The NFL player protests, Black Lives Matter, the “blue” cocoon, Trump’s SOB’s, and the 1947 movie “Boomerang!” came to mind during the sit-ins by half-million-dollar-per-year protesters Sunday, September 24.
The first three on the list are animated by a faulty postulate: American law enforcement is riddled with racism. It’s the “cause without a cause”. In this case, “cause” being a premise without some relation to facts .
The slander has its biggest and loudest following in urban and academic centers, the so-called “blue” precincts. It has spread beyond the street and campus into professional sports – who, by the way, are centered in “blue” America – and earning the ire of a huge part of the fan base in “red” America and President Trump.
As for the movie, “Boomerang!”, it reminded us that “justice” is the ultimate goal of all legal proceedings, and hopefully resistant to mobs inflamed by falsehoods (more about the movie later). Real justice is an inconvenience for those in a hurry to hang a few cops. Now, professional athletes are getting sucked into the sordid enterprise.
So, in the end, we have the NFL tarnishing its reputation, players heightening their profiles as political firebrands, fans registering disgust, and all because of a demonstrably false proposition. Don’t expect justice here … but reckon a humbling decline in the once-vaunted NFL.
It’s a lesson for all high profile sports: Don’t insult your fans!
A good chunk of sports fans might have a very different take on issues like policing the streets of many of our wannabe Kabuls and Baghdads. Your average fan sitting in font of his big screen TV on Sunday afternoon probably doesn’t see the world like your typical Sociology professor or average campus SJW (social justice warrior), and for good reason. The alleged racism in police departments, so readily accepted in faculty lounges and by impressionable college sophomores, isn’t supported by the facts.
First, crime, like wildfires, isn’t evenly distributed. Local circumstances produce divergent results, without ever getting into the racism of the “man”. Certain areas of the country have a fecundity for crime as areas of thick forests produce a fire season. An infamous example is LA’s “death valley”, South Vermont Ave. Read the captions. (1)
Some self-styled crusaders of justice cite deceiving statistics to hold up the edifice of rampant racism. Weaknesses in their assertions abound. For instance, their comparisons of crime to population over a broad space hide a serious problem in certain sectors. The overall crime number in a specific locale may register no concern since the good numbers coming out of some neighborhoods depress the frightening stats emerging from others. Examine the maps for New York City, Chicago, and Milwaukee. (2)
The theme throughout is the same: the highest crime rates occur in the locations with the highest concentrations of poverty. These areas correspond with the greatest assemblage of ethnic and racial minorities. The higher the incidence of crime, the greater the opportunity for run-ins with police for people of a particular hue who predominate in these places. We have a crime problem within certain sectors of our population, not a police problem.
Such subtleties might not course through the mind of an athlete whose life has been spent focusing on other things. The field is wide open for pop-culture grandees or media-savvy racialists to set the tone for the ill-informed.
Some may sound reasonable like Killer Mike above, but they still repeat a now well-worn mantra of a generalized campaign of racial injustice. Rapper T.I. pontificates, “Police brutality is really just a tentacle to a larger problem — the racial divide and the systemic racism that goes on from the highest of highs to the lowest of the low of society in America.” (3)
And of course we have Al Sharpton, the race hustlers’ version of the legal profession’s ambulance chaser. Here he is whipping up the congregation after the 2014 Ferguson shooting.
For many quick to have their biases confirmed, facts on the ground can be inconvenient. As it turned out, the deceased in Ferguson was no saint (see below). So much so, Pres. Obama’s Justice department, always on the hunt for the ghost of Bull Connor or Jim Crow, couldn’t gin up a case against the officer. No facts, no case – to borrow a much abused cadence.
After Ferguson, a movement was born: Black Lives Matter. Out of the garbage can, also, is resurrected the old conjoining of “cops” and “pigs”.
Like a teen girl watching the Emmies, the fashion is picked up by the impressionable tuning in. Thus is born Colin Kaepernick as self-anointed conscience of the NFL.
The case of Colin Kaepernick is interestingly instructive. Having shown no prior desire to publicly pontificate as a SJW, all of a sudden he’s kneeling during the national anthem and brandishing cops-as-pigs socks. More than a few have speculated on the influence of his fiance/girlfriend, Nessa Diab.
Most recently, she spouted off on Ray Lewis’s suggestion that Kaepernick keep his opinions private as Kaepernick was being considered by owner Steve Bisciotti for a position on the roster. She implicitly referred to Lewis as a “house negro” to Bisciotti’s slaveholder on Twitter.
She’s quite the pollinating bee fluttering from the blue-dot worlds of celebrity, MTV, San Francisco, and a DJ gig at the HOT97 in New York City. She seems to have a thing for 49er players after dating Aldon Smith. She’s also fully immersed in the lingo of the left. Here she is commenting on the shooting death of Alton Sterling:
Imagine the victim #AltonSterling as your brother, father, son, cousin, friend, co-worker. You didn’t have to know him personally to feel this horrific pain. This is a MAN who wrongfully got murdered!!! Don’t let this “system” now criminalize Alton Sterling to help justify these coward actions by the police. They will try and they will also try to discredit the store owner’s account of what occurred because he’s Muslim and we know Islamaphobia is at an all time high in this country.
This kind of stuff isn’t hard to find in her social media posts.
As a Muslim and familiar with Saudi Arabia, she should be aware that her chic glam would attract the attention of the Mutaween, the kingdom’s religious police, if she traipsed around in Riyadh’s nightlife in her figure-hugging and revealing sartorial beauty.
Bringing a Bible into the country is a crime; women can’t get driver’s licenses; and the public dress code for women centers on the burka. It’d certainly be hard for her to display her natural endowments robed like above.
You’d think that she would have greater appreciation for life in the good ol’ USA. Instead, she treats a multiracial country of 330 million experiencing the rare police shooting as if it is a hotbed of racial bigotry. She ignores the nature of life in dar al-islam (lit. territory of Islam). The lack of any sense of proportion is a hallmark of the ignorant. But nonetheless, she appears to be an influence on poor Colin.
A little digging by Colin and Nessa would undermine their jihad. Blacks are not shot or otherwise accosted by police in a broadly unjust fashion. If anything, they are disproportionately represented in the incidence of crime, particularly of the violent kind. And their victims are disproportionately black. (6) Yes, black lives matter, and, for their lives to matter, police need to seize their assailants … who happen to be disproportionately black. No wonder the high number of police confrontations with blacks, overwhelmingy male.
Yet, in the recent high-profile police shooting cases, few have resulted in convictions of the officers. Some hustlers use the fact as conclusive evidence of something airily called “systemic” racism. In other words, these pantomimes of racial justice want convictions no matter what. If so, why bother with a trial if media buzz is enough to condemn?
The matter was brought into clearer focus while watching the movie “Boomerang!”. It’s the story of a prosecutor who refused to pursue charges against a murder suspect after being subjected to intense political pressure. The DA couldn’t remove from his mind the legal profession’s standards of ethical conduct for prosecutors. Put succinctly, “The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict.” (7) Is it asking too much to demand a similar sobriety in the celebrity world and the media-incited mobs?
Well, into the frenzy jumps Pres. Trump. Echoing the thoughts of many, speaking at a campaign rally for US Sen. Luther Strange, he said, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, `Get that son of a bitch off the field right now! Out. He’s fired! He’s fired!“ (8) Leaving aside the language, the sentiment has currency among many – if not most – veterans and a sizable swath of the country’s population, mostly in “red” America. Undoubtedly, the comment angered some of the marginally inclined in the locker room. So, we experienced the NFL’s own “black Sunday” on September 24. Here’s a sample.
It happened throughout the NFL on that day. And it drew criticism from fans.
In a debate on MSNBC between Brian Mitchell and Hugh Hewitt, Hewitt raises the scepter of the NFL losing touch with its fan base. As for Mitchell, he accepts the received wisdom of a pervasive racism. Take a look.
Some like Brian Mitchell see the players’ actions with all the integrity of The Grand Remonstrance of 1641. In 1641, the English Parliament presented to King Charles I a list of grievances, The Grand Remonstrance, which His Highness quickly dismissed. The result was over 40 years of civil war and social disruption. The players’ protest could do the same by inaugurating a civil war between the league and its fans. I don’t think the league will come out of it any better than Charles I. He lost his head.
The full effect of the protests will take awhile to gestate. The players have certainly displayed their right to free speech, and some fans are exhibiting the same right. Free speech for everyone, including the right to express that speech in the abandonment of the NFL. Many prescient owners and players can envision dollars whisking out of their wallets like so many autumn leaves on a windy day.
Could the NFL players’ racialized outcry have the same fallout as the 1994 baseball players’ strike on Major League Baseball? A person could argue that Major League Baseball hasn’t fully recovered from it. What waits in the offing for the NFL? Much depends on the NFL’s response to players using the national anthem as a forum to present their social and political discontents.
Sensing the trouble, Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys knelt with the players and then everybody stood for the anthem. A compromise, but why kneel? What’s the reason for the kneeling? Is it to show solidarity for a broad charge of racism for which there is no valid proof? What’s the point?
The whole thing rests on a premise without much of a foundation. Indeed, it’s cause without a cause. To be clearer, it’s a political movement without much justification. Thus, any compromise gives credence to a sham.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
- “South Vermont Avenue: L.A. County’s ‘death alley’”, Nicole Santa Cruz and Ken Schwencke, Los Angeles Times, 1/19/2014, photos by Genaro Molina, http://homicide.latimes.com/post/westmont-homicides/
- “The Debate Over Crime Rates is Ignoring the Metric That Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality’: Focusing on the neighborhood level is the best way to understand violence in America. Here are six charts that prove it.”, Daniel Kay Hertz, The Trace, 7/25/2016, https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/crime-rates-american-cities-murder-inequality/
- “T.I. speaks out on police brutality”, Deena Zuru, CNN, 8/14/2017, http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/24/politics/ti-us-or-else-movie-police-brutality/index.html
- “CLASSY: Kaepernick’s Girlfriend Compares NFL Owners to Slaveholders, Ray Lewis to ‘House Negroes'”, Eliot Hamilton, The DailyWire, 8/3/2017, http://www.dailywire.com/news/19319/classy-kaepernicks-girlfriend-compares-nfl-owners-elliott-hamilton#
- “COLIN KAEPERNICK: EXPLAINS PIG COP SOCKS
… Shot At ‘Rogue Cops'”, TMZ Sports, 9/1/2016, http://www.tmz.com/2016/09/01/colin-kaepernick-cop-pig-socks-rogue-cops/ - “The lies of Black Lives Matter”, Kelly Riddell, The Washington Times, 7/18/2016, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/jul/18/lies-black-lives-matter/
- “Criminal Justice Standards; Prosecution Function, Part I, General Standards”, https://www.americanbar.org/publications/criminal_justice_section_archive/crimjust_standards_pfunc_blk.html#1.2
- “Trump Calls on NFL Owners to Fire Players Who Kneel During Anthem”, Daniel Politi, Slate, 9/23/2017, http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/09/23/trump_calls_on_nfl_owners_to_fire_players_who_kneel_during_anthem.html
