RUTHFULLY YOURS

It didn’t happen until last night. For the entire time that the recent spate of highly inflamed National Anthem protests on NFL playing fields has been unfolding this year, there’s been something nagging at the back of my mind. Watching liberal activists (not to be confused with rank and file voters who may happen to be registered Democrats but also enjoy sports) charging to the barricades over these displays of kneeling, sitting or otherwise acting disrespectfully during the playing of the anthem and the display of the American flag, something just didn’t seem right. But last night was when it hit me. This isn’t about protesting racism, police misconduct or anything of the sort. What we’re observing is potentially one of the greatest red herrings in the history of American political scams.

The question I was most confused over was… why this location? Why this particular time? The reality is that any of these well paid players could call a press conference or show up at any rally to talk about racism, police shootings and all the rest, and they would draw the attention of millions, along with the media. (God only knows ESPN would show up.) So why were the liberal activists insisting that it had to be at the start of a game while the National Anthem is playing and the flag is on display? It didn’t make sense. And then, suddenly, it did.

I think the light bulb finally went on when I was reading this piece on the subject from the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart. It wasn’t really so much what the author had to say because that was probably the fiftieth tirade of that sort I’d read in just the past week. No, it was more a matter of who was saying it. To his credit, Jonathan is honest enough to open the piece with a statement reminding people that he’s, “not much of a sports fan.” But that doesn’t begin to describe him. For those who ever watched Capehart fill in for Willie Geist on MSNBC’s old “Way Too Early” show, you’ll know what I mean. It became something of a running gag (which Jonathan engaged in with a great sense of humor) to watch him attempt to read the teleprompter on Monday morning and describe what had happened around the NFL the day before. Frequently he had to be rescued by Bill Karins, jumping in to offer some commentary from the perspective of somebody who had actually seen the game and knew how football worked. (Keep in mind that Bill is the meteorologist, not the sports analyst, although he did compete in several sports in school.)

With that complete lack of engagement in professional football, why would Jonathan and so many of his progressive colleagues be so completely driven to support and gin up protests taking place on the gridiron? Why did they suddenly care so much about the intersection of racial identity politics and football?

The answer is that they don’t. This has little or nothing to do with police shootings, racial profiling or any of the rest of it. What we’re seeing is an almost brilliant and concerted effort to damage, if not eliminate, the National Football League.

Why? Because the activist Left has despised the NFL for years. They hate everything about it. It’s a game filled with big, tough, manly men engaging in the closest thing to warfare you can manage without guns. It’s a game rife with symbolism and, yes… nationalism. Even people who would never buy an album from a country singer could feel their blood heating up when Hank Williams used to sing, Are you Ready for Some Football. The military loves football and they fly jets over the stadiums in formation and send our nation’s finest out to pay tribute. And it’s not just the military. Our police and other first responders are frequently called out for honors at the games. Everything about it screams of apple pie, fireworks and patriotism. (Or, if you prefer, God, guns and flags.) And the activist Left hates it. Probably the only sporting event they despise more is NASCAR.

And this isn’t the first ginned up attack on the NFL that the Left has orchestrated. Observe the running debate, mostly driven by liberals, about how concussions and other long-term physical effects on players make the sport “unsafe.” Do you honestly think it’s because they care about the health of the players? Activists have gone so far as to point out that even “micro concussions” caused by repeated, far lighter taps to the head are too much of a risk.

David Randall is Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars.https://amgreatness.com/2017/09/26/take-a-knee-to-pc/

It’s time to stop listening in silence to the social justice catechism—the propagandists take silence as consent, and so do your fellow Americans. It’s time to let everyone know that we do not consent to nonstop progressive hectoring and that we do not regard it as simple virtue.

Colin Kaepernick shows us what we need to do. Take a knee.

Take a knee when your college’s convocation speaker is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Take a knee when your university’s commencement speaker calls for amnestying illegal immigrants. Take a knee when the college president calls on you to work for social justice.

And proudly wear a t-shirt that says “Liberty Matters.”

Take a knee when your teacher spends class time ranting against the president. Take a knee when you’re forced to undergo “diversity training” at your new job. Take a knee when you listen to the chairman of a corporation that fires its employees for speaking up against PC.

Take a knee every time your conscience tells you “I do not assent and I will not let my silence be taken as consent.”

Take a knee, and invite your friends and neighbors to join you.

Take a knee, and when the henchmen of the authoritarian Left try to fire you, shun you, yell at you, or simply beat you up—

Then is the time to stand up and sing the national anthem.

It is the best and worst of times for progressives and liberals.

Politically, their obsessions with identity politics and various racial and gender -isms and -ologies have emasculated the Democratic party: loss of governorships, state legislatures, the House, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

Democrats, for the time being at least, are now reduced to largely a coastal, big-city party. It can certainly pile up lots of blue electoral votes. And, thanks to California, Democrats can capture the popular vote, without necessarily winning presidential elections.

The old liberal idea that the new demography is progressive destiny did not work out as planned. when the Blue Wall crumbled; Hillary Clinton lost a sure-thing election. Large Latino populations in red Texas and blue California are not likely to turn either one into a swing state. Inner-city voters so far have not transferred prior record levels of turn-out and bloc voting to candidates of the Hillary Clinton sort. Identity politics did not ensure that the white liberals who created it were always exempt from the natural boomerang of their own ideology.

24/7 Sermonizing

Yet culturally, the progressive octopus continues to recalibrate popular life according to the new orthodoxies shared by a minority of the population.

Indeed, the octopus has formidable and far-reaching tentacles that reach into every crevice of modern American life. Our progressive mollusk is big, and he swims with us everywhere.

Most Americans are quite willing to concede spheres of partisanship — but not lawlessness. Some colleges, such as Evergreen State or UC Berkeley, while public and tax-supported, are, by definition, leftist in the manner that a private Hillsdale College or Saint Thomas Aquinas are traditionalist and conservative. But whereas the latter are calm and tolerant of dissent; the former, with public monies, are hysterical and often Stalinist when confronted by opposing views. That disconnect is unsustainable.

Most citizens are fine with the fact that Fox News is the conservative cable-channel bookend to the progressive MSNBC. Americans realize that a different sort of crowd goes to a NASCAR race than watches the Tour de France.

But what is bothering half the country is not such ideological birds-of-a-feather tribalism per se. The rub instead is the progressive attempt to undermine all shared public institutions by turning them into left-wing megaphones and in the process condoning the use of violence, obscenity, and racialism.

So it is not quite accurate to complain of the “politicization of everything,” given that the phenomenon is largely a progressive project in which nothing is much sacred from left-wing political hectoring — our vocabulary, the very cars we drive, even the TV shows we watch.

No Escape

Why are the major private research universities such as Yale, Harvard, Duke, and Stanford, not just liberal but fully in service to a left-wing social agenda? Do they not all pile up huge billion-dollar endowments that are not taxed, thus robbing taxpayers of considerable annual revenue, while they turn out more biased yet less educated students?

Network news was always liberal. Yet in the last decade, ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with PBS and NPR, as well as their cable counterparts such as CNN, have become veritable progressive operatives. Mention of transgenderism, gay marriage, abortion, global warming, and identity politics will be massaged to promote a progressive position that was once held only by minority — until the position morphs into an intolerant mainstream orthodoxy that does not allow dissent.

Sometimes the scripted metamorphosis takes just a few years. Obama’s loud support of traditional marriage in 2008 changed to support for gay marriage in 2012. And when he left office, he conformed to the idea that only homophobes agreed with the position he’d held a few years earlier. Bill Clinton’s stance not too long ago on legal-only immigration would reduce him to a nativist racist by today’s progressive standards.

Old Glory is almost certainly the most honored flag in the world.

The late political scientist Samuel Huntington marveled at its place in our national life: We pledge allegiance to it. The national anthem celebrates it. An incredibly elaborate code stipulates how it is to be displayed, handled, and maintained. It even has its own holiday.

“Since the Civil War,” Huntington wrote, “Americans have been a flag-oriented people. The Stars and Stripes has the status of a religious icon and is a more central symbol of national identity for Americans than their flags are for peoples of other nations.”

The NFL players who kneel during the national anthem — a phenomenon that increased exponentially after President Donald Trump colorfully demanded that they stand — are disrespecting the most potent and enduring national symbol of the most patriotic nation on Earth.

Not only are they wrong to do so, they aren’t delivering the devastating rebuke to Trump that they may imagine.

The power of national — or imperial — symbols isn’t anything new. The Romans couldn’t abide the collective disgrace of losing their standards to the enemy in battle, and would undertake great exertions to win them back.

The American flag is layered with history and meaning. As Tim Marshall recounts in his book A Flag Worth Dying For, its roots probably reach back prior to the country’s independence. It may owe its red and white stripes to the flag of the Sons of Liberty, the revolutionary agitators who carried out the Boston Tea Party.

The “rebellious stripes” of that flag, lacking a field of stars, don’t look like much. In 1777, the Continental Congress added the stars — “white in a blue field representing a new constellation.”

The flag took time to catch on. The Civil War, which tested the integrity of the flag, represented a watershed. It came to be known as Old Glory at this time courtesy of a cussed merchant seaman named William Driver, who demonstrated a characteristic American attitude to the Stars and Stripes.

Driver had retired to Nashville, Tennessee, with his flag still in his possession. When local Confederates demanded that he hand it over, he replied that they were welcome to take it … over his dead body. Secreted away in a bed quilt, the flag was eventually handed over to Union forces, and the legend of Old Glory spread.

After the war, Union veterans advocated for the display of the flag and for its veneration. The National Flag Conference of 1923 — yes, there was a national flag conference — set out the code subsequently adopted by Congress.

Per the code, “the flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing.” It states that “no disrespect should be shown to the flag,” and when it is taken down, it should be placed into “waiting hands and arms.”

Because the left dominates the news media, the entertainment media and academia, Americans are swimming — actually, drowning — in an ocean of lies.

Here are a few examples:

America is racist.

America oppresses its minorities.

America oppresses women.

Universities have a culture of rape.

There are more than two genders.

All cultures are morally and culturally equal.

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma were caused, or made more intense, by global warming.

Israel is the villain in the Middle East conflict.

Western civilization is a euphemism for “white supremacy.”

The latest lie of the left is that, with regard to the conflict between the NFL and President Donald Trump, the president is the “divisive” party.

Whenever people on the left tell one of these lies, I always wonder if they really believe it. I have concluded that they nearly always do. Which is more frightening than if they knew they weren’t telling the truth. With people who know they aren’t telling the truth there is always hope. But there is no hope for people who believe their lies.

What other conclusion could any fair-minded person reach when people say with a straight face that Trump is the divisive party with regard to his conflict with players refusing to stand for the National Anthem?

Apparently, the question, “Who started it?” means nothing to the journalists, politicians and NFL players, coaches and owners who call the president “divisive.”

So, before discussing Trump’s reaction, our fellow Americans on the left need to answer some pretty simple questions: Has the behavior of those athletes has been divisive? Is kneeling while tens of thousands of people are standing divisive? Is publicly showing contempt for the American flag for which innumerable Americans risked their lives, were terribly injured, or died divisive?

The answers are so obvious that if someone denies that those actions are divisive, it inevitably raises another question:

Why would anyone deny it?

Here are three likely reasons:

First, most people on the left think that they are centrists, or at most center-liberal. Therefore, they deem whatever they believe to be normative and deem whoever differs with them to be divisive and ultimately extremist.

This is true for every issue. Take same-sex marriage. Redefining marriage to include two people of the same sex was the most radical change in the history of the family — far more radical than, say, banning polygamy. Yet, I have never read or heard a person who favored same-sex marriage acknowledge that this was a radical change, not to mention divisive. On the contrary, people on the left believe that all those who wanted to retain the only definition of marriage any society has ever had — the union between the two sexes — are divisive and extremist.

Likewise, in the eyes of the left — the media, academia and the Democratic Party — it is not professional athletes who have refused to stand for the national anthem who are divisive; it is the president and all others who condemn the players for doing so.

Was the president’s rhetoric over the top? I believe some of it was — specifically, calling the players “sons of b———.” No politician, let alone the president of the United States, should use expletives publicly.

But if the president had sharply rebuked the players and the NFL using soaring rhetoric, the left would have similarly accused him of being divisive.

Imagine the president had begun his comments by saying something along these lines:

“To see professional athletes publicly dishonor the flag for which hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, the flag that millions of Americans have seen drape the coffin of their child, their spouse, their sibling, their parent, or other loved one is as morally repulsive as it un-American. Of course, these players have the right of free speech — and so do I, and that is precisely the right I am exercising now.”

Had he spoken that way, would the left not have characterized him as divisive?

There is a second reason the left portrays the president, not the players, as divisive. They agree with the players that the flag represents a systemically and socially racist country. How could they not? The left is the primary reason many Americans believe that America, the least racist multiracial country in history, is a racist country.

A third reason the left calls the president, not the players, “divisive” is that the left will say anything about those with whom it differs. The left sees language as a tool — not with which to express truth but with which to defeat its enemies. From Stalin calling Trotsky a fascist to the American media calling Trump and his supporters “Nazis” and “white supremacists,” lying about one’s political enemies is as part of leftism as hydrogen and oxygen are of water.

And why have non-leftist NFL coaches and owners also called the president “divisive?” Because they if they told the truth — that the players are the divisive party here — they would have no team.