The recently-concluded World Cup was a revelation for me in so many ways. As it began, I decided that I was going to relax and enjoy as much of it as I could. My initial motivation was that I wanted to use it as a bonding thing with my daughter and her longtime boyfriend, who is really, really into soccer. He grew up playing soccer with one of the guys on the U.S. Men's National Team (USMNT). I also reasoned that there is plenty to be annoyed at in the world, so all diversions are welcome.
This column is about people who are praising the World Cup, but lacing the praise with negative qualifying sentiments, so I won't be doing any of that. I watched more soccer in the last month than I had in my entire life and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. FULL STOP. As a diehard sports fan (baseball, football, college hoops), it was very relaxing to watch an international competition where I wasn't too emotionally invested in anything. Sure, I was rooting for the USMNT, but we've all learned to greatly modify our expectations when it comes to international soccer competition.
As has been well documented in conservative media, one of the most fantastic things to watch throughout the tournament was the flood of social media posts by foreign visitors who were overwhelmed and thrilled by seemingly everything about the United States of America. I spent a lot of time during the World Cup scrolling through Instagram and watching gushing testimonials about America's awesomeness.
Of course, if you're a conservative American, you knew all of that, but it's always fun to see something familiar through fresh eyes. They reveled in all of it. Ranch dressing. Buc-ee's. The sheer size of everything. The generosity and hospitality of everyday Americans. It was a joyful and thorough refutation of everything that the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the mainstream media have been saying about this country for the last ten years. Because American leftists are such bitter, horrid people, all of that goodwill actually gave them a solid beatdown.
Time and time again, one of our European visitors would post about having been lied to by the media — theirs and ours — about the United States. They've been told it's unsafe — the gun haters tried to make them believe they were going to get shot as soon as they walked out of the airport. They were told that the South was racist and wouldn't welcome foreigners. Of course, their leftist leaders and media led them to believe that we were living in dark times because ORANGE MAN BAD.
A clinically insane USA Today writer (more on her in Friday's Morning Briefing) kicked off her World Cup coverage by writing that we lost before we even started because America is "a hateful and greedy nation" (h/t Guy Benson).
The truth-challenged propagandists in the MSM aren't being honest with themselves about the fact that they no longer have a stranglehold on narratives and can't get away with just making things up like they used to. They make sure that they only surround themselves with the low-info types who still lap up their nonsense, but don't have any influence beyond that. Still, they see all the evidence of their impotence, like social media being turned into a love fest for America for several weeks.
Since Spain won the title last Sunday, I've seen several MSM outlets try to belatedly pretend that they were part of the festivities. It's all backhanded compliment stuff along the lines of "Yeah it was great, BUT," sprinkled with all the negativity they can find. I'll briefly mention a couple here. Both of these are from Thursday.
The New York Times tasked three reporters with writing an article about the World Cup's financial winners and losers. It begins with a lot of good news, but finishes with some whining about how ordinary fans couldn't afford tickets. That was an ongoing complaint during tournament that was mostly being repeated by the MSM. Yes, the tickets were expensive. So are tickets to the Super Bowl, or World Series games. Real sports fans are aware of this. The media complaints about ticket prices only resonated with people who were only going to soil their diapers about the World Cup anyway. NYT reporters can't believe that people won't join in their misery, and won't stop trying to get more inmates in the asylum.
A Washington Post Op-Ed was titled, "The World Cup that restored my faith in America." Right away, you know all you need to about the author. Any American who needs to have his or her faith in the Republic restored is obviously weighed down by the burden of being a perennially whiny leftist. Again, we already had plenty of faith in this country here on this side of the aisle.
The first sentence of the piece begins, "Whatever your thoughts about the president of the United States," so you know where it's going from there. The author does say a lot of good things about the World Cup, but Stage 4 Trump Derangement Syndrome makes him incapable of writing too much without getting in a dig at the president.
The frothing America Last ghouls in the MSM can stop pretending that they enjoyed anything about the World Cup. We all know that they wanted it to be a vehicle for their un-American complaint machine and were hoping that the foreign visitors — especially the Europeans — would validate their hatred for this great land. Seeing French people fall in love with the United States and have fun celebrating on Independence Day was the stuff of nightmares for American lefties.
Just one more reason I loved the World Cup.
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