CLOWN KAEPERNICK NOW WEARING SOCKS DEPICTING POLICE AS PIGS: “This ass**** is just begging to be cut, which he probably soon will be, so then he can cry racism,” JWF writes, linking to a CBS Sports article that notes, “It appears that over the past few weeks, Kaepernick has been wearing socks that show a pig in a cop’s hat. The quarterback has been wearing them since at least Aug. 10.”
Black Lives Matter masks failure. The Left has proven that practice works. So when one of the cultural Left’s protégés, a San Francisco radio DJ and MTV host named Nessa Diab, an ethnic Egyptian whose ideological curriculum vitae includes Islam, Fidel Castro fandom, and Black Lives Matter agitation, found her way into the life of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as his girlfriend since last year, the stage was set for the conversion of a prominent athlete into perhaps America’s most high-profile meltdown.
Read the whole thing. In the wake of 1985’s Live Aid, it was fascinating to watch one superstar rock star after another cash in his chips for whatever the cause du jour was — usually PETA, Amnesty International, the rain forest, and/or an attack on this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein — Reagan, Thatcher, Gingrich, Bush, etc. Once a performer morphed into what we would now call a fullblown SJW, it was a sign his career as a creative artist was over. He had built up his fan base, didn’t need to worry about offending new potential fans, as he could play the hockey arena circuit forever, and could stop focusing on any pretensions towards art and channel his energy into fundraising and cocktail parties with Bianca and Yoko and John Kerry.*
Kaepernick seems to have accelerated the process exponentially, once he was benched last year and replaced by former Jacksonville Jaguar QB Blaine Gabbert. This preseason, as McKay writes, “the business decision for San Francisco is obviously to find a way to cut Kaepernick loose for football reasons; he’s a declining player with a negative attitude whose on-field performance doesn’t match his compensation, and having a brooding ex-star in the locker room is poison to team chemistry.”
What happens next for Kaepernick? Well, according to sports blog Bleacher Report, “If you thought fans on Twitter were upset about Colin Kaepernick, you should talk to some people around the NFL…. Across NFL front offices, there are team officials who are not offended, and even embrace, the controversial position of Colin Kaepernick. They are out there. Statistically, they have to be. But they are keeping a low profile. They seem to be far outnumbered by the members of NFL front offices who despise him. Truly, truly hate him. ‘I don’t want him anywhere near my team,’ one front office executive said. ‘He’s a traitor.’”
If Kaepernick was a linebacker in the Ray Lewis mold, or a DB ala “They call me assassin” Jack Tatum, he might be able to get away more with the SJW performance art. But the QB is supposed to be the clean-cut face of the team, the guy who sells the most jerseys, is plastered on the most magazine covers. Historically, the most controversial thing front offices wanted to see from their quarterback was that he was reported out late in a bar having fun and entertaining the fans, ala Kenny Stabler, Terry Bradshaw, or Dandy Don Meredith. To build your franchise around a guy who alienates half your potential ticket and merchandise buyers doesn’t seem to be very smart from a PR or marketing stance. But as Scott McKay writes at the Spectator, “perhaps the politically correct NFL league office will exhort some team to give him another chance next year lest the league look like reactionaries. None of which would make him a good quarterback, after all. That throwing motion still stinks, and he never did fix it.”
But as with Hollywood perpetually handing roles to box office poison like Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin, perhaps politics trumps performance in the NFL these days as well.
San Francisco 49ers quarterbacks Blaine Gabbert, left, and Colin Kaepernick (7) stretch during NFL football training camp, Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2016, at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Ben Margot.) Click to enlarge image.
* See also: the fellow who once sang backups on a song that noted, “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow,” before selling out a half century later to a zillionaire dowager typically photographed wearing a Mao suit.
One can revisit the great civil rights debate over using violence as a means to an end; suffice to say, America’s better off that Martin Luther King, Jr. and his commitment to nonviolence, not Malcolm X and his “by any means necessary” approach, won the day. And this divide is only highlighted by Castro’s harboring of a bunch of American cop killers, such as Assata Shakur and Eldridge Cleaver, who claim their unconscionable and murderous actions were done in the name of “racial justice”.
The biggest problem here is that Kaepernick is seemingly unaware of Castro’s legacy. Aside from Castro dragooning and executing Christians and gays, Castro’s record on racial justice is decidedly not “woke”, as the Internet likes to say. While Cuba’s legacy of racism predates Castro, it’s safe to say overt racism against individuals of African ancestry there remains far more pronounced than it is in the United States. In fact, racism is kind of an unstated official policy: “State-posts, government jobs, or positions in the tourism industry are often allocated on the basis of skin color. Take a look at the top office holders in Cuba. See any black faces there? No,” Mediaite’s AJ Delgado wrote.
You really only need the first three words of Mark’s headline for the past weekend to make sense.
San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has willingly immersed himself into controversy by refusing to stand for the playing of the national anthem in protest of what he deems are wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United States.
His latest refusal to stand for the anthem — he has done this in at least one other preseason game — came before the 49ers’ preseason loss to Green Bay at Levi’s Stadium on Friday night.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Speaking of getting away with murder, Kaepernick’s salary last year was nearly 20 million dollars, when the 49ers went 5-11.
I really miss the days when football served as an escape from politics instead of just another front line for the reactionary left.
Last week, the influential International Association of Fire Fighters – another male-dominated union that backed Biden – joined the Teamsters in saying they wouldn’t endorse anyone this election cycle.
Which begs the question: What is now driving working-class men away from the Democrats?
For all his faults, ‘Amtrak Joe’ spent much of his long political career cultivating ties in rust-belt states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – election battlegrounds crucial to winning the White House.
The same cannot be said for Harris, who cut her teeth as a district attorney and attorney general in the liberal la-la land of California. Despite growing up in the leafy suburbs of Berkeley near San Francisco, she has tried to bolster her plebeian credentials by touting her experience – mysteriously unverifiable – of working in McDonald’s as a college student.
But America’s working-class men don’t seem impressed – and that should serve not so much an alarm bell for the Democrats as a klaxon. For if a significant number of union voters abandon Harris in November, she may lose.
In the 2020 election, Biden carried union households by 16 points in his victory over Trump, while Hillary Clinton bested Trump by only five points among union voters in 2016 – and, of course, she lost.
Now, a September Fox News poll has shown that Kamala is in Hillary-territory. In their survey, Harris narrowly won union voters by six points – 53 percent to 47 percent.
And it’s not only working-class men who appear to be turning their backs on the Democrats.
An October New York Times poll revealed that Harris is 11 points underwater with male voters overall. She is even performing relatively badly with black and Hispanic men, who might have been expected to support her overwhelmingly.
Beginning with a flashback to Michael Douglas in 1993’s Falling Down, in a G-File titled “Who’s the Bad Guy,” Jonah Goldberg charts the 30 year history of the left’s ongoing war on men, before writing:
A couple years after Falling Down came out, the Angry White Male discourse went into overdrive because of the Oklahoma City bombing, when Bill Clinton cynically but brilliantly blamed it on the white male rage fueled by right-wing talk radio. A few years later, Chris Rock and then Toni Morrison started calling Clinton “the first black president.” This became a bigrefrain in the Lewinsky scandal, but the intent was the same even before: to create a rationale to inoculate Clinton’s behavior as something different than what would be deemed toxic masculinity or white privilege in a Republican.
Now, I should say that I was hugely critical of this stuff back in the day—and remain so in many respects. But given the trajectory of Angry White Male-ism since then, I have to concede that there was more to it than I thought at the time.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. I am willing to accept that the diagnosis had more merit than I appreciated at the time, but the remedy made everything worse. The decades of mocking, belittling, and minimizing of white men made many of the problems with white men worse, not better. I’m not for depriving men—or women—of agency in their own predicaments. The incels and white supremacist poltroons, the Andrew Tate fanboys, the “childless cat lady” choristers, and all of the right-wingers who now insist that the bullying and dishonest, thrice-married adulterer Donald Trump—who puts on makeup every morning—is the epitome of manly virtues and a “manly man” (in the words of one of his super-fawners Tom Klingenstein) shouldn’t be let off the hook for their own choices. But the backlash to this cultural tide is real all the same.
And whatever partisan advantage Democrats got out of this stuff, it’s now a partisan disadvantage as men—white, black, and Hispanic—move out of the FDR coalition into what is now essentially the Trump coalition.
Indeed, it’s a sign of how deep in a cultural bubble progressives are, that Democrats thought Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz could lure a sufficient number of these men back into the Democratic fold. In the same way that, say, Charlie Kirk is an old white right-winger’s idea of what a young person is—or should be—Walz is an MSNBC producer’s idea of what a “real” rural white man is.
It reminds me of the great fun we had with “Pajama Boy” during the Obamacare brouhaha. For those of you who don’t remember, in 2013 the Obama team released a web ad with a smugly smirking “man” in his 20s wearing flannel onesie pajamas drinking some hot cocoa. The tagline: “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”
The ad was only possible in a world where this image is not only what you think young men look like, but what you think they should look like.
Fortunately, Nike, knowing both that, as Michael Jordan was famously quoted as saying, “Republicans buy sneakers too,” and that Kamala wants to temporarily dial back the leftist male bashing, has a new ad that calls for a truce in the gender wars.
Instead of defending actual women from having to compete against biological males on their own sports teams, Nike is charging full steam ahead with the “woke” agenda in their latest ad, taking aim at the “patriarchy” and touting anti-whiteness, lesbianism, and basic human history.
The new ad, first aired in August as part of the Nike brand’s “Play New” campaign and currently making the rounds (and being widely mocked) on social media, features a black high school student who’s been tasked with writing a report on a historical dynasty. Instead, she chooses to focus on the “new” dynasty of women’s basketball, one the ad claims will “Make Alexander the Great look like Alexander the OK” and headlining “women of color, gay women, and women who fight for social justice.”
Oh – and it’s a dynasty that “makes your favorite men’s basketball, football, and baseball teams look like amateurs.” Feel free to belly-laugh, it’s good for your health.
Check it out:
“A dynasty that makes Alexander the Great look like Alexander the Okay.”
Nike embraces anti-white wokeness with its latest ad. You are witnessing corporate pandering to black resentment the likes of which you’ve never seen. pic.twitter.com/YcBSwGCx1p
As with Falling Down being Ground Zero in the left’s cinematic War on Men, Pinch Sulzberger was quoted in New York magazine in 1991, as saying that if his newspaper was “alienating older white male readers [that] means ‘we’re doing something right.'”
It may seem like the Democrats are playing offense. That certainly fits a sports cliché, but it gets the underlying political dynamic backward. Football—and the reclamation of patriotic symbology—is pulling the Democratic Party to the right. While the left never had a coordinated plan to sink pro football, the last decade’s exposure of the sport’s corrosive nature is a good thing. People have the right to know the negative physical and psychological effects that can arise from playing the most popular sport in the country. Football and medical whistleblowers have exposed a right wing willing to look away from public health if it means pats on the back and campaign dollars from the reactionary billionaires that run the NFL.
“While the left never had a coordinated plan to sink pro football,” we all know of one fella who really gave it the ol’ college try, speaking of sports cliches. Good luck with that, though:
“Wasn’t it a risky move?” one of my friends asked. “Offending a billion people is not the best way to win friends and influence people, or attract viewers, right?”
It wasn’t risky at all. In fact, it was a guaranteed win for marketing the games.
Christians may be offended, but what are they going to do? It’s not like they were offending Muslims, in which case the organizers would soon be competing in the headless horseman competition. Offending Hindus would lead to all sorts of riots and burnings, and that wouldn’t be good for the TV ratings.
So Christians presented themselves as the most eligible target for controversy. And the rest of us fell into the trap set by the organizers.
BEEGE WELBORN: Go Woke, Go Broke? Just Do It! “I have a warm fuzzy about this one – a fuzzy that’s at least twice as big as multi-millionaire, failed quarterback, and professional race-grifter Colin Kaepernick’s fro when he’s feeling really oppressed and needs to victim signal.”
The worst response came from the NFL, which insisted on distancing the league from Butker’s opinions. Notably, unlike Colin Kaepernick, Butker did not use the NFL’s property or airtime to spread his opinions; he did so in his free time. There’s already a long and inconsistent record of the NFL and other sports leagues attempting, and failing, to come up with a consistent approach to punishing non-game-related things done by athletes off the field. The league wasn’t nearly this quick in the past to denounce violent crimes committed by its players. Nobody actually believes that it has been, or will in the future be, vigilant about making statements every time a player says or does something politically or socially controversial from the left. The point of this is to send a message that people who believe what Butker believes are apt to face discipline in the workplace for their faith and opinions. (That’s not just private action, either, given that the NFL is an association of franchises, one of which is publicly owned by the government of Green Bay, Wis.) And it is, to boot, a misreading of the NFL’s fan base: Do we really think that pro football fans are overwhelmingly left-leaning on cultural matters?
Plus: “So, let Harrison Butker be himself. His opinions are outgrowths of virtues in short supply today: faith, fidelity to the traditional family, and respect for the different, complementary, and mutually supporting roles played by husbands and wives. These are mostly opinions that were not even controversial until a few decades ago, and it should alarm us to see so little tolerance for their mere expression in the public square.”
Everyone must genuflect to the pieties of the Gentry Class, even though the Gentry Class itself doesn’t really live by them.
The richer you are, in general, the more conservative your life choices are. Most left wingers talk left but live right. They live in gated communities, put kids in private schools, maximize tax avoidance, have stay at home wives, pay attention to what they do not what they say.
Not one single NFL player has criticized Harrison Butker for what he said. You know why? Because almost all of them agree with him. The gap between what players — and coaches — believe and what the sports media who covers them believes is seismic.
In New York, where Alvin the Chipmunk Bragg is trying him because a porn whore extorted money from him, the jolly times continued.
The New York Post reported, “Trump vows to ‘straighten New York out’ while visiting bodega where clerk Jose Alba was hit with murder charge for stabbing an ex-con in self-defense.”
Only public outcry forced Bragg to drop charges against the bodega clerk, who is now suing the bastard.
Trump had them singing the national anthem in Harlem. Colin Kaepernick was the hardest hit.
But read all about the lawfare against him:
Using the courts to kill Donald Trump was well planned and coordinated by the White House. Unfortunately, the planner appears to be the incompetent Kamala Harris fresh off her job as border czar, which saw the largest invasion American history.
The DC press is in denial of course.
On Tuesday Politico said, “Trump and his allies like to complain these days that he is a victim of ‘lawfare’ — some sort of elaborate, multi-jurisdictional conspiracy involving federal and state prosecutors, private civil litigators and judges in different courts across the country to take him down through the court system. The media aids and abets it, in their telling.”
And yet the trials are coordinated so that he is not in two courts at the same time. The press coverage, too, is coordinated, which was the whole point of the Politico story I cited, “Inside the Off-the-Record Calls Held by Anti-Trump Legal Pundits
“Some of the country’s most prominent legal commentators are holding off-the-record sessions to hash out the latest twists and turns in Donald Trump’s legal saga.”
If you lived through it, and I did, “spectacle” is the most generous term you could use to describe the media environment around the trial. It was the moment the entire media, seeing the ratings and attention tabloid shows were garnering, went all-in on the trash-exploitation and racial tropes that dominate news media today. Lead Simpson attorney Johnnie Cochran shamelessly made the trial about the LAPD versus another poor black man — and upon Simpson’s acquittal, was covered by television shows on Court TV and was an invited guest to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.
As Cochran stoked racial fires only a few short years after the Rodney King riots, Christopher Darden, a prosecutor during the trial, and a black man, was labeled a race traitor and an Uncle Tom.
Simpson’s legal team was dubbed “the Dream Team,” a label also attached to the 1992 Men’s Olympic basketball team. Sports and politics merged in a way that would later be seen in a way similar to Colin Kaepernick kneeling on the NFL sidelines. Jay Leno’s Tonight Show featured several dancing Asian men in black robes in a comedy segment he labeled “The Dancing Itos,” a reference to the judge of the trial.
Simpson attorney Robert Kardashian’s family later became national celebrities in their own right, with his wife Kris Jenner and her daughters cashing in millions on sex tapes and television shows, music albums, merchandise, perfumes and clothing lines.
In the middle of the trial, National Enquirer published leaked nude photos of lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, sold to them by an ex-husband. Everyone became a punchline, and a character, and a celebrity, due to and because of the guiding hand of the national media. Lost in all of it was the fact that two people had been brutally murdered.
On the menu today: It almost always feels like the scourge of cancer targets those who deserve it the least. I say almost, because yesterday, cancer ended the life of O. J. Simpson. You can make a strong argument that Simpson turned into one of the most terribly influential Americans of the last quarter of the 20th century — terrible both in the scale of his influence and in the moral dimension of his influence.
The Myth of the ‘Juice’
O. J. Simpson passed away from cancer Thursday. The instant meme was an image of the late Norm McDonald declaring, “Finally, O.J. can rest, knowing that his wife’s killer is dead.”
Kids, you may not believe this, but in 1994, it seemed absurd that somebody who was rich and famous would be the kind of person capable of murdering two people. There was just this blanket assumption that anyone living a lifestyle of “champagne wishes and caviar dreams,” as Robin Leach described it, would be happy.
This was before Phil Spector, before Robert Blake, before Oscar Pistorius, before Aaron Hernandez.
This was before TMZ, before cell-phone cameras showcased every celebrity meltdown, tantrum, and other outburst. The rich and famous people in Hollywood, and their handlers and agents and consultants, exercised a lot more control over their images. This was also before #MeToo, and it was a few years before the country realized it had elected men who saw the White House interns as their own personal sex kittens — not just in 1992, but also in 1960.
You could say it was a more innocent time, but it is likely more accurate to say it was a more naïve time.
When O. J. Simpson was mentioned “as the focus of the investigation” on June 14, 1994, the initial overwhelming attitude among the public, white and black, was that it was unthinkable that the famous face could have committed such a bloody and heinous crime.
A large part of what made O.J. “unthinkable” as a murderer was the byproduct of being an NFL superstar. Pete Rozelle became commissioner of the league in 1960, and with the help of NFL Films, its omnipresent in-house propaganda machine, created a myth of hard-hitting warriors on the gridiron who were unassailable gentlemen off of it. Even after the O.J. trial, even after Rozelle stepped down from his perch in 1989, this myth soldiered on remarkably well until Colin Kaepernick and Rozelle’s successor finished it off for good in 2016: Roger Goodell Killed the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
In the 1960s, American culture was fracturing along a fault line, with the common man on one side and scorn against his mores and values on the other. The league’s commissioner at the time, Pete Rozelle, chose to take the side of ordinary Americans in the raging culture war, because they were his natural audience. The league sent star players to visit troops in Vietnam and issued rules requiring players to stand upright during the playing of the National Anthem.
In 1967, the NFL produced a film that combined sideline and game footage titled, “They Call It Pro Football.” The film was unapologetically hokey. It was crew cuts and high tops and lots of chain smoking into sideline telephones. With a non-rock, non-folk, non-“what’s happening now” soundtrack, heavy on trumpets and kettle drums. John Facenda, who would come to be called “The Voice of God” for his work with NFL Films, provided the vaulting narration. The production began with the words, “It starts with a whistle and ends with a gun.” There was nothing Radical Chic about it.
The NFL surpassed baseball as America’s pastime with careful branding that conformed to the tastes and sensibilities of middle-class Americans – Nixon’s silent majority. A half century later, Roger Goodell would kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
In August 2016, America was experiencing a polarizing presidential election. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick sat during the playing of the national anthem, to protest injustice. It was a politically divisive act directed at fans who regard the national anthem as something sacred. The league did not lift a finger to stop him.
Most employers don’t let their workers make controversial political statements to their customers. It is why you do not know your UPS driver’s views on the expansion of NATO. The Constitution does not prohibit private businesses from regulating speech during work.
A savvier commissioner would have reminded Kaepernick that he is being paid millions to wear the logo of the NFL, and the league does not permit players to use its brand to flaunt their personal politics. Instead, Roger Goodell permitted the pregame ceremonies to become the focus of intense political scrutiny, as the media lined up to catalog whether players stood, sat or knelt during the national anthem.
In retrospect, as somebody who had bought into Rozelle’s myth wholeheartedly, I’m glad that Kaepernick and Goodell finally buried it. That it could survive someone as heinous as O.J. Simpson is a testament to its strength, the gullibility of pro football’s most rabid fans — and whatever was going on this week in offices of the legacy media:
This is why The Free Press NPR piece is so important. Not a single person, journalist, editor, lawyer at THE FUCKING ASSOCIATED PRESS thought… "let's maybe not run this one?" https://t.co/O3UBixrkV8
As the 1960s kept ending, the next installment was the arrest of Charles Manson and four of his followers for the horrific murder of five people, including actress Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, at a luxury mansion north of Beverly Hills. When Manson’s trial began in 1970, Wenner [who would then have been about age 24–Ed] leaped at the story with an idea for the headline: “Charles Manson Is Innocent!”
Wenner’s headline was less insane than it sounds to modern ears. Manson was already an object of media obsession, a former Haight-Ashbury denizen who drifted to L.A. and collected hippie acolytes for LSD orgies and quasi-biblical prophecies. While the straight world viewed him as a monster, much of Wenner’s audience saw him, at least hypothetically, as one of their own. The underground press of Los Angeles, including the Free Press, cast him as the victim of a hippie-hating media. Manson was a rock-and-roll hanger-on. Wenner was convinced of Manson’s innocence by his own writer David Dalton, who had lived for a time with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys, a Manson believer. “I’d go out driving in the desert with Dennis, and he’d say things to me like ‘Charlie’s really cosmic, man.’ ”
* * * * * * * *
Meanwhile, a lawyer in the DA’s office, believing he was doing a favor for a friend of [David] Felton’s at the Los Angeles Times and that this hippie rag from San Francisco was a benign nonentity, brought Felton [then-recently hired away from the L.A. Times by Wenner] and Dalton into the office to show them the crime scene photos of the butchered bodies of Manson victims — including a man with the word war etched in his stomach with a fork. Dalton blanched when he saw the words “Healter [sic] Skelter” painted in blood on a refrigerator, instantly recalling what Dennis Wilson told him about the coded instructions Manson heard in the Beatles songs. “It must have been the most horrifying moment of my life,” said Dalton. “It was the end of the whole hippie culture.” Jann Wenner changed the headline.
WTF: CNN Contributor suggests black people identified with OJ because he k*lled white people.
“[OJ] represented something for the black community in that moment, in that trial, particularly because there were two white people who had been k*lled.”
The 2009 movie “The Blind Side” does not state or imply that the Tuohy family adopted Michael Oher. Neither does Michael Lewis’ 2006 book that inspired the film that won Sandra Bullock an Oscar.
In 2011, when Michael Oher published his first memoir, “I Beat the Odds,” he stated directly that the Tuohys secured a conservatorship when he was a senior in high school. He wrote that Sean and Leigh Anne Tuohy insisted that he maintain a relationship with his biological mother and 11 siblings. Oher wrote that his mother participated in the procedures necessary for the Tuohys to become conservators.
Why on earth is Michael Oher pretending he only recently discovered that the Tuohy family didn’t adopt him? Why are members of the media going along with Oher’s effort to shake down the Tuohy family for cash under the pretense that they lied to him and exploited him for profit?
Yesterday, Oher, a former NFL offensive lineman, filed a petition in a Tennessee court arguing that the Tuohys earned millions of dollars from “The Blind Side” and the false belief that they “adopted” him. He claims that he earned nothing from the movie and that the Tuohys owe him millions. This made headlines across corporate and social media. Twitter feeds overflowed with allegations that the Tuohys had profited from Hollywood’s love affair with the “white savior trope.”
Somebody’s attended the Colin Kaepernick School for racial grievances and financial shakedowns.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Insufferable Soccer Women Will Have to Be Embarrassing at Home. “While I may not be a fan, I did know about the women’s team, largely because of the above-mentioned Ms. Rapinoe’s big mouth. She’s been one of the more tedious woke athletes who mistakenly thinks she understands world affairs enough to weigh in on them. Think Colin Kaepernick with purple hair.”
“Lashing out after his arraignment on federal charges last week, Donald Trump took aim at President Joe Biden and Democrats with language that seemed to evoke another era: He was being persecuted, he said, by ‘Marxists’ and ‘communists,’” writes the AP’s Ali Swenson.
It’s so unfair for Trump and others to compare the left to communists, Swenson asserts, and she explains why.
“Trump has used the labels since he first appeared on the political scene, but it lately has become an omnipresent attack line that also has been deployed by other Republicans,” she continues. “The rhetoric is both inaccurate and potentially dangerous because it attempts to demonize an entire party with a description that has long been associated with America’s enemies.”
Swenson cites “experts” — because we all know that there’s an “expert” to back up anything the left wants to claim is true — including a Canadian professor who said that “red-baiting is as American as apple pie in political communications.” It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the poor babies, isn’t it?
Here’s the thing: overblown rhetoric is a fact of political life and has been for a long time. Sure, these people may not be actual communists, but the Democrats continue to rush headlong toward the far left, which does align them more closely with communists than with anyone on the right.
Ever since Barack Obama brought the concept of “community organizing” into the forefront of politics, the modern left has built much of its modus operandi around Marxist teaching and philosophy. Witness the most egregious grassroots movement on the left these days, which encompasses Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the domestic terrorists in Atlanta.
Like John and Yoko in the late ’60s, Colin Kaepernick after leaving the NFL, and AOC during her Green Nude Eel phase, Greta’s got to keep coming up with ways to generate new headlines now that her initial novelty has worn off.
Some people are foolish enough to take their political cues from show-business celebrities like Bette Midler, Rob Reiner, and Cher. Not me. I listen to athletes. So when I heard that 28-year-old British diver Tom Daley had made a documentary about the current status of human rights in certain former British colonies, I sought it out at once.
Just in case you didn’t know, Daley won a gold medal at the 2020 Olympics. He’s also come in first at the Commonwealth Games no fewer than four times. The premise of his documentary, Illegal to Be Me, is that, as this year’s Commonwealth Games approached (they were held in Birmingham between July 28 and Aug. 8), he began to think about the fact that, in 35 of the 56 countries competing in the games, it’s illegal to be gay. In three of those countries, homosexuality is punishable by death.
In some of Nigeria’s northern states, he informs us, the penalty for homosexuality is death by stoning. He doesn’t explain why this is the case in the north but not the south. Want to guess?
Daley says that since he himself is gay — he came out in 2013 — and has competed all over the Commonwealth, these statistics give him a queasy feeling. He’s won medals in some of those 35 anti-gay countries: How, he asks, should he feel about those medals? The anti-gay laws also pique his historical curiosity — where did all this hatred come from? — and make him want to “get the sporting world to try to change things.”
His tentative goal, he tells us at the outset of the documentary — which aired on BBC One on Aug. 9 — is to persuade Commonwealth Games officials to deny countries with anti-gay laws the right to host the Commonwealth Games. But he realizes that this stratagem may be misguided. “I still have so much to learn,” he admits. So he travels to a couple of the anti-gay Commonwealth countries to “meet some queer athletes,” see how they live, and bounce his ideas off them.
First up is Pakistan…
Ellipses mine. It’s the BBC, so I think you can see where this is going, but read the whole thing, nonetheless. If Netflix teamed up Daley with Colin Kaepernick to host a series, the level of wokeness and blinkered PC-thinking would likely implode the universe.
I think the author may have misspelled “yawns” at the end of that headline.
THE TRAGIC KINGDOM: Disney made itself an arm of the Democratic Party on a losing issue. “The GOP isn’t picking fights with corporations and painting them as fringe extremists. Those corporations are backing fringe, extremist ideas when they back Kaepernick’s anti-police screeds or the Democratic Party’s support for medical transitions for children.”
The sports press—those noted “progressives” who almost uniformly praised Colin Kaepernick for “taking a knee” and did their best to ignore LeBron James’s coddling of the genocidal Chinese communists— immediately jumped all over Djokovic as if here a leper on the loose.
Said Sports Illustrated: “Novak Djokovic Is Still Making Bad Decisions.”
The Guardian chimed in: “Novak Djokovic’s propensity for self-sabotage has become a defining trait.”
Tennis World opined: “Novak Djokovic’s darkest moment.”
And, of course, our friends at The New York Times wrapped it all up for us:
“For now, Djokovic will still not get vaccinated against the coronavirus, no matter how much it costs him, as he made clear in an interview with the BBC that was broadcast on Tuesday and in which the interviewer, Amol Rajan, summed up a fair share of the global mood by abandoning journalistic sang-froid and imploring: ‘Why Novak, why, why?’
“‘Because the principles of decision-making on my body are more important than any title or anything else,’ Djokovic answered. ‘I’m trying to be in tune with my body as much as I possibly can.’
“That approach has him out of tune with his sport and his times,” the NY Times concluded.
Oh, really? Tell that to the brave Canadian truckers and their supporters who are having their bank accounts frozen by a despotic leader who arrests peaceful protesters with impunity.
But it’s a safe bet the NY Times doesn’t have much sympathy for the truckers or anyone else who doesn’t toe their line.
Unlike Colin Kaepernick or Chris Kluwe, Kanter Freedom is not just a fading player using politics as an excuse for running out of jobs. He was still averaging 14 rebounds per 36 minutes, and, at 29 years old, he should still have some years left as a banger in the paint. Certainly, he’s a guy that a contending team could use — say, a team like the 76ers, who just traded backup center Andre Drummond and could use a guy with a little of the Spirit of 76.
But will his politics — specifically, his outspoken criticism of the Chinese Communist Party — get him blackballed from the NBA? If so, it may be time to start asking which nation the “National” in NBA stands for.
Part of the reason this wisdom hasn’t been applied to the coaching world is due to absurd racial quota systems like the “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which forces teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy.
The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002. A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.
This is not a defense of the NFL. The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.
The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.
By former New England Patriot Jake Bequette, Read the whole thing.
But no matter what airhead celebrities want, Kaepernick is not a hero, and Rittenhouse is not a terrorist. But to be honest, they don’t say that they want that. They’re saying how they want people to think about the facts, which is typical for the left.
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