Five people have been arrested after England footballers were racially abused online following their Euro 2020 final defeat.
Marcus Rashford, Bukayo Saka and Jadon Sancho were targeted after they missed penalties in the Euro 2020 final. The attacks were racist and extremely abusive and were very upsetting for the young players.
Of course, it must not be forgotten that, if any of the young men had hit their penalties home and England had won, they would be national heroes and the question of their race would have been completely forgotten, but such is the wrath of sports fans – particularly England football fans – that if you let them down, their reaction is swift and brutal.
Not that I am condoning racism in any way, but it was a predictable outcome for a very disappointing result. Maybe, considering the circumstances, the team management might have given the opportunity to win the game to more experienced players, as the big occasions can be overwhelming for young players and it is particularly harsh when the result of an entire tournament comes down to a throw of the dice, such as penalties. Still, it proves that the English soccer hooligan is alive and well. That is one institution that the British woke have been unable to toss into a river.
There is a lot of evidence that the British public are becoming as tired of the culture wars as we are in this part of the world. At least the British are not having the name of their country changed by stealth, but their own woke faction seems to be responsible for just about everything else. It has been so bad, in fact, that a new news channel called GB News was launched recently with a promise to combat “cancel culture” and defend free speech. This must have been music to the ears of viewers looking for a change from the usual woke drivel that seems to be served up by all mainstream media outlets these days.
However, it wasn’t able to keep its promise even for the first month.
The burgeoning broadcaster has been “cancelled” by its own disillusioned viewers and rocked by the reported resignation of a senior executive after a backlash against one of its presenters taking the knee on air.
Guto Harri, a former adviser to Boris Johnson when he was mayor of London, performed the gesture on Tuesday in solidarity with England football players who had faced racial abuse.
What? He wasn’t even at a football game! He was on air! It is like some kind of cruel joke, where they said: “We will not be woke. Just kidding! We are woker than the rest of them put together!”
Needless to say, the viewers were totally unimpressed.
According to Barb TV ratings, the number of viewers for the channel at points the next day had slumped so low as to be “immeasurable” after viewers, claiming the channel had itself succumbed to cancel culture, pledged on social media to boycott its shows.
GB News had zero viewers in the sample group used to measure ratings at 1pm during a slot featuring business expert Liam Halligan and former Labour politician Gloria De Piero, and again at 5pm during a show presented by Simon McCoy and Alex Phillips.
Well, what do we always say on this channel? Get woke, go broke. But GB News did it in record time, within a month of the launch of the channel. You have to admit, that was a classic failure of epic proportions, and it would be funny if it were not so tragic.
Harri defended his actions in the face of the apparent viewer boycott, telling The Telegraph that he had “said his piece on air” and claiming that taking the knee was “not woke and not Stalinist”.
Not sure if it could be described as Stalinist, but it is definitely woke. What does he think all those players taking a knee are doing? They are being woke. That is what the viewers of GB News were trying to get away from. Instead, they got… wokeism. Again.
Harri provoked outrage from viewers when he said he had “underestimated how close to the surface the racism still was” after seeing the online abuse Marcus Rashford and other England players had received.
Speaking on air he said: “I actually now get it and so much so that I think we should all take the knee. In fact, why not take the knee now and say: ‘it’s a gesture, but it’s an important gesture’.
“And it’s not about me in this studio, but for them to do that as players on the field makes sense.”
Daily Telegraph UK
Oh, God. This guy just doesn’t get it, does he? Even though he says he does. It is possible – and indeed common – for people to abhor racism but also to hate woke stuff. “Taking the knee” is a BLM signal, and BLM is a terrorist group. Of course black lives matter, and the organisation started as a genuine protest against police brutality in the USA aimed mainly at black people. But now it has morphed into a terrorist organisation, responsible for riots, burning buildings and many deaths.
To be honest, I think this is funny, though not for the investors in the new channel, once guaranteed to have a good following. They were trying to meet a need in British broadcasting. They must have spent a fortune on a good idea, now damaged irrevocably by an idiot presenter who just couldn’t keep his wokeness to himself.
I am very sorry for the young footballers who have been treated so abysmally by ignorant fans but no doubt they are getting a lot of support from those that understand that, as sportsmen, they would never have wanted to miss a shot like that. They already have to deal with that within themselves, without the racial abuse.
Wokeism is not the answer to this particular problem, and the founders of GB News, in spite of their apparent good intentions, are being hit very hard by the actions of their presenter. The channel has apparently pulled Harri off air, but it is probably too late. Get woke, go broke. Promise not to be woke and then get woke… that is deception, and the viewers, or should I say, former viewers, are not going to take that lying down.
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