'A Nazi movement': Chris Kluwe wants anti-MAGA campaign to go national

26 February

Former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe as grand marshal in the 2013 Twin Cities Pride parade in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Wikimedia Commons/Tony Webster

Chris Kluwe, a former NFL player, was arrested last week and charged with a misdemeanor after he said that the Trump movement is “explicitly a Nazi movement.” He made the statements at a city council meeting in Huntington Beach, Calif., his hometown. In a piece published Wednesday, he told the Guardian that he hopes his action will inspire others.

“Kluwe hopes his protest will inspire other concerned citizens across the country to take a stand and motivate Democratic lawmakers in particular to fight harder. ‘Right now, the Democratic party is contributing nothing to trying to defend our nation,’ says Kluwe, who had been on the phone with party operatives before clicking over to talk to me. I asked whether he was interested in running for office himself, but he said he was more interested in the power of civil disobedience,” Lawrence writes.

“MAGA stands for resegregation and racism,” he said to the city council. “MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. … MAGA is a profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat but that is what it is.”

The council had recently approved a plaque for the city library that said “Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous” — MAGA. As meeting attendees cheered, he “stepped forward from his public podium toward the city council dais and gave himself up as police swarmed to arrest him,” the Guardian reported. His charges were a misdemeanor for disrupting an assembly.

“I had seen at previous city council meetings that this city does not listen to its community,” Kluwe told the Guardian’s Andrew Lawrence. “They want attention so that they can get more power. But they don’t want to do the actual work of making the community better.”

He said he was held at the police precinct for two and a half hours “because they were waiting for something to charge me with.”

“Now I have a court date in April, so we’ll see what happens. There’s a possibility the ACLU might get involved. Some people have been telling me they’re looking to challenge this because they think it might not be legal,” he said.

He also said he hopes to send a message to the rest of the world that not all Americans support Trump. “These countries have been our friends and allies for decades. It’s up to us to show the world that the 25% of people who cast their votes for him do not represent the American people, nor do they represent the American dream, which is one of inclusion, diversity and respect, both home and abroad. We may not always achieve it, but I think it is an ideal worth striving towards.”

“He says he’s finding the current administration stranger than fiction, particularly when he saw thephotoshopped magazine cover of Trump wearing a crown that was posted on the White House’s official Instagram account. ‘I cannot think of anything more profoundly un-American than a picture of an American president with a crown,’ he says. ‘That goes against everything this country stands for,’” Lawrence writes.

A punter for the Minnesota Vikings in the 2000s, Kluwe has long been outspoken politically. He called two top football players “greedy douchebags” in 2011 “for reportedly seekingindividual carveouts from the league at the expense of a collectively bargained agreement,” writes Lawrence. He also filed a brief to the Supreme Court expressing support for same-sex marriage. When the Vikings cut him in 2013, Kluwe said this position was the reason. “I Was An NFL Player Until I Was Fired By Two Cowards And A Bigot,” he wrote in Deadspin. He also supported Colin Kaepernick’s civil rights activism.

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