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Raging attempts to shame Team USA hockey players are exactly why Trump was voted back into office 

On Wednesday night, golden boy and New Jersey Devil Jack Hughes returned to his home ice in Newark. The half edentulous star embraced his USA teammate turned opponent, Buffalo’s Tage Thompson, expressed his national pride and thanked the crowd.

He recieved a thunderous ovation.

And to think, a day earlier, The Athletic columnist Jerry Brewer wrote of Team USA’s post-win celebration — including that now-famous call from President Trump — “They’ve already lost some of the room.”

The “room” of which he writes isn’t the real world, where Hughes and Thompson were showered with love.

Rather, it’s a lefty echo chamber, made up of journalists and a bizarre ecosystem of online hockey fans, that wants to tear the sport down to its studs and remake it in their progressive likeness, complete with pronouns in the bio.

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It’s a chorus that has treated our conquering heroes like thought criminals — browbeating these elite athletes because they took a celebratory call from the democratically elected president of their country.

Also on the list of grievances: The tipsy crew laughed through Trump’s joke that he’d get impeached if he didn’t also invite the gold-medal women’s team to the State of the Union; but many also shouted affirmations and support for the ladies.

Just as bad, apparently, the fellas had the gall to actually attend the SOTU address.

A USA Today column said the players “utterly failed to meet the cultural moment,” while ESPN host Pete Rosenberg called them “sad little pawns” for attending. Feminist Jessica Valenti wrote in her Abortion, Every Day newsletter that any of the players with daughters blew their credibility with their own offspring — I guess because they didn’t correct Trump mid-call and read him a passage from a Gloria Steinem book.

Across the Northern border, Toronto Star columnist Damien Cox opined that Auston Matthews, a Californian who plays for the Toronto Maple Leafs, “could have just skipped the White House nonsense … All he had to say was he understood the feelings of Canadians in these troubled times.”

Yes, won’t anyone think of the losers?

Even now, as the boys return to their respective NHL teams, reporters are putting them through struggle sessions about the supposed controversies. (Three have now expressed mild public regrets over their reactions to the president’s joke.)

What’s the purpose of this mass shaming exercise? These whingers and whiners want the guys to publicly disavow Trump and promise to wear hair shirts under their pads and sweaters for the remainder of the season.

Nothing short of a symbolic self-immolation at center ice will do. Then, maybe, the beatings will stop.

Of course, these dudes have nothing to apologize for. Unless you consider being awesome an offense.

But this isn’t just about USA hockey.

The pearl-clutching pile-on is a broader indication that many in the media learned absolutely nothing from cancel culture’s halcyon days, in the early 2020s. Back when online pitchforks were yielded fiercely to squash critical thinking and differences of opinion — and repercussions were very much felt in real life.

When the anointed social executioners demanded that any dissidents abandon their not-lefty-enough thoughts and join the side of kindness and compassion. When even Twitter (pre Elon) would shut down accounts for “misgendering.”

In this house, we believe you say the thing we want you to say and no one gets hurt.

But we’ve all learned that you don’t win hearts and minds at the end of a wagging finger.

If anything, those tense attitudes led people to speak softer for a bit. They kept their thoughts and political leanings quiet, but privately seethed over having to self-censor.

The mass demand for purity — as defined by a small amount of people — only pushed more normies away. And many common sense liberals to move right.

This demand for conformity was a radicalizing moment for many Americans. The backlash to the scolds helped Trump win his second term.

And I’ll bet Team USA, whatever their politics, won’t suddenly wake up reprogrammed to the suit the political tastes of the critics.

None of them endorsed anything or anyone. They simply expressed pride in their country, the one they just represented at the Olympics and accepted an invitation from the leader of the free world.

However, much of the left is still waging a campaign to marginalize Trump and anyone who associates with him at any turn — even if it means smearing a group of men who played their hearts out for the stars and stripes.

So much for that vibe shift.

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