Earlier: An Australian Reader Reports Indigenous Australian Rugby Players Protesting The Australian National Anthem

From: Phil Shannon [Email him]

His Holiness, George Floyd (blessed be thy name), the patron saint of the Church of Anti-Racism, has crossed the International Date Line and the equator to make the sport of Australian Rules Football fully woke.

In peak virtue-signaling form, just prior to the start of the game between two of the AFL's grandest old clubs, the Collingwood Magpies and the Richmond Tigers, all players and umpires came together in the center of the ground to “take a knee.”  This was, they said in a statement on their behalf, to show "solidarity with our indigenous brothers and sisters for all people of colour." [SBS News - AFL players take a knee in support of BLM, June 11, 2020).

Signaling that they do not harbor any racially impure thoughts on the looters and other BLM criminals, or on deaths in police custody of Indigenous Australian felons, the mostly white Australian footballers spared no knackered woke cliché from another gallop around the track—"we see strength in diversity, it makes us better as a football club and as a community ... we will continue to learn and walk this journey together” yada, yada, yada …..

Not everyone was impressed.  Former Geelong champion footballer, Sam Newman (above left), whose physical playing style can best be euphemized as “uncompromising,” sheeted home the responsibility for the anti-white display to the AFL's corporate leaders.  Newman [Tweet him]said that the AFL's CEO, Gillon McLachlan, had intimidated the players into the woke gesture to try and avoid the fate of NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell (who got in a pickle for being insufficiently woke over that football code’s knee-taking tantrum).

(Newman  has, of course, lost his job.)

So what lies behind the AFL’s weak-kneed party line on “taking the knee”?  There seem to be three main reasons:

1. Follow the money: The AFL, a mega-wealthy media-entertainment industry business, has material interests in corporate riches.  Corporate broadcasting rights, sponsorship and advertising account for most of the AFL’s $800 million annual revenue, of which the elite clubs get $315 million, the AFL’s top executives cream off a juicy $11 million, and even the players’ union scores $38 million (AFL 2109 financial report).  With major corporates falling over themselves after the BLM protests-cum-riots to publicly display fealty to ‘anti-racism’ in order to appease the mob and protect their brand, the AFL would be keen to side with its “anti-racist” corporate backers.
2. Race pandering: Indigenous footballers, whose average physical build predisposes them to the prized attributes of agility and fleet-footedness, form a richly talented gene pool for AFL clubs who are thus always eager to pander to their black players.  Indigenous footballers make up 10% of the elite AFL competition, three times the proportion (3%) of the total Australian population which is Indigenous (meanwhile, their “indigenous brothers and sisters,” whose praises were sung by the “anti-racist” AFL choir, also form another elite of a kind – as a race, Indigenous imprisonment rates per 100,000 Indigenous population are twelve times that of the total Australian population). 
3. Culture wars:  White, Anglo-Celtic-European Australians fear the risk of being labelled “racist” and will, like Goodwhites everywhere, abase themselves to heavily-sanctified “people of color.”  High-public-profile footballers will “take the knee,” either out of sincere belief in, or successful brainwashing in, the hysteria about wicked white cops, or, more cynically, for the sake of personal peace and a future playing career. 

Sadly, Australian football has just shown that it will not be leading the resistance to the authoritarian, social-shaming, intolerant, morally-righteous, "anti-racist" mob of black criminals, dysfunctional, failing minorities and their white liberal auxiliaries.

Phil Shannon is a retired Australian Rules footballer, veteran working class socialist and latter-day VDARE.com supporter. See earlier letters from him here.