Just Call It The NFAL – No First Amendment League

If you haven’t heard about the latest Woke NFL controversy, this one involving longtime coaching veteran and former player Jack Del Rio, prepare to be infuriated.

Del Rio is in hot water and his future in the league is in jeopardy because he offered an opinion perhaps half the country shares. Seriously. Del Rio dared to suggest that the hundreds of George Floyd riots across the country in which billions of dollars in property damage was done and scores of lives were lost in the summer of 2020 might have been more consequential than what happened on Jan. 6 of 2021.

And he dared to suggest it during a week when Democrats in Washington were busily attempting to make hay of January 6 in a vain attempt to salvage their disastrous public opinion polling.

No stepping on the narrative is allowed. Particularly given that Del Rio coaches on the staff of the Washington Redsk…er, Commanders, who are busily jumping through woke hoops in trying to get corporate welfare from Democrat-run local governments for a new stadium.

First came his public apology. Then came the $100,000 fine. And now, Jack Del Rio’s Twitter account has been deleted.

Del Rio’s exit from the social media platform caps a rocky week for the Washington Commanders’ defensive coordinator that began with a tweet, followed by comments to reporters, in which he compared the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to the 2020 racial justice protests.

“People’s livelihoods are being destroyed, businesses are being burned down – no problem. And then we have a dust-up at the Capitol, nothing burned down – and we’re gonna make that a major deal?” Del Rio told reporters after a Wednesday practice.

Del Rio’s comments were disavowed by head coach Ron Rivera. In a statement released Friday, Rivera said he had fined Del Rio $100,000 and would donate the sum to the U.S. Capitol Police Memorial Fund.

“His comments do not reflect the organization’s views and are extremely hurtful to our great community here in the DMV,” Rivera wrote, using a regional acronym for the metropolitan area around Washington, D.C.

So how out of line is Del Rio?

Before we even get there, let’s remember that it’s a complete abuse of the man’s free speech rights that he has to suffer a public rebuke from his employer and be fined $100,000 for having an opinion which is not illegal in any way.

But that’s the NFL these days. Look what happened to Jon Gruden for having opinions while he wasn’t even in the league which came out later when he was coaching. And look what happened to Drew Brees when he dared to defend the American flag his grandfathers had fought for in World War II.

The fact of the matter is there are a whole lot of Americans who share Del Rio’s opinion that January 6 was widely overblown as some watershed moment in American history, and in fact was less of a problem than those George Floyd riots were. CBS News released a poll on the eve of last Thursday’s dud of a prime-time Jan. 6 Committee hearing in which 30 percent of the respondents, most of them Republicans, said they didn’t even think it was important to find out what happened during that protest.

And it’s a poorly-worded question to begin with, because there are a whole lot of Americans who agree with Del Rio but would be in the 70 percent because they’re suspicious that Jan. 6 was a Reichstag Fire of sorts. The fact that it seems like the Capitol had a strange deficit of security that day, which we now know came from decisions Nancy Pelosi made, is one factor which would drive suspicions. The evidence of possible agents provocateur, including a man named Ray Epps who appears to be a federal informant and was never charged with anything despite being caught on tape exhorting people to go into the Capitol, is another factor.

You can be interested in knowing exactly what happened on Jan. 6 without believing the Democrats’ narrative that Donald Trump was trying to foment an insurrection with hundreds of unarmed plumbers and real estate agents. So the CBS poll is largely bogus.

And even then it shows Jack Del Rio is not out of the American mainstream for thinking the power elite in this country have intentionally blown the event out of proportion for political gain.

Naturally, there is no polling on that question. Wonder why.

All this is, of course, of a piece with our current woke constrictions on free speech for those who ply their trade in captive institutions like the NFL, corporate media, Hollywood and academia. You’re not allowed to have or express an opinion about Jan. 6, about the transgender mob, about George Floyd or Black Lives Matter or even about Ukraine or “climate change” without being branded a kook, an insurrectionist or a bigot.

With such strict compliance demanded at all times, you would think these institutions would be running at maximum efficiency, wouldn’t you? To command such discipline?

Except they aren’t. Each one of them is a hollow shell of what it was when it was built to service a need of the American public. They’re all in decline.

But we can say one thing – the Washington Commanders turns out to be an appropriate name, because it’s a top-down, totalitarian organization. Perhaps Commissars is a bit more appropriate.

And if Del Rio’s career as a pro coach is over, he can at least take some comfort in the fact he’s being persecuted for a legitimate opinion and not that he failed at his job.