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 and Sunday, 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. Their left-wing oppression Olympics identity politics worldview was always incompatible with the overriding ethos of sport — the ultimate meritocracy. The best man or woman wins in sports, not the best man pretending to be a woman. Athletes, coaches, and owners, who overwhelmingly support capitalism and individual excellence finally spoke out loudly enough to silence the small minority of athletes and coaches — the LeBron James’s, Greg Popovich’s and Steve Kerr’s among them — who had decided to make left wing sports their hallmark.
