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White Guilt Dog Won’t Hunt

National Football League commissioner Roger Goodell maybe right in playing his White Guilt Card to largely white fan base. After all rich liberals can afford to grovel for Social Justice Warrior vanity points. NASCAR President Steve Phelps thinks that taking a Goodell, a knee for the cause, is a winning play. I doubt it.

While I am not a racing fan, a motor racing fan or NASCAR fan, I do share a fondness for what is uniquely American. In it history, fanbase and on field personnel, NASCAR is the uniquely American sport, from American Spectator [1]:

NASCAR comes from a quintessentially American, and delightfully Jacksonian American, tradition; the cars, which ultimately made their way onto the first stock-car racing tracks had been customized, if not actually built, for a specific purpose — namely, to outrun the law enforcement vehicles that routinely chased bootleggers up and down the hollers of Appalachia during Prohibition. NASCAR comes from a decidedly blue-collar, hillbilly tradition, which other American sports leagues don’t claim. There were no Ivy League colleges specializing in racing cars up and down the highways of the East Coast to mirror the creation of football, basketball, and baseball; this sport was built on an American ideal that holds that what the hifalutin’ New York set has to say about a certain something matters not a bit unless it’s to set the standard for disagreement, and standing up to The Man is to be held as a show of common-man virtue.

Confederate flags at NASCAR events are, or have usually been, de rigeur. That some degree of racism fell along with that was not the point; it was that the NASCAR demographic was perhaps the most pro-America of all sports leagues, and also perhaps the most pro-law enforcement, it was also the most fervently invested in the old-fashioned American ideals — individualistic, self-reliant, courageous, masculine, and an interesting mix of traditionalist and iconoclastic.

For his part, Bubba Wallace is well on his way to exceeding Danica Patrick’s career NASCAR futility record, if he can but stay sponsored.  As for Richard Petty Motorsports, it look the Hall of Fame driver has hit his Peter Principle level.  Did Petty sign Wallace because he could not coax Patrick out of retirement?