Pro Football Talk asks on Twitter, “Colin Kaepernick forfeited his NFL career for engaging in peaceful protest; should Myles Garrett forfeit his NFL career for engaging in behavior that could have seriously injured or killed Mason Rudolph?”
UPDATE: Browns’ Myles Garrett suspended indefinitely; Steelers’ Maurkice Pouncey gets 3-game ban. “Garrett will not play again this season, and maybe longer.The NFL announced Friday that the Cleveland Browns defensive end has been suspended for the rest of this season, including the playoffs should the Browns make it, and will have to meet with the commissioner’s office before being reinstated in 2020.”
The 23-year-old Bronxville native recalled the physical and mental abuse she endured when she was 17, while training with Nike’s Alberto Salazar, claiming that the highly touted track and field coach forced her to lose weight and ignored her acts of self-harm.
“I joined Nike because I wanted to be the best female athlete ever,” Cain said in the video. “Instead, I was emotionally and physically abused by a system designed by Alberto and endorsed by Nike.”
* * * * * * * *
Multiple prominent runners, including New York City Marathon winner Shalane Flanagan, have spoken out in support of Cain. Olympic runner Kara Goucher backed up Cain’s allegations and criticized Nike’s handling of the situation on Twitter Friday.
“So [Nike] responds to [Cain],” Goucher wrote. “Takes the time to victim shame Mary, before saying they will investigate. I hope you come to me, because I have stories to match all of Mary’s claims and so much more. Don’t let this be more lip service, actually do something.”
In his own way, Trump also fights back in 360-degree fashion, from the existential to the trivial, railing against Colin Kaepernick, tit for tatting Hollywood stars, weighing in on radical abortion, open borders, power outages, the homeless and subway jumping. The result is not just that there looms a choice between two different agendas, but two quite different American lifestyles and experiences—and histories.
Like it or not, 2020 is going to be a plebiscite on an American version of Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. One side advocates a complete transformation not just of the American present but of the past as well. The Left is quite eager to change our very vocabulary and monitor our private behavior to ensure we are not just guilty of incorrect behavior but thought as well.
The other side believes America is far better than the alternative, that it never had to be perfect to be good, and that, all and all, its flawed past is a story of a moral nation’s constant struggle for moral improvement.
One side will say, “Just give us more power and we will create heaven on earth.” The other says “Why would anyone wish to take their road to an Orwellian nightmare?” The 2020 election is that simple.
DAVID HARSANYI: LeBron Jame$ Is A Coward. “There’s nothing wrong with exporting capitalism. There’s absolutely something wrong about supporting tyrants.”
Only last year, James, a purported champion of social justice, came out in support former quarterback Colin Kaepernick with the vacuous platitude, “I stand with anyone who believes in change.” Anyone? Of course, LeBron’s stand, as with most acts of pretend celebrity bravery, resulted in hosannas being thrown at him by the press, and, more importantly, never costing him a penny.
Americans tend to use word like “stand” and “fight” in their political disagreements, though they never really have to stand and fight for anything. Tank Man stood and fought. The Hong Kong protesters stand and fight. We take to social media and argue. Posting a Nike-approved picture on your Instagram account of Kaepernick—adorned with the $40-million market-test slogan, “Believe in something, Even if it means sacrificing everything”—is not an act of bravery, LeBron.
And that’s fine. All of this just speaks to the relative safety afforded dissent and protest in our political life. In the United States celebrities are free to accuse the president of being fascist dictator or “bum,” and no one is coming to knock on their doors. Watching fabulously wealthy men fretting over their words abroad is a useful reminder of the liberalism we have inherited.
And which they are gladly squandering.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): They’re not so much “squandering” freedom, as selling it.
In addition to testing out their slogan from this past summer, Nike’s has also invalidated their eighties-era licensing of John Lennon’s “Revolution” in their ads as well. Apparently, both the shoe company and the NBA are perfectly OK carrying pictures — or at least the water — of Chairman Mao.
Related: CNN journalist “gets quickly shut down when she asked James Harden, Russell Westbrook if they would refrain from speaking out on politics/social justice after China debacle:”
Of course, today’s Sports Illustrated has little in common with the publication that Henry Luce, its center-right creator, began in 1954. Or as Iowahawk would say:
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Rapper Jay-Z Partner with the NFL, Joins the Ranks of the Insufficiently Woke. “The social-justice Left sees only one path to redemption for the NFL, and that’s a team signing Colin Kaepernick…Most NFL teams either are in a mode to ‘win now’ or are rebuilding for the future. Kaepernick [now age 31, and out of football since the end of the 2016 season] isn’t good enough to help a team that’s built to win now, and he’s probably too old to be a building block for the future.”
Related: You know things are bad when the PC mob comes for Jay-Z. “Recall that Nike canceled an entire line of shoes over Kaepernick’s inane PC complaints. In defending the deal, the rapper said: ‘You can’t just throw someone out if they make a mistake. This is the real world. You can’t say, ‘Oh, you made a mistake, you’re canceled. I’m never speaking to you again.’ That doesn’t accomplish anything.’ He’d better hope people will be making that argument on his behalf, too.”
Last week, Disney announced that Halle Bailey, a black actress, would portray the fictional mermaid princess in a live-action remake. Allegedly, this infuriated some racists because Ariel is red-haired and white-skinned in the cartoon version. “Us white girls, who grew up with The Little Mermaid, deserved a true-to-color Ariel,” wrote one critic, Rebeccs, in a tweet that went viral. “Disney, you made a huge mistake by hiring Halle Bailey.”
Horrified? Don’t be. A troll account was responsible for the tweet, as Buzzfeed‘s Brandon Wall helpfully explained:
Moreover, there were a lot more people responding to the tweet and disagreeing with it than liking it.
It’s true that a few Twitter users seemed genuinely upset about the casting. But the overwhelming majority of people tweeting #NotMyAriel are doing so in support of Bailey and expressing outrage that anyone would be offended by a black Ariel. Their fury is well-intended but largely unnecessary.
Giant corporations sure know what they’re doing when it comes to pressing the buttons of a mass audience on social media, even if their PR machines have to break a few eggs in the process:
The idea of athletics is to try to live up to our highest ideals. Not revel in living down to the debased standards of others.
Besides—not to put too fine a point on it—but it’s a really bad look given your enormous privilege. Thailand’s per capita GDP is 1/9 of America’s. They went through a military coup in 2014. When you go crazy after scoring the 8th goal against those women you maybe look like Cobra Kai. Nobody roots for Cobra Kai.
All right, Megan, we’ll let you go enjoy the fruits of your victory. You’ve earned your place in the Pantheon, and we hope you’ll use it constructively. As someone who’s been so blessed and so privileged, please encourage other young women to take advantage of their opportunities in this country that are unparalleled anywhere else in the world, and urge them to work hard for what they want, just as you did.
And as a P.S., I’d also ask you to indulge me by listening to Whitney Houston’s version of the National Anthem. It’s a game changer.
SPIRIT OF ’76: Forty years on, America’s bicentennial cohesion may be unrecoverable.
The Bicentennial was blessed with good timing, arriving on the heels of a long post-1960s hangover that culminated with two bleak closing acts, less than a year apart: the fall of an American president elected in large part to quell the previous decade’s disorder, and the fall of Saigon to the Communist North Vietnamese, bringing a tragic end to the war that had inspired much of the disorder. With that depressing coda, there was nowhere to go but up, and the Bicentennial became, as Lance Morrow wrote in Time, “a star-spangled ceremony of self-forgiveness.” After a long gaze inward, many concluded that the country and its republican traditions still looked pretty good.
That pride was reflected in the American Freedom Train, a 26-car locomotive loaded with historical exhibits and decorated in stars and stripes. It stopped in all 48 contiguous states from April 1, 1975, in Wilmington, Delaware, to December 31, 1976, in Miami. “It was by far the greatest event on rails since the end of the steam era,” declares a commemorative website, which estimates that tens of millions of Americans stood to watch it pass by and that more than 7 million bought tickets and attended.
I was one of those 7 million, or at least my parents were—they paid for the tickets. We stood in the Freedom Train’s fabled long lines on a hot summer day in suburban Illinois. Sometimes people waited for hours before they could get on board and see the exhibits, and even then, they were hustled along on a moving walkway that rushed them through in 15 minutes (later slowed to 22). It was all a bit overwhelming: “Zuni necklace, golden spike, first English Bible, first edition of Poe, Henry Aaron’s home run bat, Edward G. Robinson as Little Caesar, the familiar, sinister voice intoning ‘The Shadow knows,’ Thomas Hart Benton’s painting, Gerald R. Ford proclaiming, ‘Our Constitution works’—more than half a thousand features flash by before one has a chance to focus,” the New York Times observed. Still, the Freedom Train is remembered fondly, and, like the gifts sent to President Ford, it’s hard to imagine it happening again. The political battles alone—from what stops to make and what exhibits to include to whether to employ unionized workers or use renewable energy—would probably keep a twenty-first-century Freedom Train stranded in the station.
In-between Walter Cronkite droning on about the impending eco-disasters of a new ice age and overpopulation to viewers of the CBS Evening News, and episodes of M*A*S*H as a thinly-disguised Vietnam War commentary full of moral equivalence between the US and North Korea, CBS could still muster up some of its biggest stars to host “Bicentennial Minutes” on the important events that led up to the nation’s founding. Today, the network would likely draft Stephen Colbert and Colin Kaepernick to opine on how the nation was born in Original Sin. Perhaps it was the lack of a 24-hour cable news cycle, or the increasingly left-leaning network remembering that it still needed to serve a wide swatch of viewers. In any case, even with a Republican president in the White House, the Bicentennial proved that as late as 1976, the Democratic Party-dominated overculture still offered room for all, decades before today’s “no escapism” mentality on the elite left.
QUESTION ASKED: “Was Nike’s Betsy Ross Flag imbroglio planned? Because we’re pretty sure Disney’s ‘Little Mermaid’ one was,” Jon Gabriel and Stephen Miller note at Fourth of July-themed “Murica” edition of Ricochet’s “Conservatarians” podcast.
Innocuous or even noble symbols can be appropriated for evil purposes. The swastika is an ancient symbol in various Asian cultures. It was adopted in Europe as a symbol of good luck until the Nazis made it their own. The KKK’s pointy hoods may have been inspired by the Catholic capirote of medieval Spain and Portugal, which looks dismayingly similar.
But here’s the thing: When evil people acquire symbols for their own ends, the only guarantee of success is when everyone else validates the acquisition.
If Nike had gone ahead with the special-edition sneakers, it would have been, in marketing terms, the equivalent of Godzilla versus Bambi. A few neo-Nazis and a few more social-justice warriors would have complained, and everyone else would have gone about their day totally unconcerned.
Instead, Nike followed the advice of a man whose business model is to stir grievance and controversy for its own sake. Suddenly, millions of people who once thought the Betsy Ross flag was just an admirable bit of Americana now associate it with hate groups. Worse, other entirely decent and patriotic Americans will now likely start brandishing the flag to offend people who, until recently, had no idea some hate groups adopted the flag in the first place.
The ranks of the perpetually offended will misread this trolling-to-own-the-libs effort as an endorsement of hate speech, and the culture war will have yet another idiotic fight on its hands, and a symbol of the country’s founding that should be a uniting image for all Americans will now be reduced to a weapon in that war.
Thanks a lot, Nike.
As Jim Treacher noted on Wednesday, Betsy Ross’s flag design “was good enough for Obama’s inauguration. Not anymore. If Betsy Ross is racist now, how about the 76ers? The Patriots? Should we start picketing showings of Hamilton?”
Given the Philadelphia Flyers’ recent memory holing of Kate Smith, I’d say the odds are 50-50 that the city’s basketball team updates their logo, which features the 13 star design. I wonder when the left starts considering their name as evil as the NFL’s Washington Redskins?
BRET STEPHENS ON ROBESPIERRE’S AMERICA. “The data confirm what one hears and experiences anecdotally all the time: In the proverbial land of the free, people live in mortal fear of a moral faux pas. Opinions that were considered reasonable and normal a few years ago are increasingly delivered in whispers. Professors fear their students. Publishers drop books at the slightest whiff of social-media controversy. Twitter and other similar platforms have delivered the tools of reputational annihilation (without means of petition or redress) into the hands of millions, so that no comment except the most private is entirely safe from the possibility of instantaneous mass denunciation.”
For the haters, it’s open season on the American ideal.
Colin Kaepernick doesn’t like today’s American flag because it reminds him of police brutality and he doesn’t like Betsy Ross’ O.G. flag because it reminds him of slavery. I’m starting to think maybe Colin Kaepernick is not so fond of the flag, or of the country that made him rich.
Nike supported him by withdrawing the Betsy Ross-flagged sneaker. That’s right, the American flag, in any form, is now apparently a toxic symbol. The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, actually praised Nike.
Meanwhile, the Charlottesville City Council just voted to stop celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday in the city where he died on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence he wrote. American patriotism has just reached a record low entirely because of Democrats, of whom only 22% say they’re “extremely proud” of their country. To celebrate the Fourth, America’s most prominent newspaper is bidding for the trolling Hall of Fame by running a video, titled “Please stop telling me America is great,” that argues how America is “just OK.”
Remember the distant past of 2016, when leading voices of progressivism were saying, “America never stopped being great” (Hillary Clinton) and “America is already great” (Barack Obama)? All that’s over.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a new interview that she believes the United States is heading in a fascist direction under President Trump. “Are we headed to fascism? Yes. I don’t think there’s a question,” Ocasio-Cortez told Yahoo News earlier this week after she visited migrant detention facilities managed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“If you actually take the time to study, and to look at the steps, and to see how government transforms under authoritarian regimes, and look at the political decisions and patterns of this president, the answer is yes.”
They define fascism as “whenever Democrats lose elections,” and therefore when Ocasio-Cortez says we are “headed to fascism,” what she means is that Trump will be re-elected. After all, Democrats believe the Betsy Ross flag is a symbol of “white supremacy,” so we shouldn’t be surprised that they consider patriotism a synonym for “hate.”
In contrast, Cocaine Mitch ensures that at least today, cooler heads prevail:
MSNBC guest Michael Eric Dyson compared the Betsy Ross American flag to the Nazi swastika and a burning Ku Klux Klan cross during an appearance Wednesday.
Nike canceled a release of shoes featuring the iconic flag with the 13 stars representing the original colonies, after former NFL quarterback and liberal activist Colin Kaepernick objected because it was “offensive.”
Dyson, a Georgetown University professor who frequently comments on racial issues from a left-wing perspective, defended the cancellation, citing its connection to the revolutionary period and that it was “deeply embroiled in enslavement.”
Never thought I’d see an MSNBC regular tacitly call Obama a Nazi. I’m so old, I can remember when the only lefties who did so were Lyndon Larouche-ites:
Matt Guice, center, a field organizer for Larouchepac.com, distributes flyers as he stands near posters he has propped up on Wall Street in New York’s financial district, Monday, Aug. 19, 2013 in New York. Larouchepac.com is a political action committee of conservative activist Lyndon LaRouche. (AP Photo and caption.)
Exit question: “Who had the Democratic Party coming up with ‘our flag is racist’ on the Fourth of July on their Self-Destruction Bingo card?”
The context is this: Hong Kong, a free, liberal, democratic, self-governing city was handed over to the powers that be in Beijing — a clutch of corrupt, brutal, dishonest, organ-harvesting, gulag-operating murderers — as part of an agreement with the United Kingdom, who once had sovereignty over Hong Kong as a colonial power. Beijing wants Hong Kong to be more like the rest of China, and the people of Hong Kong do not. They recently took to the streets to force the reversal of a decision that would have subjected Hong Kong residents to extradition to the so-called People’s Republic of China for certain crimes rather than be tried in Hong Kong under Hong Kong law. Because the junta in Beijing has no compunction about drumming up charges for political purposes, this would have represented a noose around the neck of every dissident in Hong Kong. Jun Takahashi tweeted his support for liberal democrats against mass-murdering national socialists.
And Nike sided with the mass-murdering national socialists.
Swoosh: There goes your soul.
Nike likes to position itself as a courageous sponsor of dissidents in the economically and racially charged world of sports, for instance giving the heroic treatment to controversial former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in a series of cinematic advertisements. Irrespective of your view on the particular merits of Kaepernick and his national-anthem protest, that is the sort of thing one likes to see a big corporation such as Nike do — to say, in essence: “Yes, this is potentially unpopular, and we may lose a few sales over it, but we’re Nike, and we’re big enough and rich enough to do what we think is right.” But of course there is rather less to it than that.
Trash.
Plus: “Ochlocracy — mob rule — sometimes takes the form of rioting or other kinds of open violence, as in the case of Antifa, but more often it consists in the mob bullying third parties — government or, increasingly, businesses — into implementing the mob’s agenda.” And frequently the third parties are actually happy to be “bullied.”
Kate of Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog quotes one wag on Twitter who responded, “This is what happens when you fire all the humans and let badly programmed shit make the decisions.”
By grabbing Nick Bosa with the second pick of the NFL draft, the 49ers got a man most agree should disrupt opponents’ quarterbacks and backfields for years to come. But is there a chance Bosa will also become a disruptive force within the team’s fanbase or even its locker room because of his political beliefs?
Bosa hasn’t hidden his right-leaning political views and fervent support of President Donald Trump, but before the draft he did delete a number of controversial social media posts from when he was a teenager that included racial tones.
“I had to,” Bosa told ESPN before the draft. “There is a chance I might end up in San Francisco.”
Among the items deleted were a Bosa tweet calling then-49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick “a clown” for kneeling as part of his social justice protests in 2016. He also criticized the movie “Black Panther” and Beyonce’s music while liking tweets from conservative political analyst Tomi Lahren.
The 49ers’ decision-makers are confident that Bosa’s online presence will not become an issue, which is why general manager John Lynch and coach Kyle Shanahan didn’t hesitate when picking him Thursday.
If there’s one thing I learned from the 49ers in recent years, some issues are much bigger than football, and a quarterback must be free to discuss them, even on Sunday. Hopefully Bay Area fans will continue to demonstrate their tolerance for diversity by accepting Bosa’s outspokenness on any issue he wishes to opine upon.
The Media Research Center calculates that CNN alone gave Avenatti “74 appearances and adds that Avenattti made a total of 147 TV appearances over 10 weeks; that means CNN hosted more than half of his appearances ‘which almost certainly makes Avenatti the most ubiquitous guest in the network’s history.’”
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