Bill Belichick’s T-Shirt Spurs Progressive Outrage

Printed from: https://newbostonpost.com/2017/07/15/bill-belichicks-t-shirt-spurs-progressive-outrage/

New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick apparently doesn’t even have to try when it comes to triggering the politically correct crowd.

The team’s improbable Super Bowl comeback this past February somehow managed to rankle liberals, and this week’s developments in Patriot Nation have managed to continue that trend.

The future Hall of Fame football coach donned a T-shirt this week, a parody of the popular “Life is Good” line of T-shirts, which depicted a wacky stick-figure cartoon of an armed man wearing a turban being bitten by a dog as he’s chased by a rifle-toting soldier along with the description “Life is Great.”

In true Belichickean fashion, the coach lopped off the sleeves of his shirt, and a photo of him wearing while vacationing on Nantucket hit Twitter on Tuesday. According to the Boston Herald, the shirts are sold by a former Navy SEAL from California named Jim Amann. Amann’s Trident K9 website also specializes in the sale of tactical gear. In Amann’s own words, the T-shirt Belichick has unwittingly popularized was intended to “celebrate the end of Osama Bin Laden.”

A visit to the website shows that the popular shirts have sold out.

Amann told the Herald’s Bob McGovern that sales of his shirt have soared to the point where he is now donating all profits to the Navy SEAL Foundation.

The shirt, however, has also apparently offended a fair share of people. In a piece titled “Bill Belichick’s Off-Season Look Is Basically Breitbart In Margaritaville,” Esquire’s Luke O’Neil, a Boston-based writer, describes the shirt this way:

“While the original Life Is Good designs are about the chill-bro vibes of tossing a frisbee on the beach, this is a much darker state of affairs: Watching a dog maul a brown-skinned, presumably Muslim man, is supposed to be … delightful?”

O’Neil connected Belichick’s T-shirt to a recent incident in San Diego involving a police dog mauling a black man.

Sean Newell at VICE SPORTS used some expletives about Belichick’s shirt and then described it as “weird” and “some might even say offensive.”

Boston Magazine predictably leaped on the triggered bandwagon, declaring that the shirt is “no good” and that without the explanation from Amann “it’s not exactly clear who the guy in the turban is, as lots of people who aren’t Osama bin Laden wear turbans.”

The Internet Outrage Machine was subsequently off to the races on this one:

The woman who snapped the impromptu photo that launched a thousand hot takes has apparently now set her Twitter account to private status.

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