Well, the Olympics television viewership ratings are in for NBC and, boy, are they ugly:

NBC’s primetime coverage of the Tokyo Olympics on July 26 averaged 14.7 million viewers -- for a 49% drop compared to the equivalent night from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games and 53% less than the 2012 London Olympics. The opening ceremonies saw their lowest viewership since 1988.

Fox News reports that the network is actually giving advertisers extra ad time just to make up for all the lost revenue.

And sure, there are a few reasons -- Simone Biles's exit, and subsequent Oprahfied melodrama about her mental health certainly sucked a lot of air out of the room. The capacity to watch the shows one likes on YouTube any time one likes is another. A third one is the International Olympic Committee getting rid of "guy" sports like wrestling in favor of circus-dancing contests (complete with sparkly lion-tamer costumes) such as rhythmic gymnastics. The big one, though, is the one the advertisers don't talk about: Wokester politics invading sports, which repels the public.

We saw that earlier, with professional basketball following professional football off the ratings cliff. Now the Olympics, and in particular, U.S. Olympics, has followed that sorry herd.

Some instances were out there, like turds in the Olympic punch bowl.

One, that character who crossed her arms on the Olympic podium to protest the U.S. after winning Olympic silver. Who the heck was she and what can we do to ensure we never hear from her again?

Two, the pre-Olympic shenanigans of Olympic hammer thrower Gwen Berry, who disrespected the flag at a qualifying event and promised more should she win a medal, and the loud support of her wokesterism from the U.S. Olympic Committee. There was a lot of cheering when she lost.

Three -- there's also the wokester coach of the men's basketball team, one Gregg Popovich, who has spouted every wokesterism in the book. His team won gold, but does anyone care? Not if they have to listen to him and his pontifications. Sorry, team.

Four, and most prominent: Megan Rapinoe and her U.S. women's soccer team. Did anyone care that she hit an 'olimpico' goal, a very hard corner-kick that won her team the bronze? Nope, not really. The only thing people saw and tuned out from thereafter was her constant kneeling at the flag, Colin Kaepernick-style, to protest America's awfulness. Who needs that?

To say that wokesterism wasn't the prime reason for the viewers tuning out is nonsense. Two days ago, the New York Post reported that Subway franchisees have begged their mother company to pull their Megan Rapinoe ads based on angry encounters with their customers, the ones who pay them money.

And as for wokesterism, Rapinoe has toned it slightly down. When President Trump put out a missive stating that wokester leftists such as her are leading to losses, (something I observed here) Rapinoe pretended to be a stateswoman and called it a "sad dig," adding "I’m just like, ‘You’re rooting for people to do bad?’ Yikes." Which was disingenuous. Yahoo! Sports noted in its backgrounder:

The relationship between Trump and the team has long been strained, particularly when it comes to Rapinoe, who last year blasted Trump as a “white nationalist.” Asked in 2019 about the possibility that the White House might invite the team for a visit, prior to their FIFA Women’s World Cup victory that year, Rapinoe let it be known: “I’m not going to the fucking White House.”

Such a civility-filled charmer. But now she's 'shocked, shocked' that Trump was happy she lost. A lot of us were.

Yes, that's why people don't want to watch soccer or much of any of the summer Olympics. A 49% plunge in viewership comes pretty close to matching the number of Republicans in the country, so when a player goes woke, half the audience tunes out. They showed it in spades in the Olympics. Now if they wokesters can just learn to keep their politics to themselves, they might just retain the missing half of their audience. But it's hard to say if they really will. They don't understand economics, they don't understand cause-and-effect, and therefore, they carry on with the wokesterism. Maybe it's numbers like these, and the lower paychecks that follow that will serve as their wokester wake-up call.

Image: Logo, via Wikipedia / public domain

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