In the grand theater of American culture, the year is 2025, and the NFL is still trying to sell us a fairy tale. As players gear up for another season of brutal, bone-crushing action, the league’s front office insists on decorating the end zones with saccharine slogans better suited for a middle schooler’s Trapper Keeper. “Choose Love.” “End Racism.” “Inspire Change.” These are the messages we’re given, a performative display of virtue from a multi-billion dollar enterprise that seems profoundly terrified of its own shadow.

This is the lingering hangover of a cultural moment that has long since passed. As Greg Gutfeld aptly put it on his show, “Wokeism is as dead as Gavin Newsom’s vibrator.” The American public has moved on. They want to see spectacular touchdowns, hard-hitting defense, and maybe a Super Bowl win for their long-suffering team. They are not, by and large, looking to a football field for moral guidance. Yet, the corporate behemoths, the NFL included, seem stuck in a time loop, perpetually pandering to a phantom mob that has already packed up and gone home.

The slogans are a classic misdirection, a sleight of hand designed to make you look at the pretty words on the grass instead of the real, festering problems plaguing the league—CTE, gambling addiction, and players whose off-field behavior is anything but virtuous. It’s the modern equivalent of buying indulgences from the medieval church; sin all you want, as long as you make a public donation to the cause of righteousness. As one guest noted, if you’re a New York Jets fan, you might go an entire season without ever seeing the words “End Racism” because your team can’t even reach the end zone. Perhaps the messages should be moved to midfield for wider visibility.

But this isn’t just about football. It’s a symptom of a much larger disease that has infected corporate America: the insatiable, self-devouring beast of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Once these departments embed themselves within an organization, their only metric for success is their own existence. The bottom line, competence, and common sense all become secondary to enforcing a rigid, often nonsensical doctrine. It’s how you get male cheerleaders nobody asked for, fashion houses that moonlight as climate activists, and, most alarmingly, a DC Police Chief who, when asked, had apparently never heard of the term “chain of command”—arguably the single most important organizing principle of any police force. Her previous job? Chief Equity Officer. The promotion of ideology over ability has real-world consequences, and they are often disastrous.

This disconnect is most starkly illustrated in the media, where the high priests and priestesses of the old order continue to preach to an ever-dwindling choir. Take Joy Reid, a television host who seems to have built her entire career on a platform of racial animus. In a recent, particularly unhinged rant, she declared that white people, particularly MAGA supporters, have never created culture. “Without black people, brown people, the DEIs, there’s no culture in America,” she proclaimed. “They got Cracker Barrel and Kid Rock.”

The sheer, unadulterated racism of the statement is breathtaking. Imagine, for a moment, the roles reversed. A white host making such sweeping, derogatory generalizations about any other race would be professionally executed before the commercial break. Their career would be over, their name a permanent stain. Yet, in the bizarre, inverted reality of modern media, Reid’s tirade is treated as acceptable political commentary.

Her comments sparked a passionate and surprisingly eloquent defense of an American institution: Cracker Barrel. As host Tyrus explained, Cracker Barrel is not just a restaurant; it’s an experience. It’s the welcoming rocking chairs on the porch, the peg game that keeps the kids busy, and the general store that serves as a time machine to your favorite childhood snacks and TV shows. It’s a place of comfort and nostalgia. To dismiss it so contemptuously is to reveal a profound ignorance of the simple joys that millions of Americans cherish. Reid’s attempt to weaponize it as a symbol of cultural inferiority backfired spectacularly, turning into a moment of bizarrely unifying praise for chicken and dumplings.

Then there is the case of Chuck Todd, a man who recently lost his prominent media perch and now laments that politics just isn’t “fun” anymore. Speaking with a sense of melancholic nostalgia, he whined that the Trump era has “sucked the joy out of it.” It’s a stunningly self-unaware statement. For Todd and his ilk, politics was a comfortable game, a club where they set the rules and controlled the narrative. Donald Trump didn’t just play the game differently; he flipped the whole table over. The “joy” Todd misses is the joy of being in control, of holding status and influence. Trump’s rise made people like Todd irrelevant, and for that, they can never forgive him. The irony, of course, is that for millions of voters, Trump brought an immense amount of fun and entertainment back into a stale political landscape, with his massive rallies feeling more like rock concerts than political speeches.

This media delusion reached its apex with CNN’s Abby Phillip, who described a gathering of European leaders at the White House as reflecting a “level of concern that I think some people say hasn’t been demonstrated since 9/11.” The comparison is so wildly inappropriate, so historically illiterate, that it borders on parody. To equate a diplomatic meeting about a regional conflict with the day thousands of Americans were murdered on home soil is not just hyperbole; it’s an insult. It’s a desperate attempt to inject a sense of gravity and crisis into a situation simply because Trump is involved.

Phillip’s analysis of Trump’s diplomacy—that he naively thinks rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin will lead to peace—betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of negotiation. Diplomacy isn’t about being mean to your adversaries; it’s about finding leverage. As guests on Gutfeld’s panel pointed out, it was Trump’s aggressive sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline during his first term that kept Putin from invading Ukraine in the first place. He understands that strength and respect are not mutually exclusive. The media’s critique is devoid of substance, driven solely by a pathological hatred that blinds them to any alternative interpretation of events. They complain when he’s tough and they complain when he’s diplomatic. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Finally, as if to put a cherry on top of the absurdity sundae, a new study now claims that dogs are a significant contributor to climate change because of their meat-heavy diets. The joyless crusade of the modern left knows no bounds. They’ve come for your gas stoves, your cars, and your cheeseburgers. Now, they’re coming for your best friend. It’s the ultimate endpoint of an ideology that sees human beings—and their companions—not as sources of joy and love, but as carbon footprints to be minimized and eventually erased.

From the football field to the newsroom to the dog park, the remnants of a failed cultural revolution are all around us. But these are the dying embers of a fire that has largely burned itself out. The American people are tired of being lectured. They are tuning out the noise and laughing at the absurdity. The corporations and media outlets still clinging to this obsolete worldview are like soldiers fighting a war that ended years ago. They haven’t realized it yet, but they’ve already lost.