Website Publishes Deranged Article Calling Patriots 'Official Team of White Nationalism'
You’ve probably heard the phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome” thrown about in the last couple of years.
If you haven’t, the basic gist is that some people’s hatred of President Donald Trump runs so unfathomably deep that they’ve willfully abandoned all sense of logic or reason to spite Trump.
Here’s the thing, though; this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. It’s actually predated by a different type of derangement syndrome.
Since at least around 2003, many people have been suffering from “Patriots Derangement Syndrome.”
Now, this isn’t to say that the New England Patriots can’t be disliked. There are plenty of reasons to detest the team, from the smug quarterback to the ornery coach to the propensity for referee favoritism to the cheating. (Full disclosure: I am a Patriots fan. I’m just repeating what my co-workers are always whining about.)
Sports fandom and sports hatred are just two of the many things that make sports fun.
But there is such a thing as just going completely overboard and being so far removed from reason and logic that your anti-Patriots attack borders on parody.
The Daily Beast’s Corbin Smith pretty much ran headfirst into that wall Friday.
“Tom Brady’s New England Patriots Are Team MAGA, Whether They Like It Or Not” blared the garish Daily Beast headline.
First, Smith took issue with Brady’s now-infamous “We’re still here!” rally, where even the staunchest Patriots fans might struggle not to cringe.
Brady leads a “We’re still here” chant then flings the mic.
He’s READY. (via @Patriots)pic.twitter.com/eOovOxzZLK
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) January 27, 2019
Look, even I’ll admit that Brady’s not exactly a motivational speaker. But Smith took the awkwardness of that moment in a completely befuddling direction.
“You would think that you were watching some square-jawed grifter throwing red meat to the hogs at an alt-right rally, screaming at the libs who thought Nancy Pelosi and her gender warriors were gonna keep DECENT AMERICAN FOLKSfrom BEING HERE,” Smith wrote.
Huh?
“(Brady) flashed a red MAGA hat, an accoutrement that is gaining more and more traction as a symbol of white nationalism in America, in his locker back in the primary days,” Smith continued.
He then further lamented the friendly relationship between Trump and Patriots coach Bill Belichick and team owner Robert Kraft.
Smith then got even more unhinged when he said all of Boston “is tinged with the sort of racism that brought Trump into office.”
“The Boston Red Sox were the last MLB team to desegregate, more than a decade after Jackie Robinson entered the league,” he wrote. “The Sox’s first owner, Tom Yawkey, was an infamous racist whose speech was peppered with racial slurs. Larry Bird became a symbol of white resentment during his time in the NBA, his jersey appearing as a symbol of white entitlement to black spaces in Spike Lee’s ‘Do the Right Thing.’ His large teammate, Kevin McHale, was spotted at a Trump rally during the election.”
About that … Massachusetts overwhelmingly voted in favor of Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and in no city was that difference more pronounced than in Boston, where Clinton picked up 221,093 votes to Trump’s 34,087.
So clearly, facts are nothing that The Daily Beast is overly concerned about here.
It doesn’t seem too concerned with logic either.
Smith decided to bring in the students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky who were attacked by the media over their encounter with a Native American activist on the day of the March for Life in Washington.
“Remember that scumbag teen, bused into DC by his racist-ass private school to protest a woman’s right to choose, smirking at a Native American military veteran while wearing that dumb little red hat as his schoolmates stood around and did tomahawk chops? Remember how, at first, everyone saw what was happening for what it was, entitled little s—s being racist and disrespectful, until this kid’s wealthy parents hired a PR firm to run interference and coach him up to do an interview where, even if he was saying the right things on paper, he still seemed like a low-boil sociopath?”
Wow. What a disgusting take.
Smith then said Brady “tried to run the same playbook” to distance himself from Trump.
“Look, it doesn’t matter if the Patriots like it or not, they are the official team of American White Nationalism, the MAGA Boys On the Field. You can’t implicitly or explicitly support Trump, who reads speeches written by Stephen Miller as a matter of course, play in a market whose sporting culture is renowned for its racism, have a decade-plus organizational obsession with undersized white receivers, and be called, no s—, the Patriots, without getting the vile Fox News Soup that poisoned half the country on your shirt.”
Hold on. Smith takes one last stab at Patriots fans, so I guess he’s personally taking a stab at me too.
“When you root for the Patriots, you are associating yourself with a virulent and revolting strain of politics that seeks to Make America Great Again — which is to say, white, European, English-speaking,” Smith concluded.
If that’s not Patriots Derangement Syndrome, I don’t know what is.
Now, please excuse me while I go reassess my association with a virulent and revolting strain of politics simply because I grew up watching Drew Bledsoe throw touchdown passes and because I enjoy watching a selfless group of men who always put the team above their individual accolades.
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