On Monday, retired NFL star Burgess Owens was declared the winner of Utah's fourth congressional district after incumbent Congressman Ben McAdams (D) conceded, but the liberal sport media wasted no time in characterizing him as a right-winger who criticizes Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick.
A 10-year NFL veteran, the 69-year-old Owens edged McAdams by less than one percent of the vote.
Owens has already getting criticized by Yahoo Sports writer Jason Owens for his ties to Donald Trump and Q-Anon. However, Burgess Owens spokesman Jesse Ranney denied to the Associated Press that Owens has any affinity for QAnon.
Kaepernick is widely viewed as a hero to the left-stream media like Yahoo, which says "Owens made criticizing Kaepernick a central theme of his campaign." Jason Owens wrote:
On his campaign site, Owens is described as "as a cultural counterweight to the hatred that former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has spewed for the last few years" and "an outspoken black conservative Republican."
Yahoo also shamed Burgess Owens for making multiple appearances on Fox News to criticize Kaepernick (who was not described as outspoken), whom he calls “an anti-American leftist.”
Owens also did an interview with "extreme right-wing outlet Breitbart News," urging people to be more like the late basketball player Kobe Bryant than Kaepernick.
Jason Owens said the former 49ers quarterback Kaepernick is ostracized by right-wingers because he protested police brutality and racial injustice during the national anthem during the 2016 NFL season.
On USA Today's website, Brent Schrotenboer said Owens has been "harshly critical" of player protests in sports. The harsh, anti-American criticisms of these social justice warriors is not addressed by Schrotenboer.
Schrotenboer added Owens had been endorsed by President Donald Trump, and the freshman congressman-elect has called Black Lives Matter a “Marxist” organization that is “against God, they hate the family unit, the nuclear family, and they hate capitalism.”
This followed Owens' appearances on Fox channels comparing "NFL player protests to Americans being bombed at Pearl Harbor." That was a gross mischaracterization of what Owens actually said, in 2017: “Pearl Harbor, when they attacked us, the American people were sleeping. I remember the enemy saying, 'We fear we’ve woken a sleeping giant.' Well when they start attacking our flag the way they have and our culture, they have woken a sleeping giant.“
Owens was painted as an infidel to the Left, for making statements like this one included in Schrotenboer's story: "We're being assaulted by the left. And we need to understand who they are. They're globalists. And they're leftist globalists. The worst thing that can happen to our country is to let them get away with it and not understand what their long game is. It’s not American."
Schrotenboer also said Rep. McAdams called on Owens to condemn the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon, but he didn't mention that the campaign denied any support for QAnon.
McAdams was also quoted about his concern that “extreme elements of both political parties interfere with our ability to find agreement on issues that matter to hard-working families. I fear deliberate misinformation is too often unchecked and seen as truth in our society. This is a time for all of us to be engaged in civic affairs and to sort from fact from fiction the best we can.”
Though USA Today tried to smear Owens with a false tie to QAnon, McAdams was not mentioned in conjunction with any controversial groups supported by his party, and the story doesn't mention the radical, violent groups Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Antifa.
The Guardian's Bryan Armen Graham first tried to tie Owens to QAnon, in a sub-headline, before burying the campaign's denial of support for the group. Citing a Salon story, Graham also defended BLM from Owens' attacks, claiming it is "a decentralized movement and does not have official policies."
Over at The Heritage Foundation, they outlined Owens's charges against BLM.
