Athletes with outspoken and progressive social views absolutely terrify the hard Right and far-Right. I am seeing so much of that fear in Germany, the US and the UK. They just have no answer or antidote to them. https://twitter.com/raecomm/status/1340633968421552128

The problem that the hard Right has in attacking athletes with progressive views is that they are forcing the public to choose between their icons - who got famous by doing the things conservatives are meant to revere, aspiring and working hard - and angry men at their laptops.

Athletes with progressive social views are very, very dangerous to the hard-Right. You can draw a straight line from Colin Kaepernick’s sacrifice of his NFL career to the galvanising of Black Lives Matter to the effective grassroots resistance against Trump in key states.

Though Colin Kaepernick didn’t change the world by himself, he was a huge factor in driving the anti-racism movement. The hard Right, having seen his success, will be rightly worried by the social justice activism of athletes with even higher profiles.

When it comes to social justice activism, what frightens the hard-Right most is not debates, but books. They love debates because they can distract and misdirect with clever rhetoric. They are most scared by authors who put work out into the world without theatre or apology.