Before tens of thousands of protesters marched in Minneapolis on Friday to demand that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents leave Minnesota, they were mocked by the voice of the Minnesota Vikings.
Protesters marched from Commons Park on the edge of downtown to a rally at the Target Center in temperatures hovering around 10 degrees below zero.
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Discussing the cold snap with former Vikings linebacker Chad Greenway, Allen said, “In conditions like this, do paid protesters get hazard pay? These are the things I was thinking about this morning.”
The moment was saved by awfulannouncing.com and can be heard here.
“You probably won’t touch that,” Greenway said, according to an audio clip posted by the website awfulannouncing.com.
Allen continued. “Everybody’s catching strays this week,” he said, citing NFL quarterback Baker Mayfield and former NFL QB Charlie Batch. “They’re all gone. The protesters caught one this morning.”
The remark, which pushes the false narrative that protesters are paid by left-wing groups, is commonly made to undermine the importance of social protest. It sparked immediate outrage on social media.
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Minnesotans were protesting an immigration enforcement campaign in the Twin Cities that the Department of Homeland Security is calling “Operation Metro Surge.” Since it began in December, federal agents have shot and killed two Minneapolis residents, Renee Macklin Good on January 7 and Alex Pretti on Saturday. Both were 37 and American citizens.
On the department’s website, DHS director Kristi Noem said, “In the past 6 weeks, our brave DHS law enforcement officers have arrested 3,000 illegal criminal aliens.”
A message left on Allen’s phone went unanswered Saturday, and the show’s producer, Eric Nordquist, declined to comment.
An email to the Vikings received no response.
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At 1:30 pm on Saturday, Allen made a post on X.com that appeared to be a response to many posts – some angry, some supportive – tagging his account.
“I have to stop watching all this for a while. I am so sad that this terror is happening all around us here in MN,” he wrote. “I just asked the will of God to somehow stop and now and (sic) she started crying.
“I’m really sorry for all those who were hurt like me through this, and I just wish we could be a Love Pact again. Really. Let’s all pray that this stops somehow because it’s horrible. And no more cheap one-liners from me.”