While ESPN in the NFL cheered the supposed courage of former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who sucked his job, for failing to stand for the national anthem, it turns out the viewers were less sanguine.

According to a new poll from JD Power, the number one reason fans decided not to watch the NFL last year was the national anthem protests, which ended up spreading to several teams and multiple players.

Fully 26% of people who said they watched less NFL content last year said they did so because of the national anthem crap.

Another 24% said the domestic violence and delay of game penalties kept them away.

This is the second major poll to confirm that leftist politics drove Americans from watching football.

In October 2016, 56% of fans said they

believed ratings were down because of the national anthem protests. They were right, which means

that the left's unwavering desire to infuse politics into even the most apolitical content

comes with a cost, alienation of an audience that disagrees. While polls show that the vast

bulk of Americans despise the national anthem protests, those statistics polarized by race. Sixty-three percent of white

Americans dislike the protests, a plurality of Hispanics disapproved, 45 percent to 36 percent,

but fully 74 percent of black Americans like the protest. Overall, 54 percent of Americans

opposed the protest with just 38% approving. That racial

polarization that gripped the nation over the last several years, thanks to the rise

of Black Lives Matter and President Obama's decision to humor racially divisive politics,

it didn't leave football untouched. And the leftists at the sports networks, in an attempt

to mirror their political idols of the Democratic Party, celebrated as their own industry imbibed from the intersectional bottle.

The cost, ratings.

Mixing politics into sport has withdrawn an essential part of our civic culture

from the realm of the universal,

and that's going to have larger ramifications than merely a drop in NFL ratings.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show. Some days there is so much news that it is impossible to get through everything.

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