The NFL Should Have Never Called Off the Bengals/Bills Game: Woke values are attacking the core of American lifestyles

You gotta know what kind of fight we are fighting and how the enemy is fighting it. I said it the night of the big football game that the NFL should have never called off the event during the first quarter when Damar Hamlin had a heart attack on the field after a tackle made. The Cincinnati Bengals game with the Buffalo Bills was an event of big consequences; both teams were fighting for a top seed in the upcoming playoffs and are two of the best teams in the NFL. I wasn’t at that particular game, but I knew a lot of people who were, and I know they looked forward to it all weekend and were prepared to spend many thousands of dollars to enjoy it. But after Bill’s safety, Hamlin made a big hit; he collapsed on the field unconscious and it looked very scary. It turned out to be a heart attack, and CPR was performed on him in the middle of the Cincinnati stadium, with more than 70,000 people on hand watching and millions more seeing it on live television. After some time went on and they could remove the player from the field, the NFL called the game off, astonishingly, and the night was over as far as football, Monday Night Football at that. I thought it was a terrible decision by the NFL, a terribly woke one. It wasn’t a decision that would help Damar Hamlin, and it would ruin the playoff picture for many teams. The NFL would end up canceling the game for the year, which makes it terrible for all the teams competing because now, suddenly, the two best teams are going into the playoffs playing one less game for the year. That’s not fair to anybody. 

Obviously, the NFL is sensitive to all the attacks on them by woke elements of society, that the sport is too violent, that it’s a gladiator sport that exploits young people for the entertainment of everyone else. The pressure from pressure groups regarding concussion protocols is behind just about everything the NFL does these days, but everyone must understand that those concerns are not about safety. They are exploited that way, but their intent is just to attack another element of American society by trying to change the values we have for it. Such as, in this Bengals/Bills game, one deadly injury is suddenly bigger than the game itself and the playoffs and all the fans in the stands cheering them on. By the modern woke rules of anti-American sentiment, like many things are poised against American activities in business and entertainment, safety is the new club to ruin our country disguised as helpful but maliciously introduced to freeze unknowing executives into satisfying radical elements of society toward compliance. The NFL executives knew that if they played the game after removing Hamlin, the media would have a field day of criticism, which they have experienced several times this past season, especially regarding the Miami Dolphins quarterback who passed out frighteningly, essentially being knocked out for the season. Yes, football is a violent sport; everyone knows that going in. The players get paid a lot of money because of that risk to their lives and health, and fans know what they are watching. But the pressure groups are trying to change that, and the result is bad press for the NFL as a corporate product, and as we all know by now, the attacks against America have been to erode away the values of our corporations, especially in our entertainment culture. 

The result was sickening. I’ve been a first responder for the last three decades and have seen more than a fair share of terrible things happening to people, just as scary as Damar Hamlin experienced. The NFL has thousands of employees who are on a very public stage all the time. Statistically, there will always be strange things that happen, such as 24-year-old kids who have heart attacks that shouldn’t happen to anybody under 50. We will likely learn that the Covid shot the NFL forced on many of the young players has increased their risk of these kinds of things, and for liability reasons, the NFL is very sensitive to their blame for harming the health of so many young people. So they overplayed their hand. Then again, the pressure to force players to take the Covid shot came from the same radical, anti-American elements who were behind the government push and were behind pushing for players not to stand for the National Anthem. Watching the players stand around Damar Hamlin was embarrassing; these were young people raised in a coddled society by all these woke public school elements who were visibly shaken by the experience. And they shouldn’t have been. Bad things happen, and part of the game of football is managing bad things to a successful conclusion, whether inclement weather, physical injury or the pressure of rivalries. To see all these big, tough, young people crying on the field over a heart attack victim was very embarrassing, then to hear the media report that condition as a value. The players should be stoically valiant and supportive of each other through strength. Instead, weakness, sadness, and even panic were featured in the news coverage and looked bad to an equally sensitive audience. Because of the pressure groups, the NFL had to send the world a message that their individual players were bigger than the game, and they put safety and security as the number one priority, so they called off the game.

Even worse, we are dealing with entertainment unions here, and you know what I say about those, which is true. All labor unions are communist organizations, as envisioned by Karl Marx. They are anti-American in their design and are meant to threaten work stoppages to leverage shared protections for workers, which they exploit as ground troops in a different kind of war, in this case, against capitalism and the economy of America. And the labor union has its members always poised against management, and the concussion protocols have forced the NFL to really soften the game to satisfy these radical leftist elements. On camera, we have seen violent conditions before, especially compound fractures. I remember a Super Bowl in which the Bengals were in, where a grotesque injury occurred. The Super Bowl didn’t stop playing. They carted the guy off the field and resumed play as they should have. But over the years, the players union has softened up its members to align with the big leftist radicals in the media who are fully intent on changing the way Americans value things; it’s just another approach to the ESG madness. And for the first time that I can remember, especially regarding such a big game, the NFL caved to those radical elements and called off a game, which set a dangerous precedent. American football is not like the European soccer game; part of the appeal is toughness and fighting through adversity, even fear. And those are the very elements that are attacking the NFL product, through the players union, through liberal media, through regulations that force mandated vaccines that feature safety and security over victory and accomplishment. And for that reason alone, the NFL should have never called off that football game. Because the battle is bigger than the people involved, and when injuries happen, take care of those people the best you can. But the show, as is a motto in America on many fronts, must go on, always.

Rich Hoffman