RUTHFULLY YOURS

When Left and Right finally agree on something, watch out: The unthinkable becomes normal.

So it is with changing attitudes toward Silicon Valley.

For the last two decades, Apple, Google, Amazon, and other West Coast tech corporations have been untouchable icons. They piled up astronomical profits while hypnotizing both left-wing and right-wing politicians.

Conservative administrations praised them as modern versions of 19th-century risk-takers such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, and other tech giants were seen as supposedly creating national wealth in an unregulated, laissez-faire landscape that they had invented from nothing.

At a time when American companies were increasingly unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble world arena, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook bulldozed their international competition. Indeed, they turned high-tech and social media into American brands.

The Left was even more enthralled. It dropped its customary regulatory zeal, despite Silicon Valley’s monopolizing, outsourcing, offshoring, censoring, and destroying of startup competition. After all, Big Tech was left-wing and generous. High-tech interests gave hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing candidates, think tanks, and causes.

Companies such as Facebook and Google were able to warp their own social-media protocols and Internet searches to insidiously favor progressive agendas and messaging.

If the Left feared that the tech billionaires were becoming robber barons, they also delighted in the fact that they were at least left-wing robber barons.

Unlike the steel, oil, and coal monopolies of the 19th century that out of grime and smoke created the sinews of a growing America, Silicon Valley gave us shiny, clean, green, and fun pods, pads, and phones.

As a result, social media, Internet searches, texts, email, and other computer communications were exempt from interstate regulatory oversight. Big Tech certainly was not subject to the rules that governed railroads, power companies, trucking industries, Wall Street, and television and radio.

But attitudes about hip high-tech corporations have now changed on both the left and right.

Liberals are under pressure from their progressive base to make Silicon Valley hire more minorities and women.

Progressives wonder why West Coast techies cannot unionize and sit down for tough bargaining with their progressive billionaire bosses.

Local community groups resent the tech giants driving up housing prices and zoning out the poor from cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.

Behind the veneer of a cool Apple logo or multicolored Google trademark are scores of multimillionaires who live one-percenter lifestyles quite at odds with the soft socialism espoused by their corporate megaphones.

Conservatives got sick of Silicon Valley, too.

The Democrat’s Trump/Russia collusion narrative took a major hit this week when Facebook leaks about Russia-linked ads forced disappointed Dems to walk back their anti-Trump messaging. Congressional leaders, in the meantime, have reportedly renewed their focus on team Obama’s election year political espionage.

The anti-Trumpers had a promising story-line — “Trump and Russia colluded on Facebook” — that had to be downgraded to merely “Russia sought to create incivility and chaos” when it was discovered that the Russia-linked group in question promoted issues and groups on both sides of the political spectrum.

According to Facebook’s investigators, the company sold up to $150,000 worth of ads to a Russian government-affiliated troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency which bought the ads through hundreds of phony Facebook pages and accounts.

The intelligence community describes the Internet Research Agency as “a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin.”

At least one of the over 3,000 Russia-bought ads, which Facebook will soon turn over to Congress, promoted Black Lives Matter and specifically targeted audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, CNN reported, Wednesday.

The Black Lives Matter ad appeared on Facebook at some point in late 2015 or early 2016, the sources said. The sources said it appears the ad was meant to appear both as supporting Black Lives Matter but also could be seen as portraying the group as threatening to some residents of Baltimore and Ferguson.

New descriptions of the Russian-bought ads shared with CNN suggest that the apparent goal of the Russian buyers was to amplify political discord and fuel an atmosphere of incivility and chaos, though not necessarily to promote one candidate or cause over another. Facebook’s review of Russian efforts on its platform focused on a timeframe from June 2015 to May 2017.

These ranged from posts promoting Black Lives Matter to posts promoting gun rights and the Second Amendment to posts warning about what they said was the threat undocumented immigrants posed to American democracy. Beyond the election, Russians have sought to raise questions about western democracies.

According to the Washington Post, other ads showed support for Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton among Muslim women.

“This is consistent with the overall goal of creating discord inside the body politic here in the United States, and really across the West,” said Steve Hall, a former CIA officer and CNN National Security Analyst. “It shows they the level of sophistication of their targeting. They are able to sow discord in a very granular nature, target certain communities and link them up with certain issues.”

Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the committee, said Tuesday that there’s “no evidence yet” that Russians and Trump officials colluded on the Facebook ads, but said “it’s an area the committee continues to investigate.”

While the Trump/Russia collusion investigation ran into a speed bump, this week, the unmasking probe gained steam.

Congressional republicans have turned their attention to team Obama’s efforts to obtain highly classified intelligence information on Trump and his allies before the inauguration.

U.S officials familiar with the situation told the Washington Free Beacon that Obama administration National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s recent testimony before the House Intelligence Committee “place renewed attention on the investigation” into why highly classified intelligence community reports were obtained and then leaked to the press.

Congressional leaders are also reportedly interested in finding out why former United Nations Ambassador Samantha Power and other senior Obama officials made an unusually high number of unmasking requests during the final months of the Obama administration.

“It was understood in the Bush administration that unmasking was out of the ordinary; it was something rare that you might sometimes do but needed a special and easily defensible reason for doing,” said a former official who served in several Republican administrations. “You could not ask out of mere curiosity, nor obviously for political reasons. There needed to be a clear, direct national security justification.” CONTINUE AT SITE

President Trump might not be winning when it comes to shuffling legislation through Congress, but the same cannot be said when it comes to regulatory rollback.

On the latter matter, his actions set a historic precedent. That is likely good for the economy and may help explain the surging stock market.

“There’s a massive movement on regulations in the first few months of Trump,” says David Ranson, director of research at HCWE & Co.

How massive? As Mr. Trump might say, it’s Bigly.

In the first place, the administration isn’t producing a ton of new regulations.

“By virtually any measure, dating back through two Democratic presidents and one Republican president, the lack of regulatory output is historic,” states a recent study by the American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank.

“Actual output was just 8 percent of the historical average,” AAF says.

The study looked at data on regulations from 1994 through 2017, specifically focusing on the period Jan. 23 to May 23 during each year.

Better still, the White House team have been busy nixing regulations.

Under the Trump administration, 64 percent of reviews by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs “have resulted in withdrawn rules,” which compares with withdrawal rates of 25 percent in 2009 and 55 percent in 2001, the report says. Both 2001 and 2009 were the first years of the prior two administrations.

Perhaps the biggest achievement of all is that the cost of introduced regulations was a fraction of those in past periods. This time the AAF reviewed data for the years 2005 through 2017.

“There have been $4.2 billion in regulatory costs since January 23, 2017,” the report states. “The 2005 to 2017 average is $26 billion.” Figures include the costs of independent agencies.

Or put another way, costs imposed by the administration are running at just 16 percent of the historical norm.

“Across the board, the results indicate a significant diminution in the number of regulations approved and a notable uptick in the number of withdrawn measures (previous rules from the Obama Administration no longer under consideration),” the report reads.

So what?

The fact that the administration is rolling back regulations in this way is good for the economy.

“My impression is that heavy regulation might slow growth and it certainly increases costs,” says Dr. Ivo Pezzuto, professor of global economics at ISM Business School in Paris.

Put another way, when regulation gets rolled back then business costs fall, profits rise, and growth can accelerate. At least that is the theory.

Statistical analysis shows this to be true as well. CONTINUE AT SITE

Just two or three generations ago, most Americans understood that George Orwell’s classics Animal Farm and 1984 were written to explain how freedom is lost to totalitarianism and the intolerance that accompanies it. “Big Brother,” a term that many people still casually use to describe an all-knowing governing authority, comes right out of 1984. In the society that Orwell describes, all citizens are continually reminded that “Big Brother is watching you,” by way of a constant surveillance through the pervasive use of “telescreens” by the ruling class.

Orwell’s warnings about totalitarianism written in novel form in Animal Farm and 1984 came shortly after Freidrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom was published at the end of World War II. But it took the shocking revelations from books on Nazism and Soviet Communism, by scholars like William Shirer and Robert Conquest in the 1960s, to really make Orwell relevant for teaching to the masses educated in American public schools. And it was not just an academic exercise insofar as Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, was at that time brutally crushing all resistance, enforcing the Soviet model of totalitarian control on East European countries that became satellite states of Moscow.

Reading Orwell, it was thought, would help American students appreciate their freedoms and gain perspective and critical faculties so as to understand socialist totalitarianism and its defining features: 1) the institutionalization of propaganda designed to warp and destroy people’s grasp on reality, and 2) the fostering of group think, conformity and collectivism designed to eliminate critical and independent thinking. By making the press subservient to the state, these two features would prevent the rise of an opposition movement or party and protect and perpetuate one party control.

Orwell described the scope of the totalitarian enterprise, noting in one section of 1984 that “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

The concepts of “newspeak” and “doublethink” in Orwell’s 1984 are fully manifest in what we now experience as political correctness. Newspeak is the distorted reality accomplished by manipulating the meaning of language and words, while double think is the conditioned mental attitude to ignore reality and common sense and substitute and embrace a distorted or false narrative to the exclusion of other views. As Orwell notes, “the whole aim of Newspeak and Doublethink is to narrow the range of thought.” This is the goal of political correctness, and it explains why its adherents tend to be so intolerant—shutting down speech from the politically incorrect on college campuses across the county, demanding that historic statues and monuments associated with the Confederacy be taken down, and demanding that people with opposing views on such subjects as climate change and gay marriage be silenced, fined or arrested.

Many assume there is a long way to go before the American government has the power of Orwell’s Big Brother. After all, the thinking goes, the press in the U.S. is not controlled by the government so Americans cannot be so easily brainwashed as they theoretically would be through state-controlled propaganda.

But what if the universities and the educational system and the major television and print media institutions embrace the groupthink that ingratiates them with the ruling elite? What if the culture shapers in Hollywood and the advertising industry on Madison Avenue follow a similar path in participating in and reinforcing the same groupthink norms?

The Hollywood faithful turned out with all their finery to reward one another with self-reverential awards called Emmys. As the public now knows this event turned into a verbal auto de fe of President Trump.

That, of course, isn’t surprising. The anti-Trump vulgarity of Steven Colbert has already been on display before. But what always surprises me is the level of ignorance.

Last week the Hollywood Left was raising money to combat Global Warming. How these well meaning dupes intend to do so isn’t clear. Will DiCaprio give up his private plane? Stevie Wonder said if you don’t agree with these suppositions you either don’t care or you are dumb. This hardly seems like the right way to secure adherents.

But the celebrity who got my attention is Beyoncé. This self-appointed queen of pop said Global Warming, about which the Trump administration is presumably indifferent, causes earthquakes. Now this is a scientific breakthrough. Up until this “revelation” I assumed earthquakes were related to seismic waves that make the ground shake. When plates rub against each other they stick, the rocks break and earthquakes occur. However, I have been deceived; earthquakes develop from CO2 cast into the atmosphere. There is simply no telling where these scientific ideas will lead.

Now in order to be a star of the first magnitude, you have to have a cause. It must be bigger than the self. If it evokes tears, all the better. You might start in Africa, a continent in need of all kinds of aid. Angelina Jolie shows up there routinely as does Madonna. If I take off my cynical judgment, it is possible some of the Hollywood glitterati actually perform good deeds.

Nonetheless, it is best to maintain a wary eye where these devotees of good deeds are concerned. I make this claim because good intentions often foster bad results; in part because so many of these stars know so little. It is instructive that Sean Penn, a high school dropout, has arrogated to himself the role of environmental moralizer.

As I see it, the time has come for these folks to get over themselves. Rather than spend time telling me and others how to live our lives, they would be better off making good films. By the way, there are very few good films that are made as reduced Hollywood profits attest. The producers of the Emmys might also take notice of the fact this recent fiasco of Trump-bashing led to the worst rating for any of these shows. Don’t these people realize the U.S. has Trump supporters? America isn’t Hollywood, even if George Clooney, among others, doesn’t know that.

As a youngster, I didn’t salute the flag or stand for the national anthem. It ran against my religious teachings.

Each year, my mother would take me to the principal’s office on the first day of school and explain that we were Jehovah’s Witnesses, which meant that I would remain silent while my classmates recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. When my father, who was divorced from my mother and not a member of the church, took me to sporting events, he stood for the national anthem while I sat. He never said anything to me about it. He respected my mother’s desire to raise her children in the faith of her choice.

Growing up, I was taught that the flag was an idol and that saluting it was a form of idolatry, which was forbidden. Indeed, all forms of patriotism were discouraged. No joining the military. No running for office. No voting or taking sides in political debates. Even membership in civic groups, such as the Boy Scouts, was frowned upon. Over the decades, Witnesses endured fierce opposition for holding such beliefs. They were tried for sedition. Their homes were vandalized and their businesses were boycotted. In the 1930s and ’40s, church members were physically attacked by angry mobs of people who prided themselves on their loyalty and patriotism. The Witnesses turned to courts for protection and were mostly successful in obtaining it, whether the issue was door-to-door proselytizing, conscientious objection to the draft, or mandatory flag salutes.

The reason the principal had to accede to my mother’s wishes is because the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled, in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), that forcing children to salute the flag violated the Constitution. The court held that saluting the flag is a form of utterance and that the right to not speak is as equally protected under the First Amendment as the right to free speech. “The case is made difficult not because the principles of its decision are obscure but because the flag involved is our own,” wrote Justice Robert Jackson for the 6-3 majority. “Nevertheless, we apply the limitations of the Constitution with no fear that freedom to be intellectually and spiritually diverse or even contrary will disintegrate the social organization. To believe that patriotism will not flourish if patriotic ceremonies are voluntary and spontaneous instead of a compulsory routine is to make an unflattering estimate of the appeal of our institutions to free minds.” The decision was handed down on Flag Day.

To my mother’s chagrin, the religion didn’t stick and I left the church voluntarily in my teens. I still remember attending a college basketball game with my father and standing for the national anthem for the first time. He did a little double take as I rose beside him. Then he put his arm around me and pulled me closer to him. I’ve been a political commentator for more than 20 years now. I vote. I take sides. A large framed reproduction of Jasper Johns’s “Flag” hangs above the fireplace in my living room. But when I see, as we all did on Sunday, professional athletes catching flak from the president on down for taking a knee during the national anthem, it takes me back to my childhood. I can’t help but feel for them.

According to Muslim feminist bloggers, who write regularly for the site muslimgirl.com, MAS, ICNA, and ISNA are blatantly racist.

If Sarsour and her fellow Islamists in the United States are to be believed, they work to “make America better…” “…out of love” for fellow Americans. Yet, their behavior tells another story — one of closeted bigotry and deceit — all for the purpose of legitimizing their own false claims to the leadership of mainstream Muslims.

In an interview published on ISNA’s website, Muzzammil Siddiqi called homosexuality a “moral corruption,” and explicitly stated that he supports laws in countries that execute homosexuals. ISNA’s annual convention included Yasir Qadhi, dean of academic affairs at AlMaghrib Institute, who has been recorded teaching students that killing homosexuals is part of Islam.

“Islam is a religion of peace, but you can’t have peace without justice,” said self-styled “civil rights activist” Linda Sarsour at the Muslim American Society-Islamic Circle of North America (MAS-ICNA) convention in December 2016. Sarsour, who describes herself as a “Palestinian-American feminist,” is but one example of a radical Muslim in the West who has carefully cultivated an image of herself as righteously preoccupied with liberal values and social justice — and Islamist organizations, such as MAS, ICNA and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), have tried to do the same.

A highlight reel from the MAS-ICNA convention features author Yasmin Mogahed declaring, “We have to care about the pain and struggles of others,” as well as a prominent imam, Omar Suleiman, asking, “What have we done for the marginalized in this country?”

In a promotional video released in 2016, the organization’s president, Azhar Azeez, boasts of “bringing a very positive impact to our communities across the nation.”

According to Muslim feminist bloggers, however, who write regularly for the site muslimgirl.com, MAS, ICNA, and ISNA are blatantly racist. One such observer, in a piece titled “Mainstream Islamic Conferences Have a Longstanding History of Normalizing Anti-Blackness,” writes:

“When I look at mosques that perpetuate patriarchal violence, I see it as powerless men trying to feel in control. Conferences are no different. Often times, it’s non-Black Muslims (mostly Arab and Desi) who organize these tone-deaf conferences, and use them as tools of oppression to silence the voices and contributions of those who are more marginalized (mostly Black Muslims).”

She continued:

“Remember last year when ICNA asked participants in a speed dating event what skin color was preferred for their potential partner? The fact that they didn’t understand why that was problematic the first time is enough of an indicator.”

Another blogger on the site recounts attending the April 2017 ICNA convention in Baltimore — “one of the most historically black cities in our nation” — and discovering that not even a panel on “America’s Original Sins: Racism and Social Inequality” included a black, Latino, or female speaker.

On September 15, I participated in a panel on “Exposing the Deep State,” hosted by Judicial Watch. Former Trump White House official Sebastian Gorka, the Washington Examiner’s Todd Shepherd, JW’s James Peterson, and I all delivered approximately 7-minute statements after which JW’s lead investigator, Chris Farrell, moderated a discussion. My written statement is here.

Not sure how much “Deep State” we were able to expose in one hour, although one thing that opened up was a bright shaft of daylight between my own and Sebastian Gorka’s approaches to the whole concept. To wit, Sebastian began his discussion seemingly negating the effort, “Exposing the Deep State,” by warning against “belief” in “conspiracy theories,” which “undermines clear-sighted analysis” — something he might like to pass along, for example, to those who prosecute organized crime on RICO conspiracy charges.

Here’s how he began:

Let me start with a caveat, if I may.

I love conspiracy theories, but I love them as entertainment.

I have a bookshelf of conspiracy theories at home. But there’s a very important part to that phrase, and it’s the second word, which is “theories.” They’re not facts. So, conspiracy theories and the belief in them, undermines clear-sighted analysis. So I’m not here to talk about the outre accusations that have been made against those who are not in favor of the cirrent administration. I want to talk about what actually happened so far … the first seven months of how the bureacracy responded to the administration of Donald J. Trump.

Let me start by saying I actually prefer the phrase “permanent state” to “deep state.” Because it’s not necessarily a function of something that’s hidden or deep. It was in our faces. It was arrogant. It was right there in the suraface of out policy discussion at the highest level of the White House. So it’s not hidden, it can be. But in many cases it’s overt. And it’s been there for a long time … this has been brewing for decades, truly decades.

His markers of this “permanent state” included:

(1) national security leaks — by his count, 125 in the first 126 days

(2) bureaucratic infighting to a point of intransigence. He used the example of his own experience with “unnamed sister agency” of the White House (sic) that refused his request “as a Deputy Assistant to the President, that [three] people be detailed over to me at the White House to work on key projects of import to Steve [Bannon] and the President … because the seventh floor of that agency, to quote a senior individual, looks at the White House as the enemy.”

Why would that be? Sebastian went on to talk about a lack of discipline when it comes to federal employees working for the new CEO/POTUS in town. He talked about NSA officials and others who ignore the president’s agenda and speeches, again identifying the main problems as something akin to insubordination, as well as the safety net of federal job security. His concluding words: “Today, we have a very large number of people in the US Government, not just SES but GS individuals, who think, `I’ve been here for 15 years, I’ll be here when the president leaves, I know better.’ That’s not democracy, and that’s not the American Way.”

My talk, linked here, proceeded quite differently, and not only because Chris Farrell cued it up by invoking my lengthy explication of mid-century Communist-“occupied” Washington in American Betrayal.

Nevertheless, I, too, wrestle with the term, “Deep State.” Having described what I think of when I hear it as “unconstitutional powers exercised by strange illegitimate branchlets of the government that are in no way restrained by the `balance of powers,’ ” I went on to note ideological links between the “Deep State” (also American culture more generally), and communist/Marxist objectives for America laid out over 80 years ago in Toward Soviet America, a 1932 tract by Communist Party USA Chairman William Z. Foster.

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.