Let Us Explain: Sportswashing

This essay is part of a series of explainers to provide our audience with a foundational understanding of fascism in today's mass culture. It is a guide to the term sportswashing. This is in no way an exhaustive exploration of the term, but a slice entry of a much wider discourse we hope may spark further reading and discussion. 

Sportswashing: the use of an athletic event by an individual or a government, a corporation, or another group to promote or burnish the individual's or group's reputation, especially amid controversy or scandal.

"Despite the presence of political parties, there is only one legal politics in the u.s.: the politics of corporativism."  

"So what is to be done after a revolution has failed? After our enemies have created a conservative mass society based on meaningless electoral politics, spectator sports, and a 3 percent annual rise in purchasing power strictly regulated to negate itself with a corresponding rise in the cost of living. 

What can we do with a people who have gone through the authoritarian process and come out sick to the core!!!

There will be a fight."

George Jackson, Blood in my Eye 

Yet another Super Bowl weekend has come and gone, and as we, the people, avoid the absurdity of the Monday after the big game being a workday by pouring over scene-by-scene breakdowns of the Bad Bunny halftime performance (and giggle at the Turning Point USA counter-show), we must face a collective truth that no Cardi B/Stefon Diggs break-up drama rabbithole can obscure: In a match between teams owned by Robert Kraft and the estate of Microsoft's late co-founder Tim Allen, zionism and technofascism won the game. 

Despite our best efforts to posit sports and sports media as a viable getaway from politics, or politics as a "more serious" alternative to sports culture, the two realms continue to prove their disimbrication an impossible feat. This is due in large part to the fact that sportswashing remains one of the most effective tools of indoctrination in the fascist state's arsenal. 

Among the pre-Super Bowl LX headlines, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft entered (anti-)fascist discourse following his public realignment with U.S. President Donald Trump and the circulation of his Blue Square Alliance Against Hate Super Bowl ad.  

The Guardian published an op-ed by sports journalist Howard Bryant critiquing Kraft's recent attendance at the Melania documentary premiere as one of Trump's guests of honor. Bryant argued that this apparent reconciliation with the president is evidence that Kraft's reputation as "the voice of reason" between the anti-progressive billionaire NFL owners and the league's predominately Black players is now tarnished. The piece surveyed Kraft's record as an arbiter of peace, citing his comparatively progressive record on racial and social justice issues during the Black Lives Matter era. Kraft, unlike many of his fellow owners, did not endorse punishing the players who publicly protested the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 by kneeling during the national anthem, as Colin Kaepernick did. 

At the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement, despite his affinity for the president, Kraft endorsed police reform and investment in Black and underserved communities. In 2018, Kraft made headlines by visiting then incarcerated rapper Meek Mill in prison, using his position to broker compromise between the owners and the players by bridging league interests with that of the hip-hop community in service to their shared fanbase. The following year, Kraft joined Meek Mill, Jay-Z, and billionaire Fanatics owner Michael Rubin in founding REFORM Alliance, a prison, probation, and parole reform organization that advocates for legislative change that promotes an end to unjust sentencing practices in the carceral system. 

Later that year, Jay-Z leveraged his relationship with Kraft to broker the deal between the NFL and his own Roc Nation entertainment to revolutionize the Super Bowl halftime experience and other gameday performances, by featuring more Black and non-white performers at the annual show. This unholy alliance was heavily criticized by activists and organizers associated with the Black Lives Matter Movement as a concession to corporate power that co-opted Colin Kaepernick's protest and compromised the more radical abolitionist demands of the larger movement.     

Howard Bryant marks Kraft's about-face as emblematic of the end of a period of progress, snuffed out by Trump 2.0's inauguration of an epoch of American authoritarianism. He presents the Trump/Kraft saga as mirroring the larger American descent into fascism by reiterating that Kraft eagerly supported Trump in 2016, having donated $1 million to the first inauguration and, unlike other professional sports organizations, Kraft presented the President with a Patriots jersey during the team's White House visit following their 2017 Super Bowl win. Despite Kraft's alignment with the Black Lives Matter reforms from 2016-2020, he did not (temporarily) sever ties with Trump until the January 6 insurrection in 2021. 

Bryant reads the split over the fascist insurrection, an event liberal consensus deemed an outright attack on democracy, as an anti-authoritarian stance, writing that the Trump/Kraft reconciliation 

represents the malleable ethics of the billionaire class, of the consistent gaslighting of a sporting public that desperately wants to see goodness in their games, for sports to lack the stench of the myriad pollutants associated with power, from the willful breaking of brains and bodies, to gambling, to Trump, to somehow be separate from the entire noxious atmosphere. Such is not possible. 

In his brief sketch of Kraft's history as a racial reformer, tarnished in part by a record of bipartisan political support characteristic of many billionaires and corporations that always make political alliances in the favor of capital's best interest, Bryant's disheartened tone falls flat. His attempt to simply paint Kraft as just another billionaire who has "fallen in line" and surrendered progressive reform under the boot of the Trump 2.0 authoritarian regime is incomplete. It fails to see why Kraft's move isn't at all shocking. In fact, Bryant's piece omits Kraft's most overtly fascist alignment: his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu and lifelong, unceasing support for israel. 

Kraft, the NFL, and Ziofascist Sportswashing 

The day before the Super Bowl, CBS Morning News Edition aired a special segment covering Robert Kraft's Super Bowl ad. The segment, which runs just under five minutes long, contains the ad itself and an interview with Kraft. He explained that he chose to run an ad for Blue Square Alliance Against Hate to continue his crusade against antisemitism, and that he launched it in the wake of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. The ad serves as a rebrand and relaunch of Kraft's nonpartisan, nonprofit organization the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. In the controversial ad, a Black student places a blue square over an antisemitic comment left on a Jewish student's backpack. The scene, according to Kraft, was intended to promote Black and Jewish solidarity—a cause he proudly touts that he's been championing by funding Unity Dinners for college students co-sponsored by the United Negro College Fund and the Zionist student organization, Hillel International.     

Kraft, a Jewish paper and packaging magnate who has owned the Patriots since 1994, married his late wife Myra Kraft in 1963. The newlyweds subsequently honeymooned in israel. The trip ignited a connection between the couple and the nascent settler state they upheld by committing a large portion of their philanthropic donations to the Zionist entity. The Kraft Family philanthropies website boasts that the Krafts have, over the years, hosted numerous "missions to the Holy Land for Jews and non-Jews," as well as "supported and launched numerous programs that create a connection to israel and Jewish life." The organization proudly credits the family's sustained investment in the zionist entity, support of birthright and "mission trips," and commitment to "combatting antisemitism" with being instrumental in forging a "robust economic relationship between Boston and israel, the results of which have created jobs and fostered technological innovations in both communities." 

Beyond this connection, the website also highlights the family's role in suturing a profound connection between the New England Patriots organization, the NFL, and the settler state. Through the "Touchdown in israel" initiative, it touts that "Robert Kraft has led three different mission trips to israel with current and former Patriots players and Pro Football Hall of Famers." 

The clips present Robert Kraft as a master at "sportswashing," the phenomena where global sports fandom is posited as a reputational laundering front for political regimes' high crimes against the people and the plane, for the sake of geopolitical unity. Sportswashing has been applied to modern cases, such as Qatar hosting the FIFA World Cup, Saudi Arabia's partnerships with and investments in numerous sports leagues, including WWE Wrestling, creating the Liv Golf league and FIFA stadium building deals, and Russia hosting the 2014 SoChi Winter Olympics. It has also been applied retrospectively to the 1936 Nazi Olympics in Berlin and the 1978 FIFA  World Cup held in Argentina during the "Dirty War."  

Sportswashing is an especially potent means by which nations exercise their soft power in times of capital and diplomatic crises. In Blood in my Eye, George Jackson sketched fascism in Marxist terms, as a reformist response to capitalism in crisis, writing, "Economic reform comes very close to a working definition of fascist motive forces." Jackson provides an extensive breakdown of fascism's crisis and reform dynamic in the section of his text titled "After the Revolution has Failed," as a lesson to the Left about the dangers of allowing the state and bourgeois power structure to implement economic and social reforms following capital flow crisis points like The Great Depression and the World Wars. Historically, crisis periods are when conditions are ripe for successful Left revolutions, as conjectures of war and economic depressions make the leftist assertion that "the only war is class war" unmistakably clear. 

Situating Robert Kraft's sportswashing reformism in the larger context of the Black Lives Matter era, and the aftermath of October 7, 2023, allows for a broader understanding of sportswashing as an ideal tool for fascist regimes to quell rebellion with the spectacle of sports and entertainment, restore regimes' global images, and stimulate markets by expanding sports' infrastructure and cultural consumption.  

The BLM Movement provided corporate elites the perfect laundering front for Black rage and white capital to manufacture consent for a reformist approach to the unredressable violence of antiblack police terror and structural underdevelopment through corporate-sponsored diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In 2020, Kraft and the other owners championed the NFL's "Inspire Change" social justice initiative, a 10-year-long pledge to direct NFL funds into Black, brown, and underserved communities by making grants to nonprofit organizations for programs in four areas: education and mentorship, economic advancement through career pipelines and financial literacy, community-police relations, and criminal justice reform. The capital redirected into these communities doubled with the aesthetic representation of the league's commitments, including painting "End Racism" in the stadium's endzones, as well as players donning social change slogans and police violence victims' names on their uniforms. 

Capitalists like Kraft and the NFL making concessions to social justice movements with revolutionary demands like the abolition of police and prisons have, however, had deadly consequences for the movements and their communities. Arthur Blank, the zionist founder of Home Depot and owner of both the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta United Football Club, has also used sportswashing to launder capital interests and the expansion of the global policing-zionist surveillance apparatus. 

As a college organizer in Atlanta, one of our youth movement's first major campaigns after the 2016 mass uprisings was fighting gentrification of the Black communities on Atlanta's westside, where Blank's Mercedes-Benz stadium megadevelopment project was built. The Arthur M. Blank family foundation has laundered capital primarily through the Westside Future Fund (WSFF) to develop affordable housing projects and provide support programs for the impacted "stadium neighborhoods."

While the initiative has, in reality, not stopped gentrification on the westside (only the abolition of capital and its property relations can actually stop gentrification), it has used Blank's philanthropy to sportswash policing infrastructure development in the neighborhoods. While the organization boasts major contributions to "worthy causes" like funding scholarships for students at the Atlanta University Center Consortium's institutions, The WSFF has built housing for Atlanta Police Department (APD) officers, reactivated the Westside Blue private police force, and expanded the Operation Shield citywide surveillance program in the communities. 

Blank's WSFF projects were done as a partner with and proud benefactor of the Atlanta Police Foundation, the public-private laundering partnership between the APD and (the worst) corporate capitalists most notoriously known for providing capital and resources that support the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) and the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center (Cop City). The same corporate and billionaire philanthropic powers that built the Mercedes-Benz stadium and laundered capital through the West Side Future Fund also funded Cop City. 

Kraft and Blank are but two of many sports owners with explicit connections to the zionist entity. This section could just as easily have covered Steve Tisch and the New York Giants, Miriam Adelson and the Dallas Mavericks, or Super Bowl winners Seattle Seahawks and Microsoft co-founder Tim Allen. However, Kraft and Blank's ties to BLM-era racial justice capital transfers from corporations to community supporting nonprofits demonstrates the extent to which cycles of crisis, reform, and restoration of corporate reputations are essential to fascism. 

Their investment in the zionist entity, Cop City, and companies that support ICE expansion demonstrates how Ruth Wilson Gilmore's "prison fix" remains just as lucrative as the cultural spectacle of capital in crisis. 

The unholy alliance between sports culture and normalizing authoritarian fascists—through sports culture's creation of the illusion of mass society—raises the stakes of liberation movement demands settling for corporate concession in lieu of abolishing the corporate capitalist structure. As George Jackson clarifies, the contemporary arrangement represents the natural progression of fascism after the capital crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic and radical politics' crisis in the afterlife of failed 21st century calls for revolution. "Mass movements," and "collective resistance," like other iterations of "mass culture," are illusory:  

From its inception, the fascist arrangement has attempted to create the illusion of a mass society in which the traditional capitalist ruling class would continue to play its leading role. A mass society that is not a mass society; a mass society of authoritarians whose short-term material interests are perfectly suited to the development of the perfect totalitarian state and centralized economy. 

Larger Culture of Ziofascist Laundering

Just as sportswashing far exceeds the boundaries of the NFL as a phenomenon that pervades major sports leagues around the world, the culture of laundering ziofascism exceeds the realm of sports. The Super Bowl is perhaps the crown jewel of the slew of celebrity-centered cultural events that span nearly every weekend from January to May. NBA All-Star Weekend, The Grammys, Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes, MLB Opening Day, The Master's, March Madness, Fashion Weeks, Royal Rumble, Wrestlemania, and the Met Gala all offer fronts for the ultra rich to launder the bloody reputations of the world's leading Ziofascist corporation while the masses are seduced by the illusion that there might still be vestiges of a monoculture.  

This year in particular, the Winter Olympics, World Baseball Classic, NBA All-Star game, and FIFA World Cup increase opportunities for wealth accumulation and laundering genocidal crimes. At the Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Milan, the audience booed the israeli national team and the american delegation led by Vice President JD Vance. Anti-Olympics protests in Milan against the games' environmental impacts, and exploitation featured cuts to transit cables, solidarity with U.S. anti-ICE uprisings, and calls for israel to be banned from competition. Italian police responded to protestors setting off smoke bombs and firecrackers by launching tear gas water cannons into the crowds. Italy's neo-fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the protestors as "enemies of Italy and Italians."

Southern cities including Houston, Miami, Dallas, and Atlanta join 16 North American cities as hosts for the FIFA World Cup, while Houston and Miami are among the four cities that will host the World Baseball Classic in March. 

Tensions around israeli participation in these global sporting events and ICE enforcement at the gates combine with the existing ills associated with hosting mega-events—increased policing and surveillance, exploitative labor conditions, and strain on public infrastructure among others—make them ideal spaces for antifascist escalation. Protests are surely anticipated, and so, the antifascist left must consider what it means to initiate a full stop of these events as a direct attack on the corporate apparatus. If the anti-zionist movement calls for full boycott, divestment, and sanction of these spheres, and ticket sales prove the latter two actions inoperable, sanctions remain a viable strategy. And by sanction, I don't mean making appeals to the complicit state to stop these events or make them more equitable; we must use sanctions-as-siege tactics to make them inoperable. 

While each of these events present opportunities to raise awareness regarding the global investment in the decadent spectacle of fascist society, and the genocidal regimes it props up and distracts us from, they also present opportunities to escalate their abolition. We must view the mega-event as a frontier for antifascist struggle and, like the Palestinian Resistance operatives at the 1976 Olympics and those who continue to fight to free the land and people in Palestine, we must not let the fear of being named "a terrorist" stop us from doing what is to be done. 

Mega Events as Frontiers of Antifascist Struggle 

Liberals have no problem indicting nations deemed "American enemies" or those marginal to western hegemony for "sportswashing." The term itself originated in 2015 as a critique of Azerbaijan's hosting the European Games soccer tournament despite its alleged human rights abuses. The term has since been applied to Russia, China, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, as well as to retrospectively designate the 1936 Nazi-hosted German Olympic games and the 1976 World Cup in Argentina at the height of the Guerra Sucia (Dirty War), where the games were held so close to torture facilities, captives could hear the crowd in their prisons. 

The fascist state, therefore, has many precedents for rolling out decadent bourgeoisie spectacles meant to disguise its violence as mass society worthy of our participation in times of heightened state violence and repression. Bourgeoisie athletes and celebrity attendees are not exempt from the laundering trend either. This year's NBA All-Star game followed Bad Bunny's Apple-sponsored Super Bowl Halftime show as a stage for the bourgeoisie to "take a stand" on pressing geopolitical issues.

In attempt to balance the league's globalizing ambitions with the growing angst regarding the United States maintaining its dominant position in the basketball world—evident in the growing number of NBA superstars from foreign nations, and seven consecutive International MVP awardees—All-Star weekend featured the blatantly nationalist-fascist theme of "The USA vs. The World," pitting league's best American-born athletes against its best International superstars in the weekend's flagship Sunday night tournament.

Beyond the questionable USA vs. World branding in a time of heightened xenophobia and anti-migrant state terror, the international roster featured the league's first israeli all-star, Deni Avdija. Avdija's presence in the game, regardless of his talent or achievement, should unquestionably be read as part of the larger attempt to normalize israel, and rehabilitate the entity's global image as it continues its genocide in Occupied Palestine. A recent call for a nuanced approach to considering Avdija's presence in the league aimed to separate the player, a kibbutz-born IOF veteran, from the war criminal accusations spewed by antizionist sports fans encourages separating the player from the genocide, given that he served under israel's mandatory conscription during the NBA's pandemic pause in 2020.

There is, however no timeline distinction between settlers and genocide; no time before the genocide after the zionist conquest, given that genocide is coterminous with settler presence.  As Frank Wilderson argues: 

"Just as slavery is the existential basis of the Black subject position, genocide is essential to the ontology of the Indian (native). Both positions are foundational to the existence of (White/settler) humanity."

In other words, Avdija's IOF service prior to October 7, 2023 doesn't negate that the presence of the zionist entity's occupation in Palestine makes every settler from 1948-present absolutely complicit in every drop of blood spilled, person displaced, home and historic rhetoric destroyed in the genocidal ethnic cleansing that makes "israel" possible. The same is true for the united states settler colony. 

NBA superstar Kyrie Irving wore a Wear the Peace "Press" t-shirt commemorating the more than 200 Palestinian journalists and media workers that have been killed since October 2023, while New York Knicks superfan Spike Lee also attended the all-star game in pro-Palestine regalia. While their actions are indeed "forms of resistance"—especially when juxtaposed against LeBron James's now infamous "I've heard nothing but good things about israel" all-star press conference comments, and reports of Steph Curry's venture capitalist investments in israeli tech startups run by IOF operatives—Lee and Irving's ongoing alignment with the zionist NBA, and bourgeoise class position bars their protests from achieving any truly radical impact. Spike Lee's deeply unserious post about his pro-Palestine attire not endorsing resistance to zionist occupation is this point making itself in real time.  

Radical direct action belongs to the masses. 

Protests at this year's Winter Olympics in Milan have put other policing agencies on high alert as they train in anticipation of their cities' hosting mega-events. In August, APD Chief Darin Scheirbaum—a GILEE deadly exchange program graduate and White Rose Society Honoree—proudly debuted new APD uniforms designed especially for this summer's FIFA World Cup patrols. The uniforms, like Cop City itself, are the fruits of investments from The Blank Foundation and other corporate investors from the Atlanta Police Foundation. The city has used its position as a top destination for sports tourism to justify ever-increasing investment in the policing and surveillance apparatus. 

GILEE was founded in 1992, two years after Atlanta won the bid to host the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. It offers, among its many initiatives, an Olympic security planning support program designed to export policing and security strategies used in israel against the Palestinian Resistance forces to Olympics host cities. The GILEE website cites the 1972 so-called "Munich Massacre"—where the Palestinian Resistance faction called the Black September Organization took 11 israeli Olympic athletes hostage during the Munich Olympic games—as the inciting event that necessitates Olympic cities undertaking anti-terror planning processes to coordinate their policing, security, and surveillance apparatus around potential attack. 

As the Stop Cop City, anti-ICE, and Palestine Solidarity Movements have demonstrated, the post-2023 urban policing and surveillance regime considers all methods of anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist resistance as terrorism. There is no such thing as peaceful protest—that is, protest exempt from terrorism designation. That means, if our Left movements are to take seriously the mega-events as legitimate fronts for anti-fascist resistance, we must be willing to engage in actions that demonstrate a sense of awareness that we organize in times of high fascist repression. To recognize repression as such means we are clear that every tactic we've already done is already accounted for in the fascist state's plan of (anti) terror action. And we cannot let this recognition force us to compromise our actions under the guise of preserving any sense of safety. George Jackson is clear: 

"No tactic can be ignored or discounted in such a battle. Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off, ignore it, isolate it with its defense mechanism—media. The greater the threat, the greater the corresponding violence from power. The only effective challenge to power is one that is broad enough to make isolation impossible, and intensive enough to cause repression to affect the normal life style of as many members of the society as possible. By compromising and playing at class war, we lose… The power of the people lies in its greater potential violence." 

Sports spectacles and megaevents offer us frontiers for antifascist struggle, not moments to participate in the spectacle of capitalist decadence. Our adversaries are using their mass accumulation to offer "unity" in times of "divisiveness" as a mask for their terror. Robert Kraft's interview on Bari Weiss' network demonstrates this perfectly. While the ad "combatting antisemitism," his zionist normalization student dinners, and continued co-optation of Black culture and "racial solidarity" are bad enough, they all work in service of a more sinister reality. Kraft has used his connections to zionist tech to operate an "antisemitism and hate speech" surveillance command center near Gillette Stadium.  

Kraft's surveillance center, Blank's Cop City, and the overwhelming number of AI surveillance tech, and American nationalism coded Super Bowl commercials demonstrate: fascist culture must be destroyed. Every mega event offers us not an opportunity for mass participation, but one to shut it down.