National Football League defensive coordinator Jack Del Rio was fined $100,000 by the Washington Commanders last week after he dared to voice an unauthorized opinion regarding the partisan Jan. 6 show trial now underway on Capitol Hill.
Refusing to parrot tired Democrat-issued talking points, Del Rio made a fairly straightforward observation to reporters when he contrasted the media’s hysterical response to what happened at the Capitol building with their muted interest in covering the violent riots sparked by the death of George Floyd in 2020.
“I see the images on TV. 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 going to make that a major deal? I just think it’s kind of two standards,” Del Rio said. “If we apply the same standard and we’re going to be reasonable with each other, let’s have a discussion.”
Of course, reasonable discussion isn’t allowed in our modern political climate. Anyone who deviates from the approved script must be immediately condemned and then humiliated. So, predictably, Del Rio was forced to apologize for his remarks. Commanders Head Coach Ron Rivera then issued a remarkably dishonest statement.
“I want to make it clear that our organization will not tolerate any equivalency between those who demanded justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the actions of those on January 6 who sought to topple our government,” Rivera said. “Coach Del Rio did apologize for his comments on Wednesday and he understands the distinction between the events of that dark day and peaceful protests, which are a hallmark of our democracy.”
Rivera is intentionally conflating two very separate issues. Any sane football fan who isn’t looking to advance a radical political agenda knows that Del Rio wasn’t speaking about those who peacefully “demanded justice” but was instead referring to the unprecedented destruction caused by a subset of protesters.
$2 Billion in Damage from Summer 2020 Riots
There were many more casualties and arrests during so-called “peaceful protests” back in 2020 than on Jan. 6 Additionally, documented incidents of vandalism and looting during the summer of civil unrest resulted in up to $2 billion in property damage nationwide. More than 1,500 businesses were damaged in Minneapolis and St. Paul alone.
One of those businesses belonged to Ibrahim Demaag, who immigrated to Minnesota from Ethiopia 30 years ago. “We left our country for a future to see the American dream and look how it happened,” he told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham after his business was burned to the ground by rioters. “You work hard. You pay our taxes. We have not done anything wrong,” Demaag continued.
Then there’s Linda Carpenter, whose furniture store in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was reduced to ashes during violent protests in that town. “It’s all gone … we didn’t do nothing to nobody,” Carpenter said while sobbing. “I don’t think it’s justifiable for anyone to destroy anybody else’s property.” Her store had been in business for more than 40 years before being torched. There are thousands of stories just like this one.
Del Rio Incident Highlights Class Divide
Yet Democrats and the corporate media are unbothered by these stories and others that directly affect the daily lives of regular, hard-working Americans. They have no interest in covering violent crime rates in big cities, record-breaking inflation, or disastrous energy policies that have led to soaring gas prices. The country’s out-of-touch elites are insulated from all of it. Can’t afford fuel? Just buy a Tesla, they shriek.
More than anything, what the Del Rio story from the world of sports highlights is the growing and pervasive class divide in the United States of America. While leftist elites obsess over the events of Jan. 6, the rest of the country is rightly concerned about the things that actually matter.
They want to know if they’ll be able to afford groceries or find baby formula for their newborns — not who Donald Trump Jr. last texted. Del Rio, in this way, spoke on behalf of millions of men and women. In so doing, he shined a light on an utterly fraudulent and painfully dishonest professional class that is unworthy of being taken seriously. In the end, that was his real crime.
