NFL’s Goodell Panders: If Only We’d Listened to Kaepernick Earlier!

Now that the world has gone Black Lives Matter crazy, the NFL’s Roger Goodell, always knowing where his bread is buttered, is doing his best to apologize for not treating Colin Kaepernick like the woke man-god that he obviously is. In an interview with YouTuber and former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho on Sunday, Goodell recited the line that players kneeling for the national anthem has nothing to do with the American flag.

“If you were to publicly express your remorse, apologize to Kaepernick what would you say?” asked Acho.

“Well, the first thing I’d say is I wish we had listened earlier, Kaep, to what you were kneeling about and what you were trying to bring attention to,” Goodell replied like a good little boy. “We had invited him in several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue. I wish we had the benefit of that, we never did. We would have benefited from that, absolutely.”

Acho brought up the criticism Kaepernick and others have received from football viewers and conservatives, and asked Goodell what he thought about critics who still think that kneeling for the anthem is a slight against America.

“Sometimes,” Acho said, “because I’ve known for years now that the peaceful protests during the national anthem — it was never about the flag — to the point where I just want to rip out my hair sometimes and say ‘it’s not about the flag.’ If you were to be able to relay that message what would you say? Like to people who still think it’s about the flag, what would you tell them?”

“It is not about the flag,” Goodell dutifully echoed. “The message here that what our players are doing is being mischaracterized. These are not people who are unpatriotic. They’re not disloyal. They’re not against our military. In fact, many of those guys were in the military and they’re a military family. What they were trying to do is exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed, and that misrepresentation of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me.”

Sigh.

The guy’s got to say what he’s got to say, we suppose. But, in a way, that’s exactly the problem. The window of acceptable opinion on this subject is growing narrower by the day. It’s “express the correct thoughts or kiss your job goodbye.” These ideas are only winning because…they are the only ones deemed palatable for the mainstream.

But Trump and the Republicans are the fascists. Cool.