It’s an interesting marketing approach: Insult the majority of the country.
Then give most of your fans a slap in the face.
This is precisely what the National Football League has been doing in pandering to its kneeling numbskulls, the overpaid athletes who’ve been “taking a knee” during the pre-game playing of the National Anthem. And now one of the country’s biggest talk-show hosts has said as much in a scathing monologue.
Pundit and raconteur Michael Savage opened his Monday show with a simple truth: The NFL players, coaches, and owners protesting during the Anthem aren’t attacking President Trump — they’re attacking America. As Savage put it:
President Trump says players who protested the National Anthem being played before games should be fired from their teams over the weekend, and the whole world exploded. Yesterday, America was treated to NFL players taking a knee, or sitting or locking arms while the national anthem was being played in protest of what the President said. Well, guess what? They weren’t protesting a President, they were giving a big middle finger to the country.
That flag and that song should be a unifying moment, a moment to say ‘no matter what differences we have, we are all American, and it’s a privilege to be one.’ But a bad player, influenced by his radical Muslim girlfriend last year decided to make it about him. He claimed to be protesting the killing of black men in America by the police while at the same time wearing a shirt praising the Castros of Cuba. And it’s spread to this. ‘He’s practicing his first amendment rights’ everyone said.
Well Donald Trump practiced his first amendment rights and an entire league lost their minds. This tradition goes back a hundred years to World War 1. The people loved their country then, with boys fighting overseas in a horrible war. We have soldiers on the battlefield today, and these players just spit on them. The national anthem is about a nation, not about a President. And if these thugs don’t know that, they should be thrown off the team.
The NFL situation truly is an unprecedented phenomenon. Anyone with sense would realize that the kneeling is an attack on all patriotic Americans; anyone with that sense and a sense of decency wouldn’t do it. Yet the NFL, despite flagging ratings, keeps on digging its hole deeper.
What’s going on? The players are generally ignorant, unsophisticated people — dumb jocks, to not put too fine a point on it. The owners may know better, but now they may consider themselves between a rock and a hard place.
If they’d nipped this problem in the bud — clamping down on Colin Kaepernick and just saying, “We won’t allow any kind of divisive political protests during ‘work hours’” — this situation would likely be passed and long forgotten.
But now the protests have snowballed far beyond what the owners probably ever envisioned; they have become the national story. My guess is that the owners now feel committed: They don’t want to halt the protests and appear to be opposing a politically correct cause. So they just keep digging and digging and digging.
They have no one to blame but themselves, however. This is not a First Amendment issue; private entities such as NFL teams can and do enforce codes of conduct. As the Politistick just pointed out in “The NFL has a MAJOR Hypocrisy Problem When it Comes to Allowing the American Flag to be Disrespected”:
The NFL forced RGIII (Robert Griffin III) to turn his “Know Jesus, Know Peace” t-shirt inside out because — according to NFL management — it violated their code of conduct in regards to apparel.
… When the Dallas Cowboys wanted to honor police that were gunned down by a progressive terrorist, they were not allowed to by the NFL. What about their “freedom of expression?”
… Expressing your Christian beliefs or supporting police is not allowed by the NFL. Expressing your America-hating or Marxist beliefs, like Kaepernick’s Communist Castro-loving t-shirt he was allowed to wear or his socks depicting police as pigs were allowed by the NFL management. Is this the USA or the USSR, NFL?
Here’s the kicker. WND.com is reporting today that the NFL does have a rule requiring players to stand for the anthem, writing, “The NFL’s operations manual, which, unlike its rule book, is not available to the public, states:
‘During the National Anthem, players on the field and bench area should stand at attention, face the flag, hold helmets in their left hand, and refrain from talking.… Failure to be on the field by the start of the National Anthem may result in discipline, such as fines, suspensions, and/or the forfeiture of draft choice(s) for violations of the above, including first offenses.’”
The NFL owners’ problem is that they’re unprincipled men with all the wrong feelings. Their sins of omission and commission bring to mind the apocryphal saying, “Moral issues are always complex matters — for people who have no principles.”
If they were better men — men of conviction, integrity, patriotism, and virtue — they would have instinctively taken the correct action as soon as Kaepernick indulged his unpatriotic ugliness. Instead, their moral universe is a place where God and country are out and Marxism, police hatred, and anti-Americanism are in.
If these NFL figures were merely dumb jocks, they could at least be pitied; people don’t choose their intelligence. But they’re loathsome, anti-American creatures who, increasingly, are being loathed by Americans. And whether or not the NFL is still a marketable product in a couple of years will tell us exactly how deeply the lack of principle and anti-Americanism runs.
Photo: AP Images
