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‘Tiresome’: Old story of MAGA hat in locker dragged out to vilify ‘white privileged’ Tom Brady ahead of Super Bowl

February 4, 2021 | | Print Article

As another example of how the sports writing industry has become an obsessively far-left-agenda-driven profession, a USA Today sports columnist in the run-up to the Super Bowl has accused Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady of white privilege merely because of his friendship or former friendship with President Donald Trump in a piece headlined “Tom Brady has gotten an undeserved pass for his past support of Donald Trump.”

“The Make America Great Again hat in his locker, the flippant endorsement of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Only when those ties became inconvenient did Brady decide he wanted to ‘stick to sports,’ and that he preferred to be a beacon of positivity rather than delve into society’s thorny ills. How mighty white of him,” Nancy Armour wrote about the National Football League superstar.

“Brady’s ability to enter and exit the debate at his choosing, to shield himself from accountability, is the height of white privilege. As this country grapples with the far reaches of systemic racism, look no further than Brady, for whom the expectations, and allowances granted, will always be different,” she added.

Traditionally, guilt by association was never part of the American tradition. Keeping your political views to yourself if you so desire is (or was) also part of the social contract, including keeping ideology out of the locker room.

The sports media is still experiencing something perhaps along the lines of a nervous breakdown over a September 2015 incident when a MAGA hat was spotted in the locker of the then-New England Patriots QB. Brady, who was a golfing buddy of Trump, said at the time that team owner Robert Kraft, also a Trump friend, was the go-between for the hat transfer.

Pro athletes get swag of all kinds without endorsing same. Moreover, Brady, who is typically very guarded in his public statements, has distanced himself from Trump, steered clear of overt political comments contrary to the premise of the article, and even declined to go the White House with the Pats when they celebrated their 2018 Super Bowl championship with the president.

“Even Brady’s aversion to talking about politics or current events is itself a form of privilege,” Armour insisted, however.

Brady and supermodel wife Gisele Bundchen navigate in elite celebrity circles where former entertainment celebrity Trump is now a pariah. As a practical matter, therefore, both personally and professionally, “social distancing” from Trump may be understandable, if not required

Among other things, Armour went on to approvingly cite NFL Hall of Famer and FS1 host Shannon Sharpe’s assertion that LeBron James or another prominent black athlete could never get away with saying that “Minister Farrakhan is just my friend.”

James and virtually the entire NBA is, however, getting away with bashing America and its former president while remaining silent, for revenue reasons, over China’s rampant human rights violations.

“You can be friends with people with different political opinions than you, and it’s not your responsibility to take ownership of their opinions,” Outkick’s Clay Travis observed in reacting to this article published in what he described as a “dying newspaper” with no audience.

“Where people are responsible for the opinions of others is in a totalitarian dictatorship where only one opinion is allowed…that’s what the sports media wants. They want a world where only one opinion is allowed. They praise far-left-wing opinions; they criticize anything other than those opinions.”

Travis and others have generally theorized that the reason the sports media has gone so far left is because its practitioners have realized at some level that their life’s work in covering games and players is pretty meaningless.

Although the USA Today article won Twitter applause from identity politics fans, others thought differently. Here is a sample:

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Robert Jonathan
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