With declining viewership recorded in the season restarts of both the National Basketball League and the National Football League during the coronavirus pandemic, might sports fans tired of athletes pushing social activism simply select another sporting league altogether?
Former National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch said the Ultimate Fighting Championship, run by President Trump’s ally Dana White and featured in prime-time spots on ESPN, is the perfect sports vehicle to draw fans frustrated with the top sporting leagues’ new emphasis on social justice causes.
“UFC may be our savior. It really may be,” Loesch said on The Dana Show on the First network. “UFC may be stepping into the spot.”
Several major fighters in the UFC, including former interim UFC Welterweight Champion Colby Covington, have been vocal supporters of Trump, and the president took in the UFC 244 card at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 3, 2019.
Loesch disparaged media figures who have made a point of “injecting politics into sports” following then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem in 2016 to protest police brutality and racial inequality.
“Our place of refuge, untouched by Washington, now completely overrun by annoying policy disputes,” Loesch said. “I really do think that the absence of sports during this lockdown, and of course, obviously, the effort to politicize everything in sports even before this ever began, but I really believe the absence of it is a huge contributor to this binary tribalism that we see because we don’t have any distractions. We don’t have anything to bring us together to unify us, so we’re able to spend all this undiluted time focusing on everything that makes us different.”
Loesch noted that the ancient Romans filled the Colosseum with water and fought gladiator-style battles in an effort to “distract the masses” from their daily anxieties and that the return of sports could have filled that role during the presidency if the sporting leagues had not become so politicized. She bemoaned the effect that mixing politics and sports has had on the average sports fan, such as her husband, who she said has stopped watching altogether.
“When you see how unexcited people are about sports,” Loesch said. “When I have people in my family who would never miss a football game, my husband and I, I can’t tell you how many anniversary dinners we would sit at white tablecloth-covered tables in fancy restaurants, and we’d be obsessed with refreshing the MLB app because it was ‘Red October,’ and now we just — so now that the shire’s been scoured, where is our national refuge? Million-dollar question.”
