{"id":158386,"date":"2025-09-15T12:28:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-15T12:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/158386\/"},"modified":"2025-09-15T12:28:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T12:28:07","slug":"the-former-nfl-player-who-embodies-the-rage-of-the-trump-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/158386\/","title":{"rendered":"The Former NFL Player Who Embodies the Rage of the Trump Resistance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ask a professional football punter: They don\u2019t get no respect<\/a>. Kick a ball downfield 45 yards so the punt can\u2019t be returned\u2014in other words, do your job well\u2014and there\u2019s a collective yawn from the stadium. But mess up and give the other team great field position, then everybody knows your name. And not in a good way.<\/p>\n

Chris Kluwe, whose pro-equality activism<\/a> dates back to his days with the Minnesota Vikings, is feeling the punter\u2019s curse even in retirement from professional ball. Disturbed that the City Council in his hometown of Huntington Beach, California, approved<\/a> the placement of a coded MAGA plaque at a local public library, Kluwe, 43, decided a simple objection wasn\u2019t enough. He went to a City Council meeting in February to fight the plaque (which cheekily included the phrase \u201cMagical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous\u201d) as well as a more explicitly pro-Trump line: \u201cThrough hope and change our nation has built back better to the golden era of Making America Great Again!\u201d<\/p>\n

Kluwe ticked off<\/a> a list of what MAGA stands for, including \u201ctrying to erase trans people from existence,\u201d \u201cresegregation and racism,\u201d \u201ccensorship and book bans,\u201d and cuts to air traffic safety and education. \u201cMAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy, and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement,\u201d Kluwe said at the City Council meeting, winning applause from onlookers.<\/p>\n

Kluwe then approached<\/a> the council members themselves, placed his hands behind his back, and fell to the floor. He was quickly arrested and detained by local police. But it didn\u2019t stop there: Edison High School, in the enviable position of having a former professional athlete as its freshman football coach, fired<\/a> Kluwe. Like nearly anonymous punters everywhere, Kluwe wasn\u2019t quite famous enough for the high school to fear a public national outcry over his dismissal. But he was just well-known enough to make the school skittish about what Kluwe said he was told was \u201ctoo much attention\u201d for their comfort level.<\/p>\n

The library had been a target of conservative political activism for some time, Kluwe said, such as efforts to ban<\/a> LGBTQ-themed books and another to privatize<\/a> the collection. The MAGA plaque was what made him decide to conduct civil disobedience.<\/p>\n

Kluwe said he thought, \u201cI\u2019ve been waiting for one of my elected officials to do something about this. I\u2019ve been waiting for someone to get arrested for causing trouble, and no one has done it.\u201d And then he thought, \u201cI can\u2019t ask them to do something I\u2019m not willing to do myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kluwe\u2019s acts are being replicated across the country by throngs of Americans protesting Trump administration policies. During a June wave of protests against immigration raids, several hundred were arrested<\/a> in California, Texas, and at Manhattan\u2019s Trump Tower. Others have filmed<\/a> the masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and posted the videos online. At least five elected officials have been arrested or confronted by law enforcement as they challenged<\/a> Donald Trump\u2019s immigration agenda. Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, was handcuffed<\/a> and forced to the ground after he attempted to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a news conference.<\/p>\n

Kluwe has a history of activism and speaking out, on matters football-related and beyond. He very publicly called out<\/a> leading NFL colleagues for being \u201cgreedy\u201d in what Kluwe thought was holding up a contract between the NFL and players. He slammed<\/a> NFL brass for putting substandard replacement referees on the field to squeeze concessions from experienced refs.<\/p>\n

Kluwe\u2019s vocal support<\/a> for same-sex marriage in 2012 \u2014 three years before the Supreme Court made such unions legal<\/a>\u2014led, he believes, to his release<\/a> from the Minnesota Vikings in 2013. Kluwe said<\/a> that special teams coordinator at the time, Mike Priefer, taunted him with homophobic comments. Kluwe threatened to sue, and the case ended with the Vikings agreeing<\/a> to donate to several LGBTQ rights groups, including a charity run by Wade Davis, an openly gay former NFL player.<\/p>\n

Kluwe never punted in a regular season NFL game again. Now 43, he writes the occasional op-ed and books and is running<\/a> for a state legislative seat in California. \u201cI don\u2019t really want to be a politician, but we\u2019re at the point in our nation\u2019s history where it\u2019s all hands on deck,\u201d Kluwe said. \u201cAre we going to act to save democracy or not? That really is the fundamental question we have to ask ourselves.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ask a professional football punter: They don\u2019t get no respect. Kick a ball downfield 45 yards so the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":158387,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[2356,96570,26188,12,47189,96571,462,8851,349,96572,99],"class_list":["post-158386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-california","tag-chris-kluwe","tag-city-council","tag-donald-trump","tag-huntington-beach","tag-local-public-library","tag-maga","tag-minnesota-vikings","tag-nfl","tag-professional-football-punter","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158386\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/158387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}