Remember this, the essay a University of North Carolina athlete submitted to one of his courses—he got an A—leaked to the news media in 2014?
On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.
I think about this when I’m reading manifestos from pro football players who think the on-field protests that they can’t adequately explain are vital to national discourse. The protests aren’t, and the protesters aren’t. All of the articles about how protests are inherently patriotic are revealed as lies when the protests they are extolling are this divisive, this costly, and this pointless. The Kneelers are almost entirely filthy rich, maleducated, pampered, narcissist dead-heads whose critical thinking skills are infantile, and whose literacy is dubious. What entitles them to a national canvas every Sunday upon which to scribble their graffitti? Nothing. And by continuing to scribble, they are gradually reducing the visibility of that canvas, as well as the viability of their own occupation, which is short-lived already.
The NFL, meanwhile, is stuck in ethics zugswang by its own incompetence. Allow the players to continue making a mindless Fall ritual of mob ecstasy over the visceral pleasures of watching behemoths in armor crush each other an exercise in cognitive dissonance, and the NFL betrays its ticket-buyers, business partners, sponsors and stock holders. Tell the players to protest on their own time, and the NFL is siding with a President who crossed a line by telling a private business how to manage its employees, and setting itself up as opposing “police brutality,” thus Black Lives Matter, thus African Americans.
Meanwhile, the liberal punditry and news media, which doesn’t give a fig about football, is cheering on the Kneelers even as it drives the NFL into cultural harikiri. It’s a little like some of the more disgusting of the anti-gun fanatics when they reacted to the Las Vegas shooting: “Well, it was a lot of conservatives, so who cares, as long as we can use it to ban more guns.” Same here: Liberals, who are far from the core audience for pro football, are quite happy to see the NFL form a circular firing squad if it furthers “the resistance” and progressive narratives, if even for a little while.
An instructive example was a column earlier this month from the Times’ latest hard left op-ed writer, David Leonardt. Called “The Choice Between Winning And Kneeling,” it purported to be a “protest smart” exhortation to the NFL kneelers, without ever articulating exactly what this foggiest of all protests is supposed to win.
Leonardt begins with five inspiring and completely irrelevant paragraphs about the civil rights protests on the Sixties. This is intended to sanctify the NFL kneelers’ grandstanding, but accomplishes the opposite. That protest movement had clear and specific goals. Blacks and fair Americans wanted an end to Jim Crow. They wanted blacks to be able to vote, as the law said they could. They wanted an end to segregation, and discrimination by public commodities. They wanted to have equal justice under law enforced.
Making the intellectually dishonest leap from Selma to the football field, Leonhardt states, “The professional athletes doing political battle with President Trump are heirs to the civil-rights movement. They are protesting government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans,” thus falling flat on his face immediately. Wait: are they opposing President Trump, or are they “protesting government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans”? Is he suggesting that Trump favors violence against African-Americans? Who and what is the protest about?
Well, some are protesting one, some are protesting the other, and some are just going along for the ride. By what measure does Leonardt make the factually false statement that violence against African American is “government-sanctioned”? The U.S. government encourages people to kill blacks? No, it doesn’t. Leonardt dishonestly links to the Washington Post data base on police shootings, as if this supports his slur. Among other things, those statistics show more whites shot than blacks. Never mind. Leonardt is just trying to pretend the NFL players have a clue what they want.
We know what legislative and societal measures Martin Luther King wanted. What measures would address the Kneelers’ concerns? A law declaring that police must never shoot blacks when the officers felt threatened? Officers counting to five before using their gun if a suspect is black, and just to three if he’s white? Automatically pronouncing any officer who shoots and kills a black man as guilty of murder? Dispensing with juries when white officers are involved, and using “innocent until proven guilty” as the standard when black officers are involved? Colin Kaepernick thought that any officer who shoots a black man should be automatically suspended without pay, before any investigation. Is that the goal? As I have noted before, “ending systemic oppression” is just a slogan. It is meaningless. If it is meaningless, so is the protest calling for “something” to be done about it.
Leonhardt doesn’t care. He just wants to promote societal division; it’s the Leftist Way. “From a moral standpoint, this issue is clear. The athletes are right — and have every right to protest as they have. Trump is wrong, about the scourge of police violence and about freedom of speech,” he writes. Really? What are the athletes “right” about? Even they don’t know. The President has never said that police violence was or wasn’t a problem, but I thought Leonardt just wrote a few sentences before that the protest was about “government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans,” didn’t he? But he linked to a source about police shootings involving all races. Whatever! This is an op-ed for the choir, and not its brightest members, either: there’s no genuine analysis or reasoning, just shotgun endorsement of broad progressive cant. Blacks oppressed. Police bad. Guns bad. United States racist. Trump racist.
Trump, of course, is completely correct about freedom of speech in this matter: employees don’t have a right to turn the workplace into their own, personal Sixties college campus. But, you see, Trump is intrinsically “wrong,” so even when he’s right, it’s wrong.
Then Leonardt, deceitfully urging the athletes to retreat even though they are “right”—about whatever—suggests that they find some other way to display their keen, sophisticated commentary on the complexities of law enforcement–it’s “police violence” again, not “government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans.” Funny, because that’s not what Colin Kaepernick claimed he was kneeling about, and—I hate to say this, but it’s true—most Americans want police to protect themselves and them, with violence, meaning guns. Good progressives like Leonardt don’t like guns. “Violence” is code for guns, you know. Which is ironic, because a lot of NFL players own guns and use them. What are we protesting again? I forget.
So does Leonardt. He writes,
“Do Trump’s opponents want to oppose him in ways that are merely just and satisfying? Or do they want to beat him? “You can’t get angry,” as the longtime activist Vernon Jordan has said, describing a different civil-rights battle, in the 1950s. “You have to get smart.”
Check that essay again. NFL players are only going to get so smart. If they are listening to advice from the likes of Leonardt, and they apparently are, it’s not nearly smart enough. In fact, the op-ed writer is counting on it. See—now the protest is about opposing Trump, and never mind “police violence”or–and?— “government-sanctioned violence against African-Americans.” This is also odd, because the writer just lectured the Kneelers about the importance of patriotic symbols. “Most Americans respect the country’s symbols and because standing is a simple sign of respect,” he says.
You know what else is a symbol of America to most Americans? The Office of the President. It was wrong for this President to punch down at a bunch of grandstanding athletes and their venal, value-free game, but the fact remains, if it’s the NFL against the White House, POTUS wins.
Now Leonardt goes full-“resistance”—police shootings? Never mind:
“The athletes shouldn’t apologize for anything. Those who continue to kneel, and draw ire, deserve support. But the smart move now is not to expand a tactic that Trump loves as a foil. It’s to shift toward protests that don’t need a counterintuitive and distracting defense, while he gets to bleat on about America first.”
Most Americans think that America should think about America first, and never have bleated in their lives. They also think that football players should be thinking about football first. Leonardt insults the President of the United States while arguing that it’s foolish for NFL players to show disrespect to American symbols. The shock of Hillary losing has completely severed so many Democrats’ connective tissue with their own nation’s traditions and values. This prime sufferer continues,
The protests can still be aggressive — like the “I can’t breathe” shirts in the N.B.A., and much more. Trump, of course, will blast any protest as some version of uppity. But so what? The target audience are the many Americans open to opposing police violence and a bullying president — but uncomfortable with a gesture that seems to oppose America itself.
Aggressive, or dishonest and stupid? Eric Garner wasn’t shot, and and the police who tacked him weren’t trying to hurt him. That wasn’t “police violence.” that was police incompetence when faced with the challenge of a 350 pound man resisting their authority. Yes indeed, I think they should have been indicted for criminal negligence, but they would have probably been acquitted. Would a 350 pound white man have met the same fate with those officers? I think so. The “I can’t breathe”are almost as incoherent as the Kneelers. Nice cheap-shot race-baiting there, too, Dave, with “uppity.” I also have no doubt that the President, a former pro football team owner, would have had the exact same reaction if it was all white NFL players protesting during the anthem. I bet you know it too, Dave, but anything to smear that symbol of the United States, the President, as a racist.
What “aggressive” protest can NFL players engage in off the football field that doesn’t involve interfering with the game or imposing their juvenile, half-baked social justice views on people who just want to see a football game and get a few hours away from the culture wars? None. They know it. So does Leonardt. Off the field, most of them will sound and be ridiculous.
Meanwhile, many stadiums around the NFL were obviously missing spectators Sunday in numbers unthinkable just a few years ago. The NFL, frightened of a battle with the union, and of being tarred as racist by people like David Leonardt, announced that it wouldn’t prohibit the protests, knowing that if this continues, the sport may never recover. But Leonardt is cheering, because every Kneeler is an insult to the President–no, no, it’s a moral protest against guns, er, violence, that is police, or oppression, or something. You know, just like Rosa Parks.
I wonder if David Leonardt even watches pro football.
Ethics Alarms 
If one were vulnerable to conspiracy theories, one could almost imagine that the NFL is hastening the end of its current lifetime. If it rids itself of football players, it limits it’s future liability for injuries, and anyway in ten years there might not be a pipeline feeding young players to the pros. If it rids itself of football, it severs its ties with working class fans of all backgrounds, who are anyway despised by advertisers. And if it just makes a small change, to European football, it can solve all its current issues while filling the parking lots of every stadium with shiny Volvos. And when the NFL finally gets an international product to market, the world will not know what hit it. Quite a good idea, if only one were vulnerable to such notions.
This guy clearly sees himself as one of the clever, ruling-class architects of the glorious Marxist future…and NFL players are, in his mind, a gang of useful idiots. He is trying to gently herd them towards doing something more directly beneficial towards his own goals of an eventual one-party America. There’s an underlying disregard towards the agency of NFL players as individual humans here. Leonardt seems to think that with his inspiring words he can control the direction of the hive-mind. I obviously don’t like it, but there’s plenty of precedent that this sort of thing works.
I thought it was a shockingly transparent bit of exploitative ideological manipulation. I don’t comprehend a competent editor letting something like that get into print. He wasn’t even trying to be consistent or analytical. And it insults the reader’s intellect.
For all the grandiloquent claims about noble social justice, remember Colin’s wardrobe choices. He wore socks depicting cops as pigs. And a Che Guevara t-shirt, for chrissakes.
If you listen, people will tell you who they really are.
“He wore socks depicting cops as pigs. And a Che Guevara t-shirt,”
He also made the rather questionable decision to wear a Malcolm X-Castro combo T-shirt in, of all places, Miami, which, to the uninitiated, is not wholly Pro-Castro.
This earned him a (IMHO) devastating bitchslap from a Cuban-born sportswriter that escaped Castro’s Shangri La.
http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/armando-salguero/article117033883.html
The bullshit that is being oversold by the Nabobs and Fuckheads League is becoming ever more clearly a manifestation of racism against whites. President Trump has simply become a convenient First White Whipping-Boy.
It doesn’t help, either, when additional giants of professional sports in the was-US – white ones, even – blow shit out their mouths like this article describes, and make themselves was-giants:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/popovich-issues-blistering-takedown-of-%e2%80%98soulless-coward%e2%80%99-donald-trump/ar-AAtBnKS?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp
After reading that, I wish I could’ve been right there to “protest” his assholery:
“What a fucked-up tool you are, ‘Pops.'”
Since the players are compliant enough to wear all that pink crap for a time during their season of violence on the gridiron, just to declare…I guess it’s their protest of the existence of certain kinds of cancer, I don’t know…I remain hopeful that they and their union will actually grow up juuuust a little bit more, “man up,” and “police” themselves a little more stringently in matters of, oh, let’s include: domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and shitty driving in their million-dollar vehicles with all those drugs and drinks and women they’re exploiting.
Second try…
The bullshit that is being oversold by the Nabobs and Fuckheads League is becoming ever more clearly a manifestation of racism against whites. President Trump has simply become a convenient First White Whipping-Boy.
It doesn’t help, either, when additional giants of professional sports in the was-US – white ones, even – blow shit out their mouths like this and make themselves was-giants:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/popovich-issues-blistering-takedown-of-%e2%80%98soulless-coward%e2%80%99-donald-trump/ar-AAtBnKS?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartanntp
After reading that, I wish I could’ve been right there to “protest” his assholery:
“What a fucked-up tool you are, ‘Pops.’”
Since the players are compliant enough to wear all that pink crap for a time during their season of violence on the gridiron, just to declare…I guess it’s their protest of the existence of certain kinds of cancer, I don’t know…I remain hopeful that they and their union will actually grow up juuuust a little bit more, “man up,” and “police” themselves a little more stringently in matters of, oh, let’s include: domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, and shitty driving in their million-dollar vehicles with all those drugs and drinks and exploited women.
It also didn’t help that the Astros looked like shit tonight.
That game made me feel better that CC beat the Red Sox 4 times this season. I though it was just because they couldn’t hit lefties. What an amazing comeback he’s had, all while recovering from alcoholism. Two years ago, he looked washed up. Amazing.
This whole NFL kneeling fiasco wreaks of public reprogramming attempts via Liberal/Progressive reeducation chambers. 😉
You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.
Oops, that should be “reeks” not “wreaks”; duh I think I need more coffee!
Related to my reprogramming theme: I wonder when we are going to “see” subliminal messages again such as anti-Trump, social justice warrior themes, etc, etc.?
“It’s for a good cause.”
Ask a kneeler why police disproportionately shoot males. They rarely harm females. The same is true about incarceration rates. Perhaps their answer might shed some truth on the matter
I don’t like those arguments. There ARE legitimate biological differences between men and women. There ARE actual biological differences in our mental and emotional make ups. Those differences DO drive differing behaviors, attitudes and inclinations. This is all True, regardless of what SJW utopian engineers desperately wish were otherwise.
Men ARE killed disproportionately more than women because we ARE more aggressive, by nature.
These arguments are NOT analogous to the ‘races’.
If blacks are being shot disproportionately more than whites, either there is an inclination to *assume* blacks are more dangerous, OR blacks actually ARE more dangerous for a variety of reasons *not tied to their ‘race’*. Or police face a combination of those two factors.
Good comment, tex. I agree.
”Progressives want you to keep protesting as long as you can, guys. Then they’ll move on to exploit someone else.”
They’ve already moved on, it’s hard to keep up with a pace whose skids are greased with perceived moral superiority.
The NBT (Next Big Thing) will be Lefty’s new found respect for the military, after (another) Trump gaffe about former POTUS’ not respecting the fallen and their families like he has.
Hold the Presses!
Another NBT has appeared on the horizon and will have an addlepated-insanity-aided push.
How HRC “could” become POTUS, constitutional law expert Lawrence Lessig:
”If number 1: If Trump is definitively found to have colluded directly with Russia, he would be forced to resign or be impeached.
”If number 2: If Trump is removed, Vice President Mike Pence would become president.
”If number 3: If Pence becomes president, he should resign too, given that he benefited from the same help from Mother Russia.
”If number 4: If Pence resigns before appointing a vice president, Ryan would become president.
”If number 5: If Ryan becomes president, he should do the right thing and choose Clinton for vice president. Then he should resign. (bolds mine)
http://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-president-lawrence-lessig-post-686077
It appears that Lawrence Lessig is politically ignorant.
He’s in la-la land, same as Charles Blow. This isn’t even worth talking about.
A drowning man will grab ANYTHING to stay afloat.
Z; But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but he’s a Constitutional Law Expert! Shouldn’t that inspire unrequited fealty from the great unwashed?
Tex; It’s almost too painful to watch.
Almost…
He’s not expert enough, apparently, to realize that Pence could appoint HRC as VP prior to resigning.
I mean, I guess I can forgive him for not considering a wacky, way-out-there scenario like that that would never actually happen in real life.
Right, President Ford?
–Dwayne
Even in this cloud cookoo land that Lessig is apparently residing in, does he really think HRC could be confirmed as VP by both house of Congress? I’m guessing that that is going to happen right after Congress votes to nominate Obama for sainthood.
Not to mention the fact that the House would immediately impeach her for bribery and / or blackmail of federal officials — how else would she get the votes?
Haven’t at least a few of the police who’ve shot black suspects been black themselves? I’d take out the “white” qualifier when speaking of the protesters’ protesting police behaviors. They are protesting the behaviors of police of any color. Which I find kind of ironic.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/452759/status-quo-mainstream-institutions-are-failing-public-turns-away
Regardless of this NFL nothingness of an issue, I think the above statement is really the interesting point here.
I don’t think police are more violent towards black people, I think they are just violent in general. If you think that choking a man to death is an appropriate response to selling cigarettes on the corner, then I think that you might have an issue. Why are they using such extreme violence to enforce such obviously BS laws? Aren’t police supposed to deescalate situations? Because if you ask me, they tend to escalate things often with little or no reason. We all know it was not about cigarettes, it was about authority, and someone standing up to authority. Garner never got violent with those guys, he just did not acquiesces to their authority, which is a death sentence in this country. That is the problem.
There might be a problem in that area. THE problem, though, is stacking up laws so that an arrest is required of someone who’s selling individual cigarettes on the street.
I’d agree with that. There are other methods like citation and release that are appropriate in such situations instead of arrest and imprisonment. Such things are already being implemented for personal amounts of marijuana in states where it’s still totally illegal.
He wasn’t choked to death. He died of a combination of causes related to the officers excessive force and his weight and health problems. People who are being choked to death can’t say “I can’t breathe.”
“Allow the players to continue making a mindless Fall ritual of mob ecstasy over the visceral pleasures of watching behemoths in armor crush each other an exercise in cognitive dissonance, and the NFL betrays its ticket-buyers, business partners, sponsors and stock holders. Tell the players to protest on their own time, and the NFL is siding with a President who crossed a line by telling a private business how to manage its employees, and setting itself up as opposing “police brutality,” thus Black Lives Matter, thus African Americans.”
It’ll be interesting to see when the NFL reaches the bottom of the plunge, where the math formula FORCES the NFL to make a decision, which decision it will choose to have some level of profitability.
Do we think this is related to NFL Kneeling or just a separate happenstance?
http://www.thenewstribune.com/sports/nfl/seattle-seahawks/seahawks-insider-blog/article179264776.html
What a concept. Petitioning the legislature to enact laws.
Is he suggesting that Trump favors violence against African-Americans?
Well, he does:
“When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don’t hit their head, and they just killed somebody — don’t hit their head. I said, you can take the hand away, okay?”
Of course, this quote doesn’t specifically refer to African-Americans. But dogwhistling is a thing that exists. At best we can say he favors police violence against all criminals, not just blacks.
Utter bullshit, Chris. The comment, a stupid one, was about perps, not black perps. How racist do you have to be to assume that every reference to criminals means blacks? Your assumption is explicitly racist.
As a wise man said, if nobody can hear the dogwhistle but you, you’re the dog.
As long as the Left insists on projecting the Left’s stereotypes of conservatives onto Trump, then everything he says must be interpreted as though he is a racist. Because the Left smears conservatives with racism.
This is almost becoming a faith claim of the leftist religion. A key presupposition.
OK, then Trump favors violence against all perps.
Right?
So peaceful protests against police brutality are just and necessary.
Right?
If particular police departments are characterized by brutality, then certainly those PDs deserve to be protested and confronted. I think the protesters would also be intelligent enough to pick a time and place of protest that doesn’t communicate a completely different message than they hope. And I’d also think the protesters didn’t actually choose to start off things by throwing an employment related temper tantrum before trying to make their temper tantrum seem noble by claiming it was about police brutality. And then something else. And then something else.
Just to nip this one in the bud:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjXl6idt_jWAhVF6oMKHR31DycQqUMIKjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Ftravel%2F2017%2F10%2F16%2Fdelta-airlines-prevented-woman-from-singing-national-anthem-on-flight-with-fallen-soldier.html&usg=AOvVaw3npT42_MrRYB2DXr9cuQze
No, in this scenario, the flag and national anthem is not being unethically disrespected the way the grandstanding and inconsistent NFL tantrum throwers are unethically disrespecting the flag and anthem.
(are not)
Look at what the racist Republicans are up to now. I can’t wait for the media to run this article about racist Republicans for weeks on end and I can’t wait for campus activists to crap their pants protesting against this racist Republican:
Tex, that Republican racism, and your link below at 1:15 pm, got me to imagining…going to a polling place on election day, going into a voting booth, selecting between the usual terrible and worst candidates, and then, just before pushing the “Cast Ballot” button, taking a knee in protest of obstacles to (1) electing write-in candidates and (2) having an actual, consequential, choice of “None Of The Above” for each elected office.
4 idiots did this:
http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2017/10/city_council_kneel_for_pledge.html