Professional sports should stop shilling for the warfare state.
Before 2009, Colin Kaepernick would have had to find some other way to protest racism against African Americans. That’s because until the height of the Iraq War, NFL football players weren’t even required to leave the locker room for the national anthem, much less stand for it.
.. The singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” was mandated during another war, World War II, when the NFL commissioner at the time mandated it for the league. The players were told to stand for it about the same time that the Department of Defense was ramping up massive recruitment and media operations around the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began paying sports teams millions in U.S. tax dollars for what amounted to “paid patriotism,” or mega-military spectacles on the playing field before the games. It got so bad that there was a congressional investigation led by none other than Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a veteran and considered one of the most patriotic men in the Senate.
.. What McCain and Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) found was that between 2012 and 2015, the DOD shelled out $53 million to professional sports—including $10 million to the NFL—on “marketing and advertising” for military recruitment. To be sure, some of that was bona fide advertising. But many of those heart-tugging ceremonies honoring heroes and recreating drills and marches and flyovers are what the report denounced as propaganda.
.. given when and how it was mandated for players to honor it, the national anthem has been used a prop in this near-religious convocation. In recent years, soldier parading, flag-waving, and jumbotron shout-outs to warriors have become de rigueur at NFL games. Consider the display put on at Super Bowl 50: A flyover by the Blue Angels fighter jets, and 50 representatives of all military branches singing “America the Beautiful” against a backdrop of a giant flag. During the game,a Northop Grumman advertisement proudly announced America’s conceptual sixth-generation fighter jet “of the future” to an unsuspecting audience, a year after it presented its new long-range bomber during Super Bowl XLIX. How much that ad time cost the company is anyone’s guess, but it is no surprise that defense contractors are hawking their billion-dollar war wares between game play these days.
.. Postwar affluence and the increase in white-collar jobs, when combined with concerns about the power of the Soviet Union, led many Americans to fear that men were too effeminate and weak. These anxieties created fertile soil for the growth of football, which became a way to affirm masculinity and fight the supposed “muscle gap.” If you didn’t embrace football—which seemed to embody Cold War ideas of containment—you might be suspected of deviant behavior like homosexuality or communism.
.. But isn’t that the problem? “Football is a warlike game and we are now a warlike nation. Our love for football is a love, however self-aware, of ourselves as a fighting and (we hope) victorious people
.. football—with its obsessive territorialism, regimented hierarchy, and peculiar combination of strategic prowess with brute force—has always been at risk of militaristic co-option.
Trump’s Deadly Narcissism
When Hurricane Maria struck, more than a week ago, it knocked out power to the whole of Puerto Rico, and it will be months before the electricity comes back. Lack of power can be deadly in itself, but what’s even worse is that, thanks largely to the blackout, much of the population still lacks access to drinkable water.
.. Until Thursday the Trump administration had refused to lift restrictions on foreign shipping to Puerto Rico, even though it had waived those rules for Texas and Florida.
.. although it’s more than a week since Maria made landfall, the Trump administration has yet to submit a request for aid to Congress.
.. Trump spent days after Maria’s strike tweeting about football players. When he finally got around to saying something about Puerto Rico, it was to blame the territory for its own problems
.. But while the Affordable Care Act survives, the Trump administration is openly trying to sabotage the law’s functioning.
This sabotage is taking place on multiple levels.
- The administration has refused to confirm whether it will pay crucial subsidies to insurers that cover low-income customers.
- It has refused to clarify whether the requirement that healthy people buy insurance will be enforced.
- It has canceled or suspended outreach designed to get more people to sign up.
.. These actions translate directly into much higher premiums: Insurers don’t know if they’ll be compensated for major costs, and they have every reason to expect a smaller, sicker risk pool than before.
.. the A.C.A. won’t actually collapse; it will just become a program more focused on sicker, poorer Americans — and the political opposition to repeal won’t go away. Finally, when the bad news comes in, everyone will know whom to blame.
.. A.C.A. sabotage is best seen not as a strategy, but as a tantrum. We can’t repeal Obamacare? Well, then, we’ll screw it up. It’s not about achieving any clear goal, but about salving the president’s damaged self-esteem.
Trump Is Right about the NFL Protests
GOP powerbrokers worry that inability to deliver while in full control of government will enrage the grassroots and depress turnout of a broader electorate that could wonder what’s the point of reelecting a Republican House and Senate.”
.. They hear us talk all day about our principles as if we’re going to solve the problems we have via some kind of discussion among gentlemen. Meanwhile, the liberal response is “You’re a Nazi, and you shouldn’t be allowed to have a job unless you agree with us.” We’re trying to win theoretical victories for our principles, but the Left is fighting to win in the real world — and they are coming out on top in the cultural wars with ease. The very fact that we’re even having this debate about the NFL (remember when sports was where you went to get away from politics?) tells you who’s winning.
.. You want to be a conservative and have run-of-the-mill political beliefs? Then you’d better work somewhere that’s friendly to conservatives, or you might end up like James Damore at Google, Brandon Eich at Mozilla, or even Curt Schilling at ESPN... We may not want to fight a culture war, but the reality is that a culture war is being fought against people like us every day whether we like it or not, and the NFL has chosen to be part of that.
A lot of conservatives are tired of the double standard. They just want to watch an NFL game or a movie without having liberal politics slammed down their throat. They’re disgusted by the fact that they’re treated like dirt by corporations like the NFL, ESPN, Apple, and Starbucks while liberalism is openly embraced. Of course, from a pure business perspective, it’s almost hard to blame the companies. If conservatives are always going to defend these corporations and say, “Thank you, Sir; may I have another?” when they smack us around because of our principles, while liberals demand special treatment, it makes all the sense in the world for them to cater to liberals.
.. go take a look at the Facebook fan pages of NFL teams from Monday. Very few of these teams have ever experienced a backlash like this. If you care about an increasingly liberal culture that seems to be going haywire, their bad day because of Trump is a good thing.
.. Getting back to the job question, I’m glad Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have one, and I would love to see NFL players fired for kneeling, because liberals don’t care about our arguments or our principles. They only care about the possibility that they might be on the receiving end of the same treatment they give us. Let liberals start getting fired for their views and they may start having some second thoughts. If they don’t, we’re just evening the playing field, because they’re already firing conservatives for their views.
.. This is an issue that matters to an awful lot of Americans, not just because of the disrespect shown to our country, but also because it’s symbolic of how liberalism has been allowed to spread unchecked through our culture. If Trump’s rants and tweets get more Americans to do something about it, then he has done a good thing.
This Culture War Isn’t about the Flag; It’s about Conscience Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451877/standing-national-anthem-voluntary-not-required
Standing for the National Anthem is meaningless if it’s mandated, and such a mandate undermines the essential liberty of free speech.
Let me begin with a simple declaration. I believe that the United States is a better country when not only the government protects the right of free speech but also the culture values that right. I believe that free speech is the essential liberty — the liberty that helps preserve all others — because without the ability to call out unconstitutional actions you cannot possibly maintain a free nation. Because I believe those things, I believe Americans should be tolerant of dissent, even when they believe dissenters are offensive and wrong, and that the best cure for bad speech isn’t censorship but rather better speech.
.. In 1943, with the Second World War still very much in doubt, the Supreme Court rendered its verdict — with words that have echoed through the generations: If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.
.. 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.
.. In other words, the power of the salute lies with the choice to salute, and the most repugnant form of censorship is compelled speech — the effort to force a person to state what they do not believe. Mandatory reverence isn’t reverence at all.
.. Sadly, it is now clear that the freedom from compelled speech is under profound threat, from both the Left and the Right. Earlier this month I was honored to write an amicus brief on behalf of 33 family-policy organizations in a case called Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The Supreme Court will decide whether petty officials (state civil-rights bureaucrats) can compel a baker to use his artistic talents to celebrate an event he finds offensive. The court will determine whether the state can compel speech.
.. Oddly enough, many members of the Right endorse this move — including those who would be livid if a Democratic president called on the NFL to fire praying football players because that’s “injecting religion into football.” Many of these same people are solidly behind Masterpiece Cakeshop in its battle against forced speech. Virtually all of these folks are outraged when private corporations and private universities enforce rules on speech that systematically disadvantage and silence conservatives. But then Trump acts in the same manner and the response is . . . Yay?
.. Oddly enough, many members of the Right endorse this move — including those who would be livid if a Democratic president called on the NFL to fire praying football players because that’s “injecting religion into football.” Many of these same people are solidly behind Masterpiece Cakeshop in its battle against forced speech. Virtually all of these folks are outraged when private corporations and private universities enforce rules on speech that systematically disadvantage and silence conservatives. But then Trump acts in the same manner and the response is . . . Yay?
.. Here’s the bottom line. If you’re participating in or justifying conduct you’d despise if the partisan roles were reversed, if you’re changing your views because “the people” have spoken and rejected an “elitist” embrace of individual liberty, or if you are not confident enough in your own views to embrace and defend a marketplace of ideas, then we’re just not on the same side.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451877/standing-national-anthem-voluntary-not-required