‘Against everything this country stands for’: ex-NFL player Chris Kluwe takes his local anti-Maga protest national

Last week the former NFL player Chris Kluwe was arrested at a city council meeting in his home town of Huntington Beach, California, for approaching councilmembers after making an impassioned speech likening the Maga movement to nazism. This came after the council approved a plaque commemorating the city library’s 50th anniversary. Writ largest on the plaque are the words “Magical Alluring Galvanizing Adventurous” – an acrostic of Maga.

Kluwe ranked among the NFL’s top punters while playing for the Minnesota Vikings in the early 2000s. During his career he was as well known for calling out NFL immorality and championing civil rights causes like same-sex marriage and racial justice as he was for pinning the opposition against their own goalline with his booming right leg.

Retirement hasn’t dampened the 43-year-old’s impassioned rhetoric. “Maga stands for resegregation and racism,” he said in his council address. “Maga stands for censorship and book bans. … Maga is a profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, Maga is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat but that is what it is.”

After dropping the mic to cheers from the gallery, Kluwe stepped forward from his public podium toward the city council dais and gave himself up as police swarmed to arrest him. He was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for disrupting an assembly.

“I had seen at previous city council meetings that this city does not listen to its community,” Kluwe said in a phone interview two days after his arrest, with characteristic wryness. “They want attention so that they can get more power. But they don’t want to do the actual work of making the community better.”

He assumed that his booking would be fairly straightforward, but the police held him for two and a half hours, “because they were waiting for something to charge me with”, he says. “Now I have a court date in April, so we’ll see what happens. There’s a possibility the ACLU might get involved. Some people have been telling me they’re looking to challenge this because they think it might not be legal.”

Chris Kluwe at the city council meeting on 20 February. ‘Maga stands for resegregation and racism,’ he said. Photograph: ZUMA via Alamy

Known as “the surfing capital of the world”, Huntington Beach is 40 miles down the coast from Los Angeles in Orange county – California’s historically conservative heartland. Kluwe, who grew up in nearby Seal Beach and has called Huntington Beach home for the past 15 years, has seen the town’s political attitude shift with the tides. “Skinheads and ‘surf Nazis’ were a known part of Huntington Beach,” he says. “But the government wasn’t necessarily like that. They were conservative. But it was small-c, don’t want to pay taxes or build new houses conservatism. But then [in the past decade] you saw the community start shifting more leftwards. When I moved back here, this was a cool beach community, a good place to live.”

But in the last few years, the community has been jerked back to the right as Maga Republicans have overtaken city politics. The former city attorney, Michael Gates, stepped down from that position this year to join Donald Trump’s justice department. Maga candidates swept last November’s elections to lock out all seven of Huntington Beach’s city council seats. After their victory they posed for pictures inside city hall wearing “Make Huntington Beach Great Again” red caps and dubbed themselves the “Maga-nificent 7”.

“A lot of people thought that Maga would help them, and they trusted the city council to look out for their best interests. They didn’t realize that this council is only here to make themselves famous and try to move upwards in the political echelon,” Kluwe says.

One of the new Maga cohort is Gracey Van Der Mark, the former mayor who won a city council seat in November. As mayor, she spearheaded a slew of initiatives including prohibitive voter ID laws, resisting California’s Covid mandates and eliminating references to hate crimes in the city’s declaration on human dignity. To regulate the city library, she pushed a resolution for a “parental advisory board” to pre-screen library books, and even considered privatizing the library’s operations. Both proposals were met with considerable backlash from the city’s liberal, independent and anti-Trump Republican residents. The library plaque includes an unattributed quote – “Through hope and change, our nation has built back better to the golden era of Making America Great Again” – which mashes up slogans from Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Trump’s presidential campaigns. But the overall tone of the tribute makes clear whose vision of America is most prized.

“The library’s name is in the smallest font on the plaque,” Kluwe says. “So, to me, it’s like, what are you really celebrating?”

Kluwe was bound to figure in the Huntington Beach resistance. During the 2011 NFL lockout, he called Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and other star members of his players union “greedy douchebags” for reportedly seeking individual carveouts from the league at the expense of a collectively bargained agreement. Two years later, Kluwe joined up with the Baltimore Ravens linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo to file a supreme court amicus brief expressing their support of the challenge to California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage. When the Vikings cut Kluwe in spring 2013, he wrote a Deadspin article attributing his release to his support of same-sex marriage and called his positions coach, whom he accused of repeatedly using homophobic language, a bigot. (After a months-long internal investigation, the Vikings settled with Kluwe by making a sizable donation to LGBTQ+-focused organizations.)

After retiring from football, he advocated for NFL players’ right to protest during the social justice movement and vocally supported Colin Kaepernick. All the while, Kluwe made a smooth transition into a career as a memoirist and sci-fi author.

But he says he’s finding the current administration stranger than fiction, particularly when he saw the photoshopped magazine cover of Trump wearing a crown that was posted on the White House’s official Instagram account. “I cannot think of anything more profoundly un-American than a picture of an American president with a crown,” he says. “That goes against everything this country stands for.”

Kluwe hopes his protest will inspire other concerned citizens across the country to take a stand and motivate Democratic lawmakers in particular to fight harder. “Right now, the Democratic party is contributing nothing to trying to defend our nation,” says Kluwe, who had been on the phone with party operatives before clicking over to talk to me. I asked whether he was interested in running for office himself, but he said he was more interested in the power of civil disobedience.

He hopes his stand against the Huntington Beach city council will be a reminder to the rest of the world of the many Americans who didn’t vote for Trump. “These countries have been our friends and allies for decades. It’s up to us to show the world that the 25% of people who cast their votes for him do not represent the American people, nor do they represent the American dream, which is one of inclusion, diversity and respect, both home and abroad. We may not always achieve it, but I think it is an ideal worth striving towards.”