The World Cup team's activism is well established. Team captain Megan Rapinoe, who calls herself a "walking protest" against the Trump administration, accused President Trump of "excluding people" in a Tuesday interview on CNN.

Making the words "F--- Trump" its battle cry, its rebel yell to rally itself, the women's World Cup team comes with a lot of wokeness. According to the Washington Times :

"Your message is excluding people. You're excluding me. You're excluding people that look like me. You're excluding people of color," Rapinoe said in a message to the president.

Weird thing to say to a president who invited her to the White House, win or lose, but the hypocrisy doesn't stop there.

Here's the doozy the Washington Times based its piece on:

Jaelene Hinkle, a 26-year-old star for the North Carolina Courage professional team, has been called the top left defender in the U.S. game, but she wasn't selected for the national team — a decision that may have had more to do with politics than prowess. In 2017, Hinkle turned down a call-up from the national team for a pair of international friendlies after learning that the players would wear rainbow-themed jerseys in honor of Gay Pride Month. She said later that the uniform conflicted with her Christian faith. "I just felt so convicted in my spirit that it wasn't my job to wear this jersey," she told "The 700 Club" in a May 2018 interview. "I gave myself three days to just seek and pray and determine what [God] was asking me to do in this situation." Hinkle has not played for the national team since. After she was left off the World Cup roster, coach Jill Ellis told reporters that the decision was "solely based on soccer," an explanation greeted with widespread skepticism.

So inclusion means that everyone except Christians gets invited to the party to play, is that it? Sounds as if this team was a hard little clique of intolerant leftists, and the cohesion of their political views was so important to them that the inclusion of a Christian would have spoiled the whole thing. Apparently, these players were congenitally unable to get along with anyone whose views on the unrelated matter of politics didn't match theirs. Hating Trump actually must have motivated them to operate as a team, so bye-bye, Jaelene.

Compounding the matter of exclusion, Hinkle was one of the very rare black players who could have made the team. One of the few black women good enough to make the team, and they made sure she didn't get on, leaving the team almost all white. Well, so much for "diversity." And so much for "looks like America." They had a chance to prove a that with this player, and they flunked. They sure didn't bother about the usual leftist affirmative action tropes about inclusion, rules that often are bent to admit less qualified people. They excluded a better player, who was black...based on her Christian faith, and actually, someone who could have made soccer palatable to the Christian and black communities to fuel ticket sales. They just didn't want that around.

The Times makes a persuasive case that the player really was an impressive one and quite nice to the other players regardless of her disagreeing with their politics, leaving questions raised in the soccer world as to why she wasn't on that team. The icky official answer seen was that she just didn't have the merit. Oh. Been there, done that, Bull Connor.

And they're yelling about Trump being the "excluding" one? Give me a break.

Update: An alert reader advises us that the women's World Cup team did include a black player, Crystal Dunne. The story has been corrected.

Image credit: Makailya Willis via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.