of C.T.E (Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease found in people who have multiple head injuries) that doctors had ever seen in a man his age. Aaron Hernandez, who killed someone else, and then ended up killing himself… A pattern which is not uncommon for football players and veterans who have had repeated brain trauma. Trump did this only a few days after a study showed that “kids who start playing tackle football before the age of 12 — whether or not they suffered concussions — are at much higher risk of developing behavioral and emotional troubles as adults.” But this is the America Trump is attempting to return to: The one where we didn’t worry about silly things like “traumatic brain injuries.” Though Trump did play tackle football as a child, so it’s possible some of his aggression and erratic behavior and insanity is due to too many head collisions and not enough helmet while his brain was still forming…

Trump’s real beef with the NFL is that they make the footballs to big for his tiny hands.

After attending a military academy for high school, he played sports while he was in college too… While he received four draft deferments for education. Then, after graduating from college, he miraculously developed “bone spurs” in his heels, which afforded him yet ANOTHER draft deferment. The man who criticized a gold star family. The man who said John McCain wasn’t a hero because he liked “people who weren’t captured.” The man who told Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating was his own “personal Vietnam.” THIS SAME MAN is angry about NFL players not showing enough respect to our country.

And now the president of the United States is calling for private citizens to be fired from their jobs for not being what he deems “patriotic” enough. A slime ball who had be forced into reading a script condemning nazis and white supremacist (just to recant his condemnation while he didn’t have a teleprompter), who noted that there were “many fine people” on the nazi side of the protests, has finally found something worth vehemently condemning… Something worth calling someone a “son of a bitch” over: Black NFL players peacefully taking a knee during the anthem to protest the needless killings and murders of People Of Color in this country. A white supremacist murdering a woman in the street in Charlottesville? Meh. Take a knee and say “Black Lives Matter?” SOMEONE FIRE THAT SON OF A BITCH!

What’s REALLY offensive to me is that there aren’t MORE people in the NFL taking a knee…

Listen. I have loved the NFL for a long time. I have played Fantasy Football for over a decade. I know the players by their faces. I know people’s injury histories. When I told my college buddies I planned to boycott the NFL this year, they convinced me to still do Fantasy with them. I admit my boycott is not as strong as others. It is a hard thing for me to give up… I love the game. But the NFL’s treatment of Colin Kaepernick has been atrocious. And so very soaked in racism. The league uses (mostly) black bodies to make white owners billions of dollars, and then it spits out those bodies a few years later with parts that barely work anymore, and C.T.E-ridden brains. In a study of 111 former players, 110 of them had some form of C.T.E. And now our cowardly, hypocritical, wouldn’t-know-patriotism-if-it-bit-him-on-his-spray-tanned-face, Racist-In-Chief finds stern words for someone daring to draw attention to the fact that BLACK LIVES MATTER, all while calling out the league for being to soft???

If you are an NFL player, at this point, how can you NOT take a knee during the National Anthem?

I get it… After watching Kaepernick get black-balled, people are probably afraid of risking their livelihood by taking a knee. This is why two things need to happen: 1) Everybody in the league needs to take a knee. All colors. All players. Do it as a sign of protest against the expendable bodies of athletes, against the continued taking of Black Lives like they don’t matter, and against this racism that Donald Trump embraces and stands for. And 2) We need to let them know we support them. The amount of people who are aware that our president is a racist, hypocritical shit bag is growing every day. We need to make our voices heard. There will always be the sorts of people who will cheer when a megalomaniac calls a black man a son of a bitch… But the players who are brave enough to take a stand need to know that those sorts of people are vastly outnumbered by those of us who support their act of protest. 

So share this post. Tweet to NFL players, and encourage them to take a knee. I started using the hashtag #EverybodyKneel, but if there is some better rallying cry, great (it seems that hashtag is going to be #TakeAKnee). Let the reality of our nation’s disapproval of Trump be so clear and loud that not even the handlers they have put in charge of only letting the president see positive stories about himself can keep it from him. Right now, things are bad enough that the ones who AREN’T protesting should be in the minority. EVERYBODY KNEEL!

If you value my writing, and this blog is the sort of thing that makes you think, “Yeah, that is TOTALLY worth a couple bucks a month,” GOOD NEWS! You can BECOME A PATRON. It super easy, and it will make both of us feel good about ourselves. If you want to leave a tip, or if you want to “boost” a particular post, you can DO THAT ON PAYPAL. Otherwise, follow me on Twitter and on Facebook to keep in touch.