As of Jan. 3rd, the National Football League (NFL) is all in on America. You read that right. The professional football organization that spent the last decade courting and promoting un-American ideas and people is finally embracing the best country in the world.
Well, maybe.
If you tuned into any NFL games this Week 18, you probably noticed some more red, white, and blue than normal. No, that wasn’t just the New England Patriots walloping the Miami Dolphins. The American flags and patriotic fanfare that kicked off Week 18 of the NFL season are all part of the league’s partnership with the commission designated to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
For the next few months, the NFL plans to promote this “national milestone” during playoff games, Super Bowl LX, and the 2026 NFL draft with “America 250” spray-painted sidelines, decorated game balls, and toss coins. NFL teams that make the playoffs will also be decked out in America 250 gear, and fans will have a chance to purchase pro-American professional football apparel as well.
According to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the league is not only “proud to participate in celebrating America’s 250th anniversary,” but “excited to honor our country’s history and celebrate our collective future.”
“The story of the NFL reflects the story of America, and the American spirit of resilience, innovation and teamwork has helped football grow into a cultural pastime that unites us all,” he said in a November 2025 statement outlining his organization’s America 250 plans.
I’ll be the first to admit that the league’s opening tribute to the 250th year, in the form of “God Bless America” and two field-covering flags, was a nice way to kick off 2026. The NFL should be proud and excited to celebrate the nation’s semiquincentennial.
Yet, it’s difficult not to wonder about the authenticity of such an observance
The NFL’s America 250 commitment, on its face, appears to be a noble and good embrace of the nation’s founding — an appeal to many of the red-blooded Americans who make up the league’s audience. In light of the league’s track record, however, the America 250 collab comes across as a shocking attempt to feign loyalty to a country the league spent years undermining.
Land That I Loathe
The most popular professional football organization wants you to believe that it has a “storied history of amplifying milestone moments in our nation’s history,” including participation in America’s 200th anniversary and a “year-round” commitment to honoring the U.S. military. But over the last decade, the NFL under Goodell’s leadership has devoted countless resources and screen time to tearing down the “land that I love.”
The slippage became noticeable as early as 2016, when, instead of outright condemning Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem stunt, the league highlighted the San Francisco 49ers quarterback’s race-based grumbles in an exclusive interview.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in August 2016 (with no pushback from the reporter). “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
The NFL claimed at the time that players were “encouraged but not required to stand during the playing of the national anthem.” The league’s article about the incident, on the other hand, positively portrayed Kaepernick’s actions as “taking a stand for civil rights” and attempting to “raise awareness to issues affecting minorities in the U.S.”
By the fall 2020 kickoff, the NFL fully bent the knee to left’s race-based agenda by mandating Black Lives Matter euphemisms “End Racism” and “It Takes All Of Us” be emblazoned on teams’ end zones, as well as incorporating such elements into “all broadcasts and across league and club platforms to begin the NFL season and beyond.”
The league also introduced the divisive tradition of segregated national anthems, the “Star Spangled Banner” and a song dubbed the “Black National Anthem,” before kickoff during opening week games as well as the Super Bowl. Five and a half years later, all of this racial posturing continues to be an integral part of the NFL and its games.
This move towards “social justice” was not simply performative. The NFL also committed to financially “support programs and initiatives that reduce barriers to opportunity” in education, economic advancement, “police and community relations,” and “criminal justice reform.”
The buck did not stop there. The NFL approved the renaming of the Redskins, effectively stripping the Washington team of any reminders of the Native Americans’ role in American history. Shortly after invoking personal liberties to justify players’ disrespect of the national anthem, the NFL harassed and threatened players who did not fall in line with its Covid-era tyranny, which reportedly included a ban on church attendance in 2020.
The league went on in later years to condemn players such as Harrison Butker, who exemplifies and encourages the Christian principles this nation was founded on, for failing to meet the league’s bar of “inclusion,” and even partnered with shady Democrat “get out the vote” groups ahead of the 2024 election. When a corporate media hit piece targeted a young Kansas City Chiefs fan who was wrongly accused of wearing blackface, the NFL conveniently ignored the controversy.
More recently, the NFL capped off its, in the words of my fellow football-loving colleague Shawn Fleetwood, “descent into gay race communism” by handing the leftist, cross-dressing, Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny the mic for the Super Bowl LX halftime performance. That was after it increasingly began to rip regular schedule games away from American stadiums and audiences to take them to ill-equipped international fields.
United We Stand?
Two of the aims of America 250, according to the commission’s website, are to “strengthen our love of country” and “unite us as a nation.” On its face, the NFL’s alleged embrace of America 250 and all it stands for appears to fit that bill nicely.
When The Federalist asked the NFL if it plans to retire divisive rituals such as segregated national anthems and on-field race-based messaging in light of its America 250 partnership, however, the league did not respond.
It would be easy for the NFL to justify doing away with ostentatious BLM-tainted end zones to embrace the uniting theme of the semiquincentennial. Instead, it appears the NFL will continue to quite literally sideline the American ideals and principles that created the best country in the world in favor of ill-disguised Marxism.
The league’s quiet, yet enduring allegiance to a race-based communism that predicates itself on dismantling the nation and dividing Americans confirms any patriotism on display by the NFL over the next few months will be, at best, a bait and switch.
