lFormer AST Week NFL player Chris Cruwe was arrested at a city council meeting in his hometown of Huntington Beach, California. This comes after the council approved the plaque to commemorate the city library’s 50th anniversary. Plaque’s biggest writing is the phrase “magical, charming galvanized adventure.” This is Magazine’s Acrostic.
Kluwe ranked as the top punter in the NFL while playing for the Minnesota Vikings in the early 2000s. During his career, he was well known for calling the immorality of the NFL and defending civil rights causes such as same-sex marriage and racial justice.
The retirement has not undermined the 43-year-old’s passionate rhetoric. “Maga stands for repetition and racism,” he said in a council speech. “Maga stands for censorship and prohibiting books. …Maga is very corrupt, undoubtedly anti-democratic, and most importantly, Maga is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced sw with a red hat, but that’s it.”
After dropping the microphone to cheer from the gallery, Kruwe proceeded from his public podium towards the City Council Days, giving up on himself as police flocked to arrest him. He was eventually charged with misdemeanor charges of disrupting Congress.
“At previous city council meetings, we saw that the city was not listening to its community,” Kruwe said in a distinctive turbulence in a phone interview two days after his arrest. “They want attention so they can gain more power, but they don’t want to do the actual job of making the community better.”
He thought his appointment would be pretty easy, but police held him for two and a half hours. “Now I have a court date in April, so we’ll see what happens. The ACLU could be involved. Some people say they’re trying to challenge this because they don’t think it’s legal.”
Known as the “world’s surfing capital,” Huntington Beach is 40 miles below the coast from Los Angeles in Orange County, California’s historically conservative centre. Growing up in nearby Seal Beach and calling Huntington Beach home for the past 15 years, Kruwe has seen the town’s political attitudes change with the tide. “Skinheads and the ‘surf Nazis’ were known parts of Huntington Beach,” he says. “But the government wasn’t necessarily the case. They were conservative. But it was small. You don’t want to pay taxes or build a conservatism in new homes. But then (for the past decade) you saw the community start moving more left. When you went back here, this was a cool beach community and a good place to live.”
But in recent years, communities have returned to the right as Maga Republicans have overtaken urban politics. Former city lawyer Michael Gates resigned from his position this year and joined Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Maga candidates swept the election last November and kept all seven of the city council buildings in Huntington Beach. After their victory, they posed for a photo inside city hall wearing “Huntington Beach a lot again” and were called “Magani Fiction 7.”
“A lot of people thought the Maga would help them, and they trusted the city council to seek their greatest benefits. They didn’t realize that this council was here just to make themselves famous and try to move upwards in the political hierarchy,” says Kruwe.
One of the new Magaco horts is former mayor Gracey Van Der Mark, who won the City Hall in November. As mayor, she led many initiatives, including the prohibited voter ID Act, resisted the obligations of the California community, and eliminated references to hate crimes in the city’s declaration of human dignity. To regulate city libraries, she even considered promoting the “parents’ advisory committee” resolution to pre-screen library books and privatizing the library’s operations. Both proposals were met with considerable backlash from the city’s liberal, independent anti-Trump Republican residents. Library plaques contain non-primary quotes. “Through hope and change, our country has built up better towards a golden age that will make America great again” – mashing up slogans from the presidential elections of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump. However, the overall tone of the tribute reveals whose American vision is most highly regarded.
“The library’s name lies in the smallest font on the plaque,” says Kluwe. “So, for me, is that like you’re really celebrating?”
It’s up to us to show the world that 25% of those who voted for him don’t represent Americans.
Cruwe was to appear in the resistance of Huntington Beach. During the 2011 NFL lockout, he is reportedly referred to as Payton Manning, Drew Brees and other star members of his players union, which is why he is sought individual sculptures from the league at the expense of a collectively negotiated agreement. Two years later, Cruwe worked with Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayan Badejo to file a Supreme Court Amicus Brief expressing support for California’s challenge to ban Proposed 8 for same-sex marriage. When the Vikings cut Kluwe in the spring of 2013, he wrote an article on Deadspin that attributed his release to his support of same-sex marriage and called for his position coach. (After a month of internal research, Vikings settled on Kluwe by making substantial donations to an organization focused on LGBTQ+.)
After resigning from football, he advocated the right to protest during the social justice movement for NFL players, and voiced support for Colin Kaepernick. Meanwhile, Kluwe smoothly transitioned into a career as a memoir and science fiction writer.
But he says he finds current administrators more than fiction, especially when he sees the cover of a photoshopped magazine of Trump wearing the crown posted on the official White House Instagram account. “I can’t think of non-Americans deeper than a photograph of an American president with a crown,” he says. “It goes against everything this country stands for.”
Kluwe hopes his protests will encourage other relevant citizens around the country to motivate democratic lawmakers to fight particularly hard. “Now, the Democrats have contributed nothing to protecting our country,” says Kruwe, who was on the phone with party operatives before speaking to me. I asked if he was interested in running for the office himself, but he said he was more interested in the power of civic disobedience.
He hopes that his position on the Huntington Beach City Council will remind him of the rest of the world of many Americans who did not vote for Trump. “These countries have been our friends and allies for decades. It’s up to us to show the world that 25% of the people who voted for him don’t represent the American people, and that they don’t represent America’s dreams, one of the inclusion, diversity and respect, both within our homes and abroad. We don’t always achieve that, but I think it’s ideally worth the effort.”
