“Are you criticizing Mike Tomlin?” No, no, no. I know what Mike Tomlin was trying to do by keeping the team in the locker room: Keep ’em away from the controversy. I totally understand that. Tomlin doesn’t want any part of this. It’s obvious. He doesn’t want some of his players going out there and doing whatever is fashionable to do now. He wanted to keep away from this. In fact, I kind of admire, “If this is what the pregame has become, we’re not gonna do the pregame.”
.. “I want to protect the players from having to make a choice.” Well, making a choice is what they’ve been doing. What he wanted to do was protect the Steelers organization from being part of this. That’s admirable.
I mean, he sees what’s going on; he sees it’s a distraction.
.. Lowry says, “He takes a commonly held sentiment — most people don’t like the NFL protests — and states it in an inflammatory way guaranteed to get everyone’s attention and generate outrage among his critics. When those critics lash back at him, Trump is put in the position of getting attacked for” defending America. There’s no way he loses. I don’t care what you all in the media think. I don’t care what Goodell thinks. You know, Goodell said, “I’ve never been prouder of our league than the way we handled this yesterday.”
.. the NFL, I actually think, is the useful idiots in the political battle that’s being waged with it, to it and against it. And I don’t know if they understand what’s happening, just like Hillary still doesn’t know what happened to her. I don’t know that the NFL understands what’s happening to it. I really don’t think they do.
.. When it starts to fade away, the first thing that happened to you if not careful is denial: “It’s temporary. We’ll get it back. It’s the hurricanes. It was the election.” But the numbers keep sliding. It wasn’t the hurricane. It wasn’t just the election. It’s something more basic. “Of course, NFL owners firing players on the spot for protesting isn’t necessarily common sense, but this is where ‘seriously, not literally’ comes in” with Trump.
.. “Trump’s statement registers for his supporters merely as forceful opposition to the protests, not as a specific plan of action.” Bingo. Bingo. Trump supporters to this day are not understood. They are still impugned and mocked and laughed at.
.. But they have grown tired of a country they love as being under assault as unjust or immoral or illegitimate. They’re fed up with it. Their president defends it, defends them. The specifics don’t matter. There is finally somebody speaking up for America. “But, Rush! But, Rush! The protesters are speaking up for America.” They may think so, but they’re not, in the eyes of most NFL fans. They’re not speaking up for America. This is not complicated, either.
.. “[W]hen Trump is criticized and doesn’t back down it is taken by his supporters as a sign of strength. If a political consultant came up with this strategy, he’d deserve a huge raise. But it’s just Trump himself operating on instinct.”
Rich Lowry, National Review: you don’t know what an admission, realization this is. This is essentially, I mean, why Donald Trump is president. Donald Trump instinctively knows where the heart of America is.
.. This is not player generated, player started. There are all kinds of activists behind this. And if their objective is to wound and weaken, diminish the NFL, the fastest away to do it is to encourage behavior that’s gonna drive the fan base away.
.. “I have friends who didn’t care for Trump at all who re-watched that rally in Alabama, and they’re laughing. They watch it over, they’re laughing each time. These people loved it, and they’re giving Trump amens and high fives, people that didn’t like Trump watched this rally.
.. The left is now out saying that if you don’t take the knee, you’re for Trump.
..
The average person knows this is silly, but now you’ve got minority voters who already realize that secular liberals are a bigger threat to them than Trump is. Trump never made ’em worry about taking their daughter into the bathroom at Target or any of this stuff. Now they just want to watch the game, and the entire left-wing complex is trying to tell ’em they have to pick a side. You have to pick the flag or you have to take a knee. You gotta pick a side, and all that’s gonna do is make people mad. They just want to watch football. They don’t want to pick a side. They don’t think this is where it should be.
Neo-Nazis in Your Streets? Send in the (Coup Clutz) Clowns
In Olympia, Wash., in 2005, a march of about a dozen brown-shirted neo-Nazis was met by protesting clowns, goose-stepping, Nazi-style. Hundreds of counterprotesters turned the occasion into a celebration of diversity and unity.
.. Two years later in Knoxville, Tenn., residents countered a white supremacist march with a hastily assembled group calling itself the Coup Clutz Clowns. The clowns pretended not to understand the shouts of “White power!”
“White flour?” the clowns cried, throwing some in the air. “White flower? Tight shower? Wife power!” For wife power, some of them put on wedding dresses.
.. Responding to far-right demonstrators with mockery originated in Europe, where one outstanding recent example took place in the German town of Wunsiedel. Unable to dislodge annual marches with ordinary counterprotests, the town took a new tack in 2014. For every meter the neo-Nazis marched, the town donated 10 euros to an organization that helped people leave right-wing extremist groups. Residents hung silly signs along the route and threw confetti at the end, leaving the neo-Nazis responsible for raising $12,000 against their own cause.
.. Here’s what white supremacists want to do when they stage a rally:
• Legitimize their views.
• Strengthen their self-image as part of the downtrodden.
• Unite their squabbling factions.
• Attract new people to the movement.
• Control media coverage.
• Feel powerful and heroic.
They can accomplish all of those goals when the Antifa, or anti-fascists, respond to violence by throwing fists or rocks.
“For the far-right groups, violence is central to their way of looking at the world,” said Peter Simi, associate professor of sociology at Chapman University. “The idea of having violent confrontation and conflicts fuels and energizes them. They feed off it.
“It also helps perpetuate their own narrative about victimization and persecution —‘Look, we can’t even have a free speech rally without being attacked.’ ”
.. After all, which plan is more attractive to young macho men? “We’ll face a small group of masked tough guys” or “We’ll face a large number of men, women and children wearing silly hats and big red noses”?
.. A good joke creates a memorable, clear message, allowing the protesters to reframe the issue and attract supporters. Humor engages people on an emotional level and — if it is not meanspirited — it can open them to your messa
.. the Barbie Liberation Organization could. A small group of pranksters bought Teen Talk Barbies and Talking Duke GI Joes — and switched their voice boxes. Then the toys went back onto the shelves.
.. “Eat lead, Cobra!” surgically altered Barbie said. “Vengeance is mine!”
.. The members used the media to magnify their effects. When they repackaged each toy, they included a phone number to call “if you experience problems with your doll.” The number was really that of a local television news station.
.. GI Joe’s macho aggression and Barbie’s obsessive mall-visiting and dream-wedding-planning had been internalized by society. The gender switch suddenly made them visible and revealed their absurdity. And it was unforgettable.
.. “People remember stories much better than they remember information,” Bichlbaum said.
.. Bichlbaum often impersonates a representative of corporate interest to announce good behavior — as it did with the W.T.O. The spoofed organization must then, embarrassingly, deny it.
.. One of the group’s common tactics was to mock the state through exaggerated obedience.
.. The police found themselves in a conundrum. They couldn’t let the protesters continue. But by making arrests, they acknowledged that no one could possibly believe in the Communist orthodoxy — and anyone who said they did must have been joking. Most Poles already knew that, of course, but the Orange Alternative forced the state authorities to make it visible.
Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing the Left
Enrollment is down more than 2,000. The campus has had to take seven dormitories out of service.
Timothy Vaughn dutifully cheered the University of Missouri for a decade, sitting in the stands with his swag, two hot dogs and a Diet Coke. He estimates he attended between 60 and 85 athletic events every year—football and basketball games and even tennis matches and gymnastics meets. But after the infamous protests of fall 2015, Missouri lost this die-hard fan.
“I pledge from this day forward NOT TO contribute to the [Tiger Scholarship Fund], buy any tickets to any University of Missouri athletic event, to attend any athletic event (even if free), to give away all my MU clothes (nearly my entire wardrobe) after I have removed any logos associated with the University of Missouri, and any cards/helmets/ice buckets/flags with the University of Missouri logo on it,” Mr. Vaughn told administrators in an email four semesters ago.
He was not alone. Thousands of pages of emails I obtained through the Missouri Freedom of Information Act show that many alumni and other supporters were disgusted with administrators’ feeble response to the disruptions. Like Mr. Vaughn, many promised they’d stop attending athletic events. Others vowed they’d never send their children or grandchildren to the university. It now appears many of them have made good on those promises.
The commotion began in October 2015, when student activists claiming that “racism lives here” sent administrators a lengthy list of demands. Among them: The president of the University of Missouri system should resign after delivering a handwritten apology acknowledging his “white male privilege”; the curriculum should include “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion” training; and 10% of the faculty and staff should be black.
.. Donors, parents, alumni, sports fans and prospective students raged against the administration’s caving in. “At breakfast this morning, my wife and I agreed that MU is NOT a school we would even consider for our three children,” wrote Victor Wirtz, a 1978 alum, adding that the university “has devolved into the Berkeley of the Midwest.”
.. As classes begin this week, freshmen enrollment is down 35% since the protests
.. Universities have consistently underestimated the power of a furious public. At the same time, they’ve overestimated the power of student activists, who have only as much influence as administrators give them. Far from avoiding controversy, administrators who respond to campus radicals with cowardice and capitulation should expect to pay a steep price for years.
Comments:
.. William Butos: .. What they do not understand is that the people paying the freight are beginning to see through this shell game and refusing to play along.
.. Barrett McShane: The only thing that can really change a university administration’s bent towards Lefties is for wealthy alums to stop contributing. For some reason the allure of having a brick, plaque, quadrangle or building with one’s name on it is stronger than common sense, so unlikely things will change to any great degree.
.. Jeff Middleswart:
This is an important lesson to understand. Actual Americans need to realize that they still hold the purse-strings here. They also need to realize that the truly privileged in this society are leaching off the productive and getting perks that the rest of us pay for and yet do not receive ourselves.
Does the 20-year old who became a welder still get spring break and summers off? Can the welder borrow money via a school loan to pay for his vacation to Europe?
How many of you work more than 9 hours per week for 32 weeks per year?
Do you get a free pension with mandated set returns from tax payers?
Can you bill the tax payers for grant money to produce work no one will read or use?
How many of you have life time employment with automatic raises?
If your business isn’t viable anymore – does it get subsidies forever like NPR, NEA, teaching French…?
Can you mandate that people use your product? The school can require that an engineer take literature from a tenured prof and buy his book.
.. John Watson
The very day Donald Trump announced his candidacy, my liberal niece asked me what I thought about it, like it was absurd. I told her that whatever the result, one thing was for sure. Trump was going to make us talk about “uncomfortable” things. No PC BS from him. She asked with concern why that was a good thing, and I explained that we can’t fix what we can’t talk about. She agreed with that basic premise, if nothing else I said.
The PC culture has done immense damage to our nation and our society. It has created what we know as snowflakes, college students who are shielded from the real world to the extent they will never be prepared to deal with it. Free speech has been endangered to the extent some even want to criminally prosecute those who dare disagree with their view of things, such as the Climate crowd. Corporations fear the PC police and their press to the point of acting irrationally, as seen by the recent exodus of CEO from Trump’s support.
Let’s talk and fix things.
.. Hillsdale College in Michigan is one of the few institutions remaining that does not have as their mission to indoctrinate students in Leftism. Sad to say, but even the military schools have become cesspools of political correctness. One can hope this movement against Leftism that has been the guiding light for over 40 years at these schools is now going to be challenged. When you look at the cost benefit ratio of student debt versus what is taught the whole college education imperative comes into question.
Donald Trump Is the Godfather of a Democratic Renaissance
After decades of getting out-organized and outspent in battles to control state legislatures, Democratic strategists have woken up to the importance of defending against Republican gains at the grass roots.
.. In 2009, according to the National Council of State Legislatures, there were 4,082 Democrats serving in state legislatures and 3,223 Republicans. By 2016, the numbers had reversed: 3,135 Democrats and 4,177 Republicans.
In 2009, Democrats controlled both the state senate and house in 27 states, the Republicans 14. After the 2016 elections, Republicans controlled both branches of the legislatures in 32 states to 14 for the Democrats.
- State legislatures not only control redistricting in most states — a key to determining which party will control the House after the 2020 census — but
- also serve as a training ground where politicians learn the ropes of winning elections and governing. In this respect, state legislatures are a key source of new talent.
.. Emerge pointedly does not have a litmus test requiring its candidates to back abortion rights.
.. On a larger scale, the immense network of organizations created by the Koch brothers and other conservative donors far outstrips the structures that Democrats and liberals are piecing together. USA Today reported in June that in 2017-18 the Koch machine plans to spend $300- $400 million on elections and lobbying at every level.
.. the renewed vitality on the left is most heavily concentrated in New York, Massachusetts and California, which are already Democratic.
.. The combination of Republican gerrymandering and the clustering of Democratic voters in urban centers “has moved the median House seat well to the right of the nation,” Wasserman notes.
The result is what Wasserman calls a structural “partisan bias” favoring Republicans in Congressional elections:
Trump lost the national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, but Republicans won the median House seat by 3.4 points and the median Senate seat by 3.6 points.
.. If, as Wasserman’s data suggests, a major victory is beyond reach in November 2018, will these players regroup and fight on? Or will they retreat at the state and local level, as they have in the past,
.. Susan Fox: I live in Missouri. I even attended Mizzou for a summer program in high school. I am now having my first child.
Mizzou will not receive a dime of my money. If my child wants to go to a state school, they can go to Rolla or Kirksville. If Mizzou sends my child brochures, they will be returned with a “We need some muscle over here!” comment splayed across it. This is 18 years into the future we are now talking about.
I do not think Mizzou has correctly accounted for the long-lasting effects its actions will have.