Another off-the-rails left-winger has landed at Deadspin, the destination for angry, race-baiting sports media types. Mike Freeman joined a staff of bomb throwers that already includes Carron J. Phillips, Rob Parker, Chuck Modiano and others and quickly blamed NFL COVID-19 outbreaks on President Donald Trump.
President Trump has been dictating terms to the NFL since slamming Colin Kaepernick a few years ago and he's doing it again with COVID-19, writes Freeman, formerly with Bleacher Report, the New York Times, Washington Post and CBS Sports. Author of the book "Football's Fearless Activists", Freeman says Trump has "dragged the country into an unending sewer system of white nationalism, corruption, and infectious disease."
As if America-loving sports fans are mindless idiots who need a president to tell them to get upset with radical football activists, Freeman suggests it was President Trump who divided the nation in 2017 when he demanded NFL owners fire SOBs who kneel during the national anthem. Trump apparently told Dallas owner Jerry Jones and New England owner Robert Kraft that "game ops policy" requires NFL players to stand for the anthem and that opposing anthem protests was a winning issue for him, prompting this race baiting charge by Freeman:
"Trump was doing what he’s excellent at, the only thing he’s excellent at, which is dividing people. In this case it was a Trump daily double bonus. He could use a mostly Black player base as punching bags to his followers."
Freeman also finds it difficult to believe Trump knows the meaning of “ops”, unless the policy was "written in comic book form and had naked ladies in it." His phone calls to Kraft and Jones weren’t just the neurons "in Trump’s twitchy lizard brain misfiring," either. It was an effort to corral the two most powerful owners in the NFL, Freeman alleges.
This year the NFL did with the pandemic what it had previously done with Kaepernick: allow the "more extremist elements to guide the NFL away from the proper course of action with Trump acting as a propeller. Once Kaepernick was proven right (as was inevitable) the NFL had to reverse itself and acknowledge that Kaepernick was correct all along."
Led again by Trump's ignorance, the NFL once more allowed "extreme, ugly parts of itself" to call the shots. Freeman cites his new colleague, Phillips, who accused Trump of bullying the league into a "lame plague response."
Unnamed sources say many NFL owners share Trump's beliefs that the virus isn’t a big deal, won’t kill healthy players and that its impact on the nation is exaggerated by media. Freeman says:
"So the consideration of a bubble or postponing the season was never truly in play because many NFL owners (not all) believed as their boy Trump did (publicly at least) that COVID-19 wasn’t a legit threat."
Without Trump's negative influence, the more "progressive" NBA regarded COVID-19 a real threat, valued its players as "true partners" and opted to finish its season in the Florida bubble.
By allowing Trump to influence them, many NFL teams also mistakenly risked the spread of COVID-19 outbreaks by allowing fans in their stadiums, Freeman contends.
Allen Sills, the NFL’s chief medical officer, held a media conference call this week and acknowledged a significant increase in infections in some of the communities where teams are located. Nonetheless, owners continue to allow fans into "COVID-likes-this stadiums."
Freeman sums up by forwarding a simple equation to explain how NFL owners are weak, mind-numbed robots for Trump: "Many of the NFL owners are Trump … and Trump is many of the NFL owners."
