Paul Allen, longtime play-by-play announcer for the Minnesota Vikings and "the voice" of the Minnesota Vikings Radio Network, took a moment on his show on KFAN Friday to engage in some easy right-wing propagandizing. In a conversation about dangerous sub-zero temperatures in the upper Midwest, and in the manner of one who is certain of his footing, Allen made a crack about the residents of Minneapolis who've filled the city's streets this weekend to protest the violent occupation of their city by unaccountable, marauding federal goons.
"Do paid protesters get hazard pay?" asked Allen, as first reported by Awful Announcing. "Those are the things I've been thinking about this morning." The conversation moved on to football, after one of Allen's hosts refused to engage in this line of commentary. Allen was not to be deterred. "Everybody's catching strays this week: [Brian] Flores; Kevin Stefanski, from Baker [Mayfield]; Charlie 'Biyatch' caught one out of nowhere; they're just all over," Allen said, in a discussion about NFL coaches and former players, before wrenching the subject back around to his preferred talking point. "Paid protesters caught one out of nowhere this morning," he continued, an apparent reference to his own ill-advised joke from minutes earlier. Allen was again met with awkward disengagement, and quickly pivoted back around to sports.
The clip was reportedly removed from the show's podcast feed. Allen posted a weepy, performatively Christian non-apology to his Twitter account Saturday afternoon, careful to avoid expressing anything even vaguely like community solidarity but assuring his followers that his face was, at that moment, tear-streaked:
"I have to stop watching all this for a little bit. I'm so sad this terror is happening all around us here in MN. I just prayed to God's will for it to somehow stop and now and started crying. I truly am sorry for all hurting like me through this, and I just want us to be a Love Covenant again. Truly. Let's all pray this stops somehow because it's awful. And no more cheap one-liners from me."
Between the time of Allen's "cheap one-liners" and his cheap apology, masked federal goons murdered peaceful protester Alex Jeffrey Pretti in broad daylight for filming them with his cellphone, and then labeled him a hell-bent would-be mass-murderer. The right-wing apparatus from which Allen adopted the lie about paid protesters has long moved on; now they're calling the protesters domestic terrorists. I suppose in either case, so long as you repeat the prevailing justifying lie, and so long as you confine your mirth to off-air exchanges, you are allowed to chuckle at the thought of your neighbors getting frostbite out there resisting Donald Trump's lawless paramilitary death squad.
