Thanks to intervention from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the National Hockey League (NHL) has backtracked away from plans to hold a job fair for only non-white applicants.
The “Pathway to Hockey Summit,” as it’s called, is scheduled to occur at the 2023 NHL All-Star Weekend celebration in Fort Lauderdale on Feb. 2nd and is designed to help “diverse job seekers who are pursuing careers in hockey.”
The controversial job fair was originally announced in a since-deleted LinkedIn post.
“Participants must be 18 years of age or older, based in the U.S., and identify as female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino, Indigenous, LGBTQIA+, and/or a person with a disability. Veterans are also welcome and encouraged to attend,” the post read, according to Fox News.
But then the governor heard about the event, and all hell broke loose.
NEW – @GovRonDeSantis spox issues statement condemning NHL for hosting summit where participants must .. “identify as female, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic/Latino ..”
“Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida,” says spox @BryanDGriffin
— MAHSA SAEIDI, ESQ.🕵🏼 مهسا (@MahsaWho) January 14, 2023
“Discrimination of any sort is not welcome in the state of Florida, and we do not abide by the woke notion that discrimination should be overlooked if applied in a politically popular manner or against a politically unpopular demographic,” the governor’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, said in a statement this week.
“We are fighting all discrimination in our schools and our workplaces, and we will fight it in publicly accessible places of meeting or activity. We call upon the National Hockey League to immediately remove and denounce the discriminatory prohibitions it has imposed on attendance to the 2023 ‘Pathway to Hockey’ summit,” he added.
Former DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw, now a DeSantis campaign staffer, got in on it as well.
“@NHL: You are officially on notice about your planned events in Florida. Unlawful discrimination will not be tolerated,” she tweeted.
In response, the NHL quickly bent the knee and deleted the offensive LinkedIn post. In addition, an NHL spokesperson issued a statement to Fox News saying the “original wording of the LinkedIn post associated with the event was not accurate.”
“The Pathway to Hockey Summit is an informational and networking event designed to encourage all individuals to consider a career in our game – and, in particular, alert those who might not be familiar with hockey to the opportunities it offers,” the NHL spokesperson continued, adding that the event is open to anyone 18 or older.
This isn’t the NHL’s first foray into “wokeness,” and it likely won’t be the last. In fact, critics would say the NHL has over the past couple of years become one of the “wokest” sports.
Two months ago, the NHL tweeted support for a transgender hockey tournament in Wisconsin.
The league specifically shared pictures from the Team Transgender Draft Tournament comprised entirely of transgender and nonbinary players, prompting one follower to question, “So, men playing on a woman’s [sic] team?”
The NFL’s official Twitter account responded “Transgender women are women. Transgender men are men. Nonbinary identity is real.”
What’s interesting is that just a few weeks later, something occurred at the Team Transgender Draft Tournament that proved why critics had been correct to call out the league.
A so-called “transgender female” (biological male) player hit a so-called “transgender male” (biological female) player so forcefully that the latter fell into a concussion.
“Shocking footage has emerged from an NHL-backed hockey tournament of a transgender female player hitting a much smaller transgender male opponent, who suffered a concussion after hitting the side wall head-first,” news.com.au reported.
Dovetailing back to the NHL’s history of embracing “wokeness,” back in October the league released its first-ever “diversity” report, and the report was predictably very anti-white.
Specifically, the NHL did an internal demographic study of its staff and all of its 32 teams concerning diversity. The results showed that hockey simply is too “white” for leftists and has to be transformed into a far more “woke” model of diversity.