One of the things that always happens during these politically and socially charged national situations is that athletes, celebrities, and people with large “platforms” receive a ton of scrutiny, whether they like it or not. If you’re not saying the right things, or not “doing enough” to help a cause, or sitting on the sidelines entirely, you get legions of people coming out of the woodwork to rip you to shreds.

This applies to Delran native Carli Lloyd of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, who again took a boatload of crap this weekend on Twitter and then deleted a couple of posts.

The ire seems to stem from the fact that she asked her followers where to buy a push cart so she can play golf with her husband. She posted this on Saturday afternoon while the nationwide demonstrations were going on, so people were ripping her for being tone deaf:

https://twitter.com/aestheticwnt/status/1266808274621513730?s=20

Those responses were typical, people shredding her for tweeting about golf while all sorts of crazy stuff was going on. It was sort of a “please read the room” type of response from people accusing her of failing to speak up.

She followed with this tweet, which was later deleted:

These two were also deleted:

That was the one that pissed off people the most, I guess, and then you had people like Katie Nolan coming after her four hours later:

This whole thing is fascinating to me.

When Carli writes about “approved” timelines or saying “what you wanted,” she’s talking about the legions of Twitter users who put together these Grover Norquist-style pledges, like they have a notebook where they keep track of which athletes shared a George Floyd social media statement and which ones didn’t. Then, the people who didn’t are criticized and slandered for “not doing enough” or not “using their platform” correctly and added to the blacklist.

The ironic thing about it is that most of these social media posts mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Every single athlete on the planet could post a heartfelt message about George Floyd, which wouldn’t be half as effective as donating money to good causes, reading up on racial inequality, or participating in a demonstration or protest. The mob mentality just results in everybody under the sun issuing their own George Floyd statement to cover their butt, not necessarily because they give a shit about injustice, but because they know the Twitter horde will come for them if they don’t post some canned crap on Instagram.

What’s interesting is that Lloyd took similar shit just a few months ago, when she posted about getting a new car at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Similarly, people ripped her back then for being “tone deaf” and “out of touch” for failing to read the room, which was arguably true. On the other hand, we’re talking about someone who runs soccer camps and has done past charitable work with Habitat for Humanity and other organizations. It’s not like she’s out here waving the Confederate Flag and retweeting Aubrey Huff. She’s always been a role model for young girls.

Of course a major consideration is that the USWNT is at the forefront of activism with voices like Megan Rapinoe and Ashlyn Harris carrying a lot of weight. Most hardcore fans of the team could safely be described as ultra-progressive, so anything perceived as anything but uber-woke is frowned upon. I think it’s fair to say that Lloyd seems to take more shit than other athletes who play sports with more moderate or right-leaning fans.

Anyway, the real question is whether or not any of these statements really truly matter. Every time something tragic happens in this country, we look to athletes and celebrities to write a few paragraphs on Twitter, and then what? It’s all good? We’ve solved racial inequality?

What really matters is what people do with their time and money, not what they write on social media, because the former results in tangible progress while the latter does not. We’re better served by logging off and doing something more productive instead of arbitrarily determining the adequacy of tweets.