11.19.24 – OutKick
“The Era of Woke Sports Is Dead”
By Clay Travis
Excerpts from this article:
https://www.outkick.com/sports/era-woke-sports-dead-clay-travis
In the summer of 2016, before an otherwise meaningless preseason game, San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, heralding the birth of the woke sports era.
On Saturday [11.16.24] and Sunday [11.17.24], that era, mercifully, came to an end when first the UFC fighter Jon Jones and later white and black players on the Detroit Lions, the Tennessee Titans and the Las Vegas Raiders all celebrated on the football field with their own versions of the Donald Trump YMCA dance.
It speaks to Trump's innate marketing gifts that he managed to design a new, somehow more popular dance to the YMCA song that replaced the gay singers with the subtle fist pump movements and light swivel of a 78-year-old man.
In the space of eight years, the NFL, America's foremost sports obsession, went from woke sports to Trump sports, the return of an era when the country is celebrated in joyful ways as opposed to attacked for its supposed racial failings and toxic masculinity.
Already some are losing their minds at the Trump dance celebrations, demanding punishments from the NFL; but the woke lunatics demanding punishments have been defeated...
The best man or woman wins in sports, not the best man pretending to be a woman...
WOKE MOVEMENT STARTED WITH KAEPERNICK
The 2016 Kaepernick kneeling moment, which reverberated across the sports and political world, set loose a cavalcade of immediate reactions, both pro and con; but the legacy of his kneeling came to extend far past Kaepernick himself – it marked the beginning of the woke sports era, a time when sports, which for many had been a bastion and refuge from politics, became the very essence of politics itself.
…But, of course, the woke sports era extended into COVID and found its peak cultural ascendence during the BLM protests in the wake of George Floyd's death…
…The woke mind virus completely and totally took over sports…
Before long, all criticism of any black quarterback was seen as racism…
WOKE SPORTS MEDIA BECAME TOO FAR LEFT
…Kaepernick's kneeling became inextricably intertwined with the COVID era as well, leading to several years of teams, leagues, and sports media mostly lighting themselves on fire and destroying their audience in the process.
The NBA, for instance, has a fraction of the audience it had before Kaepernick kneeled, consistently setting new ratings lows year after year (even if most in the sports media won't cover the league's collapse).
Indeed, so far this season, the NBA is setting new ratings lows yet again.
…Identity politics, by the fall of 2020 (as Joe Biden ran for president against Donald Trump) appeared to have won; race-baiters notched huge contract.
Twitter [before Elon bought it] curtailed the sharing of criticisms of school shutdowns and masking.
Athletes who refused to get the COVID shot were publicly shamed by sports media as infidels.
Most sports media demanded that no games be played and that all sports be shut down.
…So football itself, that aggressive sport played by men, came under attack.
…Around that time, when they tried to tell us all that Sarah Fuller [female kicker -- first to play in SEC ballgame] was a hero and made you wear masks to football games outdoors, I went into a Target store to buy football cards for my then 10-year-old son.
As we walked into the store, he pointed to the shirts being sold in the store, a bevy of them that said, "Girl Power," on them in a variety of shapes and colors.
…my 10-year-old noticed.
He and his friends were being raised in a very different era [wokism] than the one you and I grew up in…
“Dad," he said, "why do girls get shirts like that? How come there are no shirts that say, 'Boy Power'?"
The comment gave me pause.
Of course he was right, a boy power shirt wouldn't ever be sold by Target.
…But it struck me, one might even say it “woke” me up.
It took me a while to realize it, but the left-wing attacks on white men weren't enough.
ALL men would become their targets, white, black, Asian and Hispanic.
And guess who most sports fans are?
Dudes.
White, black, Asian, and Hispanic.
We may live in different parts of the country; and we may have different incomes; but sports unites men like nothing else.
Put a group of dudes of different races and ethnicities on a deserted island; and before long, they'd all be sitting around talking about their favorite wide receivers from the 1990's.
Most men, deep down, are pretty similar.
Sports is our connective tissue, the fabric that unites us.
I'm not deriding women's sports fans; there are many.
But men, innately talk sports. It's in our DNA.
As the Kaepernick era tookover sports and COVID threatened to shut down sports, something interesting began to happen.
OutKick‘s daily audience (on radio, TV, and the web) began to skyrocket – and all I [Clay Travis] was saying was this: “Sports are good; we should play them during COVID; and we can do so safely.“
[Clay Travis and Buck Sexton broadcast daily on Outkick.]
…When I had the audacity to say kids shouldn't have to wear masks, I was included, accidentally, on an email thread of sportswriters ridiculing me for daring to speak out against kids wearing masks.
But a counter revolution was under way. I could feel it.
THE COUNTER REVOLUTION
Young men of all races were done with the Woke Era.
They were becoming aware of how much they'd been lied to (about what they were being required to say to stay in good standing with the left):
-- that boys were actually girls
-- that biology wasn't real
At some point, the cult goes too far for most members of the cult.
WOKE-MIND VIRUS TOOK OVER
Yes, Joe Biden still rode this woke mental illness to a 2020 victory; but the seeds of woke sports' demise were already present in the result.
Something very interesting happened in 2020, even if most didn't take note of it.
Then, Donald Trump…increased his support among all races.
Joe Biden didn't win because of minorities [in 2020]; he won because of woke suburban WHITE college grads.
It turned out that while many of the high-profile faces of the woke sports movement were black, the true supporters of woke sports were white, college-educated professionals.
The richest and whitest people in America were actually…the wokest.
SUMMER OF 2022
The undercurrent of support was building there in 2020; but in the summer of 2022, it stepped into public view.
That summer in Atlanta, Georgia, a man pretending to be a woman named Lia Thomas dived into a swimming pool and won a “women's” NCAA swimming championship.
Video of “his” victory in women's sports went mega-viral; and a brave women's swimmer named Riley Gaines (whom we are proud to employ at Outkick today) -- had had enough.
She [Riley Gaines] had to turn down dental school and begin to speak out about what men were doing to women's sports.
Enough, at long last, was enough.
While Lia Thomas tried to label “himself” the Jackie Robinson of trans sports, most reasonable Americans saw his win for what it was -- the logical extension of woke sports, a moment when inclusion became exclusion.
When Lia Thomas dived into the pool that day, “he set loose a small ripple that would become a red Trump tsunami in the fall of 2024.
But that was still to come.
OUTKICK SAYS IT LIKE IT IS
…At OutKick, we had a crazy idea; biology was real.
And it turned out almost all sports fans agreed with me.
Our OutKick audience continued to swell.
But the red tsunami I predicted didn't show up in 2022 yet; it was too soon.
Yes, the House flipped; but the Senate stayed in Democrat control.
Yet again, however, the ripples of the red tsunami were present.
…And, interestingly, Joe Biden took the lack of a red wave as a good sign.
Rather than step down and allow Democrats to pick a new nominee, he announced he would run again.
FANS GREW TIRED OF THE ONE-SIDED WOKE CULT
Woke sports continued its march.
OutKick was regularly attacked for being racist and sexist.
The oppressive Olympics still had its stalwarts.
The NFL was sued for racism based on its coaching hires.
Most in the sports media refused to acknowledge men shouldn't be able to win women's sports.
But all those young men -- they were turning off traditional television; and they were turning on male focused podcasts on all fronts.
They left behind the new woke scolds and sought out new voices.
From Andrew Tate to Jordan Petersen, Joe Rogan to Ben Shapiro, young men were seeking answers to why they were seen as the problem by everyone?
With Trump out of office, men of all races were attacked by the left. If you were male, you were the problem.
But young men were baffled by this.
How was it that they could be so young, have so little power, and yet be blamed for everything that was going wrong in the world?
Back to my own sons and their friends, whom I would find listening to right-wing podcasts or YouTube channels.
I asked them what they and their friends liked, for instance, about Andrew Tate.
"Mostly," said one of my sons, "the fact that he just tells us to quit whining and do more push-ups."
I thought about this when I saw Lamar Jackson modeling a new T-shirt, "No one cares," it said. "Work harder."
Blamed for everything wrong in society, this youngest generation of boys and men in America had come to embrace a profound and individualistic self-reliance.
If everyone is convinced you're the problem, you stop expecting them to save you and try to find out how to save yourself.
That's what they were all doing, searching for life meaning's online [during COVID], as we shut down their schools, shut down their teams, and left them alone in their homes.
…it's a unique era of self-exploration, a time for defining ones-self and embracing a profoundly unapologetic opinion – there's nothing wrong with being a man.
White, black, Asian, and Hispanic, the boys and young men of America were all coming to the same conclusion: “Masculinity isn't toxic; despite all the lectures, most of us haven't done anything we should have to apologize for.“
And, make no mistake, woke culture is one long apology.
…What's more rebellious than deciding you haven't done anything at all wrong when everyone is telling you that you have?
This further crystallized for me when one of my friend's sons came home from sixth grade.
He complained about one of the lessons they were being taught (in Tennessee public school) about how white men were evil and were the cause of all the world's problems.
"How can I be evil Mr. Clay," he asked me one day, "when my mom doesn't even let me pick what to eat for dinner?"
He laughed when he said it, but the message he and other young boys were getting all over the country was clear: “You are the problem.”
And all of this angst, all of this uncertainty, played out for all these young men in an era when suddenly the adults in their lives [during COVID] shut down their schools and wouldn't let them play sports.
I fought harder for schools to open than I have for anything in my career because every grown man knows tons of young kids who only stayed in school and kept themselves on the straight and narrow because of sports!
How many of you reading this right now owe much of your success in life to a coach who took the time to help guide you, to a teacher or religious leader who took his time to teach you what it was to be a man?
Most of you, I'd wager.
Because make no mistake, it wasn't just a feminized society telling young men they didn't matter.
It was a host of their political leaders on a broad level and, sadly, an awful lot of men who still don't understand that the most powerful thing any man can actually do is raise boys to be men.
Being a great dad? That's what real hard work is.
Many of the young men out there have decided they can only rely on themselves because the men who would otherwise raise them are absent from their lives.
Boys need men at home; women can't be both mom and dad.
(By the way, every time I write or say this I get inundated with emails from women saying they are single parents and their boys don't need fathers.)
My comments:
I appreciate the fact that you are doing both jobs, and some of you will do both jobs well; but the data doesn't lie.
Boys, far more than girls, suffer immensely when men aren't present in their lives.
We need many more, better dads. And granddads and uncles. Only men ultimately can save men.
Imagine all this was happening, a generation of white, black, Asian, and Hispanic boys that have been failed by our society but who are suddenly moving from boys to men.
And they're voting for the first time.
And who do they trust?
The men they've found online to raise them.
And those men are overwhelmingly Trump supporters.
In Trump, they've found the unapologetic and masculine figure they'd been seeking for most of their lives.
YOUNG MEN SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS HELPED END WOKE VIRUS
It isn't a coincidence that he's called Daddy Trump by many of them; he's their avatar of masculinity…
…he sees and hears them, tells them that they don't have to apologize for who they are or how they feel, or for being men.
…he even says it's good to be a man!
If Trump had thought of it, he'd sell them all red boy power T-shirts. (And hats. And probably anything else he could brand, too).
These young men … know when they're being lied to because they've been lied to for years [about COVID].
We took sports from them.
We took prom from them.
We took graduation from them.
We made them wear masks while they played sports OUTSIDE!
We told them they might die from a virus less dangerous to them than the common cold.
And we didn't let them say goodbye in person when their grandpa died.
Would you trust the authority figures that did that to you?
I wouldn't.
… imagine that you were sitting in your house on July 13, 2024, killing time online on a summer Saturday as you often do.
And suddenly your phone blew up with a brand new viral video – Donald Trump, the alpha of Generation Alpha was on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, when someone tried to kill him.
Trump … had just been shot at.
Trump, the paragon of all evil according to the people [e.g., Fauci and others who took your freedom away for years because of COVID regulations] -- “Hitler” himself, had just been buzzed by an assassin's bullet, such that his ear was actually clipped!
He was there hidden behind the podium.
You didn't know if he was dead or alive.
Your heart pounded as you watched the viral video play out.
Then, suddenly, he rose.
Blood poured down his face.
Men rushed to cover him, begged him to hide, to stay safe, to avoid the potential danger around him.
In that moment, what did Trump do?
He stood, faced the cameras, and screamed, "Fight, fight, fight!"
…A quarter inch from death and Trump rose and risked it all to tell you he would fight for you to the point of death.
And that he wasn't scared of death and that being a man was actually something to be proud of.
…All those kids who had been lied to [about COVID] for their entire lives saw Trump rise and scream that he would fight.
And the young men across America decided right then and there that they had found their champion, the man who would tell them that being male was okay.
They might not know his political opinions or his tax and trade policy; but they knew, in that one instant, that everything they'd been told about him was wrong.
He was their fighter.
And they voted for him in record numbers.
Putting him back in the White House.
YOUNG MEN NOW CELEBRATING VICTORY
And leading athletes, overwhelmingly young men themselves, back on the field of play to celebrate his election with a viral twist of their own, the Trump dance.
America, it turned out, wasn't a place of oppression and evil ruined by men.
It turned out, it was a place of opportunity, bravery, joy, and fun.
It was a place, after all, where men could be men.
And where better for men to be men than on fields of gridiron combat and on octagons covered in blood -- the place where men have measured themselves for generations, where wins and losses reign supreme.
Yes, the Trump dance is joyful and spreading like wildfire; but look beneath the surface and the message is clear…
it's saying, "I'm not apologizing any more for being a man. Go Trump!"
And with that athlete gesture from New York City to San Francisco, Detroit to Nashville, and all points in between, the message is loud, clear, and strident.
Say it with me: “Woke sports is over; the Kaepernick era is dead; at long last, it's Daddy Trump time.”
“RIP woke sports.”
Trump and the young male athletes who love him killed you [wokism] -- once and for all.