Posted on 08/05/2020 4:29:09 AM PDT by Kaslin
In November 2015, three years after taking the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl, quarterback Colin Kaepernick was benched in favor of Blaine Gabbert, a career journeyman most recently unsuccessful with the Jacksonville Jaguars. The following preseason, Kaepernick began donning garb designed to mock police officers, including socks with cops dressed as pigs.
He also remained seated for the national anthem during a preseason game, claiming, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color."
At the time, multiple NFL players spoke out in opposition to Kaepernick's symbolic move: New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz said, "You've got to respect the flag, and you've got to stand up with your teammates. It's bigger than just you, in my opinion. You go up there; you're with a team. And you go and pledge your allegiance to the flag and sing the national anthem with your team, and then you go about your business."
At the time, this was a majority proposition: Seventy-two percent of Americans thought the gesture unpatriotic, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Kaepernick never regained a starting role in the NFL ... but his career took off again. He signed a lucrative endorsement deal with Nike to cash in on his supposed bravery; he cut a content deal with Disney. When he was offered a private tryout with NFL teams, he promptly violated all protocols and blew up the process. In June 2020, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell urged NFL teams to sign Kaepernick anyway.
On July 4, Kaepernick tweeted: "Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of 'independence,' while you enslaved our ancestors. We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all."
Today, Kaepernick's symbolism has become the new normal, morphed into a rote ritual of wokeness thanks to the ugly sight of then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd, who would later die. Democratic elected officials knelt in the halls of Congress. Major League Baseball players knelt before the national anthem to protest supposed systemic American racism. NBA players knelt as well, wearing Black Lives Matter T-shirts.
And players who refused to comply were publicly cudgeled. When San Francisco Giants pitcher Sam Coonrod refused to kneel, stating that he would not kneel for anything but God, he was castigated as benighted at best, racist at worst. When black Orlando Magic basketball player Jonathan Isaacs stood for the national anthem, again citing the unifying anti-racism of Christianity, he was ripped as "dangerous." Only San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who has spent years utilizing purple progressive language about President Donald Trump, was exonerated for standing for the anthem -- and that was because he wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt.
So, what changed? Certainly not the data. Despite the presence of individual racism in Americans of all walks of life, America's police are not systemically racist. Until the pandemic wrecked the economy across the board, black Americans were experiencing historic lows in unemployment and historic highs in median income.
What changed is that Americans surrendered to the narrative promulgated for so long by those who seek to undermine American comity: that American history is not the story of moving toward the fulfillment of the promises of the Declaration of Independence, but a story of the continuous, chameleonic perversion of bigotry. It the narrative that America's founding ideas were lies, then and always, and that only racial identity provides credence for talking about racial inequalities. The burden of proof has shifted to America's defenders.
And those defenders can never prove their case: first, because no country is perfect, and second, because systemic racism is a non-disprovable theory. Four short years ago, we mostly assumed the best of our fellow Americans -- that they weren't endemically racist, at the very least -- and the best of our country's ideals. No longer. The counterculture has become the culture. And that is both a tragedy and a travesty. There can be no future for a country in which standing for the national anthem is considered gauche, while kneeling is considered heroic.
Of course the national FELON’s league hates cops.
And the NFL can shove their kneeling up their Obamaholes.
You got it.
In 2019 the New York Times told everyone, that going forward their coverage would be race focused. They are probably not the only media outlet to do this but they were the only one that was blatant enough to express it. Trump had been able to help minority communities with low unemployment and changes to criminal laws and he was seeing some historic gains in minority support. The left could not allow that to happen and what better way to erode that support than to create a narrative that the United States is a racist country being led by a white supremecist.
Bunch of programmed robots. Individualism is the real counterculture
Our system of representative government provides a mechanism for repairing itself--to change course if required by the people.
This movement isn't counter culture, it is anti-representative government and in favor of a totalitarian system in which the rebels are in charge.
The evidence of this rests in the mere fact that their demands, to the extent they actually have demands, are vague and undefined.
As Ben says in the article, systemic racism can be neither proved or denied. What does it mean?
What systemic racism means is that our "entire system" must be destroyed...and that is the goal of the Left.
It is worth noting that the Left hasn't yet told us what they plan to replace it with (though they know full-well what that system is).
Communism.
Right on point.
This isnt black/white. It is liberty/tyranny.
The left is pushing the rest of us to a great sorting out.
It becomes culture when you allow it
bump
.....the counter culture must be exterminated, destroyed, ended.
There can be no co existence
Ha! Herbert Marcuse said it best: ‘One Dimensional Man’
Once a sub culture gets absorbed into the mainstream... it become indistinguishable FROM the mainstream...it’s finished.
The kids ‘demonstrating’ now look like children of parents who are themselves a sub culture.... purple haired, tattooed, establishment-hating losers.... Like the man said, ‘Conforming to non conformity, is conforming just the same’.
These ‘protesters’ are that element of losers in the US, which the media has glorified for as long as I can remember. Movies, sit coms, magazines, everything you can think of, represents losers as ‘cool’ and the establishment element are a crowd of mindless dummies.
‘Mindless dummies’ I should say, who keep the lights on.... No one wants to talk about that, though!
We’re talking about people whose very first decision in life is to reject the establishment... so, where WOULD they go from there-once they decide their life will be a struggle against established society?
Their definitive adult struggle begins with, but is hardly limited to, the rejection of marriage. If we have about 3 generations of citizens who bear children out of wedlock.... well, this is what we get...I could ramble forever about this..
Mark
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