Did New England Patriots football coach Bill Belichick overrule the players' vote to allow "protest" kneeling? No, that's not true: This claim comes from a satirical website that has a history of fabricating content surrounding popular topics, and features a disclaimer that states, "Everything on this website is fiction." Lead Stories could not find evidence on Google News to substantiate the claim.
The claim about Belichick appeared in an article published by The Dunning-Kruger Times on September 7, 2023, titled "Coach Belichick Overrules Players' Vote To Allow 'Protest' Kneeling: 'Not On My Field'" (archived here). The article opened:
Coach Bill Belichick has one of the most impressive resumes in all of professional sports.
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
Coach Belichick Overrules Players' Vote To Allow "Protest" Kneeling: "Not On My Field"
Coaches aren't messing around this season.
There is no truth to the claim that Belichick overruled his players' desire to kneel in protest. A Google search of the keywords "Bill Belichick overrules the players vote to allow protest kneeling" yields no credible matching results. It does return several national news stories (here and here) from 2017, when Belichick released a statement supporting the Patriots players after they took a knee during the U.S. national anthem before a game.
The Dunning-Kruger story is a fabrication from the site network America's Last Line of Defense (ALLOD), run by Christopher Blair, a self-professed liberal troll who produces content targeted at conservative audiences. Lead Stories has published fact checks on several of the fabricated narratives Blair's network has recently published (here).
Lead Stories has a satire policy and typically does not fact check content clearly labeled as satire. In this case, it is warranted as ALLOD content is frequently plagiarized and republished on other websites without a satire label.
Lead Stories' other debunks of Dunning-Kruger-Times articles can be found here.
The Dunning-Kruger Times
The Dunning-Kruger Times is a satirical website with an About Us page (archived here) that has the following disclaimer:
About Us
Dunning-Kruger-Times.com is a subsidiary of the 'America's Last Line of Defense' network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery, or as Snopes called it before they lost their war on satire: Junk News
About Satire
Before you complain and decide satire is synonymous with 'comedy':
sat·ire ˈsaˌtī(ə)r noun: The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, OR ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.
Everything on this website is fiction. It is not a lie and it is not fake news because it is not real. If you believe that it is real, you should have your head examined. Any similarities between this site's pure fantasy and actual people, places, and events are purely coincidental and all images should be considered altered and satirical. See above if you're still having an issue with that satire thing.
The website is named after the Dunning-Kruger effect, a term from a psychology experiment that describes the phenomenon of being ignorant of one's own ignorance. (That experiment's accuracy has been disputed.)
