Former NFL player Burgess Owens was met with swift backlash after likening Nike’s latest advertising campaign to attacks like “9/11 and Pearl Harbor.”
Owens, during an appearance on Fox Business Network on Monday, bashed Nike’s ads featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who became controversial for kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality.
“We now just have Nike, for instance, just joining this fray,” Owens told host Stuart Varney on the eve of the 17th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. “And as we see a little bit less probably of the kneeling, we’re going to still see the narrative by Nike. And that is a Marxist who’s going to be the face and commercial in the NFL games from this point moving on.”
He continued: “We have to look at the bigger picture and understand, America, that we are under assault. It’s like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor ― we’re being assaulted by the left. And we need to understand who they are ― the globalists and the leftist globalists. The worst thing that could happen to our country is to let them get away with it.”
Varney appeared unfazed by Owens’ comparison, quickly erupting into laughter when told the title of the former NFL player’s first book: Liberalism or How To Turn Good Men Into Whiners, Weenies And Wimps.
“Now there’s a title I could live for,” he told Owens.
But Owens’ “sick” comparison wasn’t lost on some Twitter users.
Owens was a safety for the New York Jets in the 1970s, and the Oakland Raiders in the early 1980s. He has expressed support for President Donald Trump and has sided with the president in the NFL kneeling controversy.
“We need to make sure that we’re standing against corporate elitists, liberal elitists like the NFL,” Owens told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in October. “It’s not a white American problem; It’s a Democratic, black and white, elitist problem.”