Chris Kluwe says he was fired from coaching freshman football after being arrested for anti-MAGA protest
Kluwe was arrested earlier this month after protesting city council meeting in Huntington Beach
By Kari Anderson, Contributing writer
Former NFL punter Chris Kluwe said he was fired from coaching high school freshman football after protesting a “MAGA” sign in Huntington Beach, California.
Kluwe, who has spent years coaching at Edison High School in Huntington Beach, wrote about losing his job in a post on Bluesky on Thursday.
“Just got fired from being a freshman football coach, if you want to know what MAGA does to communities,” Kluwe wrote. “They don’t care about what helps people, because the school is certainly not going to find an ex-NFL player willing to coach there at that level, they only care about trying to hurt people.”
The high school’s athletic director told USA Today that the move was a personnel matter and the school district declined comment.
Earlier this month, Kluwe was arrested after speaking at a city council meeting, protesting the council’s decision to put in a plaque at the local library. The plaque included an acrostic that spelled out “MAGA,” an acronym used by President Donald Trump and his supporters, standing for “Make America Great Again.”
Kluwe told CNN on Friday that the school had fired him because the incident was “getting too much attention.”
“I’m sad that I won’t be able to work with the kids anymore, because they always were excited once they figured out I had played in the NFL,” Kluwe told CNN.
At the protest on Feb. 18, Kluwe criticized the decision to endorse the “MAGA” movement with the plaque.
“’MAGA’ is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, ‘MAGA’ is explicitly a Nazi movement,” he said as part of his address to the council. “You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that’s what it is.”
He then took a seat at the front of the room and refused to leave, participating in what he called “the time-honored American tradition of peaceful civil disobedience.” Kluwe was arrested and charged with disrupting the assembly, and was detained for around four hours before being released. He reportedly has a court date set for April.
Kluwe, who retired in 2013, spent most of his career with the Minnesota Vikings, playing for the team from 2005-2012. Kluwe has been outspoken about his political beliefs for years, and alleged that the Vikings cut him from the team because of his support for same-sex marriage.
In 2014, Minnesota and Kluwe settled for an undisclosed amount over allegations of homophobic remarks; the money from the settlement was donated directly to organizations serving LGBTQ+ causes.
