BUCK: Gwen Berry is at the Olympics qualifying here, and President Biden… Well, let me tell you what she did first. She has expressed her irritation at the national anthem being played when she was getting her bronze medal. She’s on the Olympic team, and she’ll be representing the U.S., and she did not appreciate the national anthem played while she was getting her bronze medal.
She turned her back on it, and — no surprise here, I’m sure, for many of you — the White House is backing her up. Now, Gwen Berry is a female African-American athlete. This White House with Jen Psaki taking to the podium saying that, you know, they respect this. Berry is representing the U.S. on a global stage, and, if she wants to disrespect America, Joe Biden stands with her. Play the clip.
PSAKI: I haven’t spoken to the president specifically about this, but I know he’s incredibly proud to be an American, uhh, and has great respect for the anthem and all that it represents, especially for our men and women serving in uniform all around the world. He would also say of course that part of that pride in our country means recognizing there are moments where we, as our country, haven’t lived up to our highest ideals and it means respecting the right of people granting them in the Constitution to peacefully protest.
BUCK: Yeah. So they respect it. They back it up. No condemnation here, of course. What should be done about this? Congressman Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a former Navy SEAL and current member of Congress, he has a pretty clear view what he thinks should happen now for this athlete. Gwen Berry, who’s representing America in the… By the way, I don’t even think I said the sport.
The hammer throw is the sport. So this is not a particularly well known, high-level — or high-attendance, I should say — sport. This is one of these track-and-field on events that people can be pretty obscure and involved in. But here’s what Congressman Crenshaw said he thinks should happen next.
CRENSHAW: We don’t need any more activist athletes. She should be removed from the team. The entire point of the Olympic team is to represent the United States of America. It’s the entire point! Okay? (laughs) So, you know, it’s one thing when these NBA players do it. Okay, fine. We’ll just stop watching. But now the Olympic team? And it’s multiple cases of this.
They should be removed. That should be the bare minimum requirement is that you believe in the country representing. But look, taking it a couple levels deeper, this is the pathological that occurs when we’re teaching critical race theory into our institutions because critical race theory, again, basically teaches that our institutions are racist, that our systems are deeply racist.
Now, you can’t see the racism, right, because it’s subtle — and if you deny it, it’s because if you’re white fragility. But you’re teaching people this constantly, and this is what it results in. It results in this. It results in these displays of hatred towards our own country, and it’s gotta stop.
CLAY: I don’t think she should be taken off the team because she did earn a spot on the team, and ultimately the most sacrosanct, to my opinion, of all sports verities is best man or best woman wins, and she at least got the bronze medal to represent the United States. Here is what I think is going on, Buck.
Everyone has Colin Kaepernick dollar signs in their head. When Nike decided to give Colin Kaepernick — and other companies as well, but Nike is the most prominent. When they decided to give Colin Kaepernick tens of millions of dollars to reward him for protesting the national anthem, what they did was set a new precedent.
Because the old precedent at Nike was, “You have to be the greatest at your sport in order to get a shoe. In order to be an endorser, we want Michael Jordan. We want Ken Griffey Jr. We want all of the greatest athletes out there of their iteration to be representing a shoe company.” It could bBe Nike, could be Adidas, could be Reebok. Doesn’t really matter.
Excellence was the hallmark.
When they gave money to Colin Kaepernick, they made the decision you could denigrate America, you could demean our country, you could absolutely — in my mind — inject your own political values during a game. And when all these different athletes saw Colin Kaepernick make the money that he did without having any real talent anymore, it set off dollar signs everywhere.
So when I saw this, the first thing I thought, this woman that nobody knew competing in the sport that no one’s really ever heard of, hardly, my first thought was, “She is angling to make money by hating America.” And this stupid woke capitalism, Buck, allows this country, unlike any other… I’m not sure there’s any other country in the world where you can become a multimillionaire by saying how much you think America sucks.
BUCK: It goes beyond ideology now. You’re right. It actually is about what benefits people, what makes them money, what will bring them more fame and more repute. I think this is why there’s this feeling — and I often have this when I would do political analysis, and I’d say, “Well, do I care what LeBron James will say about something,” or, you know, name an athlete, whoever it may be.
“Do I care what some athlete says about politics?” And there’s always this back-and-forth between, well, no matter how ignorant the statement may be or how absurd it may be, they have a following at a level that it matters; so it’s worth pushing back on how wrong it is or why it’s wrong.
In a case like this, we’re sitting here talking about Gwen Berry using her name on a radio show that’s on over 400 stations, right, all across the country giving her airtime. Of course, she’s the top story on the Daily Mail right now. I mean, she’s on Fox News. She’s everywhere. CNN, you name it.
CLAY: It’s not us making this story.
BUCK: Right. This has become a huge story. The White House has been asked to weigh in on it. Jen Psaki has said the usual thing of, “Yeah, don’t worry. We like wokeness even if Biden, we’re not gonna get him to actually weigh in on it specifically ’cause who knows what Joe Biden will say in the circumstances,” but here’s why this is important as well.
The incentives have changed such that now stepping out and saying this, not only is it not brave, but it’s the obvious thing for certain athletes to do, because that’s how much the system and that’s how much corporate America has changed in recent years. So why there’s a part of me that wants to say, “I wish we wouldn’t give this story the additional focus of someone who’s…” Let’s just be honest: It’s a bratty thing to do to say you don’t want to hear the national anthem when you’re representing the United States of America on an Olympics team.
So if somebody walked up and said, “Hey, I want a hamburger. I want a Big Mac,” and the cashier at McDonald’s said, “Well, meat is murder, like, they’d get fired pretty quick because the goal and the job at McDonald’s is to sell hamburgers. So if you’re opposed if you’re a vegetarian and you want to say instead, “Why don’t you get a sadly, instead,” well, eventually you’re gonna get fired probably really quickly.
But at least that’s a private entity, right? The San Francisco 49ers who Colin Kaepernick played for, they are a for-profit NFL franchise. To me you’re taking the next step, when you are representing the United States of America on the global stage and you are disrespecting us in this manner.
BUCK: And let’s just call if what it is with this White House and the Biden administration, Psaki speaking — the White House press secretary speaking — on his behalf: It’s cowardice.
CLAY: Yes.
CLAY: The truth.
BUCK: — if they actually spoke the truth on this issue, there’s about 30% of the Democrat Party, maybe more like 30% of the country — 20 to 30% — that would view that as some kind of betrayal of wokeness. And Biden needs, you know, the woke army working on his behalf. He needs them.
CLAY: He’s afraid of them, I think, is another way of putting it, too, ’cause he knows they’re constantly looking for a target and an old white guy is a pretty fertile target for them historically. And so this has always been a tenuous relationship. To me, this is going to I think … Some people say, what’s the ultimate impact of this? She’s not going to be the only one that does this.
That’s the truth. And next month when we are on the global stage, this is gonna be a major issue. And here’s what I’ve always argued, Buck. I went after Megan Rapinoe and the U.S. women’s soccer team because when they were representing the U.S. in the women’s World Cup, I thought that all those women had an opportunity to say the reason…
If you look at the women’s World Cup, for instance — and this is true also in the Olympics — one reason we dominate is because we’re so wealthy, because capitalism gives us the luxury to be able to have really good hammer throwers. Right? The reason why Gwen Berry, despite the fact she doesn’t represent belief that America’s worth celebrating, the reason why Gwen Berry is good at hammer throwing is because we have the resources and the luxury to be able to train people like Gwen Berry to be hammer throwers.
Right? The reason why we dominate is because of the wealth of this nation and so in the women’s World Cup and also in the Olympics, very often you can just look at the freest countries and they tend to win the most medals. So my argument with the women’s World Cup team that was so frustrating to me is, all they had to do was say, “Every country should try to be like America.
“Try to be like us. If you allow your women to play sports, if you allow them…” Saudi Arabia doesn’t even let you wear shorts. Iran doesn’t let women go watch actual soccer matches for much of its history. It’s not a surprise that those countries get their ass kicked by the U.S. women when we’ve got Title IX, we’ve got all these scholarships and everything else out there.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: — cinema achievements of all time. There used to be this sense that when it comes to the Olympics or it comes to American athletes on the world stage, this is one of the great moments of unity because we are all —
CLAY: That’s right.
BUCK: — rooting for our people, our American athletes. And to undermine that, to pollute that with petty, woke garbage is just… It’s just indicative of what we’ve come to now. I mean, I really do believe that America hatred for many on the left is becoming its own disorder. It’s becoming a fashionable mental illness.
CLAY: It pays. That’s what’s so frustrating, Buck. Nike set this precedent. Because the reason why Gwen Berry is trying to be like Colin Kaepernick is, how much do you think the average hammer thrower makes from hammer throwing if they even win a medal? Almost nothing. But I guarantee you one of these woke, loser corporations is gonna sign Gwen Berry to represent them, and they are gonna pay her millions of dollars.
There’s no other country that I’m aware of in the world, Buck, where on the national and the international stage you can basically stick up a medal finger at the country. In China, your family would disappear if you tried to do this. No other country’s gonna do this, and yet we’re gonna reward this behavior.
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