NFNFL Is Bringing Back 'Woke' Messages for End Zones, Helmets

NFNFL Is Bringing Back 'Woke' Messages for End Zones, Helmets

Kyle BeckerFollow @kylenabecker

AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File

The National Football League is bringing back "Woke" messages on end zones and helmets.

Front Office Sports confirmed that the NFL is again pushing the race-shaming practices.

The NFL will again place anti-racism messages across playing fields and player helmets in 2026, Front Office Sports has learned. It will be the seventh straight season the Shield has been out front on social justice messaging. The strategy dates back to 2020, when the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer ignited a long hot summer of protests and social unrest. “Can confirm that we are continuing with both the end zone stencils and helmet decals this season,” an NFL spokeswoman told FOS in a statement.

This would be the seventh year in a row of the NFL scolding its audience with Woke messaging, as if broadcasting insipid statements about racism is going to stop a Klan rally.

Those Klan rallies mostly stopped themselves, after the SPLC funding got cut off.

Here is what the NFL has in mind for this upcoming season, according to the report:

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• On-Field Messaging: Over the past six seasons, all 32 NFL teams have stenciled in on-field messages around their end zones. Last year, they chose between four options: “End Racism,” “Choose Love,” “Stop Hate,” and “Inspire Change.”  For February’s Super Bowl LX between the Seahawks and Patriots, the league added Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Choose Love” along with “It Takes All Of Us.”

• Helmet Decals: Also starting with the 2020 season, players were allowed to wear helmet decals featuring victims of racial violence, such as Floyd and Breonna Taylor. During the 2025 season, players had the option to wear four decals on their helmets reading: ‘Stop Hate, “Inspire Change, “End Racism,” and “Choose Love.” 
• Black National Anthem: Along with the U.S. national anthem, the NFL has added renditions of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known as the Black national anthem, before the Super Bowl and other big events. Teams played it before season openers in 2020. Since 2021, some artists who’ve performed the song during the Super Bowl pregame include Alicia Keys and Coco Jones.
• Jay-Z/Roc Nation Alliance: In 2019, Front Office Sports broke the news that Goodell’s NFL was forming a sweeping business alliance with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. The landmark partnership ultimately gave the rap superstar creative control over the Super Bowl Halftime Show, which sometimes draws more TV viewers than the game itself. This year, the league and Jay-Z faced criticism for casting Bad Bunny as the headliner. The global music sensation sings most of his songs in Spanish. That led the conservative organization Turning Point USA to counter-program with “The All-American Halftime Show” headlined by Kid Rock.

When it comes to the No Fun League, the George Floyd riots never stopped.

All of the riots that burned down black neighborhoods, doing billions in damage, the loss of nearly two dozen lives — this is apparently something the Woke NFL wants seared into the American consciousness.

Never mind these riots were fueled by radical activists who cherry picked a tragic case and framed it misleadingly to convince a black community that it was being targeted by white cops. This led to the massive Black Lives Matter grift that scammed donors out of millions of dollars.

Then there was the kneeling. The incessant kneeling. As if America's national anthem had something to do with career criminals resisting arrest and putting themselves and law enforcement at risk.

Sorry, your great-great-great-great grand uncle being enslaved at a time when the barbaric practice was prevalent, only to be emancipated by hundreds of thousands of Americans spilling blood to end it, is not the reason someone hooked on fentanyl tries to pass off a phony $20 bill at a convenience store.

Let's get something straight: These Woke messages are not trying to "end racism." 

They are scapegoating white viewers over alleged racism that is purportedly causing problems for black people in primarily Democrat-run cities. Of course, they only imply white people in the audience might be racists, not that black people, Latinos, Asians, etc. can be racist against white people.

Racism is the stereotyping of people as superior or inferior according to their race — it has nothing to do with "power structures," it has to do with ignorance.

Why? Because whether or not a race of people happen to be the predominant one in a society has nothing to do with whether or not their ignorant views might lead to socially damaging behavior. 

Demographics shift. Power shifts with it. If a group of people that generally holds racist views suddenly gains power, it doesn't magically make them "racist," when earlier their ignorant views were benign.

Americans are "over" this. People who watch the NFL, NBA, or heaven help them, the WNBA, do not do so because they are "racists." Not only has logic left the building, so has any marketing sense.

The NFL needs to decide if it is a professional sports league or a left-wing propaganda echo chamber. Because it is only trashing its brand further with this activist nonsense.

https://redstate.com/kyle-becker/2026/08/29/nfl-will-bring-back-woke-messages-for-end-zones-helmets-n2206216?utm_source=rsmorningbriefingvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl

Why Are They the Way They Are?

 Why Are They the Way They Are?

by Kevin McCullough

AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

We like Canada.

Seriously. We do.

I’ve been there. I like Canadians. I even like poutine. And Tim Hortons has rescued me on more than one occasion.

So explain something to me.

Why are they the way they are?

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Start with trade, because apparently everything starts with trade now.

For years, Canada has enjoyed a pretty good arrangement with the United States. They sell us oil. They sell us lumber. They protect their dairy industry behind tariffs and quotas that would make an American farmer’s head spin. Then, when Washington finally decides maybe this relationship could use a little recalibration, Ottawa discovers the word “fairness.”

Funny how that works.

Canada responded to the latest American tariffs by matching them dollar for dollar — very tough, very defiant — and then started making exceptions when the consequences got uncomfortable at home.

Including seafood.

Apparently, the revolution will not interfere with the salmon.

That’s politics. I get it. Governments protect their industries. Prime ministers have voters, too. But spare me the wounded-neighbor routine when the United States finally decides to protect its own interests.

Then there’s the lake.

President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” on the American side of the border.

And Canada lost its mind.

Canadian officials called it “real foolishness.”

Maybe it is.

It’s also funny.

More importantly, it changes almost nothing. International bodies don’t suddenly have to call it Lake America. Canadian maps aren’t being confiscated at the border. Nobody from the United States Coast Guard is paddling across the lake with a Sharpie.

It’s a gesture.

And Ottawa seems considerably more offended by the gesture than by the trade policies that helped provoke it.

Want “Lake Ontario” back on American government documents?

Here’s an idea.

Come back to the table.

Negotiate.

That’s what neighbors do.

Which brings me to the part of this week’s Canadian news that isn’t funny.

The CBC.

Canada’s taxpayer-funded national broadcaster reportedly issued internal guidance ahead of the 25th anniversary of September 11, instructing journalists not to describe what happened that morning as “terrorist attacks.”

Instead, we’re supposed to talk about “hijackings” that “led to passenger jet crashes.”

Passenger jet crashes.

I had to read that twice.

Nearly 3,000 people were murdered on September 11, 2001. Nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners. They deliberately flew two of them into the World Trade Center. Another was deliberately flown into the Pentagon. Passengers aboard Flight 93 fought back before that aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania.

That wasn’t a collection of “passenger jet crashes.”

It was terrorism.

If that doesn’t clear the bar for the word, the bar doesn’t exist.

And apparently, CBC’s concern is that “terrorist” is too loaded, too politically fraught, too compromising to the network’s impartiality.

Impartiality toward whom?

Al-Qaeda?

There are moments when our obsession with sanitizing language becomes so absurd that the sanitizing itself becomes dishonest.

September 11 is one of them.

Nobody needs a euphemism for what happened that morning. We don’t honor the dead by sanding the edges off the evil that killed them.

And this is where Canada loses me.

We’re not talking about some hostile country halfway around the world. Canadians are our neighbors. They’re our allies. They’re our friends.

Which makes all of this stranger.

You want to fight with us about tariffs? Fine. Let’s fight about tariffs.

You want to be mad about “Lake America?” Be mad. I suspect President Trump will survive the criticism.

But don’t tell me September 11 was a collection of passenger jet crashes.

That’s where the joke stops being funny.

Twenty-five years is long enough for children born after September 11 to become adults, get married, and start raising children of their own. It’s long enough for memory to soften. Long enough for people who didn’t experience that morning to know it primarily through photographs and documentaries.

Which is precisely why words matter now.

Those planes didn’t crash because of mechanical failures.

The towers didn’t fall because of an accident.

The Pentagon wasn’t struck because somebody made a navigational error.

Terrorists attacked America.

Say it.

Maybe that’s what bothers me about all three of these stories.

Not Canada itself.

I like Canada.

It’s the weird insistence that reality needs to be repackaged before anybody is allowed to talk about it.

A tariff becomes unfair only when America imposes it.

A symbolic name change becomes an international outrage.

And terrorism becomes a “passenger jet crash” because apparently the accurate word might offend somebody.

No.

Sometimes friends need to tell friends when they’re being ridiculous.

So Canada, from your neighbor to the south, with genuine affection:

Keep the hockey.

Keep the poutine.

Keep Tim Hortons.

We’ll even talk about the lake.

But September 11?

Leave that one alone.

We know what happened.

And we’re going to call it what it was.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kevinmccullough/2026/08/28/why-are-they-the-way-they-are-n2682076?utm_source=thdailyvip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&utm_content=ncl-zX3ykNmJkS&utm_term=&_nlid=zX3ykNmJkS&_nhids=ncApgukbUQrkls