Matt Birk, a Harvard-educated former Super Bowl-winning NFL center and current Republican candidate for Minnesota’s lieutenant governor, was in the news last week for saying our country promotes abortion “by telling women they should have careers.” . Speaking at a National Right to Life event last month, Birk said that “our culture promotes abortion loudly and quietly, telling women that they should look a certain way, that they should have careers, all of these things.” The what’s more he compared abortion to slavery and said pro-abortion activists “always want to go to the rape card.” He then made a joke about winning a Super Bowl.
Since Birk, who went to Harvard, is running for office as a pro-business Republican, it would be strange if he No burst out with some reactionary rubbish about how women should come home to their offspring, since that idea is central to both the conservative and neoliberal agendas. But while those ideas are very old, there’s nothing new in hearing them from Birk either. For more than a decade, Birk, who has an economics degree from Harvard, has spent years filtering clouds of increasingly powerful ideas, not just about abortion and women, but gay marriage and science. For more than a decade, too, Birk has benefited from the reputation of being a smart guy that she garners from graduating from Harvard. She has long enjoyed fawning media coverage, including mentions of the 34 she scored on the ACT in high school, and has regularly appeared on “Smartest Athletes” lists. This part of his identity is crucial to his brand. Birk makes sure to point out that he went to Harvard in campaign materials and your speaker at the 2022 National Convention for the Right to Life Biography said:
Super Bowl Champion Matt Birk is a 15-year veteran of the National Football League and currently serves as a Special Assistant to the NFL. A six-time NFL Pro Bowl selection and two-time All Pro, Matt proved to be an undisputed leader on the field and was named the sixth smartest athlete by Sport News. A Harvard University graduate, Matt received the 2011 Walter Payton NFL Man of the Year Award for his excellence on and off the field, including his commitment to emphasizing the importance of education through his HIKE Foundation.
The sixth smartest! Why such a classification was devised in the first place is perhaps a question for another day; Birk’s test scores and titles tell us as much about his ability to play football as his high school miles would tell us about his ability to play football. Sport News journalists to write about professional football. And it certainly says nothing about Matt Birk’s moral acuity, a matter of at least some relevance in a league that has spent the last decade pretending to care about racial justicesexual violenceand the wellness of their own players. dine in a Sport News ranking of the “smartest athletes” of 2010 that is not even on the internet more it’s pretty pathetic by any standard. This helps it fit in with just about everything else Birk (Harvard ’98) has ever said.
In 2012, our man from Harvard wrote a opinion piece in the star tribune supporting a law that would ban gay marriage in Minnesota. Birk was then playing his last season in the NFL, and very upset:
Same-sex unions may not affect my marriage specifically, but it will affect my children, the next generation. Ideas have consequences and laws shape culture. Redefining marriage will affect the broader well-being of children and the well-being of society. As a Christian and a citizen, I am obligated to care about both.
I speak on this subject because it is too important to remain silent. People who simply acknowledge the basic reality of marriage between a man and a woman are being labeled “bigots” and “homophobes.” Haven’t we outgrown that as a society?
In 2013, the year of his Harvard class’s 15th anniversary celebration, Birk explained that he would not be going to the White House with the rest of the Ravens’ Super Bowl-winning team because then-President Obama had thanked Planned Parenthood in a speech.
“Planned Parenthood performs about 330,000 abortions a year,” Birk said. “I’m a Catholic, I’m active in the Pro-Life movement and I felt like I couldn’t deal with it. I couldn’t endorse that in any way.”
After retiring after the 2012 Super Bowl, a flattering profile in the star tribune he sold Birk as the potential next big thing in Republican politics in Minnesota, pointing to a little-talked-about part of his biography:
“He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics and sports a Crimson football tattoo on his left leg. He plans to donate his brain to science due to his concern over concussions in football, and doesn’t wear his Super Bowl ring regularly, recently telling a person that he was big and ‘nasty’ ”.
Codified respectability policy about flashy jewelry aside, the former Harvard football player’s concerns about football-induced brain trauma subsided somewhat after he began working for the NFL in 2014. In 2013, Birk de Harvard said he would donate his brain and spinal cord to “help better understand the effects of football” and urged other players to do the same. Four years later, and by then on the NFL payroll as an adviser, Harvard’s Birk changed his tune. After a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association found that the brains of 110 of 111 deceased former NFL players had evidence of CTE, the Harvard economics student expressed skepticism that casts doubt on his status as a person who understand how numbers work.
Is Matt Birk smart? By virtue of going to Harvard, he is certainly believed to be intelligent, though there is no lack of evidence to the contrary. Does it even matter if Matt Birk is smart? Probably not. What matters is that he uses the idea that it’s smart (did I mention he went to Harvard?) to provide cover and credibility for a movement that seeks to assert dominance over others. Especially in this regard, he is like many other Harvard graduates before him.
Pointing to the diploma hanging on the wall is easier than trying to put together a morally coherent argument for your vision of a collective future, but what does it really say? After all, Harvard should be better understood as a $53 billion private company that relies on the exploitation of workers and the public to preserve the status of your own brand and the broader status quo; its Main Exports they are brothers of finance and management consultants. The fetishization of this “success” has revolting results both figuratively and, in a civic sense, literally. That’s how you end up with people who think Harvard’s Matt Birk might have something valuable to say, and maybe even should be in charge.
There really isn’t much to say about Matt Birk, the candidate. He is completely out of the ordinary, a utterly nondescript disgusting Republican with boring ideas and a terrible haircut. I think it’s much more illuminating to see how he got here. By merging mainstream Republican politics, whatever it may be at any given time, with his fame as a professional athlete and his reputation as a smart man with the Harvard brand, Birk manages to have the right meritocratic appearance while displaying the deepest disregard for basic rights. . of his fellow humans.
People have been mistaking Matt Birk for a smart guy for decades, when all he really is is a guy from Harvard. And they’ve been mistaking the Harvard boys for something else much longer.